The third, last, and weakest of the RKO horror films produced by Val Lewton and directed by Tourneur, after Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. This one is set in a small town in New Mexico where young women are killed after a publicity stunt goes awry and a leopard escapes. Low-key and atmospheric, with a very nice first victim stalking sequence, but ultimately too fragmented and impersonal for its 66 minutes: the story spends itself on an excessive number of characters and the heroes have little more on the line than their guilt over staging the publicity stunt in the first place. Definitely worth a look, however, for fans of this kind of noir. Based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.
++1/2
The third, last, and weakest of the RKO horror films produced by Val Lewton and directed by Tourneur, after Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie. This one is set in a small town in New Mexico where young women are killed after a publicity stunt goes awry and a leopard escapes. Low-key and atmospheric, with a very nice first victim stalking sequence, but ultimately too fragmented and impersonal for its 66 minutes: the story spends itself on an excessive number of characters and the heroes have little more on the line than their guilt over staging the publicity stunt in the first place. Definitely worth a look, however, for fans of this kind of noir. Based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.
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++ "In January 1957," Michael Newton writes, "Glatman had a brainstorm. He was moving to Los Angeles." What immediately follows -- a history of Los Angeles -- typifies the author's approach throughout this book, which includes many other mini-histories, like that of the prisons in which Glatman was incarcerated and a primer on Jews in America (just because Harvey and his parents happened to be Jewish, never mind that they were non-practicing Jews). Some of Newton's information is interesting in itself, much of it is merely distracting, and all of it is completely irrelevant. Most surprising, however, is that Newton even manages to make his own commentary on Glatman's crimes somewhat suspect and redundant, for Glatman, with an almost admirable air of wholeness and truthfulness, confessed everything, and Newton provides that confession verbatim in a later chapter. We may thank him for that -- it's the most interesting part of the book -- but it tends to undermine the entire concept of Rope, for Glatman comes off as a guy who, as serial killers go, oughtn't to rate anything more than a long article. Intuitively that seems wrong -- here's a guy who raped, bound, and photographed three women (using a tripod, no less) before murdering them, but the fact is, sad little Harvey really just wanted to screw. Neither Glatman, the available record, nor Newton is able to penetrate much deeper than that. Included in the bloat, toward the end, is an intriguing anti-profiling section that cuts against the grain of contemporary thought (or myth, as Newton would have it). ++ Dated, somewhat stagy horror classic, based on Bram Stoker's novel by way of the 1924 play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. The revised story (written by Garrett Fort) asks a great deal of readers of the book, particularly in that here it is Renfield, not Harker, who visits Castle Dracula. Harker is still engaged to Mina, but Mina has somehow become the daughter of Dr. Seward. At only 85 minutes, what could we expect? Not this. Not a condensation when what was really required was a distillation. The story lies with Harker and Mina, but that story is too busy fighting for screen time to establish any meaningful ties with the audience. The long opening at Dracula's castle -- now wasted on an ancillary character -- unbalances the entire film. With Renfield's continued antics and the filmmakers' refusal to jettison Lucy, bless her heart, Harker is reduced to a blind fool and Mina to mooning over how it feels to become a vampire (it feels pretty good, evidently.) It all runs so quickly that this feels like the Cliff's Notes version of a badly mistranslated copy of the book. On the plus side, Helen Chandler, as Mina, is quite good and director Browning manages a few good shots along the way, particularly those involving long, wide staircases as are found in Dracula's castle and his London home of Carfax Abbey. With Dwight Frye as Renfield, Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing and, of course, Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Followed by a sequel, Dracula's Daughter, in 1936. ++++ Seminal slasher film "introduces" Jamie Lee Curtis as a smart, virginal teen who becomes the primary target of a mask-wearing psychopath named Michael Myers. Michael, however, is no ordinary man: as Donald Pleasance, playing his psychiatrist, tells us, he is, in fact, the boogeyman come to life. Still holds up today, thanks to good performances all around, a simple but effective script, and suspenseful direction that relies as much on showing us the killer as not. That, and the terrific theme music, written by Carpenter himself. With Nancy Loomis, P. J. Soles, and Nick Castle as "The Shape." Followed by six sequels, and a remake directed by Rob Zombie. ++1/2 The novelization of the 1965 film. Part Ellery Queen, part Paul W. Fairman. Fairman wrote the novelization (as an unpublished manuscript by John Watson in which Holmes takes on Jack the Ripper) and Queen wrote the framing story (in which Ellery reads the manuscript