***

Starts out rather like a British version of The Thing (From Another World) -- mysterious alien ship discovered buried not in ice, but deep in the earth causes friction between military and scientific investigators, while a living remnant of its crew wreaks havoc -- but unlike Hawks' film, the threat here is never very clearly defined and its haziness and inconsistency saps the suspense. Nice-try special effects don't greatly harm the movie, but don't help a lot, either. Still, a film with ideas (many psi-related) and a few nice scenes and touches, as, for instance, when a scholar, translating Latin on the fly, has to turn the page to find his verb. The third and last in Hammer's Quatermass films, preceded by The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2. This standalone feature was titled Five Million Years to Earth for U.S. release in 1968. Starring Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, James Donald, and Julian Glover.

*

A British woman historian, an American architect, the Russian curator of the Hermitage art museum, and a female Israeli Mossad agent discover that their independent inquiries into the Third Reich are related by an incredible possibility: that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun survived World War II and might still be alive "today," in 1985. In spite of the possibilities -- history and politics, art and architecture -- Wallace produces a trivial novel with very little information and no atmosphere whatsoever, and a plot that hinges on excavating the bulldozed Führerbunker (where Hitler and Braun committed suicide) in order -- get this -- not to find something. With one-dimensional characters (two of whom fall instantly in love), a tit-for-tat view of mass murder, and an absurd resolution that is hardly worth the 400-page wait.

"One of Wallace's characters asks the heroine, 'Another book on Hitler? There have been so many.' Too true, too true." - People, January 06, 1986

"[Wallace] hooks you on the first page and holds you until the last--not an inconsiderable achievement. But it's not enough, alas--not nearly enough." - David Shaw, Los Angeles Times, March 02, 1986

****

In sum, a romantic mystery coupled with its personal and practical aftermath, as those left behind cope with the fate of four college girls who, on Valentine's Day, 1900, during an outing to Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation in Australia, wended their way toward the top of the rock, where three of them disappeared and the fourth ran away screaming. The larger portion -- the investigation and the differing ways the tragedy affects the lives of those touched by it -- is well-constructed to maintain suspense, but frankly it isn't what makes this movie so haunting and so memorable. That distinction belongs to the first third of the film, recounting the mystery itself, which Weir evokes with rare poetry: a combination of gorgeous photography, portentous atmosphere, and pointed (if yet ambiguous) dialogue. Based on a novel (by Joan Lindsay), but not an actual event.

"Horror...may be a warm sunny day. the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death." - Vincent Canby, The New York Times, February 23, 1979

"Russell Boyd's cinematography unfolds in a series of images so lush and chimerical that they seem less the product of his camera than the result of brush-strokes by the elder Renoir." - Ed Roginski, Film Quarterly, Summer, 1979

**

Director Yates and writer Steve Tesich's follow-up to Breaking Away might have been an intriguing romantic drama, but is instead a contrived thriller with unbelievable romantic overtones. It's about a janitor (William Hurt) who intimates he knows more about a murder than he actually does in order to get close to a woman reporter (Sigourney Weaver) on whom he has had a crush for years. This, of course, makes him a target himself. With overdramatized characters (absolutely everyone has issues), lots of red herrings, a political tie-in to Jewish refugees, and a couple of cops who seem to believe the stakeout is a police officer's raison d'etre. Star-studded, however: in addition to Hurt and Weaver, the cast includes Christopher Plummer, James Woods, Steven Hill, and Morgan Freeman.

**

Mystery-thriller set in motion when a woman receives a phone call allegedly from her young nephew who died 16 years earlier. A retired cop suspects the woman will be next after two townies are subsequently murdered. Meanwhile, the mystery itself founders on red herrings and ancillary action, until the whole thing is detailed in a sexist episode late in the book that has a man explaining psychology to a woman psychologist. With, in the cop, one of the genre's most unpleasant heroes. Implausible and contrived. Made into a film in 1972.

"Well--you won't hang up" - Kirkus Reviews, Nov. 13th, 1967

***

Slick, cowardly Public Relations officer Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is sent to the front lines in a war with alien invaders; when he kills a rare species, its blood initiates a temporal loop that causes Cage to repeat the day endlessly, each time he is killed. He learns more with each repetition, soon meeting a woman (Emily Blunt) who once had the same ability, and who helps guide and train him to use it as a means of combating the enemy. Ridiculous premise, but well-executed and exciting, leavened frequently with genuine humor. Excellent teaming of an irreverent Cruise with a hard-nosed Blunt. Looking rather like spinning mechanical octopi, the aliens aren’t really a highlight, but then the story isn’t about them anyway. Based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka.

**

Infinitely better and more involving than the later Nicolas Cage film in spite of a much-too-young-looking Kirk Cameron playing TV journalist Buck Williams, which (among other things) gives the film an amateurish feel that it can never quite surmount. Enjoyable nevertheless, in a guilty pleasure sort of way. When 150 million people disappear from the face of the world, Buck links a new technology that allows food to be grown virtually anywhere with a couple of greedy businessmen and a prideful contender for the Secretary-Generalship of the United Nations and comes up with the Biblical Rapture in progress. Helping him are a once-lustful airline pilot and his initially disbelieving daughter. The story continues in Left Behind II: Tribulation Force and Left Behind: World at War, all of which are based on the series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, who, by the way, like the critics, generally disliked the films.

**

The Night People are two couples looking to inject some excitement into their mundane lives who begin playing practical jokes on themselves and the police in the dead of night. Finney’s intriguing premise degenerates quickly into a revenge match between the couples and an exceptionally stupid and violent cop, a yokel from Oklahoma. This rather short novel reads like a reject from the sixties/early seventies, when its radical, cop-hating attitude might have stirred sympathy from like-minded hippies. Likewise, Finney’s characters and dialogue seem ripped from one of the author’s own essays into nostalgia, harking back to a time well before any of them were born; plunked down in 1977, they come off not as sophisticated, but rather as silly, stilted, and thoroughly unbelievable.

"...Night People may offer some vicarious Thousand-Clownsy pleasure to three-piece-suiters who dream of breaking out, climbing bridges, and bopping cops." - Kirkus Reviews, Oct. 14th, 1977

**

Competent drama of passengers and crew of small plane discovering what they're made of after storm forces them down in South American jungle where headhunters are only one of their worries.  With Rod Steiger as a killer on his way to a firing squad, Anita Ekberg as a kept woman en route to her new job as a whore, and several others, each with problems of their own.  Nothing outstanding here, although Ekberg is certainly arresting.  Filmed once before, also by Farrow, as Five Came Back (1939).

****

Hitchcock's adaptation of the Graham Winston novel is about a frigid kleptomaniac with a dreadful past and the man determined to rehabilitate her, even if it means binding her with blackmail and thrashing her with his unwanted sexual advances. It is, according to the original poster, Alfred Hitchcock's "suspenseful sex mystery." (Whatever that might be -- a glory hole, perhaps?) More likely, it is an exploration of the mystery of sex, albeit the darker side of it. It asks questions like, "How far do love and good intentions allow a man to go?", "Is blackmail ever justified?", and "When is rape for a woman's own good?" Clearly, this is no movie for the knee-jerk crowd. Yet it's Hitchcock all the way.  The suspense is generated by Marnie's life of crime, the mystery by her psychological problems (they date back to her childhood), and the sex by about a million years of cold, hard instinct. Not quite as good as the book (which has different emphases), but a classic in its own right. Starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.