Canadian actor/director Philip Borsos made a couple of interesting films before an untimely death in his early forties, including
The Grey Fox
(1982) and this crime thriller starring Kurt Russell as police beat reporter Malcolm Anderson. Happily abandoning the Miami Daily for which he's labored for years, he takes a job on a small town paper hoping to take life in the slow lane for a time. Of course, he's soon caught up in a career-making story, after a serial killer (Richard Jordan) likes his account of a murder he's committed and decides to use the journalist as his mouthpiece. As the killings continue, Anderson begins to receive national attention, and the Numbers Killer, motivated primarily by a desire for the limelight, becomes jealous, and decides to kidnap Anderson's girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) to teach him a lesson. As he has with Anderson, the killer soon develops a relationship of sorts with the woman, and slowly reveals the workings of his bizarre personality while the police search desperately for the pair.