Movie Reviews : ‘Out of the Dark’ Doesn’t Stand Up to Light of Day

“Out of the Dark” (citywide) has a surface like Day-Glo on chrome, even though its heart is pure slime. It’s a tongue-in-cheek, slasher thriller about a psychotic killer in a clown outfit, slaughtering the women who work in a telephone sex service called “Suite Nothings.” It reeks of low intentions and sleazy pretensions.

Bobo, the movie’s killer, looks like a cross between Bozo the Clown and The Joker of Batman comics. Bobo slays his victims in ways that are supposed to be surprising or droll: bopping them with baseball bats, strangling them with telephone cords or prowling around with a huge, serrated knife that practically screams phallic symbol . Since the cops--including the late Divine--suspect a hunky professional photographer (Cameron Dye), we also seem to be getting another Hitchcockian “wrong man” thriller, with another couple-on-the-run.

Director Michael Schroeder and cinematographer Julio Macat are trying for some of the voluptuous, overheated stylishness of a Brian De Palma thriller. But if the film suggests De Palma, it’s a De Palma who has forgotten how to create suspense.

The movie is paralyzingly shallow; the only feeling you can detect behind it is the desire to make a movie. And though it’s trying for a certain cold, nasty, hyper-stylized chic, the lines are so dumb and the acting so mannered or vacuous that the effect is like a clammy-handed massage. Even good actors like Karen Black, Bud Cort, Tracey Walter or Geoffrey Lewis are used as if they were big plastic cutouts of themselves. It’s stultifying. Watching “Out of the Dark” is like staring at a strobe light while someone keeps screaming and dirty jokes are droned in your ear.

The acting and writing--which are, respectively, erratic and bad beyond belief--suggest a porno movie, but when Schroeder shoots a sex scene, he does it in chi-chi fragments. Virtually every sequence is borrowed from something else: “Body Double” or “Dressed to Kill,” “Stripped to Kill,” “Jagged Edge” or “Psycho.” When the film makers feel classy, they stage a scene with a faceless crowd and a street accident victim who seems lifted from Bunuel’s “Un Chien Andalou”; as a camp touch, they throw in Tab Hunter as the man driving the car. That’s what the whole movie is: clammy-handed camp. “Out of the Dark” (MPAA rated R for sex, violence and language) should probably be kept out of the light as well.