Word: slashers
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DIED. JANET LEIGH, 77, coolly seductive Hollywood star, who earned immortality as the cinema's prime slasher victim in Hitchcock's Psycho; of vasculitis; in Beverly Hills, California. She could have settled for being Tony Curtis' wife (for 11 years) and Jamie Lee's mother. But Leigh had a gaze as alert and sexy as any in movies. It bored into Frank Sinatra's frazzled psyche in The Manchurian Candidate; mixed fear and fire as a captive in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Even after she'd been killed in the Psycho shower (a model doubled her in some shots...
DIED. JANET LEIGH, 77, coolly seductive Hollywood star, who earned immortality as the cinema's prime slasher victim in Hitch-cock's Psycho; in Beverly Hills. She could have settled for being Tony Curtis' wife (for 11 years) and Jamie Lee's mother. But Leigh had a gaze as alert and sexy as any in movies. It bored into Frank Sinatra's frazzled psyche in The Manchurian Candidate; mixed fear and fire as a captive in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Even after she'd been killed in the Psycho shower (where a model doubled her in some shots), Leigh...
When you first see Michael Bennett at work, you could mistake him for a revival preacher: sweating, pacing in his crisp vest and raving hoarsely into a microphone. Bennett is actually a car salesman--not just any car salesman, mind you, but the Slasher. Hired by local car lots--at $12,000 a pop--he flies across the country to set up inventory-clearing extravaganzas, his arrival heralded by obnoxious radio commercials. ("Armed with a savings chainsaw! Slicing high prices!") Like an itinerant evangelist, he rolls into town, sets up his tent and spends 72 hours infusing the customers with...
...documentary Slasher (IFC, June 19, 10 p.m. E.T.), director John Landis (The Blues Brothers) spends a week with Bennett as he organizes and executes one such blowout. En route to the airport, Bennett struggles to remember where he's going--Memphis, Tenn.--while an assistant preps him on the local vernacular. ("Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural.") Once on the scene, though, the Slasher--a wiry, nervous guy, like Billy Bob Thornton with Tom Waits' rasp--thrums like a racing engine. "This is a show to me," he says, "not a sale." He struts around...
...times Landis works too hard to make his subject more entertaining. When Bennett talks about the reputation of car salesmen as liars, the director glibly inserts a montage of quotes from Presidents ("I am not a crook," etc.). But mostly Slasher lets Bennett and the customers tell their stories, abetted by only crisp editing and a sound track of Stax soul tunes. It's an acute yet nonjudgmental picture of a crusade that will continue long after the buyers drive home in their sputtering purchases and the Slasher heads for another town to preach his American gospel of hope...