Shot in September 1986, though not released on video until very late in 1987, If Looks Could Kill is the earliest of porn director Chuck Vincent’s low rent psycho-thrillers. He followed it up with titles like Thrilled to Death (1988), Enrapture (1989) and Bad Blood (1989), all starring adult performers trying and mostly failing to break out into the mainstream. If Looks Could Kill dutifully offers roles to his porn compatriots though this one isn’t a patch on the later and interestingly surreal Deranged (1987), equally packed with familiar faces from the XXX aisle, including prolific performer and director Veronica Hart who pops up in both films under her occasional pseudonym Jane Hamilton.
The UK video sleeve of If Looks Could Kill hopefully invokes Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and even, cheekily, Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) which hadn’t even been made when Vincent shot his film. Don’t believe a word of it – this feeble erotic thriller is notable only for anticipating the glut of such efforts made in the wake of the criminally over rated Basic Instinct (1992). Doubtless Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) would have cropped up somewhere had the publicists thought of it and given how much of that film’s plot is shamelessly lifted here it’s surprising that they didn’t.
George Ringer (Tim Gail, who made one more film, Prime Evil (1988) before disappearing from sight) is a video cameraman, hired by a seedy middle man (porn legend Jamie Gillis, surprisingly rather good) to tape the activities of a young woman whose husband suspects her of being rather less than faithful. She is, in fact, a high class prostitute and George finds himself being dragged deeper and deeper into a sordid but frankly not that interesting blackmail and murder plot.
Resolutely downbeat and hidebound by its own meager budget, If Looks Could Kill is a tawdry attempt to belatedly cash in on De Palma’s far superior Body Double. Vincent even re-stages the lengthy sequence in which the hero pursues the woman he has been duped into spying on, which De Palma, of course, ‘borrowed’ from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). It lacks even the admittedly meagre psychological complexities of its template and Vincent is quite incapable of capturing the grubbily sensuous atmosphere that pervaded De Palma’s film. Instead, we get dull softcore filmed with all the technical ineptitude of Vincent’s hardcore efforts and a plot so slight that it needs substantial padding with inconsequential detail to bring it up to even a feeble 87 minutes.
Not content with taking Body Double for a swift re-run, Vincent also invokes David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) (the hero witnesses strange sexual practices from the sanctuary of a closet) and, sure enough, Hitchcock’s Rear Window. There is some effective use of some particularly unpleasant and very grimy New York locations, and Vincent’s sly sense of humour and feel for the absurd is evident in some of the ridiculous sexual plays acted out in the hooker’s apartment, but overall, the films is just a tired collection of second hand set pieces decorating a hand-me-down narrative. As if to disguise this fact, Vincent and his regular co-writer Craig Horrall go to great lengths to tie their slender plot into as many knots as possible, presumably in the mistaken belief that complexity equals significance. In this instance, it equals only boredom and confusion.
There was some doubt as to whether If Looks Could Kill really belonged here at all. Nova’s UK video release featured a sleeve that made it look much more like a full blown horror than it really is. Eventually, because of its unashamed borrowing from films already fully deserving of their place in EOFFTV, it just about makes the grade. It remains, however, very much a borderline entry.
The EOFFTV Review 