Reviews

Before the glut of slasher movies that followed Halloween, there were the cheap @ss demon/devil movies that followed the Exorcist and Carrie, and this was one of those movies that sort of fell into the overlap. For a long time, I had this memory of being suckered into going and seeing one of these movies, when I typically would have known better, because the TV promo somehow made it look really good. Anyway, for years, I've told people about going to see this awful horror movie back in 1981, when I was a teenager, and as I was walking out of the theater when it was over, I found myself behind these two very elderly ladies who were probably suckered by the same TV promo that got me there. Anyway, one of these little old grey haired hunched over ladies says to the other one "I shouldn't have come to see this. It'll give me nightmares." and the other one, with undisguised contempt and unrestrained annoyance loudly says "Nightmares? How the hell could that movie give you nightmares? It was so STUPID! I WISH it was scary enough to give me nightmares! Give you nightmares! Give me a break!" Still makes me laugh forty years later.

The negative reviews here are most likely from guys for whom this movie struck a nerve. The acting and writing are excellent. You know this because this movie actually causes the viewer to feel compassion for and root for a character who is very nearly a complete solipsistic, self-absorbed buffoon. I don't know how someone could view it and find no comedy in it, unless they so strongly identify with the main character that they too acutely feel his pain. I was chuckling throughout and the perfectly delivered line "You wish!" made me lose it.

A big part of the humor is that the main character is a devotee of what is itself even a fading form of nerddom: the Dungeons and Dragons inspired tabletop fantasy role-playing game, and that he's even been able to assemble a clique of players for his own homemade, unpublished specimen. It's one of those domains in which the competition is so fierce because the stakes are so small.

The movie reminded me a little of the also excellent Big Fan (2009), another humorous character study of an obsessed man-child.

I was surprised, after watching it, to see how old this movie was. The actors in it, esp. The lead, deserve more additional roles and recognition than they've gotten.

Another reviewer who identifies as an attorney working in elder care disputed the premise of this movie, but I had a friend who was an attorney who ten years ago told me a story about one of his clients, an elderly man, still of perfectly sound mind, who was caring for his wife, who had Alzheimer's. One day, when he was driving her somewhere, he got lost and he pulled over to the side of the road for a minute to look over the directions. A cop came along, spoke to them and discerned that the old man was "confused" (he was not only dealing with some cop intruding on him, but his wife who was panicky). Next thing you know, they have some court appointed "guardian" LIVING IN THEIR HOUSE. Treating them like children, questioning everything they do and reporting on it for further evaluation. AND THEY HAD TO PAY HIM! My friend, their attorney was working to get this guardianship dissolved and get this guy out of their house. As far as I'm concerned, that is in and of itself a terrifying abuse of power and a violation of that couple's constitutional rights! My attorney friend assured me that the court appointed guardian process was ripe with corruption and graft and it was pretty well known to be within the family court system. Maybe not the assembly line racket portrayed in this movie, but still a vile outrage that needs to be exposed.

If I recall correctly, this movie, when shown "flat" on TV has some perplexing moments when characters inexplicably move objects toward and away from the camera, apparently for no reason other than to create a 3D effect, like in the old Second City TV skit "Doctor Tongue". If you're looking for a big budget aliens attacking flick like Independence Day in 3D, you'll be disappointed. It's a little more cerebral, creating atmosphere and suspense instead of thrills. In order to appreciate this kind of a movie, you have to be willing to work with it.

The barebones of the story are pretty close to the truth: a dentist in a blue collar neighborhood in south St. Louis has been intermittently killing people over a period of twenty years. Mostly the victims are husbands of women he's involved with, who he splits the insurance proceeds with. His operation starts to unravel when he assasinates the woman who owns a dental lab that he owes alot of money to. An ex-wife with whom he maintains a relationship is instrumental in bringing him down and turning him into authorities. Growing up in St. Louis, I remember this as a fascinating story, as it played out in the local news and the press, beginning when the dentist was very publicly put under investigation well before his arrest. The main problem with the TV movie is the problem I'm sure exists with all made for TV movies that tell fact-based stories: everything is "genericized" and there is no real local flavor to the story; it takes place in that parallel suburban universe where all of tv takes place even though the actual story took place in an urban locale. The actual characters were really very ordinary looking people, not beautiful Markie Post and Corbin Berenson. The actual Glennon Engelmann was a scary looking dude, which made his ability to control so many women so mysterious and fascinating. Even though it's credited as based on a book explicitly about the case, the names have all been changed, which is the tv-movie makers way of saying that this is only a "story based on fact" and not a journalistic movie that tells the story, but point for point it's a lot closer to some movies that do, even with the part of the kitty cat starting to chew up the wiretap.

You can get an idea of the story here, but for the real flavor of the case, see the Learning Channel true crime documentary with re-enactments, entitled Deadly Dentist.

Robert Altman makes several kinds of films, but the best fall into two totally seperate categories: there are the faithful adaptations of turgid stage plays like Five and Dime Jimmy Dean and Streamers. He's found a way to make otherwise unfilmable stage plays into movies that are as riveting as a live performance for those who are willing to engage with them: The story is told through an intense unblinking focus on the characters. The other type of movie he makes are these large, chaotic, no-strict-storyline examinations of particular, exotic worlds like the country music industry in Nashville or a Korean war MASH unit or the Paris fashion scene. Gosford Park is his merging of the two types of film: it has a very defined story and fully realized characters, but there is a very large cast of characters and the focus shifts about so no single character is allowed to become the protagonist through whom the story is seen - almost: the character of Mary, Maggie Smith's ladies' maid comes closest to filling that role. Technically, as there is a murder, and it is revealed to the viewer (but not the police inspector in the movie) who the killer is, you might claim it is a whodunit. But that is to miss the point entirely. This movie is and is meant to be an ultra-high resolution examination (meticulously researched) of the world of the British aristocracy at the time of its height of glamour and sophistication and precariousness, the way say, Nashville for example was an examination of the '70s country music scene. Unlike Nashville, and MASH and Pret-A-Porter, it had a very strong character driven story line like Altman's filmed stage plays. This movie differs from a mainstream Hollywood film in chiefly this way: each character in it is fully written and worthy of a whole movie centered on him/herself; no character is used as a mere device to move the story along. This may be too challenging or simply not to the taste of some viewers, but that is why this movie is better seen on video, where you can rewind and replay any particular scene: little gestures or casually spoken lines are later revealed to have such great significance. I enjoyed it more for this reason as it seemed a much richer experience than a typical movie, but I suppose for this very reason some people would enjoy it less. Other than the milieu, it does not have much in common with an Agatha Christie mystery: the characters, though representing conventional stereotypes, are not abstract "stock" characters, the murder plot is pretty straightforward, not a formulaic elaboration of twists and red herrings and there's no real suspense or spookiness. I've read about half a dozen AC mysteries that take place in the English countryside and I learned far more about that world from watching this film.

To be honest, most of the humor in this film comes from the shock of seeing something onscreen and saying "Omigod, I can't believe they did that!" Most of it's pretty funny, the first time you see it. Once you know what's coming, it all falls flat. As much as I enjoyed this film, and to be honest, I did, quite a bit, I left the theater knowing that I NEVER wanted to see it again.

While home from college for Thanksgiving in '81, a friend and I wanted to go see a movie. 1981 was a really BAD year for movies (we had wanted to see Chevy Chase's Modern Problems, but it had gone) and the local nabe had just been converted to a twin cinema (multiplexes started popping up the next year). Inexplicably, this (then 5 year old movie) was playing. We knew nothing about it, but thought it might be interesting. It remains one of the few movies I have ever walked out of. Watching it does not shock or horrify at all. It bores you and depresses you and gives you a headache and fills you with a vague nausea, not related to any particular image on the screen, but the theme of the piece in general. Knowing that there are people for whom this movie is, well, precisely their idea of fun, gave me at that young age, great insight into everything that is wrong with the world. Anyone who regards this movie as a "campy good time" must be a sad, dreary, understandably lonely and weirdly repugnant bore. Title describes best the film's makers.

Ick. Was tricked into going to see this movie by the previews which cunningly highlighted the dazzling art direction. If they gutted all the dialog and plot and just kept the dazzling special effects and scenery work and constructed another whole movie around them, it would have had to have been better than what they ended up with. The big idea about the afterlife (It's like a pizza, you create your own!) has been presented before in other movies/tv shows - hell, it's not an original idea, we're beaten over the head with it. I remember that shortly after I saw this flick a friend of mine asked me how it was and I told him how much I disliked it. He said "my cousin saw it and said it was real deep" I said "Maybe if you're catholic and have the brains of a caterpiller." He said "Well, he is real catholic..." I wanted to say "and?" I found my prescience there kind of amusing. If this movie turns up on SciFi channel though, watch it for the art direction; turn the sound down and play Dark Side of the Moon on your stereo. They synch up - it's eerie.

Ludicrous dialog! Impossible plot! Execrable acting! Looks like it was shot in one afternoon. How can you not love a movie where someone says "When the lights went out, I held up the glass table top between us. So you're poison dart missed me!" In the scene right after the police chief has (hysterically) dressed down all of his subordinates and they're all filing out of the room, you can hear someone, presumably the director, shouting "Now call back Silverstein" just before the chief says "Inspector Silverstein, a word with you please." A highlight has a "professor of criminology" accurately guessing the offences of criminals in a line up based solely on their appearance. These ultra-cheap movies of the 30's and 40's, made by companies long out of business like PRC, Reliable Pictures, Chesterfield are ghoulishly fascinating, when they're not the routine westerns that were made by the hundreds. The interesting thing is when they feature a name actor (this one has Reginald Denny!) at some really low point in his/her career. You have to wonder, where were they shown? What did audiences of the time think of them? When we hear that half the films made before 1950 are lost, I suspect that most of the lost films are of this calibur and aside from the weirdness value, it's no great tragedy, though there were the rare gems in this bunch....

On the surface, this film examines the culture of verbal cruelty and the strange sport of making people into unwitting buffoons as these evolved over generations in the court of the Kings Louis of France. On a deeper level, however, it is a tableau of doomed decadence: the courtiers and Royals inhabit such an "isocentric" world, so arrogantly contemptuous and unconcerned with the citizenry over which they rule and so passionately obsessed with gaining status within a frivolous internicine hierarchy of their own making that, as you watch all this, you get an almost chilling realization of the inevitability of the bloody revolution to come. If nothing else, it's a marvelous sort of diagram of a social dialectic and it's presumably all based in fact. The film it most reminded me of, oddly enough, was the American high school based black comedy Heathers, in which a similarly corrupt social hierarchy is toppled, but in a more artificial, movie-ish fashion.

Stanwyck and Capucine were lesbians in real life, so you'd think they'd bring some conviction to their roles here, as if to make the most of the opportunity to present gay characters on the screen when this was rare. Stanwyck's character is in love with Capucine but jealous of her relationship with Laurence Harvey's character. When she's being tender to Capucine, she comes off like a nurse tending to a patient. When she's raging at her in jealousy, she sounds more like a nagging mother. Perhaps it was too much for her that the script had her turn from one extreme to the other on a dime. Capucine acts as though she's in a trance through most of the movie, dripping condescension or ennui on everyone she speaks to, except when she's with Laurence Harvey. She acts normal then and that's how where supposed to know she's in love. This movie proves that Jane Fonda was not a natural born actress, but remember, ten years later she created Bree Daniels. If you need further proof, watch her dealing with her frigidity in The Chapman Report by shrieking "I'm not a pathological case! I'm not! I'm not!" This movie is basically a lot of fun for people who enjoy watching big names give bad performances. Anne Baxter comes off best in an unusually understated performance as a mexican chilli slinger.

Also, the script is really ambiguous about the relationship between Capucine and Stanwyck. Stanwyck (very unconvincingly) implores her at the beginning "Don't go down to the DollHouse tonight." referring to the bar where customers pick up the girls. Are they lovers or not? It's pretty clear that Capucine works as a prostitute in the DollHouse, but does she work for herself or Stanwyck? The line leaves you scratching your head wondering who's the boss, in business and in private.

The film Nighthawks, made in 1978 may look very amatuerish today, gay films and independently made films have come a long way since then, but for its time it was pretty groundbreaking and thus, it was historically important. It offers a pretty good look at a vanished time: before AIDS and apparently before anyone had much money(the characters all seem unabashedly impoverished in comparison to today's urban gays). It's very cinema-verite with actors playing themselves, characters based on themselves or based on people the film-makers knew. In 1991 the director made this film, a recollection-documentary on the making of Nighthawks. This film is chiefly worthwhile if you've seen the first and are thirsty for more info on it. The director tells very poignantly his own story of self-discovery and coming out. Most striking is the story of how much effort and determination it took to get Nighthawks made and why there are hundreds of names in the closing credits that the "producers would like to give thanks to" - they are people who sent in small amounts of money after reading in a London gay paper that the filmmakers needed funds to continue the project.

I remember seeing the previews for this movie when I went to go see Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, Family Plot. I was about twelve and I can tell you, to the non-Star Wars exposed audience it looked pretty impressive. I remember hearing everybody say "I gotta see that." If it were released a couple of years later, of course everyone would have laughed at it. But for it's time, the "look" was a pretty plausible portrayal of the future (will not the actual "look" of the future ("the" future) be in large part determined by movies?) This movie really tells us a lot about that mysterious, murky, poorly documented historical void that was the '70s. Nuclear armegeddon seemed alot closer than (I don't know why it shouldn't seem as close now) and our attitude toward it was "don't show me all the starvation and disease, show me the real drama: what goes on in that segment of humanity that manages to get spared and to protect itself from the fallout." Also, there was much more of a "generation gap" in those days: it was safer to make assumptions about someone's sexual-social-political outlook based upon their age than it is today. Thirdly, we were all a bit spooked by the specter of over population (again, I don't know why we we're relatively relaxed about this today). Remember Soylent Green? Does the world presented in that movie seem more ridiculous with the passage of time? So you had this movie (Logan's Run) that did a pretty good job of plugging into the zeitgeist, and deservedly, it was a moderate hit. It's no classic. To become a classic, a sci-fi need not be "right on the money" regards the future, but should subtly, perhaps allegorically make some statement on the times in which it's made, the way the original Planet of the Apes did with racism or the way the original Star Trek did with everything in the '60s. LR had no subtlety, it was a hair-and-pyrothecnics fest, but don't tell me they're not making dumber movies today.