Crime Wave

1985 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A little girl becomes fascinated by a "color crime movie" maker who moves into a room above her parents' garage. She befriends him and tries to help him work through writer's block.

John Paizs has only made one other feature film--something called Top of the Food Chain that came out 14 years after this one. This quirky, slightly-surreal dark absurdist comedy shows a director with a unique voice and potential that needed to be developed.

This is an unusual little, reminiscent of a less artistic David Lynch. Not that there isn't any style with Paizs' work. But when the style is recreating the tone of 50s/60s informational filmstrips with fervent narration provided by a little girl named Eva Kovacs. If I had to name this genre, I'd call it filmstrip noir as it's got some almost cartoonish homages to noir. Steven Penny, the "color crime movie" screenwriter who I don't believe utters a single line in this story, can only write beginnings and endings to his stories. There are loads of creative ideas in this as numerous examples of these--with recurring bad actors and parallel imagery--are shown. These are humorously clever movies-within-movies that add some unpredictability to the whole thing.

A recurring image of a streetlight coming to life is beautiful, but where it winds up is even more beautiful.

McDonald's and Kodak product placement, an optical illusion that really didn't work (at least for me) despite the harmonica accompaniment, and the bouncy repeated musical theme all contribute to the weird tone. Weirdest--and maybe most Lynchian--of all is a villain who pops in the final third of the movie. He's played by Neil Lawrie. He's wacky but great, but Lawrie's unfortunately only in two other movies. One of them is a Guy Maddin movie though.