Well, I've got a ton of vitriol in me and nowhere (else) to direct it, so... (Spoilers, obviously.)
DEATH OF A UNICORN
Who knows why certain projects get greenlit? Is it a burning need to bring your story to the screen? Is it a mad dash to take advantage of quickly-expiring IP rights? Or is it because the actors are free, the cameras are working and the money men assure you that the checks probably won’t bounce, maybe? Having witnessed 2025’s fractured fairy tale, the answer is closest to the latter. The film stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter who, while traveling to his boss' mansion for an important work project, ran over a unicorn. She was amazed by the creature, but he tried to kill it, hoping to put it out of its misery. Automatically, I am gobsmacked that this dingus is someone I'm meant to be rooting for. They take the unicorpse with them to the mansion where, remarkably, the creature a) demonstrated restorative properties that could've potentially make the greedier characters of the story richer and b) was far less dead than anyone could've expected, the unicorn coming back to life to take violent revenge on its ostensible captors. Not a terrible idea for a movie, but writer/director Alex Scharfman's execution flattens the idea out, taking nearly two hours to tell - at best - a half-hour story. Rudd usually makes solid choices in his comedy roles (well, almost usually; this year, I plan on rewatching the 21st century comedies I saw in a theater and the thought of revisiting the interminable improv of Wanderlust’s mirror scene fills me with the opposite of joy), but his instincts must’ve gone out for a pack of smokes on this project and never returned. His feckless, workaholic putz (topped off with glasses, because dorks, amirite?) was even more unbearable than the story’s ostensible villains, loosely patterned after the characters of “Succession” because why not? While Richard E. Grant, Tea Leoni and Will Poulter tried valiantly to imbue their stick figure characterizations with life, Ortega was the unquestioned highlight of the film; the kind of soldiering on performance that should guarantee a long and fruitful career, but not even she could save this movie. For a better mix of comedy and horror in a recent A24 project starring a Latinx it-girl, Y2K is right there. Flaws and all, it's better than you've heard.
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
Despite my experience with seeing Red Notice (at a drive-in!!), I have no great enmity for streaming-exclusive, star-studded action movies. If the story (and trailer) interest me enough, I'm all in. Also, I had no reason to think anything but the best for this 2025 yarn, directed as it was by Guy Ritchie who hit something of a hot streak following the success of the Aladdin remake (haven't yet seen The Covenant, but I'm working on it) and written by James Vanderbilt, who's had some solid works in his up-and-down career (The Rundown, the Radio Silence Scream movies, White House Down) and while I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for the sadistic streak of The Losers (no doubt the work of Very Bad Things auteur Peter Berg), he has to shoulder 100% of the blame for this. The story was just your basic 'collecting ancient artifacts and keeping them out of the hands of bad guys, Da Vinci Code/National Treasure' kind of deal; a neat throwback to the would-be franchises of two decades ago, but the death of any fun to be provided by this movie can be summed up in two words: John Krasinski. As Luke, he had the nominal Nicolas Cage role of devil-may-care treasure hunter dragging his unwilling family into this exciting but possibly dangerous situation. But seriously, why was this character such a knob? Thinking nothing of getting his sister, Natalie Portman's Charlotte, fired so she had more time to help him in his pursuits and convinced that he's in a will-they, won't-they thing with Eiza Gonzalez's femme fatale Esme despite her obvious disinterest (and that she was able to sell Esme's heel turn of her exterior being broken by his "charm" makes Gonzalez, for my money, one of our greatest living actresses). Oh, and more points off for the complete waste of the great Stanley Tucci. Again, in a vacuum, the story could work as an enjoyable non-think adventure. Shame about the main character, though, who I presume will be leading the charge in any hypothetical sequels to this. Seriously, if this gets a sequel before The Adventures of Tintin, I'm cracking skulls.
