Reviews

I saw BvS under protest, because a friend wanted to do it for his birthday weekend. I think I may have set a record for how many times I checked the time on my phone, wondering how much longer this movie was going to go.

This seemed to me like nothing more nor less than a clumsy attempt to catch up to Marvel's Avengers franchise and get a jump on Civil War. The problem is that, unlike the Marvel cinematic creative team, Snyder and the rest of DC's cinematic brain trust haven't done a thing to create the dichotomy between Superman and Batman that exists between Captain America and Iron Man. Superman, as he's been portrayed in the Snyderverse, is almost as dark and brooding as Batman, and when one character complains that "(Superman) answers to no one," she could just as easily be talking about Batman.

Three dream sequences in one movie is at least two too many, and three "is he really dead" moments for the same character is worse. I have to wonder if Snyder felt that the name recognition on the characters was high enough that he didn't need to delve too deeply into his bag of storytelling tricks, because he certainly didn't do so for this.

Ben Affleck is very good as Batman--which shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone, Daredevil notwithstanding. Henry Cavill is just as good as what passes for Superman in this movie. But whether because of his own choices or because of how he's been directed, Jesse Eisenberg as Luthor delivers the most toxic performance I've seen since Tori Spelling in Trick. It is bad enough that every DC hero these days is trying to out-grim Batman; I do not need every DC villain to start trying to out-psychotic Joker.

Another thing that bothers me is Wonder Woman--specifically, how she's been used in the DC Cinematic Universe. Gail Gadot is fierce as all hell as Diana, but I'm really not happy that Wonder Woman is in this movie.

Marvel, in setting up the first Avengers movies, first gave us solo movies for what they considered to be their big guns--Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk, the ones even non-comics readers would recognize. Hawkeye and Black Widow did not get such movies (although they both debuted in one of the aforementioned big guns' movies); they are considered to be secondary characters not on the level of the Big Four.

Wonder Woman has not yet had a solo movie; having her make her cinematic debut here, in my mind, demotes her to the Hawkeye-Black Widow level, and the character, as one of the handful of superheroes to survive the Great Implosion of the late 1940s (when most superhero comics were either cancelled or reformatted) and as the most iconic female protagonist in any form of literature, deserves far better than that.

Okay, we'll forego discussing the rampant sexism and condescension in which this episode wallows. It's the main reason this episode has aged so badly, but not the only one. Taken in and of itself, this is still a poor episode, with plot holes up the wazoo and a lot of filler to pad it to twenty-two minutes.

The big problem is setup for the bat-deathtrap. Batgirl has held her own against trained fighters. She's even gone toe-to-toe with Catwoman, fer cryin' out loud--even if all she had to do was toss the Princess of Plunder into Chief O'Hara's waiting arms. But the second she's grabbed by Nora Clavicle, who has no fighting skills to speak of, she might as well be one of Nora's decorative henchwomen for all the fight she puts up.

There are lots of shots that seem unnecessary, usually of mice going all over the city--maybe the writers didn't think they had enough for a full episode? And then you have the usual third season problems--the low budget sets, the writing that was less phoned in than it was attached to a blind, arthritic turtle and aimed in the general direction of the studio, the lack of wit or genuine humor--and you have an unholy mess of an episode that is truly painful to watch.

All of these were problems throughout the season, but some of the episodes were still salvaged by old stalwarts Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Victor Buono, or especially Burgess Meredith (who could always be counted on for a good ad-lib or three), or by series newcomers like Eartha Kitt or Joan Collins. Unfortunately, the usually stellar Barbara Rush delivers the most uninspired performance of her career, partially because she's working with arguably the worst script in the series.

OK, OK, I lied. Let's talk about the sexism and the condescension. It's rampant, it's ridiculous, it's even worse than most of the series (and that's going some), and it turns the episode from painful to watch to impossible to watch. All in all, this was the low point for the series, and even with Penguin, Shame, and King Tut on the way, pretty much the kiss of death.

And Then There Were None is one of my favorite novels of any genre, and was one of the first "grown-up" books I read as a kid. There have been many adaptations of it for the screen, from the solid but unspectacular 1945 black and white to the occasionally too- faithful Russian version to the absolutely dreadful 80s African safari. This, in my opinion, outshines all of them, remaining more or less faithful to the story and taking elements from the previous versions and using them to far better overall effect.

