When Immovable Corruption Meets Unstoppable Corruption. MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE is a clickbait title. It tells us it’s going to push the mainstream narrative that FBI Associate Director William Mark Felt singlehandedly brought down the corrupt Nixon administration in 1974, by leaking anonymously to the press during Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Nicknamed “Deep Throat” by … Read More
THE RELIC
Horror Movie Handbook meets Callous Director. Another good scientific story sacrificed to Hollywood’s Lowest Common Denom. THE RELIC finds a field researcher dabbling in tribal drugs on the dark continent shipping a crate containing a strange fungus back to his lab at the Chicago Natural History Museum. Also in the crate is a relic of an ancient god that could … Read More
DREAMCATCHER
Same Shit Different Director. So why is it that films made from Stephen King’s stories turn out, for the most part, to be movies that look as if they’d been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home For the Terminally Inept? — Harlan Ellison, Oct 1984, “In Which We Scuffle Through The Embers” (Magazine of S&SF). DREAMCATCHER … Read More
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
A Spielberg fantasy done horribly right. What if the United States Military actually possessed a shred of decency and humanity? Shyeh! What if. In SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the people who type the “Sorry Your Son’s Dead” letters for the Warmongers Who Send Sons Off To Die notice that three letters are addressed to the Ryan family of Anytown USA. Seems … Read More
TRUE ROMANCE
Delicious Vicious, Frantic Romantic. A brazen thug-fest, played like an adventure story for boys. Tony Scott (TOP GUN, DAYS OF THUNDER) directs TRUE ROMANCE, but it’s got Quentin Tarantino‘s stank all over it – delicious dialogue juggled with vicious gun play. Though Tarantino is listed only as “writer,” TRUE ROMANCE seems to be the middle child of what could be … Read More
PASSENGER 57
Plain Plane Pain. Wesley Snipes is airline security specialist Cutter, who is the titular PASSENGER 57 onboard a flight when it is hijacked by British terrorists trying to escape the FBI (Bruce Payne as Charles Rane (who falls mainly on the plane), and a strikingly beautiful Elizabeth Hurley as his Bad Girl). Wesley must use his patented Wesley-Kwon-Do to bring … Read More
PEARL HARBOR
Pearl Before Swine. In garish detail and stunning investigative probing, PEARL HARBOR digs deep below the surface of the gasoline embargoes and jingoistic fomenting and reveals exactly what this WWII conflict was all about – the love triangle between three young American Models. You see, Ben loves Kate. And Kate loves Ben. But Ben’s best friend, Josh, also likes Kate. … Read More
RED PLANET
Blue-Skying Salmon Sky. The OTHER Mission to Mars. In March 2000, Gary Sinise and Tim Robbins, under director Brian de Palma, went to Mars ignorantly. In November of that same year, Hollywood synergy (read as plagiarism) sends Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss and director Antony Hoffman to the same planet just as ignorantly, in RED PLANET. In 2050, Earth is such … Read More