An odd comic concept: a retriever of missing animals (and a virtual Saint Francis to an illicit menagerie in his Miami apartment). The man himself, Jim Carrey, is still odder: a spastic, rictus-afflicted, ducktailed rejectee from a Grease audition, whose mouth (and sometimes even voice) resembles Dan Aykroyd doing Dick …
Young wholesome clean-cut American couple competes with old depraved whiskered Britisher for the Scientific Find Of The Century: a brontosaurus family (papa, mama, and little baby) in Darkest Africa. The creatures — as light on their feet as marionettes, but as lubberly in movement as if they all slept wrong …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Two of the more socially conscious of cinematic genres — science fiction and the detective story — have been mated to produce a future-generation Los Angeles (A.D. 2019) that looks like Tokyo or Hong Kong gone to seed. The detective work is somewhat scamped, except for a good scene (echoing …
Scare story about white-collar drug abuse -- and in fact moderately scary, for all its somber predictability. James Woods, who worked so memorably with this same director in The Onion Field, is tuned naturally to the proper idling speed and barely has to touch the gas pedal. Sean Young, Steven …
American remake of a very lucrative French export by Jean-Charles Tacchella (to whom, whatever happened?). It could hardly have gotten any shallower than it already was, without complete evaporation. And indeed the roles for the secondary mates (William Petersen, Sean Young) have been considerably beefed up. At the same time, …
The Hammer horror factory already had the thought (in 1971) to re-do the R.L. Stevenson tale as a sex-change thing: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Of course that version didn't have the thought to do it funny. But then this version had only the thought, not also the ability. Tim …
All of the principals are homed in on pulp-thriller stereotypes (Armand Assante, tough guy; Sherilyn Fenn, girl Friday; Sean Young, man-trap; Kate Nelligan, gold-digger), but the gags are all over the map: Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, obviously, but also Cape Fear, Sleeping with the Enemy, Double Indemnity, Body Heat, …
Quaintly Hardy-esque period piece, from an H.E. Bates novel, about dog-paddling humans tossed about by the waves of fate. More specifically, a friendless lass, having just buried her stillborn bastard, receives shelter under the same roof with three strapping brothers -- trouble for sure. Fine-point photography by Peter Sova; sparsely …
A let's-kick-butt military operation against a noncontroversial butt: a South American drug cartel. The weapons of choice are helicopters (our Apaches vs. their Scorpion), and the aerial combat gets those old jingoistic juices flowing. The preliminaries are as abbreviated as they are predictable. With Nicolas Cage, Sean Young, and Tommy …
Comedy of bad taste, set among the mixed-nuts occupants of an El Monte trailer park: bad enough to raise the specter of Pink Flamingos, not bad enough to raise an eyebrow. With Max Parrish, Adrienne Shelly, Andrea Naschak, Diane Ladd, Sean Young; written and directed by Joel Hershman.
Disney animated literary adaptation, with songs. And, despite the track record of Victor Hugo as a begetter of hit musicals (Les Miz), not a good idea. Not even if you have the "vision," the nerve, the self-servingness, to see clear to how the twice-told tale of the bell-tower hermit Quasimodo …
James Dearden's remake of a 1956 quickie (Gerd Oswald, director) isn't so much modernized as deliberately old-fashioned. Specifically, Hitchcock-fashioned. Not, in fact, since early De Palma has anybody labored so hard to emulate The Master. And the result is a veritable feast for Hitchcockians: the indoor stage-set passed off as …
Lizzie Borden, of Working Girls, paddles into the mainstream with a sex thriller about a smarmy scam artist (Patrick Bergin) who poses as a world-renowned photographer -- the David Hanover of Vogue magazine -- in order to get women to pose for his camera. His modus operandi is intriguing and …
The second screen adaptation of Kenneth Fearing's suspense novel, The Big Clock. The first, cleverly called The Big Clock, was in 1948, and only a fool would want to invite comparisons with it. The fool responsible for the remake, Roger Donaldson, avoids these for a while, with forty-five minutes of …