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.