Reviews

Name a show that Nealon ever carried? Yeah, that's right, zero. The guy can't even out-act Arnold Palmer. "Make mine a Kevin Nealon." Yeah, sure, they are going to make a drink that is tasteless and flat.

The guy is a poor man's Chevy Chase and that's like saying he's a talentless schmuck who happens to know people in Hollywood.

The show can be summed up by the title: a very small joke that's part of every single show.

One good thing you can say about the show is that it is no longer in production.

The only bad part of this show's immediate bombing is that Lewis is funny and intelligent. Too bad. The guy knows how to deliver a line.

Three people intentionally rob a house. A murder occurs during the robbery. Tons of money is stolen. One of the three later dies, and the other two deny responsibility.

One of the remaining two decides to dig up the stolen money, all the while denying any responsibility. Even after confessing to his daughter, he continues to deny. Luckily, his daughter is also psycho, and she joins in with the denial.

For no apparent reason, the underage actors get nekkid in various scenes.

Along the way, the innocent murderer encounters people who are much worse than he is. You know they are worse then him because they also want the money that he got from his robbery/murder.

Eventually, the innocent murderer becomes a grave robber because way back when he didn't do anything wrong, he hid the money in a casket.

Overall, a heartwarming story of innocent people who aren't responsible for the murders, death, robberies and other crimes that they committed.

I remember Pat Paulsen fondly. He was one of the better parts of the Tommy and Dickie show. His popularity was at least as great as the Smothers Brothers during the run of their show. That however is not high praise. They were wildly popular for 15 minutes and then shunned by the public from that point forward. None of them were ever stars again.

Following the demise of the Smothers Brothers Show, Paulsen had his own short, failed TV series (which I loved) and a never-ending string of low-budget bombs. At all times, he played the same character. Most of the time, his credits were way down towards the bottom, below such powerhouses as unknown child actors and Playboy Bunnies.

As it turns out, speaking in a monotone voice is neither a skill nor an attraction. Much like Foster Brooks, if Paulsen was on the screen for a short time, he was hilarious; but if he was a major character, his delivery became grating.

If you want a complete understanding of Paulsen, just watch any of his work. His performance is always the same. The only reason to point out specific roles would be for the jokes, not the performance.

Paulsen's strength was his writing. His delivery, in my opinion, was a mistake. Despite great material and a very unusual delivery very few remember him. With a more normal delivery, he could easily have been the Seinfeld of his time.

I saw this in a small theater in Germany while in the Service. Liebman looked and acted like a porn star. He had the better lines. Bridges was a Caspar Milquetoast character. He let the other characters get him into situations.

I remember just two scenes. One was a scene where Liebman acted outraged because a clerk would not help him. Another reviewer said it was an S&H Green Stamps office. I would have said unemployment office. Liebman stood in a crowded room and berated the clerk. When he finished, the others in the room cheered him. But his speech was dreck. He was wrong in what he wanted. His speech was meant to show that he was the champion of the downtrodden, but it came off very poorly.

The other scene was set in the morning after a party. A gorgeous woman is pulling on her very tight jeans. After that excellent shot, she approaches Bridges, kisses him, and then leaves. Bridges turns to Liebman and asks, "Did I sleep with her?" Liebman replies, "No. Yes. I don't know." Liebman was great in that scene.

I'm off to YouTube to see if they have that scene. She has to be in her 60s now, but I wouldn't mind seeing those jeans again.

Some guy spends his time destroying the career of a cop by playing practical jokes on him. So some guy's sister says let's drive out in the desert. Then they sleep in the desert for no good reason. The next day they drive to a gas station and then a town. Maybe it's illegal to drive in a desert at night in Australia.

Along the way, they meet a lot of people who want the sister to lip sync some music, and some guy makes a lot of silly "inventions" that do not work except for the miracle of modern editing. When some guy isn't messing with the cop, he screws with other people's lives.

They're rich people who are on the run because a cop with no proof is mad at one of them for a minor offense; so naturally part of the movie is about them looking for permanent jobs. In the end, nobody kills some guy, but that's why they make sequels.

I won't get into the plot. Almost all the other reviewers thought it necessary to ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it.

I won't get into whether Myrna Loy was hot or was good actress. Plenty of other reviewers thought she was the star of this show, and they spent way too much time on a third-billed starlet with a throwaway role. Remove her role, and the movie marches on. No script changes would be needed besides removing her few forgettable lines.

