Walsh returns to paranoia in "Needful Things" (1993) as Danforth "Buster" Keaton III. It's a low-grade piece of Steven King, comic-book Satan schlock, so Walsh has some fun with it and swerves some hilariously over-the-top snark into his performance as a desperate, cigar-chomping Northeasterner on the verge of ruin who sells his soul for some inside tips at the horse races.

But there is a prime J.T. moment. We watch him as if we were watching him from behind the mirror at a bar.

He locks eyes with the mirror, with us, with juicy, creedling paranoia -- he never breaks his stare, even when a guy kicks the jukebox behind him so loud they use gunshot foley.

"Y'know, Henry?" he asks the bartender. "You know what they do? They do it at night. They come in, they take out the mirrors, and they put in a piece of one-way glass, and they stick a camera on the other side of it, and they watch ya, and they laugh at ya. And they take down every single word you say."

He licks his upper lip and looks sideways at the bartender as if he is imparting some great, cool, conspiratorial knowledge, some deep spook information, in the classic way of the paranoiac. Paranoid people do this -- they think they're holding it together. They think they're being reeeeeal cool about all this terrible action taking place against them, and when they tell you these things, some weird part of them is trying to impress you. J.T. nails it, ka-pow.

At the end, he gets to devolve into ridiculous, screaming scenery chewing, and kill his annoying wife with a hammer, and scream on his knees, "Oh please, Goh-haw-hawd, just let me die!" and risible bathos of the like, but the whole script has no more plausibility than an eighth-grade haunted house full of peeled-grape eyeballs, so his irreverence is appropriate. Ed Harris tried to subvert the comedy by committing wholeheartedly to the hopeless lines in the thing, like, "The devil is in Castle Rock. I need your help to get rid of him." (The film, incidentally, was distributed by Castle Rock. Coincidence?) But when the actors try to do a respectable job here, the film gets more clunky and self-defeating than orthopedic stilts -- J.T. had the right approach.

Another favorite among J.T. fans was his minor role in "The Last Seduction" (1994) as Linda Fiorentino's sleazy lawyer, Frank. I think people liked this role because the lawyer is the cat who understands Linda, the sociopathic femme fatale, and on some objective level appreciates what a reptile she is. "Has anyone checked you for a heartbeat lately?" he chuckles. I think, for boy fans, this role suggested that J.T. possessed an imperviousness to the evils of feminine guile.

Another plum in the Walsh repertoire was the bourbon-swilling dad who pervs around, pathetically flirting with Alicia Silverstone in "The Babysitter" (1995), a film about male sexual fantasies that will scare straight anyone considering having a teenage daughter. He fantasizes, driving with his frumpy wife to a party, that he is driving Alicia home. He's smoking, with his hair moussed into a teen Fonzie wedge; Alicia's teenage breasts heave toward his driver's seat. His wife sneers, "I'm almost positive that the last time [the babysitter] sat for us, she used our bathtub and took a bath. I mean, can you imagine that?"

It is evident by the suddenly serious look on his face that J.T. is imagining it so clearly that it is difficult for him not to wrap the car around a pole.

As he drinks at the party, his fantasies get creepier -- busting in on Alicia as she screws her boyfriend on his couch, terrorizing them. Catching Alicia in his bathtub and getting in with her, fully clothed, in his suit. It's a grotesque, tragicomic tour de force -- these odd parts were where J.T. really knocked the ball out of the park.

Walsh took things seriously again as John Ehrlichman in "Nixon" (1995), Oliver Stone's pounding-it-into-the-ground, Psych 101 treatise that states, over and over again, that Nixon was a squirmingly insecure troll who grew up poor and ugly in a rich man's game, and constantly took it out on the world that he wasn't an Ivy League pretty boy like JFK. Walsh does a fine job as Ehrlichman, a quietly horrible bureaucrat with a hideous comb-over; his sonorous voice is the reasonable emotional counterpoint to the shrill circus of character-actor combat taking place all around him.

"Breakdown" (1997) is an amusing film -- rather like Spielberg's classic "Duel." J.T. plays Redd Barr, an evil trucker who terrorizes Kurt Russell, and it's good to see J.T. finally get to terrorize Kurt Russell.

"Negotiator" (1998) was one of Walsh's final films; it came out the year he died. He plays Niebaum, a crooked, shifty-eyed Internal Affairs guy who is trying to frame star cop and hostage negotiator Samuel L. Jackson for the embezzlements he's been committing against the Chicago P.D. pension fund. J.T. doesn't look so hot -- he looks fat, toxic and pasty, as though he put a lot of poisons in his body and they didn't come back out. You know it's an action film, because the foley track is so loud and so Echoplexed that when Jackson is shoved against a file cabinet, it sounds like a Hyundai being chucked down an elevator shaft, and when there are extreme closeups of cigarettes being lit with a Zippo, the logs of tobacco ignite with a howling wind-tunnel effect. Niebaum is another morally bankrupt dud role, devoid of any human angle, which mainly consists of seething and scowling, which is why I like to remember J.T. Walsh's last film as "Sling Blade" (1996).

Walsh gets to bookend "Sling Blade" with some wonderful, skin-crawly monologues. Billy Bob Thornton, before he became a narcissistic glitz fiend all strung out on blow jobs and cosmetic enhancement, was a really fine writer -- he had a relaxed, funny way with language, kind of like a Southern Sam Shepard. J.T. starts out like an innocent crazy in the psychiatric hospital, shuffling around in his robe, dragging a chair around, flubbering his lips. He smiles at Billy Bob. He wants to talk. He wants to share.

"Mercury is a real good car. That was the car I was drivin' that day. I have a lot of cars." (He's lying, like a little kid, looking down, fidgeting with his fingers. His eyes are soft and innocent. His cheeks look babyish. He sighs.) Yeah. Different kinds. Lot of different kinds of cars. (He was sweetly trying to impress the grunting retard Billy Bob. Now he slowly starts dripping on the icky, drip, drop, drip.) She was standin', this girl, on the side of the street where there was this chicken stand ... and I pulled up the Mercury right up alongside, there, and I rolled down the window, see, by electric power. (A great tiny moment -- Walsh's big blue eyes light up, and he looks to connect with the underbiting Billy Bob, as if cuing Billy Bob to turn his big shaved head and say, 'Electric power? Well, aren't you the cosmopolitan!') And, uh, she had this leather skirt on, and she had a lot of hair on her arms, and I like that, I like that a lot, it means she has a big bush and I like a big bush. Heh!"

Walsh's gorgeous, careful evolution from harmless crazy to incredibly creepy sex offender ticks like a time bomb and gets a little more dangerous every second he's on camera. He plays the excellently juicy, weird lines like a Bösendorfer:

"You gotta make something explode to truly understand it. I mean, you gotta examine all those little tiny particles while they're still on fire," Walsh says intently, nodding, as if he were explaining to the mute Billy Bob a singular intellectual pleasure of molecular biology. It's pure sick pleasure.

This was a thoughtful man, this J.T. Walsh. I feel he invested a lot of atomic weight in his work: His life may have ended, but he was so committed, so present, so explosive, the little scattered impressions of himself that he left on film are still on fire.

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