‘Sins’ Delivers a Tense, Fun-House Ride

“Night Sins,” CBS’ two-part movie about child abduction and small-town secrets, is a juicy thrill ride, with spookiness to make you smile and sudden jolts and curves to boost your heart rate.

Beginning Sunday and concluding Tuesday, this extravagant chiller stars Valerie Bertinelli as a gutsy FBI field agent and Harry Hamlin as the town’s police chief, faced with a kidnapped child and an unknown sociopathic menace who’s calling all the shots.

As the case unfolds, dark secrets and red herrings abound and the plot’s amusingly bizarre twists and turns reveal, of course, the hidden face of a seemingly perfect town--the religious fanatic, the pedophile, the emotionally wounded, the venal. There’s also a touch of TV’s theme du jour: the supernatural.

Based on the novel by Tami Hoag, John Leekley’s taut fun-house script careens along, with a few lapses: some romantic hokum, a too-cartoonish, slimy TV reporter and the standard climactic cop hero cliche: Never call for back up before confronting a psycho killer alone.

But Bertinelli’s admirably understated performance plays well against the deliciously escalating weirdness, and director Robert Allan Ackerman rarely lets the tension slacken. His claustrophobic and suspicion-raising closeups are a kick, as is his use of the camera as an ominous, manic observer, scanning a room, watching someone sleep, peering over a shoulder or closing distance in a sudden rush.

Composer Mark Snow’s humorously disquieting score adds just the right touch.

* “Night Sins” airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS (Channel 2).