- Directed by Alan Parker
- Written by William Hjortsberg, Alan Parker
- Stars Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet, Charlotte Rampling
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 53 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKzekw3xn8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is very much a noir detective story with horror elements. It builds nicely as we follow the case along. Mickey Rourke is great in the lead role, managing to be likable and ruthless at the same time. The settings, cinematography, and direction are excellent. It’s a winner.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open on a dog in an alleyway looking for food. It passes a dead body and moves on. We are told that it’s 1955 New York.
Harry Angel walks into his office and gets a call from Mr. Winesap and agrees to meet him in a Harlem church. He passes a woman washing blood off a wall after a man killed himself there. Winesap’s client is Louis Cyphre, a strange man sitting up in a chair like a throne. Angel is a detective, and he’s not quite sure why these men have called him.
They discuss a man who went to war and came back a vegetable; Cyphre’s contract was never honored, and he wants Angel to find Johnny Leibling AKA singer Johnny Favorite to make sure he’s still alive or dead. Angel takes the case.
Angel pulls out his fake ID from the Nation Institute of Health and goes to the mental hospital looking for Leibling. The man used to be there, but he was transferred away more than a decade ago.
Angel’s next stop is the doctor who may have treated the man. He breaks into the doctor’s house and finds lots of morphine bottles in the fridge. The doctor comes in, and Angel asks about Liebling. He says that some people came and took him away in a car years ago; he had amnesia after waking from a coma. After giving the doctor some time to suffer from withdrawal, Angel goes back hoping for more information and finds the doctor has killed himself.
Angel updates Cyphre about what he’s learned. Angel doesn’t like being involved with a death and wants to quit. Cyphre increases his fee tremendously, and Angel can’t refuse. He goes back to the Harlem church and finds a weird shrine with dead things on it. Some men attack him and chase him down the street.
Angel talks to a reporter friend about Liebling, and he was pretty popular as singer Johnny Favorite. He goes to interview an old bandmate, Spider Simpson, who tells him about another guy, Toots Sweet. Angel travels to New Orleans to follow more leads.
Angel next follows up on a fortune teller that “Johnny Favorite” used to see a lot; “Madame Zora’s” real name is Margaret Krusemark. He finds Margaret quickly and goes to her under the pretense of getting his fortune read. She says Johnny Favorite is dead, or at least dead to her.
Following up on a lead, he meets up with Epiphany Proudfoot, the daughter of someone who knew Johnny. Afterwards, he goes to see Toots Sweet, a musician. The meeting does not go well, so Angel follows him after the show is over. Sweet goes to a big Voodoo ritual where Epiphany dances with chicken blood; she’s a Mambo Priestess.
In the morning, the police show up; Toots Sweet is violently dead and he had Angel’s contact information in his hand. He goes back to Margaret the palm reader and finds her dead too. On her desk, he finds an old, mummified hand and her very fresh-looking heart.
After getting beat up again, he tracks down Epiphany again; he thinks she set up Toots, since she was the only one who knew he was involved. She admits that Johnny Favorite was her father but denies hurting Toots.
He meets up with Cyphre again, this time in a big church. Cyphre doesn’t seem impressed upon hearing about the murders. Angel thinks Johnny is the one killing all the people who might know anything about his location.
Reuniting with Epiphany, they talk about her father and then start dancing, which leads to sex as the ceiling rains blood. It’s a weird, hallucinatory scene.
Angel goes to see Ethan, Margaret’s father. He and his daughter are the ones who broke Johnny out of the mental hospital. Margaret was into “hocus pocus” and wanted Johnny released; he says Johnny sold his soul to Satan for stardom. Angel doesn’t believe any of it. Johnny tried to get out of his deal with the devil. He tells the whole story of Johnny’s ritual. The only way out was to steal someone else’s body, memories, and identity who was the same age as him by eating the other guy’s heart. Suddenly, Angel finds Ethan dead in the gumbo pot.
Angel runs back to Margaret’s place and finds a pair of Harold Angel dog tags— his own dog tags where they sealed them away after the ritual. Yes, he has been Johnny all along, but with a new identity as Harold Angel so good that even he didn’t realize it. He starts remembering everything, fighting hard against it.
Cyphre shows up, and Angel realizes that Louis Cyphre is Lucifer. Angel denies killing everyone, but Cyphre just smiles. Everyone who’s had any connection to him has been killed, the devil using Johnny to clean up the loose ends. Angel now remembers killing all those people, even the doctor who wasn’t actually a suicide. Cyphre picks up the dog tags and Johnny’s gun and vanishes.
Angel runs back to Epiphany, who is dead like all the others. She’s wearing his dog tags. And his gun is there as the murder weapon. Angel tells the cop there that she was his daughter. “You’re gonna burn for this, Angel,” says the cop. “Yeah. In Hell,” he answers.
Commentary
“I got a thing about chickens.”
The story just gets weirder and weirder as it goes along, adding in hints that things aren’t exactly what they seem to be. The various Voodoo, occult, and Satanic imagery gradually fill in what’s going on all along.
The locations are amazing; the cinematography is interesting, and the whole setting really makes the movie. It’s a very strange film, but also really good!