This weekend's movie magic
Aug. 24th, 2003 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinThe first thing we saw of the videos Kibo brought over was something called Basil Hears A Noise that was based on the Canadian version of Sesame Street. I wasn't paying much attention.
The Master Of Disguise really is a terrible movie, though I've seen worse. Part of the problem with it is that, in sort of the reverse of the Kangaroo Jack catastrophe, it was clearly originally intended as a children's movie but was marketed partially to adults. This is possibly because Dana Carvey, or whoever had creative responsibility, kept putting in jokes that no kid would possibly get (an extended Al Pacino impression; a reference to the old shark-hunter dude from Jaws). Some of these are kind of amusing when they first pop up, because Carvey is a genuinely talented impressionist, but they're out of place.
The movie seems to have been cut down from a much, much larger amount of material. Oddly, the end-credit gags and outtakes, which go on for a very long time, are mostly from these deleted sequences. Some of the deleted scenes are on the DVD and are funnier than what ended up in the movie. But I think that rescuing the whole thing in post-production was probably a hopeless task.
The rest of the night was devoted to good movies, the first being the highly satisfying Vincent Price vehicle Theater of Blood, in which he plays a fading Shakespearean actor who kills all of the theater critics who panned him, in grotesque ways inspired (very loosely, in most cases) by killings in Shakespeare plays. Diana Rigg plays his daughter, and spends half of the movie in male drag with an orange fright wig and fake mustache, leading Price's entourage of methanol-drinking bums. Milo O'Shea (Duran Duran from Barbarella) plays the slightly dim police detective on his trail, and Ian Hendry is a critic with slightly more survival instinct than the rest of them. The victims are all unbelievably stupid, but Price is having so much fun that you can't help but enjoy the whole thing; and the gorgeous cinematography, and the fact that they actually had an abandoned theater to shoot in and destroy at the end, really sell it.
Continuing the theme of methanol-drinking bums, the final movie was the lovely widescreen DVD transfer of The Andromeda Strain. What a great-looking movie-- this is the kind of thing DVDs were made for. Seeing it this time around, I think my favorite thing besides the set design and the clever effects (including laser guns portrayed by honest-to-God real lasers, and an utterly convincing fake 3D computer-graphic of the Wildfire complex made by Douglas Trumbull with slit-scan techniques) has got to be Kate Reid's tough, funny, utterly believable performance as Dr. Ruth Leavitt. Her lack of Barbie-doll looks probably kept her from becoming a gigantic star, but I see from IMDB that she actually got a lot of work. She died in 1993.
Addendum: One thing we were wondering about when we saw The Andromeda Strain was how they managed to portray the rapid deaths of several rats and an obviously suffering monkey, given that the movie had a prominent notice of Humane Society supervision in the credits. I don't know whether they really killed the rats or not, but in the making-of featurette, Robert Wise mentioned that they actually got the monkey to act by partly asphyxiating him, bringing him back when a snuffed-out candle flame indicated that it was time to stop. No way would they get away with that in today's Hollywood, and it's probably a good thing all told.
The Master Of Disguise really is a terrible movie, though I've seen worse. Part of the problem with it is that, in sort of the reverse of the Kangaroo Jack catastrophe, it was clearly originally intended as a children's movie but was marketed partially to adults. This is possibly because Dana Carvey, or whoever had creative responsibility, kept putting in jokes that no kid would possibly get (an extended Al Pacino impression; a reference to the old shark-hunter dude from Jaws). Some of these are kind of amusing when they first pop up, because Carvey is a genuinely talented impressionist, but they're out of place.
The movie seems to have been cut down from a much, much larger amount of material. Oddly, the end-credit gags and outtakes, which go on for a very long time, are mostly from these deleted sequences. Some of the deleted scenes are on the DVD and are funnier than what ended up in the movie. But I think that rescuing the whole thing in post-production was probably a hopeless task.
The rest of the night was devoted to good movies, the first being the highly satisfying Vincent Price vehicle Theater of Blood, in which he plays a fading Shakespearean actor who kills all of the theater critics who panned him, in grotesque ways inspired (very loosely, in most cases) by killings in Shakespeare plays. Diana Rigg plays his daughter, and spends half of the movie in male drag with an orange fright wig and fake mustache, leading Price's entourage of methanol-drinking bums. Milo O'Shea (Duran Duran from Barbarella) plays the slightly dim police detective on his trail, and Ian Hendry is a critic with slightly more survival instinct than the rest of them. The victims are all unbelievably stupid, but Price is having so much fun that you can't help but enjoy the whole thing; and the gorgeous cinematography, and the fact that they actually had an abandoned theater to shoot in and destroy at the end, really sell it.
Continuing the theme of methanol-drinking bums, the final movie was the lovely widescreen DVD transfer of The Andromeda Strain. What a great-looking movie-- this is the kind of thing DVDs were made for. Seeing it this time around, I think my favorite thing besides the set design and the clever effects (including laser guns portrayed by honest-to-God real lasers, and an utterly convincing fake 3D computer-graphic of the Wildfire complex made by Douglas Trumbull with slit-scan techniques) has got to be Kate Reid's tough, funny, utterly believable performance as Dr. Ruth Leavitt. Her lack of Barbie-doll looks probably kept her from becoming a gigantic star, but I see from IMDB that she actually got a lot of work. She died in 1993.
Addendum: One thing we were wondering about when we saw The Andromeda Strain was how they managed to portray the rapid deaths of several rats and an obviously suffering monkey, given that the movie had a prominent notice of Humane Society supervision in the credits. I don't know whether they really killed the rats or not, but in the making-of featurette, Robert Wise mentioned that they actually got the monkey to act by partly asphyxiating him, bringing him back when a snuffed-out candle flame indicated that it was time to stop. No way would they get away with that in today's Hollywood, and it's probably a good thing all told.
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Date: 2003-08-25 12:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-25 03:10 am (UTC)