Color of Night

4/14/2015

ust when you thought they'd never make a mystery thriller as deliriously bad as Midnight Lace, just when you imagined that the gold lame spirit of Douglas Sirk had departed forever, comes director Richard Rush's COLOR OF NIGHT to brighten up your dull evenings. Color of Night isn't just bad: it's bad with raisins in it. If you were one of the few who saw Color of Night in a theater, you probably remember the plot, but for those millions and millions who missed this gem, let's recap. Bruce Willis stars as a psychologist. (Are you laughing too hard or can we go on now?) Willis is having a crisis of conscience/ confidence because one of his patients leaped out of a window after applying lots of lipstick. (We all know, don't we, that applying lots of lipstick is a sure sign of suicida

9/5/2022

Rare is the movie that benefits from addition. Color of Night is almost but not quite the exception that proves the rule. According to TV Tropes, “The director’s cut [which runs 20 minutes longer than the theatrical release] restored … much of the film’s humor.” Not nearly enough of it, though; if the movie had truly embraced its comedic potential, it could have been the Naked Gun of erotic thrillers. Less than three minutes after he has been accused of being figuratively colorblind, psychologist Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) goes literally colorblind. To call this foreshadowing is an insult to prefixes. Bill loses the ability to see the color red when one of his patients defenestrates herself (the dummy that takes the fall is so stiff it looks like it might start gliding away at any secon