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jim_snowden
Reviews
The Starfighters (1964)
Mr. Zens, you made this film. For God's Sake Why?
I can't figure out who this film was meant for. It can't be a training film. You learn that the F-104 needs frequent refueling and that it can make mincemeat out of large, white rectangles, but that's as much technical information as you'll get. It isn't a gripping family drama, though there are a lot of scenes where Bob Dornan's father, Congressman Liberace, rings up his son and his commander to diss their fighter jets (it could have used a sort of, kind of Jazz Singer moment where the Congressman hears his son is flying jets instead of bombers, rips his clothes, and proclaims he has no son. That would have been something anyway). As for the romance...well, lets just say that the midair refueling scenes deliver more raw eroticism than any of these drunk, speed freaked pilots who troll the bars to pick up vapid Iowa chicks for nights of wild snuggling. My current theory is that this movie was some kind of commercial for the F-104 and the Tactical Air Command, though I'm still not sure who they're trying to sell it to (Congressmen? Pilots? The General Public?). With ads like this one, I'm surprised the Air Force doesn't have to hold bake sales to buy its bombers.
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Not sure why they told us this story
I came out of this movie with mixed emotions. The special effects were good, the chases were tense and the backstory of this new Terminator's relationship with John Connor was clever. Still, there was a fatalism throughout the movie that reduced the impact of the ending. The movie essentially says to us, "This is the way things will turn out...things are turning out as I predicted...I was right, this was the way turned out." Not only does this ruin suspense, but it also means that whenever someone dies in the picture, instead of pitying the dead, we shrug and move on. It alienates us from the movie and its characters when we want to feel close, and by the end my reaction to the story paralleled that of the kid in The Princess Bride who screams, "Jeez, grampa, why did you want to tell me this story!"
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Would You Believe This Movie Was A Hit?
I had one of my students research the Amityville hoax as an exercise in critical thinking, and he wound up watching the movie as part of the project--poor kid. He told me, and I must agree, that the scariest part of the film is when the occultist neighbor woman exposes her teeth during one of the "red room" scenes. They were horrifying, and they haunt me to this day. The rest of the movie, well, doesn't. In some ways they would have been better off if they hadn't played the "It's a true story" card, but even as a fiction it's derivative and at times silly (do you notice how little time they seem to spend working on the house, dealing with utility people, or shopping for new housewares). Also, when the house spills blood or black goo all over everything, they never seem to have to call carpet cleaners or even give the walls a good once over with a sponge (and wouldn't some of that stuff prompt an angry call to the Realtor?) The Lutz's and their ghost-writers, the only ghosts involved in this story, never really seemed to think this sort of stuff through. The only other frightening part of the movie is when the house, presumably, rips off George Lutz for a cool grand. I can't blame the house for doing it. Apparently it repairs all the crap it breaks on its own. It must cost. Still, it puts Lutz and his family in desperate economic straits, and that was something everyone feared in 1979. I think Stephen King suggested calling this movie "The Terror of the Shrinking Bank Account". It might have been better. As it is, we have to chalk it up as yet another thing we can't believe was popular in the seventies.