Movie Review Son in Law (1993)
Classic Movie Review Sleepless in Seattle
Sleepless in Seattle (2023)
Directed by Nora Ephron
Written by Nora Ephron, David S. Ward, Jeff Arch
Starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Rita Wilson, Victor Garber, Rosie O'Donnell, Bill Pullman
Release Date June 25th, 1993
Published June 26th, 2023
Losing my mother in 2013 was the hardest thing that I have ever endured. My mom was awesome. She worked three retail jobs, 80 to 90 hours per week, when I was a kid, just to make sure that myself and my sister had food and a good home. All that time, she remained unsinkable in her spirit and love. She was a human teddy bear, soft and comforting. Her worst quality was that when someone she loved was suffering, she would make that suffering her own, as if she could take our pain away by making it her pain. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had a mom who was so loving and empathetic.
My mom fostered my love of movies. I have a distinct memory from my childhood of my mother swooning over Cary Grant. I'd make fun of her for her reaction to Cary Grant movies and she would lean into it by talking about how handsome and charming he was in effusive terms. I can recall the first time I saw my mom cry was the day she was supposed to go see Cary Grant's one man show in Davenport, Iowa. That show never happened as Grant died the night before the show was to take place. My mom showed me that para-social relationships with celebrity weren't a bad thing, they were a human thing.
The movie Sleepless in Seattle, which features prominent references to Cary Grant, became a favorite movie for my mom. She would watch it any chance she got. She didn't love Tom Hanks as she did Cary Grant, but her heart leapt seeing him fall for Meg Ryan at the last minute. She felt the same rush of emotion every time she watched the movie, even as she'd seen it a dozen times and was fully aware that the happy ending was coming. She always got teary when Meg Ryan took Tom Hanks' hand at the end of the movie. It showed me that being emotional about movies was not just okay, but something that just happens when you witness something beautiful.
Sleepless in Seattle is a beautiful film. It's a celebration of magical romance and believing in something beyond yourself, the notion of fate. The characters of Sam Baldwin and Annie Reed were fated to be together. The universe conspires to unite them. Through the audacity and resolute stubbornness of Sam's son, Jonah, and the good luck that he has a best friend, played by Gaby Hoffman, whose parents are travel agents, Sam and Annie are brought dramatically together on the most romantic day of the year in one of the most romantic spots on the planet.
Read my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Swing Kids
Classic Movie Review Army of Darkness
Army of Darkness (1993)
Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi
Starring Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz
Release Date February 19th, 1993
Published June 20th, 2023
Army of Darkness is a direct sequel to Evil Dead 2 but, in the tradition of Evil Dead 1, continuity between the two is not necessary. The basic elements are enough to marry one film to the other. Ash (Bruce Campbell), survived a fight against the Deadites, zombie demons from another dimension, only to find himself sucked into another dimension. In this dimension there are Kings and servants, warring clans, and an ancient evil that Ash happens to have some experience in defeating. After demonstrating god-like powers in surviving against a Deadite at the bottom of a well, Ash is welcomed into this bizarre world.
In classically Ash fashion, he immediately flirts with and gets the girl, Sheila (Davidtz), who is then subsequently stolen away and corrupted by the Deadites. In order to free this cursed land from the evil of the Deadites, Ash must go on a quest to retrieve the Book of the Dead, the very book that got him into this mess in Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. The book was sucked through this dimensional portal along with Ash and has now fallen into the hands of the Deadites who've placed it in a cursed cemetery. The Arthurian touches in Army of Darkness are inspired gags.
The key to Army of Darkness however, is a spirit of anarchic invention. Director Sam Raimi and his star, Bruce Campbell show off a childlike glee as they workout different bits and gags they can do with the larger budget and platform they were given following the modest but notable success of Evil Dead 2. If you ask Raimi, he would say that he didn't need the budget that was given to him but he also then felt obligated to spend it since he had it. With that, we get both improved special effects and the kinds of practical effects that Raimi developed a remarkable talent for in the Evil Dead movies.
