I was all of 24 years old when I first saw Martin Scorsese's pitch black "comedy", After Hours. I really related to the lead character, a bored twenty-something stuck in a 9 to 5 reality, yearning for something edgy, an adventure on the dark side of town...happily, I never got my wish:
After Hours tells the tale of of Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) , a young man who works at a mind numbing job ( a "word processor") in a large office in mid town Manhattan.
One night, after leaving work, Paul goes to a coffee house and while reading, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer he is hit upon by a pretty gal named, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) who begins to tell him how much she loves the novel. Later on she tells him about her roommate, sculptress, Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), and how Kiki makes these incredible "Plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheeses". Paul tells Marcy that he'd love to buy one, and she gives him her number.
Later that night, Paul calls Marcy and she invites him over - seems her apartment is on the other side of town, Soho. So Paul takes a wild cab ride that ends with his lone twenty dollar bill being sucked out of the window, leaving him penniless and stranded on the dark side of Gotham...
Once he gets to Marcy's apartment, Paul discovers Kiki working on her latest objet d'art, a peculiar paper mache sculpture of a man cringing and seemingly crying out in anguish. Nonetheless, Paul is fascinated with the smoky voiced sculptress and eventually he starts helping her with the statue...
...eventually, Kiki asks Paul to give her a shoulder massage, and while Paul thinks he might get lucky, Kiki ends up falling asleep, and Marcy finally shows up. At first things seem OK, and Marcy invites Paul into her bedroom to talk...it does not take long, as he listens to her babel on about burnt flesh and an alleged rape that occurred to her in this very room, for Paul to suspect that Marcy might be few cents short of a dollar.
Later on the couple go out for coffee and ...hey look, it's Dick Miller!
After coffee, they go back to Marcy's loft and when Marcy goes to take a shower, Paul discovers that his new friend has some odd reading material...
...things go from bad to worse as Marcy offers Paul some pot, which turns out to be nothing more than oregano, then he questions several of the tales she has told him, and finally he demands his "Plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheeses". Marcy looses it and runs from the room in tears, and Paul figures it's time to beat a hasty retreat...
...when he tries to take the subway home, he discovers that the fares have gone up at midnight and he's just few cents short of the amount he'll need and the fare-taker will not let him pass. Disgusted he goes back above ground and finds himself in a sleazy bar where he meets a waitress named Julie (Terri Garr) who invites him back to her place. Clearly, Julie's got some issues of her own, and Paul is starting to get a bad vibe from her. When he looks over at her bed and see's that it's surrounded by rat traps, he knows he's got to get out her place - pronto!
Things go from bad to worse for Paul, and like Dorothy in Oz, all he want's to do is get home...but circumstances keep him from moving on...
...when he ends up back in Marcy's apartment, he finds her dead in her bed and calls the police and leaves some notes leading them to the body...meanwhile we discover that a rash of robberies are occuring in the neighborhood, and due to several more misadventures, Paul is now the prime suspect.
Of course it does not help when Julie, who is upset over Paul spurning her advances, has posted wanted posters of Paul on telephone poles. Nor do things get any better when Paul meets Gail (Catherine O'Hara) a manic Mr. Softie Truck operator who seems somewhat unhinged...
...and leads an angry mob that chases him through the streets of Soho...
...at one point, while hiding from the mob, Paul witnesses a shooting and says, "I'll probably get blamed for that".
Somewhere along the way, Paul ends up in a punk club and almost forcibly is given a Mohawk.
Eventually Paul ends up with a middle aged woman named June (Verna Bloom), who seems to take pity on him and agrees to hide him from the mob who are still after him...
...iroically, June is also a sculptress and she wraps Paul in chicken wire, and starts laying on strips of paste and paper over him in order to hide from Gail and her mob. Of course, when she's through he looks just like the statue that Kiki was working on. Once she's through, she leaves him alone...
...and a pair of burglars (Cheech and Chong) break in and steal,what they think, is a statue and toss it into the back of their van. Of course they don't know that there is a man under the paper mache, and as such, Paul finally gets to leave the dark side of town...
...and the van's doors fly open and Paul falls out of the back , the sun is up...
...and Paul is back at his office building, his nightmare ended. Back to the safe, mind numbing world he wanted to escape from only hours ago.
OK, so it's not really a horror film, but After Hours is a deeply unnerving piece that manages to take elements of the Wizard of Oz, Kafka's "Before the Law", and several Hitchcock movies and mash them up into one creepy film noir comedy that for whatever reason, scared the hell out of me when I first watched it many years ago.
