[REVIEW-CAST #3] SPECIAL EFFECTS (1984)

This opening scene with the raincoat brigade photographing Lund (in a space of roleplay) always makes me think of the series of scenes in Andrzej Żuławski's film LA FEMME PUBLIQUE (THE PUBLIC WOMAN [1984]) with the man who pays to photograph Valérie Kaprisky nude while she stridently dances around a room.

[NOTE: This is the third in a new series of capsule reviews that will focus on genres related to the Krimi and Giallo; for more info, read this post. In short, these reviews are less rigorous, more associative, and are my way of flagging films that relate to the Krimi and Giallo genres and that, in their own ways, appeal to the same sensibilities. NOTE: As with all posts on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED for every movie mentioned below.]

[GENRE]: Psycho-Thriller [>exploitation]
[VERSION WATCHED]: MGM DVD

Larry Cohen's GOD TOLD ME TO is one of the most unnerving horror films I've seen, full of secret fears and irrational personal terrors of mine that get dramatized onscreen by an admittedly "rough around the edges" production. When Tony Lo Bianco turns to face the camera at the end and deliver a line that would be, in almost any other context, pure cheese, it is the movie's deeply disturbing mood (and its even more disturbing view of what it means to be a human being who is both desperate to be in relationships but also literally repulsed by them) that sells it. The movie is paranoia. The movie is New York City 70s grit. The movie is pulp material being brought to transgressive potboil.

(Take just the wrenching scenes between Bianco, his wife [Sandy Dennis], and his current lover [Deborah Raffin] where they discuss the inability of Dennis and Bianco to create a family. It is awkward, and tense, because it is taking place between the inert love triangle. And taking place in a way that you get the feeling the characters are, at times, telling secrets about each other as if they weren't there, listening, in the room. When later in the film we get the revelation that Bianco's alien powers were used by him to actually kill the children in the womb because, subconsciously, he couldn't stand the thought of more alien hybrids like himself coming into the world, it is profoundly disturbing. And profoundly sad.)

So after seeing that one, I added a bunch of other Cohen movies to my watchlist. SPECIAL EFFECTS rose to the top of the list after I discovered that MS. 45's Zoë Lund starred. When doing some digging about Lund's cinematic career, I came across this description of SPECIAL EFFECTS:

"Enter Special Effects, made back-to-back with Blind Alley (1984), and a very queer number indeed. I couldn't honestly say there is a single fleshed-out element in Special Effects – dramatically, psychologically, emotionally or thematically. And there certainly isn't anything going on worth blessing with the title of mise en scène."

I can't say I agree with this. There's plenty fleshed out in the movie, just in the same unabashedly pulp strokes that Cohen uses in his other films. I.e., this is, on its face, the pulp version of VERTIGO (or, even moreso, the sister film to Robert Aldrich's own VERTIGO rework, THE LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE, which stars an unbelievably transformed Kim Novak and some familiar Italian genre actors of the day, and would be hit with the same criticisms by the reviewer above I suspect).

Lund plays the Novak role, this time a Midwestern mother who has temporarily abandoned her family to go to New York and hit it big as a model/actress. When her disgruntled, stereotypically corn-fed husband tracks her down, he finds her roleplaying as a Marilyn Monroe-like stripper in an improvised Oval Office set that's been built into a fleabag hotel. Men pay to come in with cameras and take pictures of her as she strips (and, presumably, tries to make them feel like they're "the most powerful man in the world").

In order to get away from her husband, Lund pretends that she has a casting call with Eric Bogosian, a hip wunderkind director who has recently bombed out of Hollywood with a disastrously unfinished project. She is so committed to this fantasy that she tracks down Bogosian, bluffs her way into his studio/home, and convinces him to give her an audition. This audition consists of him taking her to bed, and then murdering her (while he films her) as the climax of their casting couch session.

From there the film really starts to spin (both in terms of picking up speed, and increasingly having the threads of its plot spin out of control as Cohen tries to keep them all in the same weave). Lund's husband is accused of her murder. Bogosian, the real murderer, gets wind of this and bails him out—on the condition that he will reprise his role as Lund's "real-life" husband in a movie that Bogosian is going to shoot about the dead Lund's life. The police, as interested in their own fame as the solution to the case, come on as "technical consultants" to Bogosian's film. And the search for an actress to play the reincarnated Lund is on.

And it should be no surprise that Lund returns to play the reincarnation of herself, her ringer, her initially unwilling doppelganger, cast in the movie of the dead woman's life. What follows, once "the second" Lund is picked to star, is at times obvious homage (the scene in VERTIGO where Stewart gives commands to the clothiers and hairdressers about how Novak must be [re]made-up is recreated here almost one-for-one; there's also a scene in a restaurant that is a clear lift); at other times, labyrinthine psychosexual corkscrewing. The film burrowing further into itself. Film, within a film. Within a film.

(Sometimes this self-referentially lets itself down, as in the moment at the end of the movie where he restages the end scene from GOD TOLD ME TO, having the police detective turn and speak directly to the camera a la Lo Bianco. Here it's not so powerful, and feels extraneous.)

...

Despite the fact that I've never been a fan of Bogosian's somewhat generic version of the urbane and/or sophisticated madman-villain, he works it well here, esp. in the moments of particular sleaze (the way his apartment is rigged so that he can secretly film not only his lovemaking with Lund, but his erotic-grotesque murder of her; the way his eyes pop and bug and glimmer a little more when he's filming the real-life unfolding trauma of Lund's husband, forced to argue with or make love to the actress playing the reincarnated Lund, right there, under the lights and in front of the whole crew; etc.).

If his cat-and-mouse schtick with the fame-hungry New York cop is mostly forgettable (and if he hams it up just a little too much as the "poor misunderstood blockbuster director kicked out of Hollywood"), he still essentially fulfills his role, and delivers more than one memorable scene (the duration of the scene when he strangles the film tech with celluloid comes to mind; I kept thinking of that scene in Hitchcock's TORN CURTAIN where Paul Newman struggles to kill the enemy agent in the cottage. The way that the man's death is gruelingly impossible to achieve—the way, even after his head is shoved in the turned-on oven, the scene feels like it just lasts and lasts and lasts ...).

Again, though, it's Lund's movie. And a markedly different sort of performance than in MS. 45, if for no other reason than she isn't mute here (though her performance as the first version of her character is dubbed; and not so well). She shows again an unusual and precise control of her physical performance, one that is layered with all sorts of unspoken commentary about her character (power relationships, sexual relationships, gender relationships, surprising humor, etc.). Would that she could've worked more.

Leonard Jacobs

February, 2015

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