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It’s a game of cat and mouse for Roy Scheider (The French Connection, Sorcerer) in Night Game. Cast as Mike Seaver, a Galveston police detective, Scheider’s in hot pursuit of serial killer terrorizing the city. When a string of murders is linked to night baseball games at the Astrodome, it’s Seaver (a former minor league player) pulling together clues and racing against time to prevent yet another murder.

Night Game co-stars Lane Smith (Red Dawn, The Mighty Ducks), Karen Young (9 ˝Weeks, The Sopranos) and Richard Bradford (The Untouchables) in a film directed by Peter Masterson (Blood Red, Full Moon in Blue Water) from a screenplay written by Spender Eastman and Anthony Palmer, based on a story by Eastman.

Night Game is probably the most leisurely paced of the serial-killer thrillers, and it's both a strength and a weakness -- the latter in that the film lacks all-encompassing suspense, and the former in that a good deal of flavor and color are garnished onto the proceedings. The setting is the resort town of Galveston, Texas, and the baseball-loving citizens are Houston Astros-crazy this time of year. And so is someone else -- a fiend who kills pretty blonde women with one fell swoop of his hand with a hook-like instrument in it; he carries this out right after the Astros win a home night game when a particular pitcher plays. The forensic evidence is yielding very little, and due to a recession the governor's office is particularly eager to have the murders solved to help out an already-depletive tourist trade. Roy Scheider plays the sergeant in charge of the case, and plays him well. Always personable but occasionally a tad too taciturn for his own good in previous roles, here he's loose and focused and also funny when the script demands, thus forgoing the typical tough-cop characterization that can almost always be counted on to bore an audience to tears. The screenplay by Spencer Eastman and Anthony Palmer occasionally gives the character some non-homicidal matters to deal with, with some of it interesting, some of it not. There's his recent engagement to a much-younger woman and his trysts with her disapproving mother that are revealing of character, but another subplot involving a corrupt county sheriff's penchant for running call girls on the side is extraneous and included, one suspects, because the writers couldn't come up with enough context to fill in the serial-killer plot.

Gary Tooze

March 25th, 2015