and comes to his own conclusions). Both segments are enjoyable in their own way, but in the end, this mystery doesn't add up. Though Fairman does a reasonable job capturing Holmes and the period, he completely ignores everything known about the Ripper, turning the whole thing into a cynical marketing ploy. +++ NFL quarterback (Warren Beatty) gets second chance in the body of another man after he is mistakenly whisked to the afterlife before his time. He also falls in love. Like a rom-com for guys: sweet, pleasing, but uncommitted to either storyline. Still, not a bad choice for date night. With Julie Christie, Buck Henry, James Mason, Charles Grodin, and Dyan Cannon. No relation, despite the heavenly connection, with the 1943 film of the same name. This is instead a remake of 1941's Here Comes Mr. Jordan. +++ The Coen brothers weren't going to improve on the original adaptation of Charles Portis' book, the wonderful 1969 film starring Kim Darby and John Wayne. They just weren't. But perhaps they thought it was worth updating anyway, both to give it a little more realism and to restore the hard truths of the novel. Well, it is grittier, and it does end the way the book did; otherwise, it's the same thing, only less entertaining. Precocious fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires trigger-happy Federal Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track the man who killed her father, figuring either to kill him or bring him back to face justice. They're joined by a brash young Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who is after the same man for an entirely different murder. The first time we hear Cogburn, he's in an outhouse. There's nothing wrong with that -- except that it warns us that realism isn't necessarily a virtue. Bridges speaks as though he still has the memory of marbles in his mouth, and Damon, after nearly having his tongue severed, speaks pretty much as he did before. Steinfeld just talks a lot. They all speak in the formalized way of the characters in the novel, as if the Coen brothers failed to realize that what made sense for a book written in Mattie's voice didn't make so much sense for a movie with actors playing the individual parts. For all that, this isn't a bad movie -- it retains some of the humor of the original and the book on which it's based, and the story itself is good -- but the drearier tone combined with characters who aren't as likable make it noticeably less enjoyable. +1/2 Religious fantasy (and horror story, barely) about not one, but two teenage virgins, both miraculously pregnant, one with the new Messiah, the other with the Antichrist. Written in bite-size chunks and peppered with melodramatic italics, this is a book of endless beginnings, as if Patterson is forever trying to entice the reader to pick up the book rather than to put it down -- permanently. Silly and superficial on every level, the story bounces between the girls themselves, an investigator of miracles for the Vatican, and Sister Anne and Father Justin (who can't decide whether or not the Second Coming is a good time to renounce their vows and hop into bed with each other). The anticlimactic ending leaves you questioning the superiority of supernatural intelligence. Reissued in 2000 as Cradle and All, but earlier (1991) adapted as a made-for-TV film called Child of Darkness, Child of Light. ++1/2 Middling effort that re-works H. Rider Haggard's novel in some very important ways, yet manages to stay true to its own internal logic. Three Englishmen are lured into a quest to find a lost city in Africa, where they find a beautiful queen (Ursula Andress) who has little regard for her subjects, yet is delighted that one of the Englishmen (John Richardson) appears to be the reincarnation of her former lover, a man of ancient Egypt. Significantly, the queen is introduced as She-who-waits; though she is later called She-who-must-be-obeyed, the damage is done: this She, in power and beauty, is a pale shadow of her literary counterpart, and much less interesting as a result. Does, however, include one nice, if particularly cruel, scene in which a daughter is returned to her father. Peter Cushing also stars. Followed in 1968 by the semi-sequel, The Vengeance of She. ++ Incompetence begets camp in this adaptation of Bram Stoker's last novel. That's camp Ken Russell style -- with nudity, sexual hyperbole, and, of course, religious (or is that sacrilegious?) imagery. To be clear, Russell's script only nods occasionally at Stoker's book -- yes, it's still about a snake-woman (Amanda Donohoe) and the band of people who want to destroy her -- but all the details have been changed to suit Russell's own irreverent vision of the story. Some of it even works: it's funny, for instance, when Donohoe is drawn irresistibly from her wicker basket (!) by the musical strains of the snake charmer (actually a Turkish recording being blasted from the hi-fi system next door). Before things get out of hand -- with scenes like those of nuns being raped while Christ on the cross is menaced by a huge snake and Hugh Grant's symbolic dream in which he raises a pencil on his lap while watching a cat-fight between two women -- that is, for the first 15 or 20 minutes, Lair is actually quite promising. One thing: even with all Russell's nonsense, the story is more comprehensible than was Stoker's. Well, at least it gives us a great "new" song for Halloween: "The D'Ampton Worm." Also with Peter Capaldi, Catherine Oxenberg, and Sammi Davis. |
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