ORBzine Movie Reviews November 2000
| TITLE & REVIEW | VIDEOS
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Fright Night 2
This may be a sequel, but it is far better than the original.
The plot is somewhat similar to the first one.
In fact, it is pretty much the same script but without the cliches.
It starts one year on from the events of the first film. Charley (the teenage hero) is in College now, and has a new girlfriend - so his efforts in rescuing Amanda Bearse were wasted. Roddy McDowell ( Planet of the Apes ) is back, but while he believes in Vampires Charley is seeing a psychiatrist in an effort to forget about them. McDowell has some new neighbours move in, and Charley suspects they are blood-suckers. They are a far more interesting bunch than in the first time. The leader is the babelicious Julie Carmen, who is reminiscent of Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn . Her ghoul is Brian Thompson ( X-Files, Kindred: the Embraced ), who eats insects (a la Renfield in Dracula ) - and knows their latin names! Other vamps are a roller-skating African-American and a shaggy-sideburned nerd type who would rather shag women than drink their blood. |
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Wes Craven's New Nightmare
This is
Wes Craven
's attempt to bring the dead villain back for one last scare
. The film centres around the actress
Heather Langenkamp
, who played Nancy in the first film and here plays herself.
Ten years after
Nightmare on Elm Street
she has a husband and a ten-year-old son.
Everything seems fine and rosy, but there is a worm in the apple.
Heather receives some anonymous phone calls from someone who sounds like Freddy. Her son is suffering from sleep deprivation. As the film progresses, things get more and more frightening ... Heather's co-stars Robert Englund and John Saxon appear, playing themselves. Wes Craven himself pops up to give exposition. The film has an anti-censorship theme. To start with, it points out that children have always enjoyed scary stories such as Hansel & Gretal. Also, Craven states that his film is about an evil that is controlled by storytellers, but when the story is forgotten (or banned) then the evil is freed. Finally, the nanny state rears its ugly head when Heather's son is hospitalised and Heather herself falls victim to interfering bureaucracy. This is one of the few films where there are earthquakes in California! |
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Poltergeist III
Nancy (Heather O'Rorke), the little blonde girl from the first two films,
is farmed out to her mother's sister (
Nancy Allen
) and her hubby (Tom Skerritt -
Space Camp
). However, the villainous ghost from the second movie follows her ...
Lara Flynn Boyle is the token babe. |
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Friday the 13th Part 3
This starts with the end of the second film,
where Jason wears a cloth sack over his head like the Elephant Man.
He is left for dead, but as ever ...
The local trailer trash listen to a media broadcast that a mass murderer is on the loose in the area. They take this as an opportunity to investigate a mysterious figure loitering around their back yard ... As always in this series, a group of teenagers take a holiday beside Crystal Lake. Jason is seen only in the shadows at first, though near the end he dons the famous hockey mask! The climax is taken from both the first and second films. |
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Conan the Barbarian
John Milius
brings to life the most famous creation of
Robert Ervin Howard
. This was the first major starring role of
the Austrian weightlifter Arnold Schwartzenegger (
End of Days
).
The story is pieced together from a number of Howard's yarns, not all of which featured Conan. To start with we get an encounter with a witch-woman that originally happened to Bran Mak Morn. Then Conan goes to the big city and meets mega-babe Sandahl Bergman , in a scene lifted straight from the early Conan stories. The arch-villain is Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones - Star Wars ), who was originally a villain in a story about Kull the Conquerer. Max von Sydow ( Flash Gordon ) has a cameo as the King who sends Conan on his quest. Mako ( ) is a wise man that Conan and his companions encounter en route. The result may not be entirely true to the works of Robert E Howard, but it is a magnificent Swords and Sorcery film - a true masterpiece.
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Puppet Masters, The
This was based on the novel by
Robert A Heinlein
, which inspired
The Body Snatchers
and
The Faculty
. Donald Sutherland (
Space Cowboys
) plays a US Government investigator who is researching into UFO sightings.
Eric Thal plays his son, another agent. Keith David (
Pitch Black
) pops up too, as does Yaphet Kotto (
Alien
), Marshall Bell (
Total Recall
) and Andrew Robinson (
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
).
The climax comes from The Satan Bug in the 1960s. However, it is refreshing to see something slightly different from the usual formulaic crap. If only slightly. |
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Tomorrow Never Dies
From the introductory titles with the
Sheryl Crowe
theme tune, we know that this is going to be a very flashy hi-tech film.
It is quite unlike the other Bond films in this respect,
because they relied on charm. Hell, they HAD charm!
