Fade to Black (1980)

"I'm Jarret. Cody Jarret, understand?!" snarls Dennis Christopher (Breaking Away) in his best James Cagney. OK, he's no Rich Little, but as the movie-mad social misfit Eric Binford he makes a convincing media-saturated Norman Bates, and for a while his geeky fumblings and wounded vulnerability keep the film on track. He is a gofer for a B-movie studio, constantly bullied by his tough-guy coworker Mickey Rourke and his aunt, a bitter wheelchair-bound failed starlet who blames the boy for her misfortunes and never lets him forget it. His sanity already precariously close to the edge, he flares up and becomes Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death, shoving dear auntie down the back stairs and forever losing himself in the characters of his favorite movies. It's the first of many movie-inspired murders, but the gimmick becomes repetitive and the film loses its focus in series of pre-Scream set pieces. Better is Eric's deluded romance with an Aussie Marilyn Monroe look-a-like. It's hard to understand what she sees in this jittery nerd who rattles off meaningless movie trivia like it was the meaning of life, but give Eric credit for wooing her as Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl. Tim Thomerson gets to play both tough guy and sensitive social worker as the counselor who utters the immortal line: "Binford's not to blame, he's a victim of society!" --Sean Axmaker Amazon.com

The Horror Of the Film Geek World

I am an actor who is part of the film geek world and not ashamed of it,I proudly worked on this film. I can recommend it as highly entertaining,with a kernal of truth as to what can happen to some of these film afficianados if they lose their minds
April 7, 2008

Interesting

This is a parody of slasher flicks that is also an intelligent horror movie. It shows how the line between fantasy and reality can become blurred and how that can lead to tragic results. Eric Binford was raised under rather bizarre circumstances by an old hag who is determined to make his life a living hell. He retreats to a movie based fantasy world. Combine this with the boss from Hell and a chance encounter with a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, and you have a perfect set-up for a descent into insanity. Things get so insane that by the end of the movie, your suspension of disbelief has been violated which is why this film does not merit a 5 stars out of 5 rating. February 27, 2007

Great movie way Underated..................

Really intresting and good movie, I highly recommend this movie as it is really rare........... February 6, 2007

a twisted little shocker with a sharp,quick wit made even more creepy because your watching the movie also

this is not the greatest movie,but it is fun (in a twisted way) and makes some sharp points(no pun intended) about the amount of time we spend watching movies and how the line between fantasy and the real world can blurr very quickly.
eric binford loves movies,so much so he stays up all night watchingold movies on t.v.(this was before dvds or cable). eric's parents are gone and he lives with his wheelchair bound aunt,a failed star herself,and she blames eric for her problems. eric also gets picked on by his co-workers(at a film studio)and most of the rest of the world.his only friends are the flashing lights of the t.v. and the actors in the movies he watches.something has to give,and it does,after watching "kiss of death" eric's aunt starts picking at him again and eric retreats into his film world and just like in the movie pushes his aunt down the steps.
after that eric sets out to right a lot of things that have been done to him.
from there the movie takes you along with eric as he desends into madness. for a b horror movie this has some very strong ideas about movies,t.v.,bullies,and how quickly one can slip over the edge into madness. i like this movie and if you try you may like it also. May 10, 2006

Never ever meet dead stars.

One more film, you may say, on the cinema as a perverted model for young men. It came out in 1981, at a time when the campaign against violence in films and on TV was going on full blast under the accusation that it was the teacher in violence for a vast array of violent teenagers and young men. The film though is slightly more positive than that and critical of this easy and narrow-minded position. It analyzes one concrete case and is very careful to show how the young man has become a film-addict because of the absurd family position in which he was living : raised by a crippled mother (a car accident) who refused to declare herself his mother not to break her dancing career which was broken anyway four years later by the car accident. Frustration, loss of references, destructured or unstrustured emotional landscape, and a vindictive henpecking rather bitchy mother/aunt who is also slightly perverted and requires her son/nephew to massage her back in the evening. It is the meeting of a girl looking like Marylin Monroe, her not coming to a promised rendez-vous and several ensuing mishaps that lead him into realizing a few vengeful crimes on the model of some of his favorite films and actors. It is an already sick mind that falls in the trap of imitating violence in films. In other words this violence is only active on already disturbed young males. Strangely enough, at the time, the case of women was not even considered. Since then of course many other films have been shot on the subject. This film takes advantage too of this opportunity to nail a big stake in the back of some policemen who only think that the solution is and can only be « Shoot them down and eventually bring them in, if it is not too much of an effort to do so, otherwise go back to the first instruction and shoot them down. » This attitude has widely changed and we have learned a lot that we have to be preventive, without segregating against some who could be sorted out as potential criminals, and afterwards reformative, though the persistance of the death penalty prevents that reformative stand from prevailing.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne
January 23, 2006

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