In short: I, the Jury (1982)

Sleazy private dick – I choose the latter word for a reason – Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) has to take a break from sleeping with the wives of clients he’s supposed to spy on because their husbands fear they’re cheating on them, and his bizarre full-body relationship with his secretary Velda (Laurene Landon). An old Vietnam buddy of his is murdered, and nobody, not even his favourite cop Detective Chambers (Paul Sorvino) seems too bothered with doing anything about it.

Hammer’s investigation soon points him towards the sex clinic of Dr Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), and the product (Judson Scott) of a government conspiracy meant to build mind-controlled killers. Though I’m not quite sure why you wouldn’t just grab an actual serial killer if you want a serial killer, instead of laboriously creating a facsimile of one. In any case, once Hammer understands who his enemies are, he’s going to murder the heck out of them.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the hard-boiled novels of raving right-wing fantasist Mickey Spillane and his murderous, misogynist prick of a hero Mike Hammer, so don’t ask me how this measures up as an adaptation. It does take considerable liberties with the plot of the novel it is based on, but then, you wouldn’t expect a Larry Cohen script to go for evil commies and Italians and whoever else Spillane didn’t like that week.

Initially, Cohen was apparently meant to direct this as well, but was replaced by bland TV hand Richard T. Heffron. That poor man then had to make sense of a Cohen script the guy wrote for himself to direct, clearly leaving much room for improvisation nobody involved in the Heffron version really knew what to do with.

This leads to a movie with a particularly weird tone: sleazy and grimy, but in a way completely divorced from any sense of reality. It’s not an ironic approach to being exploitative so much as a strange fever dream idea of what exploitation might be, with some of the more absurd bits of sex and violence you’ll see in a movie featuring actual actors. Often, it is difficult to parse if certain elements of the film are meant to be terrible jokes or supposed to be taken seriously, which increases the highly peculiar vibe of the whole affair.

Most of the actors seem perfectly baffled as well. But then, what would you think about Hammer’s fish tank obsession in Assante’s position that sees him talking with a client while holding a dead fish in one hand in the very first scene? The big sex clinic orgy that would put off even the most easily aroused? Whatever is supposed to go on in the climax? Only Barbara Carrera seems unruffled, but then, she’s just doing her usual femme fatale bit; if the femme fatale – and the sex scenes – are a bit weirder than usual clearly doesn’t matter to her. Whereas this viewer rather enjoyed stumbling from one improbable scene to the next.

Three Films Make A Post: In this town a speeding ticket is a death sentence

Twin Murders: The Silence of the White City aka El silencio de la ciudad blanca (2019): This Netflix movie adaptation of a crime novel that’s apparently much better (which shouldn’t be terribly difficult to achieve) directed by Daniel Calparsoro feels like a greatest hits version of the serial killer thriller genre, and as with most greatest hits collections, there’s a lot of glitz but little substance on screen. Sure, the film does look great, but the script is a complete mess full of sub-plots that are picked up, dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason, motivations and character psychology that make little sense (and is usually neither explained nor demonstrated but just stated awkwardly). The film has the kind of overloaded stop and start pacing you often get when a book is cut down to what a screenwriter deems to be its highlights.
Otherwise, there’s only the usual overblown serial killer movie nonsense, full of grand declarations of intellectual depth that doesn’t actually exist, ridiculous murder rituals this film isn’t even clever enough to make as creepy as they should be, and taking place in a world where characters are probably even accompanied by Very Dramatic Music™ when they are on the loo.

Housewife (2017): I absolutely adored director Can Evrenol’s Baskin, but this, his second feature, is quite a step back, despite hitting some of my favourite horror and weird fic elements, namely a creepy cult, a protagonist who can’t quite understand if she’s dreaming or not, and creepy flesh masks. Evrenol seems to be trying to formally emulate the dream logic of Italian 80s horror, but for much of the film’s running time, he doesn’t hit the proper mood of a bizarre and unpleasant dream but more the randomness of actual dreams, which simply isn’t terribly interesting to watch. There are a couple or three effective scenes here to show that Baskin wasn’t an accident, but most of what we get is aimless meandering.

The film also suffers badly from the decision to have a cast of non-native English speakers speak English dialogue, adding a stilted and unnatural quality that may have been meant to add to the film’s unreal mood but in practice makes the already pretty awkward dialogue difficult to make out and puts another layer of distance between audience and characters when they badly need to feel as close to the audience as possible.


The California Kid (1974): Which leaves this post’s role of “The Good Film” to this unassuming 70s TV movie by Richard T. Heffron in which drag riding Martin Sheen takes revenge on Sheriff Vic Morrow who purposely drove his brother and others off a mountain road. It’s not a tight, Duel-style thrill ride but more interested in a  very 70s exploration of characters on the side-lines of life, while having some thoughts about the reasons why good people look away from bad acts, usually avoiding the melodrama that can come with the TV territory. Heffron’s direction is not spectacular but makes nice use of its California locations and knows how to provide space for a cast that also features a young Nick Nolte, Michelle Phillips and Stuart Margolin.