The visuals are breathtaking; camera angles are brilliantly used (I particularly liked the scene of Mrs. Rogers throwing the leftover lobster carcasses over the side of a cliff), and the lighting and soundtrack give the whole production a disquieting, eerie feel to it that enhances the overall experience.

The performances of the ten leads are one and all superb, particularly Anna Maxwell Martin as Mrs. Rogers, Charles Dance as Wargrave, and Toby Stephens as Armstrong. Notable among the "background players" are Rob Heaps as Hugo Hamilton and Paul Chahidi as Mister Owen's agent, Isaac Morris.

And then there's the script...

For the most part, Sarah Phelps' script is superb; more than any of the others, it gives the actors the most to work with in portraying the increasing mental stress and terror the characters are feeling. The cocaine party scene has become the most controversial in the production, but I feel that it works well, as the simmering tension among the characters finally explodes. Little touches here and there work very effectively, such as the role-reversal in Vera slapping an hysterical Armstrong after Rogers' murder. The antagonism between Lombard and Blore is the best I've seen in any of the adaptations, because there's a complexity to it that other adaptations lack.

But if I do have nitpicks, it's that, like her predecessors, Phelps changes some of the material in ways that question whether she truly thought through those changes--specifically, the crimes which have earned each of the characters a place on the island, and the degrees of severity of those crimes which dictate the order in which the prisoners are to be executed.

The biggest example is Blore's crime; instead of perjuring himself and sending an innocent man to prison, here Blore beats a young gay man to death. In the 21st century Western world, that's horrible. But as late as the 1990s, judges in the United States were jokingly asking if violence against gay men "was a crime now"; would a Victorian mind such as Mr. Owen's really view killing a "sodomite" worse than smothering an elderly woman, abandoning a servant girl, hanging an innocent man, or performing surgery drunk?

All in all, however, this is a brilliantly made film, and one I intend to watch again and again for the sheer thrill of it.

Ten-plus years since its release, it's safe to say that "The Room", conceived, written, directed, and produced by lead actor Tommy Wiseau, has become a phenomenon. Making less in its initial release than your average paralegal rakes in on one paycheck--*after* taxes--The Room has become the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its generation, with midnight screenings and various rituals enacted by its fans. Numerous online critics, including the Nostalgia Critic, CinemaSins, and Obscurus Lupa, have had a merry time taking the movie apart--oh, sorry, *TEARING THE MOVIE APART, LISA!!!!* And yes, the movie is one of the movies that is truly so bad it's good. The script, and Wiseau's delivery of his lines, are guaranteed to make you smile for all the wrong reasons, so it qualifies as a guilty pleasure, too. And after seeing all the online hatchet jobs, I decided, "Hey, it's on YouTube, and for free--why not enjoy it again?" Unfortunately, by this time, the joke had worn off. Barely fifteen minutes into the movie, I was bored out of my mind. Camp comedy doesn't have a long shelf life in general, and when you outgrow it, you're left with the appalling mess that is The Room.

The problem, obviously, is Tommy Wiseau, wholly and entirely. The Room is his story--his baby, if you will. It flows completely out of his understanding of American culture and the human condition--and it fails because Wiseau's understanding of American culture and the human condition is utterly and completely superficial.

He knows, for example, that Americans in general love football, but he doesn't understand *why* we do, or that we put football aside when we have more pressing concerns (like a wedding). He knows that banks handle money, but he doesn't understand that an investment banker (which is what I'm presuming Johnny is, because I doubt very much he's a teller at your corner Citibank) is primarily in the business of *making* money, not just saving it. Johnny shouldn't be talking about how he saved the bank money; he should be talking about private placements and hedge funds. And so on and so on.

Wiseau shows a similar ignorance of human character and relationships. The oft-mocked breast cancer line is actually an opportunity for Wiseau to explore the concept of "like parent, like child"--if Lisa is manipulative and willing to tell outrageous lies to get what she wants, where's the most logical place for her to learn such behavior? This would also make Lisa's lack of reaction to the line more understandable. But Wiseau apparently doesn't have any grasp of the relationships between parents and their children; for all that he makes use of their relationship, Claudette and Lisa might as well be neighbors, co-workers, or perfect strangers rather than mother and daughter.

