Rather a lot of new material to start off the new year:
Alien3 (1992), in which lightning stubbornly refuses to strike a third time, no matter how many writers the studio hires and fires…
Bloody Moon (1981), in which boarding schools for language studies are every bit as hazardous to your health as any summer camp in New Jersey…
Full Moon High (1981), which is sort of like a very rarely funny three-way head-on collision among Teen Wolf, Airplane!, and Young Frankenstein…
In the Folds of the Flesh (1970), in which a damn good giallo unaccountably decides to suck with all its might for the last half hour…
Murder at the Baskervilles (1937), which the folks at Astor Pictures would like you to mistake for a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles, even though it is both two years older than that movie and British…
Stargate (1994), which is a good deal better than any Dean Devlin-Roland Emmerich production has any business being…
and…
A Study in Scarlet (1933), in which Sherlock Holmes evidently got impatient waiting around for someone to invent the slasher movie.
#1 by JessicaR on January 18, 2009 - 10:22 pm
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Stargate is one of those movies I wish was worse, as it just reaches the heights of mediocrity. With such a cool premise and James Spader it should either be a low budget outright disaster that’s fun to watch burn or well done piece that likely did jack at the box office but found second life on home video. How apt that for the most part it looks and feels like a very expensive pilot to a tv series.
#2 by Tom Meade on January 19, 2009 - 2:20 am
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I remember loving Stargate as a kid, though. I even had the novelisation of the film, and I think I read it at least as many times as Jurassic Park (which is saying something). Then one day around the turn of the century it came on TV and completely failed to engage me. I was heart-broken. It’s a common tale but it’s hard when it happens to you.
A Study In Scarlet sounds pretty fascinating, at least in terms of influence, although the P.O.V. shots sound like something out of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.
#3 by Blake Matthews on January 19, 2009 - 8:43 am
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I grew to like Alien 3 as time went on. I had a Sigourney Weaver crush back then, so I was sad to see her die. I need to revisit that series one of these days; I only saw Alien: Resurrection once.
#4 by The Rev. D.D. on January 19, 2009 - 9:27 am
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I’ve still not seen Alien3. Even sadder, I was dragged to the theater to see Resurrection.
I only saw Stargate once, years ago, but I remember thinking it was a decent piece of fluff. Now thanks to Tom I’m afraid to watch it again.
#5 by Tom Meade on January 19, 2009 - 10:18 am
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I was hardly a discriminating viewer at time of reappraisal, mind. I think that was around the same time I saw Battlefield Earth at the cinema and declared it a minor classic. I’ve given-up trying to figure these things out.
Although speaking of differences of opinion, given all the love for her around these parts it’s kind of funny that the main memory I have of Alien 4 is my uncle reading about it in Entertainment Weekly and declaring “Who the HELL would want to ressurect Sigourney Weaver?”
#6 by Blake Matthews on January 19, 2009 - 10:45 am
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When I told my missionary roomates that I once thought Sigourney Weaver was one of the greatest women ever created, they looked at me as if I were some guy who walked up and down the street accusing chestnuts of being lazy.
#7 by Zack on January 19, 2009 - 11:33 am
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I like Alien3 almost entirely for the fact that it was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw in theaters; for it and Die Hard 2, I have a thorouhgly undeserved patience.
Great reviews, as always. Santo, have you had a chance to see the “extended cut” of A3? It doesn’t do much to correct any of the movie’s flaws, but unlike the director’s cuts of Alien and Aliens, I’d say it’s quite a bit better than the theatrical version.
#8 by Blake Matthews on January 19, 2009 - 11:48 am
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I love Die Hard 2…a lot more than the third one, actually.
#9 by rjschwarz on January 19, 2009 - 12:52 pm
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I liked Alien3 initially and was always hurt that nobody else liked it. Yeah the guys looked a like but the alien was part dog and that was pretty cool. Then I realized that it seemed more like a sequel to the first Alien. Ripley crashes and she’s all alone, survivors from the Sulaco, all gone. Just a robot head which could easily have been Ash with a little rewriting. It seemed such a massive waste to sort of erase Aliens that way. Then again Alien3 looked awesome by comparison to Alien 4.
#10 by El Santo on January 19, 2009 - 1:47 pm
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“A Study In Scarlet sounds pretty fascinating, at least in terms of influence, although the P.O.V. shots sound like something out of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.”
Rouben Mammoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde may very well have been the immediate inspiration for the killer’s POV cam, but the uses to which the two movies put the first-person camera are completely different. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the first-person perspective both opens the movie and introduces us to Jekyll, and the first image it shows us is the doctor’s face in a mirror. Mammoulian, in essence, is forcefully inviting us to identify with Jekyll. In A Study in Scarlet, the technique is used as a showy but cheap way to keep the killer’s identity hidden, and if I had to name one specific scene from another film that it reminds me of most closely, it would be the one in Friday the 13th when the hitchhiking counsellor gets picked up by Mrs. Voorhees. It even has the killer holding up his end of the conversation completely via gestures, so that we aren’t tipped off by hearing his voice.
#11 by El Santo on January 19, 2009 - 1:49 pm
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“have you had a chance to see the “extended cut” of A3?”
Honestly, I didn’t even know it existed until last night.
#12 by KeithA on January 19, 2009 - 4:39 pm
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Full Moon High!!! THat’s the movie I saw part of a couple weeks ago and found myself thinking, “What the hell is this?”
#13 by Tom Meade on January 19, 2009 - 8:08 pm
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Yeah I’m not willing to argue that there was any high artistic purpose behind it, especially since I haven’t even seen the film.
#14 by MatthewF on January 20, 2009 - 4:15 am
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I like Alien3 for being a film that seemingly has no truck whatsoever in pandering to the audience, though I can see why people don’t like it. I was please though that El Santos reasons for disliking it had nothing to do with the complaint that you can’t tell the prisoners apart or understand them because they have funny accents, which has been a major bug-bear of mine in previous reviews of the movie.
#15 by Read MacGuirtose on March 15, 2009 - 4:56 pm
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OK, making another months-late post that nobody will read (though only two months late–see; I’m catching up!)…
OK, I don’t get a chance to see that many movies, and most of the movies you review here I’ve never heard of, let alone seen, but I’ve seen Stargate, and… wow, you were way more complimentary toward it than I would have been. When I saw it, I thought it was dumb as rocks; I so detested the movie that I never had any interest in watching the TV series when it came out, figuring it was unlikely that anything good could come of something based off a movie that stupid. (Then again, in retrospect perhaps I should have given the series a chance; I loved the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, even though by all accounts (including yours a few posts ago), the movie (which I haven’t seen) was an idiotic mess.)
Then again, like I said, I don’t see that many movies, so maybe I’m just not as experienced with the lower part of the bell curve as you are. I guess maybe in comparison to many of the subjects of your reviews, Stargate may not be too bad. Also, I admit I’ve only seen it once, and it was a long time ago; maybe if I saw it again I’d think it wasn’t as bad as I remember. Though I’m not particularly eager to put that to the test…