#douglashickox

So there’s this lady in a red trench coat, right? She walks up to a house and knocks on the back door. Then she rings the doorbell, and it sounds like a buzzer, which, who has a doorbell on their back door, and that’s not how a doorbell sounds. Fucking CARE MORE, filmmakers. The lady finds a spare key and enters the house. It’s pretty eerie. There’s classical music blaring, and the remnants of a child’s birthday party are still on the dining table. The lady goes into a side office, where the classical music is blaring from, and turns off the record player. But what’s that? The TV is on in another room. So the lady heads downstairs. It’s dark. It’s creepy. And in the TV room, there’s another lady and three kids, and they’re super duper dead! Whoa! Afternoon ruined!

And so enters Detective Grandpa. He’s a grizzled old gumshoe who you just know is going to take this case way too personally and the guy who did it is going to become his white whale, etc. etc. etc. Detective Grandpa learns that the patriarch of this murdered family, one Ed Vincent, has gone missing. So of course that must be the perp who done it! Cut to: a guy hitchhiking by the side of the road. Huh? So he gets picked up by someone driving what looks like a Yugo or a Gremlin or some other terrible late 20th century car. Anyway, this fucking guy immediately starts tailgating a lumber truck for no goddamn reason. Ease off the gas, dicknose! Then he tries to pass the lumber truck on the right hand side, which, c’mon, asshole, and then ANOTHER LUMBER TRUCK comes in the other direction, the car swerves, goes up a hill, comes crashing down, and fucking EXPLODES. Was it worth it, ya tailgating son of a bitch?!

Now the movie turns into The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a few minutes, and we see things from the perspective of the hitchhiker. Turns out he’s suffered serious facial injuries and will require a series of total reconstructive surgeries, plus he’s got amnesia, so he has no idea who he is, whoops. We meet a bunch of his doctors, who don’t matter, plus his nurse, who is played by Kathleen Quinlan, aka the lady from Apollo 13, plus her cop boyfriend, played by Michael Beck, aka the guy from The Warriors and zero other good movies. She’s a recent divorcee, and he’s extremely pushy about wanting to get married, and gets super annoyed when she tries to assert her personhood, but don’t worry about it. Anyway, our homie gets all of his surgeries, and decides that he wants to look like Keith Carradine, which is fine. It’s a choice. It’s like saying, hey, make me look like a more wholesome Klaus Kinski. But yeah, eventually he and Kathleen Quinlan fall in love, and decide to get married. Michael Beck takes this extremely well, by which I mean he yells at her and then pretends he was only worried about their financial situation. Oh hey, is that a wall on Michael Beck’s bedroom that’s covered in photos of Kathleen Quinlan? I thought I said don’t worry about it!

Cut to: six years later. Keith Carradine is going by the name Allen Devlin. He’s a super successful real estate agent, he and Kathleen Quinlan are happily married, and they have three kids. Detective Grandpa, meanwhile, has been forced into retirement by the powers that be, definitely because of political reasons and not because he’s a degenerate drunk. But then someone anonymously sends him a newspaper clipping with a picture of Allen Devlin, and he’s like, oh fuuuuuuuuck, I’m off to Washington state to harass some innocent people! He accosts Allen on a crowded elevator and is like, Oh hey, Ed Vincent! And of course Allen is like, um, no, you’ve got the wrong guy. And Detective Grandpa is like, oh no, you’re definitely Ed Vincent, remember, you had a wife and three kids and then they were fucking murdered?! Anyhoo, see ya later! And then he just gets off the elevator and Allen is like, what the hell was that about, some old rummy just called me a killer?!