The combinations of Harryhausen inspired practicality, music, and slightly more expensive effects, are used to create a low budget atmosphere on a relatively large budget. Raimi's homemade aesthetic somehow survives the move to a big studio feature and there is a wonderful charm to how Army of Darkness combines big effects with the kind of inventive, chaotic, weirdness that drove Raimi in his early career as a filmmaker. The delight Raimi and his collaborators take in creating comic gore, and paying tribute to low budget effects movies of the past is wonderfully infectious.
Bruce Campbell however, is perhaps the best special effect in the movie. Campbell's ability for physical comedy, his willingness to put his body on the line for a gag, and his more than willingness to be silly, is an incredible asset to the charm of Army of Darkness. His Ash may talk like a cross between the tough guy banter of Bogart and the suave charm of Errol Flynn, but Campbell has a comic quality that neither of those legendary performers has. It's a sly ability to ride the razors edge between silly camp and action movie star that is a one of a kind combination.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Last Action Hero
Last Action Hero (1993)
Directed by John McTiernan
Written by Shane Black, David Arnott
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dylan O'Brien, Charles Dance, Anthony Quinn, Mercedes Ruehl, Tom Noonan
Release Date June 18th, 1993
Published June 19th 2023
In the history of Hollywood debacles, Last Action Hero has quite a reputation. With massive budget overruns and egotistical executives pushing for an extremely misguided schedule and release date, Last Action Hero was a doomed production. Having began life as a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger style action movies, the film had to be radically retrofitted when Schwarzenegger chose to star in the film. No longer could the star be the subject of the jokes, he was now the one making the jokes. With Schwarzenegger aboard, the original screenwriters were booted in favor of Shane Black and David Arnott who were tasked with solving a tricky tone of meta-humor and action movie tropes.
That a movie vaguely watchable came out of the mishmash or rewrites and revisions, that included something like 7 writers, including rewrites by William Goldman and Carrie Fisher, on top of the original duo of Zak Penn and Adam Leff. Both the director and star each offered insight on the script and well, you know what they say about Too Many Cooks? Yeah, way too many cooks took their turn in trying to boil up a workable version of Last Action Hero and the result is a bland, tasteless, pile of gruel, a little salty thanks to Schwarzenegger's star power, but mostly a forgettable and moderately distasteful meal.
The concept is really the only thing anyone seemed to like about Last Action Hero. In the plot, a 12 year old boy named Danny Madigan (Austin O'Brien), receives a magical movie ticket as a gift from his friend, Nick the Projectionist (Robert Prosky), who has gifted Danny a preview showing of the new Jack Slater movie, Jack Slater 5. Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is an action movie hero in an action movie universe where he's an indestructible action machine who kills bad guys and cuts mad quips at their expense, all while rock music plays on a loop.
It's everything an adrenalin fueled 12 year old could want, bullets, babes, bad guys, and our hero always wins in the end. This Jack Slater adventure however, is going to be a little different. Thanks to Danny's magic ticket, Danny is transported inside the movie. After dynamite seemingly blows up the movie theater, Danny wakes up in the back of Jack Slater's car, mid-car chase and shootout. Slater is as surprised as Danny to find a young boy in his back set, but that doesn't stop him from finishing off the bad guys and finishing the action scene.
From there we explore the world of Jack Slater with Danny as our audience surrogate. All the while, Danny tries to convince Jack that they are in a movie in a series of jokes that diminish in comic returns each time. When Danny starts telling Jack that he saw the bad guys set up Jack's favorite second cousin Frank (Art Carney), Jack starts to take Danny seriously, a little bit. Things ramp up when the baddies realize Danny is on to them and the evil Mr. Benedict comes into possession of Danny's magic movie ticket and takes the chance to escape into the real world.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review The Crush
The Crush (1993)
Directed by Alan Shapiro
Written by Alan Shapiro
Starring Alicia Silverstone, Cary Elwes, Jennifer Rubin, Kurtwood Smith
Release Date April 2nd 1993
Published June 17th, 2023
According to writer-director Alan Shapiro, The Crush, is based on a real life experience he had in which a teenage girl developed a fixation on him that became obsessive. This was an exaggeration to say the least. The original film, as shot and scripted by Shapiro even used the real name of the teenager, he claimed inspired the film. Naturally, because she is portrayed as a murderous nutjob in the movie, the real-life teenager sued Shapiro for Defamation of Character. The studio responded by clumsily changing the name of the main character via a comically bad piece of over-dubbing.
