Film Reviews by Frank Talker™

Brilliant psychological conspiracy-thriller about a combined Sino-Soviet attempt to get a hardcore communist elected as the President of the USA, carefully disguised as a virulent anti-communist.

The performances are all superb, the direction taut & the writing focused - there is a genuine determination here to make the somewhat absurd premiss literally-plausible rather than just metaphorically-believable. It works.

Of particular note are the three distinctively-different female characters whom represent either destroyers of men or their saviours. Angela LANSBURY is terrifying as Laurence HARVEY's domineering mother; Janet LEIGH is delightfully-slutty as the woman whom quickly discards her fiancé after meeting a man on a train whom looks a lot like Frank SINATRA; &, Leslie PARRISH is brilliantly funny as the delightful ingénue whom Laurence HARVEY marries.

An excellent companion-piece to The Candidate (1972), wherein Western democracies tend to elect leaders whom do not truly represent voter aspirations.

Aptly-named movie that came out at the end of the Hollywood disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s.

An all-too-absurd plot includes a research facility built right over the crater of an active volcano; coupled with a holiday resort constructed not too far from that! This mind-boggling setup hampers what could have been a fun film.

The final nail in the coffin for these increasingly-disastrous disaster films was the movie parody of Airplane (1980); making anyone financing such a movie a brave backer, indeed, since they would then have to run the very real risk of being completely laughed-off the screen.

This movie is only really watchable because of the star power and charisma of the leading players - particularly a well-paired Jacqueline BISSET and Paul NEWMAN. And the weakness of the special effects makes it all-too-likely that most of the movie's budget was spent on the stars.

Worst of all, too many good-looking women get killed in this movie to make it any more than an inadequate time-passer - you simply cannot kill-off Barbara CARRERA and get away with it, you simply can't!

Good actors wasted in a relentless barrage of pointless gunfire.

The script does not differentiate nor develop characters whom all speak as if they were raised in the same culture - and the spoken and visual cliches fly as fast as the bullets.

The worst aspect of all this nonsense is the unpleasant war-propaganda of it all. The aliens, like any People of Colour on the Earth whom Western powers wish to wage war against, are also non-differentiated such that they are merely targets to be killed, rather than sentient entities with clear goals.

This is basically a recruitment advertisement for the US Marines filled with dramatic incident but no real drama.

Weak characterisation, poor editing & no necessary sense of ever-present dread hurt this movie immeasurably.

The actors are all fine but it is hard to care for their characters when they are so thinly-drawn and possess no grounded motivations for their relationships with one another.

Overall, there is no compelling reason for this film to exist. It offers no social commentary on the existence of the automobile, where on Earth the shape-shifting monster came from (& what its purpose is) and why something as hard-to-manoeuvre-in-small-spaces as a motor car could ever truly be seen as threatening, scary or in need of being hunted down like a rogue wild-animal in an underground car-park.

Above-average horror movie which alternates between a psychological explanation of the events depicted and a para-psychological one.

First, we are presented with an oddly-lascivious ghost whom repeatedly rapes the heroine (brilliantly played by Barbara HERSHEY) in her imagination, but with real bruises to substantiate her claims - yet no police involvement?

We are then told that the heroine's parents were sexual perverts, that she has an Electra complex, that she wants to have sex with her handsome teenage-son and there is even an implication that her psychiatrist is getting personally involved in her case. And HERSHEY's self-evident sex-appeal makes the plot's sexual implications all-too-believable.

There is an ideological battle here between those whom believe HERSHEY's character to be a hysterical female, troubled by deep-seated sexual fears, and those whom believe that the entity stalking her is a tangible presence. This ambivalence is resolved in a slightly-underwhelming ending which is deliberately left ambiguous.

Underpinning the sexual tension on show here is a feminist allegory about a woman's proper place in a Judeo-Christian Western society and the necessarily-sexist and -misogynist incubus - with poltergeist tendencies - being a metaphor for the gender oppression of women in Caucasian and Jewish cultures.

The writing here is first class, the characters clearly differentiated & everyone involved offers-up convincing performances which very much helps the suspension-of-disbelief required in a somewhat bizarre tale loosely-based on a true story. And the Dutch angles the director Sidney J FURIE loves to use actually add to the melodramatic sense of emotional disorientation rather than potentially irritating or bemusing the audience.

