Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10208 in VHS
• Released on: 1995-02-21
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 96 minutes

Amazon.com
This well-regarded cult film is a tense Kafka-esque tale concerning what happens to a likable computer guy who is in the wrong place at the wrong time in the city that never sleeps--New York. This is a New York infested with bizarre characters vividly brought to life by a once-in-a-lifetime cast. Griffin Dunne's wonderfully controlled comic performance as Paul Hackett is the glue that holds this increasingly surreal film together. Scorsese utilizes a full array of independent and underground film techniques, including special film speed manipulations, angles, and edits, deftly capturing the strange rhythms of an after-hours New York City. Many will find the jokes clever, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Some, however, will find the film an excruciating series of staged circumstances setting up a sadistically cruel dark nightmare of horrors. And there are a few lines of dialogue 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, surreal ride. The most offbeat character is the beehive-sporting, Monkee-obsessed neurotic played to perfection by Teri Garr. And the moment when Griffin Dunne uses his last quarter to play Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" and dances with Verna Bloom while an angry mob searches SoHo for him is an inspired bit of lunacy. --Christopher J. Jarmick

Customer Reviews

makes you wish scorsese would make more comedies
Uptown east side guy finds himself in an entirely new world, even though it's on the same island of Manhattan. This is not a new theme but I doubt if I've ever seen it carried out as far as Scorsese's AFTER HOURS. Griffin Dunne is perfect as the Everyman from a safe neighborhood who, on the hunt for a date (Roseanne Arquette in a very eerie role), finds himself in the artsy/clubby/s&m world of SOHO and the West Village.

The result is a hilarious black comedy with great performances, including a cameo by Cheech and Chong. Scorsese' pacing is breathtaking and right on the money. One of my favorite moments is when a large group of would-be vigilantes try to chase down Griffin Dunne, and their "armored vehicle" is an ice cream truck. There is too much going on here to describe in one review. Just give this one viewing, and you'll be glad you stayed up late to watch.

Quirky Comedy From Scorsese
After tackling heavy topics in his previous films, Scorsese made a departure from form and directed a comedy. But even for Scorsese, a comedy entails a word processor's date with a nice girl turning into an infinitely Kafka-esque nightmare where one bad episode follows another. I recall seeing "After Hours" at the time and considered it to be unlike any film I'd ever seen. It still holds up well. The only films akin to the work Scorsese has done here may be the work of the Coen brothers. Griffin Dunne is great as the harried lead and he is complemented with a great supporting cast. A minor criticism of the film is that the indignities heaped on Dunne may be a little overdone at times.

Watch this before you die
This film was one of the many things that my boyfriend and I found in common when we first met. When we first started dating we would go out into Soho and have 'After Hours' nights, although not quite to the surreal extent of this film, obviously! As unlikely, bizarre and downright WEIRD as the sequence of events in this film is, I find it completely inspirational. Our cities are full of strange characters and odd goings-on, but most of us walk around in little bubbles, oblivious (or blind) to it all. After watching this film, I opened my eyes a little wider.

Teri Garr is fantastic - nice but scary. Rosanna Arquette plays the role of her career. And New York itself is irrestistible - not the shiny slick metropolis that we are usually presented with, or the gangster-ridden crime land, but a human, vulnerable, strange and at times silly city full of secret compartments and surprises. A star! I want to watch this film at least once a year, for the rest of my life. It's a classic.