Film Reviews by Frank TALKER™

An amusing and an entertaining feminist parable which reveals just how nasty are the attitudes of Western men to women in an inherently-sexist culture of rape, sexual objectification & physical intimidation and harassment.

Laurene LANDON is excellent as Hundra; bringing an appealing mixture of sexiness, sass & humour to what must have been a physically-demanding role. She demonstrates that martial skills, self-confidence & self-esteem can be used with great effect to defeat men - especially if closely-associated with a swift kick to the testicles.

This is the ultimate sex-war drama of perhaps the world's first feminist.

(This United Kingdom DVD is a not-by-the-BBFC censored version of the film - unlike the "Richard's Cinema Vault" print currently available on YouTube. This latter version is also properly letter-boxed.)

The essential problem with Steven Spielberg's movies is that they are essentially designed as self-therapy for a childhood marred by his parents' divorce. This was most evident in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Empire of the Sun (1987) & Catch Me If You Can (2002) in which absent fathers and/or dysfunctional families play a key role.

Spielberg's persistently-neurotic nostalgia means that his movies are not focused upon a passion for story-telling, but a need to find closure for his unsuccessful struggle to understand both his parents and, inevitably, himself.

The problem with art therapy - as Carl Jung discovered - is that it seldom produces great art - only self-indulgence instead of self-awareness. If one cannot get beyond trauma, trauma is all that one has to offer others. And it is a certainty that most people have met such people, including ourselves, whom cannot get on with their lives and merely regurgitate their suffering in hopes that the world will sort-of admire them for their honesty.

Woody Allen is the classic example of this navel-gazing tendency since his body of work does not show any genuine maturing away from his generally pessimistic, narcissistic & nihilistic world-view. But, he just happens to be funny, so he can get away with it. When Mr Allen tries to be serious, however, he is resolutely off-putting and unable to express anything really complex about the human experience.

Similarly, Steven Spielberg (like Cecil B DeMille) can produce great visual and escapist entertainment which has little to say about humanity; explaining why Spielberg's movies never matured since he remains mostly fixated upon largely-meaningless big-budget spectacle which desperately apes David Lean. But, in Lean's case, he never forgot the characters and their motivations for a single moment of screen time because his action told the audience about the characters and weren't just there to keep the audience awake in-between dialogue scenes.

With The Fabelmans (2022), Spielberg is still unable to tell us if his great passion in life is storytelling, as such, or merely being someone devoted to re-creating himself as the person he wishes he really were from the safe, emotional distance of the mediating camera-lens - his means of avoiding unresolved issues from childhood. The performances are excellent throughout, but the characters are psychologically-thin and, therefore, emotionally-uninvolving. Part of this comes from the fear of revealing too much about oneself in public and the fact that the Spielberg family is really not all that interesting. Had it been anyone else's childhood, would this film have ever been made?

Mr Spielberg has never really grown-up as a man and this explains a good deal about his great facility with child actors. But it also explains the large decline in his popularity and relevance as a cinematic storyteller and why he is now reduced to flogging-the-dead-horse represented by the last two Indiana Jones' movies.

Steven Spielberg can't stop making movies and retire because he would still be faced with the trauma that every child goes through when their parents divorce. And this is what he wants to avoid because resolving it might mean facing the fact that he is nothing more than a one-trick-pony film director and basically a hack.

A desperately unfunny film featuring some very sexy women and classy actors wasted in an underwritten story set in an English country-house.

The production values and the costuming are excellent for such a low-budget movie, but these do not adequately compensate for cringe-making and vapid humour. There are absolutely no valid statements to be made about human sexuality in this British sex-comedy despite its claim to being a sex comedy.

All that the audience gets instead is a White culture of sexual repression, male insecurities & the inevitably-resulting sexual desperation - especially among the largely-unsatisfied women. To make things worse, the film insults its audience by treating them as if they were also just as love-starved.

There is no real sense here that sex is a means to an end - just an end in itself - since all of the characters are either scared of sex or see it as something you get from someone else rather than something that you share with them. And where's the fun in that?

Impressive-looking movie with excellent special-effects compromised by terrible, expository dialogue which does not provide any kind of engaging emotional drama.

The actors do their best but their parts are so underwritten that the love triangle here comes across as pure soap-opera.

The underlying story here of scientific and technological over-reach leading to global catastrophe remains topical but is never fully unexplored. Perhaps there is a reason that the Earth's magma-core is shrouded by a thick mantle which only a fission bomb can penetrate? Yet only one of the characters in laboratory coats here in the whole wide world ever suggests that drilling through this protective layer might have deleterious and suicidal effects for the planet.

