*½/****Image
B- Sound
C+
Extras A
starring
Louise Lasser, Paul L. Smith, Brion James, Reed Birney
screenplay
by Ethan Coen & Joel Coen & Sam Raimi
directed
by Sam Raimi
by
Walter Chaw Sam Raimi's sophomore picture Crimewave
is a nightmare, a mess, a calamity of rare scope but also one possessed
of a
singular, maybe misguided but definitely committed, vision. It wants
very badly to
be a
feature-length Three Stooges sketch or Warner Bros.
cartoon (one of
the early Tex Averys), and so the thing it most resembles is
Joe Dante's segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, stretched to
a truly sadistic length (a deceptively scant-sounding 83 minutes) and
thrown together
by
misadventure, studio interference, and a lot of talented people who
didn't know
what they didn't know. It's so consistently and dedicatedly cross-eyed
badger
spit, in fact, that it eventually takes on the surreality of a Max
Ernst
gallery, or an acid trip in a travelling funhouse. It's deeply unpleasant, even as fans of Raimi and the Coen Brothers (who co-wrote
the
screenplay with Raimi) busily trainspot all the auteur
signatures in double
time. What Crimewave represents is that peculiar
artifact of a film that
should have ended careers instead getting "lost" by a
bumfuddled, betrayed studio for long enough to allow Evil
Dead II and
Blood Simple the opportunity to cement reputations
before this one could
bury them.
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Vic (Reed Birney) is a former security
guard on Death Row for multiple murder who, the film reveals in
flashback, has been
framed
by a pair of cartoon exterminator villains (Blade Runner's "Leon" Brion James and Popeye's "Bluto" Paul
L. Smith)
hired by a real-estate developer (producer Edward R. Pressman) to kill
everyone standing in the way
of his
development plans. That's it, really. Vic falls in
love with a
pretty girl (Sheree J. Wilson), who is herself in love with an unctuous
guy
(Bruce Campbell)–said unctuous guy played by the actor originally
tabbed by
buddy Raimi for the movie's lead and who could have
single-handedly
made this a cult classic instead of a cult curiosity. There's a big
difference.
Crimewave is
essentially the Chiodo Brothers' Killer Klowns from
Outer Space
without the sense of joy and
lack of pretension. The real problem with it is that you get
this
feeling throughout that the picture views itself as a holy mission as it's
presenting
itself as a lark. It's a serious try to do something DIFFERENT and, as
such,
tends only to feel desperate and highlight exactly how special Jerry
Lewis
truly was. It's the kind of movie, precisely, that The Evil
Dead was
not, so that the joke of placing A Farewell to Arms
on top of a stack
of books
used to hold down a severed, possessed hand in that film, works,
while a similar gag of putting "megahurts" on a
voltmeter for the
killer's murder weapon in Crimewave, doesn't. I
do love a sequence
where one of the killers chases harried housewife Helene (Louise
Lasser)
through an endless tunnel of doors, however–the only moment
in the
film,
frankly, that approaches the focused inventiveness of the Chiodos'
shtick.
What's so wearying isn't the bowling balls to the head followed
by the
birdie
noises, it's the vision it took to bring
to
bear a film that pays complete, numbing hommage to the
sort of surreal
slapstick goofiness so beloved by Raimi and the boys. It works when
Norville
Barnes gets his foot stuck in a flaming wastebasket, for instance, or
when Ash
breaks a series of plates over his head; it works, in
other words, when it's
an accent note rather than the melody, chorus, bassline, and
drumbeat–and it
doesn't work at all as the motivating principle for an entire feature. At
least it
doesn't if you're not Jacques Tati. In other words: I get it, I get it.
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Shout! Factory brings Crimewave home for the
first time on any video medium in a
laudable Blu-ray edition. The 1.78:1,
1080p presentation of the movie proper resists putting an HD gloss on
the fundamentally flat, '80s image, but neither the copious grain nor
the wild fluctuations in contrast and
(colour)
tone provide much of a distraction. The source materials are in remarkably good condition, probably
because they haven't seen the light of day in almost thirty years. The
monophonic 2.0 DTS-HD MA track presents every note of that old-cartoon standby "The William
Tell Overture" in garish, repetitive fidelity. It is to sigh. The real
jewel in this crown is an audio commentary by Bruce Campbell
and supplementals director Michael Felsher that is frank, hilarious,
self-excoriating,
and vulnerable in a way that clarifies the real pain of crafting something with no hope of it working and under impossible circumstances.
Campbell makes it
clear that
this could have been not just a career-buster, but a
friendship-buster. What
it did instead was pull the team together like soldiers bonding under
heavy
fire.
A separate featurette with Campbell ("The Crimewave Meter,"
15 mins., HD) is more of the
same, with
Bruce confessing that the years this film was mostly
hidden from
public view was great for all involved. A similar short
with
producer and co-star Ed Pressman ("Made in Detroit," 8 mins., HD) has
the man behind stuff
like Badlands, Sisters, the Frankenheimer Dr. Moreau, Wall
Street, Larry
Fessenden's Wendigo, and on and on talking about
screaming at Louise Lasser
to shut the fucking window. Really, he seems like a lovely person.
Ditto Reed
Birney, who in his own sit-down ("Leading Man," 16 mins.,
HD) recounts how he
came to the
production, how he spent the year after it in semi-retirement, and how
his son
now loves Crimewave. He also confesses to being terrified of both James, who
destroyed
his hotel room during the shoot to chase demons out of the
light
fixtures,
and Smith, whom Birney could never disassociate from Smith's
role as a
sadistic prison guard in Midnight Express. An
"Alternate Title
Sequence" (30s, HD) reveals that of the half-dozen titles for this film,
one
of them was "Broken Hearts and Noses." Rounding out the platter, an animated photo
gallery with stills and promo art (7 mins., HD), plus a 2-minute
theatrical trailer (HD) that doesn't
do
enough to warn you. A DVD version of the film is included in the keepcase.
