Take a "Looker"

Most people who know me to any extent know that I am a classic film lover. I have the utmost adoration and respect for those great examples of cinema that enthralled audiences long ago and still would now if people gave them a chance and weren’t offended by black & white film or old clothes or different manners of speaking, etc… So why, if I feel this way, do I have an almost equal, perhaps even greater, affinity for utter garbage? For every Vertigo or Singin’ in the Rain I have a Color of Night or a Can’t Stop the Music! I get such a perverse thrill out of movies that cost a decent amount of money and featured name brand stars but yet wound up as ludicrous, hilarious or embarrassing (or all three.) Such a film is today’s “gem,” the Michael Crichton-directed Looker.

Despite being splendiferously tacky, ineptly scripted, awkwardly edited and petrifyingly dated, this thriller about corporate manipulation of the masses through television advertising manages nevertheless to be fully entertaining and more than a little prescient. Old TV ads are always funny anyway, but when they are fake to begin and from the 80s it only adds to the cheese factor.

Albert Finney, of all people, plays a hotshot Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who has had a string of models make use of his services, each with extremely specific requests about the changes they want done (down to the millimeter.) Shortly afterwards, they begin dying off! He attaches himself to one of the most recent ones (Susan Dey) and begins to investigate what is happening, even though he is simultaneously being framed as a prime suspect in the murders.
James Coburn plays the head of a massive and shadowy conglomerate and is assisted by the rather icy Leigh Taylor-Young. This pair is the chief focus of Finney's legwork. One of the futuristic devices they are developing is a mechanism that is able to pinpoint exactly where the viewer’s eye is landing when watching an advertisement. Reportedly, such a device now exists in real life, though they needn’t bother with me. I can tell you where I usually look!

Standing in Finney’s way is hit man Tim Rossovich who wields a futuristic and baffling weapon (are you ready for this? It’s a gun called the L.O.O.K.E.R., standing for Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses), which causes time to stand still for the victim. Soon, Finney's own life is in grave danger as he tries to unravel the secret shenanigans of the folks who are making these models flawless and then offing them.

Finney does an okay job, though he's hardly the most desirable leading man for a film of this nature with his trousers yanked up to his sternum. Best known for touchstone films such as Tom Jones and Two for the Road, he was in the middle of an attempt to do more commercial and mainstream fare such as Wolfen and Annie. Soon he would revert to more artistically challenging and rewarding projects like The Dresser and Under the Volcano before coming back with a splash in Erin Brockovich.

Ex-The Partridge Family cast member Dey (who is horribly miscast) is adequate, but has a sketchy role with little to do except seem concerned. Fans of hers will be delighted at the amount of skin she shows (the film was made before a PG-13 rating existed and, as a result, the non-sexualized nudity was deemed okay for a PG movie.) Still, if we’re being honest, a film all about the perfection of an exactly symmetric face with flawless features did not necessarily need to focus on the cute, pert and appealing, but decidedly unusual-looking, Dey! The ex-Playboy models who make up the other victims seem a tad more plausible in this regard. Incidentally, Wheel of Fortune icon Vanna White is briefly visible within a passel of girls crossing a drive to enter a building. Coburn tries to inject some wit into his role, but, like so many other folks in this movie, is just a pawn in the bigger picture of “techno-thriller with a message.” Gaunt and rather craggy, with the feathered hair he (and most everyone) favored during this period, he isn’t exactly at his physical or creative peak.

Dorian Harewood has another one of the many cop roles that dominated his career at the time and winds up having little to do of interest. Taylor-Young, who is undeniably gorgeous, goes through the entire film with little expression and one eyebrow raised much higher than the other, which itself almost seems an unintentional comment on the dangers of cosmetic surgery. In her final scene, she looks like someone who is desperately sad she didn't get to play Mommie Dearest with her shoulder pads, severe hair, pearls and even the requisite “fuck me” shoes!

Ex-pro football linebacker Rossovich is a total kick as the hit man (billed in the credits as "Moustache Man"!!) His kinship with Tom Selleck in real life (they were college roommates) is more than obvious here and his hilarious look dates the movie more than anything else. (He is older brother of the yummy Rick Rossovich, an actor who appeared in The Terminator, Top Gun and, most notably, Roxanne, among other things.)

The film is often uproariously funny, but in this case a lot of the humor seems to be intentional. Little quirky bits of irony emerge along the way (for example, a product called "Spurt" is advertised as a character has blood gushing out of his chest!) The featured weapon, silly as it is sometimes presented, allows for some really interesting and eye-opening sequences.

Made at a time when excess and tastelessness were about to explode as never before, it wallows in idiocy and illogic, but is rarely dull. One death from a balcony is shown in slo-mo with the crotch of the victim front and center as the body flails to its eventual death. Someone even decided to mark the lovely event with a lobby card all its own!

The lame script (also by Crichton) has so many holes in it it's downright ridiculous, but somehow the movie still works as light entertainment and is able to get a few points across. This is one rare time when a film could have been better if it were allowed to be a little bit longer. Oddly enough, as he warns here about the dangers of computer-generated imaging, the most successful film adaptation of one of his works was the heavily CGI-ed Jurassic Park. As it stands, Looker is the first mainstream film ever to feature a “realistic” computer generated character, a model named Cindy.

The addictive title song is about as close to deliriously bad 80s heaven as one can get. This film has many similarities to director Crichton's Coma but without that film's darker edge (and without Jerry Goldsmith's nerve-jangling score. This one is done by Barry De Vorzon who had just come off the camp scream Xanadu.)

The preposterous climax of this film, which takes place inside a massive studio, is notably bizarre and hard to forget with the villains doing more harm to each other than to anyone else as they find themselves living inside virtual commercials! Cheesy spokespeople hawk various products while the antagonists skulk around the premises wielding guns.

