Larry Cohen does his best Brian De Palma imitation with Special Effects, which is to say a poor one. Perhaps the only special thing about this minor effort is that, more than any other of the filmmaker’s works, the movie demonstrates he’s better at conceiving ideas than birthing them. This one’s certainly no Q; it’s a Zzzzz.
In her first role post-Ms. 45, Zoe Tamerlis plays Mary Jean, a naive, Oklahoma-to-Manhattan actress who cheats on her hick husband, Keefe (Brad Rijn, Smithereens) with a down-and-out film director she’s just met. He’s Neville (Talk Radio’s Eric Bogosian, speaking out of his mouth’s left side), who feeds her the line, “I think we should do a slow dissolve to the bedroom.” It works, and while writhing in the pink satin sheets, Neville strangles her to death.
Rather than become the prime suspect, Neville cannily deflects suspicion by making a movie about the murder, with the intent to pin the crime on the yokel spouse who agrees to play himself. Essaying the role of Mary Jean is her dead ringer, Elaine (also Tamerlis), a clothes sorter at the Salvation Army.
Sounds absurd, right? It should, for Special Effects is a messy bundle of story threads Cohen doesn’t bother to unravel before attempting to connect. If he had, I suspect the film would remain too ludicrous to swallow; Rijn and Tamerlis’ near-amateurish performances wouldn’t be remedied by even the sharpest script. With touches like Neville choking someone with 35mm film and asking, “Who made your head? Carlo Rambaldi?,” the movie must be intended as some industry-insider statement, but what the statement says is as mysterious as the entire premise is muddled.
Aside from a quick visual joke referencing Tootsie, Special Effects bears precious little of Cohen’s clever sensibilities. —Rod Lott