Reviews

(Some spoilers)

As a fan of Indian films, I found this one to be very entertaining and exciting from beginning to end. Though I'm not an ethnic Indian, a few of my friends are and they introduced me to this world of major Indian studio films, the best of which come from major studios in Bombay hence 'Bollywood.' This one has several major Hollywood action and dramas referenced as well as previous Bollywood action flicks too.

For the plot, it opens with police inspector Amar Damjee foiling an assassination attempt on a bus load of people at a rural rest stop (shades of Harrison Ford in Patriot Games) by a terrorist group seeking to abduct a government VIP. He is labeled by the press as a hero and becomes an instant celebrity. But one of the terrorists Amar kills is the brother of the leader and they form a complex plan to frame him for the murder of the police commissioner's daughter which Amar is sent to prison. But with the help from an inmate, Amar escapes and sets out to find the terrorist leader to clear his name with the help from his cellmate and a female journalist. From then on it becomes "The Fugitive" with a moderately erotic love scene devered from the food-tasting love scene in 9 1/2 Weeks, all of which the plot twists come together at the climax when Amar confronts the terrorists whom have taken a group of government officials hostage in a 12-story high-rise office tower in downtown Bombay and only Amar can save everybody (shades of Bruce Willis in Die Hard).

Good violent action with some impressive musical production numbers with some gripping drama and a little comic relief make this big-budget Bollywood film one for the record books.

Spoiler alert As a fan of major studio production movies from India, 'Bollywood' as called, I found this to be a great, almost exact remake of the classic 1977 Italian 'giallo' thriller Seven notes in Black directed by Lucio Fulci.

The premise is the basically the same; a young clairvoyant woman has a vision of a murder and of the victim being walled up in an old house. Years later, she batters down the wall and finds the skeletal remains. She, with the help of a parapsychologist friend, try to solve the mystery of who the victim is and if the killer is still out there. The first hour more or less drags along with the woman, Deva, being introduced and meeting her future husband and after a nice courtship, they get married. Only during the second half does the movie really take off with the discovery of the body.

In the similarities between the Fulci film and this are many, with few differences. In the Fulci movie the heroine has her fragmented disjointed visions while driving through a road tunnel, here she has the visions while swimming in her backyard swimming pool. The yellow French cigarette burning in the ashtray in the Fulci film is replaced here by a light cigar. The magazine with a photo a young woman on the cover (the murder victim) is replaced by a photo of a racehorse. Also the incriminating letter detailing who the killer in The Psychic, is replaced here by a videotape with the English title: '100 Days' showing the killing. But basically the plotlines are all the same with the climatic chase, the murders, and even the now memorable wristwatch the heroine wears midway through the film which makes a loud beeping sound on the hour which gives away her hiding place as the killer is chasing her, and reveals her location when she's incapitated. In the Lucio Fulci film, the watch instead plays a haunting tune rather than a loud beeping.

In addition to the long dramatic opening hour, also added was an extended version of the climax which brings on a more upbeat ending. A fan of international films, I found this to be quite enjoying, not just for Indian citizens, but any fans of mystery-horror-thrillers regardless of their country of origin.

Fans of Lucio Fulci who have seen The Psychic, check this one out.

I very much liked this movie for it was a wickedly, fast-paced, unpredictable, black comedy/thriller which was directed by Martin Scorsese, whom I'm a fan of his other films (Taxi Driver, et al.) plus this remains one of his best and less known work.

Set during one long night in the life of a lonely New York City computer programer Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) opens with him working his job and showing a new trainee (a cameo by Bronson Pinchot) who tells Paul he wants more than working in this kind of office. Paul goes home at the end of the day to his Upper East Side apartment where he wastes the evening away watching TV. Venturing out in search of carnal pleasures, Paul meets the sexy-but-quirky Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in a coffee shop near his apartment building and begins chatting up a conversation with her. Paul asks for Marcy's phone number before she leaves and she tells him that he can call her anytime. Back at his apartment, Paul works up enough nerve to phone Marcy. She invites him to come down to SoHo where she is staying with Kiki, and artist friend of hers. Paul jumps into a taxi cab outside his apartment, and then the weirdness begins...

