Movieline Online

It's hard to keep a good Django down...or even a dead one, for that matter. Director Sergio Garrone's 1969 film might not be a direct sequel to the Franco Nero classic, but it's still better than almost anything else the character's name has been slapped onto, including Tarantino's re-imagining. Drifting into town like a vengeful spirit, which he just might be, Django (Anthony Steffen) hunts down the men responsible for abandoning their posts during a military attack. The opening sequence, shot with the stylized atmosphere of a horror film, sets expectations high. And even if the rest of Garrone's film can't match it, Django the Bastard is still well above the spaghetti western curve. Steffen's deadpan performance (he also co-wrote the script) is perfect here and manages to never spoil the surprise his character's supernatural origin. In that respect, the film is an obvious influence on Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter ...a...

From a filmmaker's standpoint, sequels are both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side of things, somebody already laid most of the groundwork ahead of time: building characters, arranging plot points, maybe even hinting where future stories could go. In the case of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984), the task should have been even simpler, since it was Craven himself who came up with the idea of a family of radioactive cannibals traumatizing any poor sap who wandered into their desert domain. But with seven long years between films, the writer / director seems uninterested in the after-lives of his iconic creations, saddling them with a blasé busload of second-rate victims who are barely worth setting the buffet. On the way to a motocross competition, some twenty-something take an ill-advised shortcut into the open desert and find themselves hunted by Pluto and The Reaper, surviving members of Jupiter's clan of cannibals, who've now taken res...

For all the claims of homophobia and outright fear mongering laid against Cruising (1980), its problems don't lie (entirely) within its admittedly dim view of one particular gay lifestyle. The flaws in director William Friedkin's film are much less scandalous than that; think script, editing, pacing, etc. And for all its attempts to shock the audience with hard-R scenes of lubed-up party boys seducing a wide-eyed Al Pacino, the biggest shock, ultimately, is that it lacks the courage of its convictions. In an attempt to catch the "homo killer," beat cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is sent undercover into New York City's underground gay club scene, a hedonistic world of casual sex and kinky fashion. Initially out of his element, Steve hunts down a few likely suspects while trying to maintain his "straight" relationship to Nancy (Karen Allen) on the side. But the perils of the job begin to take their toll, pushing Steve to take chances that will end the ...