Film Reviews by Frank Talker™

The usual Hollywood America-wins-a-war-against-aliens for the benefit of the entire human race movie - just as bad as the frequent American claims that America won World War 2.

A preposterous plot of sending untrained soldiers into the future to fight a war with aliens resulting in the inevitable demise of most of them is reminiscent of currently sending poorly-trained troops to the front lines in the Russo-Ukraine War.

This film compounds its idiocy with a soap-opera concern for the relationship between the hero and his daughter. This tells us nothing about such relationships and merely serves up cloying sentimentality, while actors flounder with awful expository dialogue; revealing little of character.

The aliens are the usual identity-less horde whom consume humans as food. Yet there is no explanation as to what they are likely to do when they render their own source of nourishment extinct. These evolutionary misfits merely serve to symbolise all of the fears of White culture: Mass migration, ongoing global-warfare, declining birth-rates, economic stagnation, rising crime, social collapse, etc.

Götterdämmerung was never so silly nor so easily solved. This is all good solacing entertainment, but you just can't kill what you fear with imaginary solutions because the problems, themselves, are just as imaginary. An impossibly-limitless supply of bullets won't help here, either, nor will the highly-derivative nature of the plotting - especially as regards the movie "Edge of Tomorrow" (2014).

Ultimately, the movie leaves-out answering the question as to what the goals of these soldiers really are. What civilisational, cultural, social, familial & personal goals are to be achieved here? What is the point of surviving and winning when there is nothing to live for afterwards. Survival for its own sake does not make much of a compelling narrative.

These fundamental existential issues are not explored in favour of a movie that is little more than a re-creation of the mindless destruction and brutal exploitation of colonialism; this time presenting White people as its most obvious victims - a hidden-in-plain-sight confession that what they have done to others can just as effectively be done to them.

Only the supporting players offer any of the only real special-effect in any movie - the quality of the acting - but they are not on screen enough for the audience to ever really care about them. Jasmine MATTHEWS and Sam RICHARDSON are particularly effective here, while Chris PRATT shows just how mediocre an actor he is in a straight drama.

...FULL OF SOUND AND FURY, SIGNIFYING NOTHING

The usual snobbish fear and hatred which the White middle-class possess for the poor. Here, modern-day pickup- and truck-drivers are all resentful rednecks, police officers honest and helpful & the middle-class hard-working and emotionally-vacant.

The married couple here are poorly-dramatised and Kathleen QUINLAN is shamefully wasted in a nothing part which centres largely on Kurt RUSSELL's husband role. This makes him appear to be in love with the idea of passionate married-love, itself, rather than with his actual, flesh-and-blood wife.

Without any clear definition of the true nature of sexual love, this movie flounders around in the same thematic wilderness as the desert-bound characters, trying to convince us that over-acting and an increasingly-improbable plot are valid substitutes: Sensationally-entertaining, certainly, but essentially vapid.

The worst aspect of this movie is the self-created class-war between members of the same race. This makes the characters little more than symbols of their respective and enforced roles in White society, with no in-depth characterisation to explain their mutual, divide-&-conquer plight: A class-based paranoid/schizophrenia which keeps them from working together against their real class-enemies, the materially-wealthy and the politically-powerful.

The overwhelming feeling here is that, like the Hollywood movie Deliverance (1972) or the European folk-tale Dick Whittington (1600s), the countryside is a forbidden zone as far as the rich and the affluent are concerned, inhabited only by - and for - poverty-stricken rural failures; while urban areas are populated by a better kind of person in the form of sophisticated city-folk.

In this movie, the near-car-accident plot-catalyst is the fault of both road users, yet they each lack the adult maturity to admit this to themselves - or to each other; inevitably leading to fatal consequences since they then choose to revert to their ingrained socially-stereotypical roles rather than just doing the most sensible thing and avoiding each other.

There is no-one to root-for here as there was, say, in the movie The Ruling Class (1972) because there is no proper dramatic exploration of the actual purpose of being class-conscious.

A load of old rubbish, really - but good, old-fashioned entertainment.

The acting is excellent throughout, the script is weak & the characterisation thin.

