A wooden Indian come to life, a carnivorous slime creature in a mountain lake, a Living Dead hitchhiker -- a trio of terrible tales of terror from Stephen King. Someone throws up in each of the first two, and there are inexplicable allusions to the Cisco Kid in each of …
Richard Pryor is a convicted con man who talks and shrieks and convulses his way into a psycho ward for observation and then has to impersonate a doctor after he escapes in the midst of a hurricane. The frequent injections of Sixties-vintage liberalism -- about things like the superior humanity, …
Amiable romantic comedy about "the all-important third date" -- a sort of D-Date -- and about the deceptions undertaken for the sake of a Good Impression. The borrowed car and apartment are such large deceptions as to border on mere distractions (the subsequently stolen car is beyond the border), and …
True story based on two books by Donald Woods, a former newspaper editor in South Africa. Woods himself is the main character, and as an "uninformed" liberal he makes a useful point of identification for much of the world's white population, specifically director Richard Attenborough and his same screenwriter from …
Several Chekhov stories blended together, with most of the delicacy that that name stands for ruthlessly expunged: aristocrats and bureaucrats of Eisensteinian exaggeration, musical peasants, a lovers' embrace in a blizzard of chicken feathers. Marcello Mastroianni, as a skirt-chaser in genuine love, behaves in that unbuttoned manner he tends to …
Your traditional Christmas-card angel (Emmanuelle Béart, the title character of Manon des Sources), bathed in white light, caressed by gentle breezes, and with the wings of a pterodactyl-sized dove, is marooned on Earth when one of the latter gets broken. Awwwww. (A couple of nontraditional touches: she speaks in the …
James Joyce's longish short story (from "Dubliners"), brought to the screen posthumously by John Huston. This is the stagiest and stuffiest brand of literary adaptation, the kind of thing you expect to see on PBS by way of the BBC, made by someone looking for a short cut to profundity. …
Bloody story of a bootcamp for soldiers of fortune, where people are used for target practice. Directed by David A. Prior, starring Cameron Mitchell, Troy Donahue, Ted Prior, Fritz Matthews, and David Campbell.
Moldily old-fashioned melodrama involving a Lady in Distress, a dead ringer for her, another dead ringer for her, an Old Dark House, a snowstorm, syringes and spiked beverages, a secret passage -- the works. Arthur Penn's heart can't have been in it, but his craft is -- and in abundance. …
How, with that attitude, did the filmmakers finish their work without falling on their bayonets? Fred Dryer, the former football player, makes a reasonable economy model of Clint Eastwood (not economy-sized, though), with a face carved by hatchet and a simmering sense of menace. But even Eastwood would be no …
Bronson, p.o.'d this time because his ladyfriend's daughter o.d.'d on coke, is given a handy membership list of the two major drug gangs in L.A. From there, it's all business and no fun. He has a different director from that of his first three WISHES -- J. Lee Thompson instead …
A teenage girl, bound for college and the Peace Corps in the summer of '63, falls in with the "entertainment staff" at a Catskill resort, and it changes her life forever: goodbye Namibia, hello mambo. The transformation, presented as an Ugly Duckling makeover with a debouchment in Swan Lake, amounts …
Dishonor among thieves, with modestly mod trimmings, primarily a metronomic score by Berlin Game that just won't quit. There are shades of Diva, not least in its incoherence, and shades of Romancing the Stone, and just plain shades -- i.e., dark glasses. In a cast of little-knowns, Carey Lowell, a …
A burlesque of the same-named television series of the Fifties, or at least a burlesque of the main character of it. Dan Aykroyd has exactly the nail-file voice and fresh-mown hair to pass as the nephew of Jack Webb's Sgt. Friday, and the walking-anachronism brand of humor makes him rather …
Routine comedy routine, time-capsulized for eternity. A dramatized prologue is tacked on to the documented concert, showing a precocious little Eddie telling a dirty joke at the Murphy family's Thanksgiving gathering in 1968. Twenty years later in a New York City concert hall he's no longer precocious, but really quite …