Taglines: Ruby Ridge… Waco… Oklahoma City… Now, he’s coming home.
The Turning movie storyline. After four years, Clifford Harnish returns to his hometown of Pocahontas, Virginia, hoping to save his family and make for himself the happy childhood he never had. Unfortunately, he has arrived just in time to see his parents’ divorce made final. He also gets to watch his mother sink into an alcoholic depression while his father builds a new life with a new woman. Soon Cliff decides to take matters into his own hands, using the methods he learned while traipsing the country with Neo-Nazis. Adapted from the play “Home Fires Burning.”
The Turning (alternately titled Home Fires Burning, Pocahontas or Pocahontas, Virginia) is a 1992 American independent drama/thriller film directed by L.A. Puopolo, based on the play Home Fires Burning by Chris Ceraso. It is the film debut of actress Gillian Anderson. Both she and co-star Raymond J. Barry later appeared in the TV series The X-Files, although they did not have any scenes together.
The film was shot on location in Pocahontas, Virginia and the neighboring communities of Abbs Valley, Virginia and Nemours, West Virginia. It was theatrically released on May 2, 1992 in the United States and on home video in 1997. It stars Karen Allen, Raymond J. Barry, Michael Dolan as Clifford “Cliff” Harnish, Tess Harper, Gillian Anderso, Jim Simmons, Madison Arnold, Tannis Benedict, John Newton and William B. O’Boyle.
The film features a sex scene between Dolan and Anderson’s characters, and was shot while Anderson was still a 19-year-old student in drama school. After the film was bought by British film distributor David Lewis in 1996, his company Unique Films released it on home video nationwide.
By then appearing in the TV series The X-Files, Anderson hired lawyers in an attempt to stop the film’s release. The British tabloid press, which described the film as a “B movie”, reported that Anderson had tried to buy it back for “large sums of money” without success. They described the scene as “semi-topless”. According to Dolan, the scene was shot at 4 A.M. after a long day and both he and Anderson were exhausted.
Anderson had a clause in her contract stating that her breasts could not be exposed in any scenes. Despite the controversy, the Orange County Register judged the scene to be “fleeting” and argued that the film “deserves better than to serve as a salacious footnote to a television show.” Nuttycombe called the scene “gratuitous” and “irrelevant”.
In 2002, Keith Phipps of The A.V. Club, who described The Turning as an “unconvincing melodrama”, argued that the film had been re-released purely for the “one brief love scene featuring Anderson, much tamer than the video box’s lurid cover would suggest.”
The Turning (1992)
Directed by: L.A. Puopolo
Starring: Karen Allen, Raymond J. Barry, Michael Dolan, Tess Harper, Gillian Anderso, Jim Simmons, Madison Arnold, Tannis Benedict, John Newton, William B. O’Boyle
Screenplay by: L.A. Puopolo, Chris Ceraso
Production Design by: Mike Moran
Cinematography by: J. Michael McClary
Film Editing by: Lesley Topping
Costume Design by: Natasha Landau
Set Decoration by: Jennifer Baker
Art Direction by: Gary Levinson
Music by: Herb Pilhofer
MPAA Rating: R for some terror and language, and for a scene of sexuality.
Distributed by: Phaedra Cinema
Release Date: May 2, 1992
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