A sleazy bounty hunter (Dylan McDermott) is dispatched to the scuzziest hellhole in Mexico to recover a fortune in laundered contraband cash from a bunch of crooks (including James Russo and Jessica Harper); the bank holding the loot is across the street from the seedy hotel and nightclub of the title. Writer-director John Lafia, making his debut here, manages to make the pseudotoughness pretty amusing on the level of dialogue, although his characters are shopworn and his plot fairly standard. From the fancy cartoon credits to the Peter Gunn-ish score (by Ethan James), the movie tries awfully hard to be hip, and while it can’t quite muster enough style to match the aggressive hyperbole, it still manages some intermittent fun. With Pamela Gidley, Yano Anaya, Dean Stockwell, Tovah Feldshuh, Michele Seipp, and an actor known as Flea. (JR) Read more
Adapted from a James Thurber story, this slightly macabre English comedy describes the plans of an elderly Scottish accountant (Peter Sellers) to eliminate a meddling efficiency expert (Constance Cummings). Charles Crichton directed; Robert Morley and Donald Pleasence costar (1960). (JR) Read more
A nice, old-fashioned horror thriller with psychological overtonesthe sort of thing Hollywood used to be able to turn out in its sleep. Andrew Fleming’s script (cowritten by Steven E. de Souza) and direction have their occasional awkward moments, but the overall drive of the narrative helps us to overlook them. The plot involves the sole survivor of a religious cult that committed suicide years before, and a series of deaths at the mental hospital where she’s recovering that suggest that the cult’s leader may still exert power over her. Unassuming, workmanlike stuff that keeps you guessing and interested. With Jennifer Rubin, Bruce Abbott, Richard Lynch, Dean Cameron, Harris Yulin, and Susan Barnes. (JR) Read more
As a chronicler of the contemporary south, independent filmmaker Ross McElwee has a great deal to tell us that gets factored out of most other accounts. This gives a particular interest to this rather loosely structured 1984 film (shot in 1976) that describes one of the filmmaker’s visits home to Charlotte, North Carolina. While we learn about his uneasy relationship to his conservative father and his curiosity about the family’s black servants, McElwee doesn’t offer himself as a comic focal point as he does later in Sherman’s Marchalthough he does emphasize his troubles filming his father’s activity as a surgeon to indicate his squeamishness. (JR) Read more
Rosa von Praunheim’s AnitaTanze des Lasters alternates between two versions of nude dancer Anita Berber, a star of Berlin cafe society of the 20s: an elderly woman today who claims to be Berber (Lotte Huber) and is confined to a mental ward (in black and white), and her imagined version of Berber in the 20s (in color, portrayed by Ina Blum). Von Praunheim uses some striking expressionistic intertitles and on the whole does some interesting things with period evocation, but after a while his procedures become mechanical and repetitive (1987). (JR) Read more
No, not the Paddy Chayefsky/Ken Russell film of 1980, but a selection of ten shorts on the same theme: drugs, mainly hallucinogenic, and the mind-altering experiences they impart. Chronologically, the survey will extend all the way from Tod Browning’s 1916 Mystery of the Leaping Fish (with Douglas Fairbanks as Coke Enniday) to Mark Nugent’s recent Manual Labour. The others: Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (with a La Monte Young stereo sound track), John Hawkins’s LSD Wall, Steve Arnold’s Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique, Daina Krumins’s Babobilicons, Adam Beckett’s Heavy-Light, Heather McAdams’s Black Coffee, Bob Cowan’s Rockflow, and Chick Strand’s Waterfall. The Experimental Film Coalition promises free acid at the door, which one assumes is not lysergicbut who knows? Read more
Based on a play that constitutes part two of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, concerned with the experiences of the hero (Matthew Broderick) at boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1943, this is an engaging, well-crafted comedy that receives very able direction from Mike Nichols. The period decor and details are nicely handled (apart from the silly decision to adapt clips from Buck Privates and Movietone News to the movie’s ‘Scope format, yielding an unnecessary anachronism), and while most of the characters are fairly standard types–sadistic drill sergeant (Christopher Walken), Jewish intellectual (Corey Parker), Polish lout (Matt Mulhern), raunchy prostitute (Park Overall), sophisticated girlfriend (Penelope Ann Miller)–the actors all give them their best shot, including the somewhat miscast Walken. The nostalgic visual style of the film, successfully modeled on Norman Rockwell by production designer Paul Sylbert and cinematographer Bill Butler, is especially fetching, and the somewhat Woody Allen-ish offscreen narration shows Simon at his best. Perhaps this movie isn’t as wise or as profound as Simon wants it to be, but it is certainly a cut above sitcom complacency, and packed with wit and charm. (Chicago Ridge, Grove, Woodfield, Water Tower, River Oaks, Ridge, Orland Square, Oakbrook, Nortown, Norridge, Old Orchard, Ford City, Harlem-Cermak) Read more
