Review of Blow Out (1981) by Brendan N — 14 Dec 2015

Two stars, only because getting one star requires at least some effort at comedy. This movie was a dreadful mishmash of nonsensical plot details smeared haphazardly over some clever camera shots and themes stolen from Blowup and The Conversation. In fairness to Travolta, who really isn't my favorite actor, he did the best he could with a ridiculous script. Nancy Allen's acting was so whiny and insufferable I wanted to kill her myself. The bast acting in the film goes to John Lithgow for our homicidal villain. What he obviously lacks in credibility as a badass, he makes up for with creep factor. He could have convinced me he was a serial killer, a child molester or a registered Republican. Truly frightening.

But the story. What was good wasn't original and what was original wasn't good. A gunshot takes out the front drivers' side tire of a moving car, in the dark, from a distance, (nonsense) causing the car to careen wildly into a creek (nonsense). A B-movie soundman records it all and knows from the beginning what he heard (nonsense). He dives into the creek, at night, in the dark and manages to see into the car and see what he knows is a woman and a dead man (nonsense). In the pitch-black, underwater, he saves the woman (really really unlikely). The story from there is all about him trying to get someone to believe he recorded this unlikely and silly murder plot. The villain even creeps into the police impound and successfully change the tire on the car to hide evidence of the bullet-hole (highly unlikely - both that he could do this, and if he could, why not use these amazing skills to assassinate the politician with a less convoluted, more reliable method to begin with?). The story was set in 1981. There were cassette tapes. Why did the genius soundman rely on annoying cumbersome real-to-real tape? Why didn't he transfer the taped murder to cassette and why didn't he make ten or twelve copies of it? What of the last ten minutes of the movie? The ridiculous car chase scene? Escaping from an ambulance to chase down the killer, with no police keeping an eye on the nut in the Jeep who almost killed countless bystanders? (Nonsense). How about the anti-climactic showdown on the roof? All that running and suspense trying to save the annoying chick - she dies anyway. Half of the movie was the hero's wasted effort. He kills the bad guy and somehow escapes it all unseen by cops and witnesses. After he escaped from the ambulance and cops after almost running over half of Philadelphia. (Nonsense). He lets the cops and media somehow draw the conclusion that the murdered girl killed her assailant while being murdered by him. Then the ending. The soundman hero has found the perfect movie scream his employers have been seeking as a subplot all through the movie. It's in his tape-recorded actual screams of the real girl being murdered. Very tasteful. Despite this success, the soundman can't bear to listen to the recorded screams, although he didn't balk at using them for sound effects. I wonder if Travolta can bear watching this idiotic movie. It was almost two hours of my life I'll never get back. By the time it was almost over, I was rooting for Lithgow, praying he would murder DePalma.