Tattoo (1981)

Memorable, crazy movie

Brilliant and touching

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

"Tattoo" drew my attention purely by chance. I was reading up on some movies with similar plot involving psychotic love and abduction, and "Tattoo" just happened to be among them. I didn't know what to expect, but I was willing to check it out. Kind of a nice surprise, really, this movie is no deep character study, it's not terrifying, nor violent or brutal, it's just pretty good. Bruce Dern is a very good choice when it comes to roles of deeply disturbed characters, and he can do a good job showing all the layers that mentally unstable can be coated with. The anger, sympathy, obsession and violence are all within him, and Maude Adams is just along for the ride.Two of them are fully compatible on screen and the movie is done by the numbers, the plot steadily flows and the story unfolds to the end, which I didn't think was right, at first, I expected something else, but the mixture of emotions within Maude Adams, should have produced the combination of love and hate that ended the movie. Worth seeing.

Extremely seamy psychological drama with a thriller-movie undermining which never quite comes to the surface. Tattoo artist, covered with ink himself, kidnaps a fashion model and begins plying his trade on her unmarked flesh. Combines "Lipstick" with half-a-dozen pictures in which Bruce Dern does his bug-eyed routine (a yawner even in 1981). Supporting cast is unusually strong, with Leonard Frey, John Getz, Jane Hoffman, and Cynthia Nixon in smaller roles. As the model, Maud Adams flashes the requisite amount of skin, yet the role itself is unattractive and it failed to give the real-life fashion star that added boost as an actress. Arty cinematography attempts to turn the sleazy milieu into a smoky, seductive modern noir; but, with such vapid characters out front, one loses interest long before the film has finished. *1/2 from ****

I had high hopes "Tattoo" would be a minor gem. The ingredients were there - Bruce Dern doing what he does best: playing a psycho, the superb Leonard Frey has a minor role, a script is by a Bunuel and the plot concerns the rarely explored world of tattoos. Yet what we get is soft porn, bad acting and a ridiculously pretentious ending. Okay, so Dern is great as the masturbating, obsessive tattoo artist but the casting of Maud Adams as the object of his obsession is incredibly off. Looking like someone who just crawled out of an airbrush-laden mid-seventies Playboy issue, Adams is about as attractive as drying paint, but not quite as talented.The script is heavily misjudged also, constructed so we come to sympathize with Dern, yet halfway switches to having Adams the protagonist, which fails as attributed to her shallow and bitchy portrayal. And there is the film's major flaw, with no-one to sympathize with the film lacks the power and suspense it so desires. On the plus side it looks great, with wonderful cinematography which somehow even manages to evoke atmosphere from the proceedings on occasion. Also we get a cameo from a teenage Cynthia Nixon, Miranda from "Sex in the City", who impresses with what little screen time she has. "Tattoo" ends on a symbolic note which some may find profound, but most will see it for what it really is - turgid and pointless.Rent "Magic" or "The Collector" instead.One and a half out of four.

This story makes has me thinking what makes a man so twisted that he becomes deeply obsessed with the woman he loves the most. (Academy Award Nominee Bruce Dern) portrays Karl Kinski a tattoo artist who develops a twisted obsession for a model that he desires the most. Maud Adams (also known as one of the bond girls who was in both The Man with Golden Gun and Octopussy) portrays Maddy, the model that Karl desires the most. This has received a little bit of controversy surrounding the issue of the poster the shows a woman to her ankles. There was also another rumor if whether the sex scene between Maud Adams and Bruce Dern was either real or just an illusion. I don't know how to rate this film, but the point of this film was that it that there are crazed obsessives who lurk among us. To be honest this was a good film.