Safety Not Guaranteed
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Written By Derek Connolly
Starring Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, Karan Soni, Jenica Bergere
This was a pleasant surprise when I watched it at a “Pre-Hugo Nomination” viewing party. It’s fun, well-executed, light entertainment that just happens to be about (theoretically) time travel.
The setup: Depressed wallflower Darius (Aubrey Plaza, the girl who had the black bars appear over her mouth every time she cussed in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) working a crappy intern position at a Seattle magazine is given a ride-along assignment to investigate a quirky classified ad by an asshole writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) (“Give me the lesbian and the Indian.” (Karan Soni)) Turns out he’s just trying to hookup with an old flame living in the same town as time travel guy.
The ad (based loosely on a real ad done as joke filler), asks for a partner to go back in time with, must bring their own weapons, safety not guaranteed.
They manage to track down Kenneth (Mark Duplass), the guy who placed the ad, but he rumbles asshole writer at once at tells him to get the hell off his porch. Darius has better luck, and soon she’s undergoing survival training him while Jeff rekindles his old flame.
If it’s not Romantic Comedy 301, then it’s not any later than Romantic Comedy 315: Two Damaged Weirdos Find Each Other. Despite the fact that the overall arc is somewhat predictable, it’s very well-executed, the dialog is clever and there are some surprises along the way. Like a hilarious, incompetently executed heist of a government research facility, where Kenneth walks past an office birthday party in his black intrusion gear. And the revelation that government agents are, in fact, tailing him. Plus the chemistry between Darius and Kenneth is completely believable. And by the end of the film, Jeff is even a little bit less of an asshole.
Safety Not Guaranteed is less about time travel per say, and more about time in general, and the vital, fleeting nature of human relationships. This came and went pretty quickly last year. While it won’t make you forget Donnie Darko or Primer, as a light romantic comedy with (possibly) time travel elements, it’s very well done, and worked a lot better than I expected. It will probably find a place on my Hugo ballot, and probably deserves a place in (at the very least) the top third of your Netflix queue.
Oh, and this song appears in the film. It’s pretty good.
The Raid: Redemption
Director: Gareth Evans
Writer: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Ananda George, Ray Sahetapy
This movie came up on the list of movie possibilities over at a friend’s house, when somebody mentioned that it was supposed to feature “non-stop action.”
Boy howdy.
The Raid: Redemption is sort of like John Woo’s Hard Boiled without all the subtlety and restraint. It’s hyper-violent, hyper-kinetic, utterly gripping, and a bit more realistic than usual for the genre. It’s so well-executed that it jumps right to the top of the Asian Action Cinema heap, which is no mean feat.
An Indonesian SWAT team of 20 or so is in sent in to clear out a drug lord’s shithole high-rise tenement in Jakarta and take him into custody. It soon becomes apparent that they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew when an entire building full of his gang (plus affiliated scumbags) come after them, with the drug lord watching all on his security camera array. About half the team dies in the first fullisade, and the rest are soon running for their lives through corridors, rooms, and even floors (tactical ax for the win!). It’s not quite non-stop carnage from that point on, but it’s pretty close. The survivors can’t escape because gangs in the surrounding tenements have whacked their drivers and cut off their escape routes. Worse, the police department doesn’t know they’re there because their lieutenant has gone rogue for reasons of his own.
The template movies here are not only Hard Boiled, but also Black Hawk Down, The Warriors and Elite Squad. The mood of brutal violence is set early on when the drug lord executes three bound, kneeling men with gunshots to the back of the head, clicks on an empty chamber on the fourth, leaves the revolver on his victim’s shoulder (“Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”), then extracts a hammer from a desk drawer and dispatches him with that. (I expect to see a similar scene in a Tarantino film in about, oh, five years or so.) If the violence in Django Unchained made you flinch, you might develop a nervous tick watching this. To use the Joe Bob Briggs nomenclature, there’s gun-fu, machete-fu, knife-fu, kung-fu (or, more specifically, the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat), ax-fu, hammer-fu, exploding-propane-canister-in-a-refrigerator-fu, filing-cabinet-fu, and probably a few fus I’ve forgotten. The fight choreography is superbly executed and extremely realistic. When our hero slams a scumbag’s head into three different parts of the same wall on the way down, you flinch every time.
