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"The fire from heaven was certainly here today." The Eisenhower Mom and Pop, blessed by a mushroom cloud and incinerated on Junior's birth, ten years to the day after the Hiroshima bombing. (The prelude's kinship to Lynch has been noted, the modus operandi of what follows is closer to Zulawski.) The orphan is next seen at the end of Reagan's decade, a California instructor (Brad Dourif) with a perpetual fever and a charred birthmark on his hand. Pyrokinesis is his curse, the spark that pops from his fingertip during distress, the incendiary paroxysm that expands with each revelation of his past. "Atom-sized thermites in the bloodstream," an affliction shared with the devoted girlfriend (Cynthia Bain) and exalted by the shadowy mastermind (William Prince). "I don't think the experiment's over." Tobe Hooper's Kiss Me Deadly and no mistake, spilling over with vehemence and sadness, a magnificent bit of escalating hysteria. His mise en scène is the tangle of raging nerves that warps the screen's skin, keyed to Dourif's frantic tour de force as the nuclear baby dolorously awakening to his creation as "the cleanest killing system on earth." The burning limb that boils the water meant to extinguish it, the pink-neon phone plugged into the new spiritualism of radio psychics, the enduring tinkle of a scorched toy carousel. A settling of scores with the Fifties, cf. Invaders from Mars, and there's vintage subversive André De Toth as a scientist lovingly dusting a shrunken skull. "I made the sun rise twice that morning in 1955," boasts the wheelchair-bound Mabuse piqued by the human pyre's lack of gratitude, his blueish mausoleum lights up in bright red and yellow. "There's absolutely no reason whatsoever for any kind of emotional crescendo." Amid the ashes of trauma, the finale clinches the affinity with De Palma's The Fury. With Melinda Dillon, Jon Cypher, Dey Young, Stacy Edwards, Brian Bremer, and Dale Dye.
--- Fernando F. Croce |