Month: October 2021

1980s Bill Murray being in this film is just odd. It’s as if Peter Venkman or Frank Cross was inserted into an Ivory and Merchant piece. At the time, he just didn’t have the acting chops, and perhaps the director didn’t know how to guide him, for the performance. He’s not the only off part of the production though. I didn’t realize I’d miss W. Somerset Maugham being a character in the story until he was missing and there wasn’t a good thread holding the various stories together. I’m not a huge fan of the original, but definitely appreciate it more than this version. That film got right into Larry Darnell’s transition, while this one spends a lot of its early parts on the war and explaining why he felt the need.

Al Pacino is a Cuban refugee, arriving in Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift. He arrives as a criminal and remains a criminal through the entire film, quickly moving up in the South American drug trade until he has nowhere to go but down. That last bit is the most interesting part of the film and where there’s some actual character depth from anyone in the entire film. I do enjoy all the 1980s Miami imagery in all its bright colored, white afroed, cocaine-fueled glory. I’ll soon watch the original Scarface and see if that changes my feelings on this one any.

After being double crossed by his most-recent employer, assassin Alan Ladd travels from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a mission for revenge. Along the way he meets up with Veronica Lake who has been hired by the employer to sing in his LA club. He’s also being tracked by Lake’s boyfriend and police detective Robert Preston. It’s an intriguing World War II era noir that also involves stolen chemical formulas and appeals to war-time patriotism. I like Ladd as the assassin; he has an air of mystery while also bringing a mix of menace and humanity to the role. I’m up in the air about how I feel about Lake, especially during her singing performances here which are a bit stiff and unnatural even when they involve magic tricks and black satin fishing costumes. 

Terry O’Quinn is wonderfully menacing as a man who desires and expects his family to be the perfect, All-American ideal. He probably should have stuck to ones without a teenage daughter though. It’s a good 1980s light horror film with just enough jump scares and twists to hold the tension. O’Quinn’s acting really sells his character and the movie, wide-eyed and innocent when he needs to be but changing at the drop of a hat when something threatens his façade. It also has some beautiful Pacific Northwest scenery, even when it’s obvious that British Columbia is standing in for Washington state.  

This feels a lot like a movie version of Episodes where David Duchovny is a writer trying to get his deeply personal, semi-autobiographical TV show onto one network’s fall schedule. Sigourney Weaver is the executive who can make it happen, but not without suggesting a few changes. It’s an amusing look at getting a TV show to air and has Judy Greer playing his optimistic assistant and Justine Bateman his very pregnant wife. I wish it were a bit longer and some of the side stories fleshed out more.

During World War II an experiment to render a Navy ship invisible to radar crosses with a related experiment being conducted in 1984, resulting in the ship being sucked into a time vortex and two of the ship’s sailors being thrown into the future. It’s the type of movie that’s best if you don’t question it too much. It’s an awful-fun mix that includes dated special effects and American militarism all presented in a way that screams 1980s science fiction. In better hands, it probably could have been a big budget summer blockbuster.