You needn't reach for the proverbial fine-toothed comb to locate snags. The scriptwriter, like a broken-thumbed piano player, hits nearly as many false notes as true, and there is a surfeit of misfit romanticism spread over the tarnished central trio and their -- or actually only one's -- quest to …
A World War II submarine adventure of a sort that already seemed outdated as of, oh, twenty-five years previous — roughly the date of that sympathetic Hollywood portrait of the embittered, weary, but still cunning U-boat commander: The Enemy Below. The main idea of how to rise above the war-movie …
Horror shocker with numerous actual shocks, from the maker of Raw Meat: Gary Sherman. While offering no narrative invention on the level of the earlier movie, this one nonetheless takes full advantage of the horror genre's -- and specifically the zombie subgenre's -- easy access to the subject of death. …
Evil is afoot in Andrew Wyeth farm country, where a sect of isolationist religious fanatics identified as "Hittites" (they, we are told, "make the Amish look like swingers") keep guard against the influence of the "incubus," and turn a cold shoulder to the brazen Hollywood starlets who occupy the farms …
Penelope Spheeris's documentary on the punk-rock phenomenon in Los Angeles, or at least those aspects of it which can fit comfortably under her chosen title. "It's the only form of revolution left in the Eighties," philosophizes Robert Biggs, publisher of the punk organ, Slash. But on the evidence, it isn't …
The year is 1997, the entire island of Manhattan has been converted into a walled prison, and the black-shirted security police are headquartered at the foot of the Statue of Liberty (how ironic!). Things, in short, have changed a bit -- but director John Carpenter still has mashed potatoes for …
Actually, it's lots of eyes for a couple of eyes, when Chuck Norris's narcotics-squad partner gets bumped off and, shortly thereafter, so does the deceased's girlfriend. Formula action film, with such ingredients as dewy damsel, comic-relief martial-arts master, crooked cop, corporate villain, and invincible henchman "built like a Sherman tank." …
The inauguration of Eric Rohmer's Comedies and Proverbs series, and the sense of a New Beginning is perhaps underscored by the scraping-off of surface polish and the return to early-New-Wave roughness. (The movie was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35.) The situations border on, or cross over into, …
The metaphor of the title — the police station as a lonely sanctuary in hostile territory — is at least as evocative as any of Joseph Wambaugh's Blue Knight-New Centurion-Choirboy metaphors for the modern policeman. A more appreciative eye for the feathered Indian decorations on the station-house walls and for …
John Fowles's Victorian-age romance has been interwoven with a modern-day romance between the two lead actors starring in a screen adaptation of that book -- not between the two real-life actors, Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, but between two fictional actors who are played by the aforementioned two real ones. …
As pretty a movie as you could ever want to see -- perhaps an odd claim to make for one confined for almost its entire length to a police-station interrogation room. But because of that very confinement, director Claude Miller, his photographer, and his set designer could concentrate on getting …
The sequel picks up immediately where its predecessor left off, or actually backtracks a few minutes for a brief refresher. Jamie Lee Curtis has plainly aged a bit since the "boogey man" went over the balcony (three years, to be exact), but that's understandable after the sort of night she's …
Sci-fi comedy for devotees seven and under. Two state-of-the-art androids (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters under thick coats of lacquer) go AWOL from the repair shop, accompanied by a cruder, joke-telling robot called Catskill, and pursued by something called Crimebuster, a Panzer-like contraption equipped with blaring loudspeaker and blazing guns. …