Slack and severely underwritten story about several uninteresting sinners who, on the day of the Biblical Rapture, are left behind while millions of others from all around the world simply vanish. One man believes aliens are behind the disappearances, and for all the evidence in the film of God’s involvement (there is none), he might as well be right. Nicolas Cage is Rayford Steele, an airline pilot and adulterer, who may or may not make it back to New York after his plane is damaged during a flight to London. Meanwhile, Chloe (Cassi Thomson), his religion-hating college-age daughter, tries to cope with the loss of her mother and younger brother in a world rapidly descending into chaos. Based on the first book in the 16-volume series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and that’s about what this film feels like: 1/16th of a complete story. With a diffuse and inept script, forgettable acting, and an unimaginative effort behind the camera by Vic Armstrong.
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Slack and severely underwritten story about several uninteresting sinners who, on the day of the Biblical Rapture, are left behind while millions of others from all around the world simply vanish. One man believes aliens are behind the disappearances, and for all the evidence in the film of God’s involvement (there is none), he might as well be right. Nicolas Cage is Rayford Steele, an airline pilot and adulterer, who may or may not make it back to New York after his plane is damaged during a flight to London. Meanwhile, Chloe (Cassi Thomson), his religion-hating college-age daughter, tries to cope with the loss of her mother and younger brother in a world rapidly descending into chaos. Based on the first book in the 16-volume series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and that’s about what this film feels like: 1/16th of a complete story. With a diffuse and inept script, forgettable acting, and an unimaginative effort behind the camera by Vic Armstrong.
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+1/2 The tagline: "Fear for her." She is Susan Harris (Julie Christie), estranged wife of the creator (Fritz Weaver) of Proteus IV, a thinking machine so far advanced of human capabilities that it devises a cure for leukemia in only four days. The difficulty: the movie has no suspense. Soon after being activated Proteus is questioning its human masters and seeking a way to escape its "box." It infiltrates an open terminal in Harris' house, usurps the environmod that controls its every function, and imprisons Susan so that it can use her body to produce a child. It is so powerful and so superior that Susan never has a chance. A better tagline would have been, "Listen to Proteus." For that is about all we can do, listen as it embellishes its egomaniacal fantasy of taking over the world. (We are, however, rewarded with one nice line, something about Proteus not wanting to make humans obsolete but to so improve on humanity as to make computers obsolete.) Based on the book by Dean Koontz -- the original version, of course, not his 1997 rewrite. Improves on the book in the sense that Proteus itself is slightly more adult (Koontz imagined it as an adolescent with dreams of becoming flesh so as to ravish women), but falls far short in that the book's best feature was the suspense of its first half. Adding nothing to the film are its special effects, which serve clunky machinery on the one hand, and are used, on the other, to produce meaningless light shows that are possibly intended to be profound. +1/2 Less ubiquitous than the 1925 abridgement, this original and uncut version of Stoker's last novel is no less surreal and just as shocking for having been written by the same man who penned Dracula, one of the greatest horror novels of all time. It's inane, self-contradictory, badly plotted, and poorly written; it is so bizarre, in fact, that it becomes, in its own way, weirdly fascinating. Lady Arabella March is the White Worm, a legendary antediluvian snake of enormous size; the last of her kind, she has existed for millenia in England where, as the story begins, she can be seen in her tight-fitting white dresses openly angling for a profitable marriage with the psychopathic owner of a neighboring estate. This madman, however, is more interested in much more delicate Lilla Watford, with whom he periodically engages in hypnotic battles of will -- that is, when he isn't monomanically transfixed by the huge kite he has set flying above his castle. Meanwhile, a couple of fellows from another nearby estate -- one an old diplomatist, the other a young buck from Australia -- having stumbled onto Lady Arabella's secret spend their days plotting her long overdue death. The impetus for the abridgement appears to have been Stoker's use of racial epithets for an ugly and mean-spirited (yet pathetically amorous) African character. That, and perhaps a simple desire to shorten the book, for not much of consequence is removed; rather, the hack job is confined mostly to removing paragraphs here