The most ambitious of Samuel Fuller's progressively indescribable post-White Dog works kicks off with a hammer-blow-to-snout jolter -- a literal tabloid wallop, and a crystallization of the director's kino-fist aesthetic. From the opener's writhing, rioting panorama emerges street dweller Keith Carradine, with scraggly, matted hair and memories of past glory as a Bowiesque pop star. It was an affair with exotic dancer/rock video chick Valentina Vargas that bought him a ticket to Skid Row, after an attack orchestrated by Vargas' druglord boyfriend (Marc de Jorge) and Carradine's agent (an ingeniously unhinged Andréa Ferréol) leaves his heart broken and his vocal cords slashed. Back in the present, Carradine finds out that de Jorge is causing the city's rampant violence wave as part of a crack-smuggling network, while keeping his beloved Vargas captive in the local fortified mansion. Disjointed, excessive, and unashamedly insane, this Euro-mix hybrid suggests a project financed by cinephile dough and shot in between European film festival tributes. Adapted from David Goodis pulp fiction, the picture is discombobulatedly New Wavish (in both the French nouvelle vague and '80s punk sense of the word), though Fuller, still full of piss and vinegar, refuses to steer into camp -- Ferréol munches cigars and Vargas gallops atop a white stallion wearing nothing but a thong, but the director's sense of purpose remains as punchy as in his Pickup on South Street days. Relegated to video shelf esoteria, Fuller's pulsating close-ups and mix of jagged editing and stretching long takes blow away the gentility of that year's big Oscar winner, Driving Miss Daisy, all while displaying a far more radicalized awareness of racial tensions, to boot. With Bill Duke, Bernard Fresson, Rebecca Potok, and a cameo by Fuller's shadow, a profile as distinctive as Hitchcock's.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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