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT
Yes, I am perfectly aware of what I said a couple years ago about the comic diversions of directors who mostly made serious movies. Fact is...sometimes, they work and sometimes, they don’t. Firmly occupying the ‘don’t’ category is this 1972 trifle where Tom Smothers (Google is your friend) plays a businessman who feels burned out by the rat race and drops out of his 9-to-5 lifestyle to become a tap-dancing magician. Well, that’s nominally the plot here. The film divided its time between Smothers's burgeoning career and his former boss John Astin (again, Google) trying to get him back into the fold. It almost seemed like something Woody Allen would’ve cooked up at the time, but, at the very least, he had editor Ralph Rosenblum to stitch his scenes and gags together to give his movies the semblance of having a beginning, a middle and an ending. Well, one out of three is better than nothing. (As it turns out, the film was taken out of Brian De Palma‘s - yes, that Brian De Palma - hands when Warner Bros. studio executives and star Smothers lacked confidence in the young director's handling. As has been conclusively proven time and again, studio executives don’t learn shit, but I’d like to think, years down the line, Smothers being talked into attending screenings of Carrie and Dressed to Kill and, subsequently, having to eat copious amounts of crow.) But even without the narrative disjointedness and lack of drive, the movie begins with a mad bomber calling Smothers's company and telling him that a bomb is about to go off in their building in six minutes...and he puts the call on hold. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. Brief appearances from M. Emmet Walsh, Katharine Ross and (especially) Orson Welles perk things up a bit; if only we were following their stories, instead. Maybe Hi, Mom and Greetings turned out better; no studio bullshit to wade through and De Palma wrote them instead of relying on the work of one Jordan Crittenden (me neither), but at the moment, I’m not eager to find out.
HOSTAGE
As Bruce Willis slips further and further away, it's fascinating to talk about his film career and wonder if he could've gone further. One figures that - if not for his health troubles - he might have found a role to earn him an Academy Award...or, at least, a nomination. Thing is that Willis had already given a number of award-worthy turns in his career: Death Becomes Her, Pulp Fiction, 12 Monkeys, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and this 2005 action movie where he played hostage negotiator Jeff Talley, forced into retirement after a situation goes horribly wrong. A year later, another crisis arose where the home of an accountant with ties to shady people was besieged by three street toughs, one of whom had a pathetic crush on the accountant’s teenage daughter. Things escalate and, before you know it, the cartoonish delinquents - essentially one character split into three bodies, one of whom was conveniently in need of severe psychological help - have taken over. Talley tried to resolve things, but unfortunately, the story was further complicated (in a Panic Room-derivative plot turn) by people who needed something in the accountant’s home and if Talley didn’t get it, his own family will come to harm. (And you know a movie is bad if it can use this latter plot line and not excite me. I even paid to see Firewall!) Remarkably, this explosion at the cliché factory was based on a number one best-selling book, yet another example of how there’s no accounting for taste. Willis‘s strong performance and Alexandre Desplat’s colorful score tried to trick you into thinking this was a real movie and sadly, the two gentlemen almost succeeded. Not to get too hacky here, but - all things considered - the title was alarmingly accurate: there was a hostage here and they answered to the name of Anyone Who Sat Down to Watch This Movie.
THE INCIDENT
I've watched a lot of movies in my life, but as I truly began to watch them with a critical eye in the last decade, I've noticed that more than a few of them would've worked far better (if at all) as short films as opposed to features. One particular example is this movie from 1967 where a pair of hoods board an after-hours train and proceed to terrorize the passengers aboard. The film boasted an impressive cast: up-and-comers Tony Musante and Martin Sheen as the hoods and, among the passengers, Jack Gilford, Thelma Ritter, Brock Peters, Ruby Dee, Beau Bridges and Ed McMahon (yes, seriously). However, all that talent ended up going to waste through a series of basically the same scene repeated every ten minutes: the psycho hoods fixate on a passenger, harass and tear them down bit by bit, leaving them thoroughly demoralized, then they start on another one. Rinse, repeat. One supposes one could look at this as some kind of valuable document about the social upheaval that would produce such criminals that may partake in this kind of activity (And someone watching from an elevated, relatively harm-free position may wonder why the group of passengers don’t stand up to these amoral bullies, reasoning that there’s more of the passengers than there are of the criminals, but you might not understand that we may end up in trouble for trying to inflict violence on these freaks, even though a good claw hammer to the skull is what every single one of them needs. Seriously, fuck every last one of you people judging us from outside of this country as if every single American voted for that cocksucker! I voted for Kamala!), but we never get any insight into who the crooks are or why they're even performing these bullying, dehumanizing acts, making this 99-minute movie more of an endurance test than a social statement. I have no idea why filmmakers had such a hard-on for the Lady in a Cage template (Beware My Lovely, The Strangers in 7A, the previous entry), but from now on, count me the fuck out.
