Change Your Image
robtclements
Reviews
Riverworld (2010)
Sod the books, let's just use the title on our film
Another Syfy channel abomination. Why do they keep making films when they have no feel - or respect - for the genre? I wonder why they didn't put a giant boa in the film & call it Boa vs Riverboat. Maybe they wanted to but thought that it would cheapen the product. Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books (starting with To your scattered bodies go, which this thing palimpsests) are not flawless; but they had stories which made made sense & exotic character details which entertained. They - he - didn't deserve this travesty. It isn't a film: it's a cheat sheet of the least interesting bits mangled through a malfunctioning food processor. & to think that Robert Hewitt Wolfe once wrote some of the best ST:TNG & DS9 episodes. He must'ave had some great EPs at Paramount keeping him in line
Jake and the Fatman: Lady Be Good (1988)
What on earth has happened to Kira Nerys's nose?
The plot has more red herrings than a rancid bouillabaisse, but Lady, be good is made unnecessarily entertaining by Nana Visitor's platinum blonde femme fatale. As the criminal insurance investigator, she gets all the best clothes (the little black cleavage - i mean dress - in the would-be seduction scene is a fetishist's delight), all the worst lines & inevitably gets caught red-gunned right before the final freeze-frame, but somehow Ms V's characteristic intensity makes this rather silly Double indemnity riff a diverting 51m. On the other hand, Lady, be good IS an episode of Jake & the fatman, so Lady, it can't be all good....
Themroc (1973)
Anarchist assault
In a time when blind respect for anyone with the arrogance to call themselves an authority has reached plague proportions, we need to rediscover Claude Faraldo's anarchist assault Themroc as a matter of extreme urgency. Whether as a surrealistic revenge fantasy that makes Dirty Harry look like Kindergarden Cop or simply as one of the funniest films ever made, the film takes nothing seriously (least of all itself) as it sets out to outrage every convention of decent law abiding filmmaking ever unwritten. It's hard to choose just one pristine moment to symbolise this work - peraps the gendarme's blind pride in the stupidity of his uniform just before he becomes Themroc's latest meal; or possibly Michel Piccoli's curious assistance in his own death as his cave family are carefully walled in - but the work is blistering in its uncompromising joyous anti-logic. Commercial traditionalists like Bunuel may have made newer - even angrier - statements; but noone has ever revelled in their own extremism than Faraldo. The sooner it turns up on DVD, the better.