Color of Night * (1994, Bruce Willis, Jane March, Rubén Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Scott Bakula, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, Kevin J O’Connor) – Classic Movie Review 7854

Director Richard Rush’s 1994 Color of Night is a shameful, atrocious, way-over-the-top farrago of an erotic mystery thriller, with Bruce Willis embarrassing himself as a troubled psychiatrist hounded by death threats and sexy young Rose (played by Jane Marsh, aka ‘the sinner from Pinner’) after he takes over the LA therapy group of his murdered co-worker friend.

Color of Night won the 1995 Razzie Award for Worst Picture (Buzz Feitshans, David Matalon). It was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Song – Motion Picture: ‘The Color of the Night’ by Jud Friedman, Lauren Christy and Dominic Frontiere.

As the colour-blind psychiatrist Bill Capa, Willis throws himself body and soul into the proceedings, in which Capa begins having intense sexual encounters with the mysterious nymphomania Rose and he realises that he is being stalked by an unknown killer. The plot just gets sillier and sillier as the film goes along and the characters do more and more preposterous things. It is hard to even care who the killer is. It also stars Rubén Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Scott Bakula, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen, and Kevin J O’Connor, so there would have been plenty of high-class acting talent to call on had Billy Ray’s story and screenplay been any good at all.

There is plenty of swearing and violence, plus full-frontal nudity and simulated sex, so you have been warned. It runs an interminable 125 minutes but the Director’s Cut runs 140 minutes. Talking about color of night, on the plus side is Dietrich Lohmann’s noir-style Technicolor cinematography.

At the Cannes Film Festival, Willis walked out of the press conference after his second question from a journalist who asked him why he appeared in ‘such a shit film’. It was probably a mistake to screen it at the Cannes Film Festival.

Though it followed in the wake of the hit Basic Instinct in an early Nineties short period of a vogue for erotic mystery thrillers, the public largely stayed away. It cost $40 million and grossed $19,721,000 in the US.

Also in the cast are Andrew Lowery, Eriq La Salle, Jeff Corey, Kathleen Wilhoite, Shirley Knight, John Bower, Avi Korein, Steven R Barnett and Roberta Storm.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7854

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