Movieline Online

THE FLICKS: Even though only a handful of people caught Mark Dacascos’ butt-kicking performance in the terrific period action/horror/ flick “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” there’s no doubt it made every one of them a fan. So how does some of the actor’s other work hold up? “Scorcher” casts him as the good guy trapped in a low-budget end of the world adventure. Inspired by other mediocre disaster movies with actors you’ve never heard of (like “The Core”), Dacascos is under-utilized as a Van Damme-type military man who must escort a team into LA to set off a couple of nukes and stop the planet’s plates from shifting. You can almost excuse the lack of special effects and terribly melodramatic dialogue, but to pull the punches on Dacascos’ fight scenes (which are choreographed like a bad 70’s TV series) is almost unforgivable. “Scorcher’s” only accomplishment is to make the apocalypse unbearably boring. “China Strike Force,” despite the Americanized voice-overs and Coolio’s stunt casting, is a ...

THE FLICKS: You’ve got classic auteurs like Bergman, Truffaut and John Ford. Modern guys like Kubrick, Scorsese and Copolla. Even the quirky independent minded fellas like Cronenberg, Lynch, and the Coen Brothers. But what the hell do you do with someone like Larry Cohen? Here’s a guy who arguably has put up just as impressive a body of work, but gets none of the credit. Laboring on genre pictures like blakxsploitation, shoot-em-ups, and monster-on-the-loose flicks, just to name a few, that garner little or no respect from mainstream critics. While the big names walk away with all the awards, Larry Cohen’s work is more subversive; changing the genre from within, adding a twist where another director would walk a straight line. One has only to take their pick of Blue Underground’s three new releases to get an idea of what his unique style of guerilla filmmaking is capable of. BONE is Cohen’s rarely seen (even during its initial release) skewering of California fantasies; its false-front...

THE FLICKS: If one is ever hard pressed to prove the legitamacy of film as art, the works of Ingmar Bergman make the case beautifully. Intensely personal, technically flawless, and emotionally raw, the director’s own obsessions are reflected throughout his career in the cinema. And although many European auteurs followed in his footsteps (Godard, Truffaut, and Fellini among them), none could explore the same psychological depths with a storyteller’s gift for tortured, yet unflinchingly honest, characters. The “Trilogy” is made up of three films that mark Bergman’s move away from the expressionistic style of “The Seventh Seal” toward a more intimate, and often painful, study of the human heart and mind. Bound together by the common thread of “God’s Silence,” Bergman finally addresses the theological questions he had danced about in previous films. A minister’s son who resented the hypocrisy of the modern church, the director had never before faced so many of his own personal demons in s...

THE FLICK: I won’t bore you with a rote description of the plot of John Carpenter’s “Halloween”. Not because it plays on some cable channel every night, or because you’re bound to catch one of its seven mediocre sequels. Because to do so is to sell the film short. Building off the modern horror ideas invented by Alfred Hitchock’s “Psycho,” “Halloween” brought terror out of the castle and into suburbia. The psuedo-supernatural killer Michael Myers doesn’t stalk his victims across some foggy countryside, he hunts them in backyards and parked cars. He’s anywhere and everywhere. It’s that sense of insecurity that puts audiences on edge. That’s what gives “Halloween” its impact – it brought fear into the home. But it didn’t do it in the sloppy, low-budget way, it did it with the same sort of meticulous craft ‘ol Hitch brought to the screen. Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey produced unsettling shots with an eye for composition, where every empty inch of screen harbored a possible th...

THE FLICK: Director Robert Wise, despite his own string of successful films like “The Sound of Music” and “West Side Story,” will always be remembered for his association with legendary film figures Val Lewton and Orson Welles. An editor on Welles’ “Citizen Kane” and creative contributor to Lewton’s series of classy suspense films, Wise’s influences came to bear perfectly with his 1963 film “The Haunting,” an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, “The Haunting of Hill House.” A ghost story that uses the power of suggestion not out of budget constraints, but by stylistic choice, no spirits are ever physically visible in the film, but their presence is a near suffocating experience. Hill House was “born bad,” constructed at odd angles and designed to confuse those who wander its halls after dark. Which makes it perfect for Dr. Marquay’s ( )scientific quest to prove the existence of supernatural phenomena. He invites a psychic (Clair Bloom), a non-believer (), and Nell (), who’s naïve, n...

THE FLICK: For those unfamiliar with Columbia’s Superbit monikor, the idea is to strip away all the extras like commentaries, trailers and deleted scenes to make more room for the movie itself; what the consumer allegedly is buying the disc for anyway. This free space adds up to a much better transfer that approaches hi-def, plus DTS & Dolby Digital Sound. It’s safe to say that if you’ve already spent a couple grand on your home theater, a Superbit title is the best way to show it off. But how Columbia selects which movies to give the Superbit treatment is the true mystery. Even by horror fans liberal standards, “John Carpenter’s Vampires” is not the director’s crowning cinematic achievement. But it is a genuinely fun time-waster with a coarse, foul-mouthed performance from James Woods as a single-minded vampire slayer out to rid the world of bloodsuckers. It’s no secret that most of Carpenter’s action flicks can be read as new-age Westerns. And “Vampires” makes it even more obviou...