Review – Birdman of Alcatraz

Vicious killer and bird expert Robert Stroud gets the Hollywood treatment in this occasionally-touching tale from the 1960s. The problem with casting Burt Lancaster in the title role is that he’s a bit too sympathetic. That may have been what they were going for here, but I would have preferred a more even balance between the kindly man who discovered cures for avian diseases and the murderer who was behind bars for a reason. This is more of a triumph-of-the-individual-spirit-over-the-system story, particularly the exchanges between Lancaster and Karl Malden as a by-the-book warden who pops in and out of the Birdman’s life. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil's Ground

The description of this picture made it sound like a group of college students were going to be pitted against evil spirits in an ancient burial ground. Instead what we get is a mediocre battle between 20-somethings and a pack of Deliverance-esque hillbillies descended from the survivors of a mine massacre. Oh, and Daryl Hannah. They must have spent most of the budget on her, because there isn’t much to the rest of the movie. See if desperate

Review – Midnight Movie

The “haunted movie” concept has sustained works from feature-length movies to novels to Masters of Horror episodes. But here it isn’t even enough to keep a 75-minute picture going. A group of theater employees, their friends, and other random patrons (including a homicide cop) run afoul of a slasher when the bad guy is unleashed via a screening of a low-budget horror flick. So basically this is two short crappy movies mashed together into one somewhat longer crappy movie. Though it sports many bad attributes, the worst is the killer’s choice of tool: a giant corkscrew that he somehow uses to pull his victims’ guts out. See if desperate

Review – Superhero Movie

If you expect this picture to fulfill its title’s promise – a generic superhero movie parody – you won’t walk away disappointed. The production assumes that at a bare minimum you’ve seen the first Spider-Man movie, though a sprinkling of other superhero flicks get targeted along the way. It also assumes that you have the sense of humor of a ten-year-old. However, at least when they’re serving up gags aimed at pre-teens they don’t mix them with an excessive amount of raunchy sex jokes. Thus the production does a reasonably good job of catering to its target audience. Mildly amusing

Review – Rambo

This likely-last installment in the Rambo franchise has two things going for it that previous efforts – and most big-budget action movies in general – don’t: it’s excessively gory and extremely brief. Our hero is once again dragged out of retirement, first to ferry a band of missionaries into Myanmar and then to lead a squad of mercenaries on a rescue mission after the first set of folks run afoul of corrupt, cruel government troops. Along the way we’re forced to sit through a lot of sexual violence – threatened and depicted – against the female members of the cast. But in partial compensation, once the large-caliber sniper rifles and machine guns get whipped out, we get a ton of decapitations, giant gaping holes and at least one hapless baddie sawed completely in half. I presume this almost grand guignol approach is an effort to keep up with what target audiences have gotten used to in ultra-violent video games. Likewise, the running time appears engineered for people with short attention spans. Little time is wasted on plot or character development, and the result is so short that the end credits take up more than 10 percent of the total running time. As a bloody massacre that doesn’t pretend to be anything else, it does an adequate job. Mildly amusing

Eight reasons movies shouldn’t be remade (plus one exception)

To be honest, I don’t generally care much one way or another about remakes.

That might have something to do with the psychology that goes into my movie ratings system. Typically I start a movie at two stars (which shows up as “mildly amusing” when I write the review). Then if it does something to impress me it climbs up the scale. On the other hand, if it does something to piss me off it slides in the other direction. That’s why so many movies end up ranked squarely in middle of my system: they simply don’t make much of an impression on me.

So by the law of averages, remakes tend to end up in the same vast middle of the pack as their originals. I don’t love ‘em. I don’t hate ‘em. Some have advantages that the original didn’t (such as improved special effects between Invasion of the Body Snatchers versions one and two), while others suffer from drawbacks (such as the reliance on special effects over plot and character between The Haunting versions one and two). But overall things even out. Even if the original is a classic and the remake dimmer by comparison (such as Dawn of the Dead versions one and two), that’s not really the remake’s fault. It can still be pleasant viewing even if it doesn’t shine as brightly as the first one.

So why does the title of this list suggest that movies should never be remade? Simply put, the loss of remakes to a draconian rule would be a small price to pay if in exchange we managed to rid the world of pictures like these eight. These movies all have two things in common: they suck and they contribute nothing to the world that wasn’t there the first time around. That combination amounts to a wicked purposelessness not found in movies that stink merely of their own accord.

 

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick original. James Mason made a perfectly smarmy Humbert. Shelly Winters was great as “the Hays woman.” And then of course there’s Peter Sellers. What about any of this called for a remake? To be sure, the Kubrick version wasn’t perfect. The novel does some things the movie doesn’t. But Adrian Lyne clearly has no interest in correcting flaws. Instead, he comes up with a trashy, perfume-ad celebration of pedophilia, a disgusting mess in which Humbert and his “girlfriend” become romantic leads in a Friday After Dark soft-core picture. The production manages to suck all of the humor and panache out of the source novel, leaving only a crude narrative about perverted sex. If you want soft-core, rent something that isn’t designed for the Dateline: To Catch a Predator crowd (unless of course you actually are a potential DTCAP customer). If you want Lolita, rent the first one. Or better yet, read the book.

The Manchurian Candidate - The Frankenheimer original is a must-see masterpiece of Cold War paranoia. As such, it’s very much a creature of its time. It might have been possible to dispose of the specter of the International Communist Conspiracy and update the story to the 21st century (perhaps using China as the title conveniently suggests). Or the new version could have been left in the original setting. But no, instead the remake sets up a company as the source of all evil, as if an international corporation couldn’t easily place an apparatchik in the White House without resorting to the slightest subterfuge. The clearest symptom of remake failure here: the brilliant, innovative brain-washing sequences from the original are replaced by nonsensical mush that wouldn’t pass muster on MTV let alone in a serious movie.

Psycho - Several critics – including me – accused the remake of being an elaborate, expensive colorization of the original. But honestly, that’s giving it too much credit. Hitchcock’s version is technically sophisticated enough to stand on its own. Colorization would have been a slight detraction (easily corrected by adjusting some settings on the DVD player). But no amount of knob-fiddling could ever transform Vince Vaughn into Anthony Perkins. Indeed, most of the parts of this picture that aren’t word-for-word copies of the first one are stupid additions, such as the odd jump-cuts crammed into the shower murder, visual non-sequiturs far too reminiscent of Benny Hill making fun of Swedish pornography. That’s a good example of the quality of the experience one gets from the remake.

