Looker

Looker is a truly preposterous 1981 thriller. The basic plot concerns several models who had similar plastic surgery and died under mysterious circumstances. The police think the deaths are suspicious enough to assign the case to homicide, and the one and only suspect is the women's common plastic surgeon. In typical movie fashion, the beleaguered doctor (Albert Finney) decides to abandon his practice to solve the crime himself. He manages to pull off a series of capers which which would impress James Bond, including reckless car chases which endanger the city, shoot-outs with automatic weapons, high-tech gizmos, stolen access codes, and disguises. In addition to his unlikely quest to expose the real killers, he also takes it upon himself to protect the one remaining model who falls into the same category as the dead girls. While he is conducting his investigation, he consistently fails to keep the police apprised of important clues and also fails to tell them that he is going to be the constant companion of the next potential victim. He doesn't even tell the police of her existence!

It's irritating that the baddies, armed with all sorts of futuristic technology, are unable to dispose of one flabby little guy. Bad guy Tim Rossovich, a former NFL player, should be able to dispose of Albert Finney with his bare lands, let alone with a perception-altering light gun. Albert Finney is not a very athletic guy, and he looked downright puny in the action sequences. Yet Rossovich fails to kill Finney repeatedly despite having him outgunned and also having paralyzed him several times with the hypnotic weapon.

Far more irritating is the fact that the film never offers any explanation of why the models were killed in the first place! Once it establishes a premise for the doctor's Mission Implausible, it goes off in a completely different direction. Since it becomes an "evil corporation" movie, I suppose the company killed the girls just because it was (summon Richard Burton's ghost to say ... ) eee-villlll!

The editing of the narrative is so choppy that the film seems to be a shortened version of a far longer work. I don't know that to be the case since there are no deleted scenes on the DVD, but it is a reasonable assumption based on such matters as these:

(1) The surgeon's partner is introduced as a possible red herring killer - even says he's going to date the girls after Finney operates on them, but he never appears again after the opening scenes. This is particularly confusing since the police should have considered him the #1 suspect in the murders, since his romantic proclivities would make him, not Finney, the central link between the women. There had to have been some reason why that character was introduced in the first place, but as the film stands he serves absolutely no purpose other than confusion..

(2) There is one sequence that goes as follows: (a) On a Saturday night, Finney is pinned down in his office by two guys with automatic weapons - all seems bleak and hopeless for him. (b) With the camera on Finney as he cowers beneath a sink, one of the off-camera guys says "to hell with him, we have the girl," and the assailants simply leave, obviously having no interest in killing him. (c) A word slide appears that says "Sunday." (d) Suddenly it is daylight and Finney is in a car, being chased by the two men, whose interest in killing him has apparently been restored. It seems quite clear that other things must have happened between the beginning and ending of this sequence, but the audience (unlike the doctor) is left in the dark.

(3) There is an undeveloped sub-plot about a presidential candidate who will (presumably) use marketing and computer technology for the evil purpose of winning elections. Vestiges of this thread pop up from time to time, but without anything to tie them together. The candidate never appears except in a video-within-the-film.

I wasn't the only one who was baffled by the editing. After I wrote the words above, I read the NY Times review written by Vincent Canby, which said, "The plot is pretty silly but Mr. Crichton's handling of it is even sillier, though it is bold. When his characters get themselves into a tight spot and, against your better judgment, you wonder how they'll get out, the director just cuts to another scene in which the tight spot has been forgotten. His chases have no climaxes. They simply end. Mr. Crichton has fun sending up television commercials in one extended sequence, but his direction of the rest of the film is so sloppy one suspects that if he himself were a plastic surgeon, two ears might wind up on one side of the same head."

I assume that all the missing pieces are on the cutting room floor. If I really wanted to test my theory about the severity of the editing, I could listen to writer/director Michael Crichton's commentary, but the film is just not significant enough to warrant such a time investment.

As Canby noted, there are sequences which are quite enjoyable, although they are comic rather than thrilling. There are some funny send-ups of commercials, but the best scene is the final shoot-out. The action occurs during a live demonstration video in which digital actors are being superimposed on the sets. Finney and the bad guys wander in and out of the sets, thus unintentionally and unknowingly interacting with the digital actors. At one point, there is a dead and bloody Tim Rossovich lying on the breakfast table while a digital family discusses their Oat Bran. All of this is broadcast as a demonstration of new technology to a hoity-toity group of corporate fat cats, who are confused and shocked, and express their reactions with stock black-and-white-era crowd dialogue like "Say, what's he trying to pull?" Somebody apparently failed to tell the author that the 1930s had ended.

Looker does have a good cast (James Coburn is the Dr. Evil character to Finney's Austin Powers), and it does have one element which makes the film much more interesting now than it was 25 years ago. Unlike the typical film about science-based paranoia, this one imagined most of the future details quite accurately. For example, it posited a day in which live actors would be replaced by their digitally-simulated counterparts to more effective product marketing. We can see many examples of this today, one recent one being the creepy recent popcorn commercial which brings Orville Redenbacher back to life. The script also posited a time when omnipresent computers would replace TVs as the primary delivery vehicles for visual stimuli. That seems obvious today, but was not in 1981 when the first PCs were basically used for word processing and performing simple math. The future it imagined in 1981 is very similar to the world in which we live, and it's interesting to see how well it predicted the future.

IMDb voters score it 5.7 which is about the right territory. It would be a C- on our scale, meaning that the comedy and the prescient view of the future make it watchable, despite the lackluster writing and editing of the thriller plot and the action sequences.

Of course, it also has Terri Welles topless. She was the Playboy Playmate of the Month in December of 1980, just before this film was released. Girl couldn't act a lick, but what a body!!

It also has former Partridge Family member Susan Dey tastefully naked.

I'll have film clips tomorrow. Here are the collages:

Susan Dey

Terri Welles

 

 

 

Secretary

Tuna and I have already discussed this at length. The new captures come from a recent HD clip. Here is the film clip, captures below.

Maggie Gyllenhaal