I will talk about Alice White. This is a woman who in real life or in almost all of her movies was the ultimate vamp. I wouldn't trust her to take out the trash, but good golly, is she ever a "Naughty Flirt." This is a movie that I would like to see every couple of years. Ms. White is quite an unusual actress. She had more talent than most actresses. She could have been a star in many different fields of entertainment. She chose movies, and she chose to be the woman who destroyed marriages and men.

Myrna, as popular as she was, had very little talent compared to Alice. People remember Myrna, but it's mostly due to the movies she was cast in. And everybody has forgotten Alice for basically the same reason. In this movie, Myrna is a quite distasteful person, but still, some reviewers somehow find her attractive and her acting compelling. I don't know what they were watching. She was simply a word that begins with B and rhymes with "witch." Not a stretch for her.

My one and only criticism of this delightful romp is that I absolutely hate how Hollywood of the '30s kept representing the common man as outrageously rich and decadent. None of the characters in this movie had a clue about the horrible despair permeating America due to the Crash of '29.

You can always tell a bad Maureen O'Hara movie. If she is top billed, it's P U Stinky. Her main acting skills involve a mane of red hair and large bosoms.

In this movie, O'Hara, once again, plays a fiery redhead who likes to tell the man she loves that she wants nothing to do with him. This was her sole role in movies until she got too old. Then she just got cranky with everybody.

Jeff Chandler was second billed. The movie revolves around his character. He gets more screen time and all the action, but he is sadly lacking in the mammary department.

They have plenty of Indians in this movie. Too many perhaps. It looks like they didn't all get outfitted in the same wardrobe department. Perhaps some of them simply wandered over from another movie.

The plot is solid as a rock. There are a bunch of Indians who always attack in small groups. And there is another bunch that are peaceful. So the Army teaches the peaceful bunch how to fight in small groups like the other bunch. And then there is a big battle where everybody forgets their roles and just attacks everybody else en masse.

And finally Maureen O'Hara gets to model a cool outfit.

The end.

This movie gets two stars: One for Ms. O'Hara's physical qualities, and one for her lack of screen time.

I almost deducted a star for Dennis Weaver's portrayal of an Indian, but it was a relief to see the man walk around without a stick tied to his leg.

It's a sad reality that people look at this wandering collage of unrelated scenes and declare it a great movie.

The actors are pretty good, but they are not given any lines worth a darn.

The director apparently went to the one-trick pony school of cinema. He likes to present cool things even if there is no reason for them to appear. I can imagine him on the set repeating over and over, the heck with reality; I'm creating a movie for 13-year-old boys.

There is virtually no reason to like any of the characters. All of them, even the cops, are as immoral and decadent as possible. They say absolutely stupid things that seem to have no relation to the movie itself.

When the good guys win, you are left with the questions of what did they win, and how did they win. There really isn't any sense in it at all.

Pitiful waste of time.

120 minutes of scenes that would be cut if they had a plot.

Basically, there is a shadowy hit-man who likes to talk to everybody. He tells his story everywhere he goes.

Talk, talk, talk.

He even talks to the cops. What a nice talkative hit-man. Oh, boy.

Luckily, even though half the city knows he is a hit-man, he can still pull off these hits without anybody catching on. Even when the cops catch him in the middle of a hit and know that he is a hit-man, nobody catches on. What a sneaky guy.

I assume that the reason why they turned the original turkey of a play into this turkey of a movie was so the characters could be heard over the endless chants of "What kind of crap is this?" Love Whitaker. Hate everything about this movie.

I couldn't get past the opening. They opened with Stark being a drunk and a whoremonger.

In the first battle, a guy screams at him and then he gets ripped apart. The Humvee that Stark is in gets riddled with holes from the projectiles. Stark would have been liverwurst at that point.

Then we find out that his heart condition is now merely shrapnel.

And that's all I could stand.

Why couldn't they make an Ironman movie about Ironman? Why did they have to make one about some god-awful person who was only fit for a Kardashian wedding.

They could have had a decent movie that was faithful to Ironman and used the same plot.

Extremely poor if you like Ironman. Maybe okay if you favor crap.

I won't regret not seeing this turkey, but I do regret the five minutes that I spent seeing how badly they treated a pretty decent character.

This movie gets one star for the casting. Robert Downey Junior is a true piece of trash, and his real life fits exactly the despicable person that they turned Tonly Stark into.

You don't have to see more than a few minutes of this movie to start picking out the plot holes. What a disaster.

