Classic Movie Review The Stunt Man

The Stunt Man (1980) 

Directed by Richard Rush

Written by Lawrence B. Marcus, Richard Rush

Starring Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey 

Release Date June 27th, 1980 

Published May 8th, 2024 

The Stunt Man is a wildly inventive and entirely incoherent exercise in style and storytelling. Directed by Richard Rush, The Stunt Man has an intriguing premise that gets overshadowed by a director eager to experiment with film style and editing. I appreciate what Richard Rush is going for but it's a failed experiment as the stylistic touches and innovations leave us with a story that is impossible to follow because scenes are missing or truncated in service of Richard Rush's desire to play with the toys and tools of filmmaking. 

The intriguing story of The Stunt Man finds a former Vietnam Veteran, played by Steve Railsback, on the run from the cops for an unknown crime. Cornered at a diner, the vet manages to sneak away. However, in the process of his getaway, the vet wanders into a movie scene as it is being shot. A stunt man is performing a car stunt and angrily drives right at the vet who is standing on a bridge that happens to be the location for this scene. In fear for his life, the vet throws a large rock at the car barreling towards him that causes the car to drive off the bridge. 

The stunt driver is killed and the incident is witnessed and filmed by the film's director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole). Once again, our unnamed vet flees the scene. This time he winds up at a nearby resort where he once again sees the movie in production. A beach at the resort is being strafed by fake gunfire by a stunt plane. Smoke covers the area as bombs fall and when the smoke clears, the audience of resort patrons are shocked to see mangled bodies and corpses strewn across the beach. Their shock and horror becomes good natured laughter as the director calls cut and the stuntmen and extras lift themselves out of the and and remove their broken, burned and battered fake body parts and wounds. 

As the vet surveys the scene, he watches as an elderly woman approaches the lead actor for an autograph. She wanders down the beach and the vet follows her curiously, wondering where she could be headed. It's a good thing that he does because the old women slips on some rocks and falls in the ocean, forcing the vet to leap in and save her. Soon after, the woman removes her makeup and reveals herself to be movie star Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey). Nina was testing the believability and durability of her old lady makeup, which she claims to have done herself. Nevertheless, she allows the vet to rescue her to a standing ovation of the assembled crew, including the director. 

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Classic Movie Review The Boogeyman (1980)

The Boogeyman (1980) 

Directed by Ullli Lommel 

Written by Ulli Lommel 

Starring Suzanna Love, Nicholas Love, John Carradine

Release Date November 14th, 1980 

Published June 6th, 2023 

I often find myself fascinated by the rudimentary elements of filmmaking. There are very basic things that a director must be able to accomplish in order to achieve a level of professionalism and competence. Director Ulli Lommel demonstrates a level of professionalism and competence in The Boogeyman, at least in the first to scenes in the film, the best scenes in the film. Beyond that, he's a crazy person who crafted a bizarre screenplay, much of which feels as if he was whipping it up on set as the film were being made in a slapdash attempt to meet some arbitrary filming deadline. 

The Boogeyman opens on a visually striking set piece. An older woman is lying on a couch and calling for her lover. He approaches and she proceeds to place her stocking over his head. At this point, we glimpse two children outside the window of the home. Through visual and context clues, it's clear that these two children belong to this woman, and she has left them outside of the home specifically so that she can be alone with this man. Seeing the children through the window infuriates the man and he proceeds to punish the older brother. 

He ties the boy to a bed, and this leads to a terrific series of horror visuals. The little sister, all of three years old, goes to the kitchen and finds a very large knife on the counter. The knife catches the moonlight and the incongruousness of a small girl, and a large knife provides a terrific horror movie shock. From there, we see the knife again as the little girl stands in her brother's doorway. For a moment, we wonder if she's about to murder him. Instead, she cuts her brother loose and hands over the knife to him. This leads to a sequence where the camera takes the position of the boy as he walks down the hallway. 

We see his arm as if it were our own. He walks down the hall to his mother's bedroom where she and the man, still wearing a stocking on his head, are about to make love. The boy proceeds to murder this man, stabbing him repeatedly in the back. I believe that this is a terrific sequence. It's followed by another basic and formal bit of visual storytelling. The story leaps ahead in time. We know this because the visual style, the cinematography is brighter and more modern. Our main clue however to this shift in time is a very simple pan across a crowd inside a church. 

Immediately following the murder, we are thrust to a new location, a cemetery. The camera flashes across several gravestones before coming to rest on a church where the sound of the scene is coming from. We jump cut inside and listen to the Priest delivering a sermon. The camera watches the Priest briefly before beginning a slow pan over the crowd at the church. This is a well done and yet incredibly basic bit of film language. As a trained audience member, we know that when the camera stops, it will stop on the protagonists of the film. It's something we all know instinctively and is rarely thought of or pondered. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media

Movie Review: Zombie

Zombie (1980) 

Directed by Lucio Fulci

Written by Dardano Sacchetti, Elisa Briganti

Starring Tisa Farrow, Ian McColluch, Al Cliver, Auretta Gay

Release Date August 25th, 1979

Published July 12th, 2003 

With the release of the much buzzed about 28 Days Later and the revival of the zombie movie, it's important to look back on zombie movies of the past. What better place to begin than with the goriest, most disgusting of all zombie movies, from Italian legend Lucio Fulci, 1979's Zombie (or Zombie 2, depending on who you ask). It’s often cited as the best or worst of the genre. With mind numbing gore and idiot dialogue, it's very easy to dismiss. However Fulci's artistry in shooting and especially in the film’s remastered soundtrack is undeniable.

We open on an eerily disheveled sailboat floating aimlessly in New York harbor. A pair of New York's finest are dispatched to investigate. At first they find nothing, until one officer checks the pantry and is attacked by a zombie. The other officer dumps the zombie over the side of the boat. His partner is dead, or he's supposed to be.

The boat belonged to the father of Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, yes Mia's sister). When Anne is called to the scene her father is considered the main suspect in the murder. However, she is certain that when she last heard from her father he was vacationing in the Antilles Islands. She sneaks aboard the boat after the cops leave to search for evidence and bumps into a journalist named Peter West (Ian Mccolluch). West has uncovered an important piece of evidence that states Anne's father was indeed in the Islands and not on the boat. From there the two head for the Antilles and the island known as Masul.

With the help of a pair of vacationers (Al Cliver and Auretta Gay), Anne and Peter make to the island where they meet Dr. David Menard. The doctor has been on the island for a number of years. Despite rumors of a voodoo curse that has the dead rising from the grave to eat the living, Dr. Menard is determined cure the disease that he thinks is the real cause.

Okay so logic isn't the film’s strong suit, hey it's about zombies, we’re going to have to suspend some disbelief here. Of course if the doctor had simply accepted what he had seen as supernatural and simply up and left, maybe hundreds lives may have been saved, but that my friends, is revisionist history. Director Lucio Fulci's strength is not in the storytelling but rather in window dressing of the story.

The makeup in Zombie is as spectacular as anything Oscar nominee Rick Baker has ever dreamed up. Especially fun are the rotting maggot-infested corpses of the Spanish Conquistadors who rise from the grave to interrupt Anne and Peter's first kiss. Also memorable is the sight of zombies snacking on what remains of the doctors wife, played by Olga Karlotos. And I don't ever again want to see the wife's death scene, which sees her impaled through ..... oh I can't even say it. Excuse me a moment.

Of course the thing that people will always remember about Zombie is the final scene of the film in which an army of zombies slowly cross the Brooklyn bridge into New York as a voiceover newsman informs us that the zombies have taken over. Zombie is classic, gory, blood-soaked Italian horror from a master of the genre. If 28 Days Later can be as good as this we can happily welcome back the zombie movie.

Movie Review Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th (1980) 

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham

Written by Victor Miller 

Starring Betsy Palmer, Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Bartram

Release Date May 9th, 1980

Published August 17th, 2003 

It seems many horror fans have been operating under great delusion for a number of years. That delusion is that Jason Voorhees was the star of each of the Friday the 13th films. That is not the case. Nine sequels with Jason as the focal point have colored the minds of many fans of Jason's high body count. In fact the first Friday the 13th film could be considered a stand-alone picture. It operates as a revenge movie/psycho horror film. Jason is merely a plot point, a motivation.

What is far more interesting though is how much you miss the Jason of myth as you revisit the first Friday the 13th. Over time, that myth has become a charming little joke of over the top beheadings and implausible returns from the grave. The first Friday the 13th is quite tepid in comparison with it's quasi realistic violence and complete lack of the supernatural.

The story has been copied numerous times in numerous knock off's, and of course the film itself was in fact a knock off but I digress. A group of nubile camp counselors has assembled at Camp Crystal Lake at the behest of the new owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer). But not without having been warned by the nearby residents that the camp is cursed. It's seems that in 1957 a young boy drowned in the lake. The following year, two counselors were brutally murdered. Each time the camp was reopened a new tragedy befell the new counselors. Nevertheless, our intrepid counselors move ahead with renovations.

It's not long however before the bodies begin to pile up. First, it’s the camps new cook Annie (Robbie Morgan) who never actually makes it to the camp. Then a couple, Jack (Kevin Bacon) and Marcie (Jeanine Taylor), who make the classic horror film mistake of having sex. After a few more murders, including the offscreen slaying of the camp’s owner, it's down to young Alice (Adrienne King) to fight off our heretofore unseen assailant.

Director Sean S. Cunningham, a veteran horror producer, doesn't bring much style to the film, though his effects and makeup are quite good. Cunningham lacks mostly in his building of suspense. The decision to leave the killer offscreen seems similar to Steven Spielberg's trouble with the shark in Jaws. It's not that he wanted the shark off-screen, it just didn't work. The same could be said of Cunningham. That keeping the killer off-screen for most of the film was not a creative choice, but one of necessity, as if he wasn't sure until late in the game how he would play it. His choice of killers is a debate for the ages.

Some horror fans claim that the killer is a great shocker that plays off stereotypical archetypes in an ironic surprise twist. I say the producers couldn't think of anything better and what they came up with is lame and horribly contrived. I am of the school of horror fans who believe that the series didn't really begin until the second film when Jason arose from the grave, not wearing the hockey mask by the way. He began a legendary run that continues soon with the recently released Freddy Vs Jason. 

Movie Review Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill (1980) 

Directed by Brian De Palma 

Written by Brian De Palma 

Starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Dennis Farina

Release Date July 25th, 1980

Published August 14th, 2002 

There is something about a great twist ending that can make a seemingly average film great. Take the Sixth Sense, it's doubtful that film would exist without it's brilliant twist. Or Hitchcock's classic, Psycho, likely the greatest twist of all. Brian DePalma's Dressed To Kill isn't quite on par with Sixth Sense or Psycho, but it does have a fantastic twist ending that is frightening and a little campy but exciting. That is, if someone hasn't already ruined it for you.

In Dressed To Kill, Angie Dickinson is a bored housewife, sexually unsatisfied and desperate for a change. She has a husband she likes but doesn't love and a son (Keith Gordon from Back To School) who she worries is becoming a shut in. So she takes her problems to a well-respected psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine). He tries to help her but after she comes on to him, he ends the session, leaving her unsatisfied and still searching for adventure. This leads her to a museum and a chance encounter with a complete stranger.

From there the film takes a left turn into creepiness as Dickinson's housewife is murdered ala Janet Leigh in Psycho. A high-class hooker played by Nancy Allen witnesses the murder. Because Allen was the only witness, she is also the only suspect, according to Detective Marino (NYPD Blue's Dennis Franz). Now a target of the killer, Allen teams up with Gordon to find the killer before she finds them. Meanwhile Dr Elliot is getting strange phone calls from an ex-patient who is taking credit for the murder and threatening to kill again. In an odd choice, Elliot does not inform the police of the calls.

The whole film is an homage to Psycho, with the story, the plot devices and the camerawork. The killer is always shot in profile with quick cuts, she's there and gone very quickly giving the audience a glimpse of things unseen by the character. 

Dressed To Kill is a good movie, very weird though. The opening shower scene is something out of soft-core porn. Then there is the ten-minute museum sequence, which is done with no dialogue or score, just ambient noise and visuals and one amazing tracking shot that takes us on a tour of the entire museum.

Brian De Palma has often been criticized for his style over substance approach where his visual mastery overwhelms his story. Dressed To Kill is no exception. However, Dressed To Kill is a film where the visuals are far more important than the plot. They in fact ARE the plot. The ending hinges on two sensational visual sequences, one a dream and the other the shocking twist.

Sadly, someone ruined the ending for me so some of the shock was taken out of it. But De Palma's visuals more than make up for it. If you don't know how it ends then you will love it. If you already know the twist you will at least be dazzled by the visual flair.

Movie Review The Last Metro

The Last Metro (1980) 

Directed by Francois Truffaut 

Written by Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean Claude Grumberg 

Starring Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Jean Poirer 

Release Date September 17th, 1980 

Published September 17th, 2015 

What is it that makes a work timeless? Can an artist set out to create a timeless work or must it organically linger in the minds of those who experience it and share that experience with others for years and decades. Francois Truffaut's “The Last Metro” is undoubtedly a timeless work; one that will linger for me and has taken up space in the minds of many for three decades now. 

”The Last Metro” stars legendary ingénue Catherine Deneuve as Marion Steiner, a famous film actress now operating the Theater Montmartre in Paris following the disappearance of her husband Lucas (Heinz Bennett). It is 1942 and being Jewish while Nazis occupy half the country and members of the Vichy Government conspire with them has made life dangerous for even a man as loved and respected as Lucas Steiner. 

Lucas is supposedly on the run, headed for Spain or South America or maybe Hollywood. We will find out however that he is still in the theater and still very much in love with his wife. Meanwhile, Marion is running the theater and preparing to unveil a brand new production under the direction of Jean Loup-Cottins (Jean Poiret), a noble but not all that interesting director who will unknowingly be receiving Lucas's notes. 

Joining the theaters regular players is an up and coming young actor named Bernard Granger (Gerard Depardieu) who we meet one day as he fails miserably attempting to pick up a woman he meets on the street. The woman, Arlette (Andrea Ferreol), also happens to be the wardrobe designer for Montmartre and she has a very good reason for declining Bernard's advances. 

Between meeting women on the street and now starring in Montmartre's new play, Bernard also happens to be a member of the French Resistance, working in secret to get the Nazis out of Paris by any means necessary. Marion Steiner is unaware of the danger Bernard brings to the theater, especially with Lucas hiding in the basement.  Marion works hard to avoid politics but when one of Paris's most influential theater critics Monsieur Daxiat also happens to be one of the top Nazi conspirators in France, he brings politics to the fore and forces Marion into some very difficult and dangerous choices. 

Reading my plot description I can see that I have described “The Last Metro” as something of a hot-house of plot. However, what is so amazing about Truffaut's work in “The Last Metro” is the complete lack of danger he brings to this material. Instead, Truffaut brings an effortless charm, sensitivity, care and nonchalance to even the most distressing and surprising plot revelations. 

In “The Last Metro” the Nazis are a mounting threat but never the arch, over the top villains of most World War 2 films. Truffaut makes the simple choice to allow the audience to fill in the danger; who doesn't know how evil the Nazis were? Truffaut recognized that there was no need to underline the point. 

We will learn that though Marion loves her husband she will inevitably fall for Bernard because that is what happens in a movie such as this. These two people are called upon to love each other on the stage and that love must eventually spread off the stage. It's part of a conventional narrative that this conflict must exist, what sets this conflict apart in “The Last Metro” is Truffaut's casual acceptance and passive presentation of Bernard and Marion's destined love affair. 

Conflict is maybe too harsh a word to describe the effortless evolution of Marion's love for her husband to her love for Bernard. Making the transition charming and easy to swallow is the ingenious way Truffaut and actor Heinz Bennett conspire to make the audience feel good about Lucas being cuckolded. For Lucas, like Truffaut, art is evolution and the evolution of his production of this play calls for Marion to love Bernard regardless of her commitment to him. 

There are other revelations in “The Last Metro” that also rise and fall like a gentle tide washing ashore. Watch the elegant ways in which Truffaut weaves the story of a pair of homosexual characters. As with his approach to the Nazis, Truffaut allows the audience to fill in the blanks about the difficulties these two characters face in both the time the film is set and, of course, under the thumb of the Nazis. 

The Last Metro is remarkably sensitive and smart, gentle and dramatic. “The Last Metro” is simply a perfect movie, one so graceful and elegant that it could only come from an extraordinarily gifted creator like Francois Truffaut. In a too short life, he passed away at just 52 years old in 1984; Truffaut created a cinematic legacy like few others.