Lance plays family-man
cop Lucas, who has made it his personal mission to track down serial killler,
Jenke (played by
Brion James),
and bring
him to justice. However, following Jenke's death by electric chair strange things
start happening to Lucas' nearest and dearest. It turns out that Jenke didn't
really die but moves back and forth between two levels of existence and is now
out for revenge.
"We've been really kicking ass with this thing," Lance says firmly. "We got together and did a round table reading of the script, and everything that was bogus, we red-pencilled. We're maybe a fifth generation script away from what it originally was, which is great. For me this has been a real pleasure - the hardest work I've ever done on a movie, but the most rewarding."
The film actually began production with another director, David Blyth, but he was replaced by Jim Isaac. "The change caused giant troubles," Henriksen sighs. "When you start with a director, you really bond with him. And that bond is something you defend, you work with, you nurture throughout a whole movie. The replacement left us high and dry for about a week, and it was very traumatic. The reshoots were very difficult, but as we got into the scenes with Jim Isaac, we realised he was allowing us to do our work, so we were able to get into new areas for this genre. Oh sure, you still have to serve the special effects, but we were able to take it to another level. Jim has allowed me to really spontaneous about the reactions of this guy."
The character of the steadfast cop was unusual for Lance. "As Lucas, when I'm faced with things from the unknown, my reactions are very pure," Lance reasons. ""What's happening is a total lack of reality, so he thinks he's going crazy. Meanwhile there's a good core in him that makes him able to do his automatic moves, his more intuitive moves, rather than having to figure it out."
Henriksen is a very thoughtful actor, who admits he thinks his way to a kind of spontaneity. Later he works out a scene with Thom Bray and you can see the two actors seriously building their roles, staying in character, following the plot of the scene, but intelligently swaying away from the script's dialogue. The scene becomes alive as Henriksen shapes his character. He's simply one of the best actors working in movies."
Text taken from an interview by Bill Warren in Fangoria #94