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Reviews
Monsters: A Bond of Silk (1989)
For better...or definitely WORSE!
This is a great episode about a newlywed couple on short-lived honeymoon who are about to find out that old saying "if it's too good to be true than it probably is" just might be correct. They check into their hotel room in the basement of the establishment only to discover that there's nothing inside but concrete walls, a mysterious elevator on the far wall and a giant spider web in the middle of the room. To make things worse, the door has been locked behind them. The special effects aren't great but it's a nail-biter of an episode...that's for sure. Horrific stuff for TV in the 80's and one of the better episodes of the series!
The Mist (2007)
There's something in the mist alright...
...one stinker of a film.
I think Darabont should have kept working on the script for another couple of years because the first half of the film is almost unwatchable. Cutting out almost all the material from the beginning of the novella (the wife gets about 3 lines of dialog), David and his son and neighbor get to the store about 6 minutes into the movie and then the mist comes. There was no time to care about David Drayton or his son...or his wife...and there's certainly nothing throughout the duration of the film to make me care about him. Thomas Jane, who I thought would be pretty good in this, was bland as eggshell white paint. Andre Braugher is all wrong for the annoying neighbor role but then again most of his dialog is awful to begin with. Marcia Gay Harden tries to bring a Tammy Faye Baker spin on Mrs. Carmody...and it works for a little bit but, boy, it gets really old really fast. In fact, a lot of Darabont's buddies (Jeffrey DeMunn and Bill Sadler and the like) return in supporting roles and they're just not good. Only Frances Sternhagen as Mrs. Reppler feels right in her shoes. The camera work is pretty awful. I saw the boom in at least 10 shots...and the film was being shown in the correct ratio 1:85...nice! The build-up to the tentacle attack plays just as poorly as it did in the novella, and the tentacles look like Playstation 1 graphics. It's so incredibly bad. However, things pick up in the second half with the bug and pharmacy scenes. Those 2 sequences are really good...but they're too little too late. Don't get me started on the new ending. First, since Drayton's wife was in 2 scenes and had about 3 horrible lines (maybe other scenes were cut for time...or more importantly because she couldn't act), I really didn't care if she lived or died. Second, the shocking new ending is just as awful as people feared. I heard about it...thought it was interesting at first...but it's just so against the grain of the underlying theme of hope...AND it's pathetically short-sighted. Nobody thought about the gas running out? They couldn't have looked for a gas station? They couldn't have tried to jump into another vehicle at some point ? I was with my parents who were liking the movie a lot more than me and after the shock-ending came my mom turned to me and said, "That ending was really dumb." Amen, mom. Amen.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Don't Come Back Alive (1955)
Very dated and silly
I guess the basic idea of this story, a wife pretending to be dead so the husband to collect insurance money and profit, isn't necessarily a bad idea but the circumstances revolving around the story were not thought out very well. The husband has been looking for work for some time, and the couple is in dire straights (although you wouldn't know it to look at them). It turns out that the husband was just hired to be a salesman, but the job doesn't start for another month and the couple needs rent money right away or they'll be evicted. So, what does this couple decide to do? Sell some things to make ends meet? Does the wife try to get a job (I know woman weren't really a main part of the work force in the 50's but there were secretaries and waitresses weren't there?) No. This couple concocts a scam where the wife will mysteriously disappear and the husband will have her legally declared dead after 7 years so they can get a whopping $25,000 from her insurance policy That comes out to just under $3,600/year for all their trouble...not a lot by today's standards that's for sure.
What's even sillier is that the scheme doesn't help the couple out in their immediate situation of having to pay rent or being evicted. This part of the story is just glossed over, too. The story just skips over how they paid their rent to make way for the investigation into the wife's disappearance and the potential "murder" the husband might have committed for the insurance money. Furthermore, the wife had to change her own identity, to rent her own apartment and to get a job to support herself while living on her own. Ummm, so why didn't she just get a job to begin with and stay put with the husband?
Maybe it's simply because 50 years have passed since this episode aired but the whole thing just seemed ridiculous and like an awful lot of work to go through for not much of a payoff. The only saving grace of the episode was the performances of the husband and the insurance investigator playing off each other.
The Twilight Zone: The Night of the Meek (1960)
The very best of both worlds
Out of all the Christmas episodes of all the TV shows in the history of television, "Night Of The Meek" is the cream of the crop. It's also one of the very best "Twilight Zone" episodes ever. Art Carney is brilliant as a down-on-his-luck drunk who just wants to make people on skid row happy at Christmas time. He gets his wish when he finds a mysterious bag in a back alley on Christmas Eve that has a knack for making a merry Christmas for everyone as long as it's in Carney's possession. The episode shows the depth of the human soul and kindness that the almighty dollar can't give a person no matter what. And it reminds us that we don't have to be rich or to be a big shot to make a difference in this world. Excellent storytelling.
