Looker (1981)

hyped garbage

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

With a strong cast and intriguing premise 'Looker' .... looks impressive. But it's NOT! By "strong cast" I mean Playmate Of The Year Terri Welles. She visits Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Albert Finney requesting some very specific changes down to .1 millimeters.The movie's off to a great start with Welles getting topless within the first five minutes. However the scene is so brief I literally watched the movie THREE TIMES before I even noticed this scene! WTF? This is the money shot! That's like having the chariot race in 'Ben-Hur' last only three seconds! Welles and other of Dr. Finney's patients turn up dead. The movie might as well be over! Terri Welles is dead within SIX MINUTES!!! WTF? They've all been thrown off balconies by a killer whom looks like John Holmes or Chuck Norris from the cover of 'The Good Guys Wear Black.' The only model not killed is Susan Dey. Susan Dey? Susan Day from 'L.A. Law' is our leading lady and trying desperately to be sexy? This is the final nail in the coffin for the film.Not even villain James Coburn can save this wreck, and he wasn't even in the trailer.The master plot revolves around an evil company developing an illegal super weapon... a ray gun which causes the victim to lose time. That's how they killed the girls. This seems pretty far fetched for a petty weapon. If they wanted a silent non lethal weapon Thomas A. Swift already beat them to it. Or they could just use a tranquilizer gun. But since they killed the models anyway, and not silently, they could have just used a gun, knife, or blunt object! Their ray gun is pretty pathetic.Why did this company kill its own models? That's never explained! This whole movie is a waste of time. The trailer promised me a movie staring Terri Welles but she's dead by the time the credits end. Skip this mess at all costs.

Al Finney looks positively bored. He moves through the scenes like a bored man, knowing full well that this script isn't worth the effort. If there ever was an example of a good actor signing up just for the money and deciding that he'd replace effort with apathy, it's this.I am frankly a little amazed that Michael Crichton wrote such a pedestrian script. There is a small measure of originality, sure, but the plot is full of logic-holes and unfolds more like a comic-book than a movie intended for adults expecting a little more than pulp fiction.I was amused at the idea of female "perfection" being symbolized by wafer-thin fashion models with no boobs or asses. Evidently, these computers were programmed by pedophiles and gay designers.I am still confused about the matter of police corruption: were the cops bought by Coburn or not? This is just one of several inconsistencies in a script that is muddled rather than concise.

Susan Dey is Cindy Fairmont, a patient of plastic surgeon Dr. Roberts (Albert Finney), who might be the next one targeted for murder after his previous patients have been killed for apparently being too pretty. Roberts is about to uncover a huge sprawling conspiracy involving high-tech research company, Digital Matrix.A somewhat prophetic little film that again has author Crichton mining his massive mistrust of technological advancements. Much of the movie is absolutely married to the '80s but there are certain elements of the film that are very much still relevant to today. I liked the film on the whole, but it does drag on in places. Furthermore I kind of wished that it would have been as scathing to the superficiality of the cosmetic surgery business as it was technology, but that's a more personal gripe.Eye Candy: Terri Welles gets topless; Susan Day goes fully nude

Spoilers within.I just watched this again and it occurred to me that it still works in 2007. If anything the premise is even more believable now than it was 26 years ago. In that sense it was a pretty darn accurate bit of future prediction in terms of where our video and computer technology was going.I've always liked this movie. It stands as a classic underrated film and a fond memory of my childhood. I took two points off though, one for each of the two problems I have with it: First, they didn't provide enough motivation or explanation for killing the models. One of them seemed to have figured out what was really going on, so that makes sense. But the others? Was it just to avoid paying out their contracts? They made a point of saying how rich the RI company was, so the cost would seem to be trivial in comparison to murder.Second, it struck me as odd that they could accurately digitize human beings but they still shot the commercials on a real set. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Even today it's much easier to model a kitchen than it is to model a human being.Overall though it's still a solid and enjoyable flick. You could make this movie today and it would be a perfectly good film for 2007.