[3] Linda Blair’s still got demons, and Richard Burton’s trying to figure out what happened to the nice priests who got pea soup all over them in the first movie. Exorcist II: The Heretic is convoluted and esoteric, the action is minimal, and the horror non-existent. John Boorman (Excalibur, Deliverance) delivers a highly odd, surreal, and ultimately terrible sequel to The Exorcist. The cheap sets, …
[6] An alcoholic news reporter is determined to catch a murderer after he becomes a suspect for the assailant’s weekly attacks. For a giallo flick, Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord lacks a compelling mystery or any memorable death scenes. But Bazzoni and three-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) damn near make up for it in their exquisite framing and painterly lighting. …
[6] Horror master Mario Bava tackles this James Bond-like action/adventure about a stealthy thief nicknamed Diabolik (John Phillip Law) who eludes a pursuing detective through a series of elaborate heists. I didn’t find the characters terribly interesting, but the film is awash in awesome 60s production design and music. Diabolik’s expansive underground lair is every bit as magnificent as anything from a Bond film. Diabolik’s love …
[7] I prefer the more crude and raw qualities of the first film over this sequel, which may be a little more polished but is also a bit less mysterious. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name is upstaged in the end by Lee Van Cleef as a rival bounty hunter, but director Sergio Leone still fuels the film with enough piss and vinegar to make …
[8] Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film (because he’s counting) is a three-hour long claustrophobic western about eight characters holed up in a lodge during a snowstorm who all have reason to kill one another. Leading the ensemble cast are Kurt Russell as a bounty hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his ruthless, almost feral captive, Samuel L. Jackson as a Union major delivering corpses for reward money, …
[7] Michael J. Fox stars in this Vietnam War flick from Brian DePalma, but combat isn’t the focus here. Fox plays a soldier who puts his life on the line when he tries to free a young Vietnamese woman that his patrol has kidnapped and raped. Even after the woman’s suffering is over, Fox’s character still has to keep a watchful eye for ‘freak accidents’ …
[8] I never particularly liked Westerns until I saw this film, my first ‘Spaghetti Western.’ Most people credit Sergio Leone for inventing the genre. If it weren’t for his so-called Man With No Name trilogy (three films starring Clint Eastwood, of which A Fistful of Dollars is the first) the sub-genre may have never taken flight. What Leone did was take the stagey, polished, over-produced …
[9] “As boys, they said they would die for each other. As men, they did.” Once Upon a Time in America is an epic, gorgeous, emotionally moving gangster flick from spaghetti western maestro Sergio Leone (The Good the Bad and the Ugly). Robert DeNiro stars as ‘Noodles’, a former Prohibition-era gangster returning to Lower-East Manhattan after thirty-five years in self-imposed exile over the deaths of …
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