What "The Entity" lacks is a musical score that is less insistent on getting your attention than the somewhat grating one presented here. It also needed a motivation for the sexual behaviour of the titular entity which rises above the merely lecherous, although it is strongly-implied that the entity is her late, sexually-creepy father.

A would-be space epic about a dysfunctional family sent on a colonising space-mission, when it would obviously have been far better to send an optimally-functioning one.

The self-indulgent, familial whining inevitably on-show here means that any attempt to make this a drama about the meaning and the purpose of the family, as such, is immediately scuppered with an ethnic obsession with the decline of the White family, as such. This social failing is compounded with there not being a single productive idea presented as to what to do about this contemporary state-of-affairs - albeit one that is here being projected into the near future.

However realistic it is to present emotionally-barren characters as two-dimensional creations, it makes for boring melodrama since there is minimal character-differentiation or development. The people here speak in the same histrionic and sarcastic manner at each other - but never to each other - most of the time, such that one begins to wonder if this is how White people actually see family life, in general, most of the time. We frequently see how these people are not emotionally-open to one another, but not in what manner they might actually complement each other.

In the end, what it is that might unite the space-family Robinson is never made clear because the writing never wants to explore character nor the basic premise of the survivability - or otherwise - of the modern nuclear-family in any emotional depth; favouring, instead, a repetitive chain of hyperbolic threats-to-life more reminiscent of a computer game than a family drama: The group psychological dynamics make no sense in terms of the need for the coherent unit-operation that is essential both to individual and to group survival.

The actors are all fine - especially Posey PARKER and Taylor RUSSELL - but they are saddled with a vast array of verbal quips spoken in the most inappropriate circumstances (eg, when someone might get killed) that it becomes very difficult to take their characters seriously, nor to care much for them. No-one here seems to be in any real danger from the alien planet that they have crash-landed onto which, in spite of this, seems completely determined to destroy them with ice, snow, freezing temperatures, hail, lack of food, etc.

(The science aspect of this science-fiction drama either makes no sense or is never properly explained. Why would spaceships in the future be powered by methane rather than something far more futuristic and far more powerful? How can a submerged spacecraft immediately work as new when raised from its watery grave while still completely sodden? How is it possible to have a glacier right next-to a wooded and then next-to a semi-desert area? These all assume that the same basic laws of geology do not operate throughout the universe, but without any explanation nor discussion from any of the onboard scientists.)

Silly and dishonest satire of the emotionally-repressed basis for the rampant political-correctness (PC) of White culture in which two forms of PC battle it out for supremacy in an inexplicable Zardoz-like (1974) vision of a Western future without the presence of genuine human emotions or actual political freedom.

The resistents' definition of freedom here is the usual American one lacking a distinction between true liberty and child-like self-indulgence. This leaves the viewer with no-one to root-for since each side of the conflict here merely represents two forms of the same PC totalitarianism.

Wesley SNIPES overacts delightfully and Sandra BULLOCK shows just how good she is at comedy. Everybody else in this picture is of little value in an unfocused script which tries hard to be another RoboCop (1987), but without resonant characterisation or a believable future-world; becoming instantly forgettable as soon as it ends, in the process.

Remake of "The Entity" (1981) with borrowings from "The Shining" (1980) and "Poltergeist" (1982).

This one is far too long for its content, which does not delve deeply into the family dynamics which dominate the early scenes. These dynamics are then not convincingly resolved at the film's end - especially regarding the sexually-creepy nature of the heroine's dying father.

Why have a rapey ghost in a soapy melodrama only then to clearly state that the ghost is not her father involved in some kind of personal sexual vendetta against the lead? Outside of a whodunnit, this red herring mostly invalidates and trivialises all of the setup, as if the movie-makers, themselves, were scared (on behalf of the audience) of the unavoidably-dark corners of the neurotic human-psyche into which such incest-laden emotional delvings would inevitably lead.

Tabu was a very good choice for the lead role, here, and she carries the film well; while doing her best with a limited role as an under-written mother-of-two.

Ultimately, "Hawa" doesn't really amount to anything more than a series of set-pieces revolving around an alternately vengeful-then-horny poltergeist whom kidnaps a child for no real reason other than to provide for an admittedly slap-bang ending.

This movie is a longer and a much better version of "Supercop" - watch this rather than that.

This movie is a longer and a much better version of "Supercop" - watch this rather than that.

