BLACK SUNDAY (1977)

Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller

BLACK SUNDAY (1977). Director: John Frankenheimer.

German-Arab Dahlia (Marthe Keller) is a member of the terrorist group Black September. She has been able to manipulate her lover, a bitter Viet Nam vet named Lander (Bruce Dern), into helping her in a plot to kill thousands of Americans. She hopes to send a message to the U.S. to stop aiding Israel. A taped message that she had planned to release to the media after the event has been recovered following a raid so that now the government knows something deadly is planned but doesn't know what. (The fact that Lander is one of the pilots of the Goodyear blimp for the Superbowl should give you a clue.) Israeli agent Kabakov (Robert Shaw) and FBI man Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) join forces with others to find this woman -- whom Kabakov should have killed during the raid but didn't -- and stop her plan before she can kill over 83,000 people -- and the President -- at the Superbowl in Miami.

Robert Shaw

Black Sunday is a thinking man's thriller, the kind they generally don't make anymore, in that it has some great action set pieces and lots of suspense, but it also has interesting characters and heroes who are not quite superhuman. The film is over two hours long but never boring as it follows the deadly exploits of the daring terrorist duo and their equally daring pursuers, with speed boat chases, telephone bombs, hotel shoot-outs and a climax involving a blimp, a helicopter, a sub-machine gun wielded all too well by Dahlia, and a bomb that will fire thousands of metal pellets into a crowd of cheering and clueless fans if something isn't done to prevent it.

Marthe Keller 

The acting in the film could not be bettered. Marthe Keller of Fedora gives another excellent and passionate performance as the terrorist, and Bruce Dern [Coming Home] is simply superb as the tormented and vengeful vet who spent months in a POW camp and whose wife left him for another man when he finally returned home. Robert Shaw is similarly on target, as are supporting performances from Weaver, Steven Keats [The Last Dinosaur] as another ill-fated Israeli agent, and others. There's a horrifying scene in a warehouse when the evil duo test their weapon on an innocent caretaker who only thinks they're going to take his picture, and many other memorable moments. John Williams' score is also quite effective.

This is based on a novel by Thomas Harris. I always thought it was far superior to his over-rated Silence of the Lambs and that this earlier film is far superior to the film version of Lambs. Back in 1977, terrorist plots like this were strictly the stuff of movies and books, not to mention James Bond, but 9/11 certainly changed that notion, as we soon realized, sadly, that now anything was possible ...

Verdict: Terrific thriller with a great plot and excellent performances. ***1/2. 

THE LAST DINOSAUR

Steven Keats and Richard Boone

THE LAST DINOSAUR (1977). Directors: Alexander Grasshoff and Tsugunobu Kotani.

"A creature forty feet tall and weighing eight tons with the mind of a pea has just destroyed one of the greatest minds of the century."

 Masten Thrust Jr. (Richard Boone of I Bury the Living) is not only a famous hunter but one of the world's wealthiest men. He has developed a vehicle called the Polar Borer, that uses lasers to drill through the Polar Ice Cap, discovering a hidden world in a prehistoric valley below that is warmed by a volcano. Four men have already died at the teeth of a T-Rex, that appears to be the only one of its kind, although there are other dinosaurs in the valley. Returning to this land with the only survivor of the first expedition, Chuck (Steven Keats), Thrust also brings along Professor Kawamoto (Tetsu Nakamura of The Manster); an expert and silent seven foot tall tracker named Bunta (Luther Rackley); and a perky photographer named Francesca (Joan Van Ark). Although the original plan is only to study the tyrannosaurus, when it proves aggressive and even squashes the poor professor underfoot, Thrust determines to destroy the creature. But then the big beast snatches up the Polar Borer in its teeth and the whole group is stranded in the valley with time running out ...

The rubber T-Rex

The Last Dinosaur has a workable plot line, but it borrows very heavily from the film The Land Unknown, and the Polar Borer (which hardly looks large enough to hold so many people) reminds one of a similar machine in At the Earth's Core. Of course it's just another imitation of The Lost World minus diamonds and "fire gods." A bigger problem is the FX work, which features some crude but effective process shots and a rubber monster brought to life with "suitmation" -- a man in an dinosaur suit. The creature also lets out metallic wails that are borrowed from Godzilla. The shame is that the film does manage to work up some suspense -- as in Land Unknown there's a small window of opportunity to get out of the valley if they can survive the beast's attacks -- and this could have made a very exciting picture had Ray Harryhausen brought the creatures to life. A battle between the T-Rex and a triceratops does not compare favorably to a similar battle in Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi.

Bantu takes after T-Rex with a spear -- good luck with that!

The acting in the movie is professional, if uneven, with Richard Boone creating a colorful if contradictory character, and William Overgard's screenplay does do its best to bring some of the people in it to life. There's some decent art direction in the movie, but the score is pretty terrible. This was meant to be a theatrical film, but it was released to television in a somewhat edited version. The film makes much of the fact that the title refers to Boone as much as it does to the tyrannosaurus.

Verdict: Hardly the "last" dinosaur we've ever seen in film. **1/4.