Reviews & Ratings for
Clean, Shaven More at IMDbPro »

Filter:

Best Chronological Prolific Authors Loved It Hated It Hide Spoilers:

Page 1 of 5:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Index

44 reviews in total

---

42 out of 48 people found the following review useful:
Clean, Shaven (1994), 17 January 2004

Author: ManhattanBeatnik from Waynesville, OH

Viewers will have one of two reactions to Clean, Shaven (1994): they'll either be repelled by it and find it overly disturbing, or they'll be repelled by it and find it fascinating. Either way, it won't prove to be an easy one-and-a-half-hours to sit through; but as far as MY reaction goes, I was in the latter group. Every year there's a batch of disappointing thrillers, and this year was no different (with the exception of the wildly acclaimed Pulp Fiction, of course). But Clean, Shaven managed to transcend these expectations and deliver a psychologically thrilling experience unlike any other. The story may seem unoriginal, and it most likely is, but it's explored in an entirely unique way: a schizophrenic man (Peter Greene in one of his most powerful performances) is searching for his daughter while being hunted by a detective (new-comer Robert Albert, in a role that would have been tailor-made for Harvey Keitel) who suspects him of being a child serial killer. But the plot is marginalized, almost to the point of being insignificant; the REAL thrills arise from the direction and the editing. Not since David Lynch's Eraserhead has there been a picture as shocking or unsettling as Clean, Shaven; whether it's a simple shot of the sea or a close-up of a wood splinter in a man's finger, every single frame of the film is saturated with an unbearable amount of tension. Combine this with a genuinely creepy score and a startling mix of brief and long cuts, and you have an entirely eerie ambiance that will haunt you long after the credits are over. While I never had the opportunity to catch this film in a theater, I would bet that at least one or two people walked out during every showing; not because it's long (in fact, it runs at a mere 80 minutes) or because it's too violent (you'd find more violence in the latest blockbuster action flick), but because all of the violence in Clean, Shaven comes extremely close-to-home. When you see someone's head being severed by a machete -- as you might in your typical Hollywood movie --, you might not even flinch because it's obvious that the incident is highly stylized; but when you see someone cutting into his own finger with a knife and removing his fingernail -- which is just one of the many shocking acts seen throughout the picture --, you can hardly bear to watch it. Some might find this gratuitous or even exploitative, but those who have this reaction are obviously missing the point: while we (as an audience) are willing to endure countless shoot-em-up cop movies, the moment we see something mildly resemblant of true violence, we find it horrific and intolerable. But this is just one aspect of an immensely complex picture, the most compelling facet of which is Greene's performance -- which is really less of a performance and more of a total immersion into the character. Every fidget, every bloodshot stare, and every act of self-mutilation is perfectly horrid. Remember the infamous scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in which the voodoo priest rips the heart out of a man's chest? Well, Greene comes off as the sort of person who could do that to himself at any minute -- THAT'S the kind of tension that's delivered from start to finish. Clean, Shaven is the debut feature of writer/director/producer Lodge H. Kerrigan, and -- needless to say -- I highly look forward to what he has to offer us next. Filmed with a low budget and a minimal cast, this film packs more thrills and chills than any other big-budgeted studio release of this or ANY year. While it might not be a perfect movie, Clean, Shaven does something different with its genre and it does it well, and that is indeed something worth applauding.

Grade: A-

---

27 out of 29 people found the following review useful:
astoundingly well made beautiful film, 5 February 2004
Author: ro6ot from providence RI usa

sorry, this isn't a Hollywood movie about schizophrenia, its not a killer/thriller, its not a gross~out picture, and its not boring. Not being schizophrenic myself i can't attest to the strict accuracy of the impression one is left with. All I can say for sure is that this is without question one of the most strangely beautiful, compassionate, powerful pieces of art i have ever seen.

The story is ultimately incredibly frustrating and deeply tragic, much like the life of its protagonist; poignant and scary start to finish. the cinematography captures the absurd beauty of the natural world and juxtaposes it with the terrifying strangeness of feeling utterly disconnected therefrom. Peter suffers from random auditory hallucinations, so we do to. He is deeply paranoid and almost utterly lost in the world; its clear someone is out to get him, and we are never sure whether he actually hurt anyone or not.

If you want to be spoon~fed something you've already experienced many times before, this isn't the movie for you. But if you appreciate being challenged, forced even, to see the world through a very different lens, you should really see this movie if you haven't already.

---

21 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
This film broke my heart, 18 April 2006

Author: tbyrne4 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I have spent a reasonable amount of time around schizophrenics and I can safely say that this is the clearest and most empathetic portrait of that illness I have ever seen. Harmony Korine's "Julien-Donkey Boy" is a brilliant movie and is accurate but it doesn't record the horror and sadness and isolation as well as "Clean Shaven". Korine's film is also much more light-hearted. David Cronenberg's excellent "Spider" is (as all Cronenberg's films are) more about David Cronenberg and his recurring themes (re-birth, degeneration, transformation) than it is about schizophrenia.

BASIC Plot line: Peter Winter is a young schizophrenic recently either released or escpaed from a mental institution. He keeps a shotgun in the trunk of his car and the film hints that he may be behind a series of child murders, although this is left vague. Peter desperately wants to see his daughter. The girl's mother died and Peter's mother put the girl up for adoption, fearing she would turn out to be schizophrenic as well. The bulk of the film is Peter's trek to find his daughter and the police's search for the child killer.

This is an absolutely captivating and brilliant film. It makes superb and beautiful use of sound. The viewer is thrust into the mind of a schizophrenic. We are constantly bombarded with images and sounds that Peter is hearing. A jumbled mass of static squelching, radio dialing, sonic squeals, abrasive voices, airplane wooshes, white noise, etc. Trees fly by. Black and white photos drift past. The film is a mad image collage, constantly shifting and moving. It's a torment. We understand that to live the life of a schizophrenic is to live in hell. Truly.

In the center of the chaos is Peter Greene's beautiful lead performance. Tragically handsome, with bright blue eyes and blonde hair. He looks like the all-American boy. Except for the insane light shining in his eyes.

The final scenes, where Peter finally gets to speak to his daughter, broke my heart. The young girl who plays the daughter has one of the most hauntingly sad faces you'll ever see in a film. When she asks Peter if her mother is really dead, the blank longing in her face will haunt me forever.

The last image of the film will always stay with me. It sweeps away any vestiges of creepiness the story accumulates and forces you to realize that schizophrenics are human beings as well. Simply because someone has a mental disorder does not mean that they are not human. The last image shows Peter's daughter trying desperately to reach out to him, because their time together was so precious but so short.

This film absolutely broke my heart. Extraordinarily sad.

---

24 out of 28 people found the following review useful:
Excellent, 5 August 2004

Author: ssaffell from Redondo Beach

Forget "A Beautiful Mind". This film has a true and simple soul. "Clean, Shaven" is a powerful and insightful look into the world of the paranoid. That it is a low budget "indie" only adds to it's effect. Hollyweird has lost it's ability to produce quality films like this one. It is an "Ox Bow Incident" for the schizophrenics of the world. From the sound effects to Peter Greene's seamless performance, this film never ceases to amaze me. That people stop watching after the first five minutes only proves the point the film is trying to make. He acts "weird" so he must be a deranged killer or a predatory pedophile. It's an indictment of the ever present "Burn them at the stake" mentality. Two thumbs up ...

---

21 out of 29 people found the following review useful:
Incredible, 4 August 1998

Author: Boyo-2

Peter Greene is amazing in this unforgettable movie. Too bad only about 17 people in the world have seen it. It is almost impossible to watch at times, but always fascinating. I will never forget some of the images from this movie for as long as I live. Lodge Kerrigan is a genius, if you ask me.

---

18 out of 25 people found the following review useful:
Ranks with "Spider" as two best portrayals of schizophrenia, 28 June 2004
Author: Roland Atkinson (psychflix@comcast.net)

Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is a tormented schizophrenic man who is let out of a hospital despite suffering from extreme symptoms of nearly continuous auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and a highly fragmented, discontinuous sense of reality. His one steady goal is to find his young daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who has begun a new life as an adoptee, following the murder of her mother. Peter first visits his own mother, a taciturn, emotionally withholding woman who is not at all pleased to see him. Later he discovers his daughter's whereabouts, when her adoptive mother brings Nicole to visit her grandmother (who is as chilly toward Nicole as she is toward Peter). Meanwhile, a police detective (Robert Albert), searching for a serial child killer, has concluded that Peter is his man. A fateful ending is set up when the detective encounters Peter with Nicole at an isolated beach.

There are serious flaws in this film: the screenplay is not well wrought and is too full of ambiguities, especially the entire serial child killing subplot. This is highly distracting. The acting is second rate, except for Greene's and MacDonald's performances. The film's strength lies in Kerrigan's insightful deployment of sound, setting and other effects to create the clinical realism of Peter's schizophrenic experience. Peter's intense, perpetual fear is palpable. Much of the film is shot in his car, where he has placed masking tape over the mirror, and newspaper over several windows, to fortify his privacy. The effect is an impacted atmosphere of paranoid insulation. Peter's hallucinated auditory experience – garbled voices, static and other noise, unaccompanied by any visual representations – is clinically valid. The voices and noise haunt him steadily. He tells Nicole he has had a radio device implanted in his head, with a transmitter in a fingernail. Earlier we had been exposed to his violent efforts to rid himself of these devices using scissors or a knife to gouge them out – forms of delusion-driven self-mutilation that are uncommon but not rare in persons suffering the throes of severe acute psychotic episodes. The use of tight close up camera angles - viewing Peter from just behind his back or in profile in his car - heighten the sense of claustrophobia, the extreme narrowing of Peter's psychotic world. The setting - Miscou Island, in New Brunswick – adds further accents of wildness and isolation to the overall tone of the film.

It can be argued that the detective's pursuit of Peter adds yet another source of paranoid fever to the film, though for me this conceit does not ring true. The fact that someone really is after Peter detracts from the power of his delusions. Other than this, Kerrigan can be congratulated for steering clear of the false visuals (realistically visualized imaginary friends and enemies) and other clinically implausible effects that Ron Howard used more recently in A Beautiful Mind. Anyone – professional or lay viewer – might rightly wonder how Peter could be discharged from the hospital in such poor psychiatric condition. Of course that happens every day in most contemporary short stay hospital settings, because involuntary treatment laws in most states prohibit keeping patients against their will except in the most extreme circumstances of immediate potential for violence. But we are given the impression at the start of this film that Peter had been incarcerated in a more traditional mental hospital, the sort in which people stay for long periods before discharge, until they appear relatively free of symptoms, sometimes longer. Of course these large old facilities are typically short staffed, keen clinical observation of patients may be scarce, and patients not uncommonly can muster a façade of normality to win their freedom.

The depiction of Peter's mother is also troublesome. Her grim withholding of affection for Peter and Nicole resurrects the spectra of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a psycho dynamic fiction popular the 1950s and 60s that accused parents, especially mothers, of causing schizophrenia through self serving, unaffectionate regard for their children. This myth was laid to rest long ago, and it is a black mark against this film to see such a notion resurrected. It does not dispel the power of this negative maternal portrayal when, from a distance, we see the mother crying as she hangs one of her son's shirts on a clothesline near the end.

Clean, Shaven shares with David Cronenberg's film, Spider, the distinction of offering the most believable portraits of highly symptomatic schizophrenic experience that have been brought to the big screen. I prefer Spider because the acting is uniformly first rate and the screenplay is superior. Both films pull the viewer into an exquisitely painful, odd, lonely, and ultimately unrewarding world, into experiences that many moviegoers would, no doubt, prefer to avoid. Dramatically, this is a "C" movie, but the portrayal of schizophrenia rates an "A."

