Before 9 ½ Weeks, before Rumblefish, heck, even before his small
role in Heaven’s Gate, the 24-year-old Mickey Rourke earned his
movie stripes as the third victim of a movie-obsessed psycho-killer in
this cult horror flick.
Eric Binford is the star of our tale, a scrawny, downtrodden nerd whose
life is a never-ending circle of abuse and scorn. This misery is heaped
upon him from all sides by his bitter wheelchair-bound mother (who has
raised him to believe she’s his Aunt Stella, loaning him money
in return for creepy incestuous “back rubs), by his hard-nosed
boss at a rundown advertising reel rental firm, and by his co-workers,
including young Mr Rourke as a muscle-bound bully who delights in picking
on feeble Eric.
Eric’s only refuge is his all-encompassing love of the movies.
His dingy bedroom is a veritable shrine to Hollywood’s Golden Age,
while he spends his evenings alone – smoking cigarettes and watching
old movies on TV or on his battered projector.
A much needed second ray of light shines into his gloomy life when he
spies an aspiring model, who not only looks just like Marilyn Monroe,
but even shares her first name. To Eric’s surprise, she not only
speaks to him, she agrees to go on a date. Utterly besotted, what remains
of Eric’s slender self esteem crumbles to dust when Marilyn forgets
to show up for dinner. He even gets the cold shoulder from a prostitute,
and when he gets home his screeching harridan of a mother/aunt smashes
his beloved projector.
Finally, and so very inevitably, Eric snaps and starts to take revenge,
drawing inspiration for his bloody retributions from the silver screen.
First to go is Aunt Stella, shoved down the stairs in her wheelchair
in a maniacal homage to the 1947 thriller Kiss of Death. Next is the
prostitute who so cruelly turned her nose up at Eric’s ten dollar
offer. He chases her through the suburbs of LA, dressed as Lugosi’s
Dracula. When she trips and crashes through a picket fence, impaling
her neck in the process, Eric calmly samples her blood before fleeing
the scene.
Eric’s revenge on poor Mickey Rourke is perhaps strangest of all.
Ambushing the swaggering thug as he wanders along a carnival boardwalk,
Eric is dressed as Hopalong Cassidy – possibly the least threatening
cowboy ever. His six-shooters, however, are very real as Rourke discovers.
He gets shot to death in an alley after enjoying only three brief scenes.
Subsequent deaths find Eric menacing his curmudgeonly boss in the guise
of Karloff’s Mummy, and blasting a sleazy movie producer who stole
his script idea dressed as a Cagney style gangster. Running concurrently
with Eric’s killing spree is an utterly unrelated and awkwardly
out of place storyline involving a hippy psychologist (played by Tim
Thomerson, see: Helen Hunt) and his affair with a young female cop. Through
methods which clearly weren’t important enough to show onscreen,
this pair discover Eric is behind the killings and track him down as
he takes Marilyn hostage and flees to Mann’s Chinese Theater.
A
stand-off ensues, culminating in Eric performing his own fatal version
of White Heat’s legendary “top of the world, ma!” finale.
Despite the over the top premise, and some gaping plotholes (how does
Eric get hold of a working tommy gun?), Fade to Black is actually an
interesting little movie. In terms of plot and structure it’s something
of a mess, but the whole thing is held together by a fantastic performance
from Dennis Christopher as the doomed Eric. Looking and sounding eerily
like a young Roddy McDowall, Christopher manages to inject genuine heart
and tragedy into Eric’s descent into murder, making him a lot closer
to the haunted pathos of Norman Bates than the remorseless killers of
the slasher genre.
Need to know: Fade to Black was produced by Irwin Yablans, who also helped
sheperd Halloween into theaters two years earlier. This, of course, explains
why there are several Halloween posters decorating Fade to Black’s
sets, and why we also hear the movie playing on Eric’s TV. Fade
to Black’s director was one Vernon Zimmerman, who started his big
screen career directing Deadhead Miles, a trucker comedy written by none
other than Terrence Malick, but his last credit was as writer on the
dreary Teen Wolf rip-off, Teen Witch.
Availability: Fade to Black has been released twice on DVD, once in a
double bill with Hell Night, though both editions are now out of print.
