The mating dance of a trailblazing, best-selling feminist author and a men's-magazine hedonist revives the Rock Hudson and Doris Day series of bedroom comedies, right down to the re-creation of the original period (1962) and the presence on screen of Tony Randall (although David Hyde Pierce takes the role that …
It might have proved a viable idea to emphasize the lock-up-your-daughters (and sweethearts) theme of the Dracula story, identifying the Count as an object of male sexual rivalry and envy. But this idea, if that's what the idea indeed was, is lost in the general turmoil, the swirling atmospherics, the …
Resurrection again! Writer-director Patrick Lussier, under the imprimatur of Wes Craven, has some genuine ideas to fiddle with. Dracula, pronounced "Dra-COOL-ya" by one who should know, does not register on camera any more than in a mirror. And his invisibility in mirrors, speaking of which, is used against him in …
Mostly tired vampire spoof, but pleasantly so, contentedly so, not ill-humoredly so. The fast-moving and soon-ending storyline confines itself to the various versions of the Bram Stoker prototype, and doesn't wander off on discursive side trips. The cast has plenty of fun with the accents, British, German, and Lugosian (Peter …
Guy Maddin's spinoff of, or takeoff from, a Mark Godden production for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The Canadian filmmaker has retained several remnants of dance (along with an Asian Count Dracula and nonstop excerpts from the first two Mahler symphonies), but not enough of them for the film to be …
Sam Raimi horror film for those who like their sadism to be gleeful. An old-fashioned gypsy curse, cast by an old gypsy of unprecedented repulsiveness (rotten dentures, coughed-up phlegm, milky eye, etc.), falls upon a girlish loan officer (Alison Lohman) who already has enough troubles in her life — a …
A burlesque of the same-named television series of the Fifties, or at least a burlesque of the main character of it. Dan Aykroyd has exactly the nail-file voice and fresh-mown hair to pass as the nephew of Jack Webb's Sgt. Friday, and the walking-anachronism brand of humor makes him rather …
Communication-from-beyond-the-grave chiller. Kevin Costner loses his wife in a Venezuelan bus mishap, searches the river in vain for her body, attends her memorial service, and performs a C-section that same day on a deceased mother in the ER, all before the end of the opening credits. A total nonbeliever ("When …
A Knight of the Old Code and a computer-generated talking dragon (cultured voice of Sean Connery) join forces to rid the realm of the evil ruler. Do all dragons talk? We don't know, because this is The Last Dragon, but no one in the late 10th Century seems taken aback …
Biopic -- no, hagiopic -- on the Hong Kong film star and so much more: cultural ambassador, martial-arts revolutionist, mixed-race family man. The source material is the memoir of Lee's widow (subtitle: The Man Only I Knew), so you know not to expect much iconoclasm. Even so, you might not …
Droll Japanese film about a small-town sawbones who, in the last days of the Second World War, wages a single-track battle against the spread of hepatitis (earning him the alias of "Dr. Liver") while the army medicos are overly concerned with typhus. The unprepossessing hero cuts an amusing figure, bustling …
Late-17th-century murder mystery, to which no solution is set forth. For us to be kept in the dark as to who did the evil deed seems admissable if our point of identification is meant to be the man who is framed for it. And insofar as this character -- the …
Eddie Murphy talks to the animals. More coarsely, and to commoner animals, than Rex Harrison talked. And they more coarsely in return: "Why do they call me a guinea pig, anyway? I'm not Italian, and I'm not pork." And no less boringly, in just more than half the time. With …
Variation on the late-Eighties theme of mind transference (or body transference or personality transference), effected this time by some faulty dream research. Newcomer Marc Rocco, paging in world-record time through the Movie Director's Handbook of Style, seizes the occasion to behave as if he were (or wished he were) Nicolas …