COPYCAT
A film review by Craig Good
Copyright 1995 Craig Good
I had a conversation with a sagacious friend at work last week about the current rash of serial killer movies. Naturally the subject turned to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Here we had a movie which was a critical and box office smash. As my friend Jeff noted, Hollywood loves to copy a success, but they often copy the wrong thing. Some collection of empty suits evidently thought that SILENCE succeeded because it had serial killers. They were wrong. It succeeded because it had well drawn characters who had an interesting relationship, and because the movie generated genuine tension in the audience. Enter the ironically named COPYCAT.
COPYCAT fails completely as a thriller. It did not raise my pulse once. Aside from the odd "boo!," I sat unmoved. There were a few character moments, and one good line ("Helen! I seem to have cured your agoraphobia!"). And I'll admit that there wasn't much that I actively disliked about the film. But neither did it do much to win me over. All in all it played about like an old "NBC Mystery Movie" except with blood, profanity and naked corpses. (I may be doing injustice to the old TV show. Most episodes of "Columbo" were much more satisfying.)
The only real surprise in the film was the way one character was killed off. The surprise came entirely from the staging and from the fact that it was completely pointless. He wasn't even killed by the serial killer, but rather by some random tertiary character introduced out of nowhere to play just this one scene. I rather suspect that the screenwriter just didn't want to have to deal with him at the end of the movie. Or maybe it was just another in a succession of cheap thrills.
I, for one, am looking forward to the end of the current fad of cinema sadism. While we wait for the boardroom brain trust in Hollywood to start copying the wrong thing from some other hit movie, we can at least cast a tiny vote for originality by spending our $7.00 on something other than COPYCAT.
-- Craig good@pixar.com Amore, Mangiare, Famiglia, Pace.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews