TV REVIEW : ‘Nightmare’: True Perils, but Pointless

If there’s anything this country loves to look at, it’s a beautiful woman in distress, which is the sole raison d’etre of the otherwise pointless “Nightmare in Columbia County” (tonight at 9 on CBS Channels 2 and 8).

Based on a true story, this TV movie details the sad case of South Carolina beauty pageant contestant Dawn Smith (played by Jeri Lynn Ryan, a 1990 Miss America runner-up herself), whose spunky younger sister Shari (Michele Abrams, in a good, all-too-brief turn) was kidnaped by an obsessed admirer.

Sheriff Metts (William Devane, likable as usual) initiates a massive manhunt for the possible serial killer despite an almost complete lack of leads, putting Dawn on television to elicit further menacing phone calls from the mystery psycho. When Shari turns up dead, the case isn’t over; the killer abducts another girl to keep Dawn’s attention.

“Silence of the Lambs” this isn’t. Though much is made of using the beauty queen as “bait,” the relatively simple solving of the case late in the game hinges on a routine police procedure unrelated to almost any of the overheated on-screen happenings. There simply isn’t much of a tale to tell here.

And writer John Robert Bensink and director Roger Young have nothing on their minds so provocative (or cliched) as a look into the mind of a killer, and nothing to say about pathological fans, with the perpetrator off-screen till the anti-climax. Not to give too much away, but the story doesn’t even offer the base satisfaction of a particularly upbeat ending, though we’re supposed to feel uplifted by the victimized family’s persevering faith.

Much more of a puzzle than the mystery is why anyone bothered dramatizing it. The case seems to have been picked merely because it was true, queasy and lurid, and puts a perfect-faced, pouty-lipped woman in jeopardy--though the mindful filmmakers skimp on the prurient aspects and at least leave us outside the killer’s lair. Meanwhile, “America: Portrait of a Serial-Killer-Obsessed Nation” continues.