So the Criterion Channel has this “‘70s Style Icons” collection, and it has this movie in it, and it’s described as a giallo style slasher directed by Irvin “Empire Strikes Back” Kershner, written by John “They Live” Carpenter, and starring youthful versions of Grima Wormtongue, Odo, Agent K, and Faye Dunaway. So okay, sure.

I think three things:

  1. Story-wise, it is very much a straight-up slasher whodunnit thing. The plot hook is that Faye Dunaway gets a psychic first-person view from the killer’s eyes as they’re just about to kill, so there’s this race to see if she can save the person plus also the clues of trying to figure out who the killer is. (Which I did, comfortably in advance of the big reveal.)

  2. Style-wise, holy crap are they correct to put this into the ’70s collection, because it is so extremely ‘70s — everything from the hair to the clothes to the apartments to the “vaguely post-apocalyptic New York City” thing.

  3. There’s this kinda-meta veneer of Social Meaning to it, because the main character is a photographer who photographs staged scenes of… “sexual violence” isn’t really the right word, but semi-undressed murder victims, I guess. And so various characters in the movie accuse her of promoting violence and she gives a whole speech about how she’s not and her work really opposes real-life violence, and I have to feel like maybe that’s something the people making the film were leaning into, rather than just admitting that they’re making an exploitative tits-out slasher movie.