Category: Drama

The Deep (1977)

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The Deep is a movie long on scenes of Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw vacuuming up the ocean floor in search of Spanish treasure and short on anything resembling excitement. The movie has also been “credited” with starting the wet T-shirt craze with scenes of Jacqueline Bisset diving around in a clingy top, but once she gets relegated to bored girlfriend status and just hangs out on the boat while Nick and Robert battle Lou Gossett and a big eel, the movie loses whatever momentum it had.

Nolte and Bisset play a dumb couple down in Bermuda on some sort of adventure vacation where they go diving around wrecks in the hopes of finding some valuable doodads or other. After finding one such knick knack, they’re approached by Lou who claims to be a bottle collector and is interested in buying this piece of glass they found. Continue reading “The Deep (1977)” →

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

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There’s been some iffy Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards. Mrs. Miniver‘s win back in 1942 over Kings Row and The Magnificent Ambersons comes immediately to mind as does Forrest Gump‘s win over any other movie released in 1994, but 1952’s selection, The Greatest Show On Earth, is easily the worst movie to win the biggest award in the movie biz.

I don’t know if this was some sort of lifetime achievement thing for producer/director Cecil B. DeMille (he would direct only one more feature, 1956’s The Ten Commandments) or if the Academy voters were made up of lion tamers, trapeze artists, and clowns, but this movie was more like an infomercial for Ringling Brothers (the opening credits state it was made with Ringling’s cooperation) than an actual movie. At least Jimmy Stewart was smart enough never to appear out of his clown make up, lest he be recognized as having been involved at all. Continue reading “The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)” →

The Best of Everything (1959)

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Despite starring Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, and Hope Lange, The Best of Everything manages to spend most of its two hours on exciting stuff like Joan throwing files on people’s desk, making them work late, and watching Lange go from dumb girl who just took the secretary job until her boyfriend gets back from London, to power-hungry wench that doesn’t care about men anymore once she’s jilted, to gal who is sweet on Mike Rice (Boyd), to dumb girl who is going to break up her old boyfriend’s marriage and then realizes that he’s only using her.

She isn’t the only woman that this movie focuses on though. This is a soap opera which means that you have the lives of a bunch of lonely, pathetic women intertwining. And by intertwining, I mean that occasionally they show up for work together and every so often they’ll all be back at their apartment at the same time to mope around about the latest stunt whatever piece of trash they’re dating just pulled. Continue reading “The Best of Everything (1959)” →

A Stolen Life (1946)

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Stolen Life PosterYou know you’re in for some rough sailing when it’s the evil twin that goes over the side of the boat leaving the goody-goody twin to assume her identity. Spoiling your “twin tricks Glenn Ford” gimmick by having him get the better twin after already dumping her for her slightly sluttier sister doesn’t make much sense and limits the sort of screeching drama that a movie of this sort demands.

A slow moving film that never amounts to much and frequently languishes on the shoals of extraneous plot points, A Stolen Life seems to be scripted without any concept of what a Bette Davis movie involving dirty tricks and silly plot twists is all about. Continue reading “A Stolen Life (1946)” →

Quicksand (2002)

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Quicksand PosterNew base psychiatrist Bill Turner shows up at his new post just in time to fail to talk a guy out of committing suicide right in front of him. Later that night at the officer’s club, a sleazy blond broad comes on to him, but it turns out she’s the general’s daughter and has been confined to base for stripping in public. Oh, and she’s also going to be his first patient. Yep, it’s going to be one of those kind of tours of duty for a bored-looking Michael “the Dude” Dudikoff.

The audience doesn’t fare much better as it suffers through a parade of alternately laughable, sordid, and just downright disgusting dialogue combined with a criminally insane lack of action from the Dude. When we have to hear the Dude ask his patient/prospective love interest if she had ever had sexual relations with her father, the viewer is likely to need a session on one of the Dude’s fancy leather couches that he brought to the Marine base from his practice in Chicago. Continue reading “Quicksand (2002)” →

The Betsy (1978)

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and hazard a guess that Sir Laurence Olivier didn’t receive his knighthood for his scene in this movie where he got all turned on by watching his daughter-in-law nursing his grandson and ended up bedding her down at the conclusion of a ten o’clock feeding that left the audience sick to its stomach.

Whether this is the single worst scene of this movie is open to debate since the movie is strewn with them, but it has to be the most memorably tacky of them.

Sir Larry wouldn’t be the only guy to trade on his reputation as a film legend to pick up movie welfare later in life (paging Sir Richard Burton!), but surely there was some other big budget flop being made in the late 1970s that didn’t involve him attempting to play both an old coot and his younger self in flashback. Watching him with his absurdly dyed hair as we traveled down mammary lane with him to the 1930s only made us wish that we could go back to 1975 where a pasty-faced up and comer named Tommy Lee Jones took center stage. Continue reading “The Betsy (1978)” →

Mantis in Lace (1968)

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After watching this less than riveting tale of a go-go dancer who takes LSD and kills her lovers, the biggest question is whether you should categorize what you’ve just seen as a bad trip or merely a bummer. I would submit that while aggressively lengthy in its pointlessness, nothing beyond the expected community playhouse acting, wooden dialogue, and pasty-sized plot occurs that would induce flashbacks years later.

There is of course the memorably bad theme song Lila that our go go dancing heroine (also named Lila) insists on playing while grinding with her johns that she picks up and takes to her daddy’s abandoned warehouse, but soon enough you’ll be humming “Li-la” over and over as you shimmy about your living room suggestively. Continue reading “Mantis in Lace (1968)” →