YMMV / Blow Out

• Complete Monster: Burke is a professional assassin who shoots out the tires on a Presidential candidate's car to send it into the water. While he succeeds in killing his intended target, a woman in the car with him survives. Deciding he needs to eliminate her as well, Burke devises a truly cruel plan to cover his tracks. So there will be no inconvenient questions, Burke becomes a Serial Killer by targeting women who look similar to his target, strangling them to death with a garrote. He finally attempts to kill the girl, Sally during a parade so her death will be passed off as the act of a random maniac. Burke is indicated to be nothing more than a sociopath using his job to hurt others.
• Spiritual Successor: To Blow Up and The Conversation. The ending in particular is one to Chinatown.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The plot centers around a B-Movie sound technician who realizes he may have accidentally recorded a political assassination while recording ambient sound and tries to uncover the truth. This partly involves syncing the audio he recorded with photos published of the apparent car accident in a magazine, which are stills from a film that he can replicate (albeit crudely). As he only has early-80s technology, he does this by cutting out the stills and making a film reel using them in his producer's animation studio, and then specially marking sections of his audio tape in his studio so he can match the exact instant the car hits the water with the sound thereof using lots of Rewind, Replay, Repeat and find where the gunshot came from. If the film took place decades later, when the process of film recording and editing became fully digital, all of this would have been much faster and easier to do and would have made disposing of the evidence much harder if not impossible.
• Vindicated by History: Despite the high critical acclaim, Blow Out suffered at the box office because word of mouth about the Downer Ending scared away audiences. Years later, the critics keep praising the work as one of DePalma's best, and it has been a big influence of other directors like Quentin Tarantino.

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