Fear City

While hardly his best film (and not even a particularly good film), this sleazy New York neo-noir might be my favorite Abel Ferrara picture. Working from a script by his frequent collaborator, Nicholas St. John, Fear City came at a point when the controversial, one-of-a-kind indie director seemed to be entering the mainstream (or maybe the mainstream was just starting to look more Ferraraesque). Like many of the director's vastly superior pictures (The Driller Killer, Ms .45, Bad Lieutenant), the movie captures New York during its seedy heyday, when corrupt politicians, aggressive city planners, and Wall Street sleazebags were pulling the city out of bankruptcy but had not yet transformed it into the Disney amusement park it would become a decade later. This grimy, dingy, angry little movie invites its stars to cut loose and let it all hang out.

Tom Berenger plays a troubled ex-boxer turned mob-connected nightclub promoter who, along with his partner (Jack Scalia), oversees a stable of exotic dancers, including Melanie Griffith, Rae Dawn Chong, María Conchita, Janet Julian, and the girl from the Thriller video, Ola Ray. Billy Dee Williams plays a hard-nosed, slick but totally ineffectual vice detective who can't stand Berenger or anything he stands for. Both men are trying to track down a brutal but methodical serial killer targeting strippers in Manhattan before he strikes again. The killer (John Foster) seems like a guy who watched Taxi Driver and the Cannon Ninja movies way too often.

Berenger is perfectly cast—movie-star handsome while looking completely authentic as a slimy stripper manager. Williams gets off a number of comically racist insults but otherwise feels like he's jetting in from another movie with a much better make-up department. It seems crazy that Melanie Griffith did this picture and Body Double in the same year, and even more surprising that her career not only survived them but took off as a result. Fear City. also helped launch the prolific Rae Dawn Chong, who appeared in ten features between 1984 and 1985, ranging from grimy stuff like this, in which she appears topless and gets brutally murdered, to John Badham and Steve Tesich's relatively wholesome sports drama American Flyers to her father's unwatchably unfunny comedy Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers to the winning hip-hop musical melodrama Beat Street to arthouse fare like Alan Rudolph's Choose Me and prestige work like Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple—quite a mid-80s run! The cinematography by James Lemmo (Ms. 45, Vigilante, Relentless) makes the dark, grimy urban environments striking in their own tarnished, hard-edged way. The title song, "New York Doll," performed by former New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, perfectly complements the many shots of the old 42nd Street.