Here’s the thing: James Spader was the biggest d-bag in the 80s.

I mean, not him personally, but his characters. He mocked Molly Ringwald and John Cryer in “Pretty in Pink”. In “The New Kids”, he menaced innocent girls as a psychopathic gang leader. In “Less Than Zero, he did no less than pimp out future Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. 

That’s why it was a GENUIS move to cast Spader as the “nice guy” in 1990’s “Bad Influence.” In the neo-noir thriller, Spader’s Michael is lured into a life of drug use, casual sex, and violent crime by rogue-ish, charming-when-he-wants-to-be Alex played by Rob Lowe.  

There’s a serious Brett Easton Ellis vibe at play in the film. Michael is basically a grown-up version of Clay from “Less than Zero”. Alex is Patrick Bateman, the evil protagonist in Ellis’s “American Psycho”. The film oozes with the yuppie entitlement, cocaine and easy sex that were the cornerstones of Ellis’s novels. (One of the final scenes, where Lowe beds two women at once, has to be a nod to the scandal that plagued the actor in the mid 80s.)

Spader nails his role. At first his nebbish protagonist (almost Woody Allenish) moves tentatively though life, eyes darting as he fearfully sizes up each situation, cocking his jaw in a nervous tic, never challenging the people who walk all over him. But when Alex shows up and introduces him to the dark side, Michael embraces it with glee.

(One moment struck me in particular. Michael, after a full night of alcohol and drug consumption, plus crime, wakes up the next morning and goes to his day job with nary a complaint. Ah, to be young again.)

Lowe I was less enthused with. I didn’t quite feel the evil simmering below the surface. I think Lowe made an astute move when he went towards comedy a few years later, as he has a natural talent there.

There’s nothing in the plot that will surprise you, but there’s some cruelty and bloodshed and it all rises to a cathartic denouement. I liked the eventual fate of Spader’s character, which felt realistic and deserved.

The appeal of this storyline, that we’ve all seen a million times, is that we all want a bad influence in our lives. We want someone to show up and give up permission to embrace our id and wrack vengeance upon our enemies.