The burly cab driver whisks Paul through the streets of New York at 80 mph as if being chased by the hounds of hell. During the wild ride, Paul loses a $20 bill, the only money he has on him when it's whisked out the car window, and he is forced to stiff the driver. Paul finds the loft and meets Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) for the first time, who's wearing nothing but a black bra and leather miniskirt, working on a paper-maché sculpture that resembles painter Edvard Munch's The Scream. Eventually, Marcy shows up where they spend some time together. But Marcy is a strange person who prattles on about events in her life, delivering her lines with a staccato rhythm punctuated by a nervous laugh. Marcy turns out to be a hyperactive mass of contradictions, and Paul decides that swaying her emotions are a bit too weird to handle. So, he begins acting like a jerk and leaves.

In trying to get home, Paul does not have any money for a subway token and is forced to seek refuge in a bar where more wierdness happens involving an ecentric waitress (Teri Garr), the friendly barman (John Heard) as well as other ecentrics including Cheech and Chong playing a couple of dim-witted robbers that show up now and then.

I won't give any more away just in a sense of reason so one can view for themselves. Very surreal, this movie is like one long nightmare which one can never wake up from, plus I never wanted it to end. It's a film like this I myself can relate to: a well-off-but-lonely yuppie leaves his sterile apartment for a night out and pays a visit to a very different neighborhood of SoHo where it seems everyone is connected and looking out for each other, where as everyone in the Upper East Side keeps to themselves. Paul's rational sensibilities are at first intrigued, then terrified by the irrational, emotional and creative energies of this neighborhood, which is populated by every kind of different people one seldom sees in person. I think that the movie is a tragedy, because Paul, like a lot of unsure-of-themselves people, is stuck between these two worlds of SoHo and the Upper East Side, yet he belongs to neither. He seeks escape to the mundane, orderly and boring world that his day makes up in an office building, and finds the offbeat, freer lifestyle in SoHo intimidating, scary and dangerous. SPOILER In the end, through a combination of luck, skill, and divine intervention, Paul is rescued from certain danger (including death) and is delivered back to the cold comfort of his computers where he works, not that he belongs there, but because he really has no other place to go.

**SPOILERS**A certainly, different, dark, inteligent horror flick from Abel Ferrara, the director of various violent New York urban pictures. Here he portrays the secret underbelly of New York's subculture of vampires. The vampirism portrayed here is like a form a drug addiction for junkies feed off of illegal drugs like heroin, amoung others, vampires have the feed for blood. The lead character is Lili Taylor who plays Kathleen, a NYU med student studying for her Ph.D and living a lonely existence in a small apartment in Greenwich Village. One evening while walking home from night classes studying about war and the devastation, a chicly dressed woman, known only as Casanova, grabs Kathleen off the street, drags her into an alley and bites her on the neck. The bite slowly transforms Kathleen into a vampire, one of the undead to walk the earth feasting on blood. Kathleen then spends the rest of the movie trying to come to terms with her new existence. Her first impressions of not being able to eat, sleep, tolarate sunlight, unable cast a reflection in a mirror, or to enter a person's residence without an invitation is a hard one for her. Kathleen's new life is shown as she is a type of junkie with the insasible appetite for human blood and is to be dependent on it. While fighting her blood lust, Kathleen has discussions with her history professor as well as her best friend, Jean, about things like war, death, and other intelectual issues such as poety, and books like Naked Lunch, etc. But eventually Kathleen gives into her addition and her first victim is a street bum huddled in a doorway who puts up an even less struggle than she did with Casanova. Not wanting to bite her dirty, first victim with her new stubby fangs, Kathleen takes some of his blood with a hyperdermic needle which she injects into her arm, like a heroin junkie. With that her transformation to full vampire is complete and she then goes around vitimizing fellow students, professors, strangers and friends.

