I was always a fan of Val Kilmer. Did he really creep you out in this too. He was the deputy that picked up the kids when they were hitchhiking. I truly don't blame them for what they did because of his behavior. I didn't quite understand what caused him to behave this way. So he wanted to scare them. I get it. But, talk about going way too far, especially with two runaways.
shareYeah, I did. Perhaps not as much, because I always remembered him as the smart-ass prankster Chris Knight in "Real Genius."
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Yeah, I was kind of surprised when a later scene revealed he really was a deputy after all. My initial assessment was that he was a sexual predator who might have gotten a fake badge out of a toy set or something and been listening in on police scanners or talk around town about two runaways. Aside from his rather creepy talk (offering them a cigarette and referring to the girl as "Jailbait"), I also thought he was behaving like he might have recently been smoking something more than just tobacco, if you know what I mean.
He doesn't behave any better in the book, incidentally, although it made a bit clearer from the start that he really was a deputy. (He doesn't just say he's calling some "friends" but that he's calling the sheriff, and his name matches the name given on the side of his vehicle and on a sign at his goat farm where he takes them; a molester usually wouldn't give potential victims any easy way of identifying him in the event that they escape.) The way the book makes this whole incident scarier is by not narrating their escape scene at all: the chapter ends with the kids wondering what they're going to do and noticing the man has left his key in the ignition, and then the next chapter cuts to the police lady explaining to the girl's mother about the kids taking the vehicle and running over the deputy's foot before it returns back to the kids at the honey stand wondering whether the mother has heard about their sideswiping the deputy with the vehicle and wondering whether they dare to call her at all considering that they're probably in big trouble for that.
The "making of" feature on the DVD has Val Kilmer talking about how he figured his role was to serve as something of a "wake-up call" to the kids to remind them after they've been having all these fun adventures demonstrating how clever and resourceful they are, the real world's still a very dangerous place and they're still too young and inexperienced and vulnerable to keep navigating it on their own. According to the police woman in the book, the deputy and the other police at her station weren't used to dealing with this "caliber of kids" in cases involving runaways, i.e. the deputy probably hadn't been briefed that these were two fairly clean-living and tenderly raised children and not the scruffy juvenile delinquents from rough situations he would usually encounter in this kind of missing persons case.