Character motivations play second-fiddle to heart-pounding action in the run-up to an almost-impossible "The Dam Busters" (1955) styled military-bombing mission. The supporting characters do not get enough time to shine, dramatically, and there are just too many of them to produce sharp narrative foci.

The love interest is feeble and underwritten with no real sense of emotional danger or sexual passion.

Oddly, the enemy planes in evidence here are not named (Su57s) because these Russian aircraft are actually superior to American F35s which are, in any case, supplanted in this film in favour of older and inferior F18s.

This airplane-technology issue hints at the most obvious problem with the film in its almost-complete dissociation from real-world geo-politics. All that remains is the usual racist arrogance that non-Anglo-Saxons (in this case Iran, since they are the only other country to operate F14s) must have their technological progress deliberately-retarded in order to maintain White supremacy. All the while Russian Slavs, whom engage in defence co-operation with Iran, must also be dissuaded from such collaboration. All of this is presented without offering the slightest evidence for the impliedly-innate cultural-superiority of the Western world or that progress and development in the East is an actual threat to the West.

Director Paul VERHOEVEN does not have enough genuine feeling for women to make this odd movie work at all well much beyond its glossy sexual-exploitation.

"Showgirls" is a clear example of a movie that most definitely should have been made by a woman since that would almost certainly have meant less exploitation of the sexually-exploitive nature of Las Vegas and more focus on exploring the reasons for said exploitation; eg, Las Vegas as a metaphor for the generally-exploitive nature of White culture, a metaphor for Caucasian gynophobia and misogyny, etc.

Elizabeth BERKLEY is a fine actress with a fierce abrasive energy, but she and everyone else is somewhat lost-at-sea in an un-empathetic script, which hurt her career, from the usually-mediocre Joe ESZTERHAS: It is riddled with melodramatic clichés and a dislike for women which taints the entire enterprise. It's hard to think of anyone else with the requisite acting and dancing skills and whom also looks good naked, whom would also have had the ability, the sheer guts &, perhaps, the desperation to even attempt this. And she gives of it her best.

The films lack of eroticism is precisely the point being made about sexual exploitation - it's only erotic for the sexually-jaded. And it is to be lauded for that despite the director repeating the point with so much nudity that the movie starts crossing-the-line between exploring exploitation and being just another part of it. One needs a tightrope-walkers skill to tread such a fine line successfully and VERHOEVEN has partly failed here.

Although intended as a satire on the American-dream social propaganda, the writer has no talent for comedy and the director somehow lost his after the better satires he directed such as RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997). The deliberate campness does not add anything amusing nor entertaining as it did with such movies as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and the clever idea of having Elizabeth BERKLEY over-act someone pulling out all the stops for fame at which the actress, herself, was trying to shoot, is drowned-out by the weakness of the satire on a White entertainment-world populated by so many ghouls and parasites. Unfortunately, this leaves BERKLEY looking exactly like the character she is playing.

Because this movie, ultimately, is as shallow and as superficial as the seamy side of the show-business being exposed, it would've been much better constructed as an old-fashioned MGM Hollywood musical - melodramatic, unsubtle & with better music; eg, Singin' in the Rain (1952). Then it could have been on much firmer ground as a social satire on Western patriarchy and the falsity of the American Dream that it clearly wanted to be.

Dramatically-thin but great driving scenes.

Attractive actors with uneven acting abilities fill-out the melodrama between exciting action-scenes of cars moving at high-speed and then often crashing in slow-motion.

The masochistic stupidity of the two main characters here is so annoying that it is difficult to empathise with them, since the life-threatening situation that they are in is largely avoidable and mostly of their own making.

It is an eternal oddity of horror films made in the West that White characters are somehow ineluctably-desirous of putting themselves into obvious danger, rather than doing the sensible thing and getting away from the obvious danger as fast as possible.

And the obvious danger here is so obvious that a blind person could easily see it: A strange man, in the middle of a sunny day, next to a main highway, disposing of human corpses. Yet they decide to investigate first before contacting the local police.

(Having said that, the first act of Jeepers Creepers is actually based on the true story of a 1990 murderer, Dennis DePUE, in which a married couple actually investigated an obvious murder before thinking to call the police!)

