This movie tries to be many things, and isn't particularly good at anything at all, except being a thorough shambles.There's a stab at satirizing the world of haute couture fashion - the titular Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway, going through the motions with hauteur and a certain understandable embarrassment) is a hip photographer whose kinky, murder-chic shots of skimpily clad models posing over tuxedoed corpses or engaged in catfights against a backdrop of burning automobiles aren't really that different from the violence-as-cool Vogue spreads that seem to raise a flap every few months or so. Considering that this movie was made in 1978, it's worth noting how little the avant really has advanced. Laura Mars is shown as a somewhat sterile and vapid figure, someone who offers trite explanations for her glamourising of murder and violence, but really wishes the press would ask her positive questions for a change.

But this is also a supernatural thriller! You see, Ms. Mars started having vivid, killer's point-of-view visions of murder scenes some years ago. Like any good pseudo-artistic parasite, she's been using these visions as the basis for her various photo shoots, all of which, unbeknownst to her, duplicate actual crime scene photographs in the police archives. Then, the killings start striking closer home as members of her own circle of flighty arts-and-farts types start falling prey to an eye-gouging serial killer. At this point, she finally become distraught and goes to the police, because this is also, also a murder mystery!

The movie finally gains some interest with the obvious, but needed humour that results when Laura Mars and her assorted hangers-on and models are carted into a downtown police station for questioning when she offers the police a detailed eye witness account of a killing she claims she was not actually present at. Also, this scene cues a young Tommy Lee Jones as floppy-haired cop who lends Ms. Mars a sympathetic ear and becomes her romantic interest.

The movie proceeds through further psychic flashes and killings, as Ms. Mars' circle is slowly winnowed down and one red herring after another is introduced. There's Ms. Mars' ex-husband, a glassy-eyed alcoholic and failed writer, her driver, a wild-haired ex-convict who develops a schoolboy crush on a gum-chewing bisexual model, and her incredibly campy agent, who, however, becomes a victim and puts himself out of the reckoning. While all this goes on, Ms. Mars and the friendly cop have time to incubate one of the least plausible romances I've seen in a movie. She's a dead-eyed purveyor of disposable chic, he's a complete blank, apart from dressing a little better than most plain-clothes cops and, of course, being a cop. There's zero chemistry between the actors as they intone laughably poor dialogue ('With everything that's going on, I just can't stop thinking about you.' 'It's terrifying.' 'No, it's beautiful.') and grope at each other like anaesthetized mannequins.

There was really only one way this movie could have delivered a psychologically satisfactory and conclusive ending - if it turned out that Ms. Mars was a Multiple Personality Disorder case who commits these murders in a dissociative state. So, naturally, that's not the ending the movie goes for. Instead there's a tawdry twist, which at least explains why a certain character was written into the movie at all, a final scene where Ms. Mars' eyes are, sadly, not gouged out and then it's all over, folks.

I'm now going to spoil this movie's ending, because I really don't want anyone to subject themselves to this tripe just to find out who it was - the cop dunnit. Yep. Turns out he's the one with MPD, watched his prostitute mother being killed as a child, became twisted and has been killing purveyors of indecency and lewdness for some time now. One of his personalities does the killings and has a major hate-on for Ms. Mars - the other loves her, for reasons that we are not privy to, and begs her to kill him. Aww, how tragic!

This is craptacular on so many levels. So she was psychically linked to him all along? But why? If she's been seeing his killings since before he started picking on people she knew, what is the basis of the link? How did a trashy glam photographer become the nexus for all this crusading psychopathology? How did an orphaned son of a whore become a spiffily-dressed ranking policeman? And what happened to that deadbeat husband anyway? Oh, and where will she get her precious inspiration now?

It doesn't really matter though. It's just a terribly mediocre and ill-conceived movie that thinks it's cleverer than it really is. It isn't even bad enough to enjoy for its glaring infelicities - just overcooked here, undercooked there and generally not much of anything at all.

No thadiyaans for this bad boy.