What I enjoy about Larry Cohen is how he approaches things as a writer: the story’s gotta have a hook! Released in the same year as Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Cohen’s film Special Effects (1984) is a comparable twist on a Hitchcockian thriller. The hook: What if a movie director was a murderer? (A plot idea conceived in the late 1960s, yet released one year after the Twilight Zone: The Movie tragedy). The title is a misdirect: it’s not really about special effects or using special effects to kill or to get away with killing. The special effect is “turning reality into make believe.”
“Who’s your favourite director?” “Abraham Zapruder. Honest Abe.” That’s what we hear over the opening credits in an interview with film director Chris Neville (a pre-Talk Radio Eric Bogosian). He’s back in New York after getting fired from a multi-million production in Hollywood, and recovering from a subsequent mental breakdown. When a model and actor, Andrea (a post-Ms. 45 Zoe Lund) shows up at his incredible loft apartment, wanting to become a star (she works as a nude dancer and model), he employs the casting couch (actually his bedroom with red walls and satin bedsheets). After being exposed secretly filming their tryst, and insulted for his career failures, Neville murders Andrea in a fit of rage. When Andrea’s husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) shows up – a hayseed who wants to take her back to the mid-western town they grew up in (and the baby son they have together) and away from the NYC lifestyle that has corrupted her – he is suspected of Andrea’s murder. The director character comes up with another angle worthy of a Columbo villain: he’ll make a film based on Andrea’s life, cast the husband to play himself, and eventually frame him for the murder, using the footage of her death that he has inadvertently recorded and privately fetishises.
There’s a low budget sleazy New York vibe to Special Effects, stylish at times with memorable shots like the one of Chris standing on the actress headshots covering the floor, or characters filmed in shadow against a doorway looking out at the neon NYC streetscape. It’s a scrappy B-movie that doesn’t reach the showmanship of De Palma or the arty grit of Abel Ferrara, but has a cynical, self-referential take on movie-making with Bogosian’s egotistical director character. Often, it feels like Cohen is commenting on the failure of the New Hollywood filmmakers (Cimino, Bogdanovich, etc), early successes leading to expensive flops and associated tragedies (Dorothy Stratton is even mentioned). This allure of the movies is insidious enough to make the lead detective on the case (Kevin J. O’Connor) become a consultant and producer on the movie-within-a-movie, unknowing helping the director on his secret, sinister plotting.
Alongside the New York location shooting (some of which shot without permits, one can assume from Cohen’s guerrilla tactics), the grind-house style sex and violence, and the psychological mind-games that the director-within-the-movie is playing on his cast, the film is also powered by Bogosian’s haughty intensity and Lund’s off-kilter energy. Lund provides a two-part performance, the first part clearly dubbed, yet thankfully the remainder allows her to shine with her own voice. Even if it’s not completely successful as a thriller or reaches the heights of Body Double, Special Effects is a lurid, entertaining B-movie that has reflexive ideas about power dynamics in cinema, both making them and watching them. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 