Spike Lee's Summer of Sam is about the long-forgotten Son of Sam murders in the frying New York summer of 1977: a serial killer before serial killers were invented, whose modus operandi of shooting brunettes and their dates seems quaintly reticent in these days of elaborate mutilation.
Son of Sam has triggered a spasm of paranoia in the Italian-American neighbourhood the killer prowls. Vinny (John Leguizamo) is a creepy, almost vampiric hairdresser cheating on his beautiful wife, Dionna (Mira Sorvino). Vinny is obsessed with the fact that the Son of Sam has seen him having sex with Dionna's cousin in his car, and now he's coming to get him. Meanwhile, his buddies suspect Ritchie (Adrien Brody), who is freaking them out by turning into a punk, complete with absurd British accent.
Lee's take on the Son of Sam phenomenon is a variant on the apocryphal New York lady who, on hearing that JFK's killer had been captured, said: "Thank God this Lee Harvey Oswald is not a Jew." The giant murder rate among blacks in Harlem is yawned over by police and media alike, but a white freak taking out whites, and writing creepy letters to Jimmy Breslin about it? That's nooz.
So, having established his perspective of irony and periphery - Lee giving himself in this regard a jokey cameo as an Uncle Tom-ish TV reporter - there is not much for him to do but step out of the circle and present a Scorsese-pastiche: a supporting cast of bickering Italians familiar from TV's The Sopranos, low-slung cars, and people's brains going splat! against the windshield to a deafening soundtrack of pop and rock standards.
This, and the weird hyper-real bulletins from Son of Sam, are enjoyably done and, however derivative, Summer of Sam has plenty of chutzpah and raunch. But the "Son of Sam" motif offers no very deep insights into the protagonists' minds, nor into the politics of race and crime.