Fear City (Abel Ferrara, 1984)

Tom Berenger in Fear City

Cast: Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Jan Murray, Janet Julian, Daniel Faraldo, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray, John Foster. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Production design: Vincent Joseph Cresciman. Film editing: Jack W. Holmes, Anthony Redman. Music: Dick Halligan. 

Abel Ferrara's style and ability to create an atmosphere almost manage to redeem the tawdry Fear City, but there's really no getting over the leaden familiarity of the story. Someone is mutilating and killing the dancers who work in New York City's strip clubs and the police, club owners, and managers of the women are unable to stop the carnage. Eventually, it falls to Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger), the co-owner of a talent agency that supplies the dancers, to search out the killer and deal with him. Rossi is a damaged man: an ex-boxer who killed a man in the ring and is tormented with guilt, but when the target becomes his ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he feels compelled to act. You can see from the start where the plot is going -- toward a showdown in a dark alley. It doesn't help that Rossi is at odds with the police officer in charge of the investigation, Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), who hates Italians: "There's nothing I hate more than guineas in Cadillacs," Wheeler says, watching Rossi get in his car. Ferrara can sometimes be thuddingly obvious in exposition: We know from flashbacks what the cause of Rossi's guilt and depression is, but just in case we don't get it Ferrara needlessly inserts a scene in which we see newspaper clippings about the opponent's coma and death. More time might have been spent developing the character of the killer, who is just a figure out of a nightmare. The acting in Fear City is mediocre and there's more exploitative nudity than necessary in the dance club scenes, but the movie undeniably holds your attention. 

Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo, Paul Calderón, Eddie Daniels, Bianca Hunter, Zoë Lund, Vincent Laresca, Frankie Thorn, Fernando Véléz, Joseph Michael Cruz, Paul Hipp. Screenplay: Zoë Lund, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Harvey Keitel's lacerating performance and Abel Ferrara's narrative skill, using a baseball playoff series as a thread to hang his story on, almost made me think that Bad Lieutenant was some kind of good film. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me a tired reworking of the old motif of Catholic guilt, a kind of feint at creating a Dostoevskyan moral fable undermined by vulgarity. Was it necessary, for example, to cast a nubile young blond as the nun who gets raped, and to provide so many glimpses of her naked? 

The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995)

Lili Taylor in The Addiction

Cast: Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Paul Calderon, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, Michael Imperioli, Robert W. Castle. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Charles M. Lagola. Film editing: Mayin Lo. Music: Joe Delia. 

Blood looks bloodier in black-and-white. In color it too often looks like ketchup or cranberry juice or corn syrup with red food dye. But under the lens and lights of cinematographer Ken Kelsch in The Addiction it turns black, flat and dry like an aging wound or glossy like the spill of an unsavory substance. And there's a lot of it in the film, which turns vampirism into a metaphor for not only drug addiction but any other self-destructive obsession. When Kathleen Conklin (the terrific Lili Taylor) is turned vampire, her attacker (Annabella Sciorra) tells her to resist, and after Kathleen is addicted, she makes a similar offer to her own victims: They should tell her to go away. Except "victims" is maybe the wrong word here. The film is about something as banal as responsibility or yielding to temptation: It almost devolves into a "just say no" moral treatise, except that it also exposes the inanity of that maxim. Christopher Walken plays a vampire who has managed to get his bloodlust under control, except that we can see the price he has paid doing so. As Macbeth put it, "I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." Admonitions against self-destructive behavior aside, The Addiction is a fable with rich intellectual content, a meditation on human appetite and attempts to control it. That it's also a pretty damn good horror movie is only part of it. 

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Gabrielle Anwar and Billy Wirth in Body Snatchers

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Billy Wirth, Reilly Murphy, Christine Elise, R. Lee Irmey, Kathleen Doyle, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips. Screenplay: Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara's version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers is nothing if not economical. The economy extends to the title: Don Siegel's 1956 version and Philip Kaufman's 1978 one were called Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Ferrara even drops the definite article. The story, too, has been pared down. Ferrara's version sets the story on a military base in Alabama instead of the urban California of the previous films. It also shifts the focus to a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), who comes with her family to the base when her father (Terry Kinney) is sent there by the EPA to investigate chemical pollution. The dynamic of a rebellious adolescent in a military culture is perfect for the conflict between individualism and conformity, the theme that unites all of the versions of Finney's story. In addition to her father, Marti's dysfunctional family consists of her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she dislikes, and her young half-brother, Andy (Reilly Muphy), who annoys her. Andy is the first to sense that something is seriously wrong in their new home when, during an art class at day care, all the other kids produce identical finger paintings. As they hold up their paintings, the teacher murmurs approvingly at each one until she comes to a halt at Andy's, which is unique. She clearly disapproves. One by one, the fact that people are being somehow replaced by identical but emotionless beings becomes clear. Ferrara is not particularly interested in the mechanics of invasion and transformation that took up more narrative space in the previous films. We get some nicely disgusting body horror scenes, but the response of Marti to the alien takeover is what drives the plot as she teams up with a handsome young helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth) to fight off the invaders. Tim's stoic military manner keeps us unsure whether he's not already one of the pod people, an ambiguity that persists until the end of the movie. Body Snatchers is a good rethinking of material whose previous versions are now considered classics. The source material was mined again for a fourth version, The invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), which starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig but bombed with the critics.   

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

Asia Argento and Willem Dafoe in New Rose Hotel

Cast: Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, Annabella Sciorra, John Lurie, Kimmy Suzuki, Miou, Yoshitaka Amano, Gretchen Mol, Phil Neilson, Ken Kelsch, Ryuiki Sakamoto. Screenplay: Abel Ferrara, Christ Zois, based on a story by William Gibson. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Frank DeCurtis. Film editing: Jim Mol, Anthony Redman. Music: Schoolly D. 

Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel is more an exercise in style than a satisfactory movie. The plot is simple: Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) are agents for a Japanese technology firm plot tasked with raiding a top scientist from a German company. They do so by hiring a beautiful prostitute called Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist, whom they will set up in a laboratory in Marrakech. The plot goes awry when one of the agents falls in love with Sandii and overlooks some evidence that she may be working for the German company, putting the agents in danger. Padding this plot into a 93-minute movie means a lot of filler, including an extended opening scene set in a kinky nightclub where some lugubrious songs get sung and the necessary exposition gets spilled. Then there are some irrelevant sex scenes while the scheme is being set up, and after it fails there are extended flashbacks that add little to our understanding of what has happened. The three leads are capable and watchable, but the film leaves us with no revelations about corporate rivalry in the age of technology that we haven't seen in better movies.