Scratch Harry

Described in a pre-credit disclaimer as an amphetamine 'fantasy", Cannon released this arty, confusing, absurdist pseudo-underground feature made in the wake of Warhol's film factory explosion, and turned by proxy ad campaign hatchetry into a skin flick. Which it ain't. The main character Harry, a penniless rake with expensive tastes, believes he is abandoned in his empty mansion by his rich wife Erica. Together with the omnipresent narrator, a weird beatnik in sunglasses (imagine Peter Fonda playing Lou Reed) known only as 'Shadow', Harry picks up a freewheeler called Christine in the city and takes her back to the mansion. Erica returns home and the two women turn on him, further fuelling his paranoia. Wordplay, parlour games, mindf*cking and blackmail prove to be a lethal cocktail in a very strange ending. Is it all a dream? An hallucination? Do wide angle lenses, sped-up footage and bogus surrealism pass as true psychedelia? Does anybody still care?

Harry is not the only thing that should be scratched in this plastic satire about inconsequential people. It begins with a slide that announces, "the film you're about to see is a speed fantasy," which refers to the various drugs taken by Harry, a frog-mouthed middle-aged man who lives off his wife and whose life is filled with fashionable, empty women. He casually kills one of them after his wife makes love with her on their living room floor, and cracks jokes while he buries her body in the backyard of their home. The story is a tasteless to conglomeration of ad-libbed dialogue, slick direction, and a few nude scenes. The untalented cast is as amateurish in their acting as the writer is about his characters. Ken Lauber's decent musical score is the only plus.