Raspberry Picking: Color of Night (1994)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Color of Night, winner of the 1995 Razzie Award for Worst Picture and – for the first and (so far) last time – no other Razzies, despite eight nominations.

The Razzies measure a film’s notoriety far more effectively than they measure a film’s ineptitude. One of the most persistent criticisms of the “awards” through the decades has been their reliance on reputation, though I would argue that’s a feature and not a bug for a companion-slash-parody of the Academy Awards themselves. Usually, the source of that notoriety is obvious from a quick glance at the cast list or production team. But when the Razzies come for a movie that looks on its face like it should be respectable – see Inchon, for example – there’s something else weird going on. 

This is absolutely the case for Color of Night, directed by Oscar nominee Richard Rush and starring the very bankable Bruce Willis and the up-and-coming beauty Jane March as the central couple. If it had only been following the rules when it was released in August of 1994, it would have been a moderate box office success and a popular date night movie for a few months. Instead, it ran straight into a torrent of invective from critics and audiences alike, and barely made back half its $40 million budget in theaters.

So what went wrong? Well, for starters, the producer and the director pretty much went to war over the movie. Color of Night was produced by Cinergi Pictures, helmed by one Andrew G. Vajna. It was to be Richard Rush’s first time in the director’s chair since 1980, when he received an Oscar nomination for the critically acclaimed action-comedy The Stunt Man (1980). Working with the director of The Stunt Man made Vajna a little nervous. The film had been nominated for three Academy Awards and had turned a substantial profit ($7M on a $3.5M budget), but it was also quite dense and artsy for its nominal genre and had only received a very limited release. For his film, Vajna wanted an accessible Hitchcockian suspense thriller guaranteed to make bank.

So when Rush turned in his 139-minute final cut of Color of Night in November 1993, Vajna didn’t care for it. He thought it was overlong and pretentious, with too much nudity and sex for a wide release, and demanded a recut, which Rush refused. So Vajna cut his own version of the film. Both Rush and Vajna screened their cuts for test audiences, and each publicly claimed that his version had scored higher (more secondary sources backed Rush’s claim). In April 1994, Vajna decided unilaterally that he would release his cut and fired Rush. The Director’s Guild of America got involved. The stress from fighting over the film put Rush in the hospital with a heart attack.

Following Rush’s heart attack, Rush and Vajna declared an uneasy truce and reached a compromise: Vajna’s version would go to theaters, but Rush’s director’s cut would get the video release. It didn’t look like it at first, but this turned out to be a total victory for Rush. While the theatrical cut flopped about like a beached fish, the home video release became one of the top rentals of 1995. To the extent that common wisdom exists about Color of Night at all, the common wisdom is clear: don’t watch any version of the film less than 139 minutes long.

One of my rules for Raspberry Picking is that the films I cover here cannot have already undergone a major critical reappraisal. Color of Night sort of breaks that rule. The director’s cut has received favorable treatment, benefitting from comparisons to its theatrical predecessor. Reviewers praised the reinstatement of Rush’s trademark understated comedy plus more and better sex scenes. However, it’s the theatrical cut that got beaten to a pulp in reviews and that racked up eight Razzie nominations. So I dutifully watched the theatrical cut. I steeled myself for the bizarre and incoherent fever dream to come.

And now I feel cheated, because Color of Night is good. Unironically so. Yes, even the despised theatrical cut. 

THE STORY

I am making a small change to the Raspberry Picking format from here forward: the story gets its own section. I had been lumping it in with the Bad section, but that doesn’t work when the story is not Bad, and the story of Color of Night (by Matthew Chapman and Billy Ray) is not bad. It’s amazingly misguided, yes, but that’s not the same as being bad.

Dr. Bill Capa (Willis), the second-worst practicing psychologist in the world, decides to take a break from his practice and a vacation to Los Angeles after one of his patients (Kathleen Wilhoite) flings herself through a window during one of their therapy sessions. The sight of the patient lying in a pool of her own blood has caused Capa to develop psychosomatic color blindness, and he has lot the ability to see red. As Capa’s own therapist (Jeff Corey) says in one of my early favorite lines, “denial of red is denial of emotion,” and the deathly serious expression Corey wears when he delivers this line sets the tone nicely for what is to come.