Eventually you start to see some of the genre’s cliches rear their heads (like “the traditional Asian one-at-a-time martial arts attacking style” and the old “I’m going to put the gun down so I can kill you with my bare hands” bit), but you’re pretty far in before that happens. And you wonder why no one among the survivors has a cell-phone.
But those are quibbles. It may not be as good a film overall as Hard Boiled simply because the characters aren’t as memorable, but the action scenes are actually better choreographed and more gripping. If that appeals to you, it should jump to the top of your To Watch list.
The Love God?
Director Nat Hiken
Writer Nat Hiken
Starring Don Knotts, Anne Francis, Edmond O’Brien, James Gregory, Herb Voland, Maureen Arthur, Maggie Mancuso and B.S. Pully
The concept of The Love God? is as amusing as it is absurd: Don Knotts not only as an unwilling Hugh Heffner, but also as an unaware object of unbridled feminine lust. (If Don Knotts as sex symbol seems beyond the realm of possibility, consider that in 1969, his separated at birth twin was precisely that.) Knotts plays his usual nervous-nebbish-with-a-heart-of-gold character, and the movie plays out very similar to his more famous works, save for the suggestive nature of the material. And it is only suggestive; it’s about the cleanest film you could ever make about a dirty magazine.
Part of the charm of the film is how it’s both strangely out of time and exactly of it’s time. You couldn’t have made a family movie about a dirty magazine too much earlier than 1969 because it would have been too risque to get greenlight by Hollywood. And you couldn’t have gotten it made too much latter, because the Sexual Revolution quickly become so sacred that no one in Hollywood would have been willing to make such ruthless fun of it, or have an ending that rejected it for the wholesome joys of marriage. One of the film’s funniest running gags is the “hip” fashion atrocities they foist onto our blithe protagonist, which obviously couldn’t have come from any era but the late 1960s. By contrast, the “swinging” signature song “Mr. Peacock” would have been considered too old-fashioned for the 1950s, much less the era of Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. Also, the characters are mostly stock types that could have appeared in most of Knotts’ other films. For a film that came out the same year as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, it has all the edge of a bowling ball.
The movie starts in court (with a technically interesting multi-camera, multiple-window view of the scene along with the credits, and possibly the first use of it on film), with an oddly sentimental pornographer Osborn Tremaine (his wife is the proud covergirl of all his issues) getting a slap on the wrist from the judge on obscenity charges, only to have his precious 4th-class mailing yanked moments later. Shortly thereafter he’s driving through the sticks when he discovers that Abner Peacock’s (Knott) namesake bird-lover magazine The Peacock is on the verge of liquidation. Tremaine quickly rescues the magazine (and its fourth-class mailing permit) and sends Abner off on wild bird chase to South America. When he gets back, he discovers that Tremaine has remade the The Peacock into a porno mag, and Abner (still listed as the publisher) is under indictment as public enemy number one.
Abandoned by all but his innocent sweetheart Rose Ellen (Maggie Mancuso, playing wholesome, loyal, and very dim), Abner is about to put his head in a noose (literally; a pretty dark touch for a Knotts film) when two ACLU types show up at his door promising to pay for his defense and hire the best attorney money can buy to support free speech.
At the obscenity trial, the Attorney General (Herb Voland) condemns Abner with delicious gusto:
I have another duty, a higher duty to perform. And that is to protect you, your children, the very morality of our nation, from the smut and moral corruption spewed forth like garbage from the lecherous, vile, lewd and licentious mind of this filthy, little degenerate! Look at his face. It is the face of a smut monger. Look at his body: thin, wasted away by the dissipation and debauchery of a life of unspeakable orgies and depravity!…He says he’s innocent. And he does look innocent…until you look into his eyes. They’re the eyes of a man obsessed by sex, eyes that mock our sacred institutions; “bedroom eyes,” they called them in a bygone day. They’re the eyes of a man whose lust knows no bounds, who lives but for corrupting others to a life of carnal pleasures and lewd designs. A man whose erotic desires and libertine practices are used to titillate the unsuspecting, who regards women as his playthings and would stoop to any depths to satisfy his pornographic tastes. The Marquis de Sade would have regarded Abner Peacock as a peer in his search for lechery. We can have a clean America, but only when we remove this sex-ridden smut peddler from the society he is bent upon destroying.
