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You've Got the Looker
January 12, 2007

It’s hard to believe that a decade into The DVD Age, the major studios are still trickling out titles for their digital debut. One such title happens to be one of my very favorite early Eighties guilty pleasures, Michael Crichton’s 1981 thriller Looker.

Part of the studio’s latest “DVD Decision Series” where we, the viewers, get to choose what yet-be-released titles will make their debut on disc, Looker features the undeniably disparate cast of Albert Finney, Susan Dey, James Coburn and a gaggle of the era’s sexiest Playboy Playmates (including Jeana Tomasina, Ashley Cox, Pamela Jean Bryant and the 1981 Playmate of the Year Terri Welles). The film concerns a Los Angeles plastic surgeon (Finney) whose supermodels clients start dying under mysterious circumstances. A little investigation leads him to the discovery of a high-tech research facility that uses computer-generated graphics (of supermodels, primarily!) to create brainwashing-styled commercials and political advertisements to take hold of the public’s minds! Finney’s investigation also leads him to the lovely Ms. Dey, but that’s another story…

A kind of "Videodrome Meets Nip/Tuck" mélange, writer/director Crichton’s movie brings together the culture of making oneself beautiful through plastic surgery, the then-emerging computer culture’s influence in visual media and the notion that as times goes by, the public is going to be inundated by advertising and increasingly be immersed and surrounded by visual stimuli created by computers. That is, stimulus that is prefabricated-- not generated in real time. It’s something that’s almost taken for granted now, but back in ’81, we were to more focused on our VHS players.

Crichton offers a video introduction on the Looker disc, where he agrees that the movie’s themes have “gone from a science fiction story to something that has become science fact.”

Looker ain’t a major film, but it has a chic and sleek look, some fun performances, nifty f/x and certainly toys with some provocative ideas. And then again, there are those those Playmates…

Posted by Laurence Lerman on January 12, 2007 | Comments (1)