Anyway, Capa is off to Los Angeles to visit his college buddy, fellow psychologist Bob Moore (Scott Bakula), and Capa is only the second-worst practicing psychologist in the world because the top spot is occupied by Moore, to whom “doctor-patient confidentiality” is a foreign concept. Moore invites Capa to sit in on and meet the patients in his Monday night therapy group, which contains five people so incompatible that they shouldn’t even occupy the same landmass, let alone the same therapy group. These people include Buck (Lance Henriksen), an ex-cop driven to the brink of suicide by the murder of his wife and daughter; Sondra (Lesley Ann Warren), a nympho-klepto-maniac; Casey (Kevin J. O’Connor), an antisocial painter with sadomasochistic tendencies; Clark (Brad Dourif), a lawyer with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder who counts everything he sees; and Richie, a troubled teenager with a mid-90s version of gender dysphoria. I can’t tell you who plays Richie, because that would spoil The Twist. It’s more fun to go into Color of Night not knowing The Twist. The Twist is blindingly obvious, but when Capa discovers it forty-five minutes after you do, the look on Bruce Willis’s face might make you laugh even though you are also watching someone be tortured with a nail gun.

Ah, but before we get to The Twist, we must contend with murder most foul. Moore confides in Capa that he brought Capa to observe the group because he thinks one of them is trying to kill him, and wants Capa’s help in figuring out who. And sure enough, someone does indeed murder Moore. They do so in a bloody and elaborately staged kill scene, one of two that would make an ‘80s slasher proud.

Following Moore’s murder, Capa decides to assist both the police and the group by taking over its leadership, hoping to discover by learning more about them who might have killed Moore. But in the meantime, Capa has a chance meeting with a beautiful and mysterious young woman named Rose (March). Rose periodically wanders into Capa’s house (well, Moore’s house, actually), has wild and passionate sex with Capa, and then wanders out with barely a glance backward. No, she doesn’t seem important to the actual plot, does she? Don’t you worry about that one little bit.

THE BAD

So the movie’s a bit of a mess. Okay, it’s a lot of a mess.

First, if you go into Color of Night expecting a sensitive, well-informed portrait of struggles with mental illness, the first question you should ask yourself is what on earth you are thinking. This is obviously not that kind of movie. Moore’s/Capa’s patients are presented at best as objects of tawdry fascination, and at worst as dangerously unhinged sticks of human dynamite. Best to simply accept that and move along.

In the realm of “unquestionably bad,” the construction of the theatrical cut is an epic disaster. No doubt this was the effect of Vajna’s less-than-judicious edits to Rush’s cut, and it shows. Scenes literally interrupt each other. In one transition, Capa goes straight from fiery pool sex with Rose to walking nonchalantly into the dead Moore’s office with his patients in what feels like negative time. Other scenes appear to have wandered in from other films, such as a lengthy, pointless, and slightly homoerotic interlude in which Capa and Moore have a bike race.

On another occasion, Capa shows up at the house of somebody named “Mrs. Niedelmyer.” Who Mrs. Niedelmyer is, why Capa needs to talk to her, and why she lives in a house decorated with unnerving cement human faces that the camera keeps zooming in on are left entirely unexplained. We learn from their conversation that Mrs. Niedelmyer’s late husband was treating Moore’s/Capa’s patient Richie and that something highly unprofessional happened between them, but how the hell Capa knew this is anybody’s guess. That’s how the sequence of events works in Color of Night: like drops of paint flung around a canvas by a drunk man trying to imitate Jackson Pollock.

The performances of the two leads aren’t disasters, but they’re not helping the film’s case either. I’ve never been much of a Bruce Willis fan, but at his best, his innate groundedness can provide an anchor for an ambitious action or fantasy setpiece. Here, he achieves some of that, but much of the time he looks a bit lost, as though he thinks he might have arrived at the wrong film set. March, meanwhile, is a young and inexperienced actress (20 at the time of filming) performing a role that requires her to do nonsensical things every time she appears onscreen. Her sweet-lost-lamb take on the role makes her appear uncomfortably young next to her co-stars. Since I watched the theatrical cut, I have not seen the legendary version of the pool sex scene, but if I were Andrew Vajna, I think I’d have made the same decision he did.

