City in Panic (1986) — Triskaidekafiles

CITY IN PANIC

WRITER: Story by Peter Wilson

Screenplay by Andreas Blackwell and Peter Wilson

DIRECTOR: Robert Bouvier

STARRING: Dave Adamson as Dave Miller

Leeann Nestegard as Elizabeth Price

Peter Roberts a Alex Ramsey

QUICK CUT: A radio personality comes to blows with his journalist counterpart as they try to decide who is more right about free speech.

THE MORGUE

Dave - A talk radio host who kinda sits there all night long playing with toys while callers talk to him about what’s going on in Toronto.

Liz - A former employee of Dave’s who went to work for his rival. She’s had a rough few years, and tries to play peacemaker between the two.

Alex - Dave’s rival, a journalist who is a bit more conservative than Dave, but also likes ruffling feathers.

Hot time, panic in the city, murders in Toronto getting dirty and gritty.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! We are gonna wrap up February, with a trip across the border into Canada. We might have to sneak across due to travel restrictions, but it'll be fine. We are heading to the fair city of Toronto, which has become...a City in Panic.

The movie has a few other names, including M, which is an homage to an old movie, and 13. Guess the reason why we are hear today? Also, I took a look at City in Panic for the 13th episode of the Blood Stream, and even though I've technically already done this, it is such a fascinating movie to me, I thought I'd bring it to the Trisk audience as well.

Our movie opens up in Toronto, and quickly establishes a killer is stalking the streets, all while our soon to be main character Dave talks on the radio. We get a bit of a gun control debate which remains timely, as the killer stalks their next victim.

The killer, known only as M because of the mark they leave on dead bodies, follows his victim home, waits until they are in the shower, and no joke recreates the shower death scene from Psycho almost shot for shot.

Later the next day, we wander in with Dave back to the radio station, learn about his rival, a journalist called Alex Ramsey, and ooorgh, the camera sways back and forth and back and forth and I am getting seasick.

M wastes no time looking for another victim, and while Dave gets on air, M heads to a gay strip club to stalk their next victim, He-Man. Oh my god, Skeletor must be the killer.

Oh no, it’s Science Crazed all over again.

Once He-Man leave the club, M chases after them in a car, slams them into a wall, and then slices them up for good measure.

We cut over briefly to the cops, where one of them on the case rants about all the dead men, and how the killer must be a gay killing gays for their perverted fantasy. Mmm, such progressive views.

Next we meet Alex's assistant, Liz, as she's getting out of the shower, and he barges into her house to listen to and mock Dave's show. Dude, get your own radio.

Speaking of, Dave is on the air, and... ...WHY IS THERE A ROBOT JUST WANDERING AROUND?? Look, okay. Back when How I Met Your Mother revealed Robin's singing career, and they gave us the banger of a song, Let's Go to the Mall, they made a joke about having an 80s movie robot. Now, I was alive in the 80s. I've seen lots of 80s movies. I have almost never seen this trope of people just casually owning helpful robots, with the lone exception of Rocky.

And now there's this. THIS MOVIE has a random robot helper. Is it purely a Canadian thing where this trope comes from?? So so strange. It haunts me.

We cut pretty well between Dave taking calls from people with varying opinions, and M stalking yet another victim. It's well done, and well paced, and pretty tense. The stalking is cut short when a police car interrupts and the potential victim hurries on his way.

Alex engineers an encounter with Dave after the show at a local bar, that almost ends in fisticuffs. Several patrons and Alex's, I guess he's a bodyguard? His driver? Whatever, so Tony saves the day and stops any blood from being spilled.

Tony and Liz head out and hang out, and Tony puts on a show he wanted to see about AIDS, for some reason, and Liz ducks out because it's not the sort of thing she wants to watch.

We drift around a bit as people move around the plot, until the bartender we met earlier heads to the gym in his apartment building, to get in a workout after work. Unfortunately, M has come to work out as well.

Dave hooks up with his girlfriend, in every sense of that word, his ex wife stops by, and we get a larger picture of the utter disaster that is Dave Miller's life.

But then Dave gets a call from his cop friend, and hears that Thomas the bartender is dead, and they start to conspire to get M to call in.

On Dave's next show, he has a doctor on to talk about M, and they try and bait M to call in. We watch various members of our cast listen and react, and Liz gets out of Alex's car, not wanting to join the regular meet and beat at Pete's Bar.

Meanwhile, a security guard we've seen a few times, heads down to the rest room, where he meets a hookup in the stall, sticks his dick through the glory hole, and discovers why that is a terrible idea as it is sliced right off.

After Alex calls in to taunt Dave some, next on the line is the greatest director of all time...no wait, just M modifying their voice.

He has a promising career as a Republican senator.

