A trixie Halloween treat

It moves at a pace that’ll have the Ritalin generation upping their meds, but Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (1981) works as both a remembrance of 1950s lily-white idealism and a component of late-70s/early-80s New Wave. It was originally (and barely) released by the short-lived World Northal Films. I caught it in first run, prompted by enthusiastic notices in The Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice, along with its snazzy poster art (see below). Twenty-eight years later I finally revisited the bugger, on widescreen DVD from Synapse Films, and it hasn’t lost any of its fractured charm. Laughlin co-wrote the screenplay with a young Bill Condon (later of Gods and Monsters fame), resuscitating the mad scientist genre with an actor (Arthur Dignam) who had me thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the cast — Dan Shor (from the little-known Kubrick valentine Strangers Kiss), Dey Young, Louise Fletcher, Michael Murphy, Charles Lane, Scott Brady and an intoxicating Fiona Lewis — are close to excellent. There’s a Halloween party, tacky costumes, a Tor Johnson mask, and a choreographed dance number set to Lou Christie’s “Lightening Strikes,” all of it unspooling in a quiet Midwestern town… filmed in New Zealand, many years before hobbits and rings. It’s also worth watching with the lively DVD commentary by Condon, Dey and Shor. (You may want to avoid Laughlin and Condon’s très cheesy follow-up, Strange Invaders [1983]; it received some positive reviews back in the day but time has dimmed its gaudy sparkle.)

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Original poster art; click to enlarge