Screenwriter Eric Red and director Kathryn Bigelow, collaborators on the 1987 vampire film Near Dark, reunited on another bloodsucker outing of sorts with 1990’s Blue Steel, which stars Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner, a recent police academy graduate whose first night on patrol with the NYPD brings her to the attention of Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a psychotic stock exchange trader who will pursue and torment her over the course of the story.

When Megan shoots an armed robber (Tom Sizemore) in a grocery store, bystander Hunt serendipitously makes away with the criminal’s weapon before she notices, inspiring him to initiate a very strange courtship. Contriving to meet her soon thereafter in a seemingly chance way, Hunt introduces himself and begins an aggressive wooing campaign, with Megan, still unaware that he was the one who removed the gun from the crime scene, quickly falling for the well-heeled and superficially well-mannered Wall Street wolf. Also unknown to her, Hunt embarks upon a series of random murders in tribute to Megan, carving her name on the bullet casings.

Foreshadowing the mutual pursuit that will preoccupy the film, a street montage that occurs early on establishes the theme of the game of skill with shots of pairs of men playing chess and basketball. The basketball scene also offers the first hint that the film will be concerned with Jews, as play occurs in front of a mural in “remembrance of all the people who believed in the Big Lie” – a reference to Hitler’s assessment of the Jewish penchant for telling libelous whoppers.

Then, as she makes her way to the scene that will set the plot in motion – as will be repeated before her final confrontation with Hunt – Megan passes sex shops advertising a “live nude revue” and 25-cent “private fantasy booths”. This male commodification of women serves as a stark contrast with Megan’s virtue and desire to serve as a helpful member of society, but also alludes to a specifically Jewish form of exploitation of women. The notion of prostitutes as victims of Jews, moreover, receives an unsubtle visualization when Hunt, after murdering a hooker (Toni Darling), rubs her blood-soaked clothing on his face and chest as if to bathe in her gore.

Decades before Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein became the ugly Jewish faces of the twenty-first-century apex sex pest, Ron Silver embodied an earlier variation on the archetype in Eugene Hunt, whose name, while not obviously Jewish, hints at his search for better genes. “I like your bone structure,” he tells Megan. Jamie Lee Curtis, though half-Jewish, reads fairly goyish in her screen presence, and scenes of them kissing, with noses in proximity, unpleasantly emphasize the Jew-gentile physiognomical dichotomy. The most anti-Semitic decision taken in the production of Blue Steel, without doubt, was the casting of Silver, with his malevolently hairy and predatory Levantine features, as the villain. Megalomaniacally, the antagonist hears voices that tell him, “You are God, Eugene”, and – just in case any viewers have not yet caught on that he is Jewish – he also invokes the rise of a “sun of righteousness” mentioned in chapter four of Malachi, which in context promises Israel rewards for following Yahweh’s laws as well as destruction for those who disobey.

Halfway through the movie, when Megan realizes her too-good-to-be-true rich boyfriend is the serial killer, her troubles are far from over. The privileged Hunt, with his wealth and prestige, is able to forestall justice with the help of his attorney (Richard Jenkins) – a character the audience is immediately inclined to despise. Indeed, though he ought to have been the prime suspect from the beginning, Hunt’s ill-gotten stature and self-assurance have insulated him from punishment – which does, however, eventually come. Taking quite a beating but still as unrelenting as Michael Myers in his pursuit of the heroine, Hunt undergoes a humorous physical transformation during the denouement, going from the slickly groomed Wall Street operator to a disheveled and wounded but still dangerous mess, at one point hiding behind a pretzel vendor’s cart as he continues to limp toward his prey, as if having devolved into a more primitive, fresh-off-the-boat, and more rodent-like manifestation of Jewry after his true nature has been discovered.

Recently released on Blu-ray by Lionsgate, Blue Steel is thrill-loaded and due for unholstering, even if the de rigueur feminist content – the it’s-tough-being-a-tough-woman stuff and an annoying subplot about spousal abuse – prevents it from being an unmitigated classic.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.