Well howdee and hucklebucks, it’s Burl, here with a movie
set in America’s great Southwest! The picture is White of the Eye, and it’s a movie I remember seeing when it was
newly out on video, and thinking was very stylish indeed; but I was never quite
sure if I really liked it much! Well, looking at it again, as I did just last
night, I find a movie that’s occasionally very silly, but is strange and
intense and certainly very watchable!
We’re in the sunbleached suburbs of Tucson, where bored,
wealthy wives wave their petals back and forth like desert flowers, and a
madman killer, whom we see only as a pair of legs and a huge eyeball, is
picking them off in ritualistic murders that hearken back to Manhunter! (Ha ha, this movie was shot
before the Michael Mann picture came out, so I’m certainly not calling
copycat!)
In the meanwhile we get deep into the story of Paul and Joan
White, played respctively by David Keith from Firestarter and The Great
Santini and Cathy Moriarty from Matinee
and Raging Bull! Paul builds and
installs audio equipment (Ha ha, I wonder if his business card reads “Paul
White, Audio Consultant!”), and, as a series of grainy flashbacks tell us, he
and Joan met when Joan and her disco-loving boyfriend (played by Alan Rosenberg
from Stewardess School and Miracle Mile) pass through town on
their way from New York to Los Angeles!
Well, the police, led by dogged inspector Art Evans – a
familiar face from Fright Night and Die Hard 2 and Class Reunion and Into the Night – start moving in on Paul, believing him to be the killer due to his
truck tires, which are so much talked about in the pictures that eventually characters are
begging other characters to stop talking about the tires already! Ha ha!
And I’m going to drop a spoiler here, so if you don’t want to know the movie’s
twist, best stop reading! But it’s a twist so expected that, for me, it
hardly even counts as one! (Though that may just have been one of my rare moments of plotguessing prescience!)
Anyway, the upshot is that Paul, despite apparently in
possession of a perfect alibi due to his supposed affair with lusty customer
Alberta “The Keep” Watson, is in fact
the madman killer! The whole last act, where he paints his mouth red and, as
his little daughter says, puts on a bunch of hot dogs (ha ha, it’s actually
dynamite) and chases his terrified wife around, is pretty crazy, and I would
say that David Keith, despite being no Keith David, and despite being the worst actor
in Firestarter by a long chalk (and
that’s saying something), does a pretty good job being Mr. Loonytunes!
The whole crazy thing was directed by Donald Cammell, a
fascinating, tragic figure who only got to make four movies in his whole
career, or maybe three and a half because he co-directed Performance; or maybe even just two and a half because he took his
name off the last one, Wild Side; and
then killed himself about ten years ago! Of course we’ve all seen Demon Seed, and that’s a pretty good
picture in its way, but so is this one! It gets goofy, like when Paul uses his
mystical moan to determine where the speakers should go in a room, but mostly
it’s a strangely realistic portrayal of an extremely unrealistic situation! All
the acting is good, and I particularly liked Marc Hayashi, from Chan Is Missing and Angel, in the role of an Asian good-old-boy deputy! A very likeable
character, ha ha! In fact all the cops are strangely likeable in this picture!
It looks great and pulls off some marvelous, harrowing
sequences, but on the other hand I found the musical score intrusive and
unappealing, and there were some slow and repetitive bits! On the whole it felt like a fancypants version of The Ghost Dance! So, not quite a
masterpiece, but a very unusual work of 1980s horror! I’ll give White of the Eye two and a half
piledrivers!
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