What better time to write about a movie that deals with mayhem, murder and fun in the sun than in the depths of a deep, cold, black winter?  No better time, says I, so fill up your coconut with your choice of boat drinks and get on board the U.S.S Zydecoldsmobile for a few changes in latitude.

And if I get another Jimmy Buffett song title in there, I get bonus points.

But A Perfect Getaway won’t be quite so relaxing…at least, after a while.  Two couples–four people total–think they’ve found paradise on earth on a vacation in Hawaii.  But what they don’t know is that they’re being hunted by madmen who have a thing about tourists.  Specifically, they want all tourists dead.

To a certain degree, this is about what you’d expect.  It’s beautiful at first, and then things start getting worse.  It’s strange how the weather almost seems to reflect, on a limited scale, the conditions in which the heroes find themselves.  It doesn’t actually RAIN down there until after the bad stuff gets started.

I don’t know whether to be pleased with or insulted by the Film School 101 stance the movie has been taking, though.  Seriously, they’re talking about “Act Two Twist” and “Red Herring” RIGHT IN THE FILM.  It’s either clever or it’s sanctimonious depending on how you want to look at it.

They do do a magnificent job with building suspense, though, and everything’s a bit straightforward but still lots of fun.  The setting, meanwhile, is absolutely beautiful and yet sufficiently ominous.  There’s horror in the midst of beauty and that not only amplifies the terror but also distracts from it a bit to make the freaky parts all the deeper for a little break.

What will be especially interesting is how, after a certain point, the movie will start to be told in flashback, giving you the second side of things, the what-was-really-going-on, the “rest of the story” to quote Paul Harvey.

A Perfect Getaway will prove to be a little more than you expect it to be, and that by itself is unusual.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves a good surprise like nothing else and thus hands A Perfect Getaway an eight out of ten for being a mystery movie that does a whole lot of strange things and presents plenty of shocks and terror to boot.