Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Horrorfest 2017: White of the Eye

I like a lot of Jim Jarmusch's movies, although I've never seen the only one that would be considered anything close to horror, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. Still, I was interested to check out some of his horror favorites and started with WHITE OF THE EYE, directed by Donald Cammell.

This 1987 UK flick takes place in Arizona and stars David Keith as a guy who goes around installing high end stereo equipment for rich people and Cathy Moriarty as his wife. Before we get to all this, though, the movie opens with a bang as a well off woman is murdered in her sprawling home. Tire tracks lead the detective on the case (Art Evans) to Keith but the movie has done a pretty good job of establishing Keith as a cool dude, so we're not so sure the detective is on the right track.

In the mean time we get flashbacks to how Moriarty and Keith met. At first we're not sure where all of this is going and to the movie's credit, it doesn't do any handholding. From the opening frames we can tell this movie is going to be more about mood and style than about plot. That's not to say the plot doesn't make sense, it's just not spoon fed to the audience. It all eventually comes together and has a very satisfying ending, but the movie is mostly notable for the beautiful shots and cool soundtrack.

Speaking of the soundtrack, it's co-written by Nick Mason, the drummer from Pink Floyd. There's a lot of good source music on the soundtrack as well, but the 80s-tastic synth and drums score is pretty sweet and ads to the slick visuals.

Cinematography wise this film is perfect. It uses a few different kinds of film stock when switching between time periods in the story, but for the most part the images are sharp, exact and detailed. Even though this is clearly a product of the 80s, the movie looks like it was shot yesterday.

Aside from all this, the movie also has the added benefit of using its locations to its advantage. This doesn't just incidentally take place in Arizona, it uses the landscape to help tell the story of lonely, isolated people, not unlike the Southern California vistas of TWENTYNINE PALMS.

No comments:

Post a Comment