If you come out of Spike Lee's SUMMER OF SAM feeling a letdown, there are two other New York movies that much more vividly capture the panic of the city during the Son of Sam's spree in the summer of '77. Abel Ferrara's FEAR CITY, not quite a good movie, at least has a Bickle-ish frenzy and delirium that's right on; and there's this sicko platter of cold cuts, the first movie of the talented, then-25-year-old William Lustig, a Son of Sam exploitation picture that seems to perfectly capture the clammy smell and taste of cold sweat.
Joe Spinell, the Berkowitz manque of this Times Square programmer, was a sort of neighborhood version of Karloff's Frankenstein: a huge, darkly glowering, pitted-faced, scary-looking guy who, in the films of Coppola and Friedkin, always suggested the soulfulness inside grim button men and cops. Here, his Son of Sam is a sort of melancholy Bluebeard who beats his head with remorse after every killing. Spinell was a marvellous actor who died young and probably would have had a nineties renaissance; Lustig captures the soot and the soiled wallpaper, the atmosphere that you makes you guiltily feel that the Berkowitz story was the quintessence of New York noir. This may be (with the Larry Cohen-scripted MANIAC COP) Lustig's best picture; it seems more like an Abel Ferrara version of the Berkowitz story than the one Ferrara actually made.
Joe Spinell, the Berkowitz manque of this Times Square programmer, was a sort of neighborhood version of Karloff's Frankenstein: a huge, darkly glowering, pitted-faced, scary-looking guy who, in the films of Coppola and Friedkin, always suggested the soulfulness inside grim button men and cops. Here, his Son of Sam is a sort of melancholy Bluebeard who beats his head with remorse after every killing. Spinell was a marvellous actor who died young and probably would have had a nineties renaissance; Lustig captures the soot and the soiled wallpaper, the atmosphere that you makes you guiltily feel that the Berkowitz story was the quintessence of New York noir. This may be (with the Larry Cohen-scripted MANIAC COP) Lustig's best picture; it seems more like an Abel Ferrara version of the Berkowitz story than the one Ferrara actually made.