Spike Lee's first film with no major black characters, moves his work onto the similar ground, neighboring areas of New York City, primarily the Italian one.Film is directed by Spike Lee. Written by Lee, Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli. Theme is still similar, native to any closely knit neighborhoods, scapegoating, making anyone that sticks out of the crowd, pay for that dearly.
In the summer of 1977, one of the hottest New York City summers ever, serial killer calling himself Son of Sam has parts of City living in fear, killing in the night any brunette and anybody who is with her. At the time, residents of Italian-American neighborhood of Bronx are looking for a suspect, checking anyone that sticks out of the crowd, and pinning the identity of the Son of Sam to all those who wronged them even the slightest.
This film is not about the killer, almost at all, it is about those that took the idea of Son of Sam and overheated their imagination turning themselves into a lynch mob, even though the scenes where Son of Sam, whose face we do not see till the end, gets his orders to kill, the way he behaves trying to avoid the voice in him and the hallucinations that make him do it, those scenes are portrayed with an amazing artistic precision, giving the main story sort of a lift and a reference point as to its direction, also these scenes are my main reason for including the film in this column.
Main story is about a group of almost lowlifes that hangs together, centering itself on two couples, Vinny (John Leguizamo), hairdresser in a woman's salon that has animal sex with almost all of the customers (after all it was a '77, a peak of sexual revolution and every fear portrayed in the film is ballanced with another sexual theme, always somehow connected with disco music, that is opposed to his friend's Ritchie's punk rock lifestyle. Vinnie is married to Dionna (fabulous Mira Sorvino), waitress in her father's restaurant, Ritchieis a local wannabe rock star that suddenly, under the influence of Sex Pistols developes punk style and haircut and a British accent, making money as a dancer in a gay club, who falls for Ruby (Jennifer Esposito, a girl that led a very promiscuous life prior to the relationship with him. Vinnie, being closer to the rest of the crowd, allows himself to be persuaded into believing that his best friend's, Ritchie's excentricities come from the madness, from the idea fixated into the brain of his crowd that Ritchie is Son of Sam, after they disqualified Reggie Jackson.
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