It's doubtful that Shapiro's story actually happened as he characterized it. The reality appears to be that creepy studio executives were eager to make a thriller based on sexualizing a teenage girl and found Shapiro's very silly, self-aggrandizing script in a pile and saw potential dollar signs from the always lucrative creep market. The production of the film seems to back up that assertion as Silverstone had to dodge the attempts by executives to get her to do nude scenes and sexual scenes beyond what is in the final film.
So insistent on a nude scene was one particular executive that a compromise was made. A body double stripped down for a scene showing off her backside in place of Silverstone's. Bear in mind, Silverstone was 16 at the time she made The Crush and the character in the movie is slightly younger than that. A mere 30 years ago, a Hollywood executive felt comfortable enough to ask a teenage actress to do a nude scene in a movie and became so insistent on the baring of teenage flesh in the movie that they had to compromise with an adult body double. That's just some of the super creepy backstory of 1993's The Crush.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media.
Classic Movie Review Fire in the Sky
Fire in the Sky (1993)
Directed by Robert Lieberman
Written by Tracy Torme
Starring Robert Patrick, D.B Sweeney, Craig Sheffer
Release Date March 12th, 2023
Published June, 2023
A group of friends worked together on a scam to convince the world that one of them was abducted by aliens. For me, this is a much more interesting story than treating the lie these men told as if it actually happened. Unfortunately, that's the approach director Robert Lieberman and writer Tracy Torme went with in making Fire in the Sky, pretending the lie was the truth. By pretending that this man was actually abducted by aliens, the filmmakers cosigned the lie and colluded to provide credence to the grift of these men that, for at least of them, continues to to this day.
Fire in the Sky asks you to believe that in 1975 a man named Travis Walton was abducted by aliens while his friends watched in shock and horror. The 'friends' ran away, leaving Travis seemingly for dead. Several days later, a naked and traumatized Travis was found a full town away shivering inside of a shed. In Fire in the Sky, D.B Sweeney provides a reasonably shaken and angst ridden performance as Travis Walton. And, because he's an actor whose been given direction on how to portray this trauma, he makes it look as if this is what really happened to Travis Walton, perhaps better than Walton himself ever could.
The story of Travis's disappearance is told in a dimwitted flashback. Apparently the filmmakers half-watched Rashomon and took a minor inspiration that pretends to art but falls squarely into melodrama. Familiar faces Robert Patrick, Peter Berg, Craig Scheffer and Henry Thomas play Travis friends who, for a time, were suspected of having killed Travis, at least according to the movie. The real story of what happened to Travis Walton is that he and his friends perpetrated a hoax that Walton has exploited for financial gain for years.
They sold the story to The Enquirer, a disreputable tabloid that claimed that Walton and his friends passed a lie detector test. The reality is, The Enquirer had just as much to gain from Travis Walton's made up abduction story as he did. Skeptical investigators who performed tests on Walton found that he was trying to beat the lie detector through various means that had been shared in books out around that time. One lie detector test that Walton ended with the administrator calling Walton's story a 'gross deception.'
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 (1993)
Directed by Stuart Gillard
Written by Stuart Gillard
Starring Paige Turco, Elias Koteas
Release Date March 19th, 1993
Published June 2023
It was clear that the makers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise was fast losing steam right about the time Vanilla Ice appeared in TMNT 2 to rap the phrase 'Go Ninja, Go Ninja, Go!' It's at about that point that as a culture we had come to the conclusion that the necessity for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle feature film was no longer a necessity. And yet, against all good sense and taste, the makers of the franchise pressed on with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a screamingly minor entry in a franchise that had only narrowly found the energy for one and one half part of a movie and sequel.
