One such project is I'm Dangerous Tonight, a TV movie made for the USA Network and inspired by a novella (unread by me) by Cornell Woolrich, the noted crime writer who also wrote the story that inspired Hitchcock's Rear Window.
I'm Dangerous Tonight has some trappings of a hard-boiled crime story: femme fatales, a grizzled detective, shadowy back streets, cutthroat characters, backstabbing rich people, and style at the expense of logic and plausibility. The film wraps these elements inside a supernatural horror story while also drawing inspiration from Cinderella.
I won't go so far as to call I'm Dangerous Tonight a lost masterpiece (although Kino Lorber has put together a nice Blu Ray for it). The story is too silly and choppy, and the network television restrictions of its era certainly hold it back to a degree. I think a theatrically released, Rated-R version of this story that ramps up the sex and violence would give it a boost, but in its own modest way, I'm Dangerous Tonight is slick, stylish, and at times sexy TV thriller in which Hooper has some fun within his constraints
College student Amy (Madchen Amick) lives with her aunt Martha (Mary Frann), her cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall), and her nearly catatonic grandmother (Natalie Schafer) after the deaths of her parents. Recruited by classmate Eddie (Corey Parker) to assist with a play, Amy buys a trunk containing a red cloak, not knowing it was used by the Aztecs during human sacrifices. Sensing some power from the cloak, Amy feels compelled to fashion it into a dress, and when she wears it, it causes her to unleash a repressed, darker nature, and when others wear it, the result is murder.
A haunted dress that possesses the wearer sounds silly, but coming from Tobe Hooper, it feels par the course. Nearly a decade prior, he made Poltergeist, the story of a family under siege by a haunted house, and by the mid-90s, he would adapt the Stephen King story The Mangler, which is about an industrial laundry steam press possessed by demon. He also directed an episode about a haunted airplane for the TV show The Others.
Why was Hooper drawn to these stories? Hard to say without a quote or an interview where he explains, but haunted or possessed objects are a staple of the horror genre. Writers and filmmakers have long taken familiar, safe, and comforting items and tried to make them scary and dangerous. We've seen stories about evil houses, dolls, and cars, so I don't think a haunted dress is too out of left field.
Of course, a dress is more difficult to make scary than say a doll, especially one that isn't ambulatory or capable of expressing personality (maybe if the dress could fly and strangle people...eh, never mind), but maybe that's why Hooper was drawn to the project: it was different, and it was a challenge.
One advantage Hooper has, however, is it's not the dress doing the actual killing and chasing in I'm Dangerous Tonight. It works through its wearers, driving them to murderous jealousy and insanity.
Amy is a Cinderella figure: quiet, conservatively dressed, made to work for others at the expense of herself. Early on, her aunt pressures her to devote to fixing a dress for her, even though Amy is already overloaded with schoolwork, and her cousin often dumps caretaking duties for their grandmother on her so she can out of dates with her obnoxious jock boyfriend.
But when Amy puts on that dress, she's no longer timid and reserved. She's seductive, flirtatious, and aggressive, leaving her invalid grandmother home alone to go to a dance where she puts the moves on Gloria's boyfriend. Only when she gets back to the dumb jock's car to have sex with him and removes the dress does Amy come to her senses and realize something is wrong.
While the dress allows her to indulge a dark side, Amy is a fundamentally good person, and the dress can only push her to go so far. Other wearers are not so inhibited. When Amy loses the dress, and it finds new owners, I'm Dangerous Tonight shifts gears, moving from the dark Cinderella vibes of its first half to a truncated mystery as Amy deals with a pushy detective (R. Lee Ermy) and tries to locate the dress before anyone else gets hurt.
It's this second half of the movie that feels choppy, as if transitions and establishing moments are missing. Whether they were cut for time or never filmed, I don't know, but the movie feels jumpy and disoriented at times, and not in a good way.
Regardless, Hooper achieves a nice effect in these sequences, particularly when the dress wearers go crazy and attack people. The final confrontation in Amy's house is about as strong as we could have hoped from early 90s cable TV, and another scene, where Amy sneaks in someone's apartment, has some nice Hitchcock vibes when that person returns home unexpectedly.
The film has a polished look. The 4:3 standard TV aspect ratio unfortunately keeps it from looking too cinematic, but Hooper stages some nice framing, and the red on the dress just absolutely pops off the frame. And it must be stated: Amick looks absolutely stunning when she wears the dress.
Amick holds the center of the movie as the heroine, sweet and determined as well as cold and ruthless, and she's aided by nothing if not an interesting cast that seems to be having fun with the material. Ermy as a detective feels on brand, but instead of his yelling drill instructor persona, he's more subtle and sarcastic than one expects, and I haven't even mentioned Dee Wallace Stone who gets a chance to play crazy as a troubled morgue assistant and Anthony Perkins as Amy's professor who possesses knowledge of the cloak and may or may not have nefarious motives. And Mrs. Howell herself, Natalie Shafer, in a wordless performance, offers a haunting presence as the wheelchair-using grandmother.
Even the cousin and aunt get more to them than expected. Frann has one moment where she gets angry and cruel as the aunt, but otherwise, she's more passive-aggressive and manipulative instead of an outright wicked stepmother. As Gloria, Hall has times that suggest she might not be a completely awful person, but when she feels threatened, the daggers come out.
A curious thing to note: I'm Dangerous Tonight features references to and involves a school production of Romeo and Juliet. Hooper's previous film, Spontaneous Combustion, features references to and involves a school production of King Lear.
I don't know if that's just coincidence, but I can't be the only person who wishes Tobe Hooper had gotten the chance to adapt a Shakespeare play. I can't envision a scenario where that would have happened at any point in his career, but it's fun to imagine how insane and bizarre it would have been.
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