Windows (1980)

Despite the fact that it is no secret that a remarkably large number of violent female criminals and prison inmates are estrogen-deprived bull-dykes, politically organized carpet-munchers feel the need to go out of their way to obscure this unspoken fact that all crime statistics confirm, as if it will compromise the fact that a good number of prominent feminist leaders and theorists are also emotionally glacial clit-hoppers. Indeed, heterosexual murderesses typically use more inconspicuous and passive-aggressive means of murder as the countless female serial killers who utilized arsenic and other poisons on their unwitting victims demonstrates.  Notably, even as far as back as 1980 way before the release of Paul Verhoeven’s lesbo-inciting neo-noir Basic Instinct (1992), organized gusset-nuzzlers become quite pissy over the pseudo-artsy-fartsy thriller Windows (1980) directed by Gordon Willis because of its depiction of a stuttering socially retarded bourgeois broad becoming the love obsession of a lethally loony lesbo with a rather raspy voice who is murderously jealous of men and their members. Starring the somewhat strange guidette Talia Shire—the sister of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and ‘cinematic wife’ of Rocky Balboa of Rocky fame—as a sexual assault victim who also happens to be the object of insane infatuation of a deranged dyke who hired a sleazy taxi driver to molest her beloved ‘friend’ so she can use an audio recording of the molestation as an extra intimate masturbation aid, the film is also notable for being the first and last film directed by cinematographer turned one-time auteur Gordon Willis, who was responsible for the striking cinematography of such classics as Coppola's The Godfather trilogy (1972-1990), as well as Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), among various other notable works. Featuring a vaguely arthouse style that seems to attempt to blend Hitchcock with the La Nouvelle Vague, Windows was a five time nominee of the less than coveted Golden Raspberry Award (including Willis for ‘Worst Director,’ which Kubrick was also absurdly nominated for his as a consequence of his work on the now-classic film The Shining (1980)) and was later more or less disowned by the director, though not because he succumbed to Sapphic outrage as one would probably suspect, especially nowadays where everyone is afraid to offend the pink gestapo and gynocentric misandrists. While the closest thing to a dyke equivalent to William Friedkin’s killer cocksucker cult classic Cruising (1980) in terms of its themes and the controversy surrounding its release, Windows ultimately feels like a shallow celluloid tourist guide of late-1970s/early-1980s NYC and its landmark that had the potential to be great but hardly goes anywhere and never rewards the viewer in any way. Indeed, the film is just another example of how great cinematographers oftentimes make ludicrously lousy film directors, hence why Willis never directed another single film but instead wisely opted to spend the rest of his career shooting works for other directors. Like an aimlessly voyeuristic Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) meets the aesthetics of Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) meets a retarded smidgen of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and a weak impotent Maniac (1980), the film is basically a less than seamlessly synthesized hodgepodge of cinematic references with a misused score by maestro Ennio Morricone that ultimately adds up to nothing aside from an unfortunate wasted attempt to make a classic cult film about a crazed killer carpet-muncher. 

 Emily Hollander (Talia Shire) is a fiercely frigid and annoyingly soft-spoken introverted female who in the process of divorcing her pansy intellectual husband and unbeknownst to her, her raspy-voiced crypto-dyke friend and fellow assumed Jewess friend Andrea Glassen (Elizabeth Ashley) is completely infatuated with her to the point where she is willing to kill to send a sort of insanely eccentric esoteric message to her beloved in the form of sleazy sexual violence. In fact, Andrea is so decidedly deranged that she hires a ludicrously low-class white trash taxi driver to sexually assault Emily so she can have an audio masturbation aid source of sorts. Notably, Andrea has the unsavory molester use a tape recorder while he defiles Emily so that she can have an amorous audio gift that keeps on giving. Indeed, Andrea gets all hot and bothered listening to Emily moan in pain and distress, thereupon demonstrating she is a sadomasochistic Sappho. As a strange and introverted woman who stutters when she gets afraid and even owns an entire bookshelf worth of books on how to train yourself to stop stuttering, Emily certainly seems like a sort of mousy carpet-muncher and her seeming growing resentment for men only makes matters worse, so it is ultimately a sort of blessing in disguise in the end that she becomes the victim of a fierce fairy lady. In a most arrogant fashion, Andrea even attempts to coerce Emily into not telling a police offer about the circumstances of her attack and attacker by arguing, “You don’t have to tell him anything, you know…He’s never going to catch who did it.” Andrea also has the taxi driver come by Emily’s place again so that she can pretend to be the protagonist's savior by smashing the molester’s arm into door when he attempts to break in while acting as if she is as brave and as strong as a man or something absurd like that. Naturally, after being maliciously molested, Emily unsurprisingly decides to move to a new apartment on the other side of town and also soon starts a romance with an uncommonly empathetic and handsome police detective named Bob Luffrono (Joe Cortese), thus causing Andrea to become all the more insane with bloodlust and murderous jealously. Of course, Andrea decides to secretly rent a flat across a bridge from Emily’s new apartment and uses a telescope to spy on her every move in a creepily voyeuristic Rear Window-esque fashion. While Andrea regularly goes to a psychiatrist to get much needed psychological help, her shrink Dr. Marin (Michael Lipton) seems to make her all the more deranged and resentful.  Indeed, no amounting of talking and confessing can calm Andrea's rising rug-muncher rage.