---

12 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
One of my favorites..., 11 July 2003

Author: Matt (guzzardmg@hotmail.com) from Chicago

I rented this movie a few years ago, and fell in love with it. Peter Greene steps out of his normal "tough, bad guy" Hollywood roles to play a sensitive father handicapped by schizophrenia.He is recently released from a hospital and reuniting with his daughter becomes his main focus.Unfortunately, we soon learn that its hard for him to focus as sweet hope soon turns tragic. All he wants is to be a good father, something his ailment makes him incapable of. I love the way the director visualizes the schizophrenic moments. If you are looking for something off the beaten path I highly recommend it. 10/10stars

---

8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Genuinely disturbing., 26 July 2000

Author: FeverDog from Center of the Universe

I will never forget this movie - it chills me every time I see it. What I like most about it is that it contains very little dialogue (unlike "Cube") and is not very visually stylish (unlike "Pi"); the buzzes, static, and blurred radio broadcasts allow direct access into the protagonist's schizophrenic mind as he tries to remain somewhat sane while searching for his daughter given up for adoption by his mother. Peter Greene gives a stunning performance. Only a slightly formulaic ending mars this intense work of art; I cannot wait to see what director Lodge Kerrigan does next.

---

6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Bleak Film About Paranoia..., 22 October 2005

Author: EVOL666 from St. John's Abortion Clinic

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

CLEAN, SHAVEN is a dark film detailing the experiences of a paranoid man trying to get custody of his daughter.

Peter has recently been released from a mental hospital, and it's pretty obvious early on that he's still not all-there. He tries to function in surroundings that are scary and alien to him, and it is not an easy situation. He wants to be the person/father that he should be, but his mental limitations make that impossible.

CLEAN, SHAVEN is a pretty somber experience and isn't recommended for the casual film viewer. I personally didn't find the film to be quite as controversial and "shocking" as many did, but it is a pretty depressing film. One scene in particular may find most in the audience squirming...recommended for those who enjoy subversive/depressing cinema. 8/10

---

4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
My take on Peter's guilt or innocence - SPOILER!!!, 11 December 2006

Author: Scott-212 from Kansas City, MO

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It took me a few viewing to get into this movie, and my biggest gripe was that the film left the issue of Peter's involvement in a rather disturbing murder unanswered. *SPOILER! Don't read any further unless you've seen the movie* The little girl is murdered at some point when Peter is staying at the hotel. It shows him lying in bed looking up at the ceiling, abruptly cutting to a shot of an unseen assailant beating the girl to death. This seems to imply Peter was involved, however right after this there is a scene where Peter hears, outside his hotel room, the sound of people laughing. Since it is established that Peter constantly hears strange noises, you don't know if this is real or not.Prior to all this is a scene where an older woman (mother or sister) is cross with the girl, threatening to hurt her. Later, when McNally is questioning the maintenance guy over the phone, the guy is not the least bit disturbed he found the battered body of a child, but rather complains to McNally that she smelled so bad he couldn't continue working. In the last few minutes, McNally is seen on the phone saying "Inconclusive?". I took from this part he was talking to his department and they were telling him there was not enough evidence to connect Peter with the murder, thus his findings were inconclusive. In the next scene, McNally is back in the bar, and sitting nearby is a man and woman. The woman is upset, crying, and the man tells her she's like a broken record. I think these two are the angry woman and maintenance guy from the hotel, and that they were the killers, since earlier in the film it was established neither have any real regard for the dead girl. It is a quick shot, almost a throwaway, but look for it the next time you watch the film. Peter's possible guilt as a child killer / abuser is also implied when he beats the girl in the city for accidentally bumping his car. The beating is never seen, only heard, and right after Peter drives away from this there are people on the sidewalk who don't act like they've just seen a man beat up a small girl. This leads me to think this whole incident was in Peter's mind. Anyway, just my two cents. Thanks for reading. Hope I'm not just repeating stuff Lodge Kerrigan says in the commentary, I've not yet seen the DVD. Scott

---

---

Page 1 of 5:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Add another review

---

Related Links

Plot summary	Ratings	Awards
Newsgroup reviews	External reviews	Plot keywords
Main details	Your user reviews	Your vote history