Review of Best Seller (1987) by Tasos L — 29 Mar 2015

Released late in the summer movie season of 1987, the thriller Best Seller had to compete with The Big Easy and No Way Out. Though a lot of critics liked the film, it disappeared from the cineplexes rather quickly but found an audience on home video.

Recently I picked up the film on Blu Ray from Olive Films. The film starts in 1972 with a raid on a police evidence locker by a group of masked gunmen wearing Richard Nixon masks. Three uniformed LAPD officers are killed, including an inside man but one officer survives to report what he knows and ultimately write a book about it.

Dennis Meachum (Brian Dennehy) goes on to become a best-selling author of police procedurals (like Joseph Wambaugh) while continuing his career as a decorated police officer. But after his wife's death from cancer, Meachum is broke, burnt-out in his police career, suffering writer's block and owes his publisher an overdue book.

Enter a mysterious, amoral killer named Cleve (Dennis Woods) who claims to have been a hit man for a respected businessman, David Matlock (Paul Shenar) and he wants Meachum to expose his former boss in his next book.

The script was written by Larry Cohen, who wrote and directed a number of very entertaining horror films in the 1970s and 80s and has written the scripts for many very entertaining thrillers. Denehy, as usual, delivers a solid performance as Meachum but this is Woods' film.

Cleve is vicious and brutal, but wants to come across as likeable in the book. Meachum grows to like Cleve, as does the audience despite the fact that the guy is a stone-cold killer. Credit Woods performance with that.

This is a film I enjoyed renting and watching on VHS back in the day but I had forgotten about it. A forgotten gem from the late 1980s.