The World According to Garp Movie Review

I have so many memories from my childhood of my mother watching The World According to Garp that I think there must have been a stretch of time when it was on TV nearly every day. I thought it a bizarre movie then and I find it a bizarre movie now. George Roy Hill directed this adaptation of John Irving’s novel, which I’ve never read. But I won’t let that prevent me from speculating on something I’d be willing to bet the book does that the movie fails to.

Classic Movie Review from My Collection: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

A strange alien ship sits in a forest clearing. Small brown creatures rustle around in the brush. In 1982, anyone who’d seen a commercial or trailer for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial knew the story. But keeping in mind that when movies are written, filmed, and edited there is usually no concept of the marketing campaign to come, one might have surmised through this opening that it was Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all know the story now and it’s far from it. The two films are hardly even kindred spirits, so different are they in tone and execution.

Friday the 13th Part III Movie Review

My greatest recollection of this film was the hokey use of 3D. I never saw it in that format because it was only available that way in cinemas, but you can spot the moments in the film that are meant to have shit popping out of the screen into your face.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

Friday the 13^th Part III was part of the 1980s’ short-lived craze with 3D cinema exposition. That incarnation of the technology was nothing like the more immersive 3D we see so often today. It was a rehashing of the old 1950s style of having things pop out of the screen at your face. Watching a movie like that on TV means having to endure shot compositions contrived to have knives, pitchforks and eyeballs directed toward the camera. Its artificiality calls attention to itself in a way that instantly draws you out of the film. Even without such antics, Part III would still be a spectacularly bad movie.

Horror Classic Movie Review: Poltergeist

I remember watching this quite young because it was a popular movie when I was a kid and my whole family watched it, I think. Of course, I identified with the boy in the film and I even had a tree outside my bedroom window.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews

My memories of Poltergeist resonate from my childhood when I was scared almost senseless by the supernatural spirits that haunt the Freeling household in a California suburb. As I watched it again many years later I realized that probably as a child I saw my own family in the Freelings. There’s Diane (JoBeth Williams), who is a housewife raising three kids: the teenaged Dana (Dominique Dunne); middle child Robbie (Oliver Robins) and the five or six year old Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Steven (Craig T. Nelson) is a local realtor and stalwart Dad who wants to protect his family. I must have been about Carol Anne’s age when I first saw the film. I have an older brother and sister just like she does and my parents were also in their mid-30s back then. I even had a large tree growing outside my bedroom window just to cap off the similarities.

Madman Movie Review

I had a fleeting memory of the opening scene of this film which I knew involved someone telling a story round the campfire about a psycho killer living in the woods whose name, when uttered loudly enough, will summon him to kill again. Then some dick calls out, "Madman Marz! Come and get us Marz!" I thought I had another memory of the ending of the movie, but watching it for this series I discovered that I might never have seen the whole thing and that other memory must belong to some other movie.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

Madman is an obvious knock-off of Friday the 13^th, which was itself trading on the success of Halloween. It’s the old premise of sticking a group of young people in the woods and sending a psychopath after them. Like Friday the 13^th, this is a camp of some sort. The opening titles inform us that it’s a camp for “gifted children,” a fact that is not once made relevant during the course of the film’s 90 minutes. In fact, we rarely see the children and they have virtually no bearing on the story except as an explanation for the presence of several young adults for the slaughter.

Important Cinema Anniversaries Marked in 2012

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Old Movie Review of Tron: Not exactly a classic, but a staple long missing from my diet

It’s easy to forget in the digital age, when nearly every film (a nearly obsolete word, come to think of it), if not shot digitally, has some digital elements, that computer computer generated images had its origin somewhere. CGI and digital technology inundate movies nowadays. They’re used to build action sequences from the ground up; create fantastic creatures; eliminate unwanted elements such as safety wires, boom mikes, and even an actor’s skin imperfections, from the frame.

Disney Studios’ Tron was one of the first feature films to employ heavy use of 3D CGI animation. It’s remarkable to consider that only eleven years passed between this film and Jurassic Park, two films that are hardly in the same league as far as CGI animation goes. And yet the latter film owes a great debt of gratitude to the former.

Classic Movie Review: Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

“The course of true love never did run smooth.” – Lysander in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And nor does this film.

Woody Allen’s 1982 film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is one of the lesser films in the Allen oeuvre. It carries through most of the major themese that have captured his attention throughout his career: marriage; love; infidelity; the inexplicability of attraction and lust. But this time they are manifested in a rather unique approach.

The usual pantheon of Allen characters is represented, to be sure. Allen himself plays Andrew, another version of the nebbish; Mia Farrow (making her first of 11 appearances in a Woody Allen film) is Ariel, the highly desirable woman; Mary Steenburgen is Adrian, the potentially jilted wife; Tony Roberts is Max, the lecherous best friend; Julie Haggerty is Dulcy, the nymphet; and the great José Ferrer is Leopold (such a bold name for a bold part), the pragmatic intellectual. But what’s unique is the setting of a country house in the late 20th century and the adhesion to metaphysics and mystical happenings.