Stephen King, on the overwhelming evidence of the movie adaptations, can seldom be bothered to develop one of his ideas, but then the ideas are seldom worth developing in the first place. The idea here -- the terrible burdensomeness of supernatural powers on their possessor -- is pretty much the …
Christopher Collet presents an image of Teenager of the Year, in the role of a normally rambunctious tenth-grader who can nonetheless pull himself together at appropriate moments for lofty displays of maturity. There are many such moments. The delicate situation, for all concerned, of a divorced mother trying to strike …
A trip to the recent past (1963), as though to a very strange place. And indeed the filmmakers trot out some truly horrible dresses, swimsuits, dance steps — but also some still irresistible pop songs: "Stand by Me," "Just One Look," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "One Fine Day," "Heat Wave." …
Potboiler whose pot contains a thin but exceedingly cloudy soup. Two Texas border patrollers unearth a jeep, a skeleton, a high-powered rifle, and $800,000. They trace the money back to Dallas, 1963, but can find no record of a robbery thereabouts in the newspaper archives. Of course, there was the …
They've studied the demographics, calculated their risk, and decided to stick out their necks on the bet that the movie audience contains more teenagers than Moral Majority members. The battle lines are drawn straight off, as John Lithgow, with turn-around collar, rants from the pulpit: "If He isn't testing us, …
After being mortally wounded and taken to the morgue, murderer Jason Voorhees spontaneously revives and embarks on a killing spree as he makes his way back to his home at Camp Crystal Lake.
Juzo Itami's first film (just ahead of Tampopo) sounds on paper to be a kind of Japanese Loved One, on a less comprehensive and more intimate scale, and it thus threatens to be perhaps a little insular in appeal. Half right. First half only. The degree to which it is …
Three parapsychologists, having had their academic grant rescinded and their research equipment confiscated, go into private practice as exterminators of any and all supernatural pests. Just in time, too. It seems that an Art Deco skyscraper on Central Park West has been designed as an antenna to pull in assorted …
Godzilla! I was hoping I'd never hear that name again, laments one of the cast of characters, in apparent innocence of the creature's frequent return visits in the company of Megalon, the Thing, the Smog Monsters, among others. The creature looks in better shape here than in some of those …
Three young people chasing big (or at least medium-sized) dreams in a Middle American small town. It was inevitable that a movie sooner or later would utilize MTV videos as a format for the fantasies of a Young Walter Mitty, and the couple of parodies (or remakes) of music videos …
Nobody is taken very much aback on meeting a pointy-eared furry little beast who speaks and sings in English, in a voice like Disney's Chip 'n' Dale. But after all, in this "typical" American small town (so beloved of executive producer Steven Spielberg), school is still in session on Christmas …
An abecedarian, biographical approach to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Jungle Man (never called by the name of Tarzan; called only by John Clayton, Earl of Greystoke). This approach ensures some dull stretches, as we pick up the story before birth, proceed through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, hit all the major milestones …
Pa and "Kid"; a laid-off construction worker and a laid-back surfer; "an asshole and a son of a bitch"; Paul Newman and Robby Benson (well, he has blue eyes, too). Nice and cute, but not, as the short story the offspring writes about his experiences is described, "profoundly moving and …
Characterization, from the pivotal people to the peripheral, is largely limited to, or supplanted by, the declarative first-person manifesto: "I want a relationship," "I want more from you," "I need to be on my own," "I gotta get serious," "I want to have her child," "I don't believe in orgasms," …
A sort of stretched-out version of Hemingway's The Killers, but not stretched out by way of flashbacks, like earlier screen treatments of The Killers itself, but rather with present-tense delaying tactics. Two London thugs have to transport a police informer from his hideaway in Spain to his scheduled retribution in …