Wholly unrelated to the adventures of Balki Bartokomous and Cousin Larry, Larry Cohen’s Perfect Strangers delivers off-kilter thrills via the story of a mob hit man named Johnny (Brad Rijn) who enters into a relationship with single mom Sally (Anne Carlisle) after her two-year-old son Matthew (Matthew Stockley) witnesses one of his contract killings. Johnny and Sally’s union is fraught with perils both related and unrelated to his murderous profession, as Cohen regularly spikes the action with not only a familiar element of child-related anxiety – recurring instances of baby-snatching give the film a hard-to-shake exploitative kick – but also gender warfare, most of which comes in the form of self-actualizing feminist retaliation against violent chauvinism (seen in a Take Back the Night rally and Sally’s male-bashing girlfriends). More entrancing than the director’s larger thematic preoccupations, however, is his film’s disquietingly ethereal atmosphere. Finding a harmonious match to its misty, dreamlike cinematography (including some striking shots of a World Trade Center-shadowed downtown Manhattan) in Carlisle’s vague, emotionally remote performance as the parentally inattentive Sally, Perfect Strangers finds Cohen successfully forgoing splattery gore in favor of a more menacingly unreal mood of urban malaise.
Ah, Balky.
I can't believe they had an entire show based on the fact someone is from another culture.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg | February 07, 2006 at 03:59 PM