Halloween - John Carpenter’s earlier horror movies are – at least in theory – ripe for remake. He tended to do innovative work that was rough around the edges. Halloween is a perfect case in point. The original is a genre classic, a picture that helped establish many slasher movie standards. However, budget limitations left it a little spit-and-tissue-paper here and there. Sometimes that was an advantage and sometimes it wasn’t, so I’m willing to concede the possibility that it could have done with a little sprucing up. Ah, but then we get Rob Zombie, an “auteur” with a seemingly limitless affection for filth and degradation. From his developmentally-disabled perspective, the hero of the movie is a kid who tortures animals, grows up in an asylum and graduates to torturing women. The leap from the four-star original to the less-than-zero remake is the greatest drop ever between the first go-around and the second.

The Omen - As with Halloween, the original is a genre classic. If nothing else, it put Revelation 13:18 on the pop culture map. The remake does nothing. If it had been a stand-alone picture, it would have come and gone with little notice. On the one hand, that’s a problem. Being an Omen remake at least gave it some marketing potential. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have suffered from comparisons to a vastly superior movie. Thus this picture is the poster child for the problems with remaking movies. If you’re not going to do anything that will surpass the first one, why not just make something original instead?

Stephen King’s The Shining - I enjoy King’s writing. I’ve been reading his novels since I was a kid. However, I’m not going with him on this ride, simply because it’s way more about his ego than it is about entertaining his audience. The original was a Kubrick picture that functions quite well despite not remaining flawlessly faithful to the source novel (and if that doesn’t sound familiar, go back and re-read the first entry in this set). Clearly the infidelity pissed King off. His anger isn’t entirely unjustified. Jack Nicholson’s over-the-top performance makes Jack Torrance into a barely-repressed psycho right from the start, and Shelly Duvall’s Wendy is far too annoying to be a sympathetic victim. Conversely, this time around Jack is played as not crazy enough. And if sticking to the novel was a big concern, this made-for-TV miniseries doesn’t do the job either. The fact that King himself came up with the innovations – particularly the “secret identity of Tony” nonsense – doesn’t make them any more welcome. Those who want to watch a good horror movie can rent the original, and those who want King’s version can read his book. What function does the remake serve?

All the King’s Men - Here we get a solid refutation of one of the apparent tenets of remake-making: throwing a lot of money at a production will automatically make it better than the original. Clearly not so. Part of the first one’s charm was its rough-around-the-edges production quality. The remake puts a stop to that in short order. It has an expensive cast. It has a pensive script. It has over-wrought cinematography. What it doesn’t have is the smallest taste of authenticity. As Oliver Stone already proved by casting Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, Hollywood’s vision of Louisiana is far more Hollywood than Louisiana. This just throws another log on the fire.

King Kong (1976 and 2005) - I don’t even know where to begin.

 

On the other hand …

The original Howard Hawks The Thing from Another World is one of the dumbest things ever done with strips of helpless celluloid. The two-fisted Army men versus the blood-drinking space carrot and the monster-coddling pinko-commie intellectual scientists? That wasn’t even in keeping with its own time, let alone ours. But Carpenter’s version is so radically different that it barely even counts as a remake. Instead of a paean to xenophobia, we get a chilling tale of men destroyed as much by their own paranoia as by the intruder hidden among them. And it goes without saying that the carrot suit isn’t even in the same ballpark with Rob Bottin’s special effects. So in this rarest of rare cases, the remake is one of the best horror movies ever made while the first one is one of the worst.

Review – Dark Relic

Thanks largely to its premise, this one doesn’t suck quite as bad as most SyFy features. James Frain (Cromwell on The Tudors) plays a knight returning from the crusades with a motley band of companions and a piece of the true cross. Unfortunately the relic seems to be drawing the attention of a demon, who attacks our heroes with no end of plagues (wolves, locusts, dead birds, possessed monks and so on) as well as the occasional direct assault. To be sure, the production values – especially the boss-from-the-end-of-Doom bad guy – are typical stuff. But overall I liked this a little better than usual. Maybe I was just in the mood for something dumb. Mildly amusing

Review – Repo Men

I’m a little surprised nobody has ever tried to remake Logan’s Run. Though this has a strong flavor of just such a project, technically it’s different enough to not count as such. In a Blade-Runner-redone-as-less-stylish future, the huge corporation that sells artificial organs (known by the awkward contraction “forgs”) is allowed to repossess them from people who don’t keep up with their payments. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play the title characters, bad-asses who joke around about the dummies whose guts they rip out for a living. But then Law’s character is injured on the job and ends up with a forg heart. And to make matters worse, his newfound inability to kill people with delinquent payments robs him of his income and puts him in the same boat with them. From there the production goes downhill a bit, particularly the predictable “surprise” ending. However, it has an amusing moment or two, which is more than I figured it would have. Mildly amusing

Review – 666: The Beast

Because if we remade the first two Omens already, obviously we have to do an Antichrist-as-an-adult follow-up. In this go-around the Prince of Darkness is in middle management at a company that’s trying to buy up assets in Israel (in order to make the prophecies in Revelation come true, as it turns out). If the primary criterion you use to judge the quality of a motion picture is the amount of partial female nudity involved, then you should regard this as an improvement over the first 666 movie. Otherwise it doesn’t have a lot to offer. See if desperate

Review – 666: The Child

Hey, let’s shoot a stupid remake of The Omen (and the first sequel). A couple of local TV journalists adopt a child who strangely survived an airplane crash. Things start going wrong, mostly because the kid is actually the Antichrist. This cheap production features more boob shots than The Omen (not much of a challenge, considering the original didn’t have any boob shots at all), so if that’s how you judge the quality of a picture then this should be a step in the right direction for you. Otherwise it may be safely ignored. See if desperate

Review – Straight-Jacket

This one’s William Castle bad without being William Castle clever. It’s the first movie he did that didn’t have a gimmick of some kind, and without bed-sheet ghosts suspended on wires or joy buzzers hidden in seats, the only draw this picture musters is Joan Crawford fresh from her appearance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She plays an axe murderer released from an asylum and reunited with her daughter. Naturally suspicion falls on her when headless corpses start turning up. Unfortunately screenwriter Robert Bloch occasionally suffered – as he does here – from mentor H.P. Lovecraft’s tendency to reveal an obvious ending at the start, so the only real thrill is the vain hope that it won’t turn out the way we all know it’s going to (especially after the heaps of clues so awkwardly telegraphed that they wouldn’t fool a five year old). At the end of the end credits the Columbia Pictures logo is beheaded, which is as close to entertaining as this picture ever gets. Mildly amusing

Independent from what?