Shot in black and white on a very low budget, The Addiction is a must-see for all those who crave sub-culture art house films. Though the film looks very art-house as an almost student made picture. Like some of other works by Abel Ferrara, it has strong Catholic messages symbolizing that the only way for one to survive is to seek redemption before God. Lili Taylor is very good as the student turned vampire whom we share her point of view almost throughout the film. Her transformation to vampire in the early scenes is compelling for her transformation physically changes her too into a dark, pasty complextion of a young version of Patti Smith. Kathleen belives that since she is a vampire, and cannot die, she is one better than everyone around her. But midway through the movie, Kathleen's belief that she's superior over the teeming masses of New York is shatered when, during one of her nighttime prowls for victims, she has a run-in with another vampire, a gauntly handsome bloodsucker named Penia who is played by the great Christopher Walken, who's so convincing in his minor role that one really must wonder if he really is a vampire in real life. Inviting Kathleen back to his loft for some nighttime talk, Penia makes no attempt to hide his contempt for Kathleen and her parasitic existence and saying that just because that they're vampires there's no reason to repent their sins and make a life for themselves that's (almost) human as he has. Penia's talk makes Kathleen wonder if this life is really for her, which sets the stage for the climatic massacre which she masterminds with her sire Casanova. The vampire carnage at a party Kathleen throws is both horrifying and funny as a sort of "Night of the Living Dead" meets "Kicking and Screaming."

The Catholic messages that repentence is the only way to find salvation and end one's lifestyle is a little confusing as well as some of the poetic rethoric thrown by all of the characters in the film that one may find hard to follow. But the (sort of) happy ending makes little sense since a lot of things are never fully explained in detail. Gore fans by be slightly dissapointed over the lack of blood and guts over the more favored characterization and poetic dialogue. But overwall a very good, not your average vampire drama one would expect to see.

Set at a summer camp in upper New York state, it opens with a divorced man (who happens to be gay) his lover and their two young children a boy and a girl are swiming at a resort lake, which takes a turn when a motorboat carring some roudy teenagers goes out of control and runs over the father and his two kids in the water. Eight years later, the surviving child, a shy 14-year-old girl named Angela has been living with her overly cheerfull man-hating aunt and her cousin Ricky. Ricky and Angela are sent to Camp Arawak on the same lake where Angela's brother and father died. The shy, withdrawn Angela becomes subjected to various taunts by other campers whom Ricky always steps forward to defend her. Soon, an unseen killer begins killing the campers in various violent ways, and making them look as accidents. The camp owner tries to keep things under wraps while Angela is befriended by one boy who sticks up for her and eventually earns his trust, so it seems.

Although the film is technically and fairly competent, there is a lot of cheap heavy-handled parts than usual. Also there is very little mystery as to who is behind the killings since it is firmly established in the early scenes as either Ricky or Angela. But starting about half-way through the movie one begins to suspect something more about Angela when one character brings up the issue why is it that Angela will not shower or change clothes with the other girls in her cabin. To reveal anything else would have to be considers a spoiler. None of the violence is explicit or graphic but we do get to see a lot of rather messy remains of victims where one is scaled by boiling water, another guy is forcibly drowned, a third guy is stuck to death by wasps in a restroom stall, a girl stabbed while taking a shower, etc.

Contents: 10 killings, no female breasts, some seriously bad acting, and an unsavory surprise ending.

A good, better than usual Halloween clone set in a quite Venice suburb of Los Angeles where an 18-year-old girl, Trish, decides to throw a slumber party for her friends, members of her school's girls basketball team. Little do they know that a wild-eyed, middle-aged, maniac named Russ Thorn, who killed five people back in 1969, has escaped from a mental hospital and spots Trish and follows her to and from school to her house and, undercover of darkness, invades their party. Pre-slumber party killings include a telephone repairwoman named Mary, whom Thorn steals her van and drill he needs for the killing, and teammate Linda (played by Brinke Stevens in an early movie role) but they woun't be missed by the others. This one has all the elements of a good 1980's slasher flick, a high body count, a fair amount of splatter, a most phallic weapon, lots of false shocks, some gratuitious female nudity, etc. Given that this was writen and directed by women one would expect anything other than this material would have been given an edge of parody or irony, but it's all played straight. There is no masked killer, no surprise killer, no twist in the end, just straight-forward horror. Despite some cheap qualities it's all not badly done, especially in the last 20 minutes where the driller killer finally breaks into Trish's house and the girls dashing from room to room getting killed one by one, all the while the girl next door, Valerie and her little sister, Courtney, are oblivious to the going-ons. It is notable for Robin Stille as Valerie in the Jamie Lee Curtis heroine role and Andree Honore and the party goer with the largest bust.

Contents: 11 killings, good graphic gore (including a head lost and a hand getting chopped off), female nudity galore, lots of screams, a more stylish-than-usual, energetic flick.