Synopsis
When they get you where they want you, they can lead you...anywhere!
A hit-man tries to seduce the mother of a child who witnessed his most recent kill.
Perfect Strangers
Cast
Anne Carlisle Brad Rijn John Woehrle Matthew Stockley Stephen Lack Ann Magnuson Zachary Hains Otto von Wernherr Kitty Summerall Steven Pudenz Bill Fagerbakke Bruce Jerreau Leo Shawah Joe Chiaramonte Conrad Bergschneider Bettina Köster Veronica Lustig Sara Carlisle Kris Roth Alexa Hunter Daniella Martin Cynthia McEwen Emily Woo Yamasaki Inansi Mike Alpert Dave Digregorio William Keenan Kevin O'Connor
Director
Producers
Writer
Editor
Cinematography
Assistant Directors
Executive Producers
Additional Photography
Set Decoration
Composer
Sound
Makeup
Studios
Country
Language
Alternative Titles
Blind Alley, L'impasse Sanglante, غریبههای تمام عیار, کوچه بنبست, Sin salida, 完美的陌生人, Ślepa Uliczka, Inocência Fatal
Releases by Date
Theatrical
-
UK18
13 Sep 1984
-
AustraliaR 18+
16 Nov 1984
-
USAR
24 Nov 1984
-
Japan
Releases by Country
Australia
13 Sep 1984
- TheatricalR 18+
Japan
24 Nov 1984
- Theatrical
UK
13 Jul 1984
- Theatrical18
USA
16 Nov 1984
- TheatricalR
Popular reviews
More-
![nathaxnne [hiatus <3]](https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/avatar/upload/1/9/5/2/4/3/shard/avtr-0-80-0-80-crop.jpg?v=2d9f35eba8)
If there was going to be a movie called Switchblade Romance in 1984 it would have been this one. Set within queer/feminist bohemian enclave of mid-80's NYC where everyone is an artist, whether scraping together to get by or descending to the streets from luxury apartments paid for by blood money, Perfect Strangers is a leather-jacketed suicide mission, a meet-cute crime scene. Every man is lethal, if not by birth then by the breaking that follows, dangerous to themselves and others, intentionally or otherwise. What to do with men? If we cannot make them safe from the world can we make the world safe from them? How do we negotiate our positions in regard to men? Do we let them…
-
When someone as curious as Larry Cohen without great computer effects could write a script and have an action and suspense movie worthy of having a good time and where there were good actors who without ever being well known did their job much better than the current ones with so much hype you realize that talent in the industry exists only that it is undervalued.
This plot is very pedestrian yet boring but very elaborate: a hitman has to kill a two-year-old boy because the mafia that has hired him fears that when the child can talk he will end up giving him away. Based on this premise, Cohen does everything he can with it, taking all his fun…
-
What's amazing about this film, besides being made on an incredibly small budget, is its ability to bottle eighties New York in the same self-reflective bitterness of pulpy forties. Working folks who are now looking for love, feminist Karens and single moms, or dads trying to see their kids. Nobody gets what they want and everyone gets what is coming for them. Crime and violence affects everyone here, that line of moral ambiguity heightening your sense of unease. I also really love how much it surprised me in taking the narrative from the adults to that of a child, a cityscape Night of the Hunter. Larry Cohen doesn't force political and sociological themes in flag waving dialogue, but let's the…
-
Cohen's made an unsurprisingly strange little drama out of his initial premise -- more of a doomed romance than a thriller -- and peppered it with characteristically amazing location photography and enough bonus atmospheric material to maybe count as some subtext, but that can't change the fact that the characters are complete aliens who seem to exhibit no recognizable human or even logical behavior and materially nothing happens between the first and last 5 minutes.
-
Larry Cohen shot this and Special Effects back-to-back, using young, hungry, and presumably non-union talent from the Lower Manhattan art scene. This typically high-concept effort, which appears to be the cheaper of the two films, stars Anne Carlisle (Liquid Sky) as a single mother whose mute toddler son witnesses a stabbing by young punk Brad Rijn (Smithereens). When his underworld boss tells him he needs to take care of the one witness, he seduces the mother.