The overall effect of the two-dimensional characterisation and lapses-of-logic is to introduce plot contrivances which reduce any tension or suspense since the main characters are not trapped by the demonic villain, but by their own need to fulfil out-of-date horror tropes, contrivances & genre-movie clichés; eg, three times their old car won't go forward when their lives are in the greatest danger.

Horror is difficult to do well. And a clear decision of the filmmaker must be made at the outset: Allegory, realism or humour; eg, the better, respectively, The Innocents (1961), Psycho (1960) or Evil Dead II (1987). If you try to mix-&-match, as this movie does, the result is a hodge-podge: Is the villain a demon, human or smirking at our deepest fears? We can't tell and, so, don't really care. And without a consistent tone, no solidly-spooky atmosphere is ever created.

This emotional flatness is exacerbated by dialogue which does not reflect the fears of the central characters but, rather, the would-be cleverness of the screenwriter. It's as if these characters are trying-to-be-cool teenagers talking about a horror film that they are watching rather than the one that they are actually in.

This metafictional narrative-technique only serves to emotionally-distance us from the unfolding drama; without offering any of the pleasures of watching the stereotypes that we enjoy so much being lampooned by metafiction; eg, 'You know the part in scary movies where somebody does something really stupid and everyone hates them for it?'

Technically, the film is good-looking with decent special-effects and some nice visual ideas; eg, a one-way mirror in a police interrogation-room into which the heroine stares while not being able to see the threatening villain on the other side. Yet, the movie is undone by the fact that the actors do not inhabit their roles sufficiently to convince us that they are in any real danger. The ending underwhelms presumably because of the low budget and, like the rest of the movie, leaves us feeling distinctly emotionally-unsatisfied.

Ultimately, this movie is not genuinely psychologically-resonant, genuinely scary nor genuinely funny-enough to distract us from its sheer vapidity; making it a horror film written by children for those very same children.

NB: This movie was directed by a registered sex-offender which may explain its odd and thematically-irrelevant fixation upon genital functions and the sniffing of used male underwear. These could have been the basis for a better film, but here they are merely self-indulgent details.

Millie PERKINS is really the only good thing in this dire, low-budget movie and she comes across as a mean, hard-hitting assassin extremely well.

The lead, Lola FALANA, is a far better singer than she is an actress and she comes across here as shrill and unlikeable.

An amusing and an entertaining feminist parable which reveals just how nasty are the attitudes of Western men to women in an inherently-sexist culture of rape, sexual objectification & physical intimidation and harassment.

Laurene LANDON is excellent as Hundra; bringing an appealing mixture of sexiness, sass & humour to what must have been a physically-demanding role. She demonstrates that martial skills, self-confidence & self-esteem can be used with great effect to defeat men - especially if closely-associated with a swift kick to the testicles.

This is the ultimate sex-war drama of perhaps the world's first feminist.

(This United Kingdom DVD is a not-by-the-BBFC censored version of the film - unlike the "Richard's Cinema Vault" print currently available on YouTube. This latter version is also properly letter-boxed.)

The essential problem with Steven Spielberg's movies is that they are essentially designed as self-therapy for a childhood marred by his parents' divorce. This was most evident in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Empire of the Sun (1987) & Catch Me If You Can (2002) in which absent fathers and/or dysfunctional families play a key role.

Spielberg's persistently-neurotic nostalgia means that his movies are not focused upon a passion for story-telling, but a need to find closure for his unsuccessful struggle to understand both his parents and, inevitably, himself.

The problem with art therapy - as Carl Jung discovered - is that it seldom produces great art - only self-indulgence instead of self-awareness. If one cannot get beyond trauma, trauma is all that one has to offer others. And it is a certainty that most people have met such people, including ourselves, whom cannot get on with their lives and merely regurgitate their suffering in hopes that the world will sort-of admire them for their honesty.

Woody Allen is the classic example of this navel-gazing tendency since his body of work does not show any genuine maturing away from his generally pessimistic, narcissistic & nihilistic world-view. But, he just happens to be funny, so he can get away with it. When Mr Allen tries to be serious, however, he is resolutely off-putting and unable to express anything really complex about the human experience.