I WONDER WHO'S KILLING HER NOW
It is always a disheartening thing when a film comes up with a witty premise only to fumble it at every single turn…and the one from this alleged comedy was a beaut: a husband looking to solve his money problems signs his soon-to-be ex-wife up for a lucrative insurance policy, but then, the company turns out to be a scam operation and he tries to cancel the hit...only to find that the guy he hired to carry it out subcontracted it to another dude, and when he tracks down that guy, it turns out that he passed the buck to someone else and so on and so forth. It's hard to imagine not getting laughs out of that setup, but this 1975 would-be farce studiously avoids anything in the way of comedy, from Steven Hillard Stern's point-and-shoot direction to the reliance on sketches of jokes instead of actual jokes to its supporting cast of 'wacky' characters (why is one of them a freaking vampire...and in the daytime?!) and an unlikable schlemiel of a protagonist. Solid character actor though he was (in projects ranging from Don Juan DeMarco to Brighton Beach Memoirs to Stay Tuned), Bob Dishy is not the first name (much less the 50th) to come to mind to anchor a goofy farce like this. (Fun fact: this was initially conceived of as a vehicle for Peter Sellers, something the Pink Panther-esque animated opening credits with their faux-Mancini scoring by Patrick Williams made no bones about, but he was laid low by a heart attack...though given that he willingly did Where Does It Hurt? and Soft Beds, Hard Battles a couple of years before, it’s possible he was just faking.) The minor twist about who actually wanted the wife dead had the whiff of cleverness, but overall, this was just the kind of nothing burger project you'd expect to take up permanent residence in the public domain. Astonishingly, the screenplay was written by Mickey Rose and if that name seems somewhat familiar, it's because he was Woody Allen's writing partner on What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Take the Money and Run and Bananas. Given what we now know of Allen, it seems morally wrong to bestow him with positive credit for anything, but judging by this movie, he was absolutely the brains of that outfit.
KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS
In 1989, xenophobia about the Japanese taking over America was at an unfortunate peak. An action movie sought to redress the situation, centering around a detective who plays by his own rules (can't have a story like this without one). His latest investigation saw him entering the world of the Japanese people...and forcing him to face unfortunate truths about himself that interfere with his efforts to catch a criminal victimizing them. Along the way, his Latino partner would lose his life, making him more determined than ever to stop the crook. At the end, the detective would catch the villain and, ostensibly, improve as a person. This movie was Paramount’s Black Rain, released in September and starring Michael Douglas. Also produced (or - given the studio’s money troubles of the time - should that be slung together?) was this February-released yarn from The Cannon Group starring Charles Bronson because of course it did. His character, Lieutenant Crowe, was on the trail of a real nasty piece of work: Juan Fernandez’s drug lord/pimp Duke. I suppose it would’ve been helpful to mention that the Duke storyline and the Japanese storyline ran parallel to each other, only intersecting when the film wanted to get super gross, such as when James Pax’s businessman Hiroshi assaults (bad touch, not violence) a young girl on the bus, the girl happening to be Crowe’s daughter, Amy Hathaway’s Rita, which serves absolutely no purpose except to heighten the senior Crowe’s racism against the Japanese (and, wouldn’t you know it, Hiroshi never faces any sort of consequence for this disgusting action) or when Hiroshi’s own daughter, Kumiko Hayakawa’s Fumiko, is on the verge of becoming Duke’s next target. A good screenwriter would’ve found a way to tie these situations together, forcing both fathers to deal with the ugliness within themselves and (hopefully) strengthen their relationships with their young daughters, but this was a movie being produced for The Cannon Group where the last helicopter was about to fly out. Who had time for any of that nuance crap, you know? Cannon wasn’t long for this world (not solely because of this movie though it certainly didn’t help matters) and the film’s director J. Lee Thompson (collaborating for the ninth time with his lead actor) retired from the business soon after because, after putting something like this out, he must’ve been keenly aware that he became directorial plutonium; absolutely fatal to any studio stupid enough to throw him a bone. Sometimes, friendship just ain’t worth it.
