All the above-listed genre material shows Craig R. Baxley with an above-average competence as a director. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Deep Red. It certainly starts out with some promise. The story makes a stab at film noir atmosphere with Michael Biehn’s burned out detective/bodyguard hero receiving mysterious assignments from beautiful women. The film holds one intrigued for some time by the sheer strangeness of the proceedings – the pursuing thugs who cannot be harmed by bullets, only fire; the people who are much older than they appear to be; the little girl who is at the centre of the quest and can bend and metamorphose her body. The film keeps one bound to it by the fact that, in its adopting a mystery format, one wants to find a rationalizing schema that will allow explanations to fall into place.

But gradually it becomes apparent that the film doesn’t have much of an idea what is happening either. Or if the scriptwriter does, they have not done a particularly good job communicating it on screen. The whole script appears to be a lumpen pile of loose ends and abrupt changes of tone. The hero (Michael Biehn)’s detective friend (Steven Williams) is suddenly revealed to be a Red – although it is never made clear if he is a Red or if this is John de Lancie’s sinister scientist having shape-changed because we never see Williams’s character again. Nor are we given any insight into why Steven Williams’s detective, if presumably he is a shape-changed Red, tips off the other detective (John Kapelos) as to Michael Biehn’s whereabouts. John Kapelos’s detective is introduced as having a major grudge against Michael Biehn for having killed his wife and daughter, but after a single sorry he suddenly jumps ship to charge into action alongside Biehn. For no apparent reason Lisa Collins, as the wife who hires Michael Biehn’s bodyguard in the first place, denies ever having met Biehn before – but we never find out why, because this is never referred to again. There are wild improbabilities – we learn that scientist Rickman is 65 and his wife 50, yet both have a young daughter under the age of 10. During the credits a spaceship appears and explodes in orbit and Lindsey Haun is suddenly affected by a cut on the hand – the significance of the sequence is never at all made clear, although by the end of the film we come to realize that this is the source of the Reds, but in terms of plot this has all the clarity of mud.