SPECIAL EFFECTS
Not that special

  All right, Eric Bogosian!  This guy makes even the schlockiest schlock fun - hell, Under Siege 2 is the only Steven Seagal movie I find myself in the mood for whenever anybody brings it up.  I could've sworn I saw him in a bit part in The Stuff, but I could be on crack.

This is Bogosian's first film role, as an on-the-decline director who murders a starlet on camera and decides to use a dead ringer to film a feature about the killing, even casting the dead woman's husband in the film.  Zoe Tamerlis (who died earlier this year) plays both the dead woman and the double.

Yeah, it's as tacky as it sounds.  Larry Cohen's a real hit-n-miss filmmaker; for every It's Alive, he gives us an It Lives Again.  Recent years have not been kind to him, from what I hear (I have yet to find a copy of Uncle Sam).  Here, he's pretty scattershot; it feels like he's trying to do Hitchcock by way of De Palma.

The dialogue sounds like Cohen wrote a rather mediocre script for everyone involved, but like Bogosian got to re-write all of his own lines.  ("Who are your influences as a filmmaker?" "Abraham Zapruder.")  So needless to say, Bogosian makes by a country mile the biggest impression.

Features a chick who can wiggle her ears just like I can.  Yeah, other than Bogosian, that's what made the biggest impression on me here, which is why I've got barely anything to write.

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