MACABRE
Sometimes, when you look for a movie to watch in October, you either want to be scared or 'scared'. The second one was closer to a funhouse type of experience, like a slasher movie that followed a template where you're freaked out or grossed out, but it was fine at the end because the monster couldn't hurt you. The first one was more along the lines of something you may find in the news; a situation that could get under your skin long after you've stopped watching. This one from 1958 fit the bill all right: William Prince’s Dr. Barrett comes home one day to find that his young daughter is missing and he receives a phone call telling her that the girl has been buried alive and he only has but a few hours to locate her. Whether or not you have a child, it’s hard not to feel your shorts filling up after hearing a premise like that. However, this film chose to waste its 72 minute runtime with a bunch of time-jumping nonsense involving characters we couldn’t be bothered to find ourselves - nor will we ever end up - caring about. (Ostensibly, this was backstory to inform the present-day narrative, but it’s too bad they didn’t make it the slightest bit interesting.) This culminated in a laughably convoluted ending that pretty much turned the Night Watch trick of completely upending the sympathy we were meant to feel for the beleaguered protagonist. Fun (he said, ironically) fact: this was William Castle’s first gimmick movie, insuring audience members $1000 against death from fright via a cheap and (looking back on it) extraordinarily tasteless jump scare. Though the man could never resist an eye-catching gimmick, it’s interesting to note that quite a few of Castle's movies boiled down to ‘desperate shyster employing an overly elaborate scheme to separate good and decent people from their hard-earned money’. Kinda makes you think, don’t it?
SECOND-HAND HEARTS
Now, there's no law on the books that prohibits a romantic movie from operating purely on vibes. After all, while not a perfect movie, 1971's Harold and Maude, directed by Hal Ashby (pay attention, kiddies, for there will be a test), is beloved for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its loosey-goosey vibe. However, when the vibes are as toxic as they were in this 1981 project, you can expect trouble. Robert Blake played Loyal Muke (more on this name later), a drifter/loser who, as the film begins, was fired from his job at a car wash. It soon transpires that during a drunken bender (a real Don Juan, this one), he got married to an aspiring singer played by Barbara Harris and, to get to know his new wife and her kids better, they embark on a road trip. Not a bad basis for a movie; plenty of opportunities to meet colorful characters and flesh out the people we get to know as the movie goes on. Unfortunately, that concept completely escaped the filmmakers, leaving us with one meandering scene after another of loud, annoying and unpleasant people screaming at each other, with the nadir coming around the 2/3 mark where we witnessed the aftermath of an ostensible scene where Harris‘s young son was molested by a stranger. Nothing was said directly, but he did demand that the boy not tell anyone. Even worse, this moment was never followed up on, nor did the stranger receive any sort of comeuppance for this ghastly act, leading me to wonder why exactly it was even introduced in the first place if it was gonna be thrown away just as quickly. And even putting aside his unfortunate late-in-life plastic surgery and conviction for spousal murder, Blake was about the last person in the world you would want as your romantic lead, a fact that the one-time “Baretta” seemed keenly aware of given that his whiny layabout character had all the sex appeal of a rotting fish. Even worse, you'd really expect Harris to be a bright shining light as she was in just about everything she did (Nashville, Family Plot, Freaky Friday), but sadly, the film dragged the actress down to its level, her Dinette Dusty just as unbearable as anything else in this waste of celluloid. (By the by, what was writer Charles Eastman on when he came up with these character names? Loyal Muke, Dinette Dusty, Human, Iota, Sandra Dee, Tragedy and the grandparents Nell and Voyd. Don’t worry. I get it. I mean, it’s not goddamn funny, but I get it.) Call me crazy, but a romance movie should make you feel good about yourself and life in general, not make you want to do bodily harm to everybody in it.
THE SLUGGER'S WIFE
Hollywood is a funny town. Some actors go on to great renown and success, while some work fairly steadily, but never quite hit the heights of their early acclaim. Michael O’Keefe went to toe-to-toe with Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, earning both men Academy Award nominations, and while most people might get swept away with four all-time great comic performers working near the top of their respective games, the young actor provided a nice grounding in Caddyshack as wayward caddy Danny. You find yourself wondering why he didn’t become a bigger name...then you watch this 1985 romantic comedy and the pieces start falling into place. O’Keefe‘s Darryl was a ball player for the Atlanta Braves who chanced to hear the singing voice of Rebecca De Mornay’s Debbie one night and, for him, it was love at first sight. It seemed like a promising start, but if there’s one thing I hate in movies, it’s asking us to buy into a relationship where one character annoys their way into the heart of another, so guess what Darryl does to Debbie over the course of the first act? And remarkably, he only got worse from there. Darryl demanded that Debbie show up to all of his games, putting serious bumps in what seemed to be a promising singing career for her (and given De Mornay's surprisingly impressive voice, it’s clear that Debbie had a real shot at success) and it wasn't even that Darryl considered her to be a good luck charm of any kind; it was just a way for him to exercise control over her. (And God forbid that children ever entered into this equation.) With such an overbearing lox for a main character, it was no surprise that the romance angle of this movie never got off the ground. However, thanks to the efforts of a pre-"Sliders" Cleavant Derricks and the once-great Randy Quaid as O’Keefe’s teammates and - of all people - Norma Rae director Martin Ritt as his coach, the comedy worked reasonably well. The project seemed to be cursed all around; not only did this make for a giant speed bump for O’Keefe's career, but also those of writer Neil Simon, who seemed to lose his touch somewhere along the way and director Hal Ashby. While Lookin’ to Get Out, Let’s Spend the Night Together and 8 Million Ways to Die had their pleasures, the 1980s hit the man hard. One can only imagine how this decade would’ve turned out with better management or (not to get too tabloidy) less chemical indulgences, but we will always be left to wonder what became of that fair-haired boy of the 1960s and 1970s.
