Special Effects Movie Review

I can never tell whether director Larry Cohen is putting everyone on or not. Just when I'm convinced he's made one of the funniest FBI movies of all time (1977's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover starring the late Broderick Crawford), he'll come up with a genuinely scary film like 1982's Q starring Michael Moriarty. 1985's Special Effects falls somewhere between these two pictures in terms of quality. It's also filled with Cohen's weird sense of humor. Zoe Tamerlis plays a dual role as a doomed would-be actress and the Good Will employee who's hired to impersonate her. Tamerlis is no great shakes in either role, but maybe she isn't supposed to be. Eric Bogosian stars as a porno movie director who plans to make a film of the dead actress in order to trap the Killer. Yes, there is a catch. (Of course.) Cohen has a good time showing how the movie industry swallows everything it touches, including police detective Kevin J. O'Connor. Cohen also has fun with the victim's boring husband (and the most likely suspect) who wants to drag back his first wife and later the Good Will employee to take care of him and the baby, a fate worse than anything anyone can imagine. Along with the It's Alive trilogy and most of Larry Cohen's other camp classics, Special Effects is great fun to watch. It is also interesting to observe Bogosian's emerging charisma, long before he made 1988's Talk Radio.

1985 (R) 103m/C GB Zoe Tamerlis, Eric Bogosian, Kevin J. O'Connor, Brad Rijn, Bill Oland, Richard Greene; D: Larry Cohen; W: Larry Cohen. VHS