Movieline Online

Americans are prudes.  Sure, we can handle an all-you-can-eat buffet of over-the-top violence, but when it comes to people bumping their naughty parts together, we fall back on our puritanical instincts, at least as far as mainstream cinema is concerned.  There was a brief renaissance though in the ‘90s that began with Basic Instinct  and bled into notorious thrillers like  Sliver ,  Body of Evidence  and  Color of Night where a healthy dose of bloodletting helped the sexy parts go down.  1997’s  Wild Things  was really the last hurrah for this Cinemax-inspired sexual awakening, marketed around a must-see threesome between stars Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. Sam Lombardo (Dillion) is a high school guidance counselor and well-known lothario among the upper crust housewives in as exclusive Florida community.   That reputation comes back to haunt him when he’s accused of rape by two stude...

The wave of Shaw Brothers films continues – as does the online argument about which titles are most  essential  – with Arrow Video’s Blu-ray release of  The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter , the studio’s 1983 spear-poking, eye-gouging, tooth-shattering ballet of kung fu artistry.  While the formula was growing a bit tired at this point, there’s still some amazing choreography and physical prowess on display in nearly every scene. The plot certainly doesn’t break any new ground.  After suffering a crushing defeat in battle, the two surviving brothers of the Yang family go into hiding; the PTSD-afflicted  6 th   son under the protection of his sisters, while the  5 th  joins a monastery to train for his revenge.  While the treacherous Mongols search the kingdom for the remaining brothers, the Yang  sisters  enter the fray to restore the family name.   The death of Alexander Fu Sheng (who plays the 6 th  son) neces...

Unlike his French New Wave contemporaries, director Claude Chabrol was never obsessed with reinventing the form of cinema.  And despite emulating Hitchcock’s penchant for thrillers and psychological quirks, his film career was closer to the work of John Ford: a solid craftsman who could bounce between genres but always bring along something of himself. Twisting the Knife: Four Films by Claude Chabrol  is the latest in Arrow Video’s box sets of the director’s later work, this time encompassing four titles released between 1997 and 2003.  Each film includes the typical Chabrol ingredients – sex, murder and copious amounts of emotional baggage – but varies the formula with even greater success than the previous set released last year.   The Swindle  (1999) is the most lighthearted of the bunch, with a small-time father-daughter pair of crooks staging a heist that puts them a new league financially.  Unfortunately, that reward comes bigger risks…...

Robocop  is a film that shouldn’t have succeeded on any level, starting with a title that even its own writers found embarrassing.  But somehow Dutch director Paul Verhoeven turned the script’s trite sci-fi escapism into a hilariously brutal satire of American capitalism – and still managed to keep the action fast and furious. Peter Weller is Murphy; an honest cop who is brutally murdered then resurrected as the future of law enforcement, Robocop.  Fighting his scattered human memories, along with the corrupt executives within OCP, the Reagan-era mega-corporation that now own old-Detroit, Murphy finds himself torn between his programming and his cop instincts. His partner Lewis (Nancy Allen) helps him bring down the bad guys and restore his humanity.   Not only does  Robocop  work as a gruesome sci-fi adventure (especially in the longer unrated cut included here), but its barbed-wire wit cuts right to the core of 80’s excess, particularly the laug...

Although Chris Marker's 1962 short film  La Jetee  is part of the basic text in film schools across the country, the time travel photo play was generally unknown to mass audiences.  Which made its clever conceit of a man witnessing his own death as a child the perfect starting place for  Twelve Monkeys  (1995), a much more elaborate (and needlessly complicated) extrapolation of Marker's themes of love, loss and memory. A post-apocalyptic "volunteer" sent back to the '90s to gather information on the disease that will destroy humanity, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is promptly locked up in a mental institution where he befriends fellow inmate Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt).  A genuine psychotic with nihilistic tendencies, Goines is in turn inspired by James' alternate reality, plotting to use his father's medical research facility to return the world to its true owners: the animals.  James eventually convinces his psychiatrist Madeleine Stowe) to...

The rape-revenge exploitation subgenre it a tough one to defend, especially in the “Me Too” era.  While its female protagonists typically punish the men responsible for their physical and emotional degradation in pleasingly painful ways, the films make us (as male viewers especially) complicit in the initial attack itself in often titillating fashion. There’s no doubt we’re supposed to  feel  the character’s pain, but are we being asked to  enjoy  it as well?   It's an uncomfortable question.  And  Thriller: A Cruel Picture  (released in the U.S. as  They Call Her One Eye ) continues to straddle the philosophical fence, punishing its mute heroine from frame one then letting her wreak bloody vengeance for a lifetime of male (and female) oppression.   No small surprise that Tarantino found enough inspiration in this offensive cult classic to reference its character in the  Kill Bill  saga.   Mad...

Director Enzo G. Castellari doesn’t attract the same kind of attention as his fellow genre-workhorses in Italian cult cinema circles.  Perhaps because his films never went overboard on gore (like Fulci) or caught on with U.S. distributors (like Leone).  On the whole, Castellari’s work is indistinguishable from other films of the period: fast-paced knock-offs of  Death Wish  and  The French Connection .  But the action scenes, which vacillate between Peckinpah-inspired slow-motion and whip-pan intensity, are cinematic creations unto themselves.  Castellari puts his camera right in the thick of things – tumbling weightless off a cliff, between the headlights of a muscle car, or popping off a thug through a 1-inch diameter pipe.  There’s an energy to his choice of angles, a devil-may-care inventiveness to his staging that was an obvious influence on modern-day filmmakers.   And  The Big Racket  finds the d...