Too-cute followup to King Kong, made for about a third the cost of Kong and released later the same year, has none of the gravitas of the former film but retains a bit of its charm. Ten months after Kong's death, his captor, Carl Denham, mired in escalating legal and financial trouble, can't wait to return to Skull island after he learns of great treasure hidden there. Along for the ride are old friends Capt. Englehorn and Charlie, the Chinese cook from his previous adventure, and new friend Hilda Petersen (Helen Mack), whom he met earlier trying to coax some monkeys out of a tree. (When Denham objects to her method of persuasion, Hilda asks, "Have you ever caught a monkey?") The first thing they find on the island, however, isn't treasure, but King Kong's son, a 12-foot white ape that, "Androcles and the Lion"-style, becomes a friend after they rescue him from quicksand -- setting him up to later on provide some of the film's aforementioned cuteness. It's worth noting, though, that this encounter doesn't occur until well after the halfway point in the film, which is only 69 minutes long (Kong was 100). The long prelude ensures that the island portion will be rushed (and so, too, the effects themselves, jerkier here than in Kong), as the filmmakers hurry to squeeze in four monsters in addition to little Kong, as well as an apocalyptic ending the gods themselves would be proud of. Better than the monsters, in fact, are the lovely and atmospheric landscape paintings sprinkled throughout and often animated, as in Kong, with flying archaeopteryxes. Robert Armstrong is still perfect as the dynamic Denham and Mack, though no Fay Wray, at least doesn't have to spend half her time screaming. With Frank Reicher as Englehorn, Victor Wong as Charlie, and John Marston as the cowardly Norwegian who originally sold Denham the map to Kong's island and who returns here to tell him about the treasure he didn't bother to mention previously.
++1/2
Too-cute followup to King Kong, made for about a third the cost of Kong and released later the same year, has none of the gravitas of the former film but retains a bit of its charm. Ten months after Kong's death, his captor, Carl Denham, mired in escalating legal and financial trouble, can't wait to return to Skull island after he learns of great treasure hidden there. Along for the ride are old friends Capt. Englehorn and Charlie, the Chinese cook from his previous adventure, and new friend Hilda Petersen (Helen Mack), whom he met earlier trying to coax some monkeys out of a tree. (When Denham objects to her method of persuasion, Hilda asks, "Have you ever caught a monkey?") The first thing they find on the island, however, isn't treasure, but King Kong's son, a 12-foot white ape that, "Androcles and the Lion"-style, becomes a friend after they rescue him from quicksand -- setting him up to later on provide some of the film's aforementioned cuteness. It's worth noting, though, that this encounter doesn't occur until well after the halfway point in the film, which is only 69 minutes long (Kong was 100). The long prelude ensures that the island portion will be rushed (and so, too, the effects themselves, jerkier here than in Kong), as the filmmakers hurry to squeeze in four monsters in addition to little Kong, as well as an apocalyptic ending the gods themselves would be proud of. Better than the monsters, in fact, are the lovely and atmospheric landscape paintings sprinkled throughout and often animated, as in Kong, with flying archaeopteryxes. Robert Armstrong is still perfect as the dynamic Denham and Mack, though no Fay Wray, at least doesn't have to spend half her time screaming. With Frank Reicher as Englehorn, Victor Wong as Charlie, and John Marston as the cowardly Norwegian who originally sold Denham the map to Kong's island and who returns here to tell him about the treasure he didn't bother to mention previously.
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++1/2 A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944. ++1/2 Decent slasher film, even if the filmmakers were so embarrassed by the YA source material, the novel by Lois Duncan, that they offensively buried that fact in the closing credits. True, the book left much to be desired, but the hook -- a group of young adults haunted by (and hunted for) a crime they committed the previous summer -- is the best thing in either version, and that belongs solely to Duncan. That said, screenwriter Keven Williamson (what he did the previous year was write Scream) does a couple of good things with Duncan's book: he eliminates nearly all of its romantic overtones and he adds much-needed pep to the dialogue. Its an open question whether turning Duncan's thriller into a horror movie was an improvement: neither approach works well enough to tell. But the movie is certainly a great deal more visceral. Gillespie gives it a smooth, professional look, and the Casting Director does the rest, hiring the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Freddie Prinze, Jr. as the teenagers who think they've successfully covered up their crime until a slicker-wearing psycho starts stalking them one by one. As usual, the setup is more interesting than the payoff. Followed by two sequels, the second of which went straight to video. ++ Hammer's followup to their own 1965 version of H. Rider Haggard's novel isn't much of a sequel to the earlier film and it isn't based on Haggard's own sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, either. It is "based on characters created by" the author, and that only barely. Most notably, She herself is absent. Oh, there's a young European beauty named Carol (Olinka Berova) who has, in essence, been nominated to take the Queen's place, but she's just an ordinary girl with no qualifications for the position other than her resemblance to Ursula Andress. On second thought, that makes her the perfect choice. For in this bizarre take on Haggard's characters, the great and terrible She-who-must-be-obeyed is