Give this a look sometime, but be prepared to hum the title song for days afterward, despite any and all measures of prevention short of fast-forwarding through it altogether.

Skywhacked

The airborne drama Skyjacked came out in 1972 and, though it isn’t a disaster movie in the sense that the plane isn’t crashing, it still belongs in the same basic family due to its all-star format and in-flight setting. Starring (who else?!) Charlton Heston as the pilot, it concerns a passenger jet, which someone onboard has decided to blow up if the crew doesn’t change its course to the destination desired. (I deliberately passed this film up in the somewhat chronological order I’ve been musing about disaster movies in, lest someone might think this is strictly a Heston blog, he was in so many of these types of movies in the 1970s!)

Some posters for the film used the popular (and oft-mentioned here) scheme of boxes with faces of the stars. This one tweaked it a bit by arranging them differently rather than in a row at the bottom. It also strove to project a “whodunit” aspect to the film and, though the movie does indeed take pains to shroud the identity of the hijacker for a fairly significant amount of time, the back of the DVD case gives the mystery away completely! So take care if you wish to be surprised when watching and ignore that until later.

During the 70s, feature films and TV movies continually focused on mid-air crises of all kinds. The Airport series featured its own mad bomber along with a collision with a small private craft, a crash beneath the waters of the Bermuda Triangle and finally a skirmish with heat-seeking missiles (clearly most of the ideas had run out by that time!) Various TV-films dealt with ghosts, crashes into the Everglades, murderers and even one in which a plane flies into a skyscraper! Then there’s the loopy Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (released to video as Starflight One) about a state of the art craft that gets flung into outer space! Check out the old VHS cover here. (Click to enlarge.)

Here, Heston and Co. are on board a passenger jet for Minneapolis when suddenly there are lipstick-written messages (the first one on a mirror in the lavatory!) demanding that the flight plan be rerouted to Anchorage instead or else a bomb will be detonated. Not only does Heston have to contend with a hijacker/bomber, but also he doesn't even know who the culprit is, just that he or she is likely a member of first class. Meanwhile, the camera keeps finding ways to land on various tubes of red lipstick!

This makes the first 30 minutes of the film a bit of a mystery. It also makes for some serious tedium, as the script can't allow viewers to know much about the people on board, lest it become obvious who is or is not the passenger with a screw loose. So the various stars have to maintain a certain level of suspicion about them while also striving to deliver facets of themselves that would make the audience give a care about them. For the most part, they aren’t too successful with this, though the script is probably the main culprit.

Heston was a master at playing these types of square-jawed authority figures and he does well here, even showing some shades of vulnerability at times. Check out the mushroom cloud of smoke he has coming out of his pipe in the cockpit! Hunky former Tarzan Mike Henry plays his co-pilot and the two are in the midst of a love triangle over attractive chief stewardess Yvette Mimieux. Henry is her current lover, though she used to be with Heston. Their past love affair is displayed in some loony, “arty” flashbacks, the kind Airplane! would later make fun of.
Football star-turned-actor Rosey Grier plays a nervous musician who carries a big cello case with him. He’s seated next to clean cut soldier James Brolin, on hiatus from his regular role as Dr. Steven Kiley on Marcus Welby, M.D.”
Confrontational hippie Susan Dey (also on hiatus from her own series The Partridge Family) manages to find time to flirt with sweet Nicholas Hammond. We all remember Hammond, of course, from his appearance as Friedrich Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. He’s on board the flight with his U.S. senator father Walter Pidgeon. Pidgeon attempts in vain to inject weight into his paper-thin part.

Ross Elliott and Jeanne Crain as a married couple are so much furniture, their roles are so un-fleshed-out. (Crain, who lived for three more decades afterwards, never stepped before a movie camera again after this.) At least Mariette Hartley gets a chance to fret some in her clichéd role of the panicky pregnant woman (and orders a Bloody Mary to drink! Take that PC people.) Claude Akins appears in a role George Kennedy would likely have played if he hadn't been stretched so thin in virtually every other disaster film of the decade. Leslie Uggams, in her film debut, plays a confident stewardess whose final line is amusing if a bit unlikely.

People keep misunderstanding each other's intentions and motives in an effort to build some mystery about the bomber. Sadly, this just isn't handled well enough to work to the film's advantage. When the hijacker is revealed, things take on a more tense feeling, but there are really very few times when anyone in this movie acts like a real person. The passengers react to the news of a hijacking the way they might react to finding that the plane is out of smokehouse almonds. At least in Airport, the star-studded cast members each got a chance to shine, even if some of the stories were silly. Here, the characters are almost strictly cardboard props.

What's neat about the film are its serene production design and color scheme, its aerial photography, its unusual music score, its generally serious tone and its eclectic cast of familiar faces. I live for those cool, cadet blue stewardess uniforms that once were the norm, though movies always seemed to contain even more sharp ones than real life.

Unfortunately, the script has to count as a debit as it fails to generate any characters of particular interest or depth. The editing and continuity on the film is also poor. Chunks of activity seem to have been left out such as Henry bandaging Mimieux's cut. Also, Mimieux's hair goes from loose to pulled-back to loose within moments.

Though the film is not nearly campy enough to be funny throughout (despite being released by Warner Brothers as a "Cult Camp Classic"), there are a couple of giggles along the way such as when one passenger is nearly frozen and has a hair full of frost or when busy character actor John Fiedler has his voice hilariously and ludicrously over-dubbed. There's a lack of urgency to the movie, typified by (the still-lovely) Crain when she has a chance to get off the plane and decides to smooth out the suede in her hat instead. It's doubtful that anyone but die-hard buffs will find this anything much beyond tiresome, but at least it isn't an over-the-top mess like so many of today's movies.