‘Angel Heart’ Is A Soft-Core Supernatural Thriller Straight From 1987
It’s Mickey Rourke at his Mickey Rourke-iest
I had plenty of movies to watch in 1987. Like Master of the Universe, the splashy film adaptation of my beloved He-Man action figures and Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, which pit the Man of Steel against a nuclear-powered Frankenstein with glam-rock hair. That movie looked like it ran out of budget halfway through production.
What I was not interested in, as a 13-year-old, was the movie Angel Heart, which I knew about because America’s dad — Bill Cosby — hated it. He thought the movie was exploitative. “It’s a movie made by white America that cast a black girl, gave her voodoo things to do, and have sex,” was his take.
Fair enough.
Angel Heart is an unexpectedly smart, slippery supernatural thriller starring a 33-year-old Mickey Rourke as a greasy gumshoe on the hunt for a missing crooner. His investigation leads him to New Orleans and 19-year-old Lisa Bonet, who was famous at that time for playing the middle daughter of America’s Dad on the nation’s most popular sitcom, The Cosby Show, a family-friendly fairy tale about a wealthy Black family living in Brooklyn.
I knew Bill Cosby as the human host of the cartoon series Fat Albert and as kindly Cliff…
