Robert B.'s Reviews

Cary Grant stars in this pleasant and oddly timely film about a wealthy British playboy who’s not feeling well. When he goes to the doctor, he’s told that he has affluenza, and that the cure for it is to walk away from his pampered life and live in the shoes of the common man for a year. There are no surprises here, but the film is well-made and entertaining, and it shares some similarities with the same year’s MY MAN GODFREY.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

Dreck masquerading as a film has a vampire, his servant, and two shapely she-vampires moving in with and taking over the life of a teenager. Film has lots of references to beach movies and vampire lore, but it’s overlong and just not very good. Adam West makes the most of his role, but it’s too little, too late to save the film from its doldrums.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

Michael Haneke, he of Funny Games and Cache infamy, has made, in Amour, his best film by far. The film tells the simple yet heartbreaking story of a long-married man and woman who are deeply in love, and the illness that upends their lives. French film legends Jean-Louis Trintignant (who came out of retirement to be in the film; indeed, Haneke wrote his part specifically for him) and Emmanuelle Riva are transcendent in their roles, with Riva being especially good—=it may be the single greatest performance I’ve ever seen. It’s not exactly a feel-good, date night kind of movie, but it’s extraordinarily well-made and worth seeking out. An instant classic.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a curmudgeonly widower is given a new lease on life when a child comes into his life. Because of this, he finds love with his widowed next-door neighbor and befriends the people whom he formerly despised (and who, rightly, formerly despised him). And So It Goes is the blandest, most by-the-numbers example of this cinematic cliché that I’ve ever seen. Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton are on autopilot, and the script is in a permanent vegetative state from which it never wakes up. The film wants to be chicken soup for the soul, but it’s more like low-fat, sodium-free canned chicken broth. The perfect film for when you want to watch something that doesn’t require you to think and/or pay attention to the plot. It’s watchable, but only just.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

This first starring vehicle for Martin and Lewis is absolutely awful. The “comedy” isn’t funny, the songs are forgettable, and the film is based on a stage play and, boy, does it show. Mike Kellin, never the most restrained of actors, mugs almost as much as Jerry, and there’s an extraordinarily weird moment where Dean and Jerry re-enact a scene from GOING MY WAY. I find it very hard to believe that this was successful enough to launch Martin and Lewis from supporting players to stars...but it was, and it did.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

More Bette on Blu. In this one, Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin play two sets of twins who were mismatched at birth. Now, one set runs a huge corporation (called Moramax, a play on the name of the independent movie studio that Disney would absorb five years later) that’s going to sell off a tiny furniture company in Jupiter Hollow, West Virginia, the town where they were born. The other set of twins still resides in Jupiter Hollow, and they go to New York City to try to stop the sale. Of course, neither set of twins knows about the other, and that’s where the pseudo-hilarity comes in. Film is sporadically funny, and Midler shows her versatility nicely, but it never rises above sitcom level. The Blu-ray I watched had some major audio/video sync issues, with the dialogue ending before the actors’ lips stopped moving. All in all, BIG BUSINESS is worth a watch, but it’s not a keeper.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

A string of odd accidents plague an English village, and it appears that the accidents are all being caused by a black cat. Lucio Fulci thriller hearkens back more to his earlier work (such as THE PSYCHIC) than to the films he made on either side of this one (ZOMBIE [aka ZOMBI 2] and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD [aka THE GATES OF HELL] before; THE BEYOND [aka 7 DOORS OF DEATH] and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY after). For fans of Fulci's gore films, this one may be slow going; however, those unfamiliar with Fulci's gore opera and/or those with open minds may find a lot to enjoy. Patrick Magee seems at times to be channeling Boris Karloff, and his eyebrows are one of the scariest things in the film. Slow moving, but it creates a creepy atmosphere along the way. Nice cinematography by Sergio Salveti; hit-and-miss score by Pino Donnagio, who's done much better work for films such as CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, THE HOWLING, and BODY DOUBLE.
Review Date: 1/31/2009

If this movie hadn’t cheaped-out on its monster, it might have had a chance at being at least somewhat well-regarded. A pair of newlyweds head to a Greek island to try to find the man’s sister, who’s gone incommunicado for several months. They find her, along with James Earl Jones and a just-awakened sea monster who lives in an underwater cave and likes to chow down on women. The sea monster looks as if it’s made of paper mache, James Earl Jones refuses to use a knife to eat a melon, and Jose Ferrer collects yet another paycheck. For the psychotronically-inclined, this is absolute gold.


