Michel Serrault, like his co-star here, Isabelle Adjani, used to be in everything. As ubiquitous as Depardieu. La cage aux folles might be his best-known film. Despite his omnipresence, he seems surprising casting as a private eye known only as "the Eye," but then he does have inverted Vs for eyebrows, just like Hammett's description of Sam Spade.The Eye has a class photograph of a group of schoolgirls. He's talking to his ex-wife on the phone. She won't tell him which one is his daughter. He guesses wrong. He'll be allowed another guess in a year. There are about thirty kids to choose from.What a brilliant opening scene! We'll forgive the strutting eighties music and neo-noir Venetian blind shadows. This is a film besotted with movie-ness and wallowing in plot contrivance, but it's also perverse, haunted and romantic. The Eye is warned against letting his new case get too complicated.
- 5/31/2017
- MUBI
So you’re wading through piles of slasher films from the ‘80s, keen on discovering a lost gem far removed from the normal gang in the woods or high school sis-boom-bah stab and gab. You’re thinking maybe a different setting will yield a fresh take, already tired tropes blurring your vision and making the distinction between a hockey mask and a fencing one harder by the day. Well…have you tried the hospital yet? Most folks are terrified of the antiseptic halls and robotic empathy doled out by uncaring staff. (Yes, yes, they also save lives, I know. I’m trying to set a mood, dammit.) And if you do decide to enter the medical field, I strongly suggest you pay a visit to Hospital Massacre (1981), Israeli King of Schlock Boaz Davidson’s wild attempt at a horror comedy, where some of the humor is even intentional.
First released...
First released...
- 5/13/2017
- by Scott Drebit
- DailyDead
Simon Brew May 17, 2019
The 2000s were a decade when medium and small-budgeted movies could do big business before being forgotten. We look back as to why.
By the end of the 2000s, getting number one at the American box office was a valuable marketing commodity. As such, studios pumped more and more money into making sure they at least had a great opening weekend for their product.
The consequence of this was that it was harder and harder for smaller, quirkier films to take a brief spot in the sun. Certainly toward the second half of the decade, it seems that the number one movie each week was pre-ordained in a marketing meeting somewhere.
Still, there were some films that have since fallen out of public view that clawed their way to number one. How many of these do you remember?
Eye of the Beholder
January 2000, One Week
Based on...
The 2000s were a decade when medium and small-budgeted movies could do big business before being forgotten. We look back as to why.
By the end of the 2000s, getting number one at the American box office was a valuable marketing commodity. As such, studios pumped more and more money into making sure they at least had a great opening weekend for their product.
The consequence of this was that it was harder and harder for smaller, quirkier films to take a brief spot in the sun. Certainly toward the second half of the decade, it seems that the number one movie each week was pre-ordained in a marketing meeting somewhere.
Still, there were some films that have since fallen out of public view that clawed their way to number one. How many of these do you remember?
Eye of the Beholder
January 2000, One Week
Based on...
- 5/15/2015
- Den of Geek
Kevin Spacey, Steven Seagal and, erm, Kangaroo Jack: they all nabbed the box office top spot last decade...
By the end of the 2000s, getting number one at the American box office was a valuable marketing commodity. As such, studios pumped more and more money into making sure they at least had a great opening weekend for their product.
The consequence of this was that it was harder and harder for smaller and quirkier films to take a brief spot in the sun. Certainly towards the second half of the decade, it seems that the number one movie each week was pre-ordinained in a marketing meeting somewhere.
Still, there were some films that have since fallen out of public view that clawed their way to number one. How many of these do you remember?
Eye Of The Beholder
January 2000, one week
Based on Marc Behm's book of the same name,...
By the end of the 2000s, getting number one at the American box office was a valuable marketing commodity. As such, studios pumped more and more money into making sure they at least had a great opening weekend for their product.
The consequence of this was that it was harder and harder for smaller and quirkier films to take a brief spot in the sun. Certainly towards the second half of the decade, it seems that the number one movie each week was pre-ordinained in a marketing meeting somewhere.
Still, there were some films that have since fallen out of public view that clawed their way to number one. How many of these do you remember?
Eye Of The Beholder
January 2000, one week
Based on Marc Behm's book of the same name,...
