Brian DePalma directs John Travolta, Nancy Allen and John Lithgow in this paranoid thriller about a movie sound engineer who records an assassination à la Blow Up.

I tried to watch this twice before late night (once on Moviedrome as a kid, another time drunk) and each time never made it past the murder. I have robbed myself of a brilliantly orchestrated thriller. Like Travolta himself , it is not a lean experience. There’s a seedy subplot involving a sex killer and a lengthy flashback to a bungled sting that tells us more about the main character than it affects the already in-motion plot. The use of blinding primary colour, deep focus, jarring close ups, movies within movies (Boy Oh Boy, doesn’t the exploitation slasher flick we open up with seem innocent compared to the corrupt “reality” we end up in?) all disrupt you the viewer out of your complacency. The ending is both downbeat and a cruel punchline. Blow Out is DePalma at his most hatefully playful, like Batman’s nemesis The Joker, the violent prank he openly plays is on everyone. Genre movie making is a joke, a trick, and here’s the method, here’s the artifice, here’s the strings. Yet I the director can still hurt you when I pull them the right way. Ow!

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