Burl reviews Best Seller! (1987)

Ha ha and chickenpox, it’s Burl, here to review a face-off between two pretty interesting actors, James “Night Moves” Woods and Brian Dennehy, fresh off of The Belly of an Architect and F/X! It’s kind of a wonder that I’ve never seen this before recently, considering that I like both those guys, as well as screenwriter Larry “half of Deadly Illusion” Cohen and director John “Rolling Thunder” Flynn!

The movie’s called Best Seller, and it has a very Cohenian premise: an ex-cop bookwriter, probably based on Joseph Wambaugh, is looking for his next big book subject, and along comes a weasel-faced killer who wants to spill the beans about his life as a trigger man and, more specifically about the work he does for a certain shady businessman! Naturally the businessman is not happy about this!

The picture suffers from taking the lack of trust that should be strictly a first-act conflict and making it the driver of the entire second act as well! Sure, Dennehy might reasonably demand a little proof of Woods’s intentions and truthfulness, but after a while, you know, move on! Ha ha, at least from a narrative point of view, that’s the way to go! Having Dennehy continually refuse to take Woods at his word leads to an extended feeling of stasis and repetition!

We are treated to staging and mise en scène that frequently make it seem as though the two leads are on a romantic date, ha ha! If this was a directorial decision, I applaud it! Seeing two tough guy actors lying across a frilly bed having an earnest discussion is a real spectacle, and distinctly novel – I’m trying to imagine, say, Robert Ryan and Bob Mitchum doing the same thing, but, ha ha, cannot!

It’s just as much a squib movie as Fatal Beauty, which is nice and very 1980s! The supporting cast, featuring Paul Shenar from Scarface and Victoria Tennant from All Of Me, is disappointingly unmemorable, but this picture is all about its principals, and of course Woods and Dennehy are top-flight as always!

This picture got plenty of acclaim when it came out, as I recall, but doesn’t quite live up to it in retrospect! Ha ha, perhaps at the time it seemed a lot fresher! At any rate, it’s still a very decent B picture, tough and amusing (though undercut by one of the worst musical scores ever heard), and I’m going to give Best Seller two Richard Nixon masks!

Burl reviews Mad Max: Fury Road! (2015)

Brrrumm, brrrumm, it’s Burl, here to review a nitro-burning automotive action picture, that new picture from the eminence gris of funny car calamity, George “The Witches of Eastwick” Miller! Of course I’m talking about his newest Mad Max picture, Mad Max: Fury Road! Ha ha, that’s right!

I can’t tell you how pleased I am that Miller is the one directing this, and, ha ha, not some television commercials director! It’s been quite a while since that old bushie boy took on the crashing cars, the eruptions of flesh and metal, the high-octane mayhem; but on the evidence he seems over the past thirty years to have been thinking of nothing else! In any case, Miller and his similarly superannuated cinematographer, John Seale, have certainly delivered a movie with no shortage of pep!

Tom Hardy is our new Max, taking over from the unpleasant crazyman who had the part before, and he’s perfectly good in the role, even if he never seems to have suffered as much abuse as we see him undergo, and as is implied! He also suffers from visions of past traumas, and this is a device which I for one could have easily done without! Ha ha!

Charlize Theron, well-known from Prometheus, is the picture’s alternate protagonist, a short-haired lady truck driver with a mission to steal away five beauty-ladies from the skull-masked bad guy Immortan Joe, who by the way is played by the old Toecutter himself, ha ha! She wants to take these ladies to The Green Place, which is not in fact the neighbourhood plant store, but rather the same imaginary patch of Shangri-La people in these post-apocalyptic movies are always searching for!

But Immortan Joe, tubby and pustulated in the classic Baron Harkonnen style, will not stand for this insubordination! He seems a reasonable man, but draws the line at lady-stealing! So the chase is on, and soon a crazy cavalcade of conveyances is hurtling across the Namibian desert! It’s very like Mad Max II, aka The Road Warrior, since everyone is after the same gosh-darn big rig! (Ha ha, in that sense it’s as much a trucker picture as White Line Fever or even High-Ballin’!)

