The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
The Rocketeer, a big-budget Disney production of Dave Stevens’s comic was a very large disappointment. The heroine was watered down, the hero seemed to have had a lobotomy and only the villains handled themselves like champs. The zeppelin scenes notwithstanding, what this latter-day pulp adventure really needed was a healthy transfusion of intelligence.
And speaking of intelligence . . . Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey—which really should have stuck with the original title, Bill and Ted Go to Hell (changed when the marketing folks nervously glanced at the Bible Belt)—was still amusing, but not as laugh-provoking as the first film in the series. Death had all the good lines.
Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King should be seen, even though Robin Williams inexplicably didn’t bring his title character to life as well as one would expect. This contemporary retelling and resetting of the English legend in New York City mostly works just fine until the ending wimps out.
Earnest: Scared Stupid? Earnest is, urn, an acquired taste. This episode in his saga is about a malevolent troll set free in the rural South. It’s funnier than you might think—at least it’s funnier than the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Then there was Suburban Commando, a lightweight adventure for kids of all ages and skewed IQs. As the star of this chase-adventure of alien bounty hunters stalking each other here on Earth, Hulk Hogan generates some real charm and a few funny lines and bits of business (though the cut-apult sequence is probably the topper).
Child’s Play 3 was maybe a little better than Child’s Play 2, but that’s arguing extremely fine points of tedium. Rent the cassette of the first one—it’s got more than a few good bits. But don’t even buy a Chuckie doll with the suction cup limbs to stick on the inside of your car window. Garfield owners will laugh at you. Highlander II: The Quickening? Russell Mulcahy, who directed Highlander, somehow also directed this wretched follow-up. Watch it, if you must, for the twenty minutes or so of Sean Connery (the production company was doubtless holding his loved ones hostage). Try not to laugh at the bargain sub-basement Bladerunner sets lest you wake the other patrons.
The British time-travel horror thriller Warlock, directed by Steve Miner, was finally released in the U.S. Richard E. Grant and Julian Sands did well as the witch hunter and witch antagonists. An adequate horror movie, if not a good one. In Body Parts, writer-director Eric Red grappled with that old chestnut, Does a person’s innate soul dwell in parts of the anatomy aside from the brain? Naturally the answer is “yes” or this wouldn’t be a horror movie. Eric Red’s scripts (The Hitcher, Near Dark) are better produced when others direct than when he directs his own work (Cohen and Tate). This one had promise but ultimately foundered in silliness.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II’s legacy of charm from its spectacularly successful predecessor wore a little thin this time around. The good will dissipated, partly because the quirkily endearing human love interest from the first film is gone. Perhaps another reason is that the filmmakers paid more attention to the “morality” and the nature of the role models in this sequel.
There’s not much to say about The Neverending Story II. It’s the same director, the same character, the same story. ... I think maybe that says it all right there. Everything’s the same. Ate de Jong’s Drop Dead Fred is an incredibly irritating comedic fantasy. Phoebe Cates plays a young woman, jilted, who is aided by her childhood invisible friend now come back in adult form. Imagine Michael Keaton’s character from Beetlejuice with absolutely no redeeming charm at all. None. Not funny, McGee.
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare allegedly terminates the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Don’t rest easy. This made a respectable amount of money. True, it did explain more of Freddy Krueger’s history and had an amusing series of cameos by actors from the other films in the series. But, like its fellow sequels, it never equalled what Wes Craven’s original accomplished. The final twenty minutes of Freddy’s Dead is a 3-D sequence. When I saw this at a dollar cinema, the box office was out of polarized glasses. Nobody in the audience seemed to care.
And then there’s Hook—Steven Spielberg’s project that deals with a grown-up Peter Pan returning to Never-Never Land to help the Lost Boys and do battle with Captain Hook. This must have seemed like a great idea in development meetings. Robin Williams as Peter? Dustin Hoffman as Hook? Cool. And Bob Hoskins as Smee is great. This one tries very hard to be a children’s classic for all ages. But it’s just too self-conscious. The effect of absolute belief in the material and the effect of craft pushed to the limit are, alas, not guarantors of the same result.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was another movie that wanted to be a classic. Oh, well. Kevin Costner’s Robin never quite generates the passion this legend needs. Not that he needed to be an Errol Flynn, but Costner’s character ended up a little too much a passive, sensitive male for the 1990s. The movie does take a genuine chance, though, when an unannounced Sean Connery turns up as King Richard in the last five minutes. The crowd murmurs. The viewing audience is amazed. And Kevin Costner might as well be invisible.
Gregory Hines starred in Eve of Destruction, yet another adventure about a robot jumping its programming tracks and causing consternation. Renee Souten-dijk played Eve, the robot. Hines and Dutch actress Soutendijk both have immensely attractive presence. What this movie doesn’t have is a good story.
Here are two gorgeously photographed and fairly interesting historical sagas with fantasy elements. Shadow of the Raven, directed by Hrafn Gunlaugsson, is a violent eleventh-century Icelandic saga about the onset of Christianity and the twilight of paganism, family blood feuds and political hardball. Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, from the novel by Brian Moore, takes us to a Canadian winter in 1634, where we see the French dealing with the Native Americans. Both are fascinating glimpses of cultures alien to our own, which make us all glad for modern central heating.
Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita starred Anne Parillaud as a beautiful young career criminal who is programmed by CIA-type folks into becoming an assassin. Less static and stylized than Besson’s earlier efforts, but it’s still not quite in a class with The Manchurian Candidate or A Clockwork Orange. Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers, from Ian McEwan’s novel, worked from a script by Harold Pinter. It’s a drama of menace as young innocents are manipulated by the older and jaded; it looked great but stumbled badly at the end.
The 23rd International Tournee of Animation wasn’t the best in the series of showcase compilations, but such pieces as “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions” (the usual weirdly surreal suspects) and “The Potato Hunter” (prehistoric man stalking stop-action spuds) made it well worth watching. If you’re a fan of endless beautiful tracking shots, find a copy ofThird Stone from the Sun, Jan C. Nickman’s desperately earnest paean to regaining humanity’s empathy with Mother Earth. Filmed in a pristine, pre-Exxon Valdez Prince William Sound, this fantasy of a young boy on a quest benefits from Linda Hunt’s voiceover as the soul of a magic ship. The sentiment is unimpeachable. But it does go on.