This year for the first time in recent memory, I decided to skip the Oscars. For some time now I’ve been put off by the combination of garish, overpriced spectacle and awards for movies I haven’t seen and probably never will. We recorded the ceremony so we could fast-forward to the Parade o’ Dead People, and we ended up watching a small spot here and there on the way to the parade, but otherwise the whole show was a welcome absence.

Indeed, if the whole thing was as bad as the Parade, I’m sure it would have been unendurable agony. For the last couple of years, they’ve had famous folks sing sad songs during the clips from the careers of those who’ve passed on. I’m fine with that in theory, but in practice it causes problems. For some reason the directors of the broadcasts start with shots of the performers as the clips begin to roll. If I want to look at James Taylor, I’ll just wait until the next time PBS starts begging for money. Until then, I want to see the clips, not the singer. This year the error was particularly egregious, as we got a long shot of Taylor while the Patrick Swayze footage ran. Though I’m not the biggest Swayze fan in the universe, I still would have preferred at that point to have the screen turned over to those being honored rather than long, dark, empty shots of the awards venue.

Also, this year the clips were extremely short. I realize that a lot of famous people died during the last 365 or so, thus loving tributes to all of them wouldn’t have been possible. But at least some of these people genuinely deserved more than two of three seconds. If they needed more time in the broadcast, perhaps they could have trimmed a minute or two off the Best Makeup award intro, during which Ben Stiller came out in Avatar greasepaint and babbled on at length in Avatar-ese before observing that Avatar wasn’t even one of the nominees in the category.

Rather than squander an evening on the Oscars, we tried watching the Independent Spirit Awards instead. Oddly enough, they were even worse. Though of course it was nowhere near as garish a spectacle as the “big show,” at least the categories at the Oscars didn’t come with prominently identified corporate sponsors. It also featured a gaggle of big stars, the folks who like to slum in indie movies in order to reinforce – or in some cases desperately try to establish – their reputations as serious artists. That few of them were taking the tent event seriously was clearly demonstrated by the high levels of intoxication among many of the celebrants.

I found myself particularly disappointed in host Eddie Izzard, who was the reason I bothered to watch the damn thing to begin with. The man is one of the most brilliant people currently working in show business, but none of his usual wit was on display. Instead he led off by remarking that God doesn’t exist and then mumbled his way through a few more minutes of incoherent nonsense before finally yielding the stage to the first set of presenters. Nor did his sobriety or performance improve as the evening progressed.

As with the show’s cable venue, the Independent Film Channel, the whole thing made me wonder exactly what the word “independent” was supposed to mean. I’m prepared to ignore the awards sponsored by car companies and breweries. Money has to come from somewhere, and unlike the Oscars the major studios aren’t reaping the benefits or footing the bill. But if this crowd is any indication, the world of independent film production is just as cliquish and insular as mainstream Hollywood. “Independent” seems to be less a state of mind or economic classification and more of an aesthetic. Most movies on IFC are some combination of grainy, dark and dull, apparently the only qualifications required to be considered “indy.”

As such they’re just as out of touch with reality as Hollywood is. I can’t say that the revolution in 21st century film-making will not be televised. But by the look of things it won’t be running on IFC or picking up any Spirit awards.

Kolchak and childhood terrors

I was scared of a lot of stuff when I was a kid.

Dogs, for example. I was attacked by a big one when I was a toddler in NYC, and ever after that they made me nervous. It didn’t help that my dad was afraid of them, too. I didn’t really get over it until adulthood, when I spent enough time around friends’ friendly dogs to get used to them.

My fascination with werewolves grew at least in part from this childhood fear. I recall being obsessed with shape-shifters, even as a pre-teen. The Wolf Man was my favorite entry in the Universal classic movie monsters set. I read my copy of Nancy Garden’s book on the subject over and over until it literally fell apart. And poring through Brian Frost’s Book of the Werewolf during a long family car trip introduced me to “The Were-Wolf” by Clemence Housman. The experience left me with the same pre-adolescent male fear-fascination with female sexuality that other boys picked up from Harvest Home.

But even before that magic moment, I tried my youthful hand at penning my own werewolf stories. One in particular I remember started off with a woman who left her apartment window open one night. And after she fell asleep, a werewolf snuck in and mauled her to death. I think some other stuff was supposed to happen after that, but that was as far as I got.

I was also terrified of killer bees. The national killer bee obsession reached its high point right around the time I was at my juvenile ripest for jumping onto the freaked-out bandwagon. Based solely on their name, I figured that just one sting from just one bee and I’d be an instant goner. I’d been stung by the ordinary kind often enough to know that as soon as the suckers made it north from Mexico that they’d get me for sure. Imagine my relief (and secret disappointment) when I did a little additional reading and found out that despite their name the bugs were really just extra-cranky versions of regular bees.

But before I found out the boring truth, I managed to start at least one killer bee story. It was about a woman who left her apartment window open one night. And after she fell asleep, a swarm of killer bees flew in and stung her to death. I think some other stuff was supposed to happen after that, but that was as far as I got.

What really frightened me was the Manson Family. I got bored during a sleep-over, ran across a copy of Helter Skelter, and scared the crap out of myself just leafing through the photos in the center. For the longest time I was absolutely convinced that Charlie and the girls were going to show up late one night and decorate my bedroom with my guts. I had no idea how they would get out of prison or why they would come to Kansas, but I was sure their arrival was imminent. As stupid as that sounds now, at least it’s a little less embarrassing than werewolves or killer bees.

I never wrote a story about a woman who left a window open thus accidentally admitting murderous hippies.