Unusual film-genre hybrid which looks like it might be an ordinary horror-movie, given the general cinematographic and psychological doom-&-gloom of the entire proceedings, but which is actually a suspenseful science-fiction conspiracy thriller.

The conspiracy here is that old movie-chestnut about any government automatically-desiring to weaponise a recently-discovered alien creature, à la mode de The Andromeda Strain (1971) or Alien (1979).

The well-titled "Sputnik" (Russian for 'travelling companion') is shot-through with references to the main characters' past and is even set in the Soviet Russia of 1983. In this way, the Soviet Union becomes a metaphor for a past which must be laid-to-rest in order to ensure any kind of viable future, but which is often stubbornly not allowed to die in its very-real affect upon the film's present.

From a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-stricken cosmonaut abandoning his son in an orphanage to join the Space Race; a brilliantly-intuitive psychiatrist raised in an orphanage, herself; &, an extra-terrestrial symbiote unknowingly-brought back to Earth, the physical and emotional connectedness of these characters is shown in a low-key manner; eschewing jump-scares and focusing on their inter-relationships, value to each other, their personal weaknesses & their intellectual strengths.

The psychiatrist here actually develops a somewhat-maternal relationship with her cosmonaut patient and even with the creature, itself; despite it literally needing the bodies of other animals to survive, thrive & grow - and in spite of the cortisol produced in human brains (resulting from a quite natural fear of the sputnik's behaviour) being its sole form of gory nourishment.

The birth (& rebirth) scenes are superior to the one in an obvious movie-progenitor like Alien (1979), since the idea isn't just immediately thrown away and is actually central to the underlying theme of healthy parenting.

The male host survives each rebirth and we are left with a salvageable-yet-substitute family-unit; albeit one presented as a recurring nightmare since the creature only appears while its paralysed host sleeps. And yet this particular family is as ultimately- and as potentially-destructive of all families as is the child-murdering convict briefly seen at the secret military-facility early-on in the film; hinting at what usually goes wrong in dysfunctional families.

The structural problem with this movie is that the flash-backs to the psychiatrist's orphaned childhood are unclear. She had difficulty walking, was inevitably obsessed with running shoes & yet somehow now walks fine. Her cure is implied to be the result of a spinal operation; while her being in the orphanage in the first place is never explained.

These flash-backs conflate the son of the cosmonaut she is treating with herself as a child, since the former has been abandoned in an orphanage by his guilt-ridden father. This subjective dramaturgical-confusion somewhat spoils an otherwise subtle and clever drama by partly-disturbing its suspense and pacing.

As always, Oksana AKINSHINA is a standout performer, surrounded by men whom are either quite cowardly or extremely cynical, à la Sigourney WEAVER's situation in Aliens (1986). She heads a talented cast whom make the most of admittedly-underwritten roles, yet all of whom help to create the moodiness of the oddly-dank, curiously-underlit & dungeon-like atmosphere of a secluded scientific/military-facility deep in the middle of nowhere.

AKINSHINA's feminine charisma helps propel the narrative in the way that a male character could not, since she is not prone to much leaping-into-action, but to intellectual introspection and emotional nurturing, instead - especially in being the only character to attempt to form an emotional bond with the alien.

A somewhat bleak yet satisfying ending makes this movie about good, responsible parenting a winner.

Unsophisticated propaganda for the dangers of climate change disguised as a mish-mash of science-fiction, suspense, horror & conspiracy thriller.

This movie does not do particularly well at any of its genres; making it a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none since it cannot decide what it primarily wants to be.

None of the actors does anything interesting with their admittedly thinly-written characters; leaving the audience to focus on wondering what is really going on amidst the long trail of death-and-destruction related to a mysterious, coded radio-message from outside of the solar system.

We don't really care for any of the characters; making two hours pass slowly.

Decent and brisk science-fiction movie, set in 1973, about the White race's obsession with manned exploration combined with the sheer terror of what they imagine they might find on their travels. Almost as if the 'final frontier' were somehow analogous to the "Dark Continent" of Africa.

The "it" here comes very much from the Caucasian id, especially given the fact that this space mission is actually a military exercise undertaken by the 'United States Space Command' in a rocketship packed-to-the-gunnels with military ordnance - automatic pistols, carbines, fragmentation & gas grenades & a bazooka. Quite an arsenal for a round trip to a supposedly-dead planet like Mars!

