Film Review: 'Angel Heart' (1987)

Robert De Niro plays Louis Cypher -- get it? -- a hood who wants Mickey Rourke to find a singer who signed a contract with him in Alan Parker's Angel Heart.

Angel Heart (1987), directed by Alan Parker; starring Robert De Niro, Mickey Rourke, Charlotte Rampling, and Lisa Bonet. Based on the novel, Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg.

Angel Heart had a hard time attracting an audience when it first came out in the late 80s. That may have been because it’s an oddball brew of different genres — Satanic Panic, film noir, Southern Gothic, and slasher. It was generally ridiculed by critics, most of whom hated seeing America’s Sweetheart of the 80s, Lisa Bonet, playing a prostitute and dancing around with a headless chicken in a weird voodoo ritual. (The chicken scene isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the critics claimed.)

Today, Angel Heart is considered a horror masterpiece. It’s also the only horror film ever directed by Alan Parker, who is mostly known as the helmsman of gritty dramas like Mississippi Burning (1988) and musicals like The Commitments (1991). Despite his lack of genre cred, Parker manages to turn in a glossy, high-class — if rather gory — horror film that sticks with the viewer long after the final credits roll.

The atmosphere is excellent, as Parker establishes a smokey, hard-boiled vibe that recalls Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown (1973). Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, a down-on-his luck New York private eye with a Chandleresque-sized case of world-weariness.

Harry's desperate for work and jumps at a missing persons case offered by a new client named Louis Cypher (Robert De Niro), who appears to be a small-time hood. And he’s a very sinister hood indeed, as he sports over-long fingernails filed to sharp points, and speaks in a weird philosophical cadence about things like why eggs "are the symbols of the soul." Plus, if his first name is shortened to “Lou," his full name becomes just a little, umm, suggestive of quite another identity. But Harry doesn’t catch on, the sap. He thinks that Lou's name is a made-up joke.

Cypher hires Harry to find a singer named Johnny Favorite, who disappeared during the war (the story is set in the 50s), shortly after Cypher signed him to an exclusive management contract. Harry snoops around and finds that Favorite’s trail leads to New Orleans, where he bumps into Favorite’s ex-wife Margaret (Charlotte Rampling), and Toots Sweet (played by the blues singer Brownie McGee), a jazzman who peformed with Favorite. Margaret swears that Johnny's dead, but Harry doesn't buy it.

Strangely, almost everyone whom Harry interrogates in New Orleans ends up dead, usually in a horribly gruesome way. Like, for example, having a head shoved into a pot full of boiling Louisiana crawfish. But Harry still doesn’t catch on, the sap.

Eventually he hooks up with one Epiphany Proudfoot (Bonet) a teenage prostitute who turns out to be Favorite’s illegitimate daughter. (She also likes to dabble in voodoo/hoodoo, hence the infamous chicken-sacrificing scene.) Harry falls in love with Epiphany—which sadly means that her future life span is not extensive. Poor Epiphany.

As the film ends in a wicked twist, Harry has a confrontation with Cypher and finds out Cypher’s true identity— as well as his own, thus revealing the fact that Harry is an even bigger sap than the one Fred MacMurray played in Double Indemnity (1944).

On disc and streaming; strong recommend.