On Criterion, I watched Fear City, a 1984 exploitation film written by Nichols St. John and directed by Abel Ferrara. They have collaborated on nine films together, including Ms. 45, China Girl, King of New York, Dangerous Game, Body Snatchers, The Addiction, and The Funeral. The film centers on two talent agents for adult entertainment performers, the agents being Matt (Tom Berenger) and Nicky (Jack Scalia), who provide strippers for Manhattan night clubs, specifically the seedy Times Square area. A serial killer begins targeting the dancers, knifing them, and his attacks later turn fatal, and Matt and Nicky are being pressed by a police detective (Billy Dee Williams) to help him find the killer.
Matt is a former boxer who accidentally killed his opponent, and he is connected with the mob over witnessing a mob hit as a child and not telling anyone about it. His ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith) is one of the star dancers, and as her friends get attacked and murdered, Matt rekindles his relationship with her and is trying to protect her from the same fate.
The killer, Pazzo (John Foster) practices martial arts in the nude in his barren loft, writes about his attacks, and stalks the women late at night. Some of the dancers are played by notable actresses in early roles, like Maria Conchita Alonso, Rae Dawn Chong, and Ola Ray (best known as Michael Jackson's girlfriend in the Thriller video). The scenes of the killer doing martial arts while naked feels like inspiration for Die Hard 2, with the scenes of a naked William Sadler practicing karate or kickboxing while nude in his home. There are also similarities to the 1983 Charles Bronson movie 10 to Midnight, focusing on a serial killer who performs his murders in the nude as to not get any blood on him, and that movie also had Ola Ray in a small part as a friend of Bronson's character's daughter.
Melanie Griffith had been acting since she was a teen in the 1970s, and in her early roles as an adult, she did get typecast in sex worker parts, with roles showing off her body, sex appeal, and soft voice. In the same year, she had been in Brian de Palma's Body Double as an adult film actor, and would become more of a mainstream star with roles in Something Wild (1986) and Working Girl (1988). She was a lot of fun in Cherry 2000 (1988), where she played a tracker of sex doll robots to help a guy find a model of his robot to replace, crossing a dangerous post-apocalyptic wasteland of 2017.
This movie definitely feels like everything that Abel Ferrara likes about 1980s New York City: strippers, gangsters, cliched Italian New Yorker stereotypes, street violence, and an overwhelming feeling of sleaziness in the nighttime. It's nice to watch as long as one knows what to expect, of a 1980s B-movie neon thriller, with a cool theme song by David Johansen and Joe Delia.
No comments:
Post a Comment