Special Effects

I'm a really big fan and admirer of writer/director Larry Cohen. Are cult, horror and exploitation fanatics even fully aware of all the things he did?!? Cohen co-created the super successful Blaxploitation genre, with milestones like "Bone", "Black Caesar" and "Hell up in Harlem". He also invented the bizarrely uniquely and blackly comical monster trilogy "It's Alive", as well as several other imaginative and unforgettable horror gems like "The Stuff", "Q – The Winged Serpent" and "The Ambulance". Larry Cohen is also a very versatile and experimental director who even tried out religious thriller ("God told me to"), werewolf comedy ("Full Moon High") and political biography ("The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover"). But I'll also tell you what Larry Cohen is not, though … He's not Brian DePalma. Cohen penned it down for himself to direct, but here's one script he maybe should have donated to De Palma… With its convoluted plot and an ambiance reminiscent to "Blow Out" and "Obsession", this film is straight up the alley of Brian De Palma and he presumably would have done more with it. "Special Effects" is a very Hitchcockian thriller about a flamboyant but failing NY movie director who goes berserk whilst seducing an aspiring young actress and strangles her on camera. He – Chris Neville – dumps her body on Coney Island but after meeting his victim's desperate husband he develops the brilliant idea of turning is crime into a movie! He casts the husband as the naive culprit, an unknown look-alike as the willing victims and he even hires the investigating police detective as counselor. Half dark satire and half serious thriller, "Special Effects" is overly talkative and quite often too dull. In sheer contrast to Cohen's other films, there's very little violence and bloodshed in this movie, but the two murder sequences that are shown are quite unsettling and macabre. Practically all characters are hateful and unidentifiable, even the ones that are supposed to be likable ones. I'm not a fan of Eric Bosogian, but he's ideally cast as the megalomaniac director, who lives in a bizarrely decorated loft full of flowers and ugly relics. Zoë Tamerlis stars in a double role, as the strangled actress and her dead ringer, but doesn't impress in either of them. Tamerlis is considered a cult heroine by many exploitation fanatics, but apart from her sole legendary role in Abel Ferrara's "Ms. 45" and dying far too young she didn't really accomplish a lot. Who knows, perhaps the whole "aspiring actresses dying whilst trying" premise was Larry Cohen's own personal tribute to Dorothy Stratten who tragically died at the age of 20 in 1980. Like Tamerlis' character in the beginning of the film, Stratten also was a naive and overly enthusiast young beauty who surrounded herself with the wrong men. By getting murdered at such a tender age, before her career even properly started, she became more famous and legendary that an actual long-running career ever could have made her.

Special Effects is kind of a serious parody, if that makes any sense, of what De Palma did back in the 80's (or perhaps Larry Cohen's work too), where a filmmaker becomes a murderer when he lets in a would-be actress to his home, films having sex with her and also films the act of death. But instead of going on the run or just hiding it and going on with his life, he decides to make a movie about this girl, using Keefe, the girl's husband (played by Brad Rijn), getting a police detective to be a consultant (because who needs to solve any crimes) and, via Keefe making a trip to the Salvation Army and her just happening to work there, a girl who with a hair change looks just like the dead Andrea Wilcox (both played by Zoe Lund of Ms 45 fame).

Eric Bogosian is the reason to see the movie, playing this nasty, brutal director with some level of... do we call it humanity? He sometimes plays it over the top, but not in a way where it chews the scenery. He is really there to be the best actor he can be, which is more than can be said of Lund (who is maybe half-good, not as Wilcox but as the 'new' Andrea, Elaine), and certainly not Rijn, who tellingly only made a few movies and is just terrible here as this angry, despondent husband.

Maybe the problem is that Cohen is just a bit too obvious with his satire, or maybe, in a way, not obvious enough. This should be really funny - once or twice I did laugh, more from the police detective's meddling - and when he does an actual sex scene with two characters it stops the movie dead in its tracks. Special Effects has a little fun with its premise, which is rather dark and takes not just from De Palma but liberally from Hitchcock (Vertigo, duh) and even Peeping Tom with the idea of a camera that, ahem, kills in its way. It also has a rather obnoxious 80's synth soundtrack, which could be fine in small doses but is laid over every scene like a cocaine-diddled cloak. And the horror scenes, when they come, are kind of shoddily filmed.

But, again, if you like Eric Bogosian, this is one of his better performances, and a good indication of what he would do later in the decade with Talk Radio.

After making a disastrous, special-effects laden film, a movie director decides to make a low budget biography of a murdered actress. To make her murder look as real as possible the director murders the actress himself. Could have been a very good film about snuff films, but the film's direction is a letdown. Zoe (Ms. 45) Lund (in a dual role) and particularly Eric Bogosian are very good in their respective roles of the murdered actress and the actress playing her, and the Cecil B. Demented director. Brian DePalma would have had a field day with this film.

Larry Cohen's "Special Effects" is an average snuff-themed horror film.Eric Bogosian plays here an on-the-decline director who murders a starlet(brilliant Zoe Tamerlis,who sadly died in 1999)on camera and decides to use a dead ringer to make a film about the killing."Special Effects" is average-the script is mediocre and the action is dull at times.Still the snuff/murder scene(the strangling)is pretty nasty!The ending is also effective.All in all I'd recommend this film for undemanding horror fans-it's really nothing special,but if you want a passable time-killer...

It seems like Larry Cohen was trying to emulate DePalma with this ambitious, but poorly realized knock off of "Body Double." Some nice sets and decent shots cannot change the fact that Zoe Tamerlis is the WORST actress ever captured on film. If you thought Bo Derek or Pia Zadora were bad actresses, then after seeing Zoe in THIS, those ladies will look like Kathryn Hepburn and Meryl Streep by comparison. Usually poor acting isn't too much of a distraction if the material is good, but every time Tamerlis speaks it is painful. Eric Bogasian and Brad Rijn fare much better. Larry Cohen has made so many great movies, mostly in the 1970's, which seemed to be his decade. Interestingly he made another film the same year as "Special Effects," called "Perfect Strangers," which is actually MUCH better than this one. Strangely it's not nearly as well-known, probably due to the fact that it isn't flashy, and loaded with sex and violence. You do get plenty of that in this film. My advice is to skip this one and seek out "Perfect Strangers" instead. This movie gave me a headache, and I feel like i lost some brain cells in the process.