Compelling study of Muhammad ALI's greatness as a boxer - although not as a man, since very little biographical information is provided here. A pity since ALI was actually bigger than just boxing because he still remains the most famous Muslim in the world - after that religion's founder (in whose honour ALI was named).

Muhammad ALI's most important antagonists are interviewed and there is a clear respect for a great boxer whom was also intelligent, witty & charming.

Melodramatic movie that is both over-ripe and under-written.

A terrific cast is largely wasted on a mediocre rehash of The Thing (1982) combined with The Shining (1980) and yet, without them, it would become unwatchably cliché since they all do their best with the weak script which they have been offered. True professionalism.

There are too many characters here to focus emotional-attention upon as the screenwriter, thereby, tries to make it harder for the audience to guess whom the killer is. And they all use the same American speaking-idiom despite being from different countries: A Scotland Yarder even identifies himself as being a member of the 'Metropolitan Police Department'!

This sameness-of-characterisation only serves to emphasise the dearth of character differentiation, which makes it harder for the audience to get emotionally involved and, thus, to care.

The plot is further weakened by nobody in the remote location in which the movie is set possessing a mobile phone, a radio or a computer to send e-mails - only a landline that no longer works because of the raging snowstorm which takes-up half of the film's running time. All of the vast panoply of modern communications'-technology always seems to fail whenever there is a deranged serial-killer on the loose! (However, a number of CB radios do turn-up at the end of the movie, but without any explanation, whatsoever, for their sudden appearance.)

Worst of all, there's no explanation of the fact that the one alcohol detoxification-unit that the film's hero attends to help him recover from the death of his fiance, is also the one where his fiancée's murderer is in residence. That and the fact that his best friend decides to take-up residence in the local community, for no real reason, just so that he can become a convenient deus ex machina later.

Still, having said all of that, Sylvester STALLONE is in it, and that fact alone usually means at least a three-star rating.

Mediocre murder-mystery which offers little more than pretty photography and good actors in beautiful locations.

The only standout performance comes from the murder victim (played by the excellent Piper LAURIE) whom spends the entire first act easily-convincing the audience that she is nasty, manipulative & greedy enough to fully justify being bumped-off.

A diverting time-killer and nothing more.

Much better than sequels usually are, this character-driven effort emotionally engages right from the start; leading to a finale that is hard to forget and deeply disturbing. Much like a Jacobean revenge tragedy, the downbeat ending is inevitable and tear-jerking - but without cheating the audience of its tears with fake or cloying sentimentality.

Along the way there is much satire of a paranoid and distinctly-violent White culture that is both impressed by talking apes, yet horrified by the implication that by the year 3955 humans will no longer dominate the Earth and control its resources for its sole use.

Everyone is good in this movie and the writing is first rate, except for the fact that the nature of the Western culture satirised is never explained nor elucidated.

Fun movie with the hypnotic Frank SINATRA taking it easy in a role that fits his laid-back charm well.

The movie doesn't take itself too seriously and it's hard to care much about the plot or the low-lifes the hero encounters, anyway, in his bid to solve a number of related murders and, in the process, keep himself from being blamed for them.

The supporting cast are excellent and funny - reducing the sense of danger and replacing it with snappy one-liners.

The beauteous Raquel WELCH is particularly good as a jokey alcoholic; Martin GABEL plays a vicious mafioso whom must temper his violent urges to avoid stress; and, Dan BLOCKER plays a sympathetic heavy whom is almost impossible to subdue in a punch-up.

Replete with in-jokes like BLOCKER watching the tv-series Bonanza on his television set or SINATRA claiming he once knew a 'broad [whom] collected bull-fighters'. Along with sexual humour about gay men and heterosexual males excitedly-frequenting massage parlours.

Amusing movie about people without the necessary social context nor cultural perspective with which to give their unfulfilling lives meaning, reality or purpose; resulting in the ennui and existential despair which inevitably comes from possessing no deep-seated sense of personal, social nor cultural identity.

Darkly funny and accurate in its depiction of those whom have never been told "No", there is, however, no explanation as to why anybody would place themselves in such a lonely position nor of why it is so hard to break free from the emotional lethargy depicted - this, despite the characters not being so delusional that they cannot actually see how delusional and self-destructive they are.

All of the performers here are excellent and make the best of the not very insightful nor particularly original material here, which is clearly not derived from personal experience.