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Reviews
Cat's Eye (1985)
A film called "Product from Stephen King"
Keep moving, folks....nothing to see here. Cat's Eye is a tired retread of select anthology stories from Stephen King's first short story compilation "Night Shift", and something is definitely lost in the translation...namely, any shred of intrigue, suspension of disbelief, character development, etc. Three rather brief ( the operative word here ) but enjoyable shorts from King's anthology are threaded together with a narrative line lead by the main character of the film, a cat that wanders from place to place, injecting itself into the lives of people it comes across. Along the way, we're given insight into three mean-spirited, black-humored segments that play like the worst of the Twilight Zone, or the drek of its distant cousin, the Outer Limits. Moral justice is metered out, adversity is overcome, bad guys with the depth of tissue paper are introduced, steroetypes are on parade and Central casting makes a fortune trotting out no name, no talent B actors to fill in the character holes so that legitimate actors like James Woods and Alan King have someone to deliver their lines to when they turn to talk.
Avoid this film. It was written specifically by King for Drew Barrymore, who acts as well as any cute 8 year old juvenile can who is coached the dialogue on the set....'nough said. The filmmakers, particularly director Lewis Teague, are guilty of exploiting her new-found fame at the time derived from ET, and stretching it to mind-numblingly bad exposition throughout the film.
Run, don't walk, to better King fare, such as Christine, The Shining or Stand by Me.
-Monstergarp
City Hall (1996)
Great Possibilities, no delivery....
City Hall is one of those hopeful yet ultimately frustrating films that never really delivers toward its potential. It's as if the characters, the plot, and the pacing of the film were kept apart throughout filming, and then only introduced in the editing room.
The film begins with a lackluster conflict, the accidental shooting of a child by a drug dealer with relatives in the NY mob families who looks as if he came directly from Central Casting, and acts just as stiff. Before we even know anything about this character, he's confronted by a possibly corrupt cop ( the entire background motivation and confusion regarding the cop's rational for meeting with the drug dealer alone, without backup and without reporting in first is left completely unresolved...don't look for answers by the end of the film), gunfire is exchanged, and everyone is dead, including the innocent child, who is clearly injected into this formula for nothing more than aesthetic/emotional purposes, and is treated like "cinema-chum", shot dead for instant sympathy by the audience, only to draw in the bigger fish in the water, the primary characters.
On the heels of the shooting, we are introduced to our principles, Al Pacino as the mayor, John Cusack as the deputy mayor, single-handedly managing the entirety of New York. The completely contrived setup of the administration of a city the size of New York being managed, at least from all appearances we are given on screen, by these two characters is beyond laughable...its' insipid. Very little backstory toward the actual operations of a City Hall, the interlying politics required to operate a major city, other than another contrived conversation between Al Pacino and Danny Aiello later in the film regarding quid pro quo negotiations for construction in a borough of the city.
The central plot of the movie springs from the reaction by City Hall to this one shooting incident, as the world is (we suppose) put on temporary pause for days afterward in New York by this event. Cusack abandons his supposed position with City Hall and becomes a knee-jerk Mickey Spilane, trodding beside Bridget Fonda on some half-ass investigation of the politics surrounding the now dead cop, suspected of corruption, and the question of why the drug dealer was ever on the streets in the first place, having been questionably released on parole years before. Everyone phones in their performances, which appears as if everyone approached the movie with high hopes, then got distracted by something better to do, (possibly calling their agents for better scripts once this movie started filming) and just showed up to through with the dialogue.
Numerous gaffs, faux pauxs regarding life in New York, cornball accents by Cusack, Fonda's character operating with the depth of a spring puddle, vanilla backgrounds, boring dialogue ( save Al Pacino's impassioned, yet ultimately weak tirades toward the shooting of James Bone and his personal conversations with Pappas) make for a really unsatisfying film....so much potential for more here.
Avoid it. As much as it pains me to recommend against Al Pacino and John Cusack, actors I really enjoy, City Hall just can't deliver and feels like a TV movie of the week.
Recommendations: Better political play on a national basis in Thirteen Days and the Contender.
Prophecy (1979)
Prophecy the movie is more complex than is being given credithere.
Reviewers of the film are quick to undercut its actual effectiveness as a film without realizing that many parts of the film succeed, including the tension of the characters against the beast, the horror of the beasts' attacks, the helplessness of man within nature, etc. Reviewers would be accurate to attack the cheesy effects, hokey dialogue at times and overall loss on energy in the film toward the climax, but there's much more going on here.
Prophecy is, at best, a) a departure for John Frankenheimer, b) a 70's horror movie with a social conscience and, c) not withstanding amateurish special effects, predictable dialogue and long-view shots of Talia Shire looking petrified beyond speech, an actually entertaining, somewhat surprisingly satisfying film. The novel created an intelligent, often compelling case for early environmentalism and the frightening consequences of doing nothing in light of the dangerous contamination of the Earth. Prophecy as a film suffers from a deplorable special effects deficiancy (case in point: at one point in the film, the monster is clearly "walking" on the dock with the courtesy of a mechanical dolly and hydraulic levers...uggh) as said before, but looking beyond this, the film's plotline does build tension, though it loses steam in the end, concluding with a rather lamely tacked-on "surprise" ending that is more befitting of the TV networks in the 70's. Frankenheimer captures a "land-locked" Jaws-like eating machine on film with a vengeance, and the subsequent carnage is, while unfortunate, in light of the circumstances that created the beast, understandable. The focal point of the movie, the beast itself, operates as a deranged ecological locomotive ( actually sounding like one onfilm at times ) hell-bent on taxing mankind for its misfortune.
Remarkably ( and most likely accidentally) the film achieved a perfect "of the moment" time slice capture of the late 70's era, replete with the worries, political movements, ambiguities and uncertainties of the time all woven within the backstory of the Indian's struggle against the papermill, global overpopulation, bigotry and commercialization at the expense of nature.
Beautiful scenery ( courtesy of British Columbia, circa 1978/1979), believable performances, particularly from Richard Dysart and Armand Assanti, combined with circumstances and sequences never actually realized on film before combine to make a pretty meaty B movie. Case in point, the opening sequence with the dogs and the cliff, the tunnels of the Indian village and their subsequent use later in the film. I saw this film when I was 11, and the memory of the camping family and their fate in the film has YET to leave me. Don't think I've ever camped again without recalling that scene...
I recommend the film without taking it as seriously as it seems to take itself, though the message of environmentalism is one worth listening to. The plot device of methyl mercury poisoning in Minimata, Japan is based on true life actual events, and is considerably more frightening than the sum of this movie, but is worth researching sometime.
- Monstergarp