BLIND DATE

1984/USA/103 Minutes

Tagline-  The ultimate hi-tech thriller.

Description-

"A man goes blind trying to remember his girlfriend" goes the IMDB description. Rather the movie is about an obsessed man playing 'peeping tom' and stalking his institutionalized ex-girlfriend's look-alike, who later loses his eyesight on being chased by the girl's angry boyfriend.

'Blind Date' is a tepid thriller that delivers 90 minutes of melodrama and a half-cooked tale of romance and obsession, rather than any genuine thrills. Jonathan is an American working in Athens as an advertising executive; he has a hot secretary Claire as a devoted girlfriend, a job which allows him to ogle at hundreds of gorgeous models during swimsuit shoots, and a 'body double' of his ex-girlfriend whose house he conveniently breaks into whenever he wants. He is a creep and an opportunist, and as such the character evokes no sense of sympathy for the situations he lands up into. I actually wonder why a sweet and caring girl like Claire (played by Kirstie Allie) would want to stand up to a womanizing and insensitive guy like Jonathan. But then love is blind, right?

Meanwhile in the city, a maniac is killing women by cutting them up with surgical precision. He first attacks these women at their apartments, sedates them, and then makes them watch the decapitation of their own bodies.

One fine night, while spying on the body double, Jonathan is given a run by her enraged boyfriend and loses his eyesight on hitting a tree. The doctors cannot explain his situation, except that it was probably induced by stress (at seeing the resurrection of his 'lost girlfriend'). After this, an experimental scientist implants a visual stimulant 'microchip' in his brain, which allows perceiving objects through grids and lines (as in a computer projected 3D image). Jonathan then spends his time feeding computer game signals into his brain via a walkman type device which helps him in recognising objects, learning to cross roads, getting intimately acquainted with the 'lost' girlfriend by studying her curves while she sleeps at night etc. On one of his slightly surreptitious outings (his girlfriend does not appreciate a blind man walking alone), he 'sees' and hears a cab with a bad engine going near a block of apartments; some time after, a woman screams from the same place. Jonathan rushes in and comes face to face with the killer, the surgical killer, and manages to run to the rooftop where he has a narrow escape after police sirens scare the killer away.

Jonathan then traces the killer to Rachel's (the body double) apartment and engages in a cat and mouse game with him, culminating in the killer's grisly end.

The pacing of the movie is a major put off, as it takes ages for the suspense sequences to kick in; and it is fleeting when they finally do.  In three-fourth of the running time, there is a parallel drawn between Jonathan's dubious activities and the killer, with no point to connect the two. Thereafter, the blind protagonist bumps into the crazy killer right outside a crime scene and can only recall a human shape in the vaguest form, and a taxi with a screeching sound. However within minutes, he has actually traced the killer to Rachel with foresight that is inexplicable, considering that the character is mostly daft and inept in the first 70 minutes. The music is typical soapy romantic stuff of the 80's and thankfully minimal, while the character development is mostly superficial and sketchy, except for Kristen who is far more sympathetic than Jonathan deserves. Even for entertainment purposes, the movie falls flat at every level.

it is an interesting idea poorly executed, and it would have been much better if the 'chance meeting' between Jonathan and the killer had taken place earlier so that the former would have been on track of the killer sooner, and hence the end result more credible. Also, the sci-fi element boasted by the movie poster and advertisements is a mere gimmick, as the supposed high tech viewing equipment is very rudimentary, and at the very best it confuses our 'poor' Jonathan into wondering about what he had really seen (of course he got a brilliant brainwave afterwards !).

The movie has been released on Blu-Ray by boutique label Scorpion Releasing in 2018. The video is touted to be a 4K scan of the original negative, and while details and clarity are generally sharp, the picture does dip into softness here and there. Skin tones are neutral and balanced, while the 5.1 DTS-HD MA soundtrack is adequate. However, while dialogue exchanges are generally audible, the sound effects are a bit screechy. English subtitles have been provided, and extras include a theatrical trailer, the slightly longer theatrical cut in SD, still gallery, and a brief look into the career of the director Niko Mastorakis.