Detective Grandpa then does what he should’ve done in the first place were he not a whisky-soaked dickhead and shows up at Allen Devlin’s office. He shows Allen a bunch of crime scene photos and Allen is horrified and agrees to prove his innocence however he can. THE VERY NEXT SCENE, they go to the doctors and the doctors are like, hey, look, Allen’s dental records don’t match Ed Vincent’s, so this movie should basically be over now. But Detective Grandpa is like, nah, who needs scientific evidence when you’ve got a sleuth’s intuition and blah blah burp. At this point Michael Beck gets pulled back into the movie, and once again rightfully points out that the movie should be over at this point because scientifically speaking Allen can’t be Ed Vincent, and Detective Grandpa responds by calling Michael Beck a “young hot shot computer type.” Ugh. So Allen hires a private investigator to look into his past before the accident, which goes pretty much nowhere. Kathleen Quinlan starts getting threatening phone calls from someone calling themselves Ed, and addressing her by the dead wife’s first name. Oh, and out of the fucking blue, Mr. Bondage Guy from the box art shows up and starts attacking women around town, and Detective Grandpa is like, oh yeah, forgot to mention this, we had similar attacks out in Ohio, creep in a gimp mask going around rapin’ everybody up in here, but they stopped…AFTER THE VINCENT FAMILY MURDER!!! SPOOOOOOOOKY!!! It’s like, c’mon, you’ve GOT to set this up way before the mid-point of the movie! It’s like getting a sandwich with one too many meats: do you want a serial killer hoagie or a bondage rapist grinder? PICK ONE, BLACKOUT!

So the private eye that Allen hired winds up dead, and the police of course suspect Allen. Allen, meanwhile, is starting to think that Detective Grandpa and Michael Beck are conspiring to set him up, because of course he would think that! This sentient bottle of Captain Morgan and the creepy cop who clearly still loves his wife suddenly start lobbing accusations of murder at him? C’mon, what’s he supposed to think? But then one of the kids finds a gimp mask in the garden shed! Oh noooooo! Kathleen Quinlan is like, gaaaaah maybe you are a murderizer! And brandishes a knife at him, and Allen is like, c’mon, baby, you know me better than that, I have no idea how that super sexy mask got in our garden shed! Look, to prove that I’m not a murderer, I’ll have myself committed, so that the cops can’t arrest me (which is not how that works), and then when the crimes continue, I’ll be exonerated for good! So off to the loony bin he goes, and into the garbage bin this movie goes.

Detective Grandpa gets the DNA results back from the lab on the super sexy gimp mask: no traces of Allen anywhere on the thing. And then a guy gets arrested for attempted rape, and they find a different sexy gimp mask on him! All of a sudden, Michael Beck, who has been calling Detective Grandpa crazy this whole time, is like, this could be a copycat crime, I think Allen is the real bad guy here now because the plot needs me to! Detective Grandpa is like, nah, your man confessed, there’s no real evidence to tie Allen to any of this, I was wrong, I’m going back to my elderly bachelor’s apartment in Ohio, but before I do that, can I use your bathroom? Michael Beck is like, sure, no problem, just ignore my wall festooned with pictures of Allen’s wife, if you could. But whoops, he doesn’t, and Detective Grandpa is like, holy shit, you set this whole thing up because you wanna go back to boning Kathleen Quinlan, you sent me that newspaper clipping, didn’t you? And Michael Beck, toilet clown that he is, tries to have it both ways, and is like, ok fine, I sent you the newspaper clipping, but I did it because I really thought he may be the guy you’re after, not because of this obvious romantic vendetta of mine! Psssssssh. So then Detective Grandpa is like, did you make those phone calls and plant the gimp mask too? To which Michael Beck is like, how dare you, I may have sent you a newspaper clipping in the hope of getting my unrequited love’s new husband accused of murder, but I’d NEVER plant evidence! Get off your fucking high horse, Beck, and just admit that you’re a creep, yeeeeaaaaaah.

To his credit, Detective Grandpa stops by to see Kathleen Quinlan, and is like, hey, I fucked up, your husband is definitely innocent, and Michael Beck definitely set this whole thing in motion because he’s still in love with you. Which comes as a huge shock to Kathleen Quinlan, and I hate when movies do this, because women are fucking smarter than this. Men in general, but especially creepy men, are terrible at hiding their unrequited feelings, and women definitely know, they just choose to ignore it. Whatever. So Kathleen Quinlan goes to see Allen and is like, I know you’re innocent now, I just want you back, and he’s like, ok, you’re right, it’s time for me to come back to my family, but oooooh boy am I mad at Detective Grandpa and Michael Beck! Anyway, I should be home just in time for…OUR SON’S BIRTHDAY PARTY!!! SPOOOOOOOOOOKY!!!

