Rewatch/Rewind: Angel Heart

it (Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.) 

At the risk of sounding like a prude (which I now am, after being subjected to excerpts of Olivia Nuzzi's book about her sexting affair with human catcher's mitt Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), I remain boggled at how much graphic sex is on TV today. It doesn't offend me, except when it's used as a lazy shortcut to depict the "darkness" inside a character, but I'm fascinated by it. I grew up in the 80s, when HBO would only run rated R movies after 9 p.m., and no one on network television uttered the word "ass," let alone showed one. You kids today, you'll never experience a version of The Exorcist in which Regan tells Father Karras that his mother sews socks that smell.

One of the most controversial movies of my teenage years was 1987's Angel Heart, due to its single sex scene featuring stars Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet. That Bonet's character is only 17 wasn't the issue: remember, this was the same decade as Blame It On Rio, a movie for which everyone involved should have been brought up on charges. It wasn't even the reveal at the end of the movie that she's actually Rourke's character's daughter. No, according to director Alan Parker, the issue was a lingering shot of Rourke's thrusting buttocks, and trimming it by 10 seconds was enough to change Angel Heart's rating from an X to an R.

Now, of course, turning on the TV and seeing someone's thrusting buttocks would barely warrant a shrug, even if, as in Angel Heart, they're eventually covered in blood. Butts? That's nothing, try watching Outlander, a TV show that's a thinly disguised graphic sex scene delivery device. Even the incest twist isn't that big a deal. It's almost quaint.

Lisa Bonet's character only being 17 still isn't great, but it's only one of several problematic issues with her that we'll get to in a minute. Watching it now, the sex scene is the least interesting thing about Angel Heart, a fascinating mess that's often deeply unpleasant, and yet you can't turn it off either. Roxana Hadadi, in her essay at Certified Forgotten, wrote, "There are good movies, and bad movies, and good bad movies, and bad good movies. Angel Heart, somehow, is all of these." It tries to be an old-fashioned noir, an erotic thriller, and a horror movie, to varying results. It is both creepy and silly. It's unnecessarily convoluted, yet not as clever as it thinks it is, but also ends on an unsettling note.

Mickey Rourke stars as private detective Harry Angel, on assignment from a mysterious client. In keeping with the other contradictions I mentioned above, while Rourke still has his original handsome face, he's also gross. Sweaty and grimy, he looks as if his detective agency is located in a bus station bathroom. If you're watching Angel Heart for the first time and thinking, "I wouldn't hire this guy to find a missing turtle, let alone a person," congratulations, you'll probably figure out the twist long before it's revealed.

Robert De Niro is the mysterious client, named Louis Cyphre (mmm-hmmmmm), and while his name is very silly, and he looks like he should be playing in Carlos Santana's touring band, he's also the best part of the movie. Calmly menacing (and menacingly calm), he manages to make peeling and eating a hard-boiled egg look as sinister as undressing a virgin to be sacrificed. He could be named Larry Johnson, and you'd still know who he's supposed to be.

Angel is sent to track down a singer named Johnny Favorite, who owes Cyphre an unspecified (but very large) debt. He's reluctant to work the case, but, as the best private dicks do, he needs the money. Favorite left a trail leading Angel from New York City to an elegantly decayed New Orleans, where he encounters all manner of creeps, weirdos, and degenerates who were all connected to Favorite in one way or another, and all of them are brutally murdered immediately after speaking to Angel.

The only one who isn't (not yet, at least) is Favorite's illegitimate daughter, Epiphany (Lisa Bonet), a teenage hottie who's introduced braless and submissively bent over while washing her hair, and, folks, it doesn't get any better from there. You'll be unsurprised to know that because this is New Orleans and she's Black, Epiphany is a voodoo priestess, who bares her breasts while performing a ritual. I'm not sure if voodoo rituals require the baring of one's breasts for maximum effect, but I'm not an expert.

ANYWAY, it turns out that Angel is literally chasing his own tail, because, in one of those classic movie twists that doesn't really make sense if you think about it for more than three seconds, Angel is Johnny Favorite, and the debt he owes to Louis Cyphre is (you almost certainly saw this coming) his soul. Lest you think Ephiphany makes it to the end of the movie unharmed, alas, she pays for her association with Favorite/Angel (who's also her father) with her life too, and she's discovered nude with a gun shoved up her vagina.

And there lies the primary issue with Angel Heart. It's a well-made and very watchable movie, covered in an impenetrable layer of grime. The story is lurid enough without the misogyny and exoticism. Every female character (what few there are) exists for Harry Angel to either fuck, or kill, or both, and the film lazily shrugs it off with "well, you know, he's a bad guy." Granted, it makes it satisfying when he gets his just reward in the end, but less than it should be, because, unlike some other unlucky characters in the movie, he isn't choked with his own penis or boiled in a pot of gumbo. No, he just gets a long elevator ride to Hell, where presumably Adolf Hitler is there to greet him while wearing a little LOBBY BOY cap.

But, man, that elevator sequence, which covers the entire end credits, is great. The shadows, the infernal clanking and creaking of machinery, Cyphre whispering "Harry...Johnny...", Angel's exhausted "this might as well happen" expression, all of it makes for a memorably dark conclusion. The scariest scene has nothing to do with voodoo rituals or anyone getting their heart cut out: it's Cyphre's pleasure at watching Angel break down over his realization of who he is. The best, most effective villains really enjoy their work, and Louis Cyphre gets a kick out of being the Devil.

Angel Heart was directed by Alan Parker, who had a truly baffling filmography, including the (unintentionally) creepy all-kids musical Bugsy Malone, the Turkish prison thriller Midnight Express, the depressing divorce drama Shoot the Moon, and Pink Floyd: The Wall, a movie I watched more times as a teenager than I'm comfortable admitting. Like The Wall, Angel Heart works better if you just accept it as a vibe, rather than anything that makes sense. They're both about grubby, shifty men falling apart over the realization that demons are chasing them, though in The Wall's case, the demon is mental illness, and not literally Satan.

I'm not sure if Parker was a great filmmaker (regrettably, his final film was the execrable The Life of David Gale), but he had a skill for weird, discomfiting atmosphere. Occasionally, that atmosphere involved a 12 year-old Scott Baio shooting at other children with a whipped cream tommy gun, but it worked for the most part in Angel Heart. You end up appreciating the journey, even if you need a shower afterward.