Bergen's character, for instance, enters the race, not to win, but because she knows that the race goes right near where her husband is in prison. She wants to break him out, and she wants to use the race to help her. Her plan is to do the race day after day until she runs across the chain gang that has her husband. Then she will overpower the guard and vamoose with the hubby.

Stupid, stupid, stupid plan. But it works. She rides hundreds of miles at break-neck speed and wondrously comes upon the chain gang with her husband at the exact time she passes. She never has to deviate from the race course!! The chain gang is right in the path of the race!! There is only one guard!! She gets her husband out. Wow.

Neither horses nor riders are outfitted for a marathon race. Horses are used like automobiles. As long as the rider can sit, the horse can keep galloping through the desert. However, get a horse near the finish line, and all of a sudden, it's about dead. Too bad the race didn't end 300 yards earlier when the horses were frisky.

I absolutely love cowboy movies, and I like every actor in this movie, but this is a load of garbage.

Perhaps it makes sense if you have never seen a horse or a desert or a race, but this is a stinker.

Horses can't be run hour after hour. Deserts are both deadly hot and freezing cold. Marathon races are not done at full speed.

Geeze, there was even bad acting by the snake. What the heck is that snake doing trying to snuggle up to a sleeping Vincent in the middle of a hot desert day? It was probably an amateur snake that had never been a snake before. A more professional snake would have argued with the director. Real snakes seek heat when it is cold and hide from it when it is hot. If they are out in the hot sun, they are hunting, and they don't hunt things larger than what they can shove down their throats whole.

And finally, if you are ever in the desert and you and your horse are dying of thirst, you aren't a horseman if you drink before you take care of your horse.

This is not a "fact-based" story as some gullibly believe. There was a race once that went the same distance, but that is the only connection.

Hackman, Colburn, Bergen, Johnson, Vincent: fine actors. Anything they have done is more watchable than this turkey.

This movie gets one cow plop out of ten. Great actors. No plot. Bad camera work. Badly edited.

Charlie wakes up from a drunk in the surf. He steals a bicycle. He steals a car. He rips up a golf course. Beer cans thrown around. Carts dumped in the water hazard.

This is the way our fighting men are portrayed on their days off.

Charlie shoots a man who is holding a gun to the head of a woman. Charlie makes a joke. Charlie is asked what is happening during combat. Charlie makes a joke. Later in another battle, Charlie is asked to assess the situation. Charlie makes a joke.

This is the way our fighting men are portrayed during combat.

I like Charlie. But I'd slap the stuffing out of him for his part in this movie.

Cheech is great. Clooney is good. Some bit players are good. Salma, as always, is a convincing whore. But almost everything else stinks.

Tarantino had an idea for a script, but failed to write it. Rodriquez had his usual half an idea about how to direct. The talentless Lewis reprises her role as a weak little girl surrounded by psychotic men. Hayek is allowed on screen long enough to dance and die, and that's a little too long for her talent. Keitel didn't have a clue about how to be a mild-mannered preacher.

Still, there is a lot of blood and gore. Lots and lots of people die. So if it's a blood fest that you want, try this one.

But watch out for that wooden post that keeps reappearing throughout the movie. That's Ms. Lewis acting her heart out.

Nobody applauds the story, the plot, the character development, the directing, the action. Everybody seems to like the part where two nubile young innocents (played by two women in their mid-20s) explore their sexuality.

And that is why some are applauding the casting. They found two hot chicks who want to kiss each other because, wow, that outfit is so hot.

The Internet is full of sites that have old women posing as underage girls, and the Internet is full of hot chicks who want to kiss each other. Those sites are also devoid of plot, character development, etc.

See the movie if you want to see hot women in their 20s kiss each other Avoid this movie if you have any other reason for watching movies.

This movie proves that silicone does not age. Jameson dies right away and becomes a vampire. Throughout the movie, her appearance degrades as she becomes more zombie-like. However, her breasts seem to remain as perfectly squeezable as the day her surgeon gave them to her.

To top it off, her other surgically enhanced sexual body part also seems to have survived the ravages of zombiehood. She may be old and wrinkly, but she still has the range and the choice of ammunition.

Sadly, her zombie lips are misshapen and grotesque -- much like the way they were before she became a zombie.

But you can't beat those boobs. Right up to the moment when she loses half of her head, those happy pillows still look warm and inviting.

See this movie if you want to see Jenna Jameson die or if you want to find out if zombie strippers act even more cold and detached than those at your regular house of sin.

Avoid this movie if you tend to cry at sad scenes such as Jameson coming back to life.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie right up to the end. But the end is not good. It stinks on ice.

