Sam Panico A movie about a socially awkward, totally obsessed film fan whose love of old films borders on the obsessive, with nights filled with movie after movie after movie? This one hits a little too close to home.Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, Breaking Away) works in a Los Angeles film distributor warehouse by day and watches movies by night. He' the guy I was referring to earlier - someone so into movies he gets bullied by his family and co-workers. And when he meets Marilyn O'Connor, who looks like Marilyn Monroe, he finally finds someone whose looks are similar to the movie ideal that life does not always achieve. Or maybe he's just so crazy that when he sees her, he goes into a fantasy fugue state and only sees what his brain will allow him to see.Somehow, Eric is able to ask her out, but she stands him up by accident. This makes him go completely out of his mind, transforming himself into various film icons to destroy his enemies.First, he re-enacts Kiss of Death by pushing his Aunt Stella (who is really his mother) down the steps, showing up to her funeral as Tommy Udo, the role Richard Widmark played in the film. No one gets it. No one has seen the movies that Eric loves. There is no one to discuss them with. They can't even put her grave next to Marilyn Monroe's grave in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetary.Eric then becomes Count Dracula, attending a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead. Eric then goes to Marilyn's house in a scene that's taken from Psycho. She screams, he drops his pen into the water and the ink becomes the blood. "I only wanted your autograph," he yells as he runs.Eric then goes back to find a hooker who had been rude to him. He chases her, she falls and dies, then he drinks her blood. Obviously, Eric has not seen Martin. Actually, the way this scene is intercut with scenes from old black and white horror films, I am certain that the makers of this film have seen Romero's vampire film.Now that Eric has gone this far, why not dress up as Hopalong Cassidy and kills off Richie(Mickey Rourke in an early role), a co-worker who bullies him. Oh yeah - Tim Thomerson is a criminal psychologist who is working with a policewoman (they're having sex, because 1980 and all) to find what he believes is a serial killer. The big problem is that his captain wants all the glory for himself.Eric talks to his aunt as if she were still alive, then after watching Halloween (producer Irwin Yablans also produced that film), he pleasures himself to a photo of Marilyn Monroe.Eric's dream has been to own his own movie theater and to make his own movie. He tells a sleazeball named Gary Bially his idea, Alabama and the Forty Thieves and you get the feeling not much good can come of it.Eric's boss fires him and won't allow him back into work to get his posters. As his everyday self, even when trying to talk like a movie character, Eric is impotent. But when he's dressed as The Mummy, he can frighten his boss into a heart attack.After seeing Gary Bially on a talk show, talking up the movie Eric created as his own, Eric shows up to the produer's brithday party. Dressed as James Cagney's character from White Heat, he fires a submachine gun at everyone in the room before killing the man who stole from him.The cops are on to Eric, but he's hired Marilyn for a photo shoot and is all set to re-enact The Prince and the Showgirl when Thomerson's character arrives. Eric runs to Mann's Chinese Theater and makes it to the roof before dying just like Cagney in White Heat, yelling, "Made it, ma! Top of the world!"Writer and director Vernon Zimmerman also created Unholy Rollers, but this movie is way beyond that. It shows how only seeing the world as the movies can be a danger to yourself and everyone else. Eric goes from shy and withdraw to dark and mean by the end of the movie, as he slowly becomes a new character. I wonder what he would have thought about the movie that they made his life into?

