Dead Of Winter (1987)

Directed by: Arthur Penn
Written by: Marc Shmuger + Mark Malone
Starring: Mary Steenburgen, Roddy McDowell, Jan Rubes, William Russ, Ken Pogue, Wayne Robson, Mark Malone

Mary Steenburgen plays Katie, a down on her luck actress who is told that she is being considered to take over a film role that was being played by someone else who greatly resembles her. The casting director (Roddy McDoweel) tell her that the first actress had a breakdown and ran away from the set. She is taken to a snowbound country house in remote upstate New York to film an audition tape for the eldery, wheelchair bound producer (Jan Rubes.) After she arrives, things begin to look as if they are not what they seem. Katie soon realizes she is in incredible danger and attempts escape.

With a premise straight out of a 40's suspense melodrama, I didn't expect much from this film. Like most bad thrillers, the most entertaining portions of the film occur in the last twenty minutes, after the damsel in distress finally pieces things together and has to fight for her life. But the majority of the movie is just tedious set-up and scenes of Katie acting like an idiot as she uncovers what her hosts are really up to.

Is she so desperate for a job that she'd go to a remote house out in the country with a complete stranger, just to shoot an audition tape? If you see your drivers license burning in a fireplace, would you not automatically question your hosts? The movie is filled with situations where Katie is forced to do something stupid in order to move the story along. I've seen this so many times in so many of these kinds of movies, but at least sometimes it's exciting. Not here.



Like I said, things pick up in the last act. When Katie's evil Doppelgänger shows up, things get interesting, mainly because we get to see Steenburgen play two different roles, one timid and afraid, the other heartless and evil. Unfortunately for the film, but not for me, their final confrontation is so absurdly shot and choreographed, the scene intended to be tense turns out to be hilarious camp straight out of a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis thriller from the twilight of their careers.

To sum things up the movie isn't a complete disaster, it's just too derivative of films of the past, and doesn't add anything new to the 'woman in distress' thriller sub-genre. Steenburgen is pretty good, even if her character can be a complete idiot at times, and Roddy McDowell has some demented fun when the shit finally hits the fan during the climax.



Final Verdict: See It (if you don't mind cliches.)

Nickelodeon (1976)

Directed by: Peter Bogdanovich
Written by: Peter Bogdanovich + W.D. Richter
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, Tatum O'Neal, Brian Keith, Stella Stevens, John Ritter, Jane Hitchcock, Jack Perkins

This homage to the childhood days of the motion pictures starts in 1910, when the young attorney Leo Harrigan (Ryan O'Neal) by chance meets a motion picture producer. Immediately he's invited to become a writer for him - the start of a sensational career. Soon he's promoted to a director and shoots one silent movie after the other in the tiny desert village of Cacamonga with a small crew of actors. But the competition is hard: the patent agency sends out Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds) to sabotage them. When they visit L.A., his crew is surprised by a new species: fans!

This movie has many problems. The biggest one being it's running time. At over two hours, it's just way too long for a comedy, especially one that aspires to recreate the screwball humor of the olden days. The second problem is the confusing tone. One moment it's a love story, the next it's a slapstick comedy, then it's a history of early filmmaking, then it's a melodrama, then back to comedy. Repeat that for over two hours and things get pretty tiresome. Because of the constant jerking of the tone, none of the leads make much of an impression with their characters.


The slapstick comedy that worked so well in director Bogdanovich's hilarious 'What's Up Doc?' falls flat on it's face here. If Bogdanovich hadn't used such a heavy-handed slapstick, there might have emerged a fond tribute to the pioneering days of silent films in the early part of the 20th Century. But instead, he has filled the movie with a whole series of non-stop sight gags that become tiresome and repetitious, even more so because none of the characters involved really come to life. As the pretty heroine of the piece, Jane Hitchcock has very limited abilities beyond staring wide-eyed into the camera lens. Burt Reynolds at least does derive several good chuckles from his comedy efforts as a reluctant participant in the troupe of silent film actors. Younger and elder O'Neal are not too bad, but Ryan is never as funny as he was in 'What's Up Doc?' and Tatum, whose performance in 'Paper Moon' is still the best child performance ever on film, isn't very memorable here.

Technically, the film is handsomely produced and pleasing to look at in color, but it plods along without the benefit of a tight script or a really compelling story and suffers, mainly, from the heavy-handed approach to comedy.


Final Verdict: Skip It

1969 (1986)

Directed by: Ernest Thompson
Written by: Ernest Thompson
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Kiefer Sutherland, Bruce Dern, Mariette Hartley, Winona Ryder, Joanna Cassidy

Kiefer Sutherland plays Scott, a naïve and idealistic 19-year-old who attends college with his best friend Ralph (Downey Jr.) to avoid being drafted into the army and shipped out to Vietnam, the fate that has befallen his older brother. The film focuses on the boy's experiences during their last summer of innocence, but nothing much really happens. They go to San Francisco, sit in a bar, then come straight home again. Ralph has a bad LSD trip, while Scott falls in love with Ralph's younger sister (Ryder,) and grows increasingly adrift from his war-hero father (Dern) over the war in Vietnam. Even though the film takes place in 1969, nothing of that era is successfully captured here, and the presence of three young stars of the 80's doesn't help either.

Watching it, you sit there waiting for something meaningful to happen, something interesting that might make you give a damn about the people involved. You wait and you wait, and finally, five minutes from the end credits, the film pulls an 'inspiring' and 'uplifting' scene that is truly horrible to watch. I really mean that – it's horrible. I couldn't believe it was actually happening, or that a screenwriter of any merit would expect us to believe that the characters' deeply ingrained convictions about a subject as complex as that which he has tried to tackle could be swept aside so superficially.



Final Verdict: Skip It

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Directed by: Fritz Lang
Written by: Charles Einstein; Casey Robinson
Starring: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Barrymore Jr., James Craig, Ida Lupino

Famed European director Fritz Lang was responsible for such classics as 'Metropolis,' 'M,' and 'Scarlet Street,' among others. However, he made this film when his career was, sadly, in decline.

The plot involves a group of newspaper reporters trying to 'scoop' the others by finding out the identity of a mysterious serial killer murdering young women in New York City. The reporter who gets the scoop will be given a powerful position at the newspaper. What follows is an overlong, contrived, often dumb film filled with too many characters and too many subplots.

Out of the large cast, the only two performers who salvage their characters from the muddled script are George Sanders and Ida Lupino, who play an ambitious reporter and his scheming gossip columnist lover.

The cinematography at times is interesting and you can tell Lang hadn't completely lost his touch yet. The sequences involving the killer are particularly well shot and suspenseful. The rest of the movie, however, is pretty flat.



Final Verdict: Skip It

Women's Prison (1955)

Directed by: Lewis Seiler
Written by: Jack DeWitt
Starring: Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Cleo Moore, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter, Howard Duff

Sadly, there's not really much to say about this 50's women in prison melodrama. It's one of those movies that haven't aged well at all, and remain as interesting as a bucket of dust. The usually excellent Ida Lupino stars as the cruel warden in charge of the female side of a co-ed prison facility. After a female inmate gets pregnant, Ida Lupino's warden goes into a frenzy. She ends up beating the pregnant woman to death, and this results in the other gals rioting.

I haven't seen many of these so-called 'women in cages' films, but this film seems to mark the turning point when these types of films, up until then regarded as respectable dramas, transformed into sleazy exploitation.

Final Verdict: Skip It