- 5/13/2015
- by simonbrew
- Den of Geek
Reviewed by Chris Wright, MoreHorror.com
“Hospital Massacre” (1982)
Directed By: Boaz Davidson
Written By: Marc Behm & Boaz Davidson
Starring: Barbi Benton (Susan Jeremy), Charles Lucia (Harry), Jon Van Ness (Jack), John Warner Williams (Dr. Saxon), Den Surles (Dr. Beam), Gloria Jean Morrison (Nurse Dora), Karen Smith (Nurse Kitty), Michael Frost (Ned), Jimmy Stathis (Tom), Lanny Duncan (Hal), Marian Beeler (Mrs. Edelman), Elly Wolf (Mrs. Fedrow), Jonathon Moore (Mrs. Parry), Gay Austin (Dr. Jacobs)
In the early 1980s, slashers were coming and going as fast as they were made. When I saw this was going to be a slasher that is based in a hospital setting, my initial reaction was, “Is this going to be a rip off of Halloween II?” Thankfully this movie, despite some faults, was much better than I gave it credit for. Boaz Davison put together a fairly atmospheric hospital slasher that was fairly well paced. In...
“Hospital Massacre” (1982)
Directed By: Boaz Davidson
Written By: Marc Behm & Boaz Davidson
Starring: Barbi Benton (Susan Jeremy), Charles Lucia (Harry), Jon Van Ness (Jack), John Warner Williams (Dr. Saxon), Den Surles (Dr. Beam), Gloria Jean Morrison (Nurse Dora), Karen Smith (Nurse Kitty), Michael Frost (Ned), Jimmy Stathis (Tom), Lanny Duncan (Hal), Marian Beeler (Mrs. Edelman), Elly Wolf (Mrs. Fedrow), Jonathon Moore (Mrs. Parry), Gay Austin (Dr. Jacobs)
In the early 1980s, slashers were coming and going as fast as they were made. When I saw this was going to be a slasher that is based in a hospital setting, my initial reaction was, “Is this going to be a rip off of Halloween II?” Thankfully this movie, despite some faults, was much better than I gave it credit for. Boaz Davison put together a fairly atmospheric hospital slasher that was fairly well paced. In...
- 8/29/2013
- by admin
- MoreHorror
How did director Richard Lester, writers Charles Wood and Marc Behm, and the Beatles themselves find inspiration for Help!, the Fab Four’s second feature film? Hint: They had a little help from their pal Mary Jane. More specifically, says one member of the movie’s team: “I never really alluded to this until now — when I think it doesn’t matter at all — but an awful lot of pot smoking was being done.”
Get a load of that pot smoking’s legacy in this exclusive clip from “The Beatles in Help!,” a 30-minute doc that accompanies the newly remastered...
Get a load of that pot smoking’s legacy in this exclusive clip from “The Beatles in Help!,” a 30-minute doc that accompanies the newly remastered...
- 7/2/2013
- by Hillary Busis
- EW - Inside Movies
Calling all Beatles fans… the group’s second feature film, 1965’s Help!, will be released on Blu-ray on Tuesday, June 25 and Wamg is giving away copies to 2 lucky readers.
Directed by Richard Lester, who also directed the band’s debut feature film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, Help! follows The Beatles as they become passive recipients of an outside plot that revolves around Ringo’s possession of a sacrificial ring, which he cannot remove from his finger. As a result, he and his bandmates John, Paul and George are chased from London to the Austrian Alps and the Bahamas by religious cult members, a mad scientist and the London police.
In addition to starring The Beatles, Help! boasts a witty script, a great cast of British character actors, and classic Beatles songs “Help!,” “You’re Going To Lose That Girl,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “Ticket To Ride,...
Directed by Richard Lester, who also directed the band’s debut feature film, 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night, Help! follows The Beatles as they become passive recipients of an outside plot that revolves around Ringo’s possession of a sacrificial ring, which he cannot remove from his finger. As a result, he and his bandmates John, Paul and George are chased from London to the Austrian Alps and the Bahamas by religious cult members, a mad scientist and the London police.
In addition to starring The Beatles, Help! boasts a witty script, a great cast of British character actors, and classic Beatles songs “Help!,” “You’re Going To Lose That Girl,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “Ticket To Ride,...
- 6/24/2013
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
The Beatles’ second feature film, 1965’s Help!, is on the way on Blu-ray. On June 24 (June 25 in North America), Help! makes its eagerly awaited Blu-ray debut in a single-disc package pairing the digitally restored film and 5.1 soundtrack with an hour of extra features, including a 30-minute documentary about the making of the film, memories of the cast and crew, an in-depth look at the restoration process, an outtake scene, and original theatrical trailers and radio spots. An introduction by the film’s director, Richard Lester, and an appreciation by Martin Scorsese are included in the Blu-ray’s booklet.
Help!’s Blu-ray edition follows the 2012 release of The Beatles’ digitally restored Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour feature films on Blu-ray, DVD and iTunes with extensive extras. Help!’s restoration for its 2007 DVD debut wowed viewers, earning five-times platinum sales in the U.S. and praise from a broad range of...