and there throughout. The oddest edit is one involving the monster: an entire sequence is cut in which the monster pursues our intrepid heroes into a river, where it is mistaken for a white whale. As director Ken Russell used little more than the idea of a woman who could transform herself into a giant snake for his 1988 adaptation, it is impossible to know whether his inspiration was this book or the abridgement. Read at your own risk. +1/2 Truly awful film, based, vaguely, on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name. Unlucky plane crash survivor (David Thewlis) is picked up in the Java Sea and taken to a small island where a mad doctor with a God complex (Marlon Brando) mixes human and animal DNA in a quest to create a race of "superior" beings. Goes downhill the moment Brando appears, his face, hands and arms covered in pasty white cream, as if an allergy to sunlight were in any way relevant to his character or the story. (As metaphor for the need for him to do his work "in the dark," it is overkill of the highest order.) "The" story, in fact, is a misnomer: screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson try to tell too many stories, one of which is an ironic mirror of their "accomplishment": even as the film devolves into incoherence, Moreau's horrible creations, without regular injections, regress to their disordered animal states. Meanwhile, the beast creatures chafe at their subjugation, and the survivor, in an idea cribbed not from the book but from the first adaptation of the book, The Island of Lost Souls, meets a beautiful woman (Fairuza Balk) with whom he develops a personal relationship. And then there's Montgomery, Moreau's all but superfluous assistant, played by Val Kilmer. A self-indulgent crazy-quilt of a movie, redeemed only by a few pretty pictures along the way. + Remake of Meir Zarchi's brainless ode to torture is slicker and in some ways sicker than the original. The basic story remains the same: young woman (Sarah Butler) goes to backwoods house to write a book and is set upon by a group of violent opportunistic rapists who live to regret their unsociable behavior as she picks them off one by one in revenge. The big difference here is the weird way in which our heroine begins to channel Torquemada as she creates one elaborate torture device after another to exact her retribution, becoming in the process even more depraved than her attackers. (Ms. 45 would have kissed a bullet just for this chick.) So, once again, the woman loses, and Zarchi (co-producer here) who says he once rescued a rape victim in real life, metaphorically slaps her around a little more. Followed by several sequels. +1/2 Super-serious yet silly religious horror film starring Winona Ryder as a Catholic schoolteacher who moonlights as an exorcist's assistant; she gets the assignment of a lifetime when a possessed mathematician puts her on to the true-crime writer (Ben Chaplin) chosen by Satan to become the antichrist. If Satan were as stupid and weak as movies like this one would have us believe, we'd have no need for God. Poorly written (by Pierce Gardner) and ineptly directed by Kamiński (who, to take but one example, unnecessarily delays a dramatic reveal -- the writer finding proof that he has been marked -- then jump-cuts through it with the speed of an afterthought). Chaplin, however, plays his part well: that is, if the vacancy in his eyes is meant to suggest the emptiness of soul that makes him an attractive target for Satan's usurpation. With a few good, if ultimately pointless, special effects. + Fawcett may have published this book as The Prey, but author Smith apparently copyrighted it under the more descriptive title Prey of the Werewolves. Smith took the part of the readers, who know quite early on what the hero is up against. Fawcett took the hero's part, for he is a man of such brainless stupidity that we can't be entirely sure he figures it out himself until very near the end. He is Morivania, and he has sworn himself to kill the man who killed his father. It's a quest that takes him across a large swath of late eighteenth-century Europe (France particularly) and during which he accepts the help of various companions, including, for no apparent reason, a girl who narrowly escapes being burned as a witch and an old scientist who manages to fall in love with a female-shaped clockwork figure. At least the beautiful woman he picks up in Paris serves a need -- that is, when he isn't rutting with an irresistible wolf-woman. The companion he needs most of all, though, is a strange old fellow who not only knows a great deal about Morivania's enemy, but how to kill him, as well. When Morivania sees him enjoying being petted like a dog, he fails to make any connection. Yet he comes by his addled wits honestly: the book itself is appallingly unglued. Smith, for instance, sees no problem with spending over 400 pages setting up a confrontation that he whimsically resolves with the words, "Seconds later it was over." One imagines he felt justified in doing this because this isn't