Yuppie NYC office worker Paul Hacketts (Griffin Dunne) has "a very strange night" when he meets Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette) at a coffee shop after work in SoHo, and gets her phone number. He calls her, she asks him to come over, they discuss Henry Miller, then things take a turn for the bizarre. His money flies out the cab window and he is stuck in SoHo. It turns into a waking nightmare when one mishap after another strands him in a hostile neighborhood in his quest to return home before morning. Two leather gays are shown kissing, a sure sign that there's something radically wrong. He finds himself the accused suspect in a string of burglaries in the neighborhood, becomes the object of a witch hunt by a posse of SoHo denizens, and can't find a way to get back uptown.
Paul spends the rest of the night trying to get home, dealing with angry cabbies, dead women (and their bartender husbands), clumsy catburglars, quirky sculptresses, unstable waitresses, condescending bouncers, and irate mobs led by ice cream truck drivers. The most offbeat character is neurotic Julie (Teri Garr) and the moment when Paul uses his last quarter to play Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" and dances with June (Verna Bloom) while an angry mob searches SoHo for him is an inspired bit of lunacy. Strangely, the seemingly disconnected events are interwoven in unusual and unexpected ways.
This black comedy becomes increasingly surreal. Many will find the jokes clever and funny. Others may find the film an excruciating series of staged circumstances setting up a sadistically cruel dark nightmare of horrors. A few lines of dialogue are so poorly written they remind you how unbelievable the thin story really is. But forgive the film these few lapses--overall it's a wild, entertaining ride with great performances, including a cameo by Cheech and Chong. The film is based on a screenplay that Joseph Minion wrote as part of an assignment for a film course at Columbia University. Howard Shore composed the original music, and Martin Scorsese directed.
