When I rented this from Netflix, they initially sent the wrong disc and I ended up with Michael Mann's action thriller. As unfortunate as that is, I would imagine the shock of the person who was expecting Mann's movie and got Morrissey's "Heat" instead. Certainly both are about the seedy underground of LA. The resemblance ends there.
Honestly, in terms of the Flesh, Trash, and Heat trilogy, Heat is my least favorite. As a parody of Sunset Boulevard it is a little hilarious, but it lacks the raw fractured style of the New York films with their broken soundtracks and even more deadbeat people. There is some pretty shocking and uncomfortable stuff in Heat but the motivations are the same old story, greedy and superficial people in Hollywood using each other for a false sense of entitlement. Morrissey and crew delight in making everything scandalous, like an invented version of Hollywood Babylon. I found watching the wretched scum of New York junkies and prostitutes to be much more mesmerizing and horrifying, even though all three movies are essentially about selfish people.
Joe Dallesandro has actually come into his own as an actor at this point--he's somewhat believable as the lackadaisical child star mooch just looking to screw his way through life, and almost succeeding but for the destructive attitude of Jessie (Andrea Feldman). With the brighter exteriors and the more colorful (and bigger) locations, Heat doesn't look or feel all that much different from an early John Waters film. It's pretty weird to watch movies made by people not specifically interested in making the movie's production value great, but watching it go up anyway as if by force of habit. Heat is far removed from the nearly senseless mashing of imagery and sound that was Flesh, and in a way that improvement is regrettable. On the other hand, the idea and the topic of the films are kept consistent, and that is really what matters.
--PolarisDiB
Honestly, in terms of the Flesh, Trash, and Heat trilogy, Heat is my least favorite. As a parody of Sunset Boulevard it is a little hilarious, but it lacks the raw fractured style of the New York films with their broken soundtracks and even more deadbeat people. There is some pretty shocking and uncomfortable stuff in Heat but the motivations are the same old story, greedy and superficial people in Hollywood using each other for a false sense of entitlement. Morrissey and crew delight in making everything scandalous, like an invented version of Hollywood Babylon. I found watching the wretched scum of New York junkies and prostitutes to be much more mesmerizing and horrifying, even though all three movies are essentially about selfish people.
Joe Dallesandro has actually come into his own as an actor at this point--he's somewhat believable as the lackadaisical child star mooch just looking to screw his way through life, and almost succeeding but for the destructive attitude of Jessie (Andrea Feldman). With the brighter exteriors and the more colorful (and bigger) locations, Heat doesn't look or feel all that much different from an early John Waters film. It's pretty weird to watch movies made by people not specifically interested in making the movie's production value great, but watching it go up anyway as if by force of habit. Heat is far removed from the nearly senseless mashing of imagery and sound that was Flesh, and in a way that improvement is regrettable. On the other hand, the idea and the topic of the films are kept consistent, and that is really what matters.
--PolarisDiB