Customer Reviews

Fade to Black [VHS]

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I found TB to be alittle weaker than he should have been for a starring role. I really enjoyed Cloris Leachman's portrayal of the handicapped neighbor. But my favorite in the movie was Michael Beck's nasty bad guy with a wonderful Brit/Irish accent, He put the edge on everything, and with his leather jacket and snakeskin boots-he made watching it worthwhile. Heather Locklear is sure enough pretty in this, and when she makes her transformation, makes you look twice. And the police are steriotypically the ones that "don't get it". This is a great Sunday afternoon matinae popcorn movie.

This TVM written by Douglas Barr and directed by John McPherson initially steals from Rear Window, with Timothy Busfield using his video camera to see a murder in the apartment across from his. Cloris Leachman is also on hand as the Thelma Ritter character, though here Leachman is the one in the wheelchair. Busfield is playing the ineffectual man, whose wife has left him because he is a "spectator at the game of life", and a voyeur as well, filming people in the building's courtyard without their consent as case studies for his social anthropology class. Barr also gives him a clarinent so that he can play on his balcony at night to demonstrate his loneliness. When Heather Locklear turns up always dressed in demure white a la Lana Turner in Postman Always Rings Twice, we cross over into Laura, with someone we thought to be dead is not. Although this TVM was made in Locklear's first year of Melrose Place ie before she hit her stride as an arch witch, her lack of attitude here reveals Locklear's lack of range, since she is dull when acting sincere. Busfield amusingly uses his class for a hypothetical about whether he should contact Locklear, though this presumes that they know more than him, which is odd as he is the teacher. But then these are the same kind of nerds who can easily pass entry into a rave club. Although the narrative gets even more film noir-ish using the genre conventions of the innocent man and the femme fatale, McPherson's skill overcomes the accumulative silliness of the proceedings, though giving two of his cast Irish accents is a disaster. Barr occasionally delivers a funny line - Leachman to Busfield "Pull your sweater up over your head so I can see how you'll look on the 7 o'clock news when they haul you in for burglary" - and we get the ridiculous phenomena of people who live with their front doors open and windows undressed, police who arrive immediately after they are called, and a DJ who uses a telephone at the rave party where it is established that the music is deafening. At one point Busfield fantasy projects seeing himself kissing Locklear which is a tangent that is not repeated, and I was grateful McPherson spared us the masses grabbing for money that falls out of an opened suitcase. If one is ultimately embarassed for Busfield and especially Locklear, Leachman probably survives the best.