PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED

Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED  (1986). 

Director: Francis (Ford) Coppola. 

Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is separated from her husband, high school sweetheart Charlie (Nicolas Cage of Ghost Rider), due to his adultery. She has mixed emotions about going to her 25-year high school reunion, but her daughter, Beth (Helen Hunt), importunes her to attend. After being crowned queen, Peggy Sue passes out and wakes up a quarter century in the past. She has an adult mind in a teenager's body! Trying to figure out if she's dead or simply going crazy, she has to determine if she wants to make the same mistakes -- such as marrying Charlie -- that she made before. 

Nicolas Cage

The basic premise of Peggy Sue, while not especially original, is compelling. Unfortunately, what the screenwriters have come up with doesn't do nearly enough with the material. Peggy Sue boasts some fine acting -- Turner and Cage are especially good if imperfect -- Jordan Cronenweth's photography is first-rate, and whenever the film seems emotionally moving it's undoubtedly due to John Barry's evocative scoring. The movie is a typical Hollywood "concept" picture which does as little with the concept as it possibly can. What could have been an especially affecting sequence when Peggy Sue goes to see her long-dead grandparents is turned into a weird bit of nonsense involving the old man's lodge brothers. (We never learn if her parents were still alive 25 years later.) It's as if the movie was merely a sequence of bits thrown together in the hopes it will turn into a cohesive whole. By the ending, nothing is really resolved. Peggy Sue is right back where she started. The whole time travel business is handled too prosaically anyway. 

Barbara Harris

A disturbing aspect of the picture is that more than once Peggy Sue mentions how much she loves and misses her two children (we only see one). This begs the question: how can she not marry Charlie when it means her beloved children (at least one of them) will no  longer exist -- but this never seems to occur to her. The superficial script doesn't wrestle with metaphysical issues in any case. So we're left with some interesting casting: Barbara Harris [Family Plot] as Peggy Sue's mother; Leon Ames and Maureen O'Sullivan as her grandparents; Barry Miller as the high school geek who makes good; John Carradine as a lodge member; and Kevin J. O'Connor [Deep Rising] as the romantic, mysterious school poet. While Barry's score adds a lot to the movie, it is not as good as his work on Somewhere in Time or Out of Africa. 

Verdict: Well-acted and reasonably entertaining, this is still a perfect example of how Hollywood can screw up fantasy-type movies. **1/4. 

DEEP RISING

The monster tries to make a treat out of Treat Williams

DEEP RISING (1998). Writer/director: Stephen Sommers.

John Finnegan (Treat Williams) and his crew have been hired to take a group of men out to an unknown spot in the South Pacific. What Finnegan doesn't know is that they are heading for the huge cruise ship, the Argonautica, to loot it on its maiden voyage. But when these pirates arrive, they find that hardly anyone is left alive on the ship, discovering mostly bloody skeletons. Apparently a gargantuan, voracious sea creature with a zillion tentacles (with maws on the end of them) has devoured just about everyone -- hundreds of passengers -- and now wants to make dessert out of the pirates; Finnegan and his crew; a pretty thief named Trillian (Famke Janssen), who was locked in the hold; and the duplicitous, slimy owner Simon Canton (Anthony Heald), who wanted to blow up the ship for the insurance. Deep Rising has some excellent and very gruesome special effects, but its tone is too flippant by half, at times turning it into more of a black comedy than a horror film and dissipating the considerable tension. However, the movie is generally fast-paced, slick, creepy and exciting -- more of an action-disaster-creature flick than a horror film -- and features a highly dangerous and rather engaging monster. One scene wherein the survivors discover an abattoir filled with skeletons is especially macabre. Williams [Prince of the City] strikes the right note; Jannsen is competent; Heald is way over the top. Jason Flemyng makes an impression as Mulligan, the handsomest of the pirates; and Kevin J. O'Connor, despite how irritating this actor can be in certain roles (including this one), is good and strangely appealing as Finnegan's engineer, Joey. The few moments of humanism don't quite come off in a movie this callous. The ending left room for a sequel that never materialized. Sommers also wrote and directed the dreadful -- and dreadfully campy -- Van Helsing.

Verdict: Well, it's not It Came from Beneath the Sea, but what is? *** out of 4.