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Coin-operated binoculars segue into a scream in the night, a nightmarish palpitation that William Lustig sustains to the very finish. The mind in murderous disarray is a fleapit flat (purple wallpaper, maternal shrine, contorted mannequins), in it wallows the hulking New Yorker (Joe Spinell) when not butchering women. One moment he's asking the hooker he's just picked up (Rita Montone) to pose "like in the magazines," the next he's nailing her scalp to a plastic effigy. "Every time you go out, this kind of thing happens," he rages to himself and the camera slowly circles until he's facing it like Lorre in M. A shotgun for the couple necking under the Verrazano Bridge (Tom Savini saves the most voluminous squib for his own exploding skull), an Oedipal exorcism with the bound model (Abigail Clayton). The victims' torment is the audience's: Lustig pushes the distress of the nurse (Kelly Piper) in the deserted subway station beyond the pleasurable frisson of Dressed to Kill and into authentic, grinding suffocation. Agonizing over abusive memories, the protagonist grows philosophical about capturing beauty with the glossy shutterbug (Caroline Munro). "Things change. People die. But in a picture or painting, they're yours forever." A pockmarked mise en scène of grime and cold sweat and engulfing synth wails, "just a little blood" streaming down the lens as blade meets flesh. Hitchcock's Psycho and before that Dmytryk's The Sniper, plus a riposte to Taxi Driver, complete with "You talkin' to me?" Prayer at the cemetery gives way to the purposeful fakery of horror-movie fog, fantasy ghouls dissipate to leave the human monster in the puddle of his own madness. With Hyla Marrow, James L. Brewster, and Sharon Mitchell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |