Classic Movie Review Westworld

Westworld (1973)

Directed by Michael Crichton

Written by Michael Crichton

Starring Yul Brenner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin

Release Date August 17th, 1973 

Listeners to the Everyone is a Critic Podcast know that I have a strange relationship with Westerns. On more than one occasion I have spoken of not being a fan of the genre only to then end up praising movies like Open Range, Rio Bravo or, one of my all-time favorites, 3:10 to Yuma. This bizarre relationship to the Western has a lengthy and unique history.

When I was a kid, I told my dad that I didn’t like Westerns. Being a fan of the genre himself, he wanted to try to get me into it. I refused and protested and would not brook watching them quietly. His last attempt to get me into the gunfighting, horse riding genre was rather clever. He said, “What if we watch a Western that also has robots and sword fighting?" The movie was Westworld, and it became the first time I willingly accepted liking something remotely part of the Western genre.

Westworld starred Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as a pair of rich guys who take a vacation at a futuristic park called Westworld. Westworld is one of three rich guy playgrounds where a company called Delos has employed robot technology to recreate the experience of the past. There is Westworld, set in the dusty saloons and whorehouses of the old west. Roman World where patrons indulge in the excesses of ancient Rome and finally Medieval World where guests play around with Arthurian legends.

The first half of the film cleverly plays on the fun of playing dress up and having it appear so real. It’s a wonderful sort of amusement park where Benjamin and Brolin can throw down in a gunfight one night, spend the night with prostitutes at a bordello in the next and have an old west style barfight in the next. All these things are wonderfully fun until they're not.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Classic Movie Review Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon (1973) 

Directed by Robert Clouse 

Written by Michael Allin 

Starring Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly 

Release Date August 19th, 1973 

Published August 19th, 1973 

This week’s classic on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast is Enter the Dragon, the final film in the all too short career of the legendary Bruce Lee. I have had little exposure to kung fu movies in my nearly 20 years as a film critic. Aside from some 80s cheese like The Last Dragon or the work of Jackie Chan, I have mostly ignored the genre having written it off based mostly on the stereotypes built from years of Bruce Lee knock-offs and cash-ins that soured more than just me on the idea of kung fu movies as anything other than the sad side of the B-movie genre.

Watching Enter the Dragon for the first time sadly is no revelation for me. While I came away with a great deal of respect for why fans took so much to Bruce Lee as a performer, I found the film not all that special. Lee’s magnetism goes a long way to making the otherwise predictable, bordering on silly story worth watching but the screen time spent waiting for Lee to start kicking butt is quite tedious and I found myself drifting.

In Enter the Dragon Bruce Lee stars as a martial arts master, also named Lee, who is recruited by a shady intelligence organization to attend a martial arts tournament run by the kind of super-villain that only exists in martial arts movies, Mr. Han played by former Drunken Master star Shih Kien. Mr. Han owns his own island in the Pacific and despite the best efforts of this intelligence agency they aren’t sure if he is amassing weapons or not.

The agency needs Lee to participate in a deadly martial arts tournament hosted by Han on his island and find out if there are indeed illegal weapons that would allow international military to attack the island. Lee agrees to the mission and then finds out that the mission has a personal component for him. We meet Lee’s father and he informs Lee and us that Lee’s sister was murdered by Han’s thugs in a seemingly random killing.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Classic Movie Review The Exorcist

The Exorcist (1973)

Directed by William Friedkin 

Written by William Peter Blatty 

Starring Ellen Burstyn, Max Von Sydow, Lee J. Cobb, Jason Miller 

Release Date December 26th, 1973

Published October 10th, 2023 

The first image you see in William Friedkin's The Exorcist is the sun, bright, orange, dawning a new day. This is followed by an image of a sweltering desert in Northern Iraq. On the soundtrack is Arabic music. What does any of this tell us about the rest of the movie we are about to watch? I would argue, it tell us nothing. The sun doesn't have any meaning related to the rest of the movie. Nor does a sweltering desert. Perhaps if I reach beyond logic, I could argue that the sun and the desert reflect the heat of Hell? Maybe? But that is a very big stretch. 

An archaeological dig is occurring in this northern Iraqi desert. Numerous men swing pickaxes and other implements intended to break rock and remove dirt. Why? We can assume it has something to do with ancient religion, an attempt to uncover something lost to time. Here, William Friedkin lingers over the images of Iraqi men with their tools, the dirt, the heat, is this a representation of what hell is like? What does it mean that Friedkin's stand in for Hell is located in a Muslim country? What does this have to do in any way with a child who later stab herself in the crotch with a crucifix? 

An elderly white archaeologist is called to come to a place where some small items have been found. The old man goes and when he reaches into the cave where these small items have been found, he finds one more, a small idol with what appears to be the face of a dog or a dragon or something. We don't know who this old man is at this point, but we stay with him as he goes to a café and has some tea. He's shaky, he takes pills for what I assume is a heart condition. He appears shaky though whether that is due to having found this idol thing or because he's very old and has been working in the hot sun all day, is unclear. 

The shaky old dude leaves the café. He walks around the corner and sees three blacksmiths hard at work, rhythmically pounding away at a piece of hot metal. One of the men turns to the old man and reveals a cloudy eye. The old man, our seeming protagonist wheezes, and the scene ends. Cut to a ticking clock. The old man mumbles 'Evil against Evil.' Finally, we learn that the old man is a priest as the other man in the room refers to him as 'Father.' The clock on the wall stops and the man says he is sorry to see the old man leave. Father tells the man that he has something he must do. The old man goes back to the archaeological dig site, he locates a statue, one that resembles the small idol he found earlier. A man kicks some rocks, dogs fight, Father stares at the statue, we fade to the sun which ends the scene and takes us to Georgetown, Virginia, USA, the setting for our story. 

Why does William Friedkin's The Exorcist begin with this prologue? What have we learned? Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) was in Iraq. He found an idol and stared at a statue. The idol and the statue are related. By the rules of storytelling then, this demonic figure that Father Merrin found must be related to the possession of young Regan O'Neill (Linda Blair). There is one, relatively inane visual scene that links Iraq and the idol to Regan and Georgetown. Following the offscreen death of a filmmaker who was directing a movie Regan's mom was working on, a Police Detective (Lee J. Cobb) finds what looks like an idol just like the one Father Merrin found in Iraq. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review The Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain (1973) 

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas Zamira Salinas 

November 27th, 1973 

Published May 15th, 2023 

Is Holy Mountain a movie or an experience? Perhaps it is both. I'm not sure exactly what it is but it had a major effect on me. Written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the movie is a wildly political, deeply esoteric and visually daring film of extraordinary ambition. Watching Holy Mountain is what I imagine it must be like to be drunk. I've never had a drop of alcohol but observing drunken behavior, I am reminded of how I felt watching Holy Mountain. The film left me dizzy, delirious, occasionally giddy and left me needing a nap. 

Every frame of Holy Mountain could be a painting. Jodorowsky's taken for composition is extraordinary. The opening moments of the film both set the tone for the rest of the movie and do nothing to establish a recognizable story. Two nude women kneel next to a black clad person wearing a large black hat. The background is a psychedelic black and white. The person in the black hat proceeds to brutally and painfully sheer the hair from the women's heads. Why? I don't know but it is damn sure a striking series of visuals. 

Our protagonist in Holy Mountain is a man who vaguely visually associates with Jesus just before he was nailed to the cross. He has long brown hair, a beard, and a lanky, emaciated frame. Our Jesus stand-in is introduced lying in his own filth. Covered in flies, urine flowing around him, and  a general air of gross, the man is awakened when a bunch of naked children start throwing rocks at him. He flees. Eventually, our Jesus meets a tiny man with no legs or hands and the two become fast friends. 

They travel to town where they witness a series of indescribable events that include a recreation of the fall of the Mayan people with the Mayans represented by Lizards and the invading Spanish portrayed by a plague level of frogs. The frogs destroy and consume the lizards as Jesus and his friend dance about. Meanwhile, soldiers arrive to break up the scene and one of the tourists breaks off to have sex with the soldier while her husband watches and calls on Jesus to capture the event on camera. 

Eventually, our Jesus stand in realizes that his resemblance to Jesus could be a way to make some money. He begins accepting money to carry a giant cross while tourists snap photos of him. However, when he falls asleep, he's kidnapped by the same people who gave him the cross to carry. They proceed to make a plaster cast of him as Jesus on the cross and when our Jesus awakens, he finds a room full of plaster versions of himself as Jesus and suffers intense despair before destroying all but one of these plaster Jesus's. 

I have left out so many things. You have no idea. And what I have described thus far is maybe 20 minutes into the movie, at most. Holy Mountain only gets wilder from here with sequences that it would take pages to try and summarize and then assess the meaning. Let's just say that what is still to come in Holy Mountain amounts to a series of artist allegories regarding corporate greed, violence, sexism, religious corruption, the death of the ego and the overall idea of what it means to transcend in the Emerson/Thoreau sense. 

It's a lot and I am not sure I understood a lot of it or what I was meant to understand. Jodorowsky appears to want the viewer to take something away from Holy Mountain that is just for them. At the same time, he's not without a very personal, political perspective. Much of that boils down to greed is bad, corruption is bad, and everyone is susceptible to these societal ills. We can try to assign more depth to Jodorowsky but the basic message is a leftist perspective that is deeply opposed to the corrupting influence of capitalism and generally suspicious of anything that represents a capitalistic status quo. 

Find my full length review of The Holy Mountain at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review The Clones

The Clones (1973) 

Directed by Lamar Card, Paul Hunt 

Written by Steve Fisher

Starring Michael Greene, Gregory Sierra, Otis Young 

Release Date August 1973 

Published January 9th, 2019

With the new movie Replicas starring Keanu Reeves opening this weekend I thought a themed entry regarding cloning would be a good idea. Replicas is about a man repeatedly attempting to clone his dead family members and it put me in the mind of how movies have dealt with the issue of cloning. It turns out, aside from several classy documentaries on the issue, narrative fiction has mostly steered clear. 

For the most part, cloning has been relegated to the dregs of the sci-fi genre with few serious looks at the issue and plenty of schlocky nonsense. This brought me to the 1973 sci-fi flick The Clones, directed by Lamar Card and Paul Hunt and starring Michael Greene and Gregory Sierra. Why The Clones? Mostly because it was available on Amazon Prime but also because it had a strikingly surreal poster that you can see here, on the film’s IMDB page. 

The Clones stars Michael Greene as scientist Dr Gerard Appleby, Gerry to his friends and colleagues. We meet Gerry as someone is watching him work in his nondescript lab on something vaguely scientific that the film doesn’t bother to describe. Something goes wrong and Gerry is forced to flee for his life. The film is so clumsy about what has taken place that it only occurred to me as I write this that someone intended for Gerry to die in this lab accident. 

When Gerry does escape he sees some leaving in his car. When he makes it to the nearby security office for his lab facility, the guard is surprised to see him… again. According to the security guard, Gerry had just left driving Gerry’s car. When Gerry arrives back at his office on the campus of the Pacific Institute of Technology, his assistant tells him that he’d just been there and that he’d just called campus security before he’d left. She appears convinced that Gerry has sudden onset Alzheimer's. 

Finally, Gerry returns to the home of his girlfriend, Karen (Barbara Bergdorf), and has his most unusual encounter yet. In Karen’s kitchen is Gerry, or at least, a perfect copy of Gerry who has Gerry’s wallet, ID, memories and personality. Our Gerry flees the scene, recovering his car and wallet only to be stopped by police and taken to the campus security office where a pair of FBI agents are waiting to take him into custody for a crime they refuse to reveal. Gerry manages to escape and thus begins one of The Clones’ interminably long chase scenes. 

The Clones packs its 97 minute runtime with a great deal more running, jumping and chasing than anything to do with cloning. If you are thinking that you are going to watch The Clones and find out why the government suddenly wanted Gerry dead and replaced with a clone you can forget it. The filmmakers apparently believe that being as vague as possible is a substitute for drama. Unfortunately, the clumsy scripting makes it appear that they simply never had a clue how this story was to play out. 

Michael Greene isn’t exactly your classically handsome and charismatic leading man. He’s wiry and being forced to run for most of the movie, he looks kind of odd. We never really get a chance to connect with Gerry because the silly plot, rather than being about sci-fi and cloning, is more about action movie chases that are desperately overlong and silly. One has Gerry being chased through a swamp and has him slip his captors by hiding in a tree in plain sight. 

The final chase scene and shootout is set in an amusement park for reasons that only the filmmakers understand. This leads to an amazingly dumb payoff wherein the lead government good, played by future Hill Street Blues supporting cast member, Gregory Sierra, attempts to hunt Gerry down and avoid Gerry at the same time by boarding a rollercoaster. The director then shows us a sign that says ‘No Standing on the Ride’ but fails to pay off the scene with a clever decapitation. 

Then again, everything about The Clones is disappointing so why should that ending be anything other than a disappointment. Am I glad I spent time watching The Clones? Eh, it’s bad but in a somewhat enjoyable fashion. I was certainly laughing at the movie and not with it but I did have kind of a good time. I don’t recommend it but if you are, for some reason, looking for movies about cloning, The Clones is a movie that has clones in it. So there’s that. 