One thing that all this kiddie anxiety had in common was the intrusion of the monster into my house. And that particular element I think I can trace to one source: an October 4, 1974, broadcast of an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The episode was called “The Vampire,” and it scared me more than Charles Manson turning into a werewolf and chasing me around with a hive full of killer bees. The part that freaked me out the worst was the scene where a woman comes home to her apartment to find a vampire waiting for her. She must have left the window open.

Oddly, that’s the only episode I remember seeing. It must have freaked me out so badly that my mom made me quit watching it. I also remember seeing part of the second Kolchak movie, The Night Strangler, at another sleep-over years later. It was good, but it didn’t have the same effect on me.

That was it for me and the intrepid Mr. Kolchak. I never saw another one until the complete collection came out on DVD. Another 8sails staffer bought the set, and we slowly made our way through them two or three episodes at a time.

But rather than continue on with my history, let me back-track and start again with the history of the show itself.

Carl Kolchak first saw the light of day in a made-for-TV movie called The Night Stalker, and the movie set the tone for all that was to follow. Our hero – ably played by Darren McGavin – is a reporter working on a story about a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. The movie first aired on ABC on January 11, 1972. It was a surprise hit, drawing more than half of all people watching TV that cold Tuesday evening. Its 33.2 rating was the highest ever earned by a TV movie at the time.

Naturally such a ratings monster almost instantly produced a follow-up. ABC hired Richard Matheson – who wrote the first one based on an unpublished novel by Jeff Rice – to write another one.

The product, which aired the next year, was The Night Strangler. The action moves from San Francisco to Seattle, allowing the use of old, buried buildings under the 20th century city. The villain drains blood from his victims, but he isn’t precisely a vampire. Rather, he’s an alchemist who needs the blood to maintain eternal youth. Otherwise number two takes few risks with the formula that made number one such a hit.

Then, after some negotiations with McGavin and resolution of a lawsuit filed by Rice, Kolchak became part of the network’s fall schedule in 1974.

Episodes tended to share a number of common elements, though not all were present each time around. Most shows began with innocent people minding their own business who are struck down without warning or provocation by some supernatural horror or another. Kolchak learns about the killing, but his initial efforts to find out what’s going on are thwarted by a bureaucrat, usually in the form of an obnoxious police officer. His boss, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland), blusters and orders him off the story, but Kolchak perseveres.

From there things varied a bit more. Our hero tended to acquire a helper character (almost always a woman or someone from a culture other than mainstream white America). He also tended to get caught by the bad guy and/or the cop at least once per show thanks to his own bungling (tape recorder malfunctions and the like).

Eventually the monster learns that Kolchak is trying to track it down, which gets the reporter added to the beast’s list of targets (assuming it has one). In the end we get a showdown, often set in a location so dark that its hard to tell what’s going on. And of course Kolchak prevails, frequently with the aid of a jim-jam supplied by the helper.

In addition to the repeated plot elements, the series also featured several recurring characters. Vincenzo was Kolchak’s editor in both of the pre-series movies, and in the series he’s the Chicago bureau chief of the Independent News Service and once again Kolchak’s boss. He also has co-workers: intern Monique Marmelstein (Carol Ann Susi), dear old Miss Emily Cowles (Ruth McDevitt), and flamboyant (in ’74 we didn’t use the word “gay”) rival reporter Ron Updyke (Jack Grinnage).

Outside the office staff, only an actor or two get a second chance at screen time. Keenan Wynn does two tours of duty as Captain “Mad Dog” Siska, and Richard Kiel’s physical stature puts him inside more than one monster suit. But plenty of 70’s era staple character actors join the supporting cast.

To be sure, the show has its flaws. They’ve got an oh-so-70s feel to them (i.e. the film is grainy and the clothes are outlandish). The writing is stiff in spots. When McGavin decided to stop playing the role, one of his complaints was that the show had become a “monster of the week” experience, and he had a point. Compared to the technical quality and cynical sophistication of much 21st century horror, most of The Night Stalker is corny stuff.

Corny as it is, however, this show passes the test of time. If nothing else, it tends to be better than most of what’s on TV now, not that that’s much of an honor. Some episodes are better than others, but even the bad ones have some entertainment value. If “tell me a story” is the true beginning of quality video, this more than satisfies.

They don’t pack the thrill that I got from “The Vampire” when I was eight years old. There’s no Manson Family, no killer bees, and only one episode with a werewolf. Even so, they all took me back to a time in my life when I could still draw a solid scare from something on TV. The set was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, at least as long as all my windows were latched shut.

Review – Where the Wild Things Are

The quicker you abandon any notion that this is going to be like the book, the more likely you are to be able to enjoy it. Director Spike Jonze completely lacks Maurice Sendak’s sense of simple fun, but he adds some art house elements that succeed in an indie-movie-for-grownups way. Max’s monster friends are archetypal neurotics melded into one big dysfunctional playgroup. I would have liked a little less “hey, that reminds me of someone I know” and a little more “hey, this is an entertaining movie,” but it does a reasonably good job being what it’s designed to be. Mildly amusing

Review – The 47 Ronin

This is actually a two-part movie, but as there isn’t much point in watching one without the other (Lord Asano commits suicide in the first one, but his retainers don’t exact their revenge until the second) I’m going to review them as a single work. This movie is very much a creature of its time, a highly conservative picture extolling the virtues of devotion to duty to Japanese audiences in the early days of World War Two. Though the source legend has tremendous cinematic potential, virtually none of it ends up onscreen here. Indeed, the entire picture is almost nothing but talking about events that occur off camera. None of the suicides are shown, nor is the epic battle scene that would have been such a natural part of the second installment. In all fairness, I admit that the print I saw was bad (spotty, choppy, etc.). As was the translation: when a subtitle says something like “I am vexed at it,” I have to wonder what nuance was robbed from the line. Technical problems aside, however, this production features none of the fantastic gift for plot, character, humor and humanity that would become so prominent in the work of Japanese filmmakers after the war. Thus this is one of the dullest movies I’ve ever seen. See if desperate

Review – Plague Town

Not for the first time – and unless fate takes pity on me, not for the last time either – I found myself wondering if there’s really a living in doing nothing but skulking around the countryside and waiting for city folk to waylay and murder. As usual, the question doesn’t seem to trouble anyone. We’re expected to take for granted that tourists will get lost in the sticks and that mutant rustics will be waiting patiently for the opportunity to slaughter them. This time around the setting is Ireland rather than Texas, but otherwise the whole thing is all too familiar. Some of the evil village’s deformed children have vaguely innovative physical problems, but most of them appear to be suffering from nothing more severe than a bad case of pale. And the closest any of the modi operandi come to clever is the scene in which one of our “heroes” is pummeled with a hubcap. I’m really starting to lose patience with unimaginative crap like this. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Amelia

Amelia Earhart gets the standard Hollywood biopic treatment, a picture that skips like a stone across the surface of her life without providing detail or insight that might have made the title character seem interesting or even human. Hilary Swank did a better job of looking the part than she did playing the woman, which didn’t exactly help. I suppose if you had to do a report on the aviator for a middle school history class, this would give you enough detail to complete the assignment. But otherwise it’s expensive, slickly-produced, visually interesting but almost completely devoid of anything that would have made it a worthwhile experience. Earhart deserved better. See if desperate

Review – The Princess and the Frog

For the first time since Song of the South a Disney animation sports a black protagonist, though she’s transformed into a green protagonist shortly after the story gets underway. Frogification notwithstanding, at least the studio makes a good-faith effort to produce a picture with an uplifting message – success comes with both aspiration and effort – and some entertaining moments. I was particularly fond of the bad guy’s shadowy helpers, which I thought were just the right amount of scary for a kid’s movie. If you hate Disney movies then yeah, you’re gonna hate this. But if you accept it on its own terms, at least it’s willing to meet you halfway. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conqueror

This would be a hysterical piece of dreadful film-making if it hadn’t been a contributing factor in the deaths of so many of its stars. While shooting on location in the desert Southwest, cast and crew were bathed in radioactive fallout from a nuclear weapon test. Many of the victims (most notably John Wayne) later died from illnesses that may have been linked to the exposure. That might have been an easier pill to swallow if the movie had been worth dying for or even worth seeing at all. But the astounding thing is that anyone ever thought it would be a good idea to make this at all, let alone get nuked over it. “John Wayne plays Genghis Khan” is really all you need to know in order to make an accurate guess about just how terrible it is. Though another actor – Yul Brynner, perhaps – might have made this a mediocre historical drama, Wayne’s iconic cowboy drawl is ludicrously out of place. If not for its lethal consequences, this picture would have sunk into well-deserved obscurity almost immediately after its initial release. See if desperate

Review – Whiteout

When this movie is actually telling a story, it’s reasonably good in a comic book sort of way. A federal marshal (Kate Beckinsale) nearing the end of her tour of duty at a research station in Antarctica is suddenly confronted with a series of homicides linked to a Russian plane that crashed and was buried in the ice decades earlier. If she doesn’t solve the mystery in time to make it onto the last transport plane out before a massive storm arrives, she’ll have to spend the winter trapped at the station and most likely in the company of the culprit. Unfortunately this simple tale ends up weighted down with several annoying action movie stock elements, such as a relentless parade of plot-delaying setbacks and a final fight sequence between parka-wrapped combatants who are difficult if not impossible to tell apart. Overall, however, it was a reasonably entertaining experience, especially after watching The Box and The Conqueror in the same evening. Mildly amusing

Review – The Box

Was this really based on a Richard Matheson story? I haven’t read “Button, Button,” but I have trouble imagining it being as terrible as this movie. The basic premise could have been turned into an acceptably mediocre horror movie. A mysterious stranger shows up at a suburban household with a box that sports a single button. If our heroes push the button, they get a million bucks and somewhere in the world someone dies. However, the copious early references to No Exit should have been a leading indicator that “pointlessly strange” would be the theme for the evening. Before we’re through, we get NASA, the NSA, space aliens, brainwashed minions and no end of expensive, go-nowhere visual tricks stirred into a messy stew with no greater purpose than unfocused paranoia. I went in dreading the cliché conundrum – would you kill someone you didn’t know in exchange for financial security? – but left wishing it had been that simple, straightforward and entertaining. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Leprechaun 4 in Space

Okay, I watched this despite having seen the first three, so this is my fault. Did I honestly think the “in Space” part betokened an improvement in the series? If so, I must have been profoundly disappointed. Space commandos find themselves sandwiched between the title baddie and a mad scientist named Dr. Mittenhand. If SyFy is going to show these things on St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps the leprechaun could at least be bothered to learn the actual lyrics to “Danny Boy.” Or then again, maybe not. The gaffe just adds to the general craptacularity of the production. Fourth verse, amazingly worse than the first three. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Leprechaun 3

Leprechauns in Vegas should definitely stay in Vegas. That would spare the rest of us from them. In this go-around the myth receives the werewolf-esque elaboration that if a leprechaun bites you, you become a leprechaun yourself. And of course in the fast-paced world of the strip, people come up with no end of things to wish for when they run across the bad guy’s errant, lucky shilling. Third verse, same as the first. See if desperate

Review – On the Beach

For an end-of-the-world movie, this sure is depressing. The average atomic annihilation picture follows a predictable path: the forces of good struggle against impending nuclear doom, and then the picture ends with a flashy display of fiery destruction. Or we may be treated to the aftermath, a dark world full of destruction and radiation. In this rare effort, however, the war is over before the picture starts. Most of the movie is set in Australia, which remains initially unravaged by the holocaust thanks to its noncombatant status and Southern Hemisphere location. Indeed, the only immediate effect on the culture is the sudden return to horse-drawn vehicles thanks to a shortage of petroleum products. The death of the world creeps in here very slowly, starting with a nuclear sub’s journey to San Francisco to check for survivors and ending with the eventual atmospheric spread of radiation across the globe. Though this world ends not with a bang but a whimper, that whimper is more poignant and disturbing than any big Hollywood fireworks show. Worth seeing

Review – The Wolfman (2010)

If Universal hoped to do with The Wolf Man what it succeeded in doing with The Mummy (i.e. turn it into a popular, profitable, reasonably entertaining franchise), then wow did it ever miss the mark with this picture. I loved the original when I was a kid and still enjoy it today, but this remake is inferior to it in almost every way. Rick Baker’s special effects are nearly as clunky as Jack Pierce’s without being anywhere near as innovative. Somehow Benecio del Toro manages to be even more charmless than Lon Chaney Jr., which must have taken a considerable amount of charmlessness practice. And don’t even get me started comparing Anthony Hopkins to Claude Rains, a shortfall that proved especially galling because the senior Mr. Talbot has a much larger role in this go-around. Even Danny Elfman’s score comes across as a bad Danny Elfman impression. The picture seems to be trying to imitate the look and feel of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, but instead it just turns into a drab, directionless mess. See if desperate