A number of things also happen that I do not want to call “bad,” because I am pleased that they happen in Color of Night, but I don’t think I can quite describe them as “good” either. So before we get to the non-ironic stuff, let me just tell you about how a rattlesnake jumps out of the mailbox at Bruce Willis.

THE GOOD

So Color of Night is a deeply, deeply confused film. It’s being pulled in several different directions and it doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. But something remarkable happens: the confusion works to the film’s advantage. Every individual thing that happens makes you wonder whether these people can possibly be serious, and the answer might change depending on which direction you’re looking. The result is a masterclass in how to make a movie fun to watch.

Take, for example, the production design. If we needed a cue that Color of Night does not take place in a completely realistic world, we only need look at the interiors. Capa’s first patient’s apartment, Moore’s house, Casey’s studio, the warehouse where Richie’s brother Dale (Andrew Lowery) works as a carpenter (or perhaps a welder?), and even the restaurant where Capa and Rose go on their first date are all elaborately decorated with mirrors and tchotchkes that give them the feeling of a combination haunted house and antique shop. If you, like me, get slightly creeped out by antique shops, you will find this an effective technique for keeping you on edge. Rush uses the interplay of light and shadow to give characters an otherworldly aura as they move through it, at a few points making Jane March and Scott Bakula look straight-up like ghosts.

The exteriors, meanwhile, on which Rush has focused several lingering shots, are begging to be interpreted in the most Freudian way possible.

We could make fun of this, but honestly, it’s cool. Cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann frames these buildings in a way that makes them feel like they’re alive and watching you. It’s a perfect fit for an atmosphere in which everyone’s sanity is under question.

Outside of Willis and March, the cast is superb. They are split on whether or not they are here to make a serious motion picture, but damn if they are not all extremely committed. The top award for understanding the assignment goes to Ruben Blades as Lt. Hector Martinez, the detective in charge of investigating Dr. Moore’s murder. Martinez does very little investigating onscreen; his two main jobs are to point out things that the audience has already noticed (like that Moore’s Monday night group sure are a bunch of weirdos) and castigate Capa for being a moron. Blades accomplishes both of these jobs with flair, playing Martinez as a slimy, bug-eyed snake of a cop, aware of and untroubled by the role he plays, and he gets big laughs in a movie that does not go out of its way to make viewers laugh.

The group therapy scenes, meanwhile, function best as excuses for Dourif, Henriksen, O’Connor, and Warren (but especially Dourif and Warren) to gobble down the scenery like starving people at a buffet. Watching them do so is a major highlight, if not the highlight of the movie. Dourif’s Clark is a twitchy nervous wreck who walks around vibrating like a tuning fork and eNUNciating EVery WORD with SPIttle-flecked ANGGGGer. Warren slinks and slithers around him, mugging for the camera and clearly loving every second of it.

Unlike Dourif, who will never get to play a stable, well-adjusted character, Henriksen and Warren are both playing against type. Henriksen, known for playing aliens and bad guys, here gets to play with outright tragedy. The scene in which Capa talks him down from suicide provides Color of Night’s one moment of real unadulterated compassion for its characters, and despite not fitting in with most of the rest of the film tonally, it’s one of the better scenes and lets both Willis and Henriksen shine.

Speaking of shiny things, there is also a car chase – nay, two car chases – that must be seen to be believed, as they defy the physics and logic of our and all other possible universes. By that point, I simply do not care about such pedestrian matters as “logic.” I’m just going to watch Bruce Willis use a car to push another car onto railroad tracks in the path of a moving train, because why on earth wouldn’t I.

I have gone long, but by golly, there was a lot here that warranted discussion. It’s possible that my standards were shot to hell by Ghosts Can’t Do It last month, but I kind of loved Color of Night. Two or three unique and incompatible artistic visions somehow combined into this piece of beautifully stylish, exploitative schlock that is also higher than a kite on its own unearned sense of gravitas. What a lesser film it would have been, and what a lesser world we would live in, if any one of these people hadn’t taken their job so seriously. This is trash cinema at its finest, made by talented and hardworking people who don’t consider it beneath them. If brutal battles of ego lead us here, gimme more.

QUALITY OF MOVIE:  3½ / 5. There’s real craft on display here.  Don’t be such a jerk, Razzies.

QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE: 4½ / 5. The best “fun I had” to “fun I expected to have” ratio I’ve experienced since the first Transformers.

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!