Help!’s Blu-ray edition follows the 2012 release of The Beatles’ digitally restored Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour feature films on Blu-ray, DVD and iTunes with extensive extras. Help!’s restoration for its 2007 DVD debut wowed viewers, earning five-times platinum sales in the U.S. and praise from a broad range of...
- 6/12/2013
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
Whether you measure your movies by box office, reviews, or popular appeal, Sony’s $125 million remake of the 1990 Ah-nuld Schwarzenegger interplanetary action fest Total Recall looks like a strike-out. The movie opened with a lethal softness; a $25.7 million first weekend meaning Recall won’t even come close to making back its budget during its domestic theatrical run. In fact, despite 22 years of ticket price increases, it’s doubtful the movie will even match the original’s $119.3 million haul.
And for those of you who think maybe the problem is Total Recall was outgunned opening while The Dark Knight Rises was still sucking up box office coin, entertain, at least for a moment if you will, the possibility the movie just plain sucks. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ canvas, almost 70% of reviewers – and over three-quarters of “top critics” – gave Total Recall a thumbs-down. Those who went to see the movie didn’t...
And for those of you who think maybe the problem is Total Recall was outgunned opening while The Dark Knight Rises was still sucking up box office coin, entertain, at least for a moment if you will, the possibility the movie just plain sucks. According to Rotten Tomatoes’ canvas, almost 70% of reviewers – and over three-quarters of “top critics” – gave Total Recall a thumbs-down. Those who went to see the movie didn’t...
- 8/15/2012
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
1965, 12, BFI
Simultaneously released on DVD and Blu-ray in the BFI's carefully packaged "Flipside" series devoted to the rediscovery of offbeat British films, The Party's Over was made at the point when our native cinema was switching from the observation of the northern working class to the celebration of swinging London.
Like The Pleasure Girls (also released this week in "Flipside") it's a morality tale shot in Chelsea involving an out-of-town innocent exposed to the traditional temptations of metropolitan life.
Written by American expatriate Marc Behm (co-author of Charade and Help!) and directed by the well-established Guy Hamilton (assistant to Carol Reed on The Third Man and later director of four Bond films), The Party's Over centres on the search by her fiancé and father for an American heiress who's fallen in with a group of well-heeled bohemian nihilists led by a charismatic Oliver Reed.
A sensational story of sex, drugs,...
Simultaneously released on DVD and Blu-ray in the BFI's carefully packaged "Flipside" series devoted to the rediscovery of offbeat British films, The Party's Over was made at the point when our native cinema was switching from the observation of the northern working class to the celebration of swinging London.
Like The Pleasure Girls (also released this week in "Flipside") it's a morality tale shot in Chelsea involving an out-of-town innocent exposed to the traditional temptations of metropolitan life.
Written by American expatriate Marc Behm (co-author of Charade and Help!) and directed by the well-established Guy Hamilton (assistant to Carol Reed on The Third Man and later director of four Bond films), The Party's Over centres on the search by her fiancé and father for an American heiress who's fallen in with a group of well-heeled bohemian nihilists led by a charismatic Oliver Reed.
A sensational story of sex, drugs,...
- 5/22/2010
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Film review: 'Eye of the Beholder'
Thrillers usually breach logic and plausibility with impunity, but Australian director Stephan Elliott's "Eye of the Beholder" is so wrongheaded and strange it threatens to become its own genre.
You'd expect that from the director of "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," but the execution seems far removed from what he intended, recasting the thriller as a psychological art movie in the manner of 1960s Alain Resnais films.
The first feature to be distributed by Destination Films, this overproduced work should quickly fade from public consciousness.
Elliott, who adapted a novel by Marc Behm, gets credit for trying to breathe some life into a dead form. But he has overcompensated in such a way that it is virtually impossible not to laugh in distress at what he has perpetrated. His movie is loaded with a lot of decorous, empty style, with every shot calling attention to itself so relentlessly that the content can't begin to support such stylistic flamboyance.
Elliott hasn't made a movie so much as a Xerox -- a copy of a copy. Specifically, his film reworks one of Brian De Palma's extended homages to Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" or Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom".
The real question is why actors as good as Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd were ever attracted to the project. McGregor, playing an agent known only by his spy codeword, Eye, is an intrepid, virtuoso surveillance expert for the British consulate in Washington. Investigating the corrupt son of the British ambassador, he records a shocking murder perpetuated by a mysterious woman (Judd).
