Against the Law (1997 film)
1997 film by Jim Wynorski
Against the Law is a 1997 American action films directed by Jim Wynorski and starring Nick Mancuso, Nancy Allen and Richard Grieco.
Plot
In California, a homeless and mentally ill man, Rex, comes to believe he is a gunfighter from the American Old West, and heads for Los Angeles. While travelling, he begins a murder spree, and his victims include police officers. He becomes fixated on Los Angeles police officer John Shepard, who is in the news after killing a drug dealer in a shootout, and news anchor Maggie Hewitt, who broke the story. He terrorizes Hewitt before arriving in Los Angeles, where he challenges Shepard to a Western-style showdown at high noon.
Cast
Nancy Allen as Maggie Hewitt
Richard Grieco as Rex
Nick Mancuso as Detective John Shepard
Steven Ford as Lieutenant Bill Carpenter
Thomas Mikal Ford as Detective Siegel
Gary Sandy as Chief Leitner
Leslie Bega as Lucia
James Stephens as Detective Ben Hamada
Herb Mitchell as Carl Stensgard
Heather Thomas as Felicity
Jaime Pressly as Sally
B.K. Byron as Lars Reder
Tim Colceri as Officer I.Q.
Randy Crowder as Lieutenant Fuller
Billy Gallo as DJ
Randy Hall as Security Guard
Frank Lloyd as Officer Caultman
Christopher Pettiet as Tommy
Production
The film was written by Steve Mitchell with Bob Sheridan. Mitchell hoped to direct and wrote it with John Terlesky in mind for the lead. Jim Wynorski bought the script for Sunset Films, a company he was operating with Andrew Stevens for Cinetel Films. Mitchell said he thought the film "ultimately turned out to be one of Jim’s best movies, but there are a lot of things I’m not happy with.
“Against the Law (1997 film)” enters the record as 1997 film by Jim Wynorski. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Against, film and Wynorski can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1443274. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Against the Law (1997 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.