TV REVIEW : Gripping, Implausible Tale From ‘Death Row’

Imagine turning on your TV and hearing: “Coming up--live execution at San Quentin. See it. Feel it. Death in the gas chamber just minutes away.”

A preposterous promo? Or, as the eyes and ears of the public, the broadcast media’s logical next step?

That’s the question explored in “LIVE! From Death Row,” a jolting Fox TV movie at 8 tonight (KTTV Channel 11 and XETV Channel 6), in which a condemned serial killer holds a TV crew hostage in his execution chamber and proceeds to broadcast the first public electrocution. It’s trash/tabloid/reality TV carried to its maximum, unsettling extreme.

The plot is lurid and implausible but grips your attention anyway because of writer-director Patrick Duncan’s edgy, raw, cinema verite style and his dramatic treatment of the complexities and consequences of capital punishment.

Up to a point, Duncan gives some slack to proponents of the death penalty. But the thematic thrust of the movie--which depicts sexual aggression, psychological and physical abuse, two suicides and a character being electrocuted in the chair while smoke rises from his head and his body stiffens and trembles for half a minute--is, clearly, against terminal punishment.

Some movies have timing on their side, and this one is heightened by the looming execution of convicted killer Robert Alton Harris (who, short of a pardon, will die in the San Quentin gas chamber April 21).

What distinguishes this drama from scores of other death-cell stories is its wicked snuff movie/news junkie premise and the role of the ubiquitous camera as public witness to the death penalty process from beginning to end.

A cynical TV reporter (Joanna Cassidy) and her cameraman (Jason Tomlins) are interviewing the serial killer in the Death Row chamber of a high-security prison just hours before his scheduled death in the electric chair (a prominent prop constantly lurking in the background). The serial murderer (a charismatic Bruce Davison as a good-looking, articulate Ted Bundy kind of sociopath) overpowers two guards and, with four Death Row colleagues, proceeds to play TV director of his own live Death Row show.

He bellows orders to the cameraman, monitoring the results on a Death Row TV set, and, in one daring technical risk that may make viewers think that their own set has gone on the blink, the killer tells the camera operator to shut off the picture while your own TV set goes blank for about 5 seconds.

Meanwhile, the killer coolly harangues his rapt audience, describing the only motive for capital punishment as “revenge,” castigating it as “a lottery for the poor,” and vowing to broadcast the first public electrocution.

Duncan indulges some flat-out license, unrealistically mixing, for instance, male and female guards and prisoners. And he goes over the top in hyperventilated scenes featuring the two suicides and the victimized guards. The movie’s strength, stylistically speaking, is its off-the-shoulder, jarring lack of slickness.

What is the media’s responsibility in this debate? Like the detached TV cameraman in Haskell Wexler’s movie about the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago, “Medium Cool,” not to mention Duncan’s Vietnam camera-toting soldiers in his debut film, “84 Charlie Mopic,” the lens merchants covering death shed their insensitivity and cynicism and melt into the human race.

Which is Duncan’s point in “LIVE! From Death Row”: the public value in going eyeball to eyeball with the pull of the switch.