Night Gallery: The Different Ones/Tell David.../Logoda's Heads (1971)
Same old song and dance
This episode of "Night Gallery" is quite honestly just Rod Serling blatantly ripping himself off. "The Different Ones" is just "Eye Of The Beholder" from the original "The Twilight Zone" series with a boy instead of a girl and a planet of disfigured inhabitants...or is it two? The problem is that "Eye Of The Beholder" was directed with style and made the viewer care about the central characters of the story. The only thing "The Different Ones" has going for it is...well...that it's in color and incorporates some N.A.S.A. footage which I'm sure was riveting at the time. Oh, there was also some stock footage of what I believe was the monorail from Disney World to help make the planet Earth look futuristic...that was absolutely hilarious...along with some random announcements over a P.A. system concerning "flying policemen" (on very visible wires and some very bad green screen) and something about aliens landing and then later being found to be "friendly"...not sure what that was except possibly a way of stretching out the story to fit the formatted running time. This is definitely not one of the better "Night Gallery" episodes.
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Spider-man Too
Well, it's breaking records at the box office but after viewing "Spider-man 3", I left the theater feeling like it should have been called "Spider-man Too".
Too many villains and too little to care about. Too many characters and too little character development . Too many characters crying and too few characters engaging me. Too many song & dance numbers and too few (intended) laughs. Too many plot contrivances (and loopholes from the last film) and too little overall plot.
Let me expound on this last point...A meteorite crashes into the ground 30 yards away from Peter and MJ with the thunderous boom of a fluffy pillow falling on the floor. The exposition and explanation of the black goo/Venom is given about as much screen time as the creature in "Jeepers Creepers" (about 20 seconds). Flint Marko becomes Sandman in about the same fashion as Poison Ivy in "Batman & Robin": Whoops. I tripped and fell where I shouldn't have. Now, I'm a super villain. It just looks a lot cooler here. Apparently Harry's butler became part of "Crime Scene Ivestigators" (because this website won't allow me to write out c.s.i. in capital letters because that's considered "shouting") since the first film and can conclusively confirm something about Willem Dafoe's death there's no way he could possibly know...not to mention the fact that he should have mentioned this information...oh, I dunno...in the last movie. I was howling at this scene. And what happened with J.J. Jameson's son getting jilted at the alter? It's a wonder Parker is still able to work at the Daily Bugle. Shouldn't J.J. be extremely ticked off at Parker for taking his son's wife-to-be away? I know J.J.'s a cheapskate and probably got some $$$ refunded to him...but at least it should have been addressed or mentioned.
The only thing this move really had going for it was #1) the relationship between Peter and MJ didn't feel forced this time. Maguire and Dunst didn't sound like they were just rehearsing lines in a play. They actually felt like a couple going through real issues. #2) Bruce Campbell...can't get enough of this guy. They should make him a villain in the next film...Rhino or Craven the Hunter with a cheesy mustache or something.
P.S. - I've had to adjust my comment about 10 times to fit the "guide lines" of this website. Ridiculous.
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
The Eye-Strain Supremacy
THE BOURNE IDENTITY really took me by surprise in the summer of 2002. I thought it was an engaging and entertaining, if not hollow, action-spy thriller filled with great stunts and an even better cast. You can imagine how much I was anticipating the release THE BOURNE SUPREMACY in the summer of 2004. Well, imagine my surprise when I walked out of the theater last night thinking the movie was inferior in every way possible.
There's no plot: Bourne is framed for killing some people. WOW! That must have taken weeks to come up with. The screenplay is devoid of much wit or engaging dialogue. The movie looks like they strapped a camera on the backs of a couple of monkeys and chased the monkeys around Europe with big sticks.
The camera never stopped moving. It was a lot of shaky, hand-held, out-of- focus-half-the-time closeups with terrible blocking, and the fight scenes and car chases were completely incoherent. Talk about making my eyes hurt. I literally had to close my eyes about half-way through the film just so I didn't go blind from the eye-strain. And Ebert & Roeper toted this film as one of the best action films in years? Puh-lease.
Let's hope that when the next BOURNE movie gets greenlit that the filmmakers learn how to use a steadicam and a dolly!!!
*1/2 out of ****
Fast Times at Hero High (2003)
HIGH-LARIOUS!!!
I must have watched this movie 100 times already, and it NEVER gets old. It plays like a trailer for a feature-length film. It's simply a bunch of quick vignettes and jokes of various Marvel and DC superheroes (and some villains) while in high school. It's SOOOO on the mark it's not funny...it's HIGH-LARIOUS!!! It's like all the bets bits from a movie crammed into 4 or 5 minutes. Alas, that feature- length movie will never come to fruition. I mean, can you imagine the red tape getting all of the right for those characters together on-screen? IN-SANE!!!
Would be great though.
Anyway, kudos to these guys for their effort!!! Hope we see more hilarity from them in the future!!!