Tom Guycot live performance + Clay Borris's Quiet Cool (1986)
July 24, 2012
PhilaMOCA
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Presented as part of Tuesday Tune-Out, a film and live music series curated by Herb Shellenberger & Black Circle Cinema
Inspired by the stark and eerie sounds of early electronic film scores and library recordings, the atmospheric synthscapes of Tom Guycot evoke fantasies of abandoned cities at night, where uncertainty and fear lurk at each turn. Performance with VHS montage arranged by Tom Guycot.
Quiet Cool, Clay Borris, 1986, US, VHS, 80'
Quiet Cool is an action film set in the leafy Northwest, in a town whose marijuana growers object mightily to the efforts of one New York City policeman (James Remar) to cramp their style. The policeman and a teen-age sidekick (Adam Coleman Howard), acting as a kind of Rambo and Son, execute a wide variety of impalings, hookings and garrotings, not to mention the usual gunplay. Quiet Cool follows Joe Dillon (Mr. Remar, who has a suitable tough-guy style and often looks as if he’s just eaten something awful) from New York to a woodsy little place called Babylon. He is summoned there by an old girlfriend (Daphne Ashbrook) who’s worried about some missing relatives. She runs a store that does especially good business in camouflage netting and gardening tools. ”O.K.,” she tells Joe, giving him a tour of Babylon, ”so it’s not SoHo. But it used to be a terrific place.” But now the town is dominated by three color-coordinated baddies—silent, stone-faced killers with white, black and red hair—and a lawman (Jared Martin) who’s in cahoots with them." —Janet Maslin, New York Times, 11/8/86
