leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (10/20/85)
AFTER HOURS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A really good script makes this film
funny and frightening at the same time. Packed into one
night in New York City's SoHo is a lifetime of weirdos,
adventure, and horror. See it and you'll laugh, but you will
also never set foot in New York after dark. Good film!
Most horror films deal with the laws of nature suddenly breaking down.
Suddenly there are vampires or werewolves. A man falls asleep on a train
and wakes up in a town where people have no faces. Ghosts invade a home in
suburbia. Things happen that break the laws as we expect them. You can't
really do a horror story in which the horror element is "I am going to have
a really bad trigonometry exam next week." That may be a frightening
thought, but it falls too well into common human experience. Perhaps the
most convincing kind of horror is that something very abstract like the law
of averages breaks down. The reader or viewer may say, "This is too darn
much coincidence," but it is tough to get a feel for how much is too much
since people run into odd coincidences every day. Falling into a barrage of
unpleasant coincidences can be the basis for a frightening and convincing
sort of horror story since there is--much more than in a vampire story--the
feel that this could happen. People will see AFTER HOURS as an often
nightmarish but hilarious black comedy but it may not register that it is
also very effective as a horror film.
In New York City, a word processor (Paul Hackett, played by Griffin
Dunne of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON), meets a good-looking girl (Marcie,
played by Rosanna Arquette) in a restaurant and arranges a date with her,
but for his date he has to go to an alien territory called SoHo. Now in
real life there as a lot of eccentric people in SoHo and director Martin
Scorsese has always had a good eye for making New York City look even more
ominous than it actually is. Here he combines an extremely well inter-woven
story with very funny portraits of the decidedly weird people who you very
well might run into in New York City and gets a film with adventure, horror,
and comedy and none at the expense of the others. It has been suggested by
critics that horror and comedy are at odds with each other, that a film that
is really funny cannot be really frightening. AFTER HOURS manages quite
nicely.
I do not want to say much more about the plot than I have for fear of
spoiling it but I will say that the story is a rich tapestry of coincidence
with events and even objects tying together at the strangest and most
unexpected times. Joseph Minion has written a truly amazing script that
fits together like a cleverly designed Chinese puzzle. It is only the chain
of coincidence and the believability of the story that do not fit well
together, but that is a minor flaw. It has been suggested that only New
Yorkers will appreciate this film noir comedy and I suspect that remains to
be seen. But I haven't laughed so hard at a comedy since seeing A CHRISTMAS
STORY two years ago (perhaps not even then). In some ways this is what INTO
THE NIGHT wanted to be and didn't quite make. It is also what Neil Simon's
THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS could have been. This is a +3 comedy on the -4 to +4
scale. There are very few comedies I would rate that high. See it,
particularly if you know New York City, but if not, give it a try anyway.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper