In short: Unforgettable (1996)

At the time it came out, neo noir specialist – who would eventually and somewhat tragically become a mere dependable TV show episode hired gun -John Dahl’s follow-up movie to his brilliant The Last Seduction was a total flop: a commercial dud that was also hated by the critics. Though, to be fair, the latter problem seems to have been with Ebert and Co.’s inability to get over the film’s “contrived” set-up, the sort of thing this genre viewer hardly bats an eye at because he understands that contrived set-ups are what nearly all thrillers have. Or would anyone call the plots  and basic ideas of brilliant movies in the genre like Psycho or Vertigo anything but contrived? Indeed, one might find one of those “metaphors” professional film critics may have heard about here. May there be something a film has to say about grief in the tale of a man (Ray Liotta) trying to catch the murderer of his wife with the help of an experimental drug that makes one relive the memories of other people but demands a heavy physical and psychological price?

Now, having said that, I also have to warn the prospective viewer that this isn’t a secret thriller masterpiece on par with its director’s best movies. The problem’s not in the script’s set-up – contrived or not - nor is it Dahl’s love for pretty wonderful and slightly surreal big set-pieces. The film’s actual major flaw is a badly paced third where Liotta’s drug-induced flashbacks become too long and much too detailed, explaining way more than is necessary of the things even the dumbest audience member will have already inferred and dragging the film down to a crawl. Which is something no thriller can afford. It’s honestly nothing that couldn’t have been fixed by cutting about ten minutes of film and rewriting ten more, but it’s still surprisingly damaging for the effect of Unforgettable as a whole.


I still find a lot to like about the film, though, be it Liotta’s all-out performance that does seem to aim for the same spot of exalted, intense yet secretly precise overacting that Nicolas Cage hits so wonderfully these days, Dahl’s against type casting of Linda Fiorentino as a much too nice and cooperative scientist she really seems to get into, or how enjoyably contrived the first two thirds of the film are.

Slayground (1983)

What should have been the rather simple robbery of a rural money transport  turns into a bit of a clusterfuck for professional thief Stone (Peter Coyote) afterwards, when the inexperienced escape driver manages to crash their car and kills a rich man's wife and daughter in the process.

Stone does feel a certain degree of guilt over the affair, but certainly not enough to turn himself and his partners in. Rich guy (one suspects dissatisfied with the way the police handles the case, though the film doesn't tell) hires a mad professional killer to find and kill everyone connected with his family's death, which he does with great enthusiasm and slasher movie killer superpowers.

Only Stone escapes the killer's wrath alive - though wounded - for a while, and decides to leg it to the UK where he hopes for some help of his former partner and friend Terry Abbatt (Mel Smith). Yet despite all of Stone's efforts in disappearing, the killer keeps relentlessly on his trail, so a final confrontation will be unavoidable.

Terry Bedford's Slayground is a rather curious film. Supposedly based on Donald E.Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novel of the same title, it's more a Chinese whispers version of the story than an adaptation. Parker adaptations always are rather free with their tight and taut source novels, but the film at hand has so little to do with the book it's impossible not to ask oneself why the producers even shelled out for the rights at all. Was it the brilliantly pulpy title?

But even if you ignore its curious status as an adaptation that doesn't adapt, Slayground is still a strange film. One half of it is a bleak crime movie with the expected existential undertones, while the other half seems to attempt to somehow shoehorn slasher movie sensibilities into the crime plot. Apart from his use of guns, the film's killer is a pure slasher invention: shadowy, never directly seen, with a propensity to turn his victims into freak-out art tableaus. Before the film relocates to the UK, the killer also seems to have the knowledge and teleportation powers of your typical slasher killer, being not only always able to know where Stone is going even in cases where there's no logical way for him to do so, but somehow appearing at innocuous places like a random gas station Stone himself won't have planned to travel to before his victim does . The killer even has his own breathing noise on the soundtrack, as well as the traditional synth plink theme.

The film's crime movie sensibilities and its slasher aspirations never quite come together for me. I do appreciate the effort, but can't help and think Bedford would have made a better crime movie or a better slasher movie if he had decided on one of the genres. Slayground also tends to meander a bit, with some plot developments awkwardly explained, others seemingly based on the assumption the audience will just fill in the blanks with crime movie clichés.

Still, Slayground is a film worth watching. It is moodily shot in the early 80s style - just before all films turned into clouds of neon and hairspray - which still keeps the graininess and bleakness of 70s films while feeling slicker than the films of the earlier era. At least half of Slayground's scenes are actually quite memorable: the random way Stone's initial getaway driver dies, the robbery, Stone's second and nearly deadly confrontation with the killer, and Terry's attempt to get his friend back on the straight and narrow are all convincing, clever and/or exciting. I'm pretty sure the film would now run as some kind of lost classic if the semi-slasher parts didn't get in the way (or, depending on your tastes, the other way round). There are also a great climax in an abandoned, downright crazy amusement park that looks inexplicably creepy to me (if it really exists), and a calm performance by Peter Coyote to recommend Slayground.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,crime,slasher,terry bedford,peter coyote,mel smith