Crime Wave (1985)

 

Director: John Paizs

Screenplay: John Paizs

Cast: Eva Kovacs as Kim Brown; John Paizs as Steven Penny; Darrell Baran as Ronnie Boyles; Jeffrey Owen Madden as Skip Holliday; Tea Andrea Tanner as Dawn Holliday; Mark Yuill as Stanley Falco; Neil Lawrie as Dr. C. Jolly (as Neal Lawrie); Bob Cloutier as Mr. Brown; Donna Fullingham as Mrs. Brown

An Abstract List Candidate

 

I'd say the guitar stays behind until you're unbroke.

Not to be confused with Crime Wave (1985), Sam Raimi's follow-up to The Evil Dead (1981), written with the Coen Brothers, the Crime Wave I am talking about is an obscure Canadian film and a curious one at that, shot in "Total Colour" and produced with "Select-O-Sound", one which went out of its way to replicate a time that never existed by even having a score, by Randolph Peters, evoking old educational films.

In this world, a family has let out a room upstairs to Stephen Penny (director-producer-writer John Paizs in a mostly mute role), an aspiring writer who wishes to create the greatest "colour crime film", and working at night by street light when he types. Living over the garage, the young daughter Kim Brown (Eva Kovacs) develops a bond with him, wishing to help Stephen overcome his writer's block. She even gets (as we the viewers do) a demonstration of optical illusions all within a story, which she narrates, of Stephen being unable to overcome his ability to create a script and the frustrations surrounding this.

A significant section of the narrative, with Stephen able to write beginning and ending but struggling with the middles of narratives, is the story of Crime Wave, Stephen's goal of a tale, in its various forms. Of vying tribute musicians - Buddy Holly, Hank Williams and Sid Vicious - with an Elvis impersonator named Ronny Boyles getting involved, one of the many stories written and unfinished by Stephen who ends it with the Tribute King dying by crashing face first into a telephone pole in a car wreck, the pole (including the face imprint left) becoming a tourist attraction.  Or the Always Diamond couples and beauty goods distribution wars, with a couple who steals from homes and even murder when need to, leading to a wheelchair bond woman's mouth being blocked with dog biscuits, or a self-help book guru who has a mental breakdown and bashes his head on the kitchen floor to die. All the unfinished scripts we see, pastiches of real crime films, with real old posters on Stephen's walls like Teen-Age Crime Wave (1955) and The Sellout (1952) with Walter Pidgeon, are funny in their weirdness. We even get the fragments, as Stephen cannot write middles and leaves the attempts in the trash for Kim to collect, from an abrupt cancer subplot, hidden bondage roleplay, or the unfortunate death of a child's pet when it went under the lawnmower.

It seems a crass thing to say, but this is a very Canadian film, at least in the sense Canadian films, when they are eccentric and allowed to be weird, are their own unique type of weird cinema, an eccentricity with quaintness where trivial things are magnified in their oddness, like a character having car counting at night as a professional part time job. This is however contrasted by a perversity; the calm and politeness of Canadian culture they are stereotyped is subverted in the likes of Guy Maddin's films as they are here, with moments of abrupt gore, and very explicit referrals to sexuality. Sex is just nearby, be it nudity or secret kinks, and even with the daughter at one point, a young teenager leading to raised eyebrows, offering Stephen to overhear her parents having sex at night to pass the time.

A lot exists on the fringes of Crime Wave, its gee-whiz mentality contrasted by so much, set in a timeless yet contemporary, which belies a more sinister edge. Of fringe groups of a more positive light too, but still ostracised, such as a group of men hanging outside in the day in the streets who are possibly gay cruisers, only to be target of homophobic half-ton truck drivers, or overtly bleak such as the fact that the final act is caused due to the town of Sails, Kansa being closed and abandoned due to a radiation accident or some "secret stuff" that means any left pets have to be shot immediately. Some of the jokes may be too dark for some viewers - in one case, an imaginary film called "The Last White Man in South Africa", an action story only seen in a poster and one scene of a Rambo figure, has not aged at all unless you call it a really bleak joke in mind to where Apartheid was at this period - but the tone in itself, strangely humble in spite of what is not hidden at all, helps considerably for impact.

The twisted nature (and weirdness) of Crime Wave comes to a head when, to help Stephen, Kim sends a letter to Dr. Jolly the screenwriting expert. Unfortunately Dr. Jolly (Neil Lawrie), who looks like a gaunt Joe Bob Briggs, the cult film and exploitation movie expert known for his Southern redneck persona, has also gone mad, trussing men up on beds and riding them in a cowboy hat, hiding the bodies after death in the boot of his car to dispose of. Crime Wave itself, to pastiche old genre films, is structured as one only in a very bizarre form, where Stephen's inspiration (by way of a street lamp over the head) is to turn on himself, and the genre tropes when they do appear are subverted, when a conflict is resolved by a car driven (or hurtled along) by a dog behind the steering wheel abruptly. With its incredible and distinct colour palette, looking of even the forties, and a whimsical tone based on old idiosyncratic influences, by way of Canadian educational films, this was a pleasant surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Perverse/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None