Special Effects (1984) **
Having just partaken in a double feature of Larry Cohen's two 1973 Tommy Gibbs films (Black Caesar (review) and Hell Up In Harlem (review) yesterday, followed by the fun 2017 documentary about the maverick, King Cohen, today, I was in the mood to seek out films directed and/or written by him that I have yet to see and also to revisit some that I'd seen before but hadn't watched for many years.
As I began to add films to my JustWatch queue (a great service to find out where films are streaming; not a sponsor) I was simultaneously looking up my and other users' ratings for films written and/or directed by Cohen on Letterboxd. Just prior to this, I had decided to watch Special Effects (1984), as it was one of the Cohen films I hadn't seen. But then I saw that I had rated the film on Letterboxd. Wait, really…I had already seen it (and only given it two stars)?
So I checked my "Films Watched" log (yes, I keep a file, in addition to using LB, because I've been doing so since 2005) and sure enough, I watched the film back in 2007. Well, I didn't remember it at all so I guess that was as good a reason as any to revisit it.
For the first half hour or so I thought to myself, "This is pretty solid, I wonder why I rated it so low?' Around the halfway mark I was starting to lose interest. By the end of the film I realized why I had forgotten it altogether. It is definitely the weakest Cohen film that I've seen (I've seen twelve of his nineteen films). Also, what is the deal with the theatrical poster for this film? The blonde woman painted on it looks nothing like star Zoë Lund (here credited as Zoe Tamerlis).
There seem to be ideas about reality vs. imagination, duality and the male gaze within Special Effects but those are hampered by a meandering mess of a film with a distracting stock-horror-film score. The film plods along and doesn't contain enough of Cohen's manic energy—something I may appear to complain about in reviews of his other films but which is a director trademark that mostly works in his favor. Lund could also have been better utilized in my opinion and while lead Eric Bogosian is one of the saving graces (Brad Rijn certainly isn't), he can't rescue this poor film.
There's also the fact that Special Effects feels a bit too similar to Brian De Palma's Body Double, released less than a month earlier. I certainly wouldn't accuse Cohen of ripping off De Palma though, as it's clear that both films were being made simultaneously and it wouldn’t be the first time that films with similar subject matter were released around the same time (plus Wikipedia says that "the screenplay was based on a script titled The Cutting Room that Cohen had written circa 1967"). It's just that as far as these two Hitchcock-indebted films go (with Vertigo (1958) being the obvious example that both De Palma and Cohen's films took inspiration from), Body Double is better made, better scored, sleazier (an aspect that actually helps with this type of subject matter), more fun, and all around vastly superior.
You can find my Larry Cohen Feature Films Ranked list here.
As I began to add films to my JustWatch queue (a great service to find out where films are streaming; not a sponsor) I was simultaneously looking up my and other users' ratings for films written and/or directed by Cohen on Letterboxd. Just prior to this, I had decided to watch Special Effects (1984), as it was one of the Cohen films I hadn't seen. But then I saw that I had rated the film on Letterboxd. Wait, really…I had already seen it (and only given it two stars)?
So I checked my "Films Watched" log (yes, I keep a file, in addition to using LB, because I've been doing so since 2005) and sure enough, I watched the film back in 2007. Well, I didn't remember it at all so I guess that was as good a reason as any to revisit it.
For the first half hour or so I thought to myself, "This is pretty solid, I wonder why I rated it so low?' Around the halfway mark I was starting to lose interest. By the end of the film I realized why I had forgotten it altogether. It is definitely the weakest Cohen film that I've seen (I've seen twelve of his nineteen films). Also, what is the deal with the theatrical poster for this film? The blonde woman painted on it looks nothing like star Zoë Lund (here credited as Zoe Tamerlis).
There seem to be ideas about reality vs. imagination, duality and the male gaze within Special Effects but those are hampered by a meandering mess of a film with a distracting stock-horror-film score. The film plods along and doesn't contain enough of Cohen's manic energy—something I may appear to complain about in reviews of his other films but which is a director trademark that mostly works in his favor. Lund could also have been better utilized in my opinion and while lead Eric Bogosian is one of the saving graces (Brad Rijn certainly isn't), he can't rescue this poor film.
There's also the fact that Special Effects feels a bit too similar to Brian De Palma's Body Double, released less than a month earlier. I certainly wouldn't accuse Cohen of ripping off De Palma though, as it's clear that both films were being made simultaneously and it wouldn’t be the first time that films with similar subject matter were released around the same time (plus Wikipedia says that "the screenplay was based on a script titled The Cutting Room that Cohen had written circa 1967"). It's just that as far as these two Hitchcock-indebted films go (with Vertigo (1958) being the obvious example that both De Palma and Cohen's films took inspiration from), Body Double is better made, better scored, sleazier (an aspect that actually helps with this type of subject matter), more fun, and all around vastly superior.
You can find my Larry Cohen Feature Films Ranked list here.
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