denis-11 Reviews

A Return to Salem's Lot (1987)

How bad was it? It was soooo baaaddd....

[20 April 1999]

....that I had to force myself to see it through to the end.... how bad? Well the kid who played the exceedingly foul-mouthed boy has NO other acting credits to his name on this movie database! That should say something...to think that Michael Moriarty, an actor with many fine films to his credit, would appear in a piece of crap like this... I first saw it last year after renting it at a video store, because the original Salem's Lot is a pretty good film, but this movie has nothing to do with the original....it looked like they shot it about 10 minutes after the writer wrote it, and they had one shot only...if you forgot your lines, just adlib something...the plot was preposterous....the only attribute it made to vampire movies at all was the concept of the "drones" who could function during the day as normal people and guard the real vampires.

Really I must say, that of "major" studio movies, this one truly has a shot at worst of all time, as they had real actors, a real budget, location, scenery and etc....and it is still horrible. So you can't judge it against awful movies that were shot for video only with a $100,000 budget....No, this one really is unbelievably bad considering its backing and the name it had to trade on..... I gave it a "2" but I think I was charitable. Because of this movie, there will never be a "Salem's Lot 3" and that's too bad.

Drum (1976)

Hard to find anymore - Not for sale anywhere either.

[15 January 1999]

I got a copy of it from one of those "avant garde" type video shops that pride themselves in having the hard to find stuff.

You can see this movie without having seen the pre-quel,"Mandingo" and not lose much understanding, since they make almost no references to what happened in the first movie. In fact, the plantation owner's white daughter was not in the first movie, so it really doesn't follow at all (she was in the novel "Mandingo"). Those who thought Mandingo was trashy will really be howling when they see this one....Warren Oates and the woman playing his daughter play for laughs in the middle part of the movie...(that actress went on to make X-rated movies and then dropped out of acting altogether by the mid 80s). John Colicos plays an evil homosexual....I like the overdone white trash talk though (" OH PAW! You ain't gonna marry that uppity bitch!) Great camp. Ken Norton acts like a mannequin most of the movie.....(" He might kill Blaize...or even worse, castrate him" - said with a totally expressionless face). And the dinner conversation is hilarious. ("Son I gonna give you Regine. How long you figger it take you to knock her up?). (" Miss Augusta, you jes got to get used to the fack that Falconhurst is all about n****r fornicatin'. If'n my n****rs stop fornicatin', we stops eatin'.)

Regine: You likes big titties, don't you Mistah Maxwell?

Hammond: Oh you knows I likes big titties.

Regine: Well Miss Augusta, she got BIIG titties.

And I repeat - this is supposed to be a serious movie.

The movie is in that "so bad it's good" category. Check it out, if you have a hankerin' for that genre.

Return to Peyton Place (1961)

Worth watching (once) for these reasons.....

[16 December 1998]

1. You get to see Robert Crane of Hogan's Heroes in an "Ed McMahon" type role to somebody else doing a "Johnny Carson". Actually he's acting more like Jack Paar.

2. The first 45 minutes of the movie take place on what seems to be two days before thanksgiving. Then on thanksgiving morning, they show a scene of New York at dawn - and the streets are totally deserted!!!!

3. You get to see this 1960 era turkey as a prop and boy, were turkeys skinny back before corporate farming took over.

4. Everything was so wholesome back then. Except when a woman (the Italian actress) has an unwanted pregnancy. Then she tries to lose it by having a skiing accident because abortions were illegal back then, silly.

5. I've been to Camden, Maine, several times, and the locals told me that they shot none of this movie up there (they filmed the original peyton place there in 1956).

6. Peyton Place was set in 1941-43; this movie never sets a year but if you figure by the fact that the young lawyer just got through law school and that takes 7 years from the start of college, and he was in the war until 1945, that would make this about 1952 I guess. Or maybe its supposed to be current with the release date and be 1961; they never explain this.

7. There is nothing said about several of the characters of the earlier movie that had prominent roles (such as the town doctor and Allison's boyfriend). Why are two such good looking girls still unmarried during that era anyway? Obvious plot loopholes.

8. This movie has an old fashioned look and feel to it even for 1960-61 standards. Within 3-4 years clothing, hairstyles, speech, and mannerisms were significantly different. It's like a time capsule movie of a small town America just before all the crappy changes that took place in the 1960s.

9. It has a really good ending. I found myself actually siding with the old biddy who is singlehandedly trying to enforce the old Puritan moral code of her era against the will of apparently the entire rest of the town, who want to change with the times and let everybody do their own thing. She walks out of the town hall meeting in silence and totally defeated; terrific symbolism, and almost supernaturally prophetic in what actually happened across the country over the rest of the decade.

10. Last but not least, the man who plays the character "Dexter" (he has about 1 line; he is a school board member who is a weak character and the old biddy uses him as a supporter)...this guy was on a lot of the old three stooges shorts. He always played a bad guy, and I've never seen him on any other serious movie.