If you’ve ever wanted to watch Lauren Bacall star in a slasher film where the killer’s primary weapon is the U.S. Postal Service, The Fan is the fever dream for you. Unfortunately, it’s also a 95-minute cautionary tale about how not to adapt a thriller novel. The movie tries to be All About Eve meets Friday the 13th—but what we get feels more like Love Boat with a stabbing problem.
The Premise: Bacall vs. Biehn, But in Slow Motion
The setup is classic stalker-thriller fodder: Sally Ross (Lauren Bacall), a glamorous Broadway star, is being harassed by Douglas Breen (Michael Biehn), a record store clerk whose idea of romance is writing deranged fan letters and occasionally upgrading to attempted homicide.
Sounds tense, right? Wrong. Most of the runtime is spent watching Bacall rehearse musical numbers that feel like they were cut from Copacabana for being too depressing. The stalking plot? It unfolds with all the urgency of a DMV line, except at the DMV you don’t have to listen to Pino Donaggio’s score try to convince you that mild hallway conversations are high-stakes horror.
The Stalker: Michael Biehn, Equal Parts Menace and Open Mic Poet
Biehn plays Douglas as if he’s auditioning for a part in Taxi Driver: The Musical. He’s handsome, yes, but also so awkwardly theatrical in his madness that you start wondering if Sally should just give him a guest pass to the green room and see if he calms down.
His escalation from “slightly clingy” to “murderous” is jarring—not because it’s shocking, but because it feels like the director skipped over the middle three steps in his mental breakdown. One day he’s brooding in a corner, the next he’s writing notes like “Dearest bitch, see how accessible you are?” which sounds less like a threat and more like a rejected line from an angry Yelp review.
The Body Count: Death by Screenplay Convenience
Victims pile up, but their deaths feel more like clumsy scene transitions than real horror. The secretary gets her face slashed in the subway because… it’s Tuesday? The maid dies in the bathroom because… that’s where she happened to be standing? There’s even a rooftop hookup gone wrong that ends in immolation, which is the film’s way of saying, “We needed to hit the R rating somehow.”
The kills aren’t staged for suspense—they’re staged for the bare minimum visual drama, as if the director was afraid that too much tension might overshadow the musical numbers.
The Third Act: Sally Ross, Action Hero
By the finale, we’re expected to believe that Sally—who has spent the entire movie being aloof, dismissive, and too busy with dance rehearsals—suddenly transforms into a blood-spattered survivalist. Trapped in the empty theater, she fends off Douglas with a riding crop, verbally dismantles him like she’s roasting him at a Friars’ Club, and finally stabs him in the neck.
It’s the most energy the film has shown in 90 minutes, but by then, the tension is long dead—possibly killed by the same editing pace that made every chase scene feel like a Sunday stroll.
Lauren Bacall’s Singing Career (RIP)
We need to talk about the musical subplot. It’s shoehorned in like a tax write-off for the choreographer’s cousin. Bacall, a legend in her own right, does her best, but the songs feel so flat and misplaced that they accidentally make you root for the stalker just to move the plot along. If The Fan was supposed to be a love letter to Broadway, someone sent it postage due.
Final Verdict
The Fan is a thriller that’s neither thrilling nor particularly coherent. It’s part stalker horror, part limp backstage drama, and part unintentional parody. The only truly frightening thing about it is how a $10 million budget resulted in a movie that feels like it was filmed during the lunch breaks of a soap opera.
Still, there’s a kind of campy charm in watching Bacall go full diva while Michael Biehn channels his inner angsty theater kid with a butcher knife. It’s not scary, but it’s a fascinating time capsule of early ’80s studio confusion.
Cast Lauren Bacall as Sally Ross James Garner as Jake Berman Maureen Stapleton as Belle Goldman Michael Biehn as Douglas Breen Héctor Elizondo as Inspector Raphael Andrews Anna Maria Horsford as Emily Stolz Kurt Johnson as David Branum Feiga Martinez as Elsa the Maid Parker McCormick as Hilda Reed Jones as Choreographer Kaiulani Lee as Douglas’s sister Dana Delany as Linda, Record Store Saleswoman Dwight Schultz as Director Griffin Dunne as Production Assistant Liz Smith as herself