Review – The Crazies (2010)

Once again a 21st century remake turns out to be more expensive and less interesting than the original. The plot is essentially the same as George Romero’s version from 1973: a small town falls victim to a runaway bioweapon, and creepy government forces move in to contain the situation. However, almost all the nuance is gone. The original focused not only on the efforts of a small cadre of townspeople to escape the murderous “cleanup” effort but also on the trouble telling the difference between an infected “crazy” and a normal person reacting to an abnormal situation. This one’s a much more straightforward “us versus them” drama. Further, infected blood flows so copiously that even the survivors would almost certainly have the disease, which puts a damper on the ending. Mildly amusing

Review – The Monster That Challenged the World

Because if they called it The Giant Snails That Ate a Few People in Southern California it wouldn’t sound as dramatic. An earthquake releases monster mollusks from the bottom of the Salton Sea, and it’s up to the Navy to put a stop to them before they over-run the entire earth. Though the creatures are plenty fake, their habit of killing people by sucking out all of their juices is kinda creepy. Mildly amusing

Review – West Side Story

Romeo and Juliet. Street gang wars. Choreography-intensive Broadway musical. How on earth did Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim ever get these elements to function together? In truth, often it doesn’t. The picture leads off with the sight of actors prancing around the war zones of Manhattan, setting the “is this ironic or not?” tone for the rest of the picture. I expect that this was radical stuff back in the early 1960s, though much of it is dated by current standards. Still, the “America” number is fun. Mildly amusing

Review – The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

Ray Bradbury (source story) and Ray Harryhausen (in his first feature as special effects chief) are quite a combination. Unfortunately the rest of the movie is standard nuclear radiation paranoia from the 1950s. A bomb test in the Arctic thaws out a dinosaur, and the beast heads back to its old stomping ground, which turns out to be New York City. As often occurs with Harryhausen’s work, the monster is so interesting and the humans so lackluster that it’s hard not to feel sorry for the city-destroying beast when he gets it in the end. Though this isn’t the height of Dynamation’s glory, it’s still a heck of a good start. Mildly amusing

Review – Star Wars Ewok Adventures: The Battle for Endor

I’m genuinely shocked that the first one did enough business to justify a sequel. There must be a lot of Star Wars fans out there who will sit through anything – no matter how bad – as long as it’s part of the franchise. Fleeing marauders who torched the Ewok village, the Ewok that has a name and one of the moppets from the first Ewok movie are taken in by a crusty old man (Wilford Brimley) and his high-speed companion creature. Then the chief baddie and his witch sidekick … oh, who am I kidding? If you can stomach Ewoks, things like plot and character development are just the picky details. See if desperate

Review – St. Elmo’s Fire

So this is basically every way upper middle class white 20-somethings can be annoying, or at least as many ways as they could pack into a single movie. Almost the whole Brat Pack gets crammed into this dull tale of a group of recent college graduates dealing with their personal issues in the real world, or rather as close to the real world as such people ever get. If you’re trying to make your way through the key movies of the 1980s, you’re probably going to have to sit through this at some point. Otherwise it’s missable. See if desperate

My eight favorite spy movies

Nobody is ever going to make a spy movie that’s actually about real spies.

For starters, a lot of spy work is un-cinematically technical. For example, one-time pads are a crucial part of many espionage operations, but nobody wants to watch a movie full of extended versions of the “be sure to drink your Ovaltine” sequence from A Christmas Story.

The technical details are symptomatic of the big problem with making an actual spy movie: the spy business is boring. For every vodka martini in a casino in Monaco, there are gallons of cheap beer in squalid hotel rooms in Bogota and Kinshasa. Spies’ cars are more likely to be used for the commute to the office or long hours of dull surveillance work than for high-speed chases.

Of course the movies aren’t exactly legendary for realistic depictions of anyone’s walk of life. However, some pictures come closer than others. The most popular “spy” movies – the Bond series and the Bourne series in particular – have little or nothing to do with actual espionage work. They’re action-adventure movies. Martial arts movies. Even superhero movies in some ways. But the job these guys do isn’t really spying.

Thus this list is devoted to pictures that are closer to the spirit if not the exact practice of espionage. Most of them don’t have much in the way of high-stakes poker or cars that turn into airplanes or submarines. Instead, they have something far better: the flavor of the important, life-or-death business of spying.

 

Confessions of a Nazi Spy – You won’t walk away from this thinking “wow, that was a really good movie.” The look and feel wedges it securely between “potheads are the devil’s pawns” movies of the 30s and “Communists are the devil’s pawns” pictures from the 50s. But the application of such scare-mongering tactics to Germans in 1940 was a watershed moment. It took real guts (not to mention support from the White House) for Warner Bros. to stand up to pressure from the German American Bund and flaunt the Hays Code in order to expose the Nazis for what they really were. The how-we-caught-them stuff also makes this an entertaining spy picture.

Sabotage Agent – Most of the movies in this set – indeed, most spy movies in general – have something to do with the Cold War. But I wanted to include at least a picture or two from the birth of modern espionage: World War Two. And unlike Confessions of a Nazi Spy, this one’s actually good on its own merits as well as representative of its place in film history. The twists and turns are plenty entertaining, but it also keeps us mindful of just how serious the spy business can be, with brutal death constantly waiting around the corner and even befalling some of the characters that a typical Hollywood production wouldn’t have done in. I was also taken with the unintentional moral ambiguity of the project. Our hero’s attempt to blow up a factory is presented as a straightforward act of heroic patriotism, but in the 21st century one can’t help but hear the word “terrorism” whispering in the background. That’s unconsciously symptomatic of the discomfort many Americans in high places felt about the creation of the real-life OSS.

Our Man in Havana – From the heart of the Cold War comes this comedy of errors starring Alec Guinness as a hapless businessman unwillingly entangled in international espionage. In the manner of the best British black comedies, this is a smooth blend of sarcastic humor and grim and sometimes violent (though not graphically so) tragedy. In other words, it’s true to the spirit if not necessarily the literal reality of the spy game.