The result is a script that makes no sense whatsoever, because Wiseau started by ignoring the first rule of writing, "Write what you know", and proceeded to blow off the second rule, "If you don't know it, do your research." Compounding the problem is Wiseau's complete lack of understanding of script structure; like a bad Off-Off-Broadway play, subplots come out of nowhere with absolutely no setup (for example, the Chris-R scene) or start and are dropped without any development (for example, the breast cancer line).

Much has been made of the performances in The Room, but I will be blunt: if you could reach back in time and take great film actors to do the roles when they were the right ages to do so--say, a 1930s Laurence Olivier as Tommy, a 1970s Meryl Streep for Lisa, a 1960s Dustin Hoffman for Mark, etc.--they still wouldn't be able to do much with this script. The complete lack of depth means that none of the actors can give more than a surface performance, although a few--Robyn Paris and Carolyn Minnott, mostly--manage to at least make their characters somewhat interesting.

Still, it's a good laugh, right? And yes, it is--the first two or three times you see it. Afterwards, the joke doesn't have the same impact. What made you laugh hysterically the first time you saw the movie only makes you grin now, and what made you grin only makes you roll your eyes.

And eventually, the elephant in the room (no pun intended) makes itself known. This is about Tommy Wiseau. That's why the script gives Johnny absolutely no flaws: he's funny (so Wiseau thinks), generous (ditto), brave (not even armed drug dealers scare him!), philosophical, is everybody's friend, and everybody's "favorite customer". Wiseau, we realize, cannot afford to consciously give Johnny any warts to his character because that would undermine his own fragile self-esteem. And the amusement we feel at the joke of The Room turns into an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of our stomach, and a vague sense of guilt that we were laughing at this person in the first place.

This is the only movie adaptation of Agatha Christie's landmark story that stays true to the novel's ending, and for that, many people are willing to overlook its flaws. But the flaws are there, largely due to the language barrier, and it keeps this from being the perfect Christie adaptation that it could have been.

Very little has been cut from the book, so that anyone who owns a copy of the book can practically dig out their copy and recite the dialogue word-for-word. And by the time the fifth murder happens, you're tempted to do so. The adaptation goes beyond faithful into slavish, and you can practically put your brain on autopilot.

Moreover, whoever did the subtitles either has never read the book or is simply not familiar enough with English to do a good job. When Rogers greets the guests upon their arrival in the novel, for example, the scene is presented from Anthony Marston's point of view, and Marston is not paying attention, so Rogers' dialogue comes out (deliberately, on Christie's part) choppy and missing some words ("What was it the butler chap was saying? Mr. Owen...unfortunately delayed...unable to get here till to-morrow."). The translator evidently thought that that was how English is constructed, and repeats Rogers' words exactly.

But while not everything has been cut, some material has been...and some of that is important. In both novel and film, after the accusation scene, it's revealed that Mr. Blore is traveling under an assumed name, "Mr. Davis", from South Africa. But while the novel gives us a scene where he introduces himself as Davis, the film doesn't--so the "revelation" doesn't have the impact it should.

Even more important is the second murder--it hinges on the poisoned drink being left where anyone could tamper with it. However, in the film, the drink isn't administered, so the second murder is impossible.

Another, minor point is Anthony Marston's confession. He describes as what happens as "beastly bad luck", at which point someone asks, "For them, or for you?" Marston's next line is cut from the film--"Well, I was thinking - for me - but of course, you're right, Sir, it was damned bad luck on them." This is the key to the whole character--Marston isn't the kind of person who actively does wrong, he simply does and thinks about it afterwards, if at all.

Still, as one other reviewer has mentioned, this is the adaptation that "goes there". The final murder is absolutely chilling. But it could have been so much tighter, and it's not.

Dan Briggs visits a music library...and one of the best action dramas in television history kicks off. The mission involves a small Latin American nation and a pair of nuclear warheads; the world was far enough removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis for such a plot to be given a chance by American audiences. Briggs and his team have to get those warheads out of the country--and not incidentally, get themselves out, too.

The pilot establishes early that the episodes will focus mainly on Dan Briggs (and later Jim Phelps), Rollin Hand (Paris), and Cinnamon Carter (who cares?); Willy Armitage's role is mainly to lift heavy things (including people), and though Barney Collier the government comes up with the tech that makes the mission possible for the first of many times, Greg Morris the actor isn't given much to do or much screen time.

