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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+++ Pre-Code adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The Island of Dr. Moreau is a notable horror film in its own right, though it departs significantly from the source material. That it will be different is given away as early as the credits when "The Panther Woman" is given equal billing with stars Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, and Bela Lugosi. Wells didn't bother with women, feline or otherwise. Not till the closing credits do we discover that the Panther Woman is actually Kathleen Burke. (Burke, a dental assistant at the time, won a talent contest for the part.) Arlen plays the luckless man who unintentionally ends up on mad doctor Moreau's island of horrors, where Moreau (Laughton) is tentatively worshipped (and secretly hated) by the human-like creatures he has fashioned out of a variety of different animals in his feared House of Pain. Lota, the Panther Woman, is his greatest achievement; Moreau tricks Arlen into staying so that he can try to mate him with Lota. Wells himself didn't like this film, but then he didn't like Metropolis either. In fact, this is an atmospheric, exciting, and surprisingly adult horror movie that also has a few chilling moments, such as the one that shows us the ultimate fate of Moreau himself. But the best costuming and makeup in the film, in spite of all the weird creatures, is arguably that for Burke, whose erotic exoticism is one of the best reasons to see this picture. ++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. ++ 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. +++1/2 Truly horrific tale of one man's unintentional sojourn with an amoral vivisectionist who carries out his terrible experiments far from the public eye on a small island populated by his bizarre, human-like creations. Vivisection, by the way, is surgical experimentation on live animals; Wells doesn't get into the medical details, fortunately, yet manages in other ways to convey the enormity of Moreau's "House of Pain." Meanwhile, as Moreau concedes and our narrator discovers, the good doctor has so far failed to make his alterations stick, and the creatures he creates soon begin to forget their human qualites and revert to their more primitive natures. Wells' message, that mankind isn't so far removed from his animal past as he might think, is confusing and somewhat self-contradictory, but he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, either. This is a full-frontal assault on our civilized sensibilities, and it is reaching, as critics and literary historians have done, to classify it as science fiction; it is horror through and through. It isn't pleasant, but it's worth reading. Adapted several times for film, most notably in 1932 (as Island of Lost Souls), but also, among others, in 1977 and again in 1996. ++ 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. ++ 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. ++1/2 Demi Moore plays a pregnant woman who finds a prophecy in the room she's just rented to a strangely quiet and intense man that links her unborn child with the Biblical apocalypse. She is not amused. It might amuse the audience, though, the way this everywoman turns into a major snoop at the drop of a hat, or, later, how she is able to gain entry to a state execution simply by walking through an unlocked door. The movie starts well enough, with mysterious and portentous happenings around the world, yet just when it should have turned inward -- to Moore and her husband Michael Biehn, who are both having to deal with Moore's previous miscarriages and her difficulty keeping the faith for this pregnancy -- it jumps the track and turns Moore's private apocalypse into a war between Christ and the meanie who smacked him one before his death 2,000 years ago. But this is a well-acted film, so it is, at least, watchable throughout -- even if it plays awfully fast and loose with Christian theology. "How can you take seriously a story in which only Demi Moore stands between us and the end of the world -- and her only ally is Hebrew scholar Avi (Manny Jacobs), who looks and talks like a teen-aged Woody Allen...?" - Michael Wilmington, The Los Angeles Times, April 01, 1988 "Basically 'The Seventh Sign' is the Book of Revelation played out as a paranoid yuppie fantasy -- 'She's Having a Baby' crossed with 'The Omen.' We could call it 'She's Having Rosemary's Baby.'" - Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, April 01, 1988 +++1/2 "Before The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there was The Case Against Satan." This is from the blurb on the back of Penguin's 2015 edition of Russell's first novel. It is, for once, an excellent selling point. It's about a Catholic priest, newly assigned to a small-town parish, who discovers that the teenage daughter of a widower may be possessed -- by Satan himself. The evidence for possession is compelling, yet Gregory is a modern priest with contemporary ideas on psychiatry, so for him the case against is equally persuasive. At first. Other than its leap directly to Lucifer, the book has little in common with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby; on the other hand, if one didn't know better (and, frankly, one doesn't), one would be tempted to say that William Peter Blatty was quite familiar with this book when he wrote his own story of possession, The Exorcist. The parallels are extensive and fascinating, including the scenes of the exorcism itself. That said, while the two books have much in common, they are very different works. To be clear, this is no Exorcist, but horror fans of the latter should be delighted by this earlier book on the same theme, which is just as serious if not as deep and really almost as explicit -- Russell doesn't pull his punches. + 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. |
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