reduced to nothing more than an impotent figurehead, Queen of the lost city of Kuma, which is actually ruled by a group of psychics called the Magi. If the film were honest about any of this, it might have worked. For instance, the one power She and her King, Kalikrates (John Richardson), actually possess is immortality; it might be interesting to see how an ability to outlive your opponents translates into political power. Instead, we get Phillip (Edward Judd), a psychiatrist who falls for troubled Carol -- and, significantly, a man who must ultimately save her. The only "vengeance" in this film is that directed at powerful women by sexist filmmakers. Which is odd because it was written by Peter O'Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books. Odder still in that the movie opens with an attempted rape that Carol appears to thwart with pre-Carrie psychokinesis, a talent that is never used again. (Can it be that even attempted rape is sufficient to render women powerless?) Senseless and silly, but the ending, by the Sacred Flame, isn't bad. ++ Lifeless, cliche-riddled sequel to Independence Day that, without Will Smith, is both uncharismatic and uncentered. Takes place 20 years after the original story, by which time Earth has been transformed into a science fiction wonderland of world peace, spaceships, and fancy new weapons that only work on misidentified aliens, not the real threats to its continued existence. Like the new mothership hovering over the Atlantic (which part of the Atlantic? a character asks; all of it, she is told) that, in its mission to drill down to and suck out the core of the planet, provides the authorities with a handy, helpful countdown clock to the end of the world. Young fighter pilots Liam Hemsworth and Jessie Usher (playing Smith's step-son from the original film) are supposed to make us care about the future of Earth, but that's hard to do when the future represented by these feuding hotshots, one of whom (Hemsworth) is just another follows-orders-only-when-he-wants-to military man, is so colorless and hackneyed. The oldsters, including familiar faces such as Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Bill Pullman, and Brent Spiner, frankly don't make us any more optimistic. Good special effects, though. ++1/2 Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended. ++ Some years after her alcoholic father dies, Sonny Blake (Rose McGowan), a psychologist with her own radio talk show, moves back into the family home on suburban Rosewood Lane. Her neighbors, she soon discovers, live in fear of the teenage lad who delivers their papers. With good reason: this kid isn't just psychotic, he's probably supernatural. And now he's after Sonny. So -- demon paperboy. Whatever possibilities were to be mined from the idea of a kid who holds an entire neighborhood hostage to his own evil, Salva, who wrote and directed, tosses out like yesterday's news. All he's interested in is how far it's possible to stretch the viewer's credulity. The story is illogical, the characters are doltish, and it all leads exactly nowhere. Yet the trailer's probably not bad. Out of context, some of the scenes have the edge of a decent thriller. But that pesky script keeps getting in the way. Like when Sonny gets tired of having her house broken into and decides to do something about it, and buys a cat. Meow. Or when she calls the cops and a couple of lunkheads with badges show up. Or when a major character vanishes and we're supposed to pretend he never existed. You know, like that. Salva has talent, just not writing talent. ++ Mostly embarrassing horror comedy with James Lorinz as ex-medical student Jeffrey Franken, whose discovery of a new form of crack that blows users' bodies to pieces comes in handy when his fiancée is torn to bits by a lawnmower. Using parts of dead, drug-using hookers to rebuild her, however, has unintended consequences. Themeless and underwritten, but with a few funny lines, and, thankfully, despite all the exploding bodies, very little blood. Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen plays Franken's betrothed. Louise Lasser has a small part as his mother. Smart, it ain't. ++ Another book that isn't nearly as good as the hook. Teenage girl receives note that threatens to expose -- or, worse, to physically make her pay for -- the very serious crime she and three of her friends committed the previous summer. The crime is horrible enough, but the kids' coping strategies are so superficial and routine that one finds oneself almost agreeing with their tormentor -- that these spoiled brats could benefit from a hard dose of reality: they are all more interested in their love lives than what they did that terrible night. If this doesn't quite happen, it is only because the characters aren't compelling enough to provoke much of an emotional reaction either way. With less action than you might expect and a whole lot more lax dialogue than you could ever want. A quick read, though. Revised and reissued in 2010 in order (a) to update the technology and (b) to squelch any sense of history a young reader might have possibly been exposed to. Made into a film in 1997 starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar. ++ Sequel starts well, picking up right where the 1978 original left off, then deteriorates into typical slasher fare as babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets taken to the local hospital where Michael Myers kills everyone in sight in order to get to her. Supporting characters (including the always-unpleasant Leo Rossi as a crude ambulance driver and Lance Guest as his good-guy paramedic partner with inexplicable feelings for Laurie) add nothing but the body parts Michael requires to make each killing unique. John Carpenter evidently added more gore to Rosenthal's film in post-production. He should have added more imagination to his and Debra Hill's script. Also starring Donald Pleasance. |
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