As Good As Dead - The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.

As Good As Dead
USA 1995. Director: Larry Cohen
Cast: Crystal Bernard, Judge Reinhold, Traci Lords

Larry Cohen alert. Susan (Bernard) is a lonely orphean girl who lives for her work and pretty much nothing else. One day she meets Nickie (Traci Lords), a smalltime thief and fulltime sexbomb. When Nickie suddenly gets urgently sick Susan drives her to the hospital. Only Nickie hasn't got any insurance so the girls temporarily swift identity so Nickie can get the needed operation. But when Susan the next day comes back to the hospital she learns that Nickie has died during the night. Which means that Susan is dead. Suddenly she has no identity, no money, no home, no job. She is as good as dead.

This is, of course, the classic Larry Cohen plot. When chaos reign, New York's finest shines. Crystal Bernard (once in Slumber Party Massacre 2) is a very unusual Cohen lead in that she is female. Cohen has always favored fast-talking, neurotic male New York actors who more or less only acts as Cohen's alter ego. People like Eric Bogosian, Alan Arkin and, let's not forget, Michael Moriarty. In that retrospect Bernard does a fair job with a character who is pretty much a female counterpart to Eric Roberts in Cohen's underrated and much better The Ambulance. The unfortunate soul trapped in a series of circumstances caused by a seemingly innocent occurance slowly taking off into absurdum. Cohen, like his biggest influence Alfred Hitchcock, loves to take completely ordinary things going on around us on an every day basis and mess around with it. What if this or that happened instead of this? What if the ambulance didn't take you to the hospital? What if the food starts to eat you? What if an ancient Quetzalcoatl began to attack people in the middle of New York City? What if you one day woke up and found out that you've been erased form all systems? But what ultimately prevents As Good as Dead from being a Larry Cohen classic and instead turns it into mediocre is that Cohen pushes his joke a few steps too far this time, to a point where it stops being scary and instead becomes just too far-fetched and goofy and where the TV-style direction and strangely frisky performance by Judge Reinhold doesn't do much to help. And where the hell is James Dixon?