PRETTYKILL (1987)
Article 5137 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-23-2016
Directed by George Kaczender
Featuring David Birney, Season Hubley, Suzanne Snyder
Country: Canada / USA
What it is: How can I say? The movie itself doesn’t know.

A detective frets about cracking a drug dealing case. His girlfriend is a madam who employs a new woman whose sanity is questionable. Someone is killing prostitutes. Viewer goes “Huh?”

The theme song running over the ending credits features this lyric – “A thousand pieces in my mind, but no center can I find.” And that is one of the most striking examples of a movie supplying its own review that I’ve ever seen. The movie has no center. It has plot elements and incidents which somehow interact with each other, but none of the interaction seems meaningful. If it’s a drama, it has no focus; is it about the policeman’s frustration with official procedure, the prostitute’s struggle with her mental condition, or about the madam’s attempts to come to terms with her own profession? If it’s a thriller about a psycho killer, why doesn’t it try to build a modicum of suspense rather than meandering all over creation? It’s impossible to say. All I will say is that Suzanne Snyder (as the dual-personality prostitute) gives a performance of awesome ineptitude, and I almost hate to say it because she’s obviously putting everything she can into the performance; it just hits wrong notes at every step of the way. Nevertheless, it’s about the only thing likely to be remembered in this muddled mess of a movie.