Review: "Angel Heart" (1987)

Here's another flick in the cannon of movies about New Yorkers who find themselves far from home, getting into all kinds of silliness.

Angel Heart stars Mickey Rourke at the height of his short-lived 1980s stardom as well as Robert De Niro in a supporting role. Rourke is a guy named Harry Angel, an NYC detective in 1955, who is hired by De Niro's character Louis Cyphre to find a deadbeat singer named Johnny Favorite. Angel locates Favorite in a mental institution upstate, only to find that he left more than a decade ago, the records of his residency at the institution cooked by a drug-addled, corrupt doctor. Angel discovers that Favorite made his way to New Orleans so Angel follows him there -- and then is dragged into a labyrinth of murder, the occult, and gumbo, plot twists abounding.

When this movie came out there was a lot of controversy. Just before its release in March of 1987, the MPAA forced the director to cut time out of some of its nastier scenes. But most of the controversy came from the casting of a young Lisa Bonet as a young New Orleans woman who holds clues to the mystery of the plot -- and has a really wild love scene with Rourke. At the time Bonet was on The Cosby Show, playing a wholesome character on a wholesome family show watched by over 30 million people per week (obviously Mr. Cosby himself wasn't that wholesome but that's another story). Anyway, Cosby and many of the squares were critical of Bonet appearing in this film, and a lot of critics just hated it. But Angel Heart has earned its place as the kind of sexy, rough, sensational movie for grown ups that we just don't see much of anymore.

The movie is worth seeing, however, for the great acting by Rourke, De Niro, Bonet, and the always luminous Charlotte Rampling. It's a movie with a lot of atmosphere, a lot of exotic mystique, worth seeing if you're in the mood for something "out there."