In research for this I re-watched this movie last night just to highlight how kind and devoted I am to this. Well it was that or that whilst I was reviewing other movies lower in this list it happened to be on TV. I will let you decide which. So if you don’t already know I am a massive John Carpenter fan and as a OCD fan of anything you have to have all you can get your hands on and after searching for years to find Dark Star this movie was not quite so tricky to get hold but it still took a lot of efforts and many searches around various shops and markets before getting my mitts on it. So, you can imagine my joy and pleasure to bring this movie home to discover that John did not direct it. That is true he did not direct the movie at all!! So why was I obsessed and it on a list I had put together? In short John Carpenter wrote this along with David Zelag Goodman. Released back in 1978 it stars Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif, René Auberjonois and Raúl Juliá. AND as it was back in ’78 so they are all looking so young in this movie. Back in those days the budget for this movie was $7m and grossed $20m at the box office which has to be seen as a success. It sits bang smack in the middle of Rotten Tomatoes scores at 50%, 49% on Metracritic and IMDb has it at 6.2/10.
I will try and breeze over the plot as I am keen for you to go and watch this movie and I don’t want to give the whole thing away here. So, the main character is Faye who plays Laura Mars a glamorous fashion photographer, who is courting controversy as her photos are quite provocative and apparently glorifying violence and degrading to women. Suddenly she starts to see through the eyes of a killer. She is seeing first-hand the work of this killer as it she was doing the killing herself. She reports this to the police and a very young-looking Tommy Lee Jones playing John Neville the lieutenant in charge of the case shows her some of the photos taken from the murder sites which mirror her own pictures taken in photo shoots. The rest of the cast come into her life including former lovers and fill up the buckets of suspects and potential victims for the rest of the film. There is also a young Brad Dourif (Chucky) and René Auberjonois (Odo from Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)) and Faye is in her prime at the time as well.
You do spend this movie waiting for the killer to look into the mirror and you know that poor ole Faye is going to be left to save herself when the killer works out, she can see what they see and needs to be removed from the investigation. This is a good movie ok it’s a little dated now but it does allow you to play who done it (or who’s doing it) but it plays out to the conclusion you predicted or didn’t who knows I didn’t but what the hell do I know. [please don’t answer that]
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