For the end of the movie to work, Eastwood needs outside help. Remember what the Hmong cop told the kid at the end? He said that this time, it would be different because .... Well, that is a young cop. His fellow officers are likely to tell him not to count his chickens before they are hatched. That outside help often dries up and blows away long before it is actually useful.

Well, all through this movie situations arise which are very similar to the end scene. All through this movie, that outside help was possible. All through this movie, nobody expected that outside help. And all through this movie that outside help doesn't appear. It doesn't appear from the community at large or from anyone related to any of the victims. It doesn't even come from the victims themselves. Heck, the victims are 100% absolute perfect candidates to give that outside help, but they don't do it either.

Still, Eastwood bets everything on it. Apparently his reasoning is: If I do my part, then everybody else will do their part. He seems to be forgetting that the entire community has been unwilling to have anything to do with that outside help that he needs.

And so, the movie closes in a way that would be shameful to Dirty Harry. He had so many other options. Instead, he goes against everything his character has done in his 80 years and chooses to do something that his character would consider weak and unmanly. It wasn't a brave act. Considering what else Eastwood's character was facing, this ending shows that he is giving up.

In the movie, Eastwood says "I finish things. That's what I do." Well, he didn't finish squat with this ending. There is a darn good chance that the people Eastwood is protecting are going to be a lot worse off in the future. That outside help often disappears. Cops on Law and Order and CSI are shown having trouble with that particular kind of outside help on every other episode.

It is a stupid, stupid ending to an otherwise totally enthralling movie.

There is no satisfactory rating to be given to this movie. It was absolutely brilliant until the end. But the ending is horrible.

If you like useless TV trivia, you know that Norman Lear was the first to get a flushing toilet onto television. It happened on All in the Family. Good ol' Norman was known as edgy and innovative for such things.

But he pushed too far with Mary Hartman. The networks considered Mary Hartman to be even more shocking than a toilet, and they rejected it. Luckily, there were plenty of independent stations that thought that a flushing toilet was very artsy, and Mary Hartman came to life.

And so we were presented with a pervert grandpa, a eunuch, death by soup, death by tree, etc. Like the flushing toilet, none of this is vital to the plot. They appear simply to shock. All in the Family didn't need the flushing toilet, but Norman did write an entire show based around the sound of a toilet flushing.

Mary Hartman was a show in which each episode concerned something shocking. The writing, acting and directing ranged from exceptionally poor (Lasser) to average. None of that really mattered. The fans tuned in to see what shocking situation Mary found herself in.

Mary Hartman had one hook: either Hartman wouldn't understand the shocking events that happened or she would fixate on a trivial detail. Take a gander at the glowing reviews written by those frustrated liberal arts students. They all talk about the shocking situations, but not a one of them can remember the plots.

It wasn't art. It wasn't cutting edge. It wasn't even sitcom noir. It was a series of unfunny jokes delivered by a severely drug-addled D-list star about some "shocking" situation that happened.

Not as well-written as Zombie Cheerleaders in the All-Night Bowlerama. Not as well-acted as My Mother the Car. Not as shocking as seeing Grandma in her nightie. The perfect gift for the average mother-in-law.

Some reviewers like this movie because it is an action movie. This isn't an action movie. There is supposed to be action in it, but you never really see it. What you do see is a hodge-podge of cut scenes at awkward angles.

Some reviewers like this movie because of its artsy-fartsy non-linear storytelling technique. I don't agree with them, but I do sympathize. It must have been a shock for them to discover that there are no useful applications for a liberal arts degree. So when something like this comes along, it is natural to grasp at straws and declare that this movie is true art. Sadly, they are basing their claims on what their freshman professor said about some Italian guy who was loved at Cannes and ignored by the public. Being part of the public, I say that it's not a good movie if you have to keep saying "Who is that?," "What did that mean?," and most importantly, "When will this piece of crap be over?"

Some reviewers like this movie because of the actors. Cuba Gooding is a great actor. Ray Liotta is as good (or bad) as ever. The rest of the cast are very minor actors who once were or someday may join Liotta on the bottom of the B list.

Personally, I started having trouble with this movie when the bank teller got shot in the head at close range and ended up with only a black spot of grease paint on her forehead. Apparently, you go into a coma if you get grease paint on your face.

Overall, this movie had great potential but fell short because of two people: the guy who hired the director, and the guy who approved the script.

This movie would make a great gift for your mother-in-law, but don't give it to anyone that you like.