Color of Night

ust when you thought they'd never make a mystery thriller as deliriously bad as Midnight Lace, just when you imagined that the gold lame spirit of Douglas Sirk had departed forever, comes director Richard Rush's COLOR OF NIGHT to brighten up your dull evenings. Color of Night isn't just bad: it's bad with raisins in it.

If you were one of the few who saw Color of Night in a theater, you probably remember the plot, but for those millions and millions who missed this gem, let's recap.

Bruce Willis stars as a psychologist. (Are you laughing too hard or can we go on now?) Willis is having a crisis of conscience/ confidence because one of his patients leaped out of a window after applying lots of lipstick. (We all know, don't we, that applying lots of lipstick is a sure sign of suicidal depression?) Anyway, Willis goes out to L.A. to visit fellow shrink Scott Bakula, who takes Willis to his group therapy session so that the fun can start in earnest. Remember "The Bob Newhart Show" from the '70's? His group therapy meetings weren't nearly as funny as these: we have a nympho, an obsessive-compulsive, a split personality, the Professor and Mary Ann -- well, you get the idea. Bakula gets killed in a scene that looks like Psycho directed by Mack Sennett. The sad part is that Bakula is the most talented and attractive member of the whole goddamn cast and 30 minutes into the picture he's been bumped off.

Willis stays on in Bakula's grandiosely modern home (crammed with screamingly bad art) despite the fact that someone keeps stalking him and leaving snakes in the mailbox. (Are hotels in L.A. that expensive?) It's like the TV movie where that devil doll keeps chasing Karen Black around her apartment going, "Yanni yanni yanni," and it never occurs to her to just leave.Instead of ruining the horribly implausible and helter-skelter plot for you, We'll just point out some of the more outrageous lapses of sanity: a) Willis's patient jumps out of a Manhattan office tower,...

Rare is the movie that benefits from addition. Color of Night is almost but not quite the exception that proves the rule. According to TV Tropes, “The director’s cut [which runs 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release] restored … much of the film’s humor.” Not nearly enough of it, though; if the movie had truly embraced its comedic potential, it could have been the Naked Gun of erotic thrillers.

Less than three minutes after he has been accused of being figuratively colorblind, psychologist Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) goes literally colorblind. To call this foreshadowing is an insult to prefixes. Bill loses the ability to see the color red when one of his patients defenestrates herself (the dummy that takes the fall is so stiff it looks like it might start gliding away at any second).

When the woman crash-lands on the street, we are treated to a shot of her bleeding face — from below; it’s sort of like the Sunset Boulevard pool shot only instead of looking through water, we are somehow looking through pavement.

A distraught Bill goes to visit his colleague and best friend Bob Moore (Scott Bakula) in Los Angeles. Bob invites Bill to sit in on a group therapy session, where one of the patients notices with amusement that Bill is wearing one red sock and one green sock — which of course looks only slightly more ridiculous than if either color actually matched.

Bob is soon stabbed to death in a scene that wouldn’t be entirely out of place in the first Scary Movie, and that culminates with Bob crashing through a glass door — well, he actually doesn’t so much crash through it as leans gently on it, at which point the door collapses like it was made of sugar glass as opposed to glass-glass, except for one particular shard that’s bigger and sturdier than the rest; so much so, in fact, that poor Bob can’t help impaling himself on it.

All five members of Bob’s therapy group are suspects, though sadly only two are blatant red herrings. Now, if the film had...