John Waters, facing the unenviable task of topping previous heights of grossness, suffers from the what-do-you-do-for-an-encore problem. It is hard to dish out shocks when the cult audience is expecting them, craving them, clamoring for them. Nothing is as shocking, in this generally slipshod fairytale about a kingdom of crooks, …
In the darkest, dingiest photography, a stoop-shouldered oaf is followed through his week in the minutest, mundanest detail: getting out of bed, shaving, making tea, walking to the subway, riding in the subway, putting on the white smock of his Marty-like job in the meat department of a supermarket, and …
Simple-minded simplification of a wonderful Conrad tale about two officers in Napoleon's army who engage each other in a series of duels over a period of years. The duels are shot in a panicked manner that does not allow you to appreciate the action, and the rest of the scenes …
A Raoul Walsh-ian war film turned topsy-turvy so that the Nazis take over the Errol Flynn-Ronald Reagan roles. The story has to do with a typically humble Nazi scheme to kidnap Winston Churchill, and the hopelessness of the task adds some firm evidence of action director John Sturges's preoccupation with …
Formerly called Slaughterhouse Hotel, and by any other name would smell as much. This is Tobe Hooper's encore to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and to this point the director still seems a run-of-the-mill caricaturist of redneck moronism and animalism. Certainly the roads leading into his horrific situations are traversable …
Extraterrestrials assume the shapes of a Catholic priest and six nuns. Perhaps the quietest apocalypse movie ever, full of stiff, underdirected actors and awkward pauses. The pacing seems to be dictated by the need to stretch a nonexistent script to feature length. Christopher Lee, Sue Lyon (who looks old enough …
Peter Shaffer's theatrical shocker about an emotionally dry psychiatrist, also a stuffy classicist with a taste for the dead gods of ancient Greece, who becomes frightfully envious of a teenage patient's brief moments of passionate spiritual oneness with horses while he rides them naked under the moonlight. Sidney Lumet shapes …
Equipped with a too sooty black-and-white image and a sadistically overamplified soundtrack, David Lynch's nightmare visions belong somewhere in the area of "fantastic art," but have found a somewhat uncomfortable home on the midnight-cult circuit. The main narrative thread, if one can be extracted from the jungly snarl, centers around …
John Boorman's Manichean allegory of good and evil, spirit and flesh, religion and science, goes way over the head of the Exorcist original, and probably over the head of the average fright-show fan as well. It goes so far as to identify Regan MacNeil (again Linda Blair) as one of …
A right-makes-might revenge tale about a war hero who returns to his home soil, hangs his Silver Star on his scarecrow, and is forced back into combat by big-town mobsters. The first half dawdles through 1940s period details, and the second plunges into 1970s gore. Gary Conway, Angel Tompkins; directed …
An unintelligible and all but imperceptible storyline about police corruption runs underneath an exhausting series of splashy action scenes. In these, the favorite idea, used three times, is to have a brigade of policemen line up like Eisensteinian shock troops and rain bullets on some guiltless sitting duck. Clint Eastwood, …
Two Manhattan sublessees meet, fight, and finally fall for one another — a supposedly heart-warming romance written in Neil Simon's glib, unctuous, hard-sell style. Simon certainly knows the rules of the Well-Made Play and that rat-a-tat rhythm of wisecracks and comebacks; he has a ready fund — as big as …
Has is it really been 40 years since I stayed up past 2 a.m. watching a scratchy 16mm print at a college film society midnight screening? My introduction to the band left a mighty impression, so strong that after seeing the band perform nine times in person, the movie still …
The number of known names in the cast is depressing testimony to the difficulty of finding decent jobs in today's Hollywood. (Some of the knowns -- Edy Williams, Joyce Jillson -- appear exclusively in the credits and never make it onto the screen in the flesh.) All of them, most …
A clan of modernday cavemen in the American West besets an Ohio family whose car has broken down in the middle of nowhere. The starving savages, wearing animal pelts and bear-claw necklaces and communciating via walkie-talkies, have their greedy eyes not only on the refrigerator in the RV, but also …