Trailer
Plot summary
Victor Ajax works as a technician for Trend-Odegard Security, installing cameras in the apartment building of Mr. Trend, the company's co-owner. Trend has learned that his partner intends to sell the business to Renaldo "The Heel", the man who stole Nancy from Victor and bullied him. In response, Trend hires a pair of exterminators whose promise is to kill all sizes. Trend then occupies Victor with talk of the grand design and tells him to go find his dream girl. That girl is Nancy, who barely responds to Victor and is enamored of Renaldo. As Victor and the building's residents, including Mrs. Trend, cross paths with the exterminators, Victor finds himself at the center of a murderous plot.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Crimewave (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bruce Campbell had to audition for the lead of Crimewave, unlike on The Evil Dead, and producers who saw his test declared "Campbell will not star in this film," so Sam Raimi enlarged a supporting role, Renaldo "The Heel", to keep him in the cast.
- Lead actress Louise Lasser, under the influence of cocaine, fired her make-up artist and insisted on doing her own make-up, often arriving on set in poorly applied "clown make-up" and messed up hair.
- The script called for clear, running water, but the Detroit River was frozen when the crew arrived to shoot at a bridge, so they cleared the ice in dangerously low temperatures and finally blew it up with dynamite.
- While filming night scenes for a week on a Detroit street directly under a nursing home, the crew had a glass bottle with a note thrown down at them reading, "The noise is keeping me awake all night long and I am getting sick. I am dying because of you."
- Actor Brion James trashed his hotel room during the shoot in an attempt to "exorcise a ghost from his light fixtures", one of several odd events on the production.
- The studio replaced Raimi's music composer, Joseph LoDuca, and his editor with its own choices, removing Raimi's influence over the film's final cut.
- Crimewave's overall failure directly led to the making of Evil Dead II (1987), and story and style elements from Crimewave influenced Raimi's later productions.
- The Coen brothers expressed dissatisfaction with Crimewave, and went on to direct every one of their own screenplays until the 2012 film Gambit.