Surprisingly technically-accurate - at least in view of the silence of space necessitated by the fact that sound, unlike light, does not travel in a vacuum - this movie has too many characters to emotionally invest-in. But at least none of the actresses are here to shrilly scream for the men to come and save them since they actually perform scientific functions in the plot and are treated as more-or-less equals by the men.

The horror element is less successful here since "it" is clearly just a well-built man in an ill-fitting monster suit - whom walks stiffly just like a well-built man in an ill-fitting monster suit would - partly-hidden behind a gloomy lighting-scheme.

What really hurts this movie is that the creature has no motivation for its behaviour beyond wanton destruction and dealing-out death; making it the unreasoning creation of irrational cinematic minds whom are unwilling to grow-up beyond childhood stories of bogeymen.

Fun movie albeit with two leading players lacking any chemistry with each other - along with there being nothing in the way of individual character-development.

However, Bess ARMSTRONG is good value as the spunky flapper-heroine whom holds her own in all of her scenes and is not just around to be rescued by the (admittedly alcoholic) hero.

Yet, the plot is just a series of ever-increasingly explosive clashes between various tribal warlords set against a backdrop of beautiful Asian locations; somewhat resembling a travelogue of the world's war-ravaged hotspots. The worst dramatic offence here is that there is no real sense of danger that the leads will ever get killed, imprisoned &/or tortured - even though many try all of these.

Enough money was spent on the handsome production to make it diverting enough as entertainment, but it is unfulfilling as a true adventure should be; that is, as a metaphor for the search for one's true self.

Brilliant psychological conspiracy-thriller about a combined Sino-Soviet attempt to get a hardcore communist elected as the President of the USA, carefully disguised as a virulent anti-communist.

The performances are all superb, the direction taut & the writing focused - there is a genuine determination here to make the somewhat absurd premiss literally-plausible rather than just metaphorically-believable. It works.

Of particular note are the three distinctively-different female characters whom represent either destroyers of men or their saviours. Angela LANSBURY is terrifying as Laurence HARVEY's domineering mother; Janet LEIGH is delightfully-slutty as the woman whom quickly discards her fiancé after meeting a man on a train whom looks a lot like Frank SINATRA; &, Leslie PARRISH is brilliantly funny as the delightful ingénue whom Laurence HARVEY marries.

An excellent companion-piece to The Candidate (1972), wherein Western democracies tend to elect leaders whom do not truly represent voter aspirations.

Aptly-named movie that came out at the end of the Hollywood disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s.

An all-too-absurd plot includes a research facility built right over the crater of an active volcano; coupled with a holiday resort constructed not too far from that! This mind-boggling setup hampers what could have been a fun film.

The final nail in the coffin for these increasingly-disastrous disaster films was the movie parody of Airplane (1980); making anyone financing such a movie a brave backer, indeed, since they would then have to run the very real risk of being completely laughed-off the screen.

This movie is only really watchable because of the star power and charisma of the leading players - particularly a well-paired Jacqueline BISSET and Paul NEWMAN. And the weakness of the special effects makes it all-too-likely that most of the movie's budget was spent on the stars.

Worst of all, too many good-looking women get killed in this movie to make it any more than an inadequate time-passer - you simply cannot kill-off Barbara CARRERA and get away with it, you simply can't!

Good actors wasted in a relentless barrage of pointless gunfire.

The script does not differentiate nor develop characters whom all speak as if they were raised in the same culture - and the spoken and visual cliches fly as fast as the bullets.

The worst aspect of all this nonsense is the unpleasant war-propaganda of it all. The aliens, like any People of Colour on the Earth whom Western powers wish to wage war against, are also non-differentiated such that they are merely targets to be killed, rather than sentient entities with clear goals.

This is basically a recruitment advertisement for the US Marines filled with dramatic incident but no real drama.

Weak characterisation, poor editing & no necessary sense of ever-present dread hurt this movie immeasurably.

The actors are all fine but it is hard to care for their characters when they are so thinly-drawn and possess no grounded motivations for their relationships with one another.

Overall, there is no compelling reason for this film to exist. It offers no social commentary on the existence of the automobile, where on Earth the shape-shifting monster came from (& what its purpose is) and why something as hard-to-manoeuvre-in-small-spaces as a motor car could ever truly be seen as threatening, scary or in need of being hunted down like a rogue wild-animal in an underground car-park.

Above-average horror movie which alternates between a psychological explanation of the events depicted and a para-psychological one.

