Before I even knew who Martin Scorsese was, I already dug him thanks to this wacky yet oddly unsettling 1985 comedy. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a word processor who makes the mistake of stepping outside his life’s safe zone only to realize that Manhattan at night is pretty close to one of hell’s lower rungs. He becomes fascinated by a flaky girl at the café (Rosanna Arquette) and is lured into her apartment, where her artist roommate (Linda Fiorentino) also lives. From there on, it’s a spiral of misunderstanding and chases that make a Kafka novel look like My Pet Goat. Even now that he’s considered America’s greatest director and all, it’s weird how little credit Scorsese gets for his comic talent. Not just here and in The King of Comedy, but also in the profane, volatile give-and-take of everything from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to Goodfellas. Dunne’s work here is really accomplished, a mix of growing terror that gets funnier the more desperate the character gets. And there’s plenty to be desperate about: Teri Garr as a vengeful waitress, Catherine O’Hara leading a lynch mob on an ice-cream truck, Cheech and Chong trying to make off with contraband… For all the neon and hip nightclubs, the city looks genuinely dangerous here. The mix of moods was very startling, because for the first time I realized how things can go from amusing to horrifying in a heartbeat. Everybody’s out to get you: That’s life. But it takes a genius like Scorsese to get laughs out of it.