johnstonjames 'Fade to Black' may not be one of cinema's greatest films, but it is a minor masterpiece of sorts. cinema great does'nt quite hit it, but it does have the feel of a masterwork. and it is definitely some kind of epiphany and homage to cinema that reaches a strange plateau that is hard for any film to surpass or emulate.while referencing so many cinema classics from the Golden Age, and many horror films, it creates an all new cinema monster. this time the monster is the cinema fan himself. the viewer and film buff. it's about a guy who thinks, lives and breathes cinema. and combined with a disillusionment with life, it turns him into a ghoulish horror.this whole thing is sort of a 'Walter Mitty' story gone terribly wrong. it's about how our fantasies both make us, control us, and can often break us. it's this guy's fantasies that make him inspired and unique. they are also his coping mechanism to deal with a hum drum frustrating world. but when his world begins to go terribly wrong, the coping mechanism goes into overdrive and drives him into delusion and murder. you could write a text on this stuff. it's brilliant.the acting is just great by Dennis Christopher as the obsessed cinema fan turned homicidal mutant. there is also a hilarious bit role played by a fledgling Mickey Rourke as one of Christopher's unfortunate victims. and an intense performance by Eve Brent Ashe as Christopher's wheelchair bound aunt/mother. but possibly the real stunner here could be Linda kerridge, an uncanny Marilyn Monroe look alike. her performance is both haunting and truly memorable. and she looks so much like the real Marilyn M. at times, that you have to take a double take. she is especially good in the final scenes where Christopher acts out 'The Prince and the Showgirl' while feeding her Quaaludes(hey boomers, remember ludes?)and pumping her with alcohol, ending in an exciting escape to the top of the Chinese theater in Hollywood with a strange 'King Kong' type ending. crazy.Vernon Zimmerman's outstanding direction also recalls the 'B' flicks of Roger Corman and Robert Aldrich.all in all, this is an amazing and memorable cinema experience guaranteed to haunt any true cinema buff for life. if you are a real fan of cinema, and classic Hollywood, and don't mind being "punked" a little, this film is for you.

rokcomx A cinema devotee murders via movie scene recreations - rarely has Hollywood portrayed its own audience as potential serial killers who emulate what they see on screen. The surprise here is that the killer's inspiration isn't always horror movies, but rather gangster flicks and even Hopalong Cassidy westerns, genres whose inherent violence is often overlooked, or at least under acknowledged.Dennis Christopher - lauded for his geeky role in Breaking Away - found perhaps his greatest role as movie buff Eric Binford, a shy pasty-faced loner and mama's boy who works on the outskirts of the movie biz and patterns every aspect of his life after the films he adores. When bullies drive him over the edge (one played by young Mickey Rourke!), he retreats into a dream world that allows him to act out his revenge fantasies, at first seeking only to frighten.However, when his first scare tactics result in homicide (his boss has a heart attack, a bully running away from him accidentally impales himself on a fence), Binford takes it to the next lethal step --- Film buffs will love all the winking references to classic cinema, and the Marilyn Monroe look-a-like lead actress does one of the most convincing impersonations ever. The finale on the roof of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood echoes several specific movies, in particular James Cagney's White Heat (with snippets of Cagney actually edited into the action), but it manages to be unnervingly unique in its own right, mainly because we've come to sympathize and even care for Eric Binford.I eagerly await a proper DVD release of this 1980 cult classic!

a_digiacomo Why did I write that first line? Because to a small extent we all deal with anger over our lives-whether good or bad. Yeah, we deal with fear and frustration and self doubt. This film is about what happens when a tormented soul (who has no coping mechanisms and no self esteem or sense of Ego and Super Ego)goes "Id"--as Freud would have it "The Patient is in the throws of his Id, incapable of rational control of his angry behavior and his rage at being an impotent(as a functioning person, not sexually)bystander in his own life" Eric IS a bystander in his own life--which is a Twilight Zone episode gone awry. His descent into madness happened WAAAAAAAY before the film begins, and it only goes deeper into insanity as the film progresses. Tim Thomerson disappoints me in this--I loved him in just about everything he's ever done(except "The Wrong Guys")-- but here he is a disgrace to himself(he must have needed a paycheck really badly!) Mickie Rourke comes across as a preview of who he would morph into as he got older and was given more films. The plot is simple:revenge or die! The execution of the plot is flawed The finale, is ludicrous BUT the character study of Christophewr's Eric is a Freudian and Jungian DELIGHT