The doctor actually has some solid insights into M, and doesn't blame him precisely, because it's society that creates the Ms. Hey, we all live in a society.

After everything that's happened, and since Dave has established a rapport with the killer, McKay wants to use him as bait. We also start to learn that the victims all had AIDS, and that may be the connection.

Which is precisely when we learn that Liz has AIDS, putting her squarely in M's crosshairs.

Looks like blood, detective. But I guess you'd call it 'graffiti'...

Dave and his girl have another steamy night, with a lengthy sex scene, as the killer stalks again. They make it look like they're the target, but instead another couple gets killed off screen.

We get more psychobabble from Dr. Farthing, and the police get some sort of lead. This makes them call off using Miller as bait, much to his frustration.

Before they can catch him though, they find Ramsey murdered in an alleyway.

Doors and corners, kid. Always check the doors and corners…

Miller again offers himself up as bait, but the police still say they have a better lead. So they send him home, and keep a cop to watch over him.

Liz calls him, and they agree to meet, to kinda calm down after everything that's happened, and meet down at an old beach house they both know.

Meanwhile, the cops are at a doctor's office. The doctor noticed a filing cabinet had been broken into some time ago, but didn't report it since nothing was missing. But he made the connection that the files broken into were his AIDS Files. Man, Mulder and Scully would have different jobs investigating those...

The cops look over the list, and that Liz is on it, and she must be next. We find out Ramsey *didn't* however, and he was killed for other reasons, trying to point fingers at Dave.

So this movie really plays like a Canadian attempt at a giallo. A giall-eh, if you will. They are typified by generally being about serial killers, a murder mystery, black gloves are a must, and at the end of the day, the plot must not make a single damned lick of sense.

And quite frankly, that sets us up for one heck of a twist, as the couple sit back and catch up, and we learn about when Liz lost a baby, and that he died from AIDS, and oh no...oh yes, you guessed it, Liz is inexplicably the killer M. And...it actually mostly works. She's off screen when the murders happen, with sensible excuses, sso it’s not TOO obvious, but makes sense in retrospect.

I'm getting ahead of the plot though, since Dave hasn't pieced it together. I'd complain, but he's no journalist, just a radio personality.

Oh come on, that’s just three kids in a trenchcoat.

We get a needlessly long stalking scene through a needlessly creepy mannequin warehouse. Of all places to randomly run into.

And so Liz blames the people with AIDS for her baby having AIDS, and in her depression she snapped, and, yeah. There's a lot to unpack here, and that's above my pay grade. The topic is...uncomfortable, but there's...something here. I think if it had been done with a little more nuance, and less over the top scenery chewing with the final reveal, it might have worked.

Dave tries to talk her out of it, saying she can't just go around killing people with AIDS and uh, I got 80 previous minutes that state otherwise, pal!

Dave bonks her over the head with a pipe aaand we're done. Maybe a bit more of a denouemont would have helped too.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It looks okay, but it has that washed out 80s VHS look to it. Okay, but that’s about it.

Audiuo: I dunno if it’s just me, but the music often drowns out the dialogue, which is a bummer.

Sound Bite: “The Lord has called me!” “And you called me.”

Body Count: Not a bad pile of bodies, to be sure. A little more would’ve been nice though.

1 - Three minutes in, and some Psycho hacks a guy to death with a kitchen knife

2 - Stripper gets run down and stabbed.

3 - Tom gets slashed up at the workout room in his apartment.

4 - Security guard gets his dick hacked off in the men's room

5 and 6 - Lovers killed off screen as a fakeout.

7 - M slashes up Ramsey

Best Corpse: The security guard gets it this week. He sold that severing, and we got to watch him dance around as he died.

Blood Type - C: Solid middle of the road. Not completely bloodless, but it skirts around it more often than not, and the makeup effects on the M marks aren’t bad.

Sex Appeal: Plenty of implied nudity on both sides, and some hints of flesh.

Drink Up! Every time you hear an aboot.

Movie Review: I’m gonna admit…this is NOT a terribly made movie. It’s low budget to be sure, but they make great use of what they got, the plot more or less makes sense, and Dave is a solid actor. Despite this being very sleazy, I actually like it, for the most part. We could talk a lot about the treatment of gay people in this movie, and the subject of AIDS being little more than a half mentioned plot device, but it still manages to be all right. It could easily have been better if they handled those topics better, and less glib, I think. Three out of five helpful robots.

Entertainment Value: This movie is odd, in it has those giallo like qualities to it, it’s very sleazy and cheesy, while also being remarkably coherent. It’s very unique in its story and style and how it’s made, and I enjoy it on some level, no matter how much I need a shower afterwards. Some of the acting is over the top, especially when the Big Reveal happens, so even being a big ball of sleaze, it’s entertaining. Three out of five trenchcoats.