Reviews

I sneered and muttered about "fairy tales" when theis was first on, but after seeing Ron Perlman in "Alien:Resurrection" I became a fan of his. So when I found it being rerun now in 2022 I discovered this show was wonderful. (Certainly lightyears better than the lame reality shows the networks are pawning off on us now.)

The romance was laid on thick, but it worked because of Perlman, I couldn't understand why Catherine didn't pack up and join him in the tunnels but maybe listening to her little girl voice would have driven them up the wall eventually. I had the same problem with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra -- two beautiful women whose voices simply weren't right for the weightiness of their roles.

I am really sorry the show didn't continue longer with Jo Anderson after Catherine's bizarre and abrupt "death," because the chemistry with Anderson was palpable. Her Diana was a super character, and she deserved more episodes and development than those last ten that she was in. Anderson had the presence and passion worthy of playing against a character like Vincent. Yet they haven't even bothered to include a photo of her Diana in the program's Photo Gallery. Shame!

This is a great movie any American should be required to see. This movie is almost unbearable to watch. It is even more unbearable to know it is based on a true story. The reality is that the foster parent system in the US is broken and a lot of foster parents are taking children in strictly for the cash, little of which is spent on the children. The "foster parent" in this story is certifiably a sadist, but even the ones who are not are people you likely would not allow to adopt a goldfish if you knew them. That's foster care.

Bruce Davison is a respectable actor, and his appearance would suggest the possibility of a passable entertainment, but wow. The special effects set on Arctic ice where the actress is so obviously somewhere warm as toast are genuinely laughable, but I guess they had to save money for the numerous disasters to which they subject that ship. Have you seen a ship suffer a disaster in a movie ? You will see it happen again here, at least once. Most of the acting is hysterically awful. This movie is not bad -- it's really raucously, rollickingly, delightfully bad.

This show has a great cast and storylines.

When they first made someone an out and out murderer, I was afraid they had gone too far, and in the first season. However, there was a recent case in Florida of a doctor doing exactly what this "doctor' did, and this must be pretty much how they got away with it for years. If you plan on ever being sick, you need to watch this.

The only new scripted show I can stand. I love it. And it just got even better.

Watch this movie for George Chakiris' perfect, perfect performance. I saw it on late night TV and there were some indications that scenes near the end had been cut out to make it TV-acceptable, or else the plotting became slightly choppy, but then it proceeds nicely to the ending. The traffic scenes used to take us through the daylight hours are a nice touch. There is a satisfying twisty ending. Not a great movie, but for me, Mr Chakiris' performance was a 10, and the reason I rated this movie so highly. Bela Lugosi set the standard. Chakiris is one magnificent standard-bearer and no one has done it better. The female lead Pamela Ludwig seems a little gauche in comparison, and one of his achievements is that his performance somehow highlights this AND works with it to highlight his character's sense of more-than-human age and experience. Ludwig is cute, and she gets better. Hauser is boiling over the top from his first scene, as his character requires, and I guess his fans would like this movie, too.

I was captivated by the bits of this I've gotten to see (it comes on just before I am leaving for work) and then I was completely taken by the episodes I got to see the few days I was out sick or on vacation.

I confess I was at first interested in the books in order to see how these themes had been covered (the laudanum, kidnapping, etc) and as I suspected they were add-ons, and probably necessary to hold the audience. But the books are absolutely delightful, and the writing about nature is absolutely magnificent.

So: Watch the series, then read the book. (All ages--I am well beyond the original target audience age, I think).

It seems to me that the key to this movie is the mystery of the banked blazing passion of the character of Claire Bloom. It looks like sexual passion, but as the movie unfolds it reveals itself as raging agony.

She inscribes scenes of terribly flawed men too willing to sacrifice others, scenes of terrible losses, scenes intended to make the viewer KNOW what rotten hopeless greedy self-centered vicious little apes we really are. This woman is a deeply civilized person who has suffered losses so terrible she is driven to travel in time and torment a surrogate for the man who caused them. She does it with exquisite controlled cruelty--the tattooing. The stories get closer to what really happened to her. She leaves in order to refrain from the culmination of her passion, which would be murder and not sex. She doesn't care that Steiger himself never hurt her because she knows now there are no innocents.

And Rod Steiger is perfect--he FEELS like her innocent victim. All he wanted at the beginning was to be with this beautiful woman. It's just that she is incandescently bitter at humanity and he is human. He is no innocent, and by the time we meet him he knows it well. He knows every person who looks at his skin illustrations learns that s/he is no innocent, either, and then hates him. He is now as embittered and vengeful as the woman was, and that's her revenge on humanity.

But then there's the stilted, awkward, vacuous non-performance of the other guy. It was as if they grabbed some carpenter's assistant to read through the script with Steiger because the real actor was passed out in his trailer. I thought Rod Steiger got more acting-back from the dog. (Many here seem to respect this actor--maybe in some other movie, but not this one.) This is what prevents it from being a masterpiece.