Low-budget, poorly made horror film vaguely inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring about two young women who are kidnapped and brutalized by a group of thugs and eventually murdered, after which the thugs seek temporary lodging in the home of one of the girls' parents who, discovering their crimes, seek bloody revenge. Too amateurish to generate much excitement (Craven clearly learned nothing of character development or how to create audience empathy from Bergman's film) and too dumb to provoke anger (far too many examples to list), this film is ultimately distasteful yet quickly forgotten. Praised, however, by Roger Ebert, who never reviewed The Virgin Spring, but could scarcely have given it a higher rating if he had. This edition includes soundless footage as a "bonus," expanding (not surprisingly) on the rape and torture of the girls. Remade, much more successfully, in 2009.
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Low-budget, poorly made horror film vaguely inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring about two young women who are kidnapped and brutalized by a group of thugs and eventually murdered, after which the thugs seek temporary lodging in the home of one of the girls' parents who, discovering their crimes, seek bloody revenge. Too amateurish to generate much excitement (Craven clearly learned nothing of character development or how to create audience empathy from Bergman's film) and too dumb to provoke anger (far too many examples to list), this film is ultimately distasteful yet quickly forgotten. Praised, however, by Roger Ebert, who never reviewed The Virgin Spring, but could scarcely have given it a higher rating if he had. This edition includes soundless footage as a "bonus," expanding (not surprisingly) on the rape and torture of the girls. Remade, much more successfully, in 2009.
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* 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. * Cheapjack survey of many of the outlandish pseudo-theories surrounding the fate of nine Russian skiers who, in 1959, hiked into the Ural Mountains and froze to death under mysterious circumstances. McCloskey strips the internet in search of UFOs, paranormal activity, military testing, and other ridiculous explanations, giving the most time to one man's tale of his alleged encounter with floating lights, which he then hilariously embellishes in order to tie it to the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Readers are advised to save their money and open Wikipedia instead, for though the Dyatlov case is a real campfire story, this book is merely fuel for the blaze. See also Devil's Pass, the Renny Harlin-directed "found footage" film about the same incident. * Young woman writer (Camille Keaton) spending the summer in a backwoods house is beaten and raped by four local men, prompting her to bloody revenge. Infamous "horror" film, thanks mostly to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert who excoriated it on their television show Sneak Previews. And not without reason: this, in spite of Zarchi's claims to the contrary, is a movie with no point of view other than the celebration of torture for its own sake. Any other result is hard to imagine, given the distorted lens through which Zarchi views this material: the film, after all, was originally titled Day of the Woman (and that is the title Zarchi himself prefers), as if it is to a woman's credit that she exacts retribution on her rapists not by appealing to the law, not even by shooting them with her gun, but by first suckering them into consensual sex. The poster for the re-release under the present title claims that "no jury...would ever convict her" -- but only if she were judged hopelessly insane. Day of the woman, indeed. With loads of violence, a great deal of full (female) body nudity, and the as-yet-unmarketed gimmick Slime-o-Vision. Remade in 2010. * Vapid tale of three women in show business dealing with the consequences of drugs, infidelity, and ineptitude, all so that one of them can find herself. Relentlessly dull, but not nearly as depressing as it might have been, for that would have required at least one character that we cared about. Despite the title -- "dolls" being a euphemism for drugs -- the opening, which represents the women as three pills, and the drug-centric blurb on the original poster for the film, only one of the women has a drug problem. It's symptomatic of a movie searching for a unifying theme where none exists, unless perhaps it is that show business sucks. (As indeed it would, if its products were as bad as the songs in this picture.) Starring Barbara Parkins (who, if nothing else, is at least pretty), Patty Duke (who gets all the really dramatic scenes, no doubt succeeding only in shaming her identical cousin), and Sharon Tate (who, thanks to Charles Manson, gets a pass). Based on the bestselling book by Jacqueline Susann, much of which seems to have been drawn from her own life. The film was satirized by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer three years later in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. (Ebert, in reviewing the original film, highlighted a scene with Sharon Tate in which she gives up her bust exercises with the words, "Let 'em droop," calling the scene and that line in particular "the most offensive and appalling vulgarity ever thrown up by any civilization" -- a remark that really needs no further comment.) * Four children are locked away in an attic so that their greedy mother can get her hands on their grandfather's fortune. Escapist nonsense that is as prurient as it is badly written (the Fifty Shades of Grey of the 1970s and, for its time, just as popular). Stuffed with some of the worst, most laughable dialogue ever published. Devoid of any artistic merit whatsoever. In short, pure genius. Followed by a career. * Carter's first Thongor book reads like juvenilia but was marketed as adult fantasy, lending unwelcome credence to the old idea that fantasy has no real literary value. Derivative, superficial, and repetitive. Fight, capture, rescue: the pattern repeats itself over and over as Thongor and friends pursue their quest to save the ancient world of Lemuria from destruction. All sorts of bad guys seek to sacrifice Thongor to their pet deities, but, as the wizard eventually points out, Thongor leads a charmed life. Meaning: the only thing that gets sacrificed here is suspense. This revised edition includes an introduction in which Carter tells us that this, his first published book, was the seventh he had written. Those first six must have been real beauties. * Girls might indeed have reason to oppose boys if all of them were as flaccid as this film. It's a barely written story of two young women (Danielle Panabaker and Nicole LaLiberte) who, after one of them is raped, begin killing any man who looks at them crossways. Sensing perhaps the deficiencies in his own script, Austin Chick directs as though he can tease significance from a scene if he just keeps the camera rolling long enough -- nearly convincing us during one interminable following seqence that Ms. Panabaker's blonde hair must somehow provide a major plot point later in the film. (It doesn't.) This movie has no plot points, just one killing after another, each one just as dull as Panabaker's affectless performance. But if that's the point -- the degree to which we have all become desensitized to violence -- its only confirmation is in the fact that this film's assault on our senses is more likely to induce ennui than vigorous defense. * An ancient virus turns out to be the triggering mechanism for a worldwide speciation event, signaling the next stage in human evolution. Against a backdrop of official denial and misinterpretation, a handful of scientists work to bring the truth to light. This literary disaster won the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Must have been the year that pretension was in. Or camp. Peopled with absurd characters whose incessant soul-searching is as shallow (and self-pitying) as it is unbelievable. Worse, it’s all chaff, spewed out by author Greg Bear in a transparent effort to conceal a severely under-written plot. Rarely have characters been so comically divorced from their circumstances. In a world in which tens of thousands of people (in America alone) have been murdered for fear of what they believe is a disease, one self-involved woman gushes that she’s never been happier. No wonder mankind is being replaced.
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