Special Effects

Special Effects is a weird movie, not because of what's on the screen, but because of the convergence of circumstances that make it what it is. But those things also make it difficult to enjoy. The movie is about a director who murders an aspiring starlet in his bedroom, secretly videotaping it the entire time. The director is known for big budget special effects movies, and his last one bombed, so he's now so focused on realism and wanting to make a movie that feels real, he decides to incorporate the videotape of the murder into his next movie. He casts the lead suspect to play himself, and a dead ringer for the deceased as the lead. It's sort of a mix of Vertigo, Psycho, and Peeping Tom. Clearly, Cohen -- known for more schocky, drive-in B-tier movies -- was going for something a little above his pay grade with Special Effects. The movie is trying to comment on the making of movies, big budget cinema, realism in art and making the fake look real, sexual violence, and the male gaze. Commentary on social topics not foreign to Larry Cohen; later in the decade, he'd look at consumerism and brand loyalty (The Stuff) and corruption in the police department and the dangers of the police brotherhood (Maniac Cop). He was never as delicate or as nuanced at it as other directors, but he tried, and I give him credit for that. He didn't just regurgitate a style and call it an homage. Brian de Palma, I'm looking at you. That ambition is a large part of his undoing, though. Special Effects wants to be a lot of things -- a sleazy, sexxxed-up (not a typo) thriller, a commentary on making movies, and a dreamy, psychological piece that blurs the line for both characters and viewer where the line is between fiction and reality. Unfortunately, it can't do all of these things at once, which results it doing none of them particularly well. Amazingly, de Palma's Dressed To Kill is more sleazy than this, which is a shame, because that was made by a doofus trying to modernize Hitchcock, whereas Special Effects has no such ambitions. It's trying to be lurid and dirty, but it never completely gets there. The commentary it offers on movies, horror movies, exploitation, and the line between art and reality is poorly drawn. Special Effects tries to have too many commentaries running at the same time, so it ends up talking a lot but saying little. And it never seems to embrace the idea of that line-blurring. This might be the most disappointing of the three failures, as there is a golden opportunity here to tell it from three angles -- the director who can no longer separate his real life from the movie he's making, the guy who is swept up in a business he never intended to be in that's preying on his own unfortunate circumstance and embellishing it for the sake of drama, and the starry-eyed woman whose only fault is looking just like a dead woman and is stuck playing that role for two deluded men. It only pays lip service to any of them, though, which leaves Special Effects feeling like a first draft that got filmed. It also doesn't help that there is some extremely dodgy acting, and that almost everyone in the movie is playing a rather unlikeable character. A movie doesn't need a sympathetic lead -- plenty of gallows humor comedies live and die by loathsome casts, and Psycho is built around bad people -- but this is one movie where it could've benefitted greatly. Instead, the husband is a domineering jerk, the original lead woman abandoned her husband and toddler, the director is a murderer, the cop investigating the murder is an egomaniac, and the woman who ends up playing the dead woman becomes a pain in the ass when she's dazzled by the possibility of fame. It's hard to get invested when everybody falls on a scale between aloof and repellant. It's still an interesting movie for its twists and turns, and its attempts at thematic exploration. Eric Bogosian absolutely holds it down as the slimeball director, and Zoe Lund gets to play two different, interesting roles. It's a shame Cohen tried to make it do so many things instead picking just one. It could've been something fun if it had.