ANGEL HEART (1987) Don't let Mickey Rourke scare you off Angel Heart, like Rosemary's Baby and The Devil's Advocate, is a movie that wants to work on two levels, depending on how early you figure out that somebody's actually Satan. Robert DeNiro here sports a mullet and actually makes it look aristocratic; it's hard to believe that anyone could take longer than his very first innuendo-heavy appearance to figure it out, but reviews from the time generally kept mum on the subject. DeNiro plays one Louis Cypher, who wants to find some unlucky bastard who welshed on a deal and owes him...something, so he hires a sleazy private eye (Mickey Rourke) to do that job. How sleazy? When he meets Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet), he makes a big deal of how pretty her name is, and when next he meets her he gets it wrong! Doesn't stop her from having sex with him though. In his search he gets mixed up with some Louisiana voodoo, Louisiana cops, Louisiana trouble. Didn't this guy see Southern Comfort? Stay the fuck out of Louisiana! Despite the Satan and voodoo angles, Angel Heart is much more noir than horror, which probably was more responsible for its box-office demise (audiences then had a tougher time getting into multi-genre movies than they do now) than the controversy over Lisa Bonet's tits. There are some bits which belie a silly sensibility (two totally shit-ass contact lens shots, a "Dental plan"/"Lisa needs braces!" moment, and Cypher is pronounced "sif-FUR" - oh, that's TERRIBLE) in this otherwise relentlessly serious movie, but for the most part director Alan Parker maintains that sober tone even as he heedlessly pours it all on so thick that in most movies you'd have to giggle. I mean, look at Satan's nails! The ending of Angel Heart seems to have been enough to send a few horror fans to mental hospitals; I can't say it had so profound an effect on me, but it is a fitting, inevitable, and uncompromising end to a movie that really could have gone to shit by chickening out in the third act. If your friends don't believe you when you tell them that Mickey Rourke was once a rightly well-regarded actor, this is the movie to show them. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE