Most critics say this is David Lynch's best movie, and he
received a nomination for the best director Oscar. (Movie
House Review.) Other critics called it moronic garbage.
One thing is not in dispute. This is a great lesbian scene, and
one of the participants is Naomi Watts, who has since become a big
star. (Zipped .wmv)
This scene isn't bad either, although it is way too dark, and
Lynch digitally blurred Laura Harring's coochy. (Zipped .wmv)
Third party videos:
Linda Fiorentino in Jade (Three
avis zipped together). Directed by William Friedkin (French
Connection). Written by Steve Eszterhas (Basic Instinct). Starring
the always interesting Fiorentino. So it's pretty good, right?
Nah. 4.7 at IMDb. Roger Ebert gave it two stars, and James
Berardinelli was even less impressed, assigning it a single star.
Favre turns in his worst performance since "There's Something About Mary." No TDs, 2 picks, finishing on the wrong end of a 26-0 shellacking. It's gonna be a long year for the cheeseheads.
Bill Maher: New Rules, September 8
I was disappointed with this. I usually find Maher very funny and incisive, but he's now getting into a level of Bush-bashing which is not funny at all, just negative for the sake of being negative. I don't much care who ya make fun of, right or left, but it's gotta be funny, not just juvenile ranting.
Egad! What a disaster. The worst weekend of this year had been $77 million. The worst of last year was $74 million. This weekend was $54 million. It was the worst weekend since September 5-7, 2003, when the box office was topped by Dickie Roberts, Child Star.
The highest grosser was the critically reviled The Covenant, and that failed to crack the $10 million mark. Moreover, it was avoided by its target audience. It's aimed at the WB female tweener market, but 75% of ticket sales went to people over 18.
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
Four of the Apocalypse (1975)
I Quattro dell'apocalisse is a spaghetti western, one of three made by
Lucio Fulci before he found his niche with horror and gialli. The source
material is obviously two short stories from Brett Harte, The Luck of Roaring
Camp, and The Outcasts of Poker Flats. As the result of a morality crackdown
by the good citizens, a gambler (Fabio Teste), a drunk (Michael J. Pollard), a
crazy black cemetery worker (Harry Baird), and a pregnant hooker (Lynne
Frederick) are tossed out of town with nothing but a wagon and horses. The
four petty criminals are soon joined by evil personified, in the form of a
bandit named Chaco (Thomas Milian), who rapes Frederick, shoots Pollard in the
leg, and leaves everyone to die in the desert. The rest of the film is taken
up with their journey to reach a town. After significant hardships, the
gambler and the hooker reach an all-male mining town, where her son is born.
Of course, the baby is named "Luck."
These two stories were staples of High School freshman English in the early
1960s, and can be read online:
As a master of capturing the local color of the Western states and
territories, Brett Harte is usually cited alongside Mark Twain himself. In
fact, there is a town in the gold country today called Twainharte, named for
both of them. Unfortunately, the plot of this movie does not do justice to The
Outcasts of Poker Flats. Harte's story pitted the Outcasts against the
elements, and the elements won. As obnoxious as Thomas Milian is, he is not as
fearsome as severe winter storms. The baby portion of the story is a little
stronger, and is more in the spirit of the source material, but the love angle
between Teste and Frederick generates no heat at all.
This spaghetti western is not just a failure at capturing the flavor of
Bret Harte, but also fails to capture the flavor of the American West. Nor
does it do a very good job at the western genre in general. The pace is
glacial and there is virtually no action. There is a fairly bloody shootout at
the beginning of the film, and then very little gunplay after that.
Furthermore, there is no good guy. Westerns were, after all, morality plays
with easily distinguishable heroes and villains. You only needed to check the
hat colors to be sure, but it was pretty obvious who the good guys were. In
this story, nobody.
There's nothing wrong with the acting, but ... this is no better than a C-,
a weak spaghetti western for genre fans only.
IMDb readers say 6.3.
Lynne Frederick,
who was married to Peter Sellers, but rebuked by his family as a
gold digger, shows breasts in two scenes, and is seen naked from the
side.
Scoop's notes:
Lynne was only 20 when she made this film, and still
only 22 when she married 51-year-old Sellers. She was still with him three
years later, when he died the day before her 26th birthday. If she was a
gold-digger, she was a successful one. She received almost every last penny
of Sellers's estate.
Within an astonishingly quick six months of Peter's death,
his grieving widow was consoled by another marriage to another successful
older man, the famous TV interviewer and satirist David Frost. That one
didn't take at all. They divorced the next year.
A very heavy drinker, Lynne died while still in her 30s, of
... er ... natural causes. (An autopsy failed to determine the cause of
death.)
Dann reports on Jenifer:
Another excellent
episode from Showtime's Masters of Horror series, maybe one of the
better ones, this 2005 episode directed by Dario Argento is
designed to creep you out, and believe me, it will.
A police detective saves a disfigured
young woman from being beheaded by an old man with an ax. Assuming the old
guy was crazy, he shoots the guy and saves the girl, but did he get it
backwards?
Authorities have no appropriate place to
put her, so he takes her into his own home, upsetting his wife and son.
Coming down the next morning and finding Jenifer calmly munching on what's
left of the family cat, he begins to wonder if a disfigured face is
Jenifer's only problem.
As repelled as he is by Jenifer's actions,
he is also drawn to her, especially her body, which is as beautiful as her
face is disfigured. Further complicating things is the fact that Jenifer
seems to like initiating sex with him, and often. Knowing he must prevent
her from hurting anyone, he takes her to a remote little town, but things
continue to spiral downward.
Creepy, scary, and extremely well done,
full of sex and gore typical of Argento, this is another must-watch
episode of a must-watch series.
Carrie Anne Fleming
Brenda James
Chryssa Florou in
Celibataires
Clara Bellar in Kill The Poor
Dita De Leon in Bottoms Up
Simona Fusco in BottomsUp
unknown in Bottoms Up
Emily McDonnell in Before It
Had A Name
Giada Colagrande in Before It
Had A Name
Judy Greer in The Great New
Wonderful
Juli Drajko and
Judit Viktor in Severance
Meghan Maureen McDonough in
Bad City
Sara Forestier in Hell
From Rokwatch, as he says, "A great ethical
moment in a great comedy. Sarah Holcomb in
Animal House."
Scoop's note: I still refer to the characters from
Animal House by their names, without having to look them up: Pinto, Bluto, Otter, D-Day. That shows that the
film established a powerful presence in the consciousness of my generation.
For the sake of a comparative example, Jack Nicholson is a great actor, but you probably can't name that many of
his characters. Jack Torrance, Jake Gittes, the Joker. (Lots of J's). I
don't know the name of his character in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces,
Missouri Breaks, The Postman Always Rings Twice ... but I know Clorette - a
minor character from Animal House, as shown in Rokwatch's collage.
Nothing fresh here, but some nice new collages of
Dina Meyer
in Starship Troopers ...
... and Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas
Sylvia Kristel in La Femme
Fidele, which was made only a couple of years after Emmanuelle
