If you were puzzled by the first comment on yesterday’s post, here’s the Sympatico/MSN movies piece that inspired it — a list of the precise points at which the great horror franchises stopped working and started sucking.
Hey, “Saw V” opened this weekend — what else was I going to write about?
Oh, and here’s another Sympatico/MSN gallery, over at our “Quantum of Solace” minisite — the best James Bond villains, ranked in order. Finally, a little love for Telly Savalas’ daring interpretation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld as a total player.
And as long as I’m throwing out the links, here’s my piece on Cinematheque Ontario’s David Lean retrospective, which started up this weekend — if you’re reading this Sunday morning, there’s still time to get down to Jackman Hall for the 1 pm show of “In Which We Serve“, which is still unavailable on DVD in North America and gets screened here, like, never.
Tally ho!
I usually envy the number of great movies you get to see through your job, but you do pay steeply for it by having to watch a lot of stinking piles of crap!
And – maybe Goldfinger was behind the whole sub-prime mortgage mess. It’s the subtlest, longest-running Bond villain plot ever. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Norm, you call Ryan’s Daughter “Lean’s last film”, and then in the next paragraph mention A Passage to India, which he made 14 years later. Oops.
@ Chris — yeah, it’s only a great job about fifteen percent of the time. The other eighty-five can feel a lot like work.
@ Josh — Aw, crap — that was supposed to be “Lean’s last WIDESCREEN film.” I’ll get it fixed; thanks for the catch!
Mr. Wilner,
I haven’t seen it in a while, but I thought I remember H20 (aka HALLOWEEN 7, the one where Jamie Lee Curtis returns for what was supposed to be the final one, this time no fooling) was pretty good; actually serving as a decent bookend to the first two films.
All of which is a polite, non-douchebaggy way of suggesting that perhaps HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (aka HALLOWEEN 8) was the real nadir of the series, not Halloween 6.
Thoughts?
Yeah, “Resurrection” is pretty terrible … but I suspect “H2O” isn’t as good as you remember. I certainly remember it being pretty lame, with a fumbling balance between actual suspense and post-”Scream” Kevin Williamson snark. And as much as I love Jamie Lee Curtis, you can so tell she didn’t want to be there.
But as bad as it is, “Resurrection” has sense enough to stay away from the whole Druid thing invoked in “Halloween VI”. That movie’s nuts. Nuts, and awful.
“Halloween” is a great film, period. No “horror” qualifier is needed. This probably colours my perceptions–but, I still say that ALL of the Halloween sequels are some shade of bad or terrible. (the eerie, atmospheric credit sequence in IV is the only somewhat memorable moment in the bunch) None of the F13th films are genuinely “good” but most of them have the spirit of goofy, six-pack in the basement kinda-fun which is largely absent from the Halloween sequels.