 In a rather convenient instance of happenstance, Emily ends up taking a taxi that is driven by her attacker whose name is Leonard Obecny (Rick Petrucelli) and who only seems to subconsciously realize that he is driving around his victim, who he makes the mistake of being not so nice to thus exposing the same exact gutter-grade tone of voice that he used when assaulting the protagonist.  Ultimately, Emily begins to realize that the taxi driver is her attacker after he gets mad at her and violently screams at her for calling him ‘Leonard,’ rather rudely remarking to her, “Why do you keep calling me Larry? Lawrence is my name. Larry is bullshit.”  After coercing the taxi driver into pulling over she can use a payphone, Emily manages to get Leonard arrested and when he is in custody, he confesses that he has an accomplice but he absurdly tells the cops that he won’t tell them who his partner is unless they promise to let him go free. Needless to say, Andrea eventually begins to completely lose it due to Emily’s new relationship with cop Bob and begins murdering people, including her crush’s elderly Jewish neighbor Sam Marx (Michael Gorrin). Emily also gets quite the scare when she opens her freezer and finds her precious orange kitty cat frozen-to-death inside. When Andrea’s psychiatrist wisely attempts to have her committed, she violently slaughters him and heads to her secret loft so that she can plot to make Emily her sexual plaything. 

 Of course, Andrea eventually has Emily come to her apartment and it does not take the protagonist long after finding the crypto-carpet-muncher’s telescope to realize that she has spying on her and that she is the deranged stalker killer that killed her kitty cat and elderly friend. After Emily realizes that the telescope is pointed right at her apartment window, aberrosexual psycho-cunt Andrea appears out the darkness like a truly ghoulish gay gal and scares the shit out of the protagonist with her creepy lezzy lurker behavior. After scaring the hell out of Emily by smashing the telescope, Andrea becomes deleteriously delusional and cries “You can never love me…don’t lie to me. I couldn’t bear it if you lied to me,” so the protagonist lies and says she can learn to be a fairy lady. Ultimately, Emily ends up staying up all night with Andrea and the next morning the loony lesbo even admits to having hired taxi driver Leonard to molest her, bragging, “I could have hurt you but I didn’t. I kept it from happening.” Eventually, Andrea begins demanding that Emily take her shirt off just like Leonard did when he molested her while stating pathetic things like, “lift up the sweater” and “show me what you showed him.” When Emily continues to refuse to take off her sweater, Andrea suffers a violently pathetic and hysterical spastic attack as a result of feeling rejected, so the protagonist smacks her in the face and tells her to stop, thus causing the deranged dyke to cower and cry, “Don’t hurt me. Please, don’t hurt me,” as if she is an innocent victim and not a deadly sapphic she-bitch.  Of course, policeman Bob and his comrades eventually show up and arrest Andrea and assumedly send her to a prison where she will undoubtedly be able to cure her latent lesbianism. In the end, Emily states to Bob regarding Andrea, “She would have never done anything to me.” Indeed, although a mad murderess, Andrea is a prisoner of lady-lover love and would not dare to personnally physically hurt the object of her desire as she lacked the gall, hence why she hired a dirty half-retarded cabbie to do it for her. 

 While the idea of a film where an ambiguously Jewish and superlatively sexually repressed lesbo lunatic begins slaughtering people because she is too cowardly to confess her delusional love to her friend surely sounds intriguing, Windows is an absurdly aimless celluloid abortion that is as anti-climatic as pussy-on-pussy penetration. Notably, director Gordon Willis would later state about the film, “One of the mistakes I did in my life was to make that movie,” curiously adding, “The Germans and Swedes like it, though, for some reason,” thus indicating that the Germanic world might have a surplus population of sadomasochistic bean-flickers.  Apparently, Willis more regretted having to deal with the mental problems of high maintenance actors/actress than dealing with the theme of lunatic lesbos, or as he stated, “I've had a good relationship with actors…but I can do what I do and back off. I don't want that much romancing. I don't want them to call me up at two in the morning saying, ‘I don't know who I am.’” Ultimately, to appease his LGBT attackers, Willis would deny that the film was even actually about dykes, arguing, “WINDOWS is not about homosexuality – it’s about insanity,” as if the two things are always mutually exclusive.  Of course, the insanity depicted in the film is of the unequivocally deranged dyke sort, with the villainous fitting various carpet-muncher clichés in her perturbing mental pathologies, as she seems like some sort of frigid feminist leader who did not get her fair share of lecherous lady-loving. In the end, Windows seems like a botched cautionary tale that attempts to warn quasi-autistic and otherwise socially retarded women who have become disillusioned with men due to their own inadequacies about what might happen if the give up on heterosexuality and opt to convert to lily-licking. While Windows certainly demonstrates why Willis earned the nickname ‘The Prince Of Darkness’ due to the oftentimes dark and shadowy style of his cinematography, directing a film takes more effort than merely being able to immaculately frame a shot in appropriate lighting, which is something the cinematographer seemed to learn the hard way as the director of what is arguably the most banal lesbian thriller ever made. Indeed, Hungarian-German auteur Fred Kelemen is also a master of dimly lit cinematography yet the films he shot for Béla Tarr are far superior to anything he has ever directed himself. Additionally, Dutch cinematographer Jan de Bont managed help contribute to what is arguably the most strange and fiercely foreboding cinematic atmosphere of Dutch cinema history when he shot the Willem Frederik Hermans adaptation De blinde fotograaf (1973) aka The Blind Photographer directed by Adriaan Ditvoorst, but he ultimately sired one of the biggest and most horrendous Hollywood horror turds of the 1990s when he directed the The Haunting (1999). Admittedly, Windows is effective in one way in that it fills the viewer with a sense of revulsion for lesbians, especially those of the ostensibly cultivated NYC-bred Jewess sort, thus I can almost understand why gay groups would protest the film.  After all, at least William Friedkin's Cruising gives a certain dark romanticism to the S&M leather-fag realm, which certainly cannot be said of Willis' film, which makes dykes seem like the most bat-shit crazy yet paradoxically banal and lonely people around.

-Ty E