Nicole (1978)

Some bad movies survive because they’re entertainingly inept, some endure because they belong to popular genres, and others remain as documents of early work by people who later became stars. And then there are movies like Nicole, also known as Crazed, which linger because of boobs. Specifically, lowbrow distributor Troma’s video marketing for Nicole accentuates the fact that supporting actress Catherine Bach, of The Dukes of Hazzard fame, does a topless scene. Yet those who seek Nicole for an erotic charge are in for a shock: Nicole is confusing, strange, and unpleasant. Leslie Caron stars as Nicole, an insane rich bitch who builds a surrogate family of sycophants. She toys with people, for instance compelling Bach’s character to get a nose job and then secretly redecorating the young woman’s apartment and replacing the young woman’s wardrobe. Nicole seems vaguely interested in having a lesbian affair with Bach’s character, and yet Nicole also seems to recruit a young male lover for the woman, and to recruit an age-appropriate male lover for herself. Or maybe some of these people have a threesome. You see, the problem with Nicole—okay, one of the problems—is that cowriter/director István Ventilla employs such a pretentious, splintered storytelling style that it’s often difficult to understand what’s happening. Moments get cut up and fragmented, audio is juxtaposed with picture in seemingly random patterns, and behavior is never explained. Case in point: The movie opens with an everyman (Ramon Bieri) discovering his wife in bed with another man and then killing both of them. Cut to the same man working as Nicole’s driver. How did they meet? Does she know what he did? Were the murders investigated? Who knows? Who cares? As a leading character, Nicole is one of those bizarre screenwriter inventions, a collection of perversions and tics without any psychological glue, so Caron is seductive and urbane in one scene, hysterical and violent in the next. As with all things Nicole, nothing about the performance makes sense, and very little of it is interesting to watch.

Nicole: LAME