a story of rising action and climactic release; it's an episodic journey punctuated at every opportunity with action that serves no purpose other than to frighten Morivania -- he certainly never learns anything from it. The truth is, he can't learn much: Smith doesn't have much to tell. The big revelation has to do with the specific nature of the werewolves. They aren't men who turn into ravening beasts at the full moon (which we knew all along); they are more like the Hengist character in the original Star Trek episode "Wolf in the Fold." But, true to form, resolving that revelation is the work of a mere paragraph or two. In addition to Star Trek, Smith may also have been influenced by Guy Endore's classic The Werewolf of Paris. Endore used the Franco-Prussian War to illuminate human depravity. Smith similarly builds much of his story within the French Revolution. He, however, has no higher purpose than to generate excuses for ostensibly exciting, if absurdly immaterial, unrest. In sum, a useful reminder that not all literary drivel is self-published. + A 300-page diatribe against Calcutta, which city evidently offended Simmons at some point. The hero, Bobby Luczak, is a coward who behaves stupidly and illogically; he's a literary type who one would think would treat his mathematician wife with some respect, but who repeatedly hides things from her and deserts her without reason. He claims to have a terrible temper, yet he's impotent in a crisis. He has a child, a 7-month-old daughter, whose very existence serves only one unpleasant purpose. His wife's only purpose seems to be to show how stupid Bobby is by contrast. One character, the college kid who gets the plot rolling, tells Bobby a story about the worshippers of the evil goddess Kali. The story starts on Page 62 and ends on Page 111. Bobby doesn't applaud at the end of it, despite the fact that it's a bravura performance, complete with backstory, chapters, and narrative arc. Perhaps he withholds his approbation because he knows the story could have been drastically shortened, and even demonstrates this when he later condenses the boy's 3-hour monologue to 10 minutes in relating it to his wife. Very little actually happens in this story, though it is filled from end to end with repeated descriptions of the rampant squalor of Calcutta. Bobby decides this is because the people are evil. Makes it easier, I suppose, for him to feel nothing for them. He dreams of it disappearing in nuclear fire. For him, it's a pleasant dream. Simmons seems less interested here in plot than Lovecraftian dread. Lovecraft, however, didn't write 300-page novels. There was a reason for that. Embarrassingly, this book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 1986. +1/2 Garbled adaptation and laughable telefilm of James Patterson's Virgin, a poor novel that should not have been difficult to improve. When the Vatican learns the truth of two virgin pregnancies, Father Justin (Tony Denison) and Sister Anne (Sela Ward) are dispatched to figure out which girl carries the new Messiah and which the Antichrist. Brian Taggert's script substitutes a constant stream of meaningless 9-volt shocks for character development and logic (in much the same way Patterson did), and it's a toss up whether the worst example of this is the dumb ending or the moment when Sister Anne crashes a family meal in the nude. A dismal film, in no way saved by its at best nondescript but otherwise wooden performances. + Rage is a slimy little book that comes to us from the bottom of some dank pond in fairyland. It's about a maladjusted high school kid who takes his Algebra class hostage in order to give his classmates a crash course in puerile psychology. Written by a future best-selling novelist, the kids all talk not like high school seniors but like future Stephen Kings. If this is an honest book, as King claims, it's a little scary how divorced from reality the man was even before he'd gone whole hog on drugs. Honest or not, the book is so light on truth that it practically floats. It belongs in the sewers with Pennywise. (Which, more or less, is evidently where it is these days. King and his publishers allowed it go out of print after several disturbed kids attempted to recreate the plot in real life.) After Charlie Decker takes over, his classmates become willing participants in his ridiculously unbelievable psychotherapy group, chipping in with their own horror stories. Fat guy with overprotective mom, fat girl who gets no dates, and so on. (There's little danger of the reader imploding under the weight of such psychological depth.) It's all ostensibly leading to one guy, the jock who isn't the All-American he appears to be. But his story is no less superficial than all the others so King goes all Lord of the Flies on him to try to generate some excitement. He fails. A truly miserable book, one that purports to reveal the humanity of its characters, but which instead celebrates only hate and violence. King's first "Richard Bachman" book. |
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