V Movie Reviews

Dismissed in 1968 as a plodding rip-off of The Dirty Dozen--without that 1967 film's sardonic, antiestablishment satire--The Devil's Brigade now plays like a nostalgic last gasp of the sentimental World War II action genre. Celebrating the 1st Special Service Force (a commando-like unit formed to fight in Norway but ultimately deployed in Italy), this typically broad Andrew V. McLaglen production recounts the teaming of some miscreant GIs with "the handpicked best of the best-trained army in the world"--the Canadians--under a U.S. officer (William Holden) who had never commanded men in combat. The first hour, heavy on machismo and low comedy, depicts the unit's training at an abandoned base in Montana, with nonstop international rivalry until Yanks and Canadians bond in a lusty saloon brawl. After that, the Germans are easy meat. Holden is solid, as usual, and so is the widescreen work of veteran cameraman William H. Clothier, impeccably rendered on the DVD. --Richard T. Jameson

Palestinian terrorists attempt to wipe out a Super Bowl crowd in this 1976 thriller directed by John Frankenheimer (Seconds). Frankenheimer's unique facility with action--the unusual breadth of his view of violence, which stresses sustained drama over escalating thrills--makes this taut movie engrossing from start to finish. The lengthy cat-and-mouse stuff during the big game--much of which was shot at a real Super Bowl--is quite exciting. --Tom Keogh

How does Jack, a chimpanzee with the IQ of a genius, end up living in the frozen North and playing hockey on a kids' junior hockey team? It all starts with the unfortunate demise of the professor who trains and cares for him and the dean's plans to sell Jack to a research facility. Jack's somewhat slow-witted janitor friend puts Jack on a train bound for the El Simian reserve, but he sleeps through his stop and winds up in a small Canadian town instead. Jack quickly befriends Tara Westover, a deaf girl recently transplanted from California, and her brother Steven. Mishaps abound as Jack attempts to blend into the town, but eventually he joins Steven on the local hockey team--as its star player! Can Jack turn around the team's dismal record? Can Steven and Tara prevent the dean from catching up with Jack and sending him to the research lab?

This is a touching story about a close-knit, functional family and its interaction with a smart, adorable chimp. While this 93-minute film does contain some fairly violent hockey scenes, it is for the most part wholesome family entertainment that celebrates such values as open-mindedness, caring, and compassion. The chimps are thoroughly entertaining, and Kevin Zegers (Steven) and Jamie Renée Smith (Tara) do a nice job with their roles. Ages 5 and up. --Tami Horiuchi

The first episodes of I Love Lucy, in comedy terms, look today like a promising map of great things to come from the hugely influential sitcom. This set of episodes, the first volume in a definitive collection of the classic television series, includes the original three broadcast episodes from October 1951, plus the so-called "Lost Pilot" that finds the earliest I Love Lucy production quite rough but genuinely promising. The actual episodes that American audiences first saw--"The Girls Want to Go to a Nightclub," "Be a Pal," and "The Diet"--find familiar elements of the classic series already in place. Housewife Lucy (Lucille Ball), restless for excitement, is married to Cuban bandleader Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz). Ricky's crazy nightclub career, however, leaves him yearning for a quiet home life and a wife content with her simple chores. Alas, it's not to be. With best friends Ethel (Vivian Vance) and Fred (William Frawley) usually aboard for the Ricardos' misadventures, I Love Lucy introduced an engaging blend of sophistication and slapstick, all wrapped in the intimacy of a three-camera TV approach. Bonus material is very satisfying, including a radio broadcast from 1951 later adapted into a TV script, a couple of gaffes, guest cast listings, and a new beginning for the second-season rebroadcast of "The Diet." --Tom Keogh

Director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood, Rosewood) made an earnest effort in this, his second, film to say a great deal that is true and relevant about living and loving in a violent, difficult time in American history. Janet Jackson plays a beautician and poet who withdraws into herself after her boyfriend is murdered by gangsters. The late Tupac Shakur plays a postman who tries to get through to her, and the two travel on a course through urban America, connecting with family and community. Singleton has so much on his mind that the film comes out a terrible muddle, but there is a certain integrity peeking through the fog. Shakur makes a startlingly good impression in his film debut, and Jackson strips away her star veneer to play something like a real person--and entirely succeeds. Maya Angelou wrote the poems that pass as those penned by Jackson's character, and she also appears in the film. --Tom Keogh

A surprise hit and one of the highest grossing films ever to come out of Great Britain, this effortlessly enchanting romantic comedy finds confirmed bachelor Hugh Grant (Nine Months) attending weddings with his single friends as they all lament not being able to commit. Grant keeps running into an attractive American (Andie MacDowell) at these festivities and begins a long-running affair with her, even as he attends her own wedding, the funeral of one of his best friends, and his own pending nuptials. Featuring a spirited supporting cast including Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient) as the acerbic friend quietly in love with Grant, this touching and funny film with a mischievous sense of humor and some truly heartbreaking moments is destined to become one of the classic romantic comedies of all time. --Robert Lane

This 1983 science fiction oddity, set in the subterranean world of heroin addicts, performance artists, and androgynous models in New York's East Village, became a staple of the midnight movie circuit and college campus film societies. A tiny UFO lands on the roof of a grungy penthouse apartment inhabited by androgynous model Anne Carlisle and her drug-dealing lover Paula E. Sheppard (the former child star of Alice, Sweet Alice). As explained with deadpan gravity by hilariously naive alien hunter Otto Von Wernherr, the UFOs congregate in areas of intense heroin concentration and feed off the highs of addicts. This alien has found a better high: orgasms. Russian émigré Slava Tsukerman's punk sci-fi feature takes the alien in alienation seriously, charting the mental disintegration of Carlisle as every sexual partner dies in climax and she turns herself into a heroine-chic angel of death. Easily the strangest to come out of the New York indie explosion of the early '80s, this low budget classic is talky and overlong at almost two hours, but remains an imaginative use of bargain-basement effects (heat aura photography, stop motion animation) for a tale of a most unusual alien encounter. Tsukerman co-composed the minimalist electronic score (in the Laurie Anderson vein). Carlisle, who cowrote the film, also appears as a surly gay male model. --Sean Axmaker