Similarly, Steven Spielberg (like Cecil B DeMille) can produce great visual and escapist entertainment which has little to say about humanity; explaining why Spielberg's movies never matured since he remains mostly fixated upon largely-meaningless big-budget spectacle which desperately apes David Lean. But, in Lean's case, he never forgot the characters and their motivations for a single moment of screen time because his action told the audience about the characters and weren't just there to keep the audience awake in-between dialogue scenes.

With The Fabelmans (2022), Spielberg is still unable to tell us if his great passion in life is storytelling, as such, or merely being someone devoted to re-creating himself as the person he wishes he really were from the safe, emotional distance of the mediating camera-lens - his means of avoiding unresolved issues from childhood. The performances are excellent throughout, but the characters are psychologically-thin and, therefore, emotionally-uninvolving. Part of this comes from the fear of revealing too much about oneself in public and the fact that the Spielberg family is really not all that interesting. Had it been anyone else's childhood, would this film have ever been made?

Mr Spielberg has never really grown-up as a man and this explains a good deal about his great facility with child actors. But it also explains the large decline in his popularity and relevance as a cinematic storyteller and why he is now reduced to flogging-the-dead-horse represented by the last two Indiana Jones' movies.

Steven Spielberg can't stop making movies and retire because he would still be faced with the trauma that every child goes through when their parents divorce. And this is what he wants to avoid because resolving it might mean facing the fact that he is nothing more than a one-trick-pony film director and basically a hack.

A desperately unfunny film featuring some very sexy women and classy actors wasted in an underwritten story set in an English country-house.

The production values and the costuming are excellent for such a low-budget movie, but these do not adequately compensate for cringe-making and vapid humour. There are absolutely no valid statements to be made about human sexuality in this British sex-comedy despite its claim to being a sex comedy.

All that the audience gets instead is a White culture of sexual repression, male insecurities & the inevitably-resulting sexual desperation - especially among the largely-unsatisfied women. To make things worse, the film insults its audience by treating them as if they were also just as love-starved.

There is no real sense here that sex is a means to an end - just an end in itself - since all of the characters are either scared of sex or see it as something you get from someone else rather than something that you share with them. And where's the fun in that?

Impressive-looking movie with excellent special-effects compromised by terrible, expository dialogue which does not provide any kind of engaging emotional drama.

The actors do their best but their parts are so underwritten that the love triangle here comes across as pure soap-opera.

The underlying story here of scientific and technological over-reach leading to global catastrophe remains topical but is never fully unexplored. Perhaps there is a reason that the Earth's magma-core is shrouded by a thick mantle which only a fission bomb can penetrate? Yet only one of the characters in laboratory coats here in the whole wide world ever suggests that drilling through this protective layer might have deleterious and suicidal effects for the planet.

Unusual film-genre hybrid which looks like it might be an ordinary horror-movie, given the general cinematographic and psychological doom-&-gloom of the entire proceedings, but which is actually a suspenseful science-fiction conspiracy thriller.

The conspiracy here is that old movie-chestnut about any government automatically-desiring to weaponise a recently-discovered alien creature, à la mode de The Andromeda Strain (1971) or Alien (1979).

The well-titled "Sputnik" (Russian for 'travelling companion') is shot-through with references to the main characters' past and is even set in the Soviet Russia of 1983. In this way, the Soviet Union becomes a metaphor for a past which must be laid-to-rest in order to ensure any kind of viable future, but which is often stubbornly not allowed to die in its very-real affect upon the film's present.

From a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-stricken cosmonaut abandoning his son in an orphanage to join the Space Race; a brilliantly-intuitive psychiatrist raised in an orphanage, herself; &, an extra-terrestrial symbiote unknowingly-brought back to Earth, the physical and emotional connectedness of these characters is shown in a low-key manner; eschewing jump-scares and focusing on their inter-relationships, value to each other, their personal weaknesses & their intellectual strengths.

The psychiatrist here actually develops a somewhat-maternal relationship with her cosmonaut patient and even with the creature, itself; despite it literally needing the bodies of other animals to survive, thrive & grow - and in spite of the cortisol produced in human brains (resulting from a quite natural fear of the sputnik's behaviour) being its sole form of gory nourishment.

The birth (& rebirth) scenes are superior to the one in an obvious movie-progenitor like Alien (1979), since the idea isn't just immediately thrown away and is actually central to the underlying theme of healthy parenting.

