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dearnhar
Reviews
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Indescribably bad
It's been a while since I saw any Moore Bond flicks, but I hazarded an evening on this one on a friend's enthusiastic recommendation. Mistake! I only shudder to think what Moore's other ones are like if this is, as many fans are saying here, his best. The frumpy ski jacket he wears at Cortina is a good little metaphor for how misguided the whole project is. If you admire the dialog and clever plotting of Scooby Doo cartoons, you may find much to like here. Other than that, the nice location shots are the only possible reason to watch. A relentless bore. The comment guide tells me I need to fill up another two lines of text.
Zombie (1971)
great bad acting boosted by hackneyed script & reckless direction
Come on, if you love B drive-in movies this is a must. Stocked entirely with a phoned-in plot, a great Johnny-Quest-like soundtrack, stereotypes (the devil-may-care, hunky romance-writer hero, expendable blacks & Latinos, bimbo wives with stupid jealous husbands, mad scientist, zombies with sunny-side-up eggs over their eyes & bad skin--it's got them all).
Like draftees into the government-sanctioned moral hygiene videos of the '50s & '60s, the C-actors seem quite willing to mutter the screenplay's bizarre malapropisms: Rich guy welcoming guests to dinner at his uncharted island plantation: "If you want those cocktails I'm afraid your'll have to bring them with you. Juarita (?) is an excellent cook. One thing she will not tolerate is food getting cold. Perhaps it's just as well--I have a Borjelais (sic) I'm very proud of. Hard liquor will just dull the palate." The Spanish is even more improvised--as if translated by Google.
No less fun (to me, anyway) for its utter predictability. Cashing in on the James Bond trend for the Busch-&-popcorn drive-in set 50 years ago (though substituting clashes of race and class for the Cold War), the scariest thing about it is the window it offers into prevailing views of (white) manhood, (white) womanhood, and the nefarious darker-skinned people who try stand in their way.
Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)
"Quality" and "classic" don't always go together
I understand the feeling of watching an old movie aghast at its clumsy (ape-like?) embrace of gender/race/class stereotypes, but I think "classic" has more to do with how a work engages the imagination than with how intelligent it is. The stodgy prose of _Robinson Crusoe_ is almost unreadable today, but you can still get a summary of the basic plot from any reasonably aware kid on the street. The same is true with the Tarzan stories, which get remade over and over. Something about the myth of a white lord of the jungle has staying power. Maybe we'll learn something about American culture if we ask what chords the story rings--even if they turn out to be embarrassingly ugly.