Other bad movies I saw this year: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Bait ('00), Caboblanco, Doom, In the Lost Lands, The Mangler, Million Dollar Mystery, Sssssss, The Trouble With Girls and The Woman in the Yard
Things that annoyed me about movies that weren't quite the worst I saw in 2025:
The Amityville Horror - This was based on a true incident where an unfortunate family was murdered, ostensibly leading to their spirits haunting their house when a new family moves in. Even so, was a little consistency in the unusual events too much to ask? A window slamming down on a child's fingers; a swarm of flies buzzing around; a wad of money suddenly disappearing; Rod Steiger's Father Delaney struck blind by a falling piece of ceiling; a door sticking shut, traumatizing the babysitter. It's hard not to assume that American-International held a contest where they asked random strangers the creepiest things they could think of and, for some reason, all of them ended up in the movie. Oh, and this all took place over two hours of runtime. Only God knows why this merited roughly 28,000 more movies (and counting!) connected tangentially (and I use that word more loosely than it has ever before been used) to this one.
Bad Boys - It's rare that I include a re-watch in this section, but I hadn't seen it since the mid-90s and I was far from the critical film analyst I am now, so here it is. Tea Leoni's Julie witnessed the murder of her friend, but the only way she'll go into protective custody is if it's with Mike Lowrey, but he's busy, so partner Marcus Burnett has to pretend to be Mike, surprising Mike who, therefore, has to pretend to be Marcus, a needlessly convoluted (and ultimately pointless; keep reading) identity switch plot strand that would shame an episode of “Three's Company”. However, staying alive long enough to testify against her friend's murderers just wasn't Julie's style, so she decided to waste them at a nightclub, which - let's be honest - would've resulted either in a life sentence or certain death for her, but she's a civilian! She didn't have the time or the luxury of waiting for the law to handle these things! Then, at the 'all is lost' moment, Julie was held captive by the bad guys and the big drug deal was going down and the only clue that Mike and Marcus had to locate the bad guys lied with a woman - Anna Thomson's Francine - who just so happened to work in their precinct. Lucky thing, that! Michael Bay's direction and the chemistry between the leads barely justified the success of this one, leading to three sequels that were miles better than this one, but, honestly, this was right up there with Face/Off as the most ridiculously overrated action movie of the decade.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt - After finding myself unimpressed with the Peter Hyams remake, I thought for certain that the Fritz Lang original could make hay out of this odd, but intriguing premise. In a pig’s eye! The film spent almost its entire runtime on the set up and topped it off with a ridiculously phony twist that, sadly, was replicated in the Hyams movie. The worst part had to be the dispatch of Sidney Blackmer’s Austin, the only other person who knew that Dana Andrews’ Tom wasn’t really guilty of any crimes. In the remake, Michael Douglas’s DA had him offed by his underlings, whereas here...he’s randomly killed in a car crash. 🥱
Blue Steel - Well-acted and dripping with style, which I’m sure the production team was hoping against hope would distract from the fact that there is a whole lot of bullshit that goes down just so the story can happen. In the opening robbery, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Megan got suspended because she shot a supposedly unarmed robber (baby Tom Sizemore!), and the cashier - apparently, the only person who could see that the guy had a weapon - couldn’t remember if it was a gun or a knife. Later, cops were chastised for breaking and entering the apartment belonging to Ron Silver’s Eugene and no one thought to reveal that his door was open. Also, he pops up behind Megan, using the gun to waste her best pal, Elizabeth Peña’s Tracy, but he can’t be brought in because Megan didn’t see his face. (Sidebar: I’m not sure what movie Richard Jenkins’s sleazy lawyer was beamed in from, but I am quite certain I hate it.) Near the end of the movie, Eugene was a wanted man and the first place he went to hide was…Megan’s apartment. Also, I assume that this was an alternate universe New York City where rape kits and forensic testing were pure fantasy because they’d have caught this joker a lot sooner if either of those things were employed. Furthermore, as Disqus user TGGP essentially pointed out in his review, Eugene’s Wall Street connections must’ve enabled him to enter a cheat code for infinite ammo since, as a non-registered gun user, it would've been very difficult for him to obtain more ammunition than the handful of bullets that were already in the gun when he stole it from the opening robbery. The dream logic thing worked for co-writer Eric Red when he did The Hitcher because, for all we knew, John Ryder may have actually been a demon that escaped from Hell, but in attempting to transpose that kind of story into a more realistic setting, the resulting film ended up being something of a dud.
