Death Warrant (1990) Biography, Plot, Box office, Filming
Death Warrant (1990)
Death Warrant is a 1990 American prison action thriller film directed by Deran Sarafian and produced by Mark di Salle. The film was written by David S. Goyer while a student at USC, and was Goyer’s first screenplay to be sold and produced commercially. In the film, police detective Louis Burke is going into a prison facility in California as an undercover cop in order to find out who was behind a mysterious series of murders, and finds himself locked up with his nemesis: Christian Naylor, a psychotic serial killer who calls himself “The Sandman,” who sets out to exact revenge upon him after getting into prison. Death Warrant was released on September 14, 1990. Upon its release, the film grossed $46 million against a production budget of only $6 million.
Plot:
Detective Louis Burke (Jean-Claude van Damme) of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police from Quebec confronts the maniac that killed his partner on the force: an enigmatic psychopathic serial killer by the name of Christian Naylor (Patrick Kilpatrick), who calls himself “The Sandman”. Burke searches an abandoned house in Los Angeles, where he comes across a series of bodies hanging from the ceiling, and is then attacked by the Sandman. Burke is able to shoot the Sandman several times in the center of his chest, apparently killing him.
Sixteen months later, Burke joins a task force assembled by the governor to investigate a series of murders in the Harrison State Prison in California which is becoming a scandal threatening his reelection. While Burke poses as an inmate, attorney Amanda Beckett (Cynthia Gibb) acts as his wife. Burke goes undercover and is interned in the State penitentiary, where befriends his cellmate Konefke (Conrad Dunn) and a clerk, Hawkins (Robert Guillaume). Despite Burke saving Hawkins from a confrontation with a Mexican gang, neither he nor Konefke will talk about the recent murders.
Development and writing, Filming.
The film debuted strongly at the box office, opening with a $5 million weekend to place No. 3. It would gross over $16 million at the domestic box office. On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 34 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews”.
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