Michael Beck, because he’s awesome at ideas, decides to show Kathleen Quinlan that he’s not a creep by accosting her in the Safeway parking lot. Smooth move, Xanadu. He’s like, look, I know that I made a few oopsies, but I still think that your husband is a murderer, and you and your family are in danger. So finally Kathleen Quinlan just unloads on him. She’s like, you’re a manipulative jerk, that’s why I didn’t want to marry you, and that’s why we’re in this situation now, and you need to fucking nut up and get over this childish crush you have on me, and while you’re at it stay away from me and my family, I never want to see you ever again. So Michael Beck totally respects these wishes and…nope, nope, sorry, he parks his car across from the house and goes and stalks them. To make sure they’re “safe.” Fuck offfffffffff, dude.

So the kids are celebrating the youngest’s birthday, they’re decorating the house and blaring the rock n’ roll radio (let’s go!). Kathleen Quinlan asks one of the kids to go close the garage door, but he’s like, nah, I’m on the phone with the radio station so that they’ll give little fuckin’ Mikey or whatever his name is a shoutout on the air! So Kathleen Quinlan goes herself to take care of the garage door, but the lights aren’t working, so she grabs a flashlight, and then, OH CRIPES IT’S MR. BONDAGE GUY!!! She fights him off and manages to knock him out. Meanwhile, Detective Grandpa has stopped for gas, when he hears the birthday dedication to little fuckin’ Mikey or whatever his name is on the radio and he’s like DEAR GOD!!! So then Kathleen Quinlan is like, I must know! So she pulls off the super sexy gimp mask, and whoopdie fuck, it’s Allen. Great. So he wakes up and starts smacking her around and he’s like blargh bloogh I’m crazy now, I’m Ed Vincent and I think you’re my wife, so everybody’s going to hell tonight! The kids don’t hear any of this, of course, because of that blasted rock n’ roll music! She barricades herself in the car, and oh shit, there’s Michael Beck’s dead body! He starts busting out the windows, she crawls out of the driveway, and he’s about to gank her with an axe, when all of a sudden, Detective Grandpa shows up and puts two between the eyes. RIP Allen Devlin. RIP Ed Vincent. And RIP Blackout.

Mostly this movie is just a deeply frustrating viewing experience. The central premise, an amnesiac accused of murder, is a really smart and fascinating one, because there are so many ways you can run with it: is this guy really a secret cold blooded killer? Is this detective just letting his obsession (and all that liquor) cloud his judgement? Or are they both being manipulated by someone else for their own nefarious means? Unfortunately, the filmmakers decided to go with the most predictable and boring answer, while also taking the most needlessly convoluted route to get there. However, the performances are all good, more or less, and there’s some excellent cinematography, courtesy of Tak Fujimoto, who would go on to do incredible work with Jonathan Demme and others, so at least the movie looks good. Still, you can’t help but lament what a lost opportunity this is from a storytelling perspective. This is exactly the types of movies that should be getting remade: films with interesting plots that failed in execution. Just imagine what someone like Nicolas Winding Refn or David Fincher could do with this story, right?!

I’ll wrap things up with a strange and macabre addendum. Thanks to Nate Phillips, who runs the fantastic online storefront Media Crypt (I own a few of their shirts, and you should too!), for pointing out to me the fact that Blackout inspired a real-life murder! The film premiered on HBO on July 28, 1985. Less than a week later, on August 3, Ed Sherman of Hartford, CT, murdered his pregnant wife, Ellen. Just like in the film, Ed cranked up the air conditioning to slow down decomposition, and throw off the time of death, in an attempt to establish an alibi. During the trial, witnesses claimed to have discussed watching Blackout with Ed the day after it aired, and the film was even shown to the jury by the prosecutor. In the end, Sherman was sentenced to fifty years in prison, but died of a heart attack only four years into his sentence. The case would eventually be covered on an episode of “Forensic Files.” So that just goes to show ya, Scumbags: crime doesn’t pay! Or maybe it would if you pick a better movie than Blackout to base your crime on. I dunno. I don’t really do crimes.