Review Date: 3/15/2019

Sting stars in this amazing feature adaptation of Dennis Potter’s play. He plays a sociopathic young man who insinuates his way into the home of a man, his wife, and their brain-damaged daughter. To say anything more would be a disservice to anyone seeing the film for the first time. The film is unsettling, but moments of humor make it easier to take. One of my favorite films from 1980s Britain.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

They don’t make movies like this anymore--movies that challenge the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about what the events of the plot mean. Somebody at Columbia had a penchant for green-lighting challenging films in the late ‘60s, if this film and THE SWIMMER are any indication. John Kane (Sydney Poitier) shows up at his sister’s deathbed without anyone having contacted him about her, making it to her mere moments before she dies. He had done the same thing for his mother and his father, and the elderly hometown doctor who had helped with John’s birth thinks that he may know why. Film is oddly shot, with a preponderance of close-ups of people’s eyes, but it’s well-acted and the score, by Quincy Jones, is quite nice. Intriguing and worth seeing.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

Ryan Reynolds spends an hour and a half buried in a box in the desert somewhere in Iraq. We spend it, every minute of it, in the box with him. In many ways, BURIED is a marvel. The ingenuity required to hold an audience's attention with only one character to work with (and he's in a wooden box that's about the same size and shape as a coffin) is substantial, yet director Rodrigo Cortés and writer Chris Sparling manage to pull off this difficult feat with amazing dexterity. For me, the MVP award for crew member goes to James Muñoz, whose work as sound designer and supervising sound editor really created an incredibly immersive sound field. It seems odd to praise a film that takes place in a box for its sound, but that aspect of the film, more than any other, really puts the viewer into the head space of the main character. Still, even though the film is really quite amazing, it's such a downer to watch that I don't expect to see it very many more times. It's just too draining. However, if you loved OPEN WATER, BURIED might be the feel-good film of the year for you. It's NOT recommended for claustrophobes, ophidiophobes*, or claustrophobic ophidiophobes.

*I had to look it up; now you have to look it up. Fair is fair.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

2012 was pretty obviously the cinematic year of Joss Whedon, and THE CABIN IN THE WOODS served as the appetizer to the main course that was THE AVENGERS. Most appetizers are tasty, but they don't fill you up...and that's kind of the way that I feel about this film. For all the cleverness on display, for all the great actors, for all that it gets right, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS still falls short of filling me up. I saw it in its theatrical release earlier this year, and I thought that it was okay but not the horror film to end all horror films, as the fanboys seemed to think. My opinion was most probably influenced by all the hate waves rolling off the audience toward the screen--I don't know that I've ever felt quite such animosity towards a film in the theater. To be perfectly honest, I felt that the film was smarter than most of the people in the theater. Still (unlike the majority of the audience) I didn't feel that I'd wasted my money. Now, upon my second viewing, I like it more than I did originally, but it still comes up just short of greatness. It may be that it's just too clever for its own good, and it feels to me that it has a clockwork heart instead of a real, live, beating one. I can still enjoy it, but I don't see myself ever really loving it.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

Based on the Stephen King novel, this remake of the Brian De Palma film falls astoundingly flat. According to promotional materials, it's been "re-imagined for a new generation." I take that to mean "remade because we're greedy and don't have any original ideas." The DVD case trumpets that the film has a "shocking, all-new twist ending!" Well, it has a twist, but it's only shocking in commercial terms, not artistic ones, as it was shot as a set-up for a proposed TV series that, thankfully, never materialized. What doesn't work about this remake? Primarily, the casting. Although I love Angela Bettis as much as the next person (and perhaps a wee bit more), she seems more borderline psycho than Stephen King wrote the character, and certainly less human than Sissy Spacek played her. And that's the gist of the problem--De Palma's Carrie is pretty much a modern classic, with two Academy Award-nominated lead performances. There's no way ANY new production could try to best the original film, especially one that's pre-eviscerated because it was made for broadcast TV. If Piper Laurie was a bit over the top in the original, IT WORKED. Patricia Clarkson in this film is barely there. The role of Margaret White is underplayed into near-invisibility. The new Sue Snell looks JUST LIKE Amy Irving...except that she's played by an African-American actress in a nod to diversity. Chris Hargensen as played by Nancy Allen was the rich-bitch high school snob from hell; Emilie de Ravin doesn't look old enough to even BE in high school yet. So, yeah, I'm not real fond of this version. There were two things that I did rather like about it, though. First, one of my favorite scenes from the book made it into this version, albeit in an adapted form. It's the scene where Chris Hargensen's father meets with the school principal to get him to let Chris attend the prom. Secondly, I like the fact that this version allowed Margaret White's death to happen in the same manner as in the novel. Even though I feel that De Palma's staging of Margaret White's death befitted the operatic mood of that film, it's nice to see King's version get used. But those two things aside, this version is dreary.
Review Date: 2/25/2009

