Cinema Canada (Oct 1979)

gomery, Monique Mercure exec. P: Peter Wilson p. John Ryan, George Mendeluk assoc. p. .Larry Frolick p.c. Ko-Zak Productions Inc. (1978) col. 35mm running time 110 min. dist. Astral Films. Years ago, | saw a movie called Astro Zombies, a real cheapie with John Carradine making monsters in the basement while spies chased after the secret formula. It was truly awful, but it had one peculiar, memorable quality: every so often, it would instantly and without warning, stop being one kind of fantasy -cliched science fiction for nine-year-olds, and become another -cliched soft-core pornography for the raincoat-in-the-lap _ brigade. This wonderous transformation was wrought single-handedly by the woman who played the chief spy. Though she did nothing out of keeping with the rest of the movie, she was so charged with sleaze that the instant she appeared Astro Zombies became a whole different movie, with no connection but the plot, to what it had been before. Similar shifts occur in Stone Cold Dead. The main fantasy revolves around Boyd (Richard Crenna), a plain-clothes cop with a hangdog face and a trenchcoat. He’s assigned to stop the sniper who’s killing Yonge St. hookers, and he’s obsessed with busting Kurtz, a big-time pimp and pusher. He enlists Monica, an uptown call girl, and McGuire, an undercover cop posing as a hooker, in his crusade. After the usual killings, clues, suspects and fights, he finally uncovers the secret identity of the mad killer. If you think you've seen this one before, You're right! Kojak with overtones of David Janssen in Harry O: picturesque trash and neon lights. It’s “Down these mean streets a man must go, who is not himself mean...” The second fantasy centres on Kurtz, played by Paul Williams, with that sort of low-key menace associated with Orson Welles -whom Williams begins to resemble a weird parody of. We first meet Kurtz in alow-angle two-shot. He sits ona sofa, bored, while a blonde kneels before him to do his fingernails. When she’s finished, she raises his hand to her lips, puckers, and we cut to a high-angle closeup, a classic voyeur shot into her use-me use-me eyes — a vicarious little taste of what Kurtz experiences while she gently, gently exhales steamy breath onto his fingertips. Kurtz is such a super-pimp that he has underlings to do the actual work, and a giant shaveheaded black man to do the killings that he orders with oblique, arch-Socratic dialogue. Sound familiar? How about The Man from U.N.C.L.E., or Victor Buono as the heavy in some Matt Helm epic, or Orson Casey Stevens 2 Starring in Prom Night To be released early 1980 Trainco Talent (416) 977-0292 FILM REVIEWS Welles in Casino Royale, or a thousand other tacky James Bond imitations. Scenes with Kurtz and Boyd together underline the incompatability of these two fantasies. Boyd treats Kurtz to a mild form of routine police harassment, the kind of harassment that if Boyd’s world were fully dominant, would just never happen. Kurtz would be too sensible to ever go near Yonge St. and too wellinsulated for Boyd to ever get near him. On the other hand, if it were all happening in Kurtz’ world, as soon as Boyd became a big enough nuisance, he’d be snuffed out as casually as Kurtz snuffs two other cops. The Boyd/Kurtz axis is far from being the only nonsense in Stone Cold Dead. Consider the sniper who, with Boyd in hot pursuit, stops to change coats. Why? Who knows. All it does is weaken the effect of the chase. Or, there’s the hooker who picks up a trick, charges him for a straight lay and then agrees to whip him, for no extra fee. Hookers just don’t do that. Extra services, especially kinky ones, always cost. Then there’s the hooker, talking tough to a pimp, who says she’s “into heroin”. They don’t call it heroin, George, like grass smokers don’t call it ‘marijuana’. If you love your drug, you have a pet name for it. Or there’s the sniper's rifle -a beautiful, sexy, evil piece of custom-built death that would never, never come into the hands of the killer: another killer, maybe, but not this one. There’s Boyd, making a speech about whores, pimps and pushers that ends with him wondering what he’s doing there. Obsessed people, and that’s what the script insists Boyd is, don’t wonder. They know what they’re doing there. They also don’t appear anywhere near as valium’d out as Richard Crenna; their obsessions give them energy --lots of it. I could go on, and on, and on... The absurdity of Boyd giving Monica her full night’s fee to keep her off the street, when it’s already well-established that she doesn’t work the street. The greater absurdity of Monica, who has no reason to like Boyd, returning it next morning. The point I’m trying to make is that Stone Cold Dead is mostly a mess, because George Mendeluk, who produced, directed and did the screenplay got his ideas from old T.V. shows, and didn’t know enough, or care enough, to put in the simple research and thought that would have made his ideas hang together. On the other hand. Belinda J. Montgomery cares. She Cinema Canada/35