Review – Full Eclipse

Vigilante commando supercop junkie werewolves. No kidding. And as an extra added bonus: Mario Van Peebles in the lead role. I’m not entirely sure how this got into my Netflix queue. Perhaps it was the producer/screenplay credit to Richard Christian Matheson, whose writing I’ve admired for awhile now. Even so, I’m surprised this disc managed to float to the top of the queue. Seems like I’ve got a lot of stuff in there that should have been higher priority. Live, learn, and dish out one-star ratings. See if desperate

Review – Weekend at Bernie’s

I got a copy of this movie for free when I ordered a pizza. Really. No kidding. Andrew McCarthy stars in what has to be one of the dumbest caper movies of all time. Two snotty morons get caught up in a ridiculous set of circumstances that for one reason or another require them to keep up the pretense that their boss is hanging out with them at his beach house despite the fact that he’s been murdered by mobsters. That nothing they did would even remotely have worked is far beside the point, as is the number of opportunities they had to bail out of the whole mess with few if any repercussions. This is stupid even by 80s caper movie standards, so how or why on earth they ended up making as sequel is completely beyond me. In retrospect, the pizza came in a box. Maybe I should have watched that for 90 minutes instead. See if desperate

Review – Suspect Zero

I’ll bet these things sound great in the pitch meetings. A psychic who used to track serial killers for the FBI has gone crazy and is now hunting and killing the killers himself. We’ll get Ben Kingsley. What do you think? No, we swear we aren’t going to stir in a ton of incomprehensible subplots or use choppy editing and a muddled script to obscure the underlying story until it becomes difficult to care about. And we’d never dream of resorting to hackneyed visual tricks or anything like that. No, we don’t have our fingers crossed behind our backs. Please, just give us the money so we can start shooting. Mildly amusing

Review – Habitat

And you thought your teenage years were difficult. Imagine how much worse they would have been if the ozone layer was gone and your dad turned into a bizarre plant ghost. And then he takes your house and your mom with him into the realm of bizarre botany. If your imagination doesn’t stretch that far, then this movie might help you out. Otherwise it’s little more than an awful adolescent flick with some sci fi grafted on. Or is it the other way around? See if desperate

Review – The Quiet American (1958)

It’s almost hard to believe that Vietnam ever looked like this to American eyes. This first film production of Graham Greene’s novel suffers from many of the drawbacks of the 21st century remake while sporting few of the benefits. Production values are mid-range at best, the acting is mediocre and the script is terrible. But worst of all is Audie Murphy, playing the boyish-yet-sinister American agent with very little of the yet-sinister quality so essential to the story (but so unacceptable to late 50s audiences, one supposes). The result comes across almost entirely as a love triangle gone bad, robbing the production of the geopolitical elements that might have made it a much more interesting snapshot of western involvement in Indochina before it became the overwhelming mess of the 60s and 70s. Mildly amusing

Review – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I won’t bother comparing this to the original. Standing on its own, this is an exceptionally uneven production. The story works, but many of its elements do not. For example, the children’s characters (except Charlie, of course) were underdeveloped, while far too much time was spent on Willie Wonka. The premise of the tale is that Wonka is a magical creature, sort of an Eyrine for bad little kids and their even-worse parents. Such a figure doesn’t require an extended back story. The flashbacks to Wonka’s youth destroy the mystery that helps make him interesting, not to mention disrupting the flow of the picture. And Burton or Depp or whoever made the decision to play Wonka as Michael Jackson made a bad call, because it served only to make the character creepy – even somewhat disgusting – and drove a wedge between him and the audience who should probably sympathize with him at least a little. On the other hand, the movie had a lot of entertaining highlights as well. I was especially fond of Veruca falling victim to angry squirrels. As a concluding aside, I should note that somehow or another I let myself get talked into going to see this on opening night at the cramped, stuffy, and otherwise generally uncomfortable Southwind theaters in Lawrence, possibly the most unpleasant place and the worst possible time to see this or any other movie. I don’t think the awful surroundings hampered my appreciation of the movie, but viewing conditions didn’t exactly help either. Mildly amusing

Review – In the Realms of the Unreal

This is a fascinating look at the life and work of Henry Darger. Of course, with Darger as a subject you’d have to work pretty hard to make an uninteresting movie. And to be sure, there are a few rough spots. I’m not as big a fan as I thought I’d be of the decision to animate his drawings. On a more fundamental level, the background material – interviews with his neighbors and the like – didn’t amount to much beyond clearly establishing that nobody knew him especially well. With this in mind, most of the screen time goes to the artist’s work, particularly his legendary 15,000-page novel. It was enough to make me wish some visionary publishing house could find a way to print it, though it sounds like it would make difficult reading at best. As it stands, most of us will just have to be content with reproductions of his drawings and snippets of his writing. Worth seeing

Review – Maniac

Here’s a real cinema rarity: an interesting slasher movie. For the first half or so, this is as plotless and episodic as a porn movie. Indeed, it resembles cheap, low budget pornography a lot, except that the women are being murdered rather than screwed. The killer (Joe Spinnell in a fine performance) is a strong base of the Son of Sam (doubtless still fresh in the minds of most New Yorkers in 1980) mixed in with a cup of Ed Gein (the whole scalp-taking thing) and a dash of Zodiac (the desire to preserve victims as slaves). When the production starts sprouting a story, it’s almost a bit of a let-down. However, the end was genuinely impressive. Even all these years later, it’s still amazing what creativity can do for a low budget production. Worth seeing

Review – Dark Star

Here we have John Carpenter’s directorial debut, an odd low-budget effort from the late hippie days of 1974. I’ve been told by a couple of Navy vets that being shut up for a long time in the company of men actually is more than a little like this. That largely serves to make me grateful that I never had the experience myself. The atmosphere is good stuff, sort of a bridge between the clean technology of 2001 (which this picture at least in part parodies) and the grubby realms of future sci fi efforts crafted by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Cobb. The story, on the other hand, is uneven. Some of it is clever in a quirky sort of way. But most of it is more silly than anything else, such as the sequence in which O’Bannon spends 15 minutes battling a beach ball with feet. Overall this stirs up some nostalgia for sci fi con screenings back in the early 80s, but beyond that this is probably fairly missable. Mildly amusing

Review – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

I thought going into this that Spencer Tracy was an odd choice for the bifurcated antihero of this classic tale. But to his credit he does a solid job, only occasionally dipping into the ham on the Hyde side. Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman do their parts to back him up as the good doctor’s intended and the brute’s lady-of-the-night victim respectively. But my favorite element of this production is the years-before-its-time portrayal of the psycho-sexual aspects of the warring personalities. Of particular note are the hallucination sequences that accompany Jekyll’s early transformations. Tracy frantically whipping two chariot-pulling horses that turn into bare (from shoulders up at least) Turner and Bergman … wow. Mildly amusing