The Quiet American (1958 or 2002) – I’ll let you take your pick on which version you want to watch. Both pictures have the crucial elements: the ins and outs of the creepy relationship between the United States and Southeast Asia in the years leading up to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately they also share the defects of the source novel, particularly an unpleasant emphasis on the protagonists’ shared love for a “native” woman. The contrast between the two is obvious in their dates. The first is an Audie Murphy picture made years before it became obvious what a mess Vietnam would turn out to be. The Michael Caine / Brendan Fraser version has the benefit of hindsight and higher production values, yet remains disturbingly similar to the original production.

From Russia With Love – Say “spy movie” to most people and I imagine the first thing that comes to mind is James Bond. Thus it would be a little weird to have a spy movie list that didn’t include at least one Bond picture. On the other hand, most of the movies in the series aren’t really about espionage. Indeed, From Russia with Love is the closest Bond ever comes to simple, workaday spy business. Here he’s just trying to steal a Soviet decoder rather than save the world from genocidal maniacs or super-terrorists. Though this isn’t the most exciting movie in the set, it is hands-down the most realistic.

No Way Out – When this is being a spy movie, it’s a reasonably good one. Trouble is, it spends most of its running time as a romance and/or crappy murder mystery. Kevin Costner is insufferable, as is Sean Young. Together they made me pray that the famous sex-in-the-limo scene included some form of unseen-yet-highly-effective birth control. But beyond the “star power” and the meandering script, this picture has some solid spy work going on. The struggle to locate a double agent buried somewhere in the Pentagon is less flashy than the sex stuff, but it’s a lot more interesting. The theme of junior officers being granted too much power was also quite timely in the age of Oliver North.

Hopscotch – Like Our Man in Havana, the last two entries in this set are comedies. In this one, Walter Matthau stars as an aging CIA operative forced out of the business by an obnoxious boss. He decides to exact revenge by writing a tell-all book, sending spy shops on both sides of the Iron Curtain scrambling to catch him before he can complete the work. One of the great charms of this picture is how our hero eludes pursuit not through amassing a huge body count (I don’t think there’s a single death in the entire thing) or employing high-tech gadgetry but simply by using his wits and a few improvised tricks. Of all the spy movies I’ve ever seen, this often-silly little picture is in many ways the most realistic.

Sneakers – Of the eight movies in this set, this is the only one I actually own in my personal collection. The picture blends humor and grim reality almost seamlessly. The cast is solid. The script is consistently clever. But best of all is the question posed: what would you do if you had a black box that would get you into any computer system in the country? This Gyges-turned-hacker scenario – complicated by a band of sinister bad guys intent on laying hands on the box and not picky about how they get it – would have been enough to make this a great movie even without the high production quality. It even manages to make some chillingly-prescient political points along the way. Not bad for a little picture that largely escaped notice when it came out and to this day still doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

Review – Star Wars Ewok Adventures: Caravan of Courage

Until recently I had no idea this thing and its sequel were ever made. Oh, if only I could have retained that blissful ignorance. This is the worst aspects of the Ewoks spun out into a feature-length production that I assume went straight to video. After a family crash-lands on the Ewok planet, the two children are separated from their parents when a giant snatches the older generation. The Ewoks adopt the kids and set off on a quest to reunite them with their parents. Act two in particular drags on forever as the “caravan of courage” encounters peril after pointless peril on the journey to the monster’s lair. Without the lavish production budget of an actual Star Wars movie, the title creatures look even more like glass-eyed carpet remnants than they did in Return of the Jedi. Narration by Burl Ives lends a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer quality, which doesn’t make it any easier to take this seriously. See if desperate

Review – Heaven’s Gate

I wanted to watch this because of all the hoopla about how terrible it was. Honestly, it didn’t live up (or down) to the hype. Yes, it was terrible. The script was weak and the acting likewise uninspiring. Studio brass, critics and audiences alike correctly observed that half of its three hour and 40 minute running time would have been more than sufficient to tell the tale. I could have done without the rape scene. And sure, its monster budget and poor box office combined to push struggling Universal Studios into insolvency. But honestly, it’s no worse than any other boring, over-long western. Some of the visuals even manage to be pretty. And if nothing else, at least it wasn’t Year of the Dragon. Kris Kristofferson stars as an educated man who takes a job as “the law” in a middle-of-nowhere town afflicted with the usual cliché battle between small farmers and a cartel with brutal enforcers. See if desperate

Review – The Gray Man

The story of child-killing cannibal Albert Fish is interesting enough, and it gets a reasonably good treatment in this production. The crimes themselves aren’t shown (thank goodness), so the bulk of the movie is devoted to Fish’s back-story – particularly his dysfunctional family life – and a policeman’s obsessive quest to track him down and bring him to justice. Mildly amusing

Review – Frances

Imagine The Snake Pit redone as a golden-age-of-Hollywood biopic and you’ve got some idea of how the folks who made this movie saw the life of Frances Farmer. Jessica Lange surprised a lot of people – including me – by doing a decent job in the title role. After Kong, I wouldn’t have thought she could act her way out of a paper bag. But she really puts some feeling into poor Farmer, the onetime Hollywood starlet who ran afoul of the studios and ended up spending a chunk of her life being brutalized in insane asylums. Worth seeing

Review – Anamorph

My initial impression of this movie was “oh boy, another Seven rip-off.” And though some aspects of the production turned out to be a little cooler than they initially appeared, the story is severely hampered by lack of originality. Willem Dafoe plays a semi-retired cop who thought he caught a serial killer with a fetish for artistically arranging his crime scenes. But when a “copycat” starts committing similar crimes, our hero is drawn back into the fray. At first I thought the corpse sculpture theme was cheap, but as the plot progressed it sort of grew on me. If nothing else, I appreciated the references to actual art history mixed in with the art director’s conceits. If only the script had been as interesting as the visuals. Mildly amusing

My eight favorite soundtrack albums

Say “soundtrack” and the names that come most readily to mind are folks like John Williams, composers of big, dramatic music for big, dramatic movies. While such scores are perfect compliments for their productions, they aren’t the sort of thing one would generally load into a CD player and just listen to. They need to work with flashy special effects, gun battles, romantic moments and the like.

The discs on this list, however, represent the best of both worlds. They fit well into their movies, but they also stand alone as music.

Sliver – This record leads off with UB40’s synth-heavy cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” The “synth-heavy” thing then turns into a motif throughout. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but Aftershock’s “Slave to the Vibe” and The Young Gods’ more metallic “Skinflowers” stand out from the pack. It also includes two tracks from Enigma, the ultimate erotica-in-a-box group for a movie full of neatly-packaged sex.

Escape from LA – This is one of those “Music from and inspired by” records in which songs that actually appear in the movie are joined by other stuff from bands the media conglomerate is trying to market. Normally I think that’s cheating. But here the set is consistent enough that I’ll let it slide, partly because “Escape from the Prison Planet” by Clutch is one of the better entries despite not appearing in the movie (at least not that I noticed). Besides, even the songs that actually are in the picture often show up for only a few seconds. A movie-specific rendition of “The One” by White Zombie is an exception, running in its entirety over the end credits. I should also note that I’m fond of the John Carpenter’s teched-up revamp of the theme from the first one, but you have to buy the actual soundtrack album for that.

A Clockwork Orange – Around the time Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel went into production, advances in music technology were allowing composers and musicians to produce new sounds. One of the trends that emerged was performance of classical music using synthesizers. Wendy Carlos puts this to particularly good use here, producing soft, haunting renditions of Beethoven and other composers. The music is simultaneously familiar and alien, not unlike the dystopian future of the movie itself.

1984 – In general turning a soundtrack over to pop musicians is a risky proposition. It can go south in a hurry. But occasionally it really pays off. The Eurythmics do an outstanding job of adapting the popular sounds of the real 1984 to the dreary tyranny of Orwell’s Oceania. This disc is worth it for “Julia” alone.

Repo Man – Despite containing a fair amount of off-the-rack stuff, these tracks function well as a set. Alex Cox’s brilliant little punk-yet-not-punk production needed music that would fit the characters and their environments without turning the thing into a punk-exclusive cult picture. Mission accomplished.

Local Hero – Of all the soundtracks on this list, this is the most “soundtracky.” Veteran soundtrack composer and Dire Straits front-man Mark Knopfler put this whole thing together specifically with the movie in mind, and it fits the light, low-key mood of the picture to a T. On the other hand, it’s also one of the few such soundtracks that makes pleasant listening by itself even without the movie.

Passion (The Last Temptation of Christ) – I’d listen to Peter Gabriel’s music for this Martin Scorcese stinker a thousand times before sitting through the movie again. The picture makes a mess of the Gospels, but on the soundtrack Gabriel employs his talent for exotic rhythms to produce something somehow subtly erotic. Fans of his work with Genesis and his early solo stuff may think this is a little weird, but take it on its own (without the movie it came from or the composer’s previous work) and it’s worth a listen.

Koyaanisqatsi – For as “minimalist” as Philip Glass’s music is supposed to be, it sure tends to intrude on movies when he writes a soundtrack score. If anything, that should be extra true for a movie without dialogue or indeed any sound at all other than the music. Perhaps it’s specifically because he isn’t fighting with the script that Glass is able to settle down and make music that compliments the breathtaking cinematography. This is about as far from John Williams as you can get, but that’s entirely appropriate for the movie at hand.

Review – Richard III (1955)

Try as I might, whenever I watch a “traditional” performance of this play I just can’t shake the Richards in the Monty Python sketch being treated for chronic over-acting. Of course Shakespeare’s characterization of his antihero is so cartoonishly evil that at least a little over-dramatization is probably in order. And in Laurence Olivier’s defense, he could have been much farther over the top than he was here (though I could have done without the nose makeup). As usual with Richard III, I was able to enjoy the machinations of one of the dastardliest villains in English history despite the unavoidable self-parody of a character so ridiculously rotten. Mildly amusing

Review – The Specialist

This documentary edits footage from Adolf Eichmann’s trial together with spooky music to paint a portrait of “the banality of evil.” I could have done without the extra drama, as if the calm discussion of mass extermination of human beings wasn’t creepy enough without added sound effects. However, the portrait of the man that emerges from the unadulterated footage is fascinating. Eichmann sticks so fervently to the “I vas chust vollowink ordars” line that it’s almost enough to make one wonder how a normal person would react to such an insane situation. But the testimony also exposes the man’s (and his society’s) obsession with organization, as if genocide was nothing more than an interesting challenge of the proper arrangement of rail transport schedules. And every once in awhile the defendant slips up and reveals a little of the “real Eichmann,” such as the notorious “remorse is for little children” line. Though I thought that the film-making tricks were unnecessary, I found the rest of it fascinating. Worth seeing

Review – Off Limits

Funny how a combination of the Vietnam War movie and the murder mystery can end up working as a representative of neither genre but still have at least a little entertainment value. Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines play Army detectives investigating crime in Saigon in 1968. They end up on the trail of a serial killer who’s slaughtering prostitutes, but their investigation starts hitting dead ends as it becomes more and more apparent that the culprit is a high-ranking American officer. Though the Vietnam angle is fraught with clichés and the mystery elements are likewise weak, the production does a few things right. The hot, sweaty, noisy milieu of the city is skillfully captured. The stars and supporting cast (including Scott Glenn, Keith David and a host of other familiar faces) do a solid job. And if nothing else, at least the relationship between Dafoe’s character and a novitiate nun doesn’t blossom into a vow-busting romance. Mildly amusing

Review – The Master of Disguise

Dana Carvey and Adam Sandler must really hate each other. Because Sandler must have agreed to produce this picture only if it turned out to be a humiliating waste of Carvey’s talent, and in turn Carvey must have done his level best to make the movie as dreadful as possible to make sure Happy Madison lost as much money as possible on it. I can think of no other explanation for a movie as bad as this. Carvey plays Pistachio, the lackwit scion of a long line of disguise masters. Bad guys kidnap his parents, setting him off on a quest with all the intellectual maturity of Spy Kids but not the cleverness or even the kid orientation. Instead the entire plot is a relentless parade of offensive ethnic caricatures, fart jokes and similar “comedic” moments that seem less “that’s offbeat enough to be clever” and more “aw, quit being a jerk.” Especially the Turtle Club scene. On the avoid-this-movie scale, this resides somewhere between previous Carvey waste Opportunity Knocks and previous Happy Madison travesty You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Wish I’d skipped it