Night Vision

Listen not to the noisy negativists: This is actually a pretty unique, offbeat little relic of the home video era, a shot on video feature made in Denver, Colorado featuring a cast of more or less unknowns, not much of a budget, a handful of clichés and one heck of an interesting idea. It is perhaps a bit too subtle and low-key for it's own good: With some bared flesh & an upped gore ante, this actually could have become a classic of the 80s direct to home video horror idiom. There is a David Lynch-esquire melding of reality, fantasy and either the supernatural or psychosis, depending upon how you deconstruct the ending, and a kind of irrepressible ultra low budget weirdness that reminds me of Jess Franco's more subtle efforts. Though without all the zoom lens effects.

The plot is so simple as to make the film appear to be about something it isn't: Kansan hayseed nebbish comes to the big city to find his fame & fortune writing a great American horror novel, encounters rejection and failure at every corner until befriended by a smart-mouthed street hustler. Really small: About five foot two, if even (MIDNIGHT COWBOY, anyone?). Along the way he applies for a job at a video rental store and strikes up a relationship with the punkish cutie pie behind the very small counter. At some point he comes into the possession of a VCR (remember those?) which was stolen with a cassette still inside, which as it turns out used to belong to members of a Midwestern satanic cult notorious for sacrificing cats. Meanwhile a hard boiled but remarkably clean-cut detective starts to try and piece together a series of crimes that are exactly like those described in the book being written by the new guy in town -- Are you getting all this down? because it may be on the quiz later.

In case you have not guessed this is a movie with ideas that exceed the 17" screen of my TV set, which is probably why there are some less than favorable comments about it. If you allow yourself to dwell on the deliberately paced plotting and K-Mart budget production values you might easily be fooled into thinking this a waste of time. But right from the start of the film attuned viewers will instinctively key in on some truly bizarre oddities. Some are obvious, like the running joke about kids stealing video boxes from the store that are empty & marked FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY. Then there is the offbeat product placement by Labatt's beer (lager, if I recall correctly) and Black and White label canned baked beans.

The "hero" of the film is also a puzzler, played with doe-eyed recalcitrance by an actor named Stacy Carson who never did anything else. He looks like David Byrne from the Talking Heads with these creepy, luminous eyes that suggested to me the guy was completely insane from the second he appeared on screen. One of the running plot devices has him repeatedly speaking on the phone with his mother back in Kansas, but since we never even hear her voice and his grip on reality starts to become more tenuous as the film progresses my conclusion was that she never even existed. The guy looks like a creepy, neurotic Midwestern weirdo, like that freak who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey. He has absolutely no charisma or definable character traits, existing as a sort of cypher upon which the rest of the cast projects their emotions. One of the strangest scenes is when he first starts to encounter odd manifestations of the supernatural due to the influence of this demonic VCR and goes to visit his street hustler buddy, who reluctantly lets him into his dingy flat wearing just his underwear & a black muscle shirt. Watching some flaky, woe-begotten nerd describing his troubles to a 5'2" guy with a mustache who talks like Joe Pesci may not have been a deliberate decision by the filmmaker to screw with the mind of his viewers, but it got a loud verbal "WHAT THE HELL??" out of me: You gotta see it to understand the strangeness of the juxtaposition.

Another thing I liked about the movie is how it started to blur the boundaries between what was happening in the "real" world of the film as well as the "imaginary" world of what was on the haunted VCR, which of course matched exactly what the guy had written in his "book" (manuscript is the more appropriate term, I believe), all of which culminates in a quite effective scene where someone finds themselves trapped in a room with somebody else who it turns out is either a demoniacally possessed satanic serial killer, or just some lunatic from Topeka. By not answering which the film turns out to be a puzzle without a solution: Was this all just the deranged fantasy of a madman? Or did some evil worshiping cult actually manage to project evil onto a previously owned rental tape of PAINT YOUR WAGON that they recorded their satanic ritual onto?

I say the former, though we'll probably never know for sure & that makes it even more fun. Here is a movie that not only defies formula but has no formula, only a bunch of clichés arranged in an offbeat, unconventional order that is ambiguous enough to offer multiple conclusions. Combine that with the absurd notion that Denver is some seething snake pit of evil that would make Travis Bickle's NYC from TAXI DRIVER seem tame by comparison and we are talking about a sleepy little cult sleeper that probably ever won't be re-discovered, but if you happen upon an old Prism Video VHS of it give yourself the benefit of a screening. While lacking in the gore or nudity department this is a movie with enough ideas to float it regardless.

6/10; Quite enjoyable, actually.