TV Reviews : ‘If Looks Could Kill’--Pointless but Absorbing

Imagine a modern-day Cinderella story with Travis Bickle as the antagonist. That, in so many words, is “If Looks Could Kill: The Marla Hanson Story” (tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39), a real-life slasher movie dramatizing the famous case of the New York model whose face was severely cut up on orders of a deranged would-be suitor. It’s absorbing, on the order of a really good, lurid People magazine cover story, and also pointless.

The story proceeds in flashback from an opening sequence with surgeons standing over an unconscious Hanson (Cheryl Pollak), proclaiming her modeling career kaput. The pre-attack dialogue is full of hokey foreshadowing: “Your face will make you famous,” says romantic interest Eric Warner (Dale Midkiff). “You don’t want your face to be distorted, do you?” asks creepy makeup man Steve Roth (Kirk Baltz), advising Hanson on camera angles.

Later on, after the attack, she’s told, “You take too many things at face value, Marla.” Few won’t be able to fill in the blank with her inevitable, all-telling response: “Not any more.”

Yet, bad similes about surface values aside, writer-director John Gray’s script exists primarily at face value. The makeup man who leases Hanson an apartment and then pursues her relentlessly is obviously a parasitic sicko from his first scene, and a dimwitted one at that, adding nothing to the cinematic pantheon of psychos. Hanson is seen as an ordinary person thrown into extraordinary circumstances who emerges from her ordeal rather, well, ordinary.

In the trial scenes, Gray tries to make this another story of crime victims revictimized in court. But her cross-examination by a heinous defense attorney seems like a side track, and lacks weight compared with all the harrowing rape-trial dramas done on that subject, especially given that the public’s sympathy stayed with Hanson.

But if you’re the type who steals glances at the Post whenever in New York--and who doesn’t?--it’ll probably grab you anyway.