THE RIDE

After a few surprisingly palatable efforts, Wainwright is back to his lower level of psycho-cops-and-killers--which is about as low as the genre ever gets. Clive Richardson, a homosexual, has been bludgeoned to death on Superintendent Flensing's turf in Lessford City; and Flensing thinks he knows the culprit. So the Superintendent uses Detective Belamy (notoriously brutal) and up-and-coming young Constable Jim Clarke to bring the purported killer--a man named Wardman--up from the south to Lessford. But though this one-day drive is expected to end in Wardman's confession, it ends instead with one of Wainwright's contrived, implausible final twists. And the ride along with way is uncommonly tedious and truly unpleasant--in the hyped-up, violent, pseudo-psychological Wainwright manner.