(Good) Bad Influence

A Curtis Hanson film you probably missed

Jan 26, 2026

grayscale photo of books on shelves — Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash

My slacker-dream was to work at a video store. Not a Blockbuster — too corporate. A neighborhood video store. The kind of mom and / or pop place that likely made most of its money on the adult films in the back room, but nevertheless made decent money renting new releases, classics, and hidden gems to local movie fans. Basically, I wanted Randall’s job from Clerks, but instead of fucking with the customers, I’d chat with them about movies and help them find the kind of film that would blow their hair back. Come to think of it, that was Quentin Tarantino’s job at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. The timeline is a little off — I think Tarantino left that gig in the 1980s — but if he’d stuck around, I could easily imagine him telling some customer that they just had to see Bad Influence. Directed by Curtis Hanson and written by David Koepp, the 1990 thriller starring James Spader and Rob Lowe belongs on the “staff recommends” shelf between Fight Club and American Psycho.

I missed Bad Influence when it came out, so I’m only — checks calendar — 36 years late to the party. But oh what a party it is. Here’s Roger Ebert’s description:

Bad Influence is like one of those old Charles Atlas ads, where the bullies on the beach kicked sand into the eyes of the 99-pound weakling, until Atlas came along and showed the wimp how to build some muscle. The primary difference between the ads and this thriller is that the role of Atlas is now filled by a sadistic sociopath. He walks into the life of a cowardly financial analyst and treats him to some assertiveness training that is more than he bargained for.

Spader plays the cowardly corporate type. Lowe plays the sadistic sociopath. Just a guess, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk were heavily influenced — in good ways — by Lowe’s performance when they were writing the characters of Patrick Bateman (1991) and Tyler Durden (1996), respectively. If Bateman and Durden are archetypes for the kind of man who chooses violence just to feel something in the face of consumerism’s Big Empty, then Lowe’s character is the prototype. He never quite articulates the machine that he’s raging against, but that doesn’t really matter. Lowe is a burning-hot Santa Ana wind storm out to knock over the 1980s yuppie ethos simply because it’s there. As Owen Gleiberman put it, “the sinful undercurrents [in Bad Influence] aren't just cheap thrills. They’re luridly topical — they’re meant to subvert a world in which people have begun to organize their erotic lives by Filofax.”

And yet … audiences mostly missed Bad Influence when it came out. Maybe they forgot to put plans to see the movie in their Filofaxes. Or maybe they were too busy seeing something else. The month Bad Influence was released there was some heavy competition at the box office. (Note: Movies actually stayed in theaters for weeks, even months, back then so the below list is a sampling of what you could’ve seen in March of 1990, not the opening weekend competition).

I found the film in a video essay from the Velvet Curtain YouTube channel. The title of the essay was: 10 Unhinged 90’s Thrillers Too Good To Ignore. Hearing that the film was directed by Curtis Hanson was enough to peak my interest. If you make a banger like LA Confidential, I’ll watch anything else you make, even wedding videos. But before I rented the film I wanted to watch the trailer. Turns out, the trailer on Fandango (the only place I could rent an unedited version without commercials) was just a scene from the movie. It’s an excellent scene — weird, dark, uncomfortably funny, and ultimately, terrifying.