Movieline Online

At this point, it’s looking like it would be easier to actually put a man on Mars than to make a successful movie set there. The red planet has a seriously poor track record when it comes to appearing on film. John Carter was the most recent bust. But a pair of competing millennial projects ( Mission to Mars and Red Planet ) didn’t fare much better…and don’t even get me started on the John Carpenter-directed catastrophe Ghosts of Mars with a cast of rock ‘n roll zombies emerging from the dust bust a cap in Ice Cube’s ass! So by comparison, The Last Days on Mars (2013) can’t help but look good. It takes the hard science angle that actually worked well for Red Planet and combines it with the ubiquitous undead approach that, well, really doesn’t. The fact that the film winds up becoming simply “Zombies on Mars” is somewhat forgivable when you have a movie that tries so hard to be something more. Vincent (Liev Schreiber) is part of a Mars mission due to return home in exactly...

Sylvester Stallone may not have invented the sequel, but he damn near perfected it! First with the Rocky franchise and its five follow-ups, then Rambo and his most recent all-star retro action fest, The Expendables . Of course, we need not mention his many one-trick failures like Cobra and Tango & Cash , which were engineered for franchise success but never made it. Simply holding the 6-disc Rocky Heavyweight Collection in your hand is proof enough that the man knew how to tailor each installment – during each decade - to the right audience. The first Rocky (1976) was a triumph not just for the character, but Stallone himself. Too bad he never lets us forget it. The story about how he wrote the script in three days, refused to sell unless he got the starring role, then carried the movie on his shoulders all the way to the Oscar finish line has been dredged up every time he hits another career slump. Rocky has been in his corner since the beginning and, despite leaning on...

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) is a little bit of everything. Call it a heist movie, a road movie, a buddy movie, a comedy, drama, or action flick. It’s the perfect example of a film whose true meaning comes from whatever the viewer brings along to the experience. And yet it still falls comfortably within Clint Eastwood’s acting range as a semi-retired criminal on the run from his old partners who teams up with a young wise-ass (Jeff Bridges) for one more job. Creatively, it’s also an unlikely partnership between first-time director Michael Cimino, who would bankrupt an entire studio in part due to his perfectionism on Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Eastwood’s much more economical shooting style. The film feels loose and fun, much in the same vein of Clint’s later fluff like Every Which Way But Loose (1978), but with a hippie hangover that still resonates with highway poetry of both the visual and thematical sort. Sounds deep? Not to worry, Thunderbolt is entertainment first and ...

You don’t have to dig very deep into the subtext of most slasher movies to uncover a psychological case study of gender roles, sexual repression, and a comical amount of phallic symbols. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) contains no more or less than average, but sticks out from the rest by virtue of having been written by renowned feminist Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Jones, who made her debut with this piece of ‘80s exploitation for legendary producer Roger Corman. Having two women behind the camera for a film like this might seem revolutionary – and Corman certainly wasn’t shy about talking it up at the time – but creatively The Slumber Party Massacre is pretty much the same old bag ‘o tricks. Naked girls, horny guys, lots of drinking, drugs and underage sex mixed with the requisite serial killer wielding his weapon of choice: a 2-foot cordless drill. Made on the cheap like most of Corman’s productions, for all its creators’ intentions of skewering slasher conventions, ...

There aren’t many secrets left to uncover in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Few directors have had their works so meticulously scrutinized, studied and admired more than Hitch. So with their release of 1940’s Foreign Correspondent on a blu-ray / DVD dual format edition, it almost feels like the folks at Criterion have lightened things up a bit. Although the extras are rich and plentiful, they take a broader view of the director’s work leading up to WW2 with his emphasis on entertainment first…and propaganda second. Foreign Correspondent was Hitchcock’s second American film following Rebecca (1940) , both films competing against each other during the 1941 Academy Awards. While Rebecca is more memorable, it’s also atypical of Hitchcock’s style at the time; a humorless affair that treats its central tragedy with a deadly earnestness dictated by producer David O’ Selznick. By contrast, Hitchcock was given pretty much free reign on Foreign Correspondent …and it shows. An obvious ...