Then his own attorney, played by James Gregory (Angela Lansbury’s husband/patsy in The Manchurian Candidate and Barney Miller‘s inspector Lugar, along with a hundred other supporting roles) gets up and, ahem, defends him:
Your Honor, ladies and gentlemen, I have sat here and heard my client, Abner Peacock, called “a filthy, obscene degenerate; a sex-ridden, lascivious defiler of virtue whose lust knows no bounds, whose publications have plumbed the depths of degradation, and are a reflection of his own sex-obsessed mind.” We’re not going to argue about that. We can see that Abner Peacock is everything the Attorney General has told you he is. It is the unsavory creatures like Abner Peacock who test the strength of our Constitution, which, like our Rock of Gibraltar, has withstood challenge after challenge in protecting our freedom of the press through the years. Now, ladies and gentlemen, are we to stand idly by and allow the first crack to be made in this rock because of this dirty little pornographer? This is a dirty case and a dirty little man. It is with disgust to the point of nausea that I find myself sitting next to this filthy little degenerate! But when I see this filthy degenerate’s Constitutional rights being threatened, then I must take this filthy little degenerate into my arms, clasp him to my breast and fight for this filthy little degenerate’s Constitutional rights and liberty with my very life!
You just don’t see enough people called “filthy little degenerates” these days.
Naturally Abner is acquitted.
With all the publicity, Tremaine knows he has a goldmine on his hands, but can’t raise the money to do the huge print run required to capitalize on it. This necessitates a visit to mobster “Icepick Charlie,” who’s mad for sophistication and self improvement (he has a tutor in to teach a new word every day). Charlie not only wants to underwrite the most sophisticated dirty mag in existence, he thinks he should be the publisher. He hires up-and-coming powerhouse journalist Lisa LaMonica (Anne Francis, still incredibly hot 13 years after Forbidden Planet) to edit The Peacock. She agrees, but on one condition: Abner has to stay on as figurehead, since the trial has made him the lust object of the nation’s id.
Abner just wants to clear his name, and assert that he’s just a clean, wholesome guy, but everyone from his lawyers to the magazine backers insist he must stay on for the sake free speech, and set him up in a penthouse (outfitted in the finest Late Bordello Red Velvet fashion) with french maids and his own “Peacock Pets.” Despite his wholesome nature, Abner (like all Knotts characters) isn’t exactly the the strongest-willed of men, and soon finds that a guy could really get used to the Hef lifestyle…
One of the high points for modern viewers of the film is the stunning array of “hip” outfits Peacock sports. Like this:
Or this:
Or even this:
And this is so far over the top, it’s almost awesome:
The running joke, of course, is that Abner, far from being a filthy degenerate, is still pure as the driven snow, and spends his spare time teaching his Pets bird calls. Despite the supposedly risque nature of the material, The Love God? plays out like Knotts other star vehicles from the period: nebbish elevated through fluke to exalted status, fall flat on his face, suffers abject humiliation, is abandoned by his friends, triumphs through combination of honesty, good-natured perseverance and a bit of luck, and gets the girl in the end. It works well not only because Knotts was a master of the type (as his five Emmys for Barney Fife attest), but because no matter how grandiose his pretensions or painful his embarrassment at falling woefully short of them, he never loses the audience’s sympathy. Orwell famously noted that “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats,” and Knotts’ characters not only garner more than their fair share, but also stand in for our own. The gulf between his character’s self-image and reality may be vaster than our own, but we’ve all suffered social faux pauxs. We’re willing to enjoy his abject humiliations because we know, in the end, he’ll overcome them; pathos rather than bathos.
Also, like Knotts’ other starring vehicles of the period, The Love God? is pretty funny. Lisa falls for Abner despite the obvious absurdity (“He’s a big square! (pause) Just like the one my mother married.”), and Icepick Charlie falls for her, setting up one of the stranger love triangles in cinema history (or love quadrilateral, counting Rose Ellen). There are pieces that don’t quite work (the birdcall song refrain bit falls a bit flat), but most do. Like many of Knotts’ other films (or a Shakespeare comedy) it ends with a wedding.
In this clip, British comedian Stephen Fry observes that American comedians like to be the triumphant trickster, while British comedians like to play the mournful failure.
And, as a broad generalization, fair enough. But this quick and dirty bifurcation ignores not only the many straight man/fall guy comedic pairings on both sides of the Atlantic (Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Cook and Moore), it ignores Knotts’ entire career as the quintessential victim.
The movie was written and directed by longtime TV writer Nat Hiken, who died before his debut film was released. That’s a shame, as it’s really well-written, smoothly executed comedy of much the same pace and style of other comedic films of the era (How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying comes to mind).
I missed the chance to see Joe Bob Briggs introduce a showing of The Love God? at the Alamo Downtown, mainly because it’s a hassle to get downtown by 7 PM these days.
You can get The Love God? as part of the Don Knotts Reluctant Hero 4-pack, which also includes The Ghost & Mr. Chicken, The Reluctant Astronaut and The Shakiest Gun In The West. That’s a lot of Knotts for your buck…
So sayeth Roger Ebert about the latest movie from Peter Farrelly. When Ebert says a movie is worse than Freddy Got Fingered, you know that all lower bounds of the barrel have been breached.
More nuggets:
Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.
The only thing “Movie 43” has in common with those movies is it’s in color.
Also:
Academy Award winner Halle Berry no longer can cite “Catwoman” as the low point of her career.
Ebert gave it Zero Stars. Yet, for some reason, his readers have given it four. Go figure.
Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, David Steen, Laura Cayouette, Don Johnson, Ato Essandoh
Django Unchained may not be Quentin Tarantino’s best film, but does seem to be the film that comes closest to fulfilling his vision for what he wanted it to be. He wanted to make a big-budget, hyper-violent, A-list, American spaghetti western antebellum slave revenge thriller. Django Unchained is such a perfect realization of that goal that I doubt anyone will ever attempt to do the exact same thing ever again.
Also, it’s a film that admirably self-selects its audience. If you think you’ll like it, you’ll probably really, really like it. If you think you’ll hate it, you’ll probably really, really hate it. It’s not a film for the faint of heart, or those with a low threshold for movie brutality.
If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know the basic setup: German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) frees slave Django (Jamie Foxx) to help him track down three brothers he can identify, then makes him his partner in the bounty hunting business. A bit later, they go to rescue Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of Mississippi plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DeCaprio). Stylish gunplay and general brutality ensues.
Like all Tarantino’s movies, there are postmodern nods and namechecks to previous films, including recycling the theme music from 1966’s Django for the opening titles. Unlike his previous films, Tarantino has done a better job sanding off the rough edges and toning down his showier stylistic flourishes. They’re still here, but seem like a more natural fit for the material, be it a slow motion montage as a procession rides past, or solarized flashbacks to Django’s slave past. Likewise, the digressions seem more organic to the film (a scene of proto-Klansmen bitching about the poor quality of eyeholes in their hoods is funny enough that you’re willing to overlook its shaggy nature).
The script is clever and fairly taut for its 165 minute running time, and it doesn’t have the dead spots of (for example) Inglorious Basterds. There are two or three plot twists, some more improbable than others. Django’s wife is named Broomhilda and speaks German (because her original owner was German), which not only makes Waltz perfect for the role Tarantino obviously wrote for him, but actually provides three or four handy plot points in a nice, tidy package. They have a clever plan to rescue Broomhilda. It comes really, really close to succeeding.
Acting ranges from the solid, to really good, to downright excellent. Bruce Dern and Don Johnson are just fine in supporting roles. Jammie Foxx is fine in what amounts to a Shaft Kicks Dixie’s Ass role, though suffers in comparison to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Waltz is very effective in his hand-crafted role of a learned, articulate man who hates slavery and kills people for money, though it’s less of a revelation than his Oscar-winning turn as Hans Landa. Samuel L. Jackson finally gets to play a villain worthy of his simmering rage.
But for me the best performance is the movie is DiCaprio’s Candie, a plantation owner whose southern hospitality doesn’t prevent him letting a runaway slave get ripped apart by dogs, and his fury at finding himself being played is something to behold. The trailer suggested he might be playing it to broad and jokey, but his actual performance is very nuanced. DiCaprio has steadily improved as an actor, and of what I’ve seen him in, this is easily his best work.
Of course, some of the usual suspects have gotten their knickers in a twist over an American spaghetti western depicting the evils of slavery. What do they want, to soft peddle the crimes of slavery instead? And those criticizing the film for being brutal and violent: Have you not seen a Tarantino film before? It’s like someone complaining that the Seventh Season of South Park is full of potentially offensive humor. Really? You don’t say?
As previously noted, those with a low threshold for bloodshed and brutality should stay far, far away. As Dwight noted after we left the theater, “I hope they gave the squib guy a bonus.” But if you like Tarantino, here he’s pretty much at the top of his game.
And if I had known that the action figures would be discontinued, I would have picked some up.
Vampire Effect
Directed by Dante Lam and Donnie Yen
Written by Hing-Ka Chan and Wai Lun Ng
Starring Ekin Cheng, Charlene Choi, Gillian Chung, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Edison Chen, Jackie Chan, Mickey Hardt
If you like Hong Kong supernatural martial arts films, you’ll probably enjoy Vampire Effect (AKA Twins Effect, since the two female leads are evidently in the same pop band). Modern-day vampire hunter gets cute new partner who clashes with his cute sister, who just happens to be dating an Emo vampire prince whose essence a vampire king wants to eat to unlock a vampire grimoire. Martial arts ensue.
You know, the usual.
Jackie Chan has an extended supporting role that’s pretty much unnecessary, except you get to see Jackie Chan fight vampires. He’s third-billed and gets about 15 minutes of screen time, so it doesn’t even make Top Ten Most Dishonest Uses of Jackie Chan’s Name on the DVD Cover list. (I’m looking at you, Drunken Fist Boxing.)
This hasn’t gotten great reviews, and it’s not a patch on the best work in the genre by the late, great Ching-Ying Lam. The romance subplot drags a bit. The pace and style of the film does rip off the Blade movies…which in turn were ripping off Hong Kong action films, which ripped off everything they could lay their hands on, so par for the course. But it’s funny, and the action scenes work, which is pretty much all I ask as a threshold for enjoyment for this kind of film.
The “sequel” Twins Effect II is evidently a historical martial arts epic with much of the same cast, but none of the same characters.
Supposedly the American DVD (I saw it on-demand) has some scenes chopped that hinder the continuity. When it comes to Hong Kong action films, continuity does not rank high on my list of requirements. I saw the version with lots of martial arts.
The Sentinel
Directed by Michael Winner
Written by Jeffrey Konvitz and Michael Winner (based on Konvitz’s novel)
Starring Cristina Raines, Chris Sarandon, Burgess Meredith, Arthur Kennedy, John Carradine, Ava Gardner, Deborah Raffin, Eli Wallach, Martin Balsam, José Ferrer, Sylvia Miles, Christopher Walken, Jerry Orbach, Beverly D’Angelo
Satan was big in the 1970s. He got his first big taste of mainstream movie stardom in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, but it was the runaway success of William Friedkin’s brilliant The Exorcist in 1973 that really kicked Old Scratch’s movie career into high gear. Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) would continue the trend; though not in the same league as The Exorcist, it was a solid enough big-budget movie that you didn’t feel like Gregory Peck and Lee Remick were slumming.
And then comes The Sentinel. I don’t remember the movie coming out, but I do remember the paperback reprint of the book staring out from every grocery store wire rack:
Even then it looked to be part of the first wave of mass market horror dreck rushed to print in the wake of the success of The Exorcist (both in print and on-screen).
So I had very low expectations for the movie adaptation when we queued it up for holiday viewing. Fortunately, it was better than I thought it would be, turning out to be only mediocre rather than utter crap. (Hurray for low expectations!) It has a few unexpected twists and a dynamite supporting cast that skims the best of three generations of Hollywood character actors. However, it’s easily the weakest of the big budget Catholic Devil films of the era, far inferior to not only The Exorcist, but also Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen.
Like The Exorcist and The Omen, the film has a cold open in a foreign clime, in this case Italy, with a mysterious conclave of Catholic officials, which ends up not telling us a damn thing.
Back in New York City, Cristina Raines (sort of a poor man’s Kate Jackson) plays Alison, a model looking for an apartment because she “needs some space” (I did say it was the 70s) from her lawyer boyfriend (a very young Chris Sarandon skillfully walking the line between sympathetic and oily). How was she to know the apartment building she choose was a Hellmouth?
Well, the fact she found a large, furnished apartment with a water view for $400 was the first hint. (Today if you advertised an NYC apartment that big at that price, you could probably get takers even if you told them it’s a Hellsmouth. “Sure, the walls drip blood. But look at all this room!”) The freaky neighbors were another, including an overly cheerful Burgess Meredith, two lesbians sharing an apartment (one of whom, a silent Beverly D’Angelo, “Jill’s off” in front of her), and the blind recluse of a priest in the top apartment. Then comes the disturbing noises and bumps above her room at night. And the strange birthday party for Meredith’s cat.
