Back in the mid-80s, I would see the VHS cover for The Osterman Weekend and it seemed very exotic. It had a mysterious name and a woman with a crossbow on the cover.
Forty years later, I finally watched it.
And it was awful.
It was Sam Peckinpaw’s final film, and it has a cast of recognizable names: Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, John Hurt, Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson (who was kind of unknown at the time), and Meg Foster (that actress with the crazy pale-blue eyes).
Unfortunately, the movie didn’t make any damn sense.
Hauer is a TV talk show host who is led by the CIA to believe his three closest friends are spies for the KGB. They’re all coming over for an annual weekend get-together, and the CIA sets up surveillance cameras in his house to… honestly, I’m not sure what. I never did figure out the motivations for half the characters.
I wasn’t the only one. The film was poorly reviewed, mainly because the plot was confusing and had lots of holes in it. Apparently the Robert Ludlum novel it was based on was also fairly incomprehensible.
I never waited 40 years to be so disappointed.