Tattoo (1981)

A troubled tattoo artist has designs on a model.

Director:

Bob Brooks

Writers:

Bob Brooks (story), Joyce Buñuel (screenplay)

Stars:

Bruce Dern, Maud Adams, Leonard Frey

1 nomination.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Bruce Dern	...	Karl Kinsky
Maud Adams	...	Maddy
Leonard Frey	...	Halsey
Frederikke Borge	...	Sandra (as Rikke Borge)
John Getz	...	Buddy
Peter Iacangelo	...	Dubin
Alan Leach	...	Customer
Cynthia Nixon	...	Cindy
Trish Doolan	...	Cheryl
Anthony Mannino	...	George
Lex Monson	...	Dudley
Patricia Roe	...	Doris
Jane Hoffman	...	Teresa
Robert Burr	...	Ralph
John Snyder	...	Hawker

Storyline

Karl Kinsky, an unbalanced tattoo artist, becomes dangerously obsessed with Maddy, a model he meets when he's hired to paint temporary tattoos on a group of women for a photo shoot. As his obsession grows, Kinsky becomes increasingly determined that Maddy should bear his "mark" ... forever.

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Plot Keywords:

tattoo | artist | tattoo artist | model | male rear nudity | 

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Taglines:

His twisted passion for her and her desire to escape, mark their lives forever.

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Genres:

Drama | Horror | Thriller

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

9 October 1981 (USA)

Also Known As:

Intohimon merkki

Filming Locations:

Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Joseph E. Levine Productions, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Technical Specs

Runtime:

103 min

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Did You Know?

Trivia

First, final and only ever feature film written or directed by Bob Brooks.

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Quotes

Karl Kinsky: Usually they're women that are ready to identified, ready to belong. Women that need the mark in order to exist. It's nothing new. It's actually been going on for centuries.

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Connections

Featured in At the Movies: Winners That Were Losers (1983)

User Reviews

Strange, symbolic and stupid, but if you like films about masturbating loonies...

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.