Catchy title sequence, made up of a series of technical illustrations tracing the history of weaponry from the Stone Age to the Atomic one, and backed by Ella Fitzgerald doing "You Took Advantage of Me." This and the CIA war-room sequence after it give the movie a genuine satirical edge, …
Sick and sickening horror show, said to be derived from an H.P. Lovecraft tale, but thoroughly contemporary in its devotion to ghoulish special effects. Humor brightens the scene momentarily when the mad doctor (or mere mad intern) injects some of his reanimating serum -- a sort of phosphorescent limeade -- …
The blood-sister of Conan the Barbarian (both creations of Robert E. Howard) must extinguish the pulsing green talisman which draws power from light, and in the wrong hands could destroy the world. A feminist anti-nuclear allegory? Probably not. (Only women may touch the talisman, and the wrong hands into which …
Fred Ward has been plucked from the supporting ranks to serve as the pulp-novel superhero of Warren Murphy's and Richard Sapir's "Destroyer" series. Something similar has happened to the hero himself, a Manhattan patrolman shanghaied into a government agency that officially doesn't exist, given a new face and name (from …
André Téchiné manages to turn up plenty of intriguing things in Paris, a little drably photographed, however. And in the occupants thereof he turns up plenty of unintriguing things such as would never be found in any actual occupants of any city on earth. Recklessly, violently, insanely, Frenchly, fatiguingly romantic, …
More truly a sequel to Night of the Living Dead than was Dawn of the Dead, although writer-director Dan O'Bannon had nothing to do with the earlier film, and indeed has the cheek to suggest that George Romero got his "facts" wrong in it. For that matter, the scientific process …
Or How America Gained Its Independence Even Though Tom Dobb of New York Looked Out Only for Himself: "Ain't my fight." It becomes his, however, after his son has the soles of his feet lashed to the bone. But even then -- even when the son gets his musket sights …
The third sequel to Rocky has gotten into politics, but there is no need for the critic to follow. Sufficient grounds for dismissal will be found, once again, in simple pugilistics. With his newfound defensive skills (see Part III) somehow mislaid, Rocky is again cast as the underdog against the …
Another illustrated "classic" from the people who gave you The Europeons and The Bostonians: not Henry James this time, but E.M. Forster. The illustrations in this instance are handsome enough, though a little heavy on the starch. They are divided up at intervals by facetious chapter headings, or captions, along …
Do you ever feel as if life were an express train and there was no one at the throttle and the brake shoes had burned off? And as if you had just spent three years in solitary confinement and had slogged through a sewer in order to escape, and it …
Spoof of Westerns, specifically of the indefensible Singing Cowboy type, founded on the ignorant assumption that all Westerns are exactly alike. Few in the intended audience (the advertisements stress that it comes from "the makers of Police Academy") will know any better; and there are precious few Westerns around, against …
If Jesus Christ can have survived some of the screen biographies of him, Santa Claus should be able to survive worse. Of course Jesus never had a script written about him by David Newman, but really the Newman touch, whose dents are evident all throughout the Superman series, for example, …
A little bit of a Rules of the Game -- a very little bit of it -- but centered on the British rather than French aristocracy, and set on the eve of the earlier World War (and mowing down pheasants, in the hunting sequences, instead of rabbits). Brief dim vignettes, …