Outside her apartment things aren’t much better. Her father dies, leading to a strange flashback of her coming home in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform, him cavorting with hookers, slapping her, and then her attempting to slit her wrists, which seems a rather drastic response. (I mean, couldn’t she just start dressing in black and listening to punk rock?) She’s fainting during her modeling gigs and on some sort of drugs. (I did say it was the 70s.)
However, things take a truly weird turn when the agent that rented the apartment to her reveals that all the flats but her’s and the priest’s are vacant, taking her on a tour of cobwebbed suites she had seen occupied the day before.
At this point the movie is starting to resemble Gaslight more than your average Satanic shocker. Is she really living on a Hellmouth? Is she just seeing things? Is it the drugs? It takes a twist back to horror land when, back in her apartment (yeah, she’s a moron) she hears more groaning and bumping above her, at which point she undertakes the only course of action available to a horror movie heroine in this situation: Go up to confront it in her negligee with a flashlight and a knife. And who should be there but her dead father, who she promptly stabs before running screaming into the street and covered with blood.
After that there’s even more weird twists, featuring two policemen (Eli Wallach, sporting the widest tie in cinema history, along with young Christopher Walken) investigating, visits to churches, lawyer boyfriend hiring a detective who disappears, a bit of written glossolalia on the part of Alison (ancient Latin, natch), and the usual plea to kept her under constant observation while he goes to Confront the Evil. You can probably figure out how well that works out.
And in case you think I was exaggerating about Eli Wallach’s tie:
It does turn back into a full-blown Hellsmouth movie about five minutes before the end, with a suitably creepy (if depressing) climax.
Here’s the trailer, which includes a goodly portion of the climax cut into little pieces, and actually makes the film seem like a bit more of a generic horror film than it actually is:
Despite the solid supporting roles, the film falls flat compared to its demonic brethren largely due to the talent on the other side of the camera. The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby featured great directors at or near the top of their game and solid screenplay adaptions of famous horror novels. Michael Winner, most famous for directing Death Wish (I, II and III) is not in that league. When Friedkin deployed the gore, it was all the more effective due to his naturalistic restraint earlier in the film. By contrast, Winner seems to reach for the sleaze pretty early, including possibly the last mainstream American film where lesbianism was intended to be a sign of moral turpitude rather than easy titillation. There’s plenty of female nudity, most of it deeply unerotic. The film has more gore than its predecessors (possibly a linear extrapolation per year), but not enough to satisfy a real gore hound. Otherwise the direction and cinematography are workmanlike.
The resume for writer Jeffrey Konvitz (adapting his own novel) is even thinner, with Silent Night, Bloody Night (not to be confused with the far more infamous, but no doubt equally crappy, Silent Night, Deadly Night) and Gorp being his only other screenplay credits. As a producer he did slightly better, with Spy Hard as his most notable film. The Sentinel probably comes in at the very top of his extremely limited resume.
The Exorcist had a solid grasp on Catholic doctrine, while The Omen had enough of one to make the plot go. The theology in The Sentinel seems loosely based on other films and horror novels and is never fleshed out enough to actually make sense. Also, in the film it becomes apparent that Alison has been Chosen, but the mechanism doesn’t make any sense. What if she never called back this particular apartment agent? Burgess Meredith’s role doesn’t really make sense. Is he a quirky neighbor? Satan? Something else? He seems as ill-defined as the rules under which Good opposes Evil. And pretty much every actor in it has done better work.
Still, the climax is nicely creepy. The film handles the “Is She Crazy or Is It Satan” question better than you think it would. It was pretty much the last mainstream horror film featuring Satan in the big city (it would soon go suburban and then rural, and then either disappear off the list of standard horror cliches entirely, go to indy films, or mutate into something else (the cenobites in Hellraiser do not come out of the Catholic demonic tradition), before staging a mild comeback thanks to remake fever. There’s lots scarier and more interesting horror fare available; this is mainly a curiosity for those who have already seen the other Hollywood horror films of the 1970s.
I can’t find box office records for the film, indicating it wasn’t particularly successful; it didn’t make as much money as that year’s other Satanic film Exorcist II: The Heretic, which raked in $30.7 million. (The top film that year was Star Wars, which you might have heard of.)
And it looks like someone has posted the entire movie online, if you’re really curious:
Do we need really another go-round explaining all the problems with Prometheus?
Why, yes. Yes we do.
Which is why I’m linking to this Prometheus Captain’s Log, not least for this line: “Weyland Corporation must not give a crap about this mission since they hired Insane Clown Posse to be our science team.”
