DEADLY BLESSING

DEADLY BLESSING (1981). Director: Wes Craven.

Thrown out of his Hittite community for marrying a non-believer, Jim Schmidt (Douglas Barr) farms his land with his wife, Martha (Marin Jensen). After he is killed in a strange tractor accident, Martha is visited by two close friends, Lana (Sharon Stone) and Vicky (Susan Buckner), both of whom have unpleasant encounters with the pious Hittite leader (and Jim's father), Isaiah (Ernest Borgnine). But there are other forces leveled against the women that they may be unprepared to deal with ...

A tarantula wants to make nice with Sharon Stone, who's having none of it

Deadly Blessing has some interesting things in it, but its script is disjointed and illogical. Wes Craven's direction shows no great skill -- although the snake in the bath tub is memorable, and was later sort of re-used in Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street -- and much of the acting is insufficient. Sharon Stone [Total Recall] is so mediocre that you would have imagined she'd wind up in one or two slasher films and then settle in as a salesgirl at Mrs. Field's Cookies. Marin Jensen is not much better, and Borgnine's performance borders on caricature. Susan Buckner makes a more favorable impression, as do Doug Barr and Jeff East [Pumpkinhead] as his sympathetic younger brother. Lisa Hartman is given one of the most embarrassing debuts since Jean Arless in Homicidal, and Lois Nettleton [Butterfly] certainly deserves much better material.

Marty gets religion: Ernest Borgnine

One female character in the film has a secret, but whether it's that she's really male, transsexual, or a hermaphrodite isn't made clear. There's a fast-moving "cat fight" at the end of the film. James Horner's score liberally borrows from Bernard Herrmann and especially Jerry Goldsmith, to an almost comical degree. With a tighter script and better direction, Deadly Blessing might have been a contender, but no dice. Former model Maren Jensen had few credits; this was her last feature film; Buckner's as well.

Verdict: Silly and oddball in the wrong way. **. 

TOTAL RECALL (1990)

Arnold Schwarzenegger

TOTAL RECALL (1990). Director: Paul Verhoeven.

In the future Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes to a firm that specializes in implanting memories so you can "remember" the perfect vacation -- a stupid idea* if you ask me --  but when they begin the process on Quaid it develops that he has already undergone a memory-altering process -- he is actually a completely different person from whom he thinks he is. When people try to kill him, he winds up on a mining colony on Mars where in his former identity he was involved in a rebellion against Cohaagen (Ronny Cox of The Car), the sinister master of Mars. Total Recall is what might best be called "schlock sci fi" in that it takes many different elements from science fiction stories, films, and comics, and throws them all together to make little more than an Arnold Schwarzenegger Action Flick. On that level the film is entertaining, and it certainly worked for Arnold. He had appeared in action flicks before but Total Recall is the film that really put him over the top.  This was true, too, of European director Verhoeven [Showgirls], who had previously directed Robocop. Some saw this as an interesting filmmaker "selling out" to Hollywood to make crap, a notion that is pretty much born out by his later film projects. (He eventually left Hollywood to make films more along the lines of his earlier work.)

At one point in Total Recall the running Quaid dodges bullets and a perfectly innocent bystander gets shot, with Quaid using the man's body as a shield and then just throwing him at his attackers. Sure, this may be an act of desperation, but can you imagine Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks or even Audie Murphy (a real-life hero as opposed to a Hollywood one) not having any reaction to this? There had always been hard-boiled anti-heroes in movies, but by the time of Total Recall the heroes lost any trace of sensitivity and became not ordinary men up against extraordinary odds, but super-heroes (without the costumes) whose success seemed preordained. Compare that to Tom Hanks in the Da Vinci trilogy -- not great films, perhaps, but the hero is strong, intelligent, and recognizably human.

That said, the last quarter of Total Recall is quite exciting and amusing and has some good FX work, but it's never more than a moron movie. Cox is excellent, Sharon Stone (who later appeared in Verhoeven's Basic Instinct) is suitably sexy, Rachel Ticotin is adept, and Schwarzenegger is Schwarzenegger, which was enough for his fans. Jerry Goldsmith's score is one of his least interesting. Remade in 2012.

* If you know your memories are just implanted and never really happened, doesn't it sort of make it all pointless? What makes memories so wonderful is that they were real. Besides, memories can't compare to the actual experience.

Verdict: Arnold builds up the body count along with his muscles. **1/2.

CALENDAR GIRL MURDERS

Tom Skerritt

CALENDAR GIRL MURDERS (1984 telefilm). Director: William A. Graham.

Richard Trainor (Robert Culp) is the publisher of Paradise magazine. He has just issued a new calendar with shapely naked women in it, when one of those women is shoved off a tenth floor balcony. More murders of models follow. Lt. Dan Stoner (Tom Skerritt of Alien) is assigned the case, but would rather be doing anything else. He is drawn to pretty Cassie Bascomb (Sharon Stone), who wants to have an affair with him despite the fact that he is married. Suspects in the case include everyone from Trainor's assistant Cleo (Barbara Parkins) to comic Nat Couray (Robert Morse). Robert Beltran [Eating Raoul] plays another cop; Alan Thicke is a photographer; and Meredith MacRae plays herself as a TV reporter. Calendar Girl Murders features good performances from Skerritt, Stone, Morse, and some of the others, but it's pretty bad, even dull, like a slasher film that excised all the slashing and suspense. Talented Morse has had a strange, if interesting, career. In the sixties, around the time of How to Succeed in Business, he had a fairly high profile. Some years later he was appearing on sit-com episodes but wasn't even listed as a "special guest-star." But weep not for Morse, as now he is playing the real Dominick Dunne on American Crime Story and all along has had a busy career. This movie is not one of its high spots. Sharon Stone [Catwoman], of course, went on to better (?) things. Despite the success of the big-screen Alien, Skerritt has kept busy mostly on television.

Verdict: Clumsy TV movie looks thrown together with spit and chewing gum. **.

CATWOMAN

CATWOMAN (2004). Director: Pitof [sic].

“You're just a little girl playing dress up.”

Catwoman was originally introduced decades ago in the pages of the Batman comic book, where she was first known as “the cat” after the cat's head mask she wore. Over the years she's gone through many changes in costume and attitude, and has been both a major villainess as well as an ally of the Caped Crusader. She was eventually given her own comic book. In this film adaptation the word “Batman” is never mentioned, and Catwoman is no longer a stylish cat burglar named Selina Kyle. She has been re-envisioned as a timid artist named Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) who overhears something she shouldn't and is killed by the bad guys. Luckily a cat who personifies the cat god comes along and literally breathes life into Patience; she is reborn as a much stronger woman who is essentially good but plays by her own rules. Tracking down the people who killed her and who ordered the hit (a married couple who run the corporation she works for), Catwoman runs into and romances a likable cop breezily played by Benjamin Bratt. She learns that her bosses are marketing a face cream that will eventually make women addicted to it and which has an extremely toxic effect. Sharon Stone plays the female half of the company chiefs and the climax is a rousing “bitch-fight” between her and Catwoman. While it takes much too long for Berry to finally become Catwoman and for the action to start, once it gets in gear the picture is quite entertaining. The direction is often a little too “rock video” for my taste, but the picture gets points for its striking art direction. The film is well-acted by all the leads, and the fine supporting players include Alex Borstein as Patience's amusing man-crazy friend Sally, and Lambert Wilson as Stone's sinister husband. The DVD features some scenes that were cut. One of them, a sequence of Catwoman being tracked by a killer dog in a junkyard after her re-birth, is excellent and should never have been left on the cutting room floor.

Verdict: Not great but not bad. **1/2.