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker - Thriller had some potential, feeling almost like a regional production in spite of its name actors. Susan Tyrrell acted the hell out of Aunt Cheryl, but even before anything unusual had transpired, it was clear as crystal that something was off about her, making the other characters look like idiots for not suspecting her sooner. Even more confounding was Bo Svenson’s Detective Carlson, pathological in his belief that Jimmy McNichol’s Billy was gay. There was virtually no evidence to back up his accusations, leading me (and others, I’m certain) to wonder if there wasn’t a major case of projection going on. It's a sign of how hateable Carlson was that I savored his death far more than that of Aunt Cheryl.
Bye Bye Birdie - Musical set around Elvis Presley with the serial numbers filed off bursted with energy in its first half, but then, it allowed too much silliness to take over in the second. The pep pills subplot was just ludicrous and, much as I enjoy Maureen Stapleton, she (as Dick Van Dyke’s overbearing mother) could’ve been cut out of this movie completely. Besides, this had a perfectly good overbearing parent performance from Paul Lynde. Why overegg the pudding?
Foul Play - A comedy-thriller where the comedy aspect was a complete flop on almost every single level. That’s gotta be some kind of a record. To wit: The ‘hilarious’ Scrabble game between the two old ladies culminating in the spelling out of a profanity. The English-deficient Japanese couple that Chevy Chase’s Tony and Goldie Hawn’s Gloria end up driving with. The assassin targeting the Pope is code named ‘The Dwarf’ and, while there’s no way Gloria could’ve known that that was just a code name, that didn’t stop the filmmakers from throwing in a five-minute scene where she just beat the tar out of poor Billy Barty’s insurance salesman. Also, every single frame of this thing devoted to Dudley Moore’s sex pervert Stanley just made me feel untold depths of embarrassment for the entirety of the production. This was the directing debut of Harold and Maude writer Colin Higgins and I’m sure that first-time directors decide to stuff every single idea they have into their first movie for fear that they may never get a second, but sweet baby Jesus, had he never even heard of the concept of ‘script editor’?
Gung Ho! - Strip away the uncomfortable racial stuff and this was - like all of Ron Howard’s comedies from the 1980s - pleasant but unremarkable, but my God, could Michael Keaton‘s Hunt not have turned off the wisecracks for five fucking minutes?! His constant snark wore thin as the movie went on, reaching a low point in the dinner scene where he told his girlfriend, Mimi Rogers’ Audrey, to “shut up” and on the drive home, he still couldn’t figure out why she was so angry, leading him to remark, “Are you on your period?”. This was supposed to be our fucking hero?! I couldn’t help but think that the townspeople should’ve let Rance Howard‘s mayor choke him out at the ‘all is lost’ moment. The momentary lack of oxygen might’ve taught him some humility.
Jinxed! - Despite the troubled production, this black comedy was pretty solid for its first half and Rip Torn was entertainingly obnoxious as Harold, but then came the second half. So, let’s see if I got this straight: Harold had a life insurance policy on himself that didn’t pay out in the event of suicide, which - unfortunately - is how he died after losing all of his money when the jinx he had on Ken Wahl’s blackjack dealer Willie was broken. Bette Midler‘s Bonita learnt this when she went to the bank where she was handed a letter from Harold sending her on a wild goose chase. And what if Harold had died by some method other than suicide down the line? What if Bonita dropped his ass at some point? What if any of the people involved in this ridiculous chain of letters had decided to leave Reno on a whim? This idiotic scheme could’ve easily fallen apart at any step and I'd say it was damn lucky on Harold’s part (to say nothing of the movie's writers) that it somehow magically didn’t. Did I mention this was a troubled production?