Landau gives a tour de force performance as Hand, and it's especially compelling to watch him go through the hard work of trying to get every nuance of General Dominguez's persona down to the point where he does it without thinking about it. Steven Hill is quite good and tastefully understated as Briggs, and we get to see his resourcefulness (when an unexpected turn of events renders part of the mission plan impossible) and his courage (when he must risk blowing himself to ashes by tampering with the warheads).

We've had one review that hated this episode and one review that liked it--and I have to say, this one was really, really, really bad.

The plot is fairly simple - a team of Alphans goes missing, and there's mysterious mist (sorry, that was inadvertent) that apparently blocks sensors (since no one thinks to scan in it for life forms). Koenig and Russell (and later, the rest of their rescue party) follow a trail left by the first team, go into the mist--and, like them, and transformed into cave people. And the mist not only has the power to de-evolve the Alphans, which is fine, it has the ability to affect their clothing and equipment, which is just too much to swallow.

But that's not all. Sandra, part of the third team, is kidnapped by one of the cave people--yet, inexplicably, she herself isn't changed. Things go downhill from there.

What really kills this episode for me is that the cave people, in two or three days, manage to come up with elaborate ways of trapping large prey and even-more-elaborate ritual methods for healing and for execution. I'm no anthropologist, but that seems waaaaaay too fast.

All in all, this is not one I'll ever want to watch again (unlike "Dragon's Domain", which remains my favorite episode of the series).

This is the first "grown-up" mystery I ever read, and it remains my absolute favorite to this day--which is why whenever I encounter a new film adaptation, I keep hoping it would do the book justice--but none of them ever do, and this particular version is the worst of the lot.

The story should be familiar to everyone: ten people are assembled in an isolated location, are accused of murder by their unseen host, and are executed one by one, with the methods of their deaths corresponding to a child's nursery rhyme. And one thing this version does have going for it is that it avoids tampering with the rhyme as the 1965 and 1974 versions do. Likewise, the crimes each of Mr. Owen's guests have committed also remain largely unchanged from the novel (the sole exceptions being Blore's and Marion Marshall's).

But what makes this version so thoroughly unwatchable is how badly the plot is served by the locale, and how badly one has to stretch credulity to believe that something like this could happen as the script writers tell us it does. For example, in her first scene, Mrs. Rodgers complains about "lions and tigers" all around the camp, and later, during the search for Mr. Owen, several characters see one--and yet, immediately afterward, one of the characters is willing to spend the night on an isolated hilltop, without any fear of becoming a lion's midnight snack. In fact, we never see or hear the lions at all after the search; once they've served their purpose of creating tension during the scene in question, they apparently vanish into thin air.

Another reviewer has pointed out that too much is out of Mr. Owen's control, and that's 100% accurate; there's simply no way Mr. Owen could have arranged for all of this, especially so far from his home country. The character has no contacts nearby, no agents, nobody to set up the safari, no way to get the natives to isolate the doomed party, no way of making sure everyone meets the end s/he deserves. Moreover, Owen is strangely passive throughout the story; he doesn't set in motion the chain of events that lead to the fifth, sixth, and seventh murders, but relies entirely on chance and opportunism, and it's simply impossible for him to commit the second.

Lombard is finally the soldier of fortune he is supposed to be, rather than the engineer of previous adaptations--but it completely strains credulity to the breaking point to think that he would not have had his own supply of ammunition, rather than having to filch Marston's. And when Lombard finally succeeds in radioing for help, and is told that a rescue plane would be launched "in the morning," it doesn't occur to him to tell whoever's sending it that four people have already died and they need that plane NOW. He takes the delay far too passively for a man of his temperament--or at least, for a man of what his temperament should be.

The acting is uneven among all the actors, with the sole exceptions of Neil McCarthy, Sarah Maur Thorpe, and Yehuda Efroni--and in Efroni's case, it's because he's uniformly bad from start to finish. His caricature of a performance starts out as distracting and ends up being just painful to watch.

Finally, the international cast of characters - three English, five American, one Romanian, one German - is a problem that plagues all four English-language adaptations and especially this one, because how would Owen even have heard about all of them in the first place? The whole point is that no one knows that these people have committed murder; all of the deaths in their pasts have been put down either to accident, natural causes, or the normal course of war or the legal system, but Owen, owing to his position *in his own society,* is able to find people to tell him what really happened. How would Owen have discovered the "truth" about the deaths of both Beatrice Taylor and Heinrich Domeratsky - deaths that take place 6500 miles and 15 years apart?