Awful film concerns android teachers at a violence-plagued high school. CLASS OF 1999 pretty much sums up everything that was wrong with genre filmmaking in the late 1980s--far-fetched storylines, egregious over-acting, awful costume designs, labored wisecracks...the list is nearly endless. I happened to catch this at a dollar theater when it came out in 1990, and I felt ripped off then. Even the usually-reliable Pam Grier didn't help matters any. I was able to pretty much eradicate it from my memory until I watched it again today. I did notice this time around that there was a Nine Inch Nails song on the soundtrack ("Head Like a Hole"). I must have discovered PRETTY HATE MACHINE sometime after I saw this movie. Watch it if you must, but I'm not recommending it.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

This never-ending parade of clichés is a laff riot from start to finish. Jenny is a troubled teenager, mainly due to what appears to be a combination of her parents separating when she was young, discovering porn at a young age, and having brain damage as a result of coloring swatches of her hair with neon paints. Dad comes back from Seoul to try to help her get her life straight. Jeff Fahey stars as his friend and former lawyer in his divorce proceedings. It’s quite obviously very low-budget, but I have to give props to the DP for giving it at least a little bit of style. The performances range from adequate to truly cringe-worthy. The film’s heart was in the right place, but there just wasn’t enough talent on either side of the camera to make it work.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

Enjoyably trashy thriller details what happens when new neighbor Kevin Spacey and his wife get a little too close to Kevin Kline and HIS wife. Yes, the events that transpire in the film are far-fetched, and yes, if you pull on a plot thread too hard the whole thing’ll unravel right before your eyes, but if you can put your critical faculties in “Park” (or at least in “Neutral”), you’ll enjoy this film quite a bit. Its critical reception was in the basement, but if you take it as a knowingly guilty pleasure, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

There’s nothing worse than a bad sci-fi film, and there’s not many worse sci-fi films than this one. A pregnant (!) cyborg flees to the cyborg version of the Island of Misfit Toys, where the badly-damaged populace must fight off the Recycler, a spare-parts collector/reseller, and his rag-tag army of bad actors on motorcycles. I must have lost thirty IQ points watching this dreck.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

Perplexing film about two high school boys who, while skipping school one afternoon, find a dead girl, naked and chained to a table, in a remote corner of the basement of an abandoned mental hospital. In this instance, though, “dead� is a subjective term, as the girl keeps moving even after having had her neck broken and being shot three times by one of the boys. Still, being teenage boys, one of them sees the sexual possibilities inherent in the situation and things rapidly get a) out of hand and b) disgusting. While I really wanted to like the film, I never felt as engaged with the story as I wanted to be. The blame for this falls on the directors more than on the screenwriter–-I get the feeling that they wanted the film’s tone to be seen as “intense,� when in actuality it comes much closer to being seen as “languid.� The screenwriter doesn’t escape all blame, though, as the film takes out a full-page newspaper ad announcing the ending about 75 minutes in. Although I hate to say it, DEADGIRL ends up being pretty forgettable.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

I think that it would take a very special combination of director, screenwriters and actors to make a good film about a homicidal dentist...and THE DENTIST proves that Brian Yuzna, Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, and Corbin Bernsen et al. were not a very special combination. Probably the worst film in all of their filmographies (well, maybe not in Corbin's), THE DENTIST never engaged me. There's not one character in the film that struck me as being a reasonable facsimile of a real person. I think the film would have been a lot more interesting and/or scary if cardboard cutouts had been used as actors instead of live people'--at least that way, I'd be able to cut the film a little slack for having ACTUAL cardboard characters instead of people PLAYING cardboard characters. The music score was just plain awful. Apparently, Alan Howarth is only effective as John Carpenter's extra pair of hands. And no, before you ask, I didn't squirm once during the dental hijinks that occurred. If the special effects had been up to snuff, I might have squirmed, but inflicting damage on a piece of rubber has never really been something that induces mad squirming in me. As it stands, there's nothing here worth recommending.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

