‘One False Move’ (R)

Whether it's the visually poetic "In Cold Blood" of the 1960s or last week's reenactment episodes on "America's Most Wanted," there's a siren-like, quintessentially American lore to coldblooded killers on the road. Maybe it's the romantic trek west gone negative, suddenly bound for hell.

"One False Move," a road trip through America's bloodstained heartland, taps right into that macabre world. It's an eerie and horrifying experience, ably directed by newcomer Carl Franklin. It's also unsettlingly compelling, even at its most conventional moments.

On a search for drugs and money, prison buddies Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach, with accomplice Cynda Williams in tow, commit a series of chilling executions in Los Angeles. Planning to unload the narcotics in Houston, they head east.

They're a scary team. Pony-tailed Thornton (also the movie's coscreenwriter) has a psychotic, Mansonian streak. Muscular Beach has the bespectacled mien of a graduate student, but he has a thing for ritual stabbing. Thornton's girlfriend Williams doesn't enjoy the brutality, but she lures the victims -- and she likes the coke.

Los Angeles cops Jim Metzler and Earl Billings soon learn the criminals' identities. They also know Williams has family in Star City, Ark. Hooking up with small-town, out-there police chief Bill Paxton, they plan a stakeout.

"False Move" is not structured like the average Hollywood chase. Instead of speeding formulaically toward the inevitable result, it drinks in everything -- the criminals' flight, the L. A. cops and the peculiar world of Star City, where everyone is destined to converge. In this fatalistic scheme of things, everything -- and everyone -- matters.

Paxton is amusingly off-kilter as the good old boy dying to rub shoulders with big guns Metzler and Billings. Thornton, Beach and Williams are memorably on edge as the beleaguered, increasingly paranoid trio. Less successful is a past connection between two of the characters that ties up the story too neatly. But it's a minor snag in an otherwise impressive work.

Director Franklin and writers Thornton and Tom Epperson imbue the movie with a flat, chilly atmosphere. Straightforward, non-gymnastic camerawork heightens the sense of realism; it makes the grisly more commonplace, hence more alarming. Often, just before something climactic (and usually horrible) is going to happen, Franklin and editor Carole Kravetz cut away to another scene. This creates a ubiquitous sense of dread, as you're forced to contemplate the barren, rural silence, fully aware of the grim horror occurring somewhere off screen.