This always has been one of my favorite episodes. The obvious Shakespearean references aside, this episode provides an interesting view of Kirk-as-Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Kirk is faced with a murderer, but is unable to take decisive action to apprehend him until it is too late. Fortunately, unlike Hamlet, Kirk's vacillation costs Caridian his life, rather than Kirk's own.

The episode has a number of nice touches--Janice Rand's glance at Lenore Karidian as the latter leaves the bridge (in Rand's last appearance on the show)--comes to mind very quickly, but it also has a sour note or two. When Spock questions Kirk's decision to allow the acting company to travel with the Enterprise, McCoy too readily attributes it to Kirk's attraction to Lenore; the doctor should be a bit more professional than that. In addition, Riley seems to give up too easily when confronted by Kirk.

Shattered gives us an interesting concept--the ship fractured into various parts of Voyager's history by a temporal accident--but it doesn't delve tremendously deeply into any of the problems setting things right might bring up.

Chakotay and Janeway have the obligatory "what-happens-when-we-restore-the-timeline" talk, and Janeway briefly considers, then rejects, the idea of altering the timeline so that her crew is never stranded in the Delta Quadrant--but we never see any of the crew who might be negatively affected by restoring the timeline. We see Torres-as-Maquis, Kim-as-rookie, and Seven-as-drone, but we don't see some of Voyager's casualties. Would Lyndsey Ballard have wanted to restore the timeline in which she was killed by Hirogen hunters? How about Lieutenant Hogan, eaten by a giant worm when the Kazon strand Voyager on a low-tech world? Ensign Kaplan, killed in a shuttle crash when Chakotay encountered unassimilated Borg?

Tasha Yar, in ST:TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise", faced this question. No one in this episode does.

This is the kind of episode I really dislike; it involves one or two of the regular characters and a bunch that we've never seen before--and, of course, will never see again. The story requires that we see how dangerous the situation is, so there has to be a high body count, and we can't kill off half of the regulars and recast the show, so we bring along a bunch of one-shots and get rid of them before the episode is two-thirds over. The only real mystery is in what order the expendables will die.

That leaves the "insight" into O'Brien's and Garak's characters that the episode shows us--but like many other "moments of truth" in Deep Space Nine, it's never referred to again by either character or by Nog, who is also present.

The writer's intention was to mimic the feel of a horror movie--but unfortunately, it does so too well; it mimics a horror movie's predictability.

This isn't one of the better Trek episodes, but Teri Garr brings the zaniness to Roberta Lincoln that she would bring to many other roles in her career. There are an awful lot of deux ex machinas in the plot--particularly Scotty's ability to use a single weather satellite to view seemingly anywhere in the United States, from any angle--and one serious hole.

When Kirk and Spock arrive at Gary Seven's offices, Roberta calls the police, then tries to stop them. Spock holds her, and, when the police arrive, holds her until Kirk gains access to the inner offices, then runs after Kirk, leaving her free to let the police in--in other words, he passes up a zillion opportunities to put her to sleep with the Vulcan Nerve Pinch.

Pour quoi, M. Spock?

I rated it so low simply because of the subject matter; arguably the greatest murder mystery ever written, And Then There Were None should have had a superb video game adaptation, instead of the mediocre one we get.

The layout of the screens is clumsy. Standing directly behind the couch in the drawing room, for example, you have to go to the far window, then make a left and go to the fireplace, and then make another left to talk to anyone on the couch--you can't simply walk around and talk to them. Likewise, the constantly shifting perspectives make getting from one place to another tedious and cumbersome.

Worse, there's a lot of "busywork" involved that has absolutely nothing to do with investigating the murder. For example, Fred (the viewpoint character), spends a good chunk of the first half of the game building materials for a parachute to take him off the island--which, of course, you know is going to fail, because then you wouldn't catch the murderer, now, would you?

Finally, you definitely want to have this page handy: http://www.uhs-hints.com/uhsweb/hints/attwn/1.php because there's a lot of stuff you have to do that you'd never figure out in a million years.

I may be committing sacrilege, but I believe this version to be the best of the four English-language versions.

