Blow Out [1981]

While recording scary nighttime noises for a cheap horror movie, sound effects ace John Travolta accidentally tapes a car plunging off a bridge, a hot news story since the drowned driver was an ambitious politician. He hauls Nancy Allen, the dead man's mistress, out of the drink and subsequently becomes convinced he has recorded a shot that reveals the incident as no accident. Naturally, a covert government creepo [John Lithgow] is on his trail, committing a string of sex murders just to create a cover story, and he has to rely on his technical skills to survive.

As if answering critics who carped that he couldn't do anything except imitate Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma here cobbled his story together from elements in Coppola's The Conversation and Antonioni's Blow-Up, tossed in Grassy Knoll and Chappaquiddick references, then added several layers of self-parody. It opens with an extract from a film called Coed Frenzy, in which a leering camera peers at a sorority houseful of naked teens before slashing into a shower, that is a virtuoso take-off of slasher mannerisms, then delivers a story in which a filmmaker working in a trivial genre decides to do something serious with his life, though his good intentions turn round and bite him in a chilling and chilly punchline.

Arriving as the careers of director and star were hitting their first serious dips, this was underrated in 1981 but now looks a fresh, unsettling, funny and pointed thriller. Good performances from an uncharacteristically solemn Travolta, a sexily vulnerable Allen and stone psycho Lithgow.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Empire

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