TV Reviews : Perkins Overshadowed in Final Film, ‘Woods’

Anthony Perkins’ last movie role, in which he plays a mysterious private investigator in pursuit of a serial killer, captures only fleeting glimpses of the late actor’s indelible and edgy screen persona.

“In the Deep Woods” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39) is essentially Rosanna Arquette’s movie, with the tight-voiced and close-cropped Perkins playing a shadow figure in a trench coat lurking about the fringes of the story.

Perkins’ characteristic intensity, though, does ultimately give the movie some jolting bursts of energy in what is otherwise a routine suspense thriller about a children’s book illustrator (Arquette) who fears that someone she loves may be a serial torture killer of women.

The plot deftly divides suspicion among three suspects. The svelte Arquette is flavorfully cast and potent in her showdown with the murderer, and the Freudian unraveling--trite as it is--is hitched to a nominally clever nursery rhyme motif.

Shot in San Diego last March--just months before Perkins’ death in September--the production bears only halting relevance to Perkins’ career, but it does catch flashes of an actor who, even mute, could rivet attention to a scene merely with his eyes and his nervous intensity.