Hugh O'Brien and Shirley Eaton are the best of the Lombard-Vera pairs, better than originals Louis Hayward and June Duprez, and infinitely better than their successors. Most of the rest of the cast at least equals any of their counterparts (particularly Fabian, who is the best of the Marstons, and Stanley Holloway, the best of the Blores). Most of the murders are plausible, even doable, without the holes that the other movies had. Particularly effective is the fourth murder, which stays true to the rhyme (as the appalling 1974 version does not), while avoiding the gore that part of the rhyme seems to call for.

Unfortunately, the need for Hollywood to fix things that aren't broken leads to some things that simply don't make sense. The second and third verses of the rhymes are the leading problems here. Rather than following the line "Nine little Indian boys stayed up rather late" with the logical original "One overslept himself and then there were eight," the writers felt that someone dying in his/her sleep wasn't dramatic enough and changed the line to "One ran away, and then there were eight." The two lines simply don't make any sense put together like this.

Likewise, "Eight little Indian boys, traveling through Devon/Heaven", which should be followed by "One got left behind/said he'd stay there, and then there were seven." The film changes it to "One met a pussycat," which, again, makes no sense.

The biggest problem is the fifth murder, and it's an outgrowth of changing the second. The book and the original movie have the murderer disposing of the second victim through an overdose of sleeping powders; however, the murderer keeps some of the powder to drug the fifth victim, so that the fifth murder can be carried out easily. However, later versions of the film have decided to go with how shocking they can make the second death (a tram crash, a garroting, etc.), so the murderer has no sleeping powders, so the fifth victims are awake and presumably able to act when the murderer confronts them. In this case, the fifth victim sees the murderer walk across the room with the weapon in hand, and does absolutely nothing in self-defense.

I'm not sure it's possible to make a truly great movie out of any of Agatha Christie's books. Christie relied too much on atmosphere and character to do justice to either in a two-hour movie. This version has atmosphere aplenty, but the characterizations are weak (partially due to time limitations), and the performances are weaker, particularly Elke Sommer and Oliver Reed. Since they're the stars, you're in for a long 90 minutes.

The main problem with this version, as with others, is that the writers took the bare facts – who dies when, for example – without examining the reasons behind those facts. Christie makes it clear that the murderer considered some of the criminals in the story less cold-blooded than others. For example, the General, in the original story, kills his wife's lover – in other words, though he commits a murder, his victim is hardly blameless, and his "slot" in the order of murders reflects this. However, here, he commits a crime much akin to Lombard's original one, causing multiple deaths of men who trusted him with their lives; following the plot closely, he should die much later. However, his death makes far more sense in this version than in the original – all of the characters have separated when the General meets his end, unlike the original, where the General is in easy view of another character when he is killed.

Blore's murder is also more believable here than in the original version. The original version was risky, and relied too much on deux ex machina – Blore would pick exactly the right spot to stand to get brained. Here, he's simply pushed off a balcony – much simpler, and much more effective.

There are a few other improvements over the original film, namely Orson Welles' voice-over. It is absolutely chilling, far more so than the dry, uninteresting voice-over in the original. Likewise, the presence of the guests is more thoroughly explained here than in the original; Armstrong, Blore, Vera, Raven, and the Martinos are there in a professional capacity, while Lombard, Ilona, Cannon, and Salvé are there to meet old friends.

However, there are many, many other things that are worse. The size of the hotel puts an massive hole in the plot. The hotel has at least fifty rooms, plus an extensive cellar system below and even more extensive ruins surrounding it. After the second murder, the remaining eight characters try to search the hotel to find their "host", but there is simply no way that eight people could cover completely an area that large and say with any certainty that there wasn't a ninth person lurking about. At best, they could determine that there were no signs of such a person (unaccounted-for clothes, toiletries, rooms that might have been used but had not been by any of them, etc.), but even this possibility is not addressed.

Likewise, the judge and the doctor manage to fake the former's death when Vera's scream sends all four men rushing to her rescue. However, unlike the original version, there's no way that Cannon and Armstrong can know in advance that Vera is going to scream; they haven't created the conditions to make her do so. (As an aside, however, the "murder" at this point makes far more sense here than in the original, because the doctor is the only one to examine the judge's body).

