ORBzine Movie Reviews May 2001
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Free Enterprise
This hilarious comedy about the lives and loves of a couple of Trekkies,
once geeks but now almost turning thirty, the bedrock of the media industry.
We get a couple of references to
Logan's Run
, to highlight their coming-of-age fear.
They regard it as a classic - which implies that they haven't read the
original book which it was based on.
William Shatner has a couple of hilarious supporting roles as both the idealised version of himself [a geek kid's imaginary friend] and the real Shatner, a hilarious parody of himself.
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Quintet
This was written, directed and produced by
Robert Altman
. It features Paul Newman and Fernando Rey,
who tramp around an icy wasteland and bump into a small cast of virtual
unknowns.
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The Fog
This is
John Carpenter
's post-
Halloween
film.
The action is set in a small coastal town
a hundred years after a shipwreck.
The ghosts of drowned lepers come back to kill off the supporting cast,
while the stars [
Jamie lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Adrienne Barbeau
] are in nominal danger.
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Altered States
William Hurt and Bob Balaban play a pair of scientists who experiment with
sensory deprivation.
Hurt takes the experiment too far, and physically regresses himself into
an ape-man.
This seems to have inspired the later film
The Relic
.
This was directed by the infamous Ken Russell , and the most obvious hallmark is the use of sacreligious imagery.
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Bone Yard, The
A strange goo turns small fluffy animals [including a poodle]
into psychotic mutant monsters, which run wild in a High School.
Phylis Diller is the only recognisable name. She's an old lady who owns the dog.
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Witchboard
This is a low-budget suspense/horror flick from the late 1980s.
Some twenty-somethings play with a ouiji-board at a party.
In following weeks the token babe,
Tawny Kitaen
, uses the board again and becomes addicted to it [!!!].
This ends in full-blown Possession by an evil ghost.
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Squirm
This is basically a remake of The Birds,
but with worms instead of wildfowl.
In a remote US town, an electricity pylon is knocked down in a storm
and the electricity [like vinegar] forces the worms out of the ground.
It doesn't get any more interesting than this.
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Stepford Wives
Katharine Ross
plays a career woman who moves, with her husband and children,
to the New England town of Stepford. She befriends
Paula Prentiss
, another new arrival, and together they realise how out of place they are.
The women of the town, typified by a plasticky
Nanette Newman
, are wooden little cooking-and-cleaning obsessives.
The two womens' libbers try to liberate the housewives,
and inject some dissent into paradise.
They have a bitch session, which fails dismally.
The film tries to explore the 1970s conflict of sexism versus grrl power, but it could also be a conflict between selfishness and practicality. There is an undercurrent of paranoia to the film, as the women try to discover what has robbed the housewives of their free will. Everything seems to centre around the town's Mens' Club ... This was filmed from a screenplay by William Goldman , based on an original novel by Ira Levin . Levin's other famous work from this period is Rosemary's Baby , which has a very similar theme: a woman who moves into an unfamiliar environment, alienated from her neighbours and her husband. The other film that shows similarities is Dawn of the Dead , insofar as it is a social commentary that parodies aspects of American society. Of note, one of Ross's children is played by a very young Mary Stuart Masterson .
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Sleepstalker
A serial killer called the Sandman murders a family,
and only a young boy survives.
Seventeen years later the serial killer is on the loose again,
thanks to the Church of Satan.
The boy, now grown up to look like C Thomas Howell,
has the chance of a rematch.
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Dreamscape
Dennis Quaid plays a psychic sports-gambler recruited by shrinks Max Von Sydow [
Flash Gordon
] and
Kate Capshaw
. The doctors use psychics to enter the dreams of patients and discover
the source of their mental anguish.
The film gets a storyline from the fact that the project is funded by
sinister bureaucrat Christopher Plummer and his sociopathic co-worker
David Patrick Kelly.
George Wendt plays a journalist who is suspicious of Plummer's sinister plotting ...
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Mosquito
A bunch of forest rangers are caught between some crazy rednecks and a
swarm of gigantic mosquitos. Gunnar Hanson, star of
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, lets loose on the beasties with a big chainsaw.
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Gorgo
Bill Travers [Born Free] discovers a dinosaur off the coast of Ireland.
He captures it and ships it back to London for display ...
Does all this sound familiar? And you can guess how it ends.
Yes, the Irish version of Godzilla crushes London.
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Hell Mountain [AKA "Chained Heat 3"]
This is a terrible piece of low-budget post-apocalyptic crap.
The villain controls a mining complex,
but the ore can only be collected by sexy young women.
As a result he has his men conscript every shaggable female in every
nearby village, including the hero's girlfriend.
The hero [who dresses like Han Solo] goes on a quest to rescue her.
The film is basically a tits&ass extravaganza. Sarah Douglas is the evil bi-sexual bitch-queen, while Jack Scalia pops up as the hero's mentor. He's a bit young and boring to be Yoda, but that seems to be the writer's intent.
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Two-Fisted Tales
This is an anthology of short stories, tied together with inserts of an insane
Bill Sadler [
Roswell High
]. It was Executive Produced by five of the biggest names in Hollywood:
Joel Silver, David Giler,
Walter Hill,
Robert Zemeckis and
Richard Donner.
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Moon 44
This movie is about a futuristic unit of helicopter gunships,
operating from a base that resembles film sets recycled from the movie
Aliens
. Michael Pare and Brian Thompson are pilots,
selected from prison Dirty Dozen style.
There is even a token female on the base,
Lisa Eichhorn
. Malcolm McDowell [also the bad guy in gunship movie Blue Thunder]
is the base commander,
secretly responsible for re-routing valuable shuttle cargoes to the enemy
for personal gain. He wants Pare dead, and uses Master-Sergeant Leon Rippy
to do his dirty work ...
The pilots are teamed with navigators, cliched techno-nerd teenagers who act as back-seat drivers over a radio link. However, there is tension between the two groups ... The story, which involves a lot of character interaction, was written in part by Roland Emmerich. This must have been his first pairing with Dean Devlin, who plays one of the Navigators. Leon Rippy has also been in most of their films. How sad to think their work has badly gone downhill since then.
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Powder
A small-town Sheriff [Lance Hendriksen -
Aliens]
finds an albino orphan who had been kept in the family basement all his life.
Mary Steenburgen introduces the young lad, named Powder [Sean Patrick Flannery -
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
] into society, and it turns out he has supernatural powers involving
electricity and magnetism.
Jeff Goldblum [ Body Snatchers ] is a scientist who investigates. Victor Salva directed this.
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