First, we are presented with an oddly-lascivious ghost whom repeatedly rapes the heroine (brilliantly played by Barbara HERSHEY) in her imagination, but with real bruises to substantiate her claims - yet no police involvement?

We are then told that the heroine's parents were sexual perverts, that she has an Electra complex, that she wants to have sex with her handsome teenage-son and there is even an implication that her psychiatrist is getting personally involved in her case. And HERSHEY's self-evident sex-appeal makes the plot's sexual implications all-too-believable.

There is an ideological battle here between those whom believe HERSHEY's character to be a hysterical female, troubled by deep-seated sexual fears, and those whom believe that the entity stalking her is a tangible presence. This ambivalence is resolved in a slightly-underwhelming ending which is deliberately left ambiguous.

Underpinning the sexual tension on show here is a feminist allegory about a woman's proper place in a Judeo-Christian Western society and the necessarily-sexist and -misogynist incubus - with poltergeist tendencies - being a metaphor for the gender oppression of women in Caucasian and Jewish cultures.

The writing here is first class, the characters clearly differentiated & everyone involved offers-up convincing performances which very much helps the suspension-of-disbelief required in a somewhat bizarre tale loosely-based on a true story. And the Dutch angles the director Sidney J FURIE loves to use actually add to the melodramatic sense of emotional disorientation rather than potentially irritating or bemusing the audience.

What "The Entity" lacks is a musical score that is less insistent on getting your attention than the somewhat grating one presented here. It also needed a motivation for the sexual behaviour of the titular entity which rises above the merely lecherous, although it is strongly-implied that the entity is her late, sexually-creepy father.

A would-be space epic about a dysfunctional family sent on a colonising space-mission, when it would obviously have been far better to send an optimally-functioning one.

The self-indulgent, familial whining inevitably on-show here means that any attempt to make this a drama about the meaning and the purpose of the family, as such, is immediately scuppered with an ethnic obsession with the decline of the White family, as such. This social failing is compounded with there not being a single productive idea presented as to what to do about this contemporary state-of-affairs - albeit one that is here being projected into the near future.

However realistic it is to present emotionally-barren characters as two-dimensional creations, it makes for boring melodrama since there is minimal character-differentiation or development. The people here speak in the same histrionic and sarcastic manner at each other - but never to each other - most of the time, such that one begins to wonder if this is how White people actually see family life, in general, most of the time. We frequently see how these people are not emotionally-open to one another, but not in what manner they might actually complement each other.

In the end, what it is that might unite the space-family Robinson is never made clear because the writing never wants to explore character nor the basic premise of the survivability - or otherwise - of the modern nuclear-family in any emotional depth; favouring, instead, a repetitive chain of hyperbolic threats-to-life more reminiscent of a computer game than a family drama: The group psychological dynamics make no sense in terms of the need for the coherent unit-operation that is essential both to individual and to group survival.

The actors are all fine - especially Posey PARKER and Taylor RUSSELL - but they are saddled with a vast array of verbal quips spoken in the most inappropriate circumstances (eg, when someone might get killed) that it becomes very difficult to take their characters seriously, nor to care much for them. No-one here seems to be in any real danger from the alien planet that they have crash-landed onto which, in spite of this, seems completely determined to destroy them with ice, snow, freezing temperatures, hail, lack of food, etc.

(The science aspect of this science-fiction drama either makes no sense or is never properly explained. Why would spaceships in the future be powered by methane rather than something far more futuristic and far more powerful? How can a submerged spacecraft immediately work as new when raised from its watery grave while still completely sodden? How is it possible to have a glacier right next-to a wooded and then next-to a semi-desert area? These all assume that the same basic laws of geology do not operate throughout the universe, but without any explanation nor discussion from any of the onboard scientists.)

Silly and dishonest satire of the emotionally-repressed basis for the rampant political-correctness (PC) of White culture in which two forms of PC battle it out for supremacy in an inexplicable Zardoz-like (1974) vision of a Western future without the presence of genuine human emotions or actual political freedom.

The resistents' definition of freedom here is the usual American one lacking a distinction between true liberty and child-like self-indulgence. This leaves the viewer with no-one to root-for since each side of the conflict here merely represents two forms of the same PC totalitarianism.

Wesley SNIPES overacts delightfully and Sandra BULLOCK shows just how good she is at comedy. Everybody else in this picture is of little value in an unfocused script which tries hard to be another RoboCop (1987), but without resonant characterisation or a believable future-world; becoming instantly forgettable as soon as it ends, in the process.