USA, R, 121 m, 1994
Richard Rush's psychological thriller Color of Night is a total mess, but it's an undeniably watchable
mess. The very tricky story is generously adorned with outrageous phallic
imagery, witty allusions to Hitchcock, and more laughable red herrings than
Harold Becker's disastrous potboiler Malice.
(Okay, Alec Baldwin's "I am
God" tirade was great.) The riotous audacity of this movie's relentlessly
sleazy, blood-splattered mise-en-scene and rickety, Devil-may-care plotting is
oddly compelling. Rush's last movie, The
Stunt Man (a fairly messy film itself), was released way back in 1980. I
can't account for the director's whereabouts during that lengthy hiatus, but I
suspect he spent those years shackled up in the laughing academy. The unbridled
lunacy of Color of Night
strongly suggests that he should return. Beefy Bruce Willis plays New York psychologist Bill Capa.
During therapy, a head-case crashes through the window of our dear therapist's
sky-rise office, plunging a gazillion stories to her grisly Waterloo. Capa is so
traumatized by this ghastly event that he becomes unable to see the color red
(read: blood). Desperately seeking to lick his mental wounds, Capa high-tails it
to Los Angeles where his psychiatrist chummy Bob Moore (Scott Bakula of the
dreadful "Quantum Leap") encourages him to participate in a session of
Monday night group therapy. The nuts in attendance are a pretty colorful lot: A
quirky nymphomaniac (Lesley Ann Warren); an obsessive-compulsive lawyer (the
peerlessly versatile Brad Douriff); a self-absorbed artist (Kevin J. O'Connor);
an emotionally distressed copper (the brilliant Lance Henriksen of Aliens
and Johnny Handsome); and a sly transsexual played by--whoops! For fear
of wrecking the requisite element of surprise (the butler did it), I can't
disclose that performer's name. When Moore is found hacked to ribbons (presumably by a
member of the cuckoo cluster), Capa decides (albeit reluctantly, but with much
prodding from a local investigator) to take over the group and ferret out the
killer. As he probes the dimly lit room of frazzled psyches, he unwittingly
begins to refile some of his own engrams. (Forgive the Hubbard-speak.) But
unfortunately, he, too, becomes a target for slaughter. When he's not eluding
instruments of death (or stumbling upon fresh corpses), Capa seeks respite with
a mysterious temptress named (fittingly) Rose (serviceably played by Jane
March), who enjoys cooking in her birthday suit and copulating underwater.
Although these kinky interludes play a key role in the story's rather
complicated chain of events, they are also its weakest link. Rush gawks
endlessly at Rose and Capa's lusty trysts, but he doesn't bother shaping the
relationship. We never feel any sort of emotional bond between these two, which
does an immense disservice to what should be a gripping climax. Worse, Capa's
chronic deletion of red seems like an afterthought; it's a pointless gimmick
that the mystery doesn't hinge upon (unlike, say, Jimmy Stewart's paralyzing
fear of heights in Hitchcock's Vertigo).
You could drive trucks through some of the plot holes in this movie, an
annoyance that I imagine most viewers will refuse to abide after the second or
third reel. Color of Night is
obviously not for every taste. At the screening I attended, patrons lumbered out
of the theater shaking their baffled heads and mumbling expletives. (At the
first glimpse of the ending credit scroll, my date lunged for the exit holding
her nose.) Rush struck a good deal of footage to avoid the dreaded NC-17 rating,
which may explain some of the story's gaffes. A "director's cut" is
slated for video that promises to bridge a few gaps in logic and flesh out the
scenes between Capa and Rose.* Maybe Color
of Night will then enjoy some of the audience enthusiasm (and critical
acclaim) it so richly deserves. I hope so. I need to find someone I can share
the guilty pleasures of this thoroughly wacko experience with. August 19, 1994 *I'm afraid the video release doesn't do much but
exaggerate the confusion of the offending moments. © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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