Directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
Summary[]
A remake of the 1950 film, a college professor (Dennis Quaid) has been poisoned and with very little time to live, he sets off to find his killer.
Trivia[]
- Throughout the story, the color in the film begins to drain to monochrome, thus representing the central character's deteriorating health as the poison steadily takes its toll (until it is in black-and-white, as in the opening - presumably showing the flashback catching up to the current time-line of the story).
- The film was made and released about thirty-eight years after the original film noir D.O.A. (1949).
- Third of five versions of the D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) story
- The picture is bookended by two sequences which are filmed in black-and-white.
- According to show-business trade paper 'Variety', the film's camera technique included large amounts of "visual gimmickry: lots of tilted, or swivelling first-person camerawork plus moire-patterned lighting to create distortion".
- The amount of time that our central character had to live was twenty-four hours with the time-frame being no more than forty-eight hours.
- The name of the toxic luminous poison solution used on our central charcter was "radium chloride".
- The movie's MacGuffin was not just the one thing but the film utilizes "two central MacGuffins" according to show-business trade paper 'Variety'. These were an unpublished fiction novel manuscript and the identity of the person who lethally poisoned our central character
Male Deaths[]
- Bill Bolender (Nick Lang, Sr.) (flashback)
- Lee Gideon (Mr. Fitzwaring) (flashback)
- Robert Knepper (Nicholas Lang)
- Christopher Neame (Bernard)
- Dennis Quaid (Dexter Cornell) (still alive at the end of the film)
- Daniel Stern (Hal Petersham)
Female Deaths[]
- Robin Johnson (Cookie Fitzwaring)
- Jane Kaczmarek (Gail Cornell)
- Charlotte Rampling (Mrs. Fitzwaring)