The updated look of the film is blatant. Secret Intelligence Service (Formerly MI6) now has a token black guy. The villain (Jonathan Pryce - ) is a Media Baron who has decided that making the news is more fun than just reporting it. There are joky references that liken the villain to both Bill Gates and Robert Maxwell. Bond's only tool is a silly gadget, the swiss army cell-phone. Nice piece of product placement. The normal Gadget Room is shown later, courtesy of the People's Republic of China. There is also a rather silly car chase that features a product-placement BMW that Bond drives by remote-control with the mousepad on his cell-phone! The two main Bond babes are in their thirties. The villain's wife is Teri Hatcher , then a top TV star thanks to Lois & Clark . The other babe is Michelle Yeoh , well-known on the Hong Kong martial-arts movie scene. The climax is set amid the spectacular islands in Thailand that we last saw in The Man With The Golden Gun. |
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Volcano
Tommy Lee Jones (
Space Cowboys
) is an LA city employee assigned to investigate strange deaths
in an underground tunnel near a newly-built subway line.
He discovers that geological activity is taking place, so calls in geologist
Anne Heche
. Of course, this kind of movie needs a hero who is active, rather than one who goes through channels.
Hence Every few minutes Jones has to rush (usually single-handed)
to the last-minute heroic rescue of an innocent bystander (usually his teenage daughter).
John Corbett ( The Visitor ) plays a slimy politician opposed to the subway tunnel because it would improve public access to the area. By strange coincidence his wife is a surgeon who plays an important role in the medical emergency scenes. His character also serves to introduce a new hotel construction that pops up at the end. This pretty much illustrates a number of the film's flaws. Lazy plotting, poor characterisation - and since the film centres around a good idea, it is a real pity. |
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Flight of the Navigator
A young boy goes for a walk, and when he gets home he discovers that 8 years have passed.
His parents (Cliff De Young and Veronica Cartright) are overjoyed,
but naturally curious as to what happened.
Meanwhile, the US Government has recovered a crashed UFO. Howard Hesseman plays the scientist in charge of researching the UFO. He has the boy taken into government care, to establish what happened to him. Sarah Jessica Parker is a friendly intern at the base who introduces the kid to 1980s inventions like music videos and different varieties of Coca-Cola. The kid manages to get aboard the UFO, and flies off it. This is the core of the film: we get to see the UFO fly around thanks to some then-groundbreaking SPFX. The UFO has a kid-friendly AI and a menagerie of cute beasties collected from distant worlds. The moral of the story? Well, one child's selfishness is more important than mankind's progress to the stars. Also, because the ending has an easy get-out clause the real issues the film evokes do not have to be answered. |
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Doc Savage: Man of Bronze
Ron Ely (then famous as Tarzan in the 1960s TV show) plays the title character.
Together with his mis-matched companions (each an expert in their own scientific field)
they journey to a Latin American country, the Republic of Hidalgo, to solve his father's murder.
The villains are led by Captain Sieze, a Bond villain without the apparent physical impairment. He has conscripted a tribe of South American natives to do his dirty work. Their secret weapon is the venom of a green snake. The venom can somehow form into a snake made of pure energy that floats about the room. Hey, nobody ever said it made much sense! The cast is unremarkable except for Pamela Hensley (Buck Rogers) in her first screen role. |
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Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Mike Myers plays the title character, a secret agent in 1967 London.
With the aid of leather-clad babe Mrs Kensington (
Mimi Rogers
) he rounds up crooks and spies at the behest of
British Intelligence boss Basil Exposition (Michael York -
Logan's Run
).
Austin's arch-enemy (Dr Evil - Myers again) blasts himself into space in a cryogenic freezing unit, and Austin allows himself to be frozen too so that he might be revived to save the world whenever Dr Evil returns. Thirty years later, and Pentagon top brass in the form of Charles Napier (who has a similar role as a different character in the sequel) discovers Dr Evil has returned. He has Austin defrosted a la Demolition Man . Austin is shocked to discover how much everything has changed. His new assistant is Mrs Kensington's frigid daughter Valerie ( Elizabeth Hurley ). The villainous Dr Evil is a persona that Myers first used in the film I Married an Axe-Murderer. Evil's sidekicks include a one-eyed Robert Wagner and some fembots (female robots). Seth Green ( Buffy the Vampire Slayer ) is Scott Evil, the artificially generated teenage son of the Doctor. They attend father and son group therapy sessions run by Carrie Fisher of all people. To catch up on recent events, Austin watches a video of the Apollo moon landing. This will mean more if you have seen the sequel. For once, this is a movie which admits that the villain's henchmen have friends and family, too. Rob Lowe pops up in one of these scenes - and as we all know, he has a different role in the sequel as well.
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