Andy Warhol's Heat

Uncut - 08/01/2005
"[A] high-camp, lo-budget send-up of HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD."

Sight and Sound - 11/01/2005
"[A] wittily bathetic homage to SUNSET BOULEVARD."

Joe hits Los Angeles as an unemployed former child star in a fast and funny look at fleeting fame where an affair with fallen star Sylvia Miles (Midnight Cowboy) results in hilarious complications. Directed by Paul Morrisey and produced by Andy Warhol.

HEAT is the third in the FLESH/TRASH/HEAT trilogy by director Paul Morrissey, in collaboration with his friend Andy Warhol, which captures the essence of some failed American lives. In Morrissey's detached and thoroughly Warholian take on Billy Wilder's SUNSET BOULEVARD, Joe Dallesandro plays Joey Davis, an oversexed has-been child star who arrives at a seedy and sex-drenched poolside motel. There Joey meets Jessica, a frumpy and burned-out fellow motel resident, and learns that her mother is the aging and fading movie star Sally Todd, who was also his former costar. Joey's half-baked aspirations for stardom lead him to the beds of almost every character he meets, and he eventually forges a sordid liaison with Sally and moving into her crumbling Hollywood Hills mansion. Joey half-heartedly fends off the advances of Jessie, as well as Sally's ex-husband's live-in lover and anyone else who comes along with something to offer. The mostly ad-libbed dialogue and ramshackle cast of characters create a shambling and hysterical chain of nonevents that lead to a torpid California poolside anticlimax. Morrissey's meandering camerawork and loosely structured plot structure allows the actors' magnetic and manic personalities to take over, as the minutiae of their failed ambitions and sordid habits are scrutinized by the lazy and all-seeing eye of the handheld camera. Despite its comic meandering and satirical overtone, HEAT pinpoints the zeitgeist of 1970s Los Angeles with an unrelenting look at the lives of these Hollywood has-beens and their empty worldview.

Racy | Theatrical Release

Genre:

• Drama Movies

Movie Categories:

• Comedies