Of course there are crazy stunts galore, which were apparently mostly filmed without the usual CGI enhancements; but any verisimilitude this process lends was undermined by the usual claptrap 3-D at the screening I attended! Ha ha, sure, stuff was flying around a bit, but I think they ought to just leave these movies flat! If I were to see this picture in the cinema again, it would be the flat version hands down!

I hear you asking, ha ha, Burl, but is the movie any good? Well, sure! It’s exciting and exceedingly well done in every department, and it’s great to have that marvelous desert car-crash sensibility at work again! I’m an unabashed fan of all three previous Mad Max movies, and this one fits nicely into the series! As spectacular as it is – ha ha, they didn’t spare the samoleans on this one! – I still prefer the more modest Road Warrior! But if you like goofy names and car crashes, this picture should be in your top four picks! I’m going to give Mad Max: Fury Road three chapped lips!

Burl reviews White Line Fever! (1975)

Hi, Burl here, putting the hammer down and roaring back to life! Ha ha, Carrol Jo Hummer! Yes, good buddies, that’s the name of the main character in White Line Fever, and I like it so much, and it gets repeated so much in the movie, that I just have to say ha ha and repeat once more, Carrol Jo Hummer! Of course Carrol Jo Hummer is played by good old Jan Michael Vincent, whom we know well from pictures like Enemy Territory and Shadow of the Hawk!

Well, White Line Fever is not so much a trucking movie as it is a trucker’s movie! The distinction is important! Most trucker pictures are workingman films, or purport to be, but this one actually walks the walk that it talks! It’s about as pro-union a picture as you’ll find outside of Matewan, and that’s a fine thing as far as old Burl is concerned! You see, Carrol Jo Hummer (ha ha!) is an independent trucker, and he’s trying to get out from under the heavy thumb of the corrupt and greedy company that wants to control all the trucking in the state of Arizona!

Kay Lenz, from Moving Violation, plays Carrol Jo’s long-suffering wife, and here I really mean suffering! Ha ha, she really gets the short end of the stick here, and no mistake! But she sticks by Carrol Jo, at least until she’s beaten so badly that she becomes insensate and unable to either stick by or not stick by any man in particular!

The movie features some excellent character actors, like R. G. Armstrong, the kindly doctor in The Beast Within, and L. Q. Jones, who was the sheriff in that very same picture! Ha ha, old L.Q. sure plays a good bad guy! Sam Laws from Get Crazy is here, as is the excellent Slim “The Howling” Pickens! But of course the finest actor we find in this movie, which is saying a lot, is the great Dick Miller, from The Long Ride Home and so many other pictures, who here plays a friendly, good-hearted, squirrel hunting jacket-wearing trucker named Birdie!

The picture has a strange, only-in-the-70s ending, wherein the bad guys are not really vanquished in any substantive way; though Carrol Jo performs a symbolic gesture which puts him in the hospital, but wins him the acclaim of an Arizona crowd, including Dick Miller, who’s sitting on a wall wearing his best squirrel-hunting jacket! Ha ha! But aside from L.Q. Jones, who catches a punching, the bad guys responsible for all the pain and suffering undergone by Mr. and Mrs. Carrol Jo remain unpunished!

But that makes it a more interesting movie by many leagues! Ha ha, with its unusual approach to trucker cinema, its pro-union bona fides and its cast of marvelous faces, White Line Fever is an enjoyable little exercise in long-haul filmmaking! Ha ha, sure, it’s a bit dumb here and there, but I’m going to give White Line Fever two and a half Glass Houses!

Burl reviews Fatal Beauty! (1987)

Ha ha, the funny thing is, other than The Color Purple, which I haven’t seen since 1985 or whenever, and The Player and I guess Girl, Interrupted, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one single Whoopi Goldberg movie before! Ha ha, and don’t scream “Ha ha, Ghost!” at me, ha ha, because I’ve never seen it! But now I’ve seen Fatal Beauty, which is when Whoopi teamed up with Tom Holland, who wrote The Beast Within and directed Fright Night!

