Early thriller, breezily written, about a fairly ordinary man, Richard Hannay, whose neighbor reveals to him the existence of a conspiracy to start a war (World War I, as it happens). The neighbor is murdered, leaving behind his cryptic notebook and, of course, the murderers, who naturally believe that Hannay knows too much and must be silenced. Wanted also by the police, who suspect him in the neighbor's murder, Hannay is forced to run for his life. What follows is an episodic cat-and-mouse game that isn't quite fair since Hannay gets one lucky break after another. It's a book that is probably best read one chapter at a time in an approximation of how it first appeared, as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine. It's light stuff: amusing at times, exciting at others, and Hannay himself is a pleasant everyman, more given to action than self-reflection. In most chapters he meets a Scottish local -- the "literary innkeeper," the "spectacled roadman," the "bald archaeologist" -- who either wants to help him or kill him. The "radical candidate" wants him to make a speech! Unfortunately, it all builds toward a rather disappointing climax. But Buchan doesn't take any of it too seriously, so if you don't either, you likely will be entertained. The basis for the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of 1935, The 39 Steps, which is, in fact, much better.
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Early thriller, breezily written, about a fairly ordinary man, Richard Hannay, whose neighbor reveals to him the existence of a conspiracy to start a war (World War I, as it happens). The neighbor is murdered, leaving behind his cryptic notebook and, of course, the murderers, who naturally believe that Hannay knows too much and must be silenced. Wanted also by the police, who suspect him in the neighbor's murder, Hannay is forced to run for his life. What follows is an episodic cat-and-mouse game that isn't quite fair since Hannay gets one lucky break after another. It's a book that is probably best read one chapter at a time in an approximation of how it first appeared, as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine. It's light stuff: amusing at times, exciting at others, and Hannay himself is a pleasant everyman, more given to action than self-reflection. In most chapters he meets a Scottish local -- the "literary innkeeper," the "spectacled roadman," the "bald archaeologist" -- who either wants to help him or kill him. The "radical candidate" wants him to make a speech! Unfortunately, it all builds toward a rather disappointing climax. But Buchan doesn't take any of it too seriously, so if you don't either, you likely will be entertained. The basis for the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of 1935, The 39 Steps, which is, in fact, much better.
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** Burton's adaptation of "a novel" by Pierre Boulle, and his de facto reimagining of the 1968 film starring Charleton Heston. Here, Mark Wahlberg, an astronaut who trains monkeys to serve as canaries in deep space coal mines, follows one of his simian charges into an electromagnetic storm and is transported to a planet ruled by apes. With one exception, that planet is virtually the sole point of contact between this film and its progenitors. But the exception is important. Like the book, Burton's apes do ape-like things: they swing from trees and other handy outcroppings, sniff each other, display during sexual encounters, and so on. Indeed, Burton is so enamored with the behavior of his apes that nothing else seems to matter; he directs as if he is the chimpanzee counterpart of Miss Manners. Oh, and this time, the humans talk (making their subjugation much more difficult to understand). Indicative of the shallowness of the characters is that Estella Warren, with the power of speech, is much less interesting or affecting than Linda Harrison was in the original film, playing her counterpart. A would-be bomb that nevertheless has good special effects and a few funny lines. *** Another largely emotionless atomic age disaster movie, this time with flying saucers wreaking havoc on Washington and scientist Hugh Marlowe in charge of developing a weapon to defeat them. More ambitious, however, than most of its kind: along with the destruction of American landmarks, we see the ships inside and out, in flight and on the ground; mobile aliens in suits and one without its helmet; energy fields and death rays -- all admirably executed by Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion saucers are a highlight. Genuine science fiction, without the usual horror trappings. It's a pity the characters are so bland. Suggested by Donald Keyhoe's book Flying Saucers From Outer Space. * Tangential adaptation of John Norman's Tarnsman of Gor that has exactly one redeeming feature: then-recent Playboy Playmate of the Month Rebecca Ferrati in a primitive bikini. Urbano Barberini is thoroughly unconvincing as wimpy physics professor Tarl Cabot, who is mysteriously transported to a counter-Earth named Gor, where he must learn to fight with sword, shield, and bow to recover an artifact stolen from Miss Ferrati's city. The embarrassingly slack script is filmed straight by director Fritz Kiersch, who did somewhat better with his first film, The Children of the Corn. A tarnsman, by the way, is a person who can ride large warbirds called tarns, but don't expect to see one in this bargain basement effort. ** Seven years after pissing off a high-ranking official at the FBI (The Silence of the Lambs), Clarice Starling is relegated to phone taps and drug busts with no prospects for advancement. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter, double-digit murderer and cannibal, is living it up in Italy. Bringing them together again is the function of grotesquely disfigured Mason Verger, one of Lecter's few surviving victims, who is plotting to capture Lecter and torture him for his own amusement. Take the tongue out of Thomas Harris' cheek and this is an unremittingly unpleasant story of ugly people doing ugly things; put it back in, and it's a tale that mocks the very readers who made Harris a bestselling author: that is, it's difficult to understand this book other than as an attempt to answer the question, How much will these fools stand for? Harris goes out of his way to position Lecter as the hero here -- he's like a mobster who only kills other mobsters, one with a strict code of conduct, with Harris at one point going so far as to botch one attempt on him from a woman so that Lecter can later kill a man for the same crime. Slick, but sickening. Made into an equally unpleasant film in 2001. ** Shapeless TV adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's novel about two kids, helped along by a friend and three strange old women, who travel to distant planets in search of their missing father, a brilliant scientist who disappeared a year earlier while working on a top secret project for the government. Manages to turn L'Engle's most emotionally powerful scene, the ending, into an action sequence, after which the film simply doesn't know when to quit. Not surprisingly, the film is neither as horrific as the novel nor does it contain any of the author's nods to Christianity. With unimpressive special effects and a kind of galactic medium who gets her kicks by using her crystal ball to watch live versions of America's Funniest Home Videos. Not that it matters, but in an interview with Newsweek's Melinda Henneberger, L'Engle herself denounced the film, saying, "I expected it to be bad, and it is." (She also dismissed J. K. Rowling's first Harry Potter book as "a nice story but [with] nothing underneath it.") This film stars Katie Stuart, Gregory Smith, and David Dorfman as the three kids, and Alfre Woodard, Kate Nelligan, and Alison Elliott as the old women. ** Well-made but unsatisfying thriller, based on both John D. MacDonald's novel The Executioners and James R. Webb's screenplay for the original 1962 adaptation, also called Cape Fear. In a fit of just-to-be-different-ness, screenwriter Wesley Strick turns MacDonald's cohesive family unit into a dysfunctional one, presenting them with a life or worse-than-death scenario in which the husband (Nick Nolte) is a weak, wishy-washy cheater, the wife (Jessica Lange) a castrating bitch, and the teenage daughter (Juliette Lewis) a rebellious moron (not to put too fine a point on it). Psychopathic menace couldn't have happened to a more deserving family. Robert De Niro plays the psycho -- he wants revenge on the lawyer who suppressed evidence that might have saved him from a 14-year prison term -- and he's very good, if equally hard to believe: by the time he gets out of prison, this self-taught man could have been a lawyer, a teacher, a priest, or a professional wrestler -- if he just weren't wildly insane. Scorsese makes it all look very slick, though. Also with Joe Don Baker, as well as Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, both of whom starred in the original film. **** Olsen's riveting account of how Dean Corll killed at least 28 boys between the ages of 13 and 19 from 1970-1973, aided and abetted by two teenaged accomplices and the city of Houston, Texas. While it's possible that later works on the case provide more detail (Olsen doesn't appear to have bothered to wait for the trials of Corll's accomplices, one of whom killed Corll before he could dispatch his latest victim), it's unlikely any are informed by the same passion. And it is Olsen's passion, though myopic and arguably elitist, that gives this work its driving force. It's about a hellhole called Houston that is inhabited by worn out, uneducated hicks and policed by overworked cops who have coined their own category of homicide, "misdemeanor murder," so as to be able to focus on the really important crimes -- or to take the weekend off. One gets the sense that Olsen wouldn't have minded much if Houston itself were wiped off the map, instead of just a relatively few children. Not that he doesn't appreciate the children; more that he cannot abide the idea that Houstonians themselves seem to care so little about them. The whole thing would be offensive if it weren't in some respects quite true. The case itself is fascinating in its scope and diabolical incestousness (so many of the victims were located, along with the killers, in the same small area of Houston, and interacted with each other), and even Olsen's recounting of Corll's history late in the book makes for interesting reading (which is not often the case). Unbiased? No. But forcefully written. ** Cult movie that was the result of a nine-day shoot, from a script written in three days, from a story idea that was produced overnight. And yes it looks it. With the exception of a nudie picture or two, the first film directed by Francis Ford Coppola (before he began using his middle name). Several years ago, young Kathleen Haloran drowned in the pond on her family's Irish estate. Lady Haloran seems to think of little else and her three sons are all affected by the tragedy in different ways. One more than the others, presumably, for somebody is going around hacking people up with an axe. Yet the violence is minimal, the cinematography awkward, and the dialogue stilted. One suspects its cult following must be due to Kathleen, the poor little girl who drowned. We see her alive in a flashback, but more importantly we see her dead. Supernaturally dead, it would appear, for she looks as she did in life; she might simply be sleeping. Her presence literally haunts the film, and when you include a creepy shrine dedicated to her memory and its unlikely location, she overshadows all the rest, an eerie reminder of what horror films are all about: wreckage, despair, and the loss of innocence. The ending encapsulates all this in a single violent act. So not without merit, but with little to offer in the way of traditional entertainment, either. By the way, one of the murders -- the most gruesome one, in fact -- wasn't shot by Coppola. It was ordered after producer Roger Corman saw Coppola's finished film and decided it needed more horror. If it weren't for that, the body count would be cut in half. ** First adaptation of V. C. Andrews' poorly written yet hugely popular book about four kids -- the products of an incestuous union -- forced to live hidden away in an attic while their destitute mother tries to wheedle her way back into the good graces of her rich, religious father. Not as bad as the book, but not very good, either; and while it tries to solve some of the former's most egregious problems -- ridiculous dialogue and the lack of any convincing reason why the kids don't simply escape -- it can't quite overcome the feeling that, despite what we're told, these supposedly perfectly normal kids might have been genetically shortchanged in the gray area of their own personal attics. Unbelievable and, given the horror of the situation, ridiculously superficial. Posts but never delivers the book's most controversial scene, and features a drastically altered ending. With Kristy Swanson and Louise Fletcher. |
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