Larry Cohen’s career has always danced on the edge of brilliance and bad taste, like a drunken magician with a switchblade. When he’s on—It’s Alive, God Told Me To, The Stuff—he’s a maestro of high-concept pulp, a king of subversive B-movie madness. But 1984’s Perfect Strangers feels less like a wild swing at genre convention and more like a soggy, half-hearted stab in the dark.
The pitch? A mob hitman witnesses a murder… committed by a toddler. The child becomes a loose end. So what’s our killer’s next move? Seduce the boy’s mother, of course.
Cohen was known for weird. He made his living in the gutters between the genres, but here he slips on the oily premise and lands face-first in an ashtray of sleaze and tone-deaf character choices. Perfect Strangers wants to be a gritty urban thriller and a twisted romance, but instead it plays like Three Men and a Baby if one of them had a body count and the emotional depth of a broken vending machine.
Where’s the tension? Where’s the stakes? Where’s the point? Somewhere buried in New York’s underlit alleys, likely right next to the lighting budget.
Anne Carlisle (Liquid Sky) plays Sally, a woman whose entire character arc can be summed up as: “trusts a stranger too quickly, especially if he has cheekbones.” Meanwhile, Brad Rijn plays Johnny—the hitman with a heart of lukewarm tap water. He’s got all the menace of a bored cab driver and the charisma of a rusted shovel. There’s never any real fear, any spark, any reason to believe this pairing is anything more than Cohen needing to pad the runtime with sex scenes and moody, saxophone-laced glances.
And speaking of sex scenes—Jesus tap dancing Christ—there are moments in this movie that feel like a Cinemax After Dark episode wandered into a mob flick. Only without the conviction or budget of either. There’s more skin than suspense, and neither adds much.
What makes Perfect Strangers extra frustrating is that, like all Cohen films, it flirts with a good idea. A child witnessing a murder is classic noir setup. A killer torn between duty and guilt? Done well, it could be Shakespearean. But this is Cohen phoning it in from a payphone, in the rain, while high on cold cuts. The dialogue is leaden, the pacing feels like it’s been drinking, and even New York—the city that usually bleeds character—is reduced to a series of bland interiors and alley shots that feel like they were filmed during a coffee break.
And then there’s the kid. Cute? Sure. But we spend most of the film asking ourselves the hard questions: is he traumatized? Is he okay? Can toddlers really ID a hitman? The film treats his knowledge as both vital and completely irrelevant, depending on the scene.
Cohen was never about polish, and that’s part of his charm. But here, the grit isn’t stylized—it’s just dirty. The characters don’t arc so much as meander. The finale lands with the dull thud of a soggy diaper. And the whole thing reeks of an idea that should’ve been left on a cocktail napkin in a bar where they don’t even serve good whiskey.
In the end, Perfect Strangers feels like a fever dream from a filmmaker who forgot to take his temperature. It’s sleazy, sluggish, and strangely sex-obsessed in a way that undermines the thriller it’s trying to be. Even the kills feel lazy—like someone behind the camera was already thinking about their next project. And if you love Cohen, as I do, that might be the biggest betrayal of all.
One star.
And that’s being generous because I’m afraid the toddler might be watching.