It’s a rare event for a remake to improve on the original, and while this spiffy new version of Rudolph Mate’s 1949 film noir with Edmond O’Brien may not be an unqualified success–due to overstrenuous efforts to impress, and a hackneyed score–it manages to come dangerously close. A good deal of the plot and setting has been reworked (the film now takes place in a college town), but the basic suspense framework–a man who is dying from radium poisoning has only a few hours left to discover his killer, and the story of his search is relayed in flashback–remains the same. Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue and codirectors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (the British creators of Max Headroom) work overtime in giving this story the kind of stylistic pizzazz that resembles a film course survey of the genre (characters, for instance, are given names like Nick Lang and Sydney Fuller, and iconographic references are just as plentiful); and stars Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, Charlotte Rampling, and Jane Kaczmarek deliver the punchy dialogue for all it’s worth. In the final analysis, the stylistic showboating may count for more than the formula plot, but Morton and Jankel keep things moving and glittering so effectively that there isn’t much time to notice. Read more
Yet another Vietnam picture, set in Saigon in 1968. This one is a mystery thriller about two plainclothes cops (Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines) assigned to investigate the murders of half a dozen local prostitutes whose babies were fathered by American servicemen; a high-ranking American officer proves to be one of the suspects. Directed and cowritten by TV veteran Christopher Crowe, and shot on location in Bangkok, the film has the singular virtue of giving more vent to Vietnamese attitudes about the U.S. than are usually found in such pictures, and the dialogue is often pungent and lively. One regrets the hokey finale as the film eventually succumbs to overly familiar generic patterns, but before this happens, some of the complexity of the American presence in Vietnam gets touched upon. (Golf Mill, Water Tower, River Oaks, Orland Square, Plaza, Dearborn, Hyde Park, Norridge, Ridge, Hillside Square, Forest Park, Grove, Woodfield, Deerbrook, Evergreen) Read more
Peter Yates, a craftsmanlike director who is generally at the mercy of his scripts, does a creditable job with a romantic thriller screenplay by former blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein (The Front), set in 1951 during the height of the cold war witch-hunts, which is strong in charm and period flavor but relatively weak in motivations. Aiming for an overall Hitchcockian ambience without the master’s undertow of guilt, the film makes pleasant use of Kelly McGillis as a witch-hunt victim who turns amateur sleuth, and Jeff Daniels (The Purple Rose of Cairo) as an FBI agent who befriends her; also on hand are Jessica Tandy, and an especially effective Mandy Patinkin as the sweet-talking cold warrior villain. Michael Ballhaus shot the film, and Georges Delerue handled the score. Nothing very profound emerges from the mixture, but this is still a rather stylish and sincere entertainment that passes the time agreeably. (Edens, Oakbrook Center, Water Tower) Read more
The brilliant Frank Tashlin directed this 1954 feature about a Hollywood screenwriter (Dick Powell) and his misadventures with a volatile teenager (Debbie Reynolds). In some ways an early version of Tashlin’s Bachelor Flat (1962), it’s narrated by the hero’s Oscar statuette, and some of the gags about 50s Hollywood are priceless (among them a parody of Gene Kelly’s dream ballets). With Anne Francis. 98 min. (JR) Read more
A silent experimental film by Spanish architect Nemesio N. Sobrevila, El sexto sentido never received a general release, but it reportedly constitutes a rare and unique effort of its period (1926), heavily influenced by French Impressionist as well as German Expressionist cinema. The leading characters are given such names as The Vampiress, The Optimist, and The Pessimist, and the title refers to the capacities of the camera to get at truth that is inaccessible to the other five senses (which suggests shades of Dziga Vertov). (JR) Read more
The first feature of screenwriter Angelino Fons as director, this 1966 adaptation of Pio Baroja’s classic novel, set in Madrid at the turn of the century, describes the frustrations of a romantic young man from the country (Jacques Perrin). Read more
Claude Chabrol’s 1973 thriller about a group of political kidnappers in Paris seems to record his disenchantment with the French left during this period as well as his cynical disapproval of the government. While it represents an honest attempt to break out of his preceding cycle of bourgeois melodramas, the plague on both houses delivered by this film is more despairing than edifying, and not very much fun to watch. (The title, which is Spanish for nothing, points to the overall nihilism.) (JR) Read more
Peter Yates, a craftsmanlike director who is generally at the mercy of his scripts, does a creditable job with a romantic thriller screenplay by former blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein (The Front), set in 1951 during the height of the cold-war witch-hunts, that is strong in charm and period flavor but relatively weak in motivations. Aiming for an overall Hitchcockian ambience without the master’s undertow of guilt, the film makes pleasant use of Kelly McGillis as a witch-hunt victim who turns amateur sleuth, and Jeff Daniels as an FBI agent who befriends her; also on hand are Jessica Tandy, and an especially effective Mandy Patinkin as the sweet-talking cold warrior villain. Michael Ballhaus shot the film, and Georges Delerue handled the score. Nothing very profound emerges from the mixture, but this is still a rather stylish and sincere entertainment that passes the time agreeably. (JR) Read more