Kiss Me Deadly - From the opening where a young Cloris Leachman (!) ended up brutally murdered (!!), this thing was a bitter pill to swallow. There was nobody to root for here, not even the nominal hero, leading up to a ridiculous ending that was comparable to The Devil’s Rain: Sure, it outshined the rest of the movie, but what the hell was it doing here?
Money Train - The chemistry between Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson was as strong as ever (I believe; I should try to check out White Men Can't Jump), but this had the unmistakable stench of something that was only half-formed and rushed into production before the WGA planned to go on strike. The money that Harrelson’s Charlie could’ve used to pay off his gambling debts was just randomly stolen by an old woman (I feel like somebody was too in love with Dumb and Dumber when they wrote that part) and the one hour, forty minute movie was nearly an hour over before the idea to rob the titular money train was even entertained. You know, between Hostage, Bad Boys and this movie, I can't help but think that screenwriter Doug Richardson was something of a hack.
Mother's Boys - Jamie Lee Curtis’s solid, against-type villain performance deserved a much better movie, one that didn’t assault the audience with amateurish fake scares every 15 minutes and one with a less naïvely stubborn eldest son.
The Music Man - Some exuberant musical numbers and a terrific cast (and it was an absolute howl figuring out where writers of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” were inspired by certain moments in their episodes), but mother of God, could you feel every second of its 150-minute running time. Say whatever you want about Bye Bye Birdie, but that had the good grace to get in and out in under two hours.
One from the Heart - Lovely cinematography. A neat Tom Waits-Crystal Gayle score. A fine cast. Where did it all go wrong? Glad you asked. This is the movie that writer/director Francis Ford Coppola pushed all his chips on to become a big success. Unfortunately, the film ended with Teri Garr’s Frannie going back to her boorish boyfriend - Frederic Forrest’s Hank - instead of flying to paradise with Raul Julia’s charming and magnetic Ray. The word of mouth that spread from this ending no doubt resulted in a) the film’s failure and b) Coppola becoming a for-hire director for the next 20 years of his life, a fate that could’ve easily been avoided had he simply thought it over for a few moments or allowed the word 'reshoot' to cross his mind. It’s just like that line from Quiz Show: “The tragedy of Francis Ford Coppola is - and always has been - Francis Ford Coppola.”
Saturn 3 - Stunning production design and a colorful Elmer Bernstein score…all for naught. Harvey Keitel’s (distractingly dubbed) Captain Benson was such a creeper from the outset, it’s astonishing how nobody caught on to his evil scheming, but even he might’ve been forgivable in a story that didn’t swing between pretentious and ludicrous. Before 2025, I would never, in a million years, have suspected that the movie where Michael Caine gives his best friend's underage daughter the protein pickup would've been the less malignant of Stanley Donen's 1980s movies, yet here we are.
Strange Days - Neo-noir had style to spare, as well as some clever touches in its subtle evocation of ‘the future!’, but seriously? Not one, but two scenes of sexual assault preserved by the memory capture technology (compounded by the victim forced to watch the assaulter performing these acts both times; real nice)? Also, though Ralph Fiennes’ Lenny was a garbage person through and through, the thing that pissed me off about his character - more than every other aspect combined - was his pathetic devotion to his nasty, toxic ex, Juliette Lewis’s Faith. One of my least favorite tropes in all of fiction is where the guy is chasing after the high maintenance girl, little realizing that true love is right under his nose with the more down-to-earth girl, in this case, Angela Bassett’s Mace. In his review, Leonard Maltin felt that turning Lenny and Mace into more than friends stank of total baloney (my words, not his). And while I like a good interracial relationship as much as the next guy, let’s look at the facts: Mace had a steady job, a family, a good head on her shoulders, likable traits. Lenny had absolutely none of these things. How the fuck is a relationship between the two of them supposed to work out?! I’m sorry, but point goes to Maltin on this one.
Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat - There’s a story in the biography section of Anthony Hickox’s IMDb page where he relates how the big bosses of Vestron Pictures told him that this movie would’ve been released after Earth Girls Are Easy and if it wasn’t a hit, goodbye Vestron. After going to a screening of that movie, the writer/director lamented that he “saw Sundown going down the drain”. I’m not in the business (yet), so I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of studio arithmetic and how one release might affect another, but having finally seen this film, I have a pet theory that the head honchos were concerned about the disastrous tonal shifts this movie had (jeopardizing any potential chance at turning a profit) and fed Hickox that song and dance about Earth Girls Are Easy to spare his feelings. Maybe, I’m just too old-fashioned a film lover, but a movie where Bruce Campbell played a goofy descendant of Van Helsing should not also have had a scene where a vampire bat turned into a man and attempted to have his way with a human woman as she slept. That’s just me, though.
