Every once in a while a perverse little curiosity flares up in me, and I wonder what I'm missing on television in my attempts to avoid hours of formulaic nonsense. Of course, whenever I indulge in this curiosity, my fears are generally re-affirmed, and I recoil like a finger from a flame. The Canadian TV-produced A Killing Spring was one of those experiences.

The movie is apparently part of something called "The Joanne Kilbourne Mysteries" series, and it plays like one of those television mini-series that grandmothers watch and find scandalous yet terribly scintillating. Think something kind of like Murder She Wrote, but with a younger heroine and a few more sordid details.

In the opening scenes, we meet ex-Detective / Journalism Professor Joanne Kilbourne as she teaches a journalism class that seems terribly remedial to have what are supposed to be the country's brightest journalism students attending. Among these students are Val (Zachery Ty Brian, looking much older than on Home Improvement, which was, ironically, another program that drove me away from TV) and Lisa, a stereotypical "bitch who will do anything to get ahead" -type. This getting ahead consists of sleeping with the school's dean, shown in a brief scene full of carefully obscured nudity.

Having thusly greased the dean's wheels (as well as a certain other part), she hands him her entry for the school's journalism contest and leaves. Since this is a mystery, it's no surprise that he is soon found (by a superfluous drag queen, for some reason) dead with stockings around his neck. The police believe he died of an autoerotic asphyxiation mishap.

Anyway, the rest writes itself. It is, of course, no surprise that Miss Kilbourne ends up leading a private investigation into the murder after becoming dissatisfied with that of the police, and it's also no surprise that more people soon begin dying.

Still, even if the story is hackneyed, the creators could at least have tried to save it in the delivery. Instead, we are given predictable suspense and false-scare scenes along with boring stock characters (the boozing wife, the jealous lover, etc.) and terribly trite "television" dialogue. Even the culprit is easily predictable, when one considers the Law of Conservation of Characters, a Roger Ebert axiom that states that any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems. I managed to pick out the killer about an hour in; surely any reader at all familiar with gialli, as I'm sure most of you must be, would be able to do so as well (not to besmirch the term by comparison, of course).

The boring and predictable film is not particularly livened by its presentation. It is presented 1.33:1 (probably the correct ratio, as it is a TV movie), and the video (at least on my disk) was sub-par. The image was strangely grainy and pixilated throughout, almost as though watching a tape I'd actually recorded off TV (instead of just watching a DVD of something that played on TV). The audio was rather weak, too, with dialogue getting drowned out whenever loud background music appeared.

Extra-wise, all I got was a trailer, though I was viewing a review disk. Various sources list various extras that will supposedly be on the actual release, though there is a good deal of conjecture, so I won't say anything here for fear of spreading rumor. Chances are you won't be picking up the disk for its extras anyway, even if it does have a documentary or commentary.

I have come to believe that television has become a lot less original in recent years, and A Killing Spring is proof that our friendly neighbors to the north are having just as much trouble manufacturing quality TV-entertainment as we are. There's really nothing particularly new or interesting about this dull affair full of obvious red herrings, stock characters, and platitudinous dialogue. (At least the bad gialli would throw in lots of sex and violence to keep you awake.) Only for viewers who are terribly desperate for a mystery, the best thing about A Killing Spring is that it answers the burning question of "Whatever happened to that older Home Improvementâ kid anyway?" though in the end you'll still be left wondering what the hell a "Killing Spring" is...