This is what noir looks like when its play of light and shadow has no psychological ground -- like just another crime drama. It is, however, one of those rare movies that reverses the typical trajectory and actually gets better as it goes along. Or rather, gets better after a certain point. The film is based on Cornell Woolrich's novel (written under his William Irish pseudonym), and so it is about the search for a woman who can provide a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife with the alibi he needs to avoid execution. The point at which it improves is also an improvement over the book. Where Woolrich was content to conceal his killer until the very end, hiding the malefactor behind literary obfuscation, Siodmak and screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfeld reveal their "paranoiac" about halfway through, instantly heightening the drama and the suspense. But it isn't enough. This is noir light (contradiction intended), from the lightweight performances of the stars (despite Ella Raines' obvious efforts as the accused's loyal and loving friend) to Siodmak's professional yet toneless visuals. It's supposed to add up to a nightmare world of murder and betrayal, but in reality -- because the off-key theme music that is both too happy and too romantic links directly with the ending -- it comes off instead as little more than a weird detour in two interrupted lives. Also with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, and Thomas Gomez.
++1/2
This is what noir looks like when its play of light and shadow has no psychological ground -- like just another crime drama. It is, however, one of those rare movies that reverses the typical trajectory and actually gets better as it goes along. Or rather, gets better after a certain point. The film is based on Cornell Woolrich's novel (written under his William Irish pseudonym), and so it is about the search for a woman who can provide a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife with the alibi he needs to avoid execution. The point at which it improves is also an improvement over the book. Where Woolrich was content to conceal his killer until the very end, hiding the malefactor behind literary obfuscation, Siodmak and screenwriter Bernard C. Schoenfeld reveal their "paranoiac" about halfway through, instantly heightening the drama and the suspense. But it isn't enough. This is noir light (contradiction intended), from the lightweight performances of the stars (despite Ella Raines' obvious efforts as the accused's loyal and loving friend) to Siodmak's professional yet toneless visuals. It's supposed to add up to a nightmare world of murder and betrayal, but in reality -- because the off-key theme music that is both too happy and too romantic links directly with the ending -- it comes off instead as little more than a weird detour in two interrupted lives. Also with Alan Curtis, Franchot Tone, and Thomas Gomez.
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+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. ++ Selfish dad (Tom Cruise) gets weekend custody of his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin) and precocious ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning), then gets a crash course in fatherly responsibility after Martians invade the Earth, killing or consuming everyone in sight. "Based on" -- which is to say suggested or inspired by -- H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds. This time, the Martians have hidden their gigantic tripedal fighting machines underground for thousands of years, evidently in patient expectation of the day when their preferred food -- mankind -- will have topped 6.5 billion units. (Had 6 billion been enough, they would have invaded in 1999.) The special effects are state-of-the-art, and the film has its moments, but any story that requires worldwide Armageddon to teach one dad the value of raising kids is not a strong one. And Spielberg, forgetting the lesson he should have learned from Jaws, infallibly substitutes action when dialogue would have served him better. With an even more pronounced sense of anticlimax at the end than the Byron Haskin version from 1953, and that because the screenwriters failed to give Wells the credit he deserved as a writer: while Wells wrote a realistic science-based ending to match his semi-historical novel, Josh Friedman and David Koepp simply tack the same ending on to their much narrower tale of personal redemption. ++1/2 Sleazy TV exec (James Woods) and his sadomasochist girlfriend (Deborah Harry) are intrigued by the pirate broadcast of a new show that trades in torture and murder until they discover it is being used in a plot to control the minds of consumers. Not that that realization causes Woods to be any less sleazy nor Harry to be any less self-destructive, so good luck finding anyone to root for here. Starts out well, as a mystery-thriller, then devolves (its cult followers would no doubt remove the "d") into a full-blown reality-bender of a horror movie, in which anyone exposed to the show suffers graphic and sometimes grotesque hallucinations. Woods himself is shocked when, among other things, his abdomen develops an organic videotape slot. Cronenberg's fuzzy-headed commentary on the dangers of television (he clearly wasn't trying very hard to make a political point, though, in a vague sort of way, the movie presages torture porn and the rise of sex and violence both on TV and the internet) -- that, combined with characters like Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who thinks people don't get enough TV, virtually guarantees that this film's only real attraction is its surreal imagery and bizarre absurdities. Well, it has plenty of both. Harry, of course, is more famous for having been the lead singer of the rock group Blondie. ++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. +++ 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. ++ 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. +++ Tough yet principled New York detective (Frank Sinatra) has his hands full with a failing marriage, the high-profile murder of a homosexual, a questionable suicide, and his own career goals. Supporting cast includes Robert Duval as a bigoted cop, Lee Remick as the detective's wandering wife, and Jacqueline Bisset as a woman who believes her husband's death has been whitewashed by the cops. Bleak, but with much to appreciate if not precisely enjoy: a convoluted plot that is nevertheless well-constructed, its dark and moody atmosphere, and fine performances. Based on the novel by Roderick Thorp, the sequel to which, Nothing Lasts Forever, was also made into a standalone film -- Die Hard. |
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