cult film freak: SUE LYON KILLING STANLEY KUBRICK FOR 'MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD'

Sue Lyon in MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD Year: 1973 Rating: ***

On the surface, Spanish low-budget director Eloy de la Iglesia's MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD is set in a future where young gangs are directly influenced by Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and speed around pulling off home invasions almost exactly like that movie, banned in Europe during this time...

Meanwhile, handsome doctor Jean Sorel is experimenting on a way to shock criminals into submission to become normal citizens, also like the Kubrick classic, one of his most controversial since LOLITA...

Sue Lyon in MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD

Enter that film's teenage starlet turned thirty-something beauty Sue Lyon, who went from studio films to exploitation b-movies, wherein MURDER aka CLOCKWORK TERROR is the epitome of...

But the best scenes exist beyond the whole ORANGE copycat, centering on Lyon, as Sorel's head nurse and semi-girlfriend, who's so rich and lonely she murders equally lonely (and equally beautiful) men in scenes straight from a kind of melancholy/arthouse giallo that BLUE WORLD mirrors more than the offbeat sci-fi homage/satire intended...

Sue Lyon in MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD

More scenes should have been given to Sue Lyon as the surreptitious costume-wearing, nightclub-frequenting, bedroom-seducing, black-widow-like killer providing a slow-burn intensity perfectly suited for a cult starlet usually prone to victims, and less to her own personal stalking blackmailer in a bland Christopher Mitchum, member of a "droogie" style gang that he seems to both co-lead and be bullied by...

Enveloped in a deliberately doubly-ironic curio where one of the most famous Kubrick starlets not only exists in a violent CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style WORLD, but at one point even reads that book by Nabokov before broodingly yet delightfully adding to the violent body count terror — that's all her own.