Director Robert Mandel is what some may call a one-hit-wonder. While having a rather successful career as a director of off-Broadway plays and several television programs, his one hit was the suspenseful thriller “F/X” (1986). This chilling tale, which starred generally little-known leads, concerns a Hollywood special effects expert who is hired to assist in a fake mob-killing for a witness protection scheme, but he quickly finds his life is in horrible danger.

Australian actor and recent star of international hit “Breaker Morant” (1980) Bryan Brown stars as special effects master Roland “Rollie” Tyler. His reputation for designing grisly visual effects for B-slasher films made him a prime resource for the justice department. Cliff De Young is Martin Lipton, chief investigator for the Justice Department, who approaches Tyler on a film set with an offer to work on a unique project. Faking he’s an independent film producer, Lipton reveals the actual job Tyler will be hired for is to completely stage a public execution of a mob informant, Nicholas De Franco (Jerry Orbach). 

The film opens with a gruesome shootout on the set of a film that Tyler supervised. Shortly thereafter, one of Tyler’s actor friends claims, “Nobody cares about making movies about people anymore. All they care about is special effects”. Then what follows in this film is filled with lots of illusions. 

Tyler finally accepts the offer to supervise the fake mob hit, and cooperating with Justice Department officials, he meets DeFranco and begins developing plaster masks and prosthetics that will be used for the shooting. Department head Colonel Mason (Mason Adams) reveals he’ll raise Tyler’s fee to $30,000, and he will need to do the shooting himself. But on the day of the event, Tyler suspects Lipton changes his gun’s fake ammo with real bullets. Then, after the public shooting in a well-known Italian restaurant, Tyler believes he’s actually killed DeFranco, and in the getaway, Lipton attempts to shoot Tyler to silence him. 

Here, the film shifts into an almost Alfred Hitchcock-like thriller with an accused killer trying to stay one step ahead of the law while trying to prove his innocence. When his girlfriend is killed by a sniper who had intended to hit Tyler, he realizes his life is in constant peril. 

Then, Brian Dennehy is introduced as veteran Manhattan homicide detective Leo McCarthy, who had been on the De Franco case for years and quickly suspects something even more suspicious. When it’s revealed DeFranco is still quite alive in a justice department safe house, both Tyler and McCarthy separately try to outwit each other and uncover the real reason the justice department is protecting DeFranco. 

All events lead to a climactic shoot in and around a guarded safe house where DeFranco is kept by federal agents with Tyler outwitting everyone. 

Brown is very effective and charming, portraying a sly and creative trickster who uses his skills––like a working lass James Bond––to stay one step ahead of the police and federal agents. Dennehy, who was not yet well known, is a fine match as a big-touch cop with many no-nonsense street smarts. Robert Megginson and Gregory Fleeman wrote the original screenplay and later developed a short-lived television series called “F/X” (1996-1998).  John Stears, the veteran of several James Bond films, was the special effects supervisor for this film.  

Cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek, the two-time Oscar nominee for director Milos Forman’s “Ragtime” and “Amadeus,” shot this film with crisp elegance, from car chases on cluttered New York streets to more rundown and isolated industrial sections of the city. Bill Conti contributed a rousing musical score. Look quickly, and you’ll see Angela Bassett in her feature film debut as a television reporter. 

While “F/X” is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, it was a surprise-box-office success and for a time made director Robert Mandel a much-wanted commodity.