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The montage of flesh and neon in the opening credits announces the luxuriant style, the old-timer (Michael V. Gazzo) puts it into words, "milk from your mother's lost tit." Bodies and audiences, the druggie (Melanie Griffith) slips out of her sequin gown before howling nightclub dwellers and her estranged beau (Tom Berenger) flashbacks to the corpse in the boxing ring. The pugilist and his fellow mook (Jack Scalia) run a talent agency, their dancers are being mutilated, it might be a gangland war except that it's a stalker who mumbles about "purity." (Bare with nunchucks in front of anatomy posters, the maniac jots down his manifesto in a notebook bearing the film's title.) Into "the cesspool" steps the police lieutenant (Billy Dee Williams), not bothering to mask his disgust: "There's nothing I hate more than guineas in Cadillacs." Abel Ferrara leading apes in Hell, adjusting Wellman's Lady of Burlesque to 42nd Street in the Eighties. Pleasure dungeons everywhere, all drained of pleasure and pumped with dread, a feeling of perpetual night even during day scenes. At one point the screen becomes a bisected rectangle with strolling stripper on one side and killer with sword on the other, a cut on movement sends the blade right into the camera's eye. "You can never prevent terrorism, you can only find its roots and destroy it," wheezes the Little Italy capo (Rossano Brazzi), the top of a business of saggy old men and naked young women. A slasher-noir of striking textures, the scuzzier the better. It ends in a dirty alley with slugger versus samurai. "You think you're a hero? Well, maybe you are." Ferrara returns to the milieu for the humanistic comedy of Go Go Tales. With Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Jan Murray, Ola Ray, Janet Julian, and María Conchita Alonso.
--- Fernando F. Croce |