The male host survives each rebirth and we are left with a salvageable-yet-substitute family-unit; albeit one presented as a recurring nightmare since the creature only appears while its paralysed host sleeps. And yet this particular family is as ultimately- and as potentially-destructive of all families as is the child-murdering convict briefly seen at the secret military-facility early-on in the film; hinting at what usually goes wrong in dysfunctional families.

The structural problem with this movie is that the flash-backs to the psychiatrist's orphaned childhood are unclear. She had difficulty walking, was inevitably obsessed with running shoes & yet somehow now walks fine. Her cure is implied to be the result of a spinal operation; while her being in the orphanage in the first place is never explained.

These flash-backs conflate the son of the cosmonaut she is treating with herself as a child, since the former has been abandoned in an orphanage by his guilt-ridden father. This subjective dramaturgical-confusion somewhat spoils an otherwise subtle and clever drama by partly-disturbing its suspense and pacing.

As always, Oksana AKINSHINA is a standout performer, surrounded by men whom are either quite cowardly or extremely cynical, à la Sigourney WEAVER's situation in Aliens (1986). She heads a talented cast whom make the most of admittedly-underwritten roles, yet all of whom help to create the moodiness of the oddly-dank, curiously-underlit & dungeon-like atmosphere of a secluded scientific/military-facility deep in the middle of nowhere.

AKINSHINA's feminine charisma helps propel the narrative in the way that a male character could not, since she is not prone to much leaping-into-action, but to intellectual introspection and emotional nurturing, instead - especially in being the only character to attempt to form an emotional bond with the alien.

A somewhat bleak yet satisfying ending makes this movie about good, responsible parenting a winner.

Unsophisticated propaganda for the dangers of climate change disguised as a mish-mash of science-fiction, suspense, horror & conspiracy thriller.

This movie does not do particularly well at any of its genres; making it a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none since it cannot decide what it primarily wants to be.

None of the actors does anything interesting with their admittedly thinly-written characters; leaving the audience to focus on wondering what is really going on amidst the long trail of death-and-destruction related to a mysterious, coded radio-message from outside of the solar system.

We don't really care for any of the characters; making two hours pass slowly.

Decent and brisk science-fiction movie, set in 1973, about the White race's obsession with manned exploration combined with the sheer terror of what they imagine they might find on their travels. Almost as if the 'final frontier' were somehow analogous to the "Dark Continent" of Africa.

The "it" here comes very much from the Caucasian id, especially given the fact that this space mission is actually a military exercise undertaken by the 'United States Space Command' in a rocketship packed-to-the-gunnels with military ordnance - automatic pistols, carbines, fragmentation & gas grenades & a bazooka. Quite an arsenal for a round trip to a supposedly-dead planet like Mars!

Surprisingly technically-accurate - at least in view of the silence of space necessitated by the fact that sound, unlike light, does not travel in a vacuum - this movie has too many characters to emotionally invest-in. But at least none of the actresses are here to shrilly scream for the men to come and save them since they actually perform scientific functions in the plot and are treated as more-or-less equals by the men.

The horror element is less successful here since "it" is clearly just a well-built man in an ill-fitting monster suit - whom walks stiffly just like a well-built man in an ill-fitting monster suit would - partly-hidden behind a gloomy lighting-scheme.

What really hurts this movie is that the creature has no motivation for its behaviour beyond wanton destruction and dealing-out death; making it the unreasoning creation of irrational cinematic minds whom are unwilling to grow-up beyond childhood stories of bogeymen.

Fun movie albeit with two leading players lacking any chemistry with each other - along with there being nothing in the way of individual character-development.

However, Bess ARMSTRONG is good value as the spunky flapper-heroine whom holds her own in all of her scenes and is not just around to be rescued by the (admittedly alcoholic) hero.

Yet, the plot is just a series of ever-increasingly explosive clashes between various tribal warlords set against a backdrop of beautiful Asian locations; somewhat resembling a travelogue of the world's war-ravaged hotspots. The worst dramatic offence here is that there is no real sense of danger that the leads will ever get killed, imprisoned &/or tortured - even though many try all of these.

Enough money was spent on the handsome production to make it diverting enough as entertainment, but it is unfulfilling as a true adventure should be; that is, as a metaphor for the search for one's true self.