Raven's murder is simply a continuity mess. After Raven is poisoned with cyanide, Armstrong, Blore, and Cannon examine the bottle and determine that the cyanide is in there. However, cyanide acts incredibly quickly, and is incredibly toxic – you don't have to ingest very much to be affected. Yet Raven takes two sips from his glass before gulping the whole thing down, without refilling his glass at all – and at any rate, the murderer is never near either bottle or glass.

Mrs. Martino's murder is almost as implausible. The Judge is in the lobby with Blore and Armstrong when Martino, Lombard, and Vera go after her, but somehow he gets past them to kill her without them seeing him and without Armstrong and Blore wondering where he's gone.

Martino's and Ilona's murders leave far too much to chance—Cannon doesn't even kill Martino himself, but trusts to the desert to finish him, and all Ilona has to do is keep the rest of the room between her and the snake while she makes her way to the exit and then shuts the door behind her, and she's safe. We don't even know HOW the doctor dies - his body is simply discovered after the fact.

The second and third verses of the rhyme are changed so that they make no more sense. The fourth and eighth verses remain pretty much the same, but the actual murders don't match them at all—there's no chopper for Martino, and no bear for Blore.

Worst of all, this version lifts entire sections of dialogue from the original movie almost verbatim, which is problem enough in itself - but it's particularly thorny when the original dialogue had two parts, and only one is copied. Blore, in the original movie, orders Vera to go to her room and lock the door behind her, then later berates her for not doing so. The second part is copied into this movie, but the first isn't - so Blore mentions a conversation that didn't take place.

WARNING--THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THE REVIEW BELOW. OF COURSE, THE MOVIE CAME OUT 20 YEARS AGO, SO YOU'VE HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO SEE IT.

Rape and revenge is one of the oldest themes in female-centered fiction, so for a story of that genre--as this one is--to stand out, the writer has to be very careful in how s/he executes it.

This one could have been a little more careful.

Okay, so Marjorie can't prove attempted rape. She can sure as hell prove assault (unless of course, consensual sex includes windows broken FROM THE OUTSIDE)--not in the same class, but better than nothing. But we need The System to be helpless so that Marjorie has to take the law into her own hands, so this doesn't occur to any of the characters.

Also, given what they know of the situation, Pat and Terry are way too willing to give Joe the benefit of the doubt. Let's review the facts as they know them:

1. Marjorie was attacked and almost raped a week before.

2. She escaped, but had to leave her wallet--with her address--behind. Therefore, her attacker now knows where she lives.

3. A total stranger is in their living room fireplace, with bug spray in his eyes and a nice scalp cut near his temple.

4. There's obviously been a fight, because there's broken crockery on the floor and the phones have been yanked out of the wall.

So why in the name of God is Pat so willing to hear Joe out??????? Is it really so much of a leap for her to figure out that this is the guy who attacked Marjorie before??????? But we need there to be some doubt in how this will play out, so Pat has to play incredibly dumb and almost fall for Joe's story.

All in all, the plot's inherent weakness overshadows very strong performances from the four principals. This should have been a lot better than it was.

If they're still spoilers 18 months later after the premiere, too bad.

I'm glad I waited for cable. This one wasn't as weak as Final Frontier, but it definitely is one of the weaker ones.

There's just too much deus ex machina. Geordi just "happened" to have come up with the transporter prototype that allowed Picard to escape death. The transporter itself just "happens" to stay functional just long enough to get Picard over to the Scimitar, and only THEN breaks down. Picard just "happened" to order a full memory transfer into B4, so now it can become the new Data since the old one has been destroyed.

The memory transfer from Data to B4 blows my mind in and of itself, actually. No maybe about it; as a command-level officer (that's commander and above, folks), Data's got a few things in his positronic brain that Starfleet doesn't want broadcast to all and sundry. The Enterprise crew has already encountered one Data-lookalike that turned out to be (WARNING: HEAVY SARCASM) somewhat untrustworthy (Lore). So Picard just casually allows everything to be downloaded into B4's brain. Let the court martial convene.

While it was nice to see Wesley Crusher (am I the only one who think the character gets WAY too much flak?), it would also have been nice to get just one line explaining how the hell he got there, since he was last seen going walkabout with the Traveller. The Federation Postal Motto must put ours to shame ("Neither Borg nor Lore nor Cosmic Entity shall keep our couriers from their appointed rounds!")

All in all, heavily disappointing. 4/10