Cohen, one of the great New York filmmakers, shoots a lot of this guerilla-style as usual. There's a scene at a Women Against Pornography rally that he clearly crashed, and a domestic dispute between Carlisle and her ex-husband that unfolds on a busy street…
-
Larry's feminist picture, and as always with a Cohen script, it's filled with obvious disdain for sexists, homophobes, and all manner of bigots. Of course, being a Cohen script, these ideas are handled with the grace and tact of a street fair merry-go-round barreling down a heavily-trafficked street- I'm reminded of the unproduced script of his I read that included several attached letters from members of the LGBT community assuring him that no, his script was not "offensive", just painfully straight. Perfect Strangers is clearly the work of an extremely well meaning ally, and not everything fits- a scene introducing a minor character as the only gay cop on the force seems to only exist as an excuse to show…
-
A young kid witnesses a hitman commit a murder, and the hitman decides to seduce the kid's mother to get close to the kid, and maybe, even kill him if need be.
This proto-THE STEPFATHER thriller from Writer/Director Larry Cohen is a great example of Cohen's skills as a blue-collar Hitchcock. He shoots in his usual guerilla-style on the streets of New York, with a cast of underground actors, and he also constructs suspense set-pieces like nobody's business: There's a swing ride that may end on spikes, a deadly game of peek-a-boo and even a goofy "People in the room don't know there's someone else" sequence mined for great thrills. The immediacy of the filmmaking may reveal the threads, which…
-
A hitman does a hit, but a 2-year-old witnesses the crime, so he does what any hitman in his situation would do: seduce the 2-year-old's mother. He has his reasons. His boss told him that that damn 2-year-old will end up blabbing and ruin their entire operation! Some psychologist or something will get him to talk years later.
I do have to mention one of the most 80s lines of dialogue you could imagine. It's also offensive. After the hitman runs into the 2-year-old riding his trike, he asks him if he'd remember him if he saw him again. The kid, overdubbed, says to him, "I'm not stupid. Do I look retarded?"
I did not imagine the…
-
Leave it to Larry Cohen to make a film about a hitman working on killing a baby.
Grimy 80s NYC. Mob caricatures. Gratuitous nudity. Baby's Day Out by way of B-grade genre cinema.
-
On a visual level, Cohen’s films are always alive with a centrifugal near-chaos. By combining multiple points of view, he denies the viewer a single character to identify with. Cohen’s scenes, built up from combinations of hand-held with tripod-filmed images, and static shots with moving shots, are alive with multiple tensions and conflicting perspectives. We see things from all sides, and we are encouraged to think and compare without being led toward any easy conclusions. - Fred Camper, Reel Life: the low-budget genius of American film
-
Larry Cohen sometimes reminds me of a clever science-fiction writer who dreams up a crazy premise and then explores every possible avenue of it. Here it's, "what if a hitman had to kill an innocent baby because his mob bosses were worried he could identify him after a hit," and Cohen draws fleeting parallels to stuff like abortion and wartime bombings. It's not as beautifully realized as Cohen's best high-concept stuff, maybe because Brad Rijn's hitman never really seems like the kind of guy who could kill a kid, and some of the supporting cast give surprisingly clumsy performances, albeit amusingly so.
Tempted to bump this up half a star just for the Argento-aping shot towards the end of a character falling down and another character appearing behind (trying to avoid spoilers here, but trust me it's great).
-
might work better in hindsight as the alarming ease of access everyone had to each other’s lives back in this pre-90s/2000s vacuum of space where a man could kill in broad daylight and slither in the lives of a child who bore witness and the mother in a malevolent seduction that’s bound to crumble. like a leather-clad, no-exit meet-cute force-grown out of blood—a romance born to die and crammed into a locational crime-thriller that runs black before it bleeds any sort of profound red, partly due to a great narrative expression, and an estranging stumbling of performances that feel unusually out of place for something that isn’t meant to bare any flimsy/campy undertones. still, no less unsettling and subtly disturbing on the lengths corruption will crawl to simultaneously infest and erase.