Tag Archives: Karen Allen

Split Image: James Woods and how to do sleaze redux

It’s taken a while, but last night I concluded my James Woods festival by finally watching the 1982 film Split Image.

I won’t say what I had to do to track down a copy of this little known gem. Let’s just say it wasn’t easy. But it was worth it.

Split Image, in which Woods plays a cult deprogrammer, confirms the central thesis of my previous post on this actor, that no one does sleaze as good as Woods, especially at the height of his career in the greed is good eighties.

Split Image occupies an interesting position in the Woods oeuvre, sandwiched between Fast Walking earlier the same year (Woods as a sleazy prison guard who gets mixed up in a neo-Nazi plot to murder a radical black nationalist) and Videodrome in 1983 (Woods as sleazy soft porn cable TV producer).

The plot is relatively simple. Danny Stetson (Michael O’Keefe) is a talented but highly-strung aspiring Olympic gymnast, from a loving but over achieving family, presided over by patriarch Kevin Stetson (Brian Dennehy).

He meets fresh-faced cult devotee Rebecca (Karen Allen, who played  the love interest in two Indiana Jones films) and is sucked into visiting Homeland, an alternative community run by Kirkander (Peter Fonda). It doesn’t take long before Danny has been renamed Joshua and chanting “make it perfect” with the rest of them.… Read more