They Won't Believe Me - Far from the most original noir, but the flashbacks were quite involving. The present courtroom story, less so. And the ending? I watched this and Sorry, Wrong Number on consecutive days. While Sorry's downer ending was bleak yet inexorable (topped off with a devastating title drop), this film’s ending wouldn't have felt out of place in a “Mad TV” sketch. Picture it:
(The defendant - let's say Michael McDonald - has finished his story. Despite the confidence he felt in relaying it, he is overcome with nervousness as the final deliberations are made. He can barely hear anyone else as his inner monologue goes on.)
“Why do I think that anyone would believe that? Sure, it's what happened, but even I don't believe it! They're gonna find me guilty, I know it! I can't go to jail! I won't go to jail. There's only one chance!”
(With a yell, the defendant hurls himself out of an open window, much to the horror of the assembled gallery. Many panicked yells ensue. The judge - Will Sasso - bangs his gavel.)
“Order! Order in this courtroom! May I remind you that this is a court of law and that we should carry ourselves as professionals. If every courtroom erupted in chaos every time a defendant jumped out a window, nothing would ever get done! Jury, did you reach a verdict?”
(The jury foreperson - Alex Borstein - rises from her seat.)
“Yes, your honor, We, the jury, find the defendant...found the defendant...not guilty.”
Audience erupts with laughter. 🎼“You are now watching Mad TV! Mad!”🎶
The Thomas Crown Affair - Contributions from a select group of talents (cf. Legrand, Michel; Weston, Jack; Bergman, Alan and Marilyn; Ferro, Pablo…and I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit the editing team which included… Hal Ashby) kept this from being a complete ordeal, but I was very turned off by its lead characters: Steve McQueen‘s “if you’re bored, then you’re boring” title character and Faye Dunaway’s insurance investigator Vicki, who thought nothing of abducting the son of Weston‘s Erwin to get information on her quarry. Our heroine, ladies and gentlemen! The Pierce Brosnan/Rene Russo remake ate this movie’s lunch, dinner and the following day’s breakfast.
Touch of Evil - For nearly seven decades, Charlton Heston as a Mexican DEA agent has been a lightning rod for this film not entirely working*, but those complainers just aren't paying attention. While his Agent Vargas was out investigating alongside Orson Welles’ Capt. Quinlan, there was a long stretch of movie where Vargas’s wife, Janet Leigh’s Susan, was left in a motel room and subsequently victimized by a local gang of toughs. I can’t pinpoint when exactly the Hays Code was thrown out, but given a set up like this, it was in no way unreasonable to assume that sexual assault was about to ensue. It didn’t (she was transported to a dive hotel and hooked on drugs, the lesser of two evil scenarios, I suppose), but all the same, the spouse of a law enforcement agent couldn’t have been equipped with even the most rudimentary self-defense skills?
…but that opening take was the shiznit, right?
Witches' Brew - The humor was so subdued as to be nonexistent. Lana Turner - in her last role (as Head Witch in Charge) - had nothing to do but take part in an underdeveloped subplot about taking over the body of Teri Garr's Margaret because...reasons? In fact, the secret word(s) here is 'underdeveloped subplot'. Whenever you run into one, scream real loud! One of the ways that the life of Richard Benjamin's Prof. Joshua went askew is him being accused of sexual harassment by one of his students...a male student, because comedy? Also, he's chased into the night by a (fairly impressive) stop-motion creature, but don't worry your pretty little head about either of these things because they weren't referenced ever again beyond the scenes in which they were introduced. And, really, the narrative impetus - such as it was - boiled down to witches utilizing their (presumably vast) supernatural abilities...just to help their schlub husbands get ahead at work? Paging Gloria Steinem. Now, I'm not saying that Burn, Witch, Burn! could never work as a comedy, but, for the love of God, don't make it so slapdash.
The Wrong Man - Like a lot of wrongfully accused Hitchcock movies, except this one had the novelty of being based on a true incident. The procedural approach to the narrative and the - if I’m being perfectly honest - flimsy methods of accusation (I would not be surprised if it came out, at some point, that I Confess was one of Hitch’s favorites of his own movies) bled all the excitement out of the story. Henry Fonda was damn good, but then, when was he not?
* - Still, I did (and do) laugh at that joke in Ed Wood. I'm not made of stone.
Labels: lists, movies