At the very least, The Clones is available at no extra charge to Amazon Prime members. 

Movie Review Papillon

Papillon (1973) 

Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner 

Written by Dalton Trumbo, Lorenzo Semple Jr. 

Starring Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman

Release Date December 16th, 1973

Published August 22nd, 2018

Papillion is considered a classic movie by some but not by me. For me, Papillion is an ungodly slog through unending misery. Sure, the sun occasionally shines but I would not be lying if I claimed that 95% is uncompromisingly bleak. The term torture-porn is a modern term invented to describe the fetishized violence of movies like Saw or Hostel, but Papillion is, perhaps, a progenitor of the term. The violence isn’t graphic but if you get off on suffering, this movie is for you.

Steve McQueen stars in Papillion as the least convincing Frenchman this side of Dustin Hoffman. McQueen is Papillion, a man falsely accused of the murder of a pimp, or so he claims. Aboard a ship to be taken to the French penal colony in French controlled Guyana, some time in the early 1930’s, Papillion meets Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), the most prolific forger in French history. It’s rumored that Dega has money and can use it to arrange an escape.

Papillion becomes a sort of bodyguard to Dega and eventually his friend. The two plot toward Papillion’s escape as Dega believes that his wife is working to get him out of jail and his money allows him some privileges in the prison camp, privileges he would lose if he attempted an escape and it failed. Indeed, Papillion’s first escape attempt fails as he is captured and brought back to the camp by bounty hunters.

This puts Papillon in solitary confinement for an unspecified amount of time though I believe somewhere in the movie it was stated as five years. This section of the movie is pure torture for Papillion and our patience. We watch as Papillion eats bugs, struggles with hunger, is given illicit food, slipped to him via courier by Dega, loses all but all but scraps of food when his supply is uncovered and he refuses to say where it came from and generally suffers for a solid 20 minute chunk of an already too long movie.

When he is finally released from solitary, Dega is waiting to nurse him back to health, or pay someone to do it for him anyway, and Papillion immediately starts planning another escape. It’s pretty much the same escape as the last, only Dega will be going with him this time. Whether it was successful or not, I will leave you to discover. I will say that the escape leads to the only good portion of the movie, we see a leper colony that is frightening yet filled with the only other good people in the movie and a brief glimpse of a life Papillion could be happy with but is, of course, taken from him.

Cruelty, despair, misery are what we face while enduring Papillion. I suppose the film is intended as some kind of triumph of the human spirit stories, it’s based on a novel by a guy who claims to be the real life Papillion, his final escape having worked, but my spirit gave up on the film about half way through rather than anything remotely like triumph experienced. Papillion is a handsome movie but it is not an entertaining or engaging movie.

Papillion is a punishing 2 hour and 30 minute slog. It’s a movie where joy goes to die. You don’t watch Papillion, you endure it. I don’t ask that all movies be happy-go-lucky but I would prefer that movies not be so all-encompassing bleak as Papillion undeniably is. There is one sequence where there is joy and it ends as abruptly as it arrives and the film scurries back to be even more dreary than before.

Has Dustin Hoffman always been insufferable or have I just been in denial all of these years? I had a similar thought that I pushed to the back of my mind when I watched his jerky performance in Tootsie but it was inescapable here. Hoffman’s stagey tics are more pronounced in Papillion than they were when he was literally playing a stage actor in Tootsie. Hoffman’s Dega constantly has bits of little business to do including limping, vocal tics and constantly touching his coke bottle eye-glasses.

I was glad when his character disappeared for a while and his antics were off-screen and that was during the film’s most bleak sequence so you can understand just how much I was loving Hoffman’s performance here. I would rather be in a dank cell with a dying Steve McQueen than outside in the sunlight with the obnoxious Hoffman. His antics cool off late in the movie and he becomes a compelling character but you likely won’t last long enough to care about that.

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If I hadn’t been paid to watch and write about Papillion I would have turned it off rather early on, once I pegged just how dreary the movie was and would remain. I consider it an act of masochism that I managed to watch Papillion all the way to the end. I don’t understand the desire to make, let alone watch, a movie like Papillion. Did director Franklin J. Shaffner just decide he wanted to test the limits of audience patience?

Papillion is being remade and released this weekend with Sons of Anarchy star Charlie Hunnam as Papillion and Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek as Dega. Here’s hoping it’s not another slog through human misery ala the 1973 original or else I am going to need a drink for this one and I don’t even drink alcohol so you can get a sense of my dread here.