NAKED FEAR
A Bare Bones Production
Directed by Greg Lamberson
Produced by Marc Makowski
Starring Robert Sabin, Tommy Sweeney, Peggy Crown
By Roy Frumkes
Here's a direct-to-videoer that warrants a looksee. Greg Lamberson, its director and writer, is a stubborn man. Just because you don't hear from him for six years doesn't mean he isn't out there cooking up another project. Some of you may remember Slime City. I mentioned it recently in the News section.
Lamberson is into genre stories, which is fine for a genre-lover like me. But despite the fact that his new film satisfies genre expectations, that's not what I'm going to praise about it. Rather I'm going to cite Naked Fear for its intelligence and human heart. It's what was important about George Romero's work as he advanced after his Citizen Kane-ish debut with Night of the Living Dead. Romero's respect for humans, for his audience, and his self respect, will be the keystones of his work in the millennium to come. I recall that I sent him an advance copy of Street Trash, looking for a quote I could use in the ad campaign. He gladly gave me one, but off the record asked, "Couldn't you have made just one character sympathetic?" (I wrote it with that in mind, George, but the casting didn't send the film in that direction.)
Naked Fear has a human heart. Its male and female leads always seem real, vulnerable, and thoughtful. Lamberson never panders to some supposed lowbrow genre audience who can't take its characterizations fleshed out.
The narrative is driven by the central character's crippling agoraphobia, an emotional illness, which, in its extreme forms, confines its host to his or her apartment, often for years or decades. Recently, it was revealed that Sandra Dee, the beautiful pixie of the '60s soap, following the death of Bobby Darin, fell into an anorexic/agoraphobic-related depression and missed a few decades of her life. Not, fortunately for all of us, as common an affliction as, say, psoriasis or reflux disease, agoraphobia nonetheless affects enough Americans to warrant a film or two being made about it.
And in fact, one was made several years ago called Inside Out, with Elliot Gould as the protagonist imprisoned by his irrational fears, and Jennifer Tilly as his order-up sex mate. While that was a laudably experimental off-Hollywood film, Naked Fear is better. It may not feature performances as skilled as Gould and Tilly, but it goes further with the concept, and manages to humanize it more while keeping its grislier goals in mind. Here's a guy who¹s been confined to his apartment for some time, and decides that getting a roommate would be a first step in the right direction. Sadly--and this is a more universal horror than his emotional disease--he makes a bad choice and is trapped with it.
Fun idea? You bet. It's a very low budget outing, and it practically goes without saying that such films fall prey to the weaknesses inherent in no-budget efforts. But it's filled with creeping suspense and horror, solid photography and art direction, and you wouldn't be squirming in your chair nearly as much if you didn't care for the characters. Naked Fear opens in June with evening screenings at the "Den of Cin" in Lower Manhattan. If you don't catch it there, look for it in video stores.