Eye trails the woman to a train station. Within hours, she has killed another man, stolen a valuable diamond and retreated to her dank Manhattan apartment that exists in a noirish back lot. (The film was shot mostly in Montreal.) With Eye installed in the apartment next to the woman, Elliott poaches an identical shot from De Palma's "Snake Eyes" -- the floating camera that tracks between the two apartments, peering down at their activities.
Elliott surrenders the more interesting procedural aspect -- Eye's investigation of the killer aided by a lot of high-tech digital equipment (Eye's one compassionate ally is an operator played by k.d. lang) -- to play out the twisted psychology that binds the two characters.
Judd's Joanna remains traumatized by her father's abandonment of her as a child on Christmas Eve, and Eye is haunted by the specter of his 7-year-old daughter's disappearance. (For much of the first hour, Elliott has the child materialize in the form of hallucinations and dream images.) But rather than try to slow down the plot and provide rational, dramatic insight into his characters and fine-tune the situations to create some semblance of order, Elliott bludgeons the film with a succession of joyless set pieces.
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Behavior Worldwise in association with
Village Roadshow-Ambridge Film Partnership
A Hit & Run/Filmline International Production
A Stephan Elliott film
Producers: Nicolas Clermont, Tony Smith
Director/screenwriter: Stephan Elliott
Based on the novel by: Marc Behm
Director of photography: Guy Dufaux
Editor: Sue Blainey
Production designer: Jean-Baptiste Tard
Costume designer: Lizzy Gardiner
Music: Marius de Vries
Cast:
Eye: Ewan McGregor
Joanna: Ashley Judd
Hilary: k.d. lang
Gary: Jason Priestley
Dr. Brault: Genevieve Bujold
Alex Leonard: Patrick Bergin
Running time -- 110 minutes
No MPAA rating...
You'd expect that from the director of "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," but the execution seems far removed from what he intended, recasting the thriller as a psychological art movie in the manner of 1960s Alain Resnais films.
The first feature to be distributed by Destination Films, this overproduced work should quickly fade from public consciousness.
Elliott, who adapted a novel by Marc Behm, gets credit for trying to breathe some life into a dead form. But he has overcompensated in such a way that it is virtually impossible not to laugh in distress at what he has perpetrated. His movie is loaded with a lot of decorous, empty style, with every shot calling attention to itself so relentlessly that the content can't begin to support such stylistic flamboyance.
Elliott hasn't made a movie so much as a Xerox -- a copy of a copy. Specifically, his film reworks one of Brian De Palma's extended homages to Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" or Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom".
The real question is why actors as good as Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd were ever attracted to the project. McGregor, playing an agent known only by his spy codeword, Eye, is an intrepid, virtuoso surveillance expert for the British consulate in Washington. Investigating the corrupt son of the British ambassador, he records a shocking murder perpetuated by a mysterious woman (Judd).
Eye trails the woman to a train station. Within hours, she has killed another man, stolen a valuable diamond and retreated to her dank Manhattan apartment that exists in a noirish back lot. (The film was shot mostly in Montreal.) With Eye installed in the apartment next to the woman, Elliott poaches an identical shot from De Palma's "Snake Eyes" -- the floating camera that tracks between the two apartments, peering down at their activities.
Elliott surrenders the more interesting procedural aspect -- Eye's investigation of the killer aided by a lot of high-tech digital equipment (Eye's one compassionate ally is an operator played by k.d. lang) -- to play out the twisted psychology that binds the two characters.
Judd's Joanna remains traumatized by her father's abandonment of her as a child on Christmas Eve, and Eye is haunted by the specter of his 7-year-old daughter's disappearance. (For much of the first hour, Elliott has the child materialize in the form of hallucinations and dream images.) But rather than try to slow down the plot and provide rational, dramatic insight into his characters and fine-tune the situations to create some semblance of order, Elliott bludgeons the film with a succession of joyless set pieces.
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Behavior Worldwise in association with
Village Roadshow-Ambridge Film Partnership
A Hit & Run/Filmline International Production
A Stephan Elliott film
Producers: Nicolas Clermont, Tony Smith
Director/screenwriter: Stephan Elliott
Based on the novel by: Marc Behm
Director of photography: Guy Dufaux
Editor: Sue Blainey
Production designer: Jean-Baptiste Tard
Costume designer: Lizzy Gardiner
Music: Marius de Vries
Cast:
Eye: Ewan McGregor
Joanna: Ashley Judd
Hilary: k.d. lang
Gary: Jason Priestley
Dr. Brault: Genevieve Bujold
Alex Leonard: Patrick Bergin
Running time -- 110 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/10/1999
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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