Awful, awful film that inexplicably garnered some favorable reviews on the fanboy sites. Bobby accidentally kills a nun at his Catholic school, unleashing some sort of malevolent force that causes much havoc. Interesting visuals and camerawork cannot make up for the fact that this is a long string of setpieces without any frame to put them in. The film seems to be striving for a PHANTASM-esque vibe, but the difference between the two films is that PHANTASM was fun, and it at least offered some sort of explanation for all the strange events, wonky as that explanation was. This just hammers the viewer with all sorts of weirdness, then ends. I did, however, learn the important fact that nuns need exercise, too. To make the viewing of this film bearable, I suggest a drinking game: every time Matilda, Bobby's grandmother, genuflects, take a shot. You'll be drunk in no time, thus mitigating somewhat the torture of sitting through this movie.
Review Date: 1/31/2009

Better than it has any right to be, DISORGANIZED CRIME tells of Frank Salazar (Corbin Bernsen), a thief who plans to rob a bank in a tiny Montana town. He sends letters to four guys who come to the town to help him rob the bank; unfortunately, he gets arrested before he can meet them to tell them the plans. Once they get to town, the film essentially splits into two narratives, one detailing the plans the gang makes without him, and the other telling how Frank escapes from the cops who were accompanying him back to New Jersey and tries to meet up with the gang. Along the way, there are some funny bits; the funniest involve Ed O’Neill’s frustrated cursing and Ruben Blades’s reactions to just about everything. The film is a trifle overlong, and it’s pretty clear that writer/director Jim Kouf had absolutely no idea how to end the film, but, overall, it’s a surprisingly good watch.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

Remake of the 1950 B-film/noir classic gets almost nothing right in the retelling of the story of a man, given a slow-acting poison, who tries to find his killer before the poison kills him. Meg Ryan, one of my least-favorite actresses of all time, is actually pretty tolerable in this film, but Dennis Quaid is all wrong as a literature professor. Shot in Austin, Texas, D.O.A. opens and closes in black and white for no discernible reason. For an all-around better film experience, stick with the original.
Review Date: 3/6/2016

Before director Neil Marshall made the internationally popular THE DESCENT, he cut his teeth on this film. DOG SOLDIERS is less a horror film than an action film in wolf's clothing. A group of Army guys is dropped into the highlands of Scotland for training exercises, but they soon find out that there is real danger waiting for them. It just so happens that there's a full moon out, and werewolves roam the countryside, looking for prey. That's the gist of the story, but it's made special by excellent performances and a script with a wicked sense of humor. Imagine ALIENS with werewolves instead of, well, aliens, and set in the wilds of Scotland, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this film is like. I went into this film fully expecting to hate it, but it won me over within a matter of minutes. The creature design for the werewolves is probably the most fearsome that I've ever seen--there's no hint of humanity in them at all. They're nasty beasts. While DOG SOLDIERS isn't my favorite werewolf movie, it's in the top five. Besides, any werewolf movie that features Debussy's "Clair de Lune" is okay by me.
Review Date: 4/22/2013

This unpretentious little film (based on the British television series) concerns a government group called Doomwatch that has been tasked with dealing with potentially catastrophic cases of pollution. While following up on the progress made after the clean-up of a tanker spill off the coast of a small island named Balfe, Dr. Del Shaw finds that the residents of the island have a much bigger problem than the residual effects of an oil spill. It appears that there’s an inordinate amount of islanders who have come down with acromegaly, but what’s causing it? I honestly don’t know why this film doesn’t get any more respect than it does, because it’s a crackerjack mystery, directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed several films for Hammer (Taste the Blood of Dracula, Hands of the Ripper) and featuring Judy Geeson, from To Sir, with Love. It’s a great, unheralded little thriller—don’t miss it.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

A little girl and a delusional rabbit search Australia for a missing kangaroo joey, stopping to ask EVERY. SINGLE. ANIMAL. that they run across. Seemingly interminable film might keep less-discerning 5-year-olds quiet for a bit, but most kids will have something better to do than watch this semi-animated musical. It’s educational in the least-interesting way possible, but I did learn that koalas don’t drink water; they get all of the water they need from the leaves they eat. Also, watching a kangaroo being born is pretty freakin’ icky.
Review Date: 3/15/2019

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