Special Effects

Legendary guerrilla cinema writer/director Larry Cohen (It's Alive, God Told Me To, Q: The Winged Serpent) turns his lens on the process of filmmaking for a kind of Roger-Corman-does-Vertigo-picture, or maybe Peeping Tom is a more apt comparison. Actor, playwright, and New York monologuist Eric Bogosian stars as Christopher Neville, a film director who apparently has made it big in Hollywood but never left his downtown roots or apartment. His latest major motion picture has been a huge flop, and everyone knows about it. From the cops and cab drivers to the ordinary man on the street, everyone thinks he's washed up. This film was made six years before Brian De Palma's colossal failure, The Bonfire of the Vanities, but that's the closest parallel I can draw to who Neville is and where his career's at. However, the more direct inspiration for the director/actress dynamic in the picture is that of Peter Bogdanovich and Dorothy Stratten; Neville even references Stratten under his breath during one of his rants.

The frustrated filmmaker has decided to return to his early style and make a personal film in 16mm, avoiding the traps of big-budget special effects that try to make the fake look real and instead make something real into a fabrication—a different kind of special effect. After murdering a young model and would-be actress in his bedroom and capturing the event on film, the megalomaniacal movie director sets out to make a feature film based on this murder, casting the dead woman's clueless husband as the patsy and finding a dead ringer to play the part of the late actress. Somehow, he convinces the police that this will be a good way to get the husband to confess to the murder, so the cops allow the unstable non-actor out of prison to star in the picture.

Bogosian is not good in this film. It was his first time as a film actor, aside from his brief appearance in Lizzie Borden's seminal indie Born in Flames the previous year. It would take working with Oliver Stone on material he'd written for himself, 1988's excellent Talk Radio, before Bogosian would come across as a real person on screen. Fortunately, Special Effects also stars Zoë Lund as both the murdered wannabe actress and the Salvation Army clerk who bears a striking resemblance to the dead girl and aggress to play her in Neville's film. Lund (credited here as Zoë Tamerlis) is a fascinating figure in '80s New York underground cinema. The actress, model, composer, musician, author, activist, producer, and screenwriter is most famous for the two films she made with director Abel Ferrara. At 17, she stared as the mute woman who goes on a killing speed in Ferrara's much-lauded rape/revenge exploration picture Ms. 45 (1981). She later co-wrote the director's infamous Bad Lieutenant (1992) and played the role of the heroin connection for Harvey Keitel's titular cop. She's able to be everything this movie wants her to be, even a former Texas rube married to the dimwit played by Brad Rijn.

Unfortunately, Lund's presence can't make this picture work, as very little we see on screen makes any logical sense. Special Effects feels like a movie made for an audience of young film critics eager to write lengthy essays about the blurred lines between fact and fiction, reality and artifice, real life and cinematic art. But these lines can't be effectively blurred if some kind of credible reality isn't at least attempted.