Review: Fear City
Blu-ray: Fear City (1984)
I’m always filled with wonder at the amount of films that were made in the 80s. I mean by now you’d think we at 60MW Towers would have seen them all. Twice. But no.
How on earth I have never seen Abel Ferarra’s 1984 Fear City is beyond me, but thankfully 101 Films have released it on Blu-ray as the 34th of their Black Label series of releases, and it’s uncut.
Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his best friend and Nicky Parzano (Jack Scalia) live in New York, only now it’s a city filled with fear, because the strippers/exotic dancers they manage are getting killed, one by one. Yes, it’s an 80s film neon noir with tits, lots and lots of tits, and really bad sexy dancing (so bad that Melanie Griffiths attempt gave me an asthma attack from laughing.)
Rossi was seeing the most sensual and popular dancer on their books and drug addict, Loretta (Melanie Griffith, over acts, can’t dance, isn’t sexy), but they parted due to him having flashbacks to killing a boxing opponent. He’s very cross, he wants her back, but unfortunately she’s a now a sexy dancing lesbian.
As more dancers get brutally murdered Detective Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams) is put on the case, he’s also very cross and he doesn’t like the Italians.
Oh my goodness, this is such a brilliant film. It’s so sincere and serious, yet so … terrible. I would have picked it as one of the ’60 Minutes into’ films for Ramrod and Dave if I’d have known. It’s also so well made, which is an anomaly as most ‘terrible’ films (like Samurai Cop) have unknowns in and awful production values. This has real stars (Rossano Brassi is the main mafia guy) in it -at that time Berenger and Griffith were big stars. Yet… it’s just plain ropey. I loved it. So if you’re a fan of 80s good/bad films, don’t miss out on this gem!
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Uncut version of Fear City (97 Minutes)
- Commentary with film critic Kevin Lyons
- Extended trailer
- Limited edition booklet: Includes ‘Seeing Red: A Neo-Noir Guide’ by Rich Johnson and ‘Returning To Fear City’ by Brad Stevens
Review by Tina from a disc kindly supplied by 101 Films.