And yet, someone forked over a $21 million dollar budget to send the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in time to some loose configuration of a past somewhere in Asia. Time travel is yet another signpost in the sweaty, desperate creation of a third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Someone really promised more than they could possibly deliver to convince anyone that this was worth doing. Nothing in the film certainly justifies why this sequel was ever brought to the light of day, let alone unleashed on an unsuspecting public in movie theaters.
My heart goes out to the parents of 1993 who must have napped or stayed in the car while their kids watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3. The chore of sitting through this nonsense is like a parent being grounded by their kid and made to sit in time out for 90 minutes. This is a screamingly inessential film, a movie that has no right to exist in any way and yet somehow it does. Time, effort, and cold hard cash was dedicated to bringing this movie to the world and, for the life of me, I cannot imagine why.
Read my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review The Opposite Sex and How to Live with Them
Published June 9th, 2023
Classic Movie Review Jurassic Park
Classic Movie Review Sliver
Sliver (1993)
Directed by Phillip Noyce
Written by Joe Esterhas
Starring Sharon Stone, Billy Baldwin, Tom Berenger
Release Date May 21st, 1993
Published June 8th, 2023
Why is the movie Sliver called Sliver? I believe it's the name of the building where the movie is set but that is such a tossed off mention that I am genuinely uncertain. I can extrapolate that it is a loose metaphor for the films central relationship between Sharon Stone and Billy Baldwin. By that I mean, he is someone who can painfully get under her skin, like a sliver. Get it? That's not explicit in the text of Sliver, but it's the best that I have been able to come up with. I spent a lot of time thinking about the title, Sliver, while watching the movie Sliver, because thinking about the title was more entertaining.
Sliver is a softcore thriller with the pretense of being a high minded drama. Director Phillip Noyce and writer Joe Esterhas seem to think they have something to say about voyeurism and sexuality but it is clear where their prurient interests truly lie. They want to watch very attractive people have sex and they've made a movie to cover for their fetish. This was not an uncommon thing among male filmmakers at the time. In fact, movie covering for my fetish could be its very own sub-genre of 1990s cinema.
Sliver stars Sharon Stone as Carly Norris, a rich book editor living in New York City. She jumps at the chance to move into a new apartment despite the apartment having a haunting past. A woman, who looks a lot like Carly, may or may not have been murdered in this very apartment by having been thrown off of the balcony. Oh well, look at all that natural light. New York real estate, am I right. If New Yorkers rejected every apartment where a murder occurred, there'd be few places to live.
Carly moves in and it is zero minutes before creeps are breathing down her neck. First up is a famous author of 'erotic' thrillers, Jack Landsford (Tom Berenger). He's a former cop who uses his cases as inspiration for his creepy fantasies. So, he's a fan insert for Noyce and Esterhas. Perhaps its a case of Berenger being the stand in for who they really are while the other love interest, Billy Baldwin, is the fantasy of who the writer and director wish they were, a handsome and smooth talking ladies man who's still a major creep at heart.
The central portion of Sliver is devoted to figuring out who killed that woman who lived in Carly's apartment. But that doesn't actually matter in the end. There are two major crimes happening and no one in Sliver is free from being implicated, aside from the beautiful, innocent, naive character played by Sharon Stone. You can see the flaws inherent in that right? Sharon Stone's talent is not necessarily playing either innocent or naive. That's no shade to Stone, she's just way too elegant and intelligent for the movie and character she's trapped within.
The murder is just a red herring, a hook to draw you toward what is far more interesting and fetishistic for the writer and director, voyeurism. Billy Baldwin's creep character, Zeke Hawkins, is a secret billionaire who owns the building in which he, Carly and Berenger's creep writer lives. Zeke has installed cameras everywhere in the building, every apartment, every room, especially in the bathrooms. He spends his days sitting in his command center penthouse watching everyone all the time.
Find my full length review at Filthy.Media
Classic Movie Review Boiling Point
Boiling Point (1993)
Directed by James B. Harris
Written by James B. Harris
Starring Wesley Snipes, Dennis Hopper, Viggo Mortensen
Release Date April 16th, 1993
Published June 8th, 1993
Sometimes the making of a movie is far more interesting than the movie being made. That is unquestionably true of the 1993 crime drama, Boiling Point. The film began life as an independent film character study of a pair of seedy criminals, one striving for a better life, the other a hothead determined to destroy them both. A small part of that story was about the cop searching for both of these criminals as tension reaches a boiling point and they collide in a tragic series of events.
That's what Boiling Point was meant to be with Dennis Hopper playing a seasoned criminal low life with dreams of getting out alive and making a life for himself. Viggo Mortensen played the doomed hotheaded young criminal whose attraction to violence would be the downfall of both men. Wesley Snipes was to be the cop looking to arrest the two for killing a fellow cop in the midst of a robbery gone terribly, horribly wrong.
Then, something happened. As the film was being completed, Wesley Snipes became one of the hottest stars in Hollywood. Seeing that they had a chance to turn this cheap independent thriller into a box office bonanza on the back of one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, producers and studio execs demanded rewrites and reshoots to beef up Snipes role from a relatively minor supporting role to a presence they could promote in marketing the film.
This is all very obvious in the final Frankenstein's monster of a movie that is Boiling Point. Most scenes featuring Wesley Snipes have him interacting with people other than Hopper and Mortensen. Most of Mortensen's performance, including most of the depth of the character, has been excised to make room for more scenes featuring Wesley Snipes. Snipes's reshot scenes are clumsily sewn into the movie and rarely add any depth to the main story which still centers on Hopper's criminal trying and failing to be a better person.
Rather than the wild-eyed monster that Hopper would play in other villainous roles, his character in Boiling Point is a pathetic, fast-talking sadsack. He's a man who is desperate to escape his circumstances and when he sees a potential payday that could be the key to his happy ever after, he risks everything to get there. It's clear that there was an important subplot involving Hopper and Valerie Perrine who plays his ex-wife. Wanting to win her back, despite a history that includes violent abuse, is a big motivation for Hopper's character. But, as the movie shoved in more about Snipes, we got less of Perrine.
There are numerous examples of how executives cut up and rejiggered Boiling Point to capitalize on Wesley Snipes. The most glaring example is how Snipes rarely shares a scene with any of the rest of the cast, including Hopper and Mortensen. The only tangible link between Snipes and the rest of the movie comes from a reshot subplot in which Snipes' cop and a sex worker played by Lolita Davidovich, have an affair while she acts as a street informant for Snipes. She's also seeing Hopper's character as a client, but this somehow never becomes important to the plot.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Benny & Joon
Benny & Joon (1993)
Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik
Written by Barry Berman
Starring Aiden Quinn, Johnny Depp, Mary Stuart Masterson, Julianne Moore
Release Date April 23rd, 1993
Published June 7th, 1993
When Johnny Depp took on the role of looney romantic hero Sam in Benny & Joon he'd been engaged in a desperate effort to abandon the Teen Beat, leading man personas that Hollywood was attempting to impose upon him. Having become a teen idol on the teen cop show 21 Jumpstreet, Depp found the Hollywood spotlight for too overwhelming and limiting to his talent. Thus he set out to take roles that would defy expectations and reshape his career the way he wanted it.
This upending of expectations started in 1990 when Depp starred in the wild and wonderful John Waters indie flick, Crybaby. No one in Hollywood wanted one of the biggest heartthrobs in the world to work with John Waters and that's likely part of what drove Depp directly into the embrace of Waters and his wild 50s aesthete and outre humor. That same year, he defied expectations in the mainstream as well with an entirely unglamorous, but slightly more commercial friendly film, Edward Scissorhands.
Depp took that role specifically because he got to wear a lot of makeup and prosthetics and Hollywood marketers could not market the film based on his looks. This defiance of expectations continued as Depp took 1992 off and rejected high profile roles in blockbuster features. When he did decide to work again, he chose yet another defiantly odd and unconventional role. Despite still being one of the most sought after leading men in Hollywood, Depp accepted a supporting role in Benny & Joon while turning down the leading man role in the eventual blockbuster, Indecent Proposal.
The gamble paid off as Depp delivers some of his most charming and dynamic work in the role of Sam, even as he's not the leading man. Sam is a wildly unconventional bohemian film lover whose persona is based on silent film heroes such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Depp takes this idea of a character and fills out the character with a mostly silent, terrifically physical performance. It's a role that threatens to be a little too twee, but Depp brings depth to the character by making the most of the few lines of dialogue the character has.
The Benny & Joon of the title are brother and sister, Benny played by Aiden Quinn, and Joon, played by Mary Stuart Masterson. Benny is the responsible older brother who owns a business and cares for his sister and her unspecified medical condition. Joon is an artist who is prone to manic episodes, depression, and jumble of other mental health afflictions that seem to indicate that she suffers from either Schizophrenia or is merely on the autism spectrum. It's a bit nebulous but the film is delicate about Joon's condition which helps keep it from being overly problematic.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Dave
Dave (1993)
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Gary Ross
Starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Frank Langella, Kevin Dunn, Ving Rhames, Ben Kingsley
Release Date May 7th, 1993
Published June 7th, 2023
Dave is one of the nicest movies ever made. This is such a good hearted, sweet, sincere movie that it feels entirely anachronistic a mere 30 years after its release. Politics in America has gotten so much uglier, nastier, and mean over the last 3 decades that Dave feels like a throwback to the 1930s rather than the 1990s. In Dave, politics is still filled with pit vipers and vile men with self-interested aims, but good is seemingly on an equal footing with the bad guy and more than capable of defeating the bad.
That feels quaint today where it's nearly impossible to believe in or remotely trust anyone in an elected office. In 1993 director Ivan Reitman and writer Gary Ross were able to get away with making a political movie that never once mentions a party affiliation. The film is about the United States President and yet we never learn if he is a Republican or Democrat. The politics are able to somehow be so fuzzy that it could be either party in charge. This would be considered cowardice in this day and age and Reitman and Ross would be castigated by both sides.
Dave is perhaps one of the last signposts of a pre-internet era of politics, a time where the lack of a constant need to feed the beast that is social media, allowed for the kind of political crossroads that seem impossible today. In the pre-internet era, parties crossed over party lines to vote what they believed in. Today, party lines are so strict, members are rumored to be leaving their party if they even consider voting against the party line agenda. The politics of Dave are, of course, secondary to the humorous conceit and central romance of the movie but it's still quite a notable indicator of just how far things have changed for the worse in Washington D.C.
Dave stars Kevin Kline as Dave, the friendliest man in his neighborhood. When he isn't finding a job for everyone he's ever met via his temp business, Dave is opening restaurants and car dealerships portraying the President of the United States, President William Harrison Mitchell (also played by Kline), with whom he shares a striking resemblance. That resemblance is soon noticed by the White House who draft Dave to portray a Presidential double to protect the President as he leaves for a secret meeting. What Dave doesn't know, but we do, is that this meeting is actually an affair with his secretary, played by a young Laura Linney.
Full length review at Geeks.Media
Movie Review Life With Mikey
Classic Movie Review Indecent Proposal
Indecent Proposal (1993)
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Written by Amy Holden Jones
Starring Demi Moore, Robert Redford, Woody Harrelson
Release Date April 7th, 1993
Published April 19th, 2023
Indecent Proposal tries to skirt the issue of its sweaty desperation with a softcore stylishness that had become a cliche trait of director Adrian Lyne well before he recaptured the zeitgeist with this movie. For all of the talent he clearly has and the discourse his movies have inspired, the one consistent thing about Lyne is that he enjoys watching attractive people cavort in little to no clothing while sweating profusely. If you can rely on Lyne for anything, it's getting well known stars to doff their duds to provide late night masturbatory thrills. Not there is anything terribly wrong with that.
It's the pretense that Lyne has about his movies. Lyne appears to have quite a high opinion of his movies which, without the imprimatur of big movie stars, would be late night cable fare. High minded as Adrian Lyne may be, it's the smut that really revs his engine. In Indecent Proposal he is desperately reaching for a respectability always slightly out of reach, probably because his other hand is reaching for a particular body part that his work aims to stimulate far more than has drama might stimulate the brain.