It’s pretty 1987, ha ha, but if you’ve ever wanted to see Whoopi and Jennifer “Night Moves” Warren have a punch-up, this is where you want to dock your boat! If your fondest wish involves Charles “The Thing” Hallahan as a nasty cop and John P. “Avenging Force” Ryan as the angry police captain who gives Whoopi heck, steer your buffalo here! If you’ve ever desired to see Whoopi make sweet love with Sam Elliott from Road House, however, you’re out of luck, since, so the story goes, gutless studio executives excised the scene after apparently bigoted test audiences were ruffled by the interracial aspect! This doesn’t just look goofy from our slightly-more-racially-enlightened times, it was goofy then too!

Ah well! The movie’s a pretty straightforward 80s cop thriller, with the businessman-drug dealer, the henchmen, so forth, the umbrella hair, the bloody squibs! Ha ha, this is a squib movie, all right! Whoopi is the sort of cop who frequently has to go undercover as a ridiculous caricature of a prostitute, and she’s after the dealers of a deadly new mind-drug called, ha ha, “Fatal Beauty,” which of course is stenciled across each little baggie of the stuff! But beware, because one sniff of “Fatal Beauty” brings on a case of the terminal jim-jams!

Whoopi’s partner is a stylish and laconic Hispanic fellow, who gets wounded but thankfully not killed in the process of the investigation! I say thankfully because he was probably my favourite character in the movie! Another enjoyable character is the main henchman, who actually seems more like the principal bad guy; he’s played by Brad Dourif from Dune! And Whoopi, whom I’ve been calling ‘Whoopi” because that’s a fun word to type and to think about, is named “Rita Rizzoli” for some reason! Ha ha, I suspect it’s because the part was originally intended for someone like, I don’t know, Madonna! That’s pure speculation on my part, but remember, Beverly Hills Cop was originally a Sly Stallone vehicle! Ha ha!

One thing that sets the movie aside from most of its contemporary genre-mates (and the only thing, really) is that putative love interest Sam Elliott starts out as one of the bad guy’s henchmen, in fact his chief henchman! Elliott seems to turn up everywhere Whoopi goes, helping her out of scrapes or just observing her as she razzle-dazzles perps with her manic improv skills!

Whoopi is okay in the movie! She gets a very sad backstory and delivers it well! But the rest of this thing, and I’m agreeing with the portly critic Roger Ebert here, is very paint-by-numbers, the more so in retrospect! As mentioned it’s very, very 1980s, with the remonstrating ghost of Nancy Reagan seeming to hover overhead at all times; but it also looks ahead slightly to the even more generic cop movies of the 90s, which, ha ha, is not a compliment! I watched the whole thing though, and that, in my current state of finding it difficult to watch a whole movie, much less review it, is a sort of compliment I suppose! It’s the best I can muster anyway! I give Fatal Beauty one pair of hand glasses!

Burl reviews It Follows! (2014)

Burl here! Ha ha, do you know Garfield Minus Garfield? Well, if you can imagine a sort of Freddy Minus Freddy, you’d have something very like this most Eighties-style hocus-pocus picture, It Follows! It comes from the director of The Myth of the American Sleepover, and shares with that film a fondness for abandoned concrete structures and aimless youth! It wears its influences pretty squarely on its shoulders, and is at times overly committed to its bit, but the picture is in general scary and very well done! Ha ha!

The story is pretty simple, even if the implications are not! It turns out there’s a sort of ghostly virus that gets passed on by intercourse! Ha ha, once you’ve got it, you will be stalked by a phantom only you can see, a person walking through a crowd straight at you, looking like a stranger or someone you know, “whatever helps it get closer to you,” one character explains, though remaining undelineated is how looking like a ghoulish giant moron or a wall-eyed freak child would help it get closer! An unlucky young lady comes afoul of this baneful curse, and she and her Scooby-gang engage in research, screaming and running, and monumentally poor decision-making! Ha ha, Endut! Hoch Hech!

Now, the Halloween influence is quite strong, which the movