Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.