That said, there is no denying Lyne's talent for base mass appeal. Lyne's lurid fantasies, just on the dark side of morality, always seemed grab hold of the culture, even if only for a short time. With Indecent Proposal, Lyne made an impact with a very simple premise: What would you do if someone offered you a million dollars for sex, with the permission of your partner? I'm being quite loose with that question. The reality is it wasn't much of a question for the masses but, rather, for the male audience. Would you let your wife sleep with another man for $1 million dollars?
Indeed, the woman in question, played by the gorgeous Demi Moore, is rather superfluous to the drama of Indecent Proposal. She's the object in play between two arrogant, possessive and deeply insecure men. That might not sound so bad except that neither the movie or the men involved, played by Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford, are remotely aware of how insecure they come off. Each wants to play the 'alpha' male with Redford's fortune proving to be the deciding factor as to who is indeed the bigger dog in this yard.
The opportunity to explore male insecurity is thwarted by a narrative more interested in moral failings like greed and infidelity than in examining where the real failings of these characters exist, in their massive, unfulfilled egos. The film romanticizes Harrelson's jealous possessiveness, as if he hadn't encouraged his wife to sleep with Redford and was a victim of her greed and his own indecisiveness in the face of a moral quandary. Jealousy is not a cute quality, it's romantic, it's ugly and creepy and while it happens to everyone, it's not a good quality and it makes Harrelson's character more of a creep than the heartbroken romantic of Lyne's conception.
Find my complete review at Geeks.Media
Movie Review Carnosaur
Classic Movie Review: Loaded Weapon 1
Loaded Weapon 1 (1993)
Directed by Gene Quintano
Written by Gene Quintano, Don Holley
Starring Emilio Estevez, Samuel L. Jackson, Kathy Ireland, Whoopi Goldberg
Release Date February 5th, 1993
Published February 6th, 2023
On the new Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast Spinoff, Everyone's a Critic 1993, myself and my co-hosts, Amy K, and M.J, watch movies that were released 30 years ago that week. One movie per week and the month of January 1993 was truly awful. It was a miserable time for movies. Leprechaun was mildly entertaining but certainly not great. Body of Evidence was downright traumatizing in how sleazy it was, and Hexed, starring Arye Gross, is among the worst movies Hollywood has produced in the last 30 years.
Thus far, the best movie we've watched is another of the worst of all time. Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is one of the great hidden gems of the So-Bad-Its-Good pantheon. It's one of the best unintentionally funny movies I've ever had the pleasure of watching. But, the pleasure is tinged with it being a solely ironic appreciation. In the first month of the new podcast, we have not seen a single good movie. February changed things immediately.
On the first weekend of February, 1993, Hollywood managed to finally release a good movie. National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 stars Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson in a Naked Gun style spoof of the Lethal Weapon movies. This might sound like a tired idea but the reality is that Loaded Weapon 1 is a hidden gem, an oasis of genuinely funny comedy in a sea of terrible movies of the early 1990s. Before the Scary Movie franchise ruined parody movies seemingly for the rest of time, Loaded Weapon 1 stuck to the basics of the spoof genre and created a forgotten classic.
The plot of Lethal Weapon 1 is brilliantly silly. William Shatner plays General Mortars, a former Army General turned drug kingpin. For reasons that are ingeniously silly, he needs a piece of micro-film to help him turn Cocaine into Girl Scout Cookies that he can distribute via a subsidiary of the Girl Scouts, headed up by Kathy Ireland as Miss Destiny Demeanor. Tim Curry co-stars as the General's right hand man and right away, from the introduction of Curry as Mr. Jigsaw, you get a sense of the wonderful silliness at play.
A girl scout gets out of a van and begins skipping towards the door of a suburban home. Just before knocking, she stubs out a cigarette. The home is a safe house where an ex-cop, played by Whoopi Goldberg is hiding out. When she finally opens here series of comical front doors and locks, we see Curry dressed as a Girl Scout and speaking with a thick, Middle-European accent. Deadpan, Goldberg invites him in so she can buy cookies and ends up dead. The back and forth in this scene is wonderfully silly and sets a terrific tone for the rest of Loaded Weapon 1.
From there we will unite our Riggs and Murtagh characters, Emilio Estevez as the haunted and suicidal detective with nothing to lose, Sgt. Jack Colt, and family man detective, on the day before his retirement, Sgt. Wes Luger. Luger also has a tragic backstory where he nearly killed his partner and has since been unable to shoot a gun without shaking uncontrollably, a bit that pays off multiple times in Loaded Weapon 1. Each gag is better than the last.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
Classic Movie Review Untamed Heart
Movie Review Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice
Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice
Directed by David Price
Written by A.L Katz, Gilbert Adler,
Starring Terrence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman
Release Date January 29th, 1993
Published January 31st, 1993
Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is a bonkers disaster of a horror sequel. Produced 8 years after the original Stephen King adapted horror flick, the film is laughably out of touch with even the minor pleasures of the 1984 film. Comically inept director David Price, the son of the head of Dimension Studios at the time, starts bad and builds one unintentionally comic scene after another until the whole thing crashes off the rails in a beautifully unintentionally hilarious train wreck.
Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice begins in Gatlin, Nebraska, the setting of the original, Children of the Corn, where a group of children are being rescued. Somehow, 8 years later, law enforcement caught wind of what happened in Gatlin. Rather, they heard all of the adults had died and figured they should rescue the supposedly innocent children of Gatlin. I think that's what is happening but the comic ineptitude of the direction of Children of the Corn 2 makes it appear as if the kids boarded a bus in their new hometown and then immediately got off and joined new families.
Meanwhile, journalists are covering the carnage in Gatlin, specifically a newsman and his camera operator who stop for a moment to give our protagonist a hard time. Terrence Knox stars in Children of the Corn 2 as John Garrett, a tabloid journalist coming to cover the story. Out TV journalists mention that Garrett is a disgraced former TV reporter but that is not something that will ever come up again or be remotely important to his 'arc,' to use a phrase that barely applies.
After acting like High School bullies, the TV guys head to a nearby cornfield to shoot some B-Roll. This is the filler material you see editors use to transition from one part of a story to another. There, in one of the great unintentionally comic moments in this rather brilliant unintentional comedy, Corn comes to life and kills the TV guys. Stalks of literal corn come to life and use their sharp leaves to slice the throat of the cameraman while another corn stalk launches itself like Poseidon's Trident through the window of the newsman, impaling the reporter.
It's as if whoever wrote this opening sequence hadn't seen the original movie and believed it was literally about killer corn stalks. Oh, and this NEVER happens again in the movie. Yeah, the movie employs actual Corn as a killing device and then never uses this motif again. It's cheap schlock of the highest order, a bit of complete nonsense that is so tasty in its unintended brilliance that I can't help but admire how awesomely stupid this sequence is.
Back to our protagonist, he along with his son, are staying in the same neighboring town that the kids of Gatlin have been brought to. In fact, they are staying at a Bed and Breakfast with Micah (Ryan Bollman), who is the new leader of the Children of the Corn cult. It is Micah who now carries out the wishes of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. This essentially boils down to wearing black and having his voice pitched in a funny overdub intended to make him sound possessed by a demon. It's quite funny, especially when his sacred robe looks like a cozy Snuggie that he cut the arms off of.
The ineptitude of the scripting and direction of Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice is a perfect example of that sweet spot for so bad its good movies. It's so bad you might think it was done intentionally but so obvious that it comes from a lack of care and talent that it becomes kind of poignant. Poignant in that you almost feel bad laughing at the effort that went into creating something so very, very, unintentionally funny.
There are so many great so bad its good moments in Children of the Corn 2: The Final Sacrifice. A famous one finds the titular child cult menacing an old woman in an electric wheelchair. The kids have an R.C car and somehow, Micah uses his dark magic to hack the woman's wheelchair so that he can control it. Micah rolls the poor old lady into the street where she is hit by a car. This creates a remarkably funny visual in which a very obvious dummy in an electric wheelchair goes flying through a plate glass window, interrupting a bingo game. That Wheelchair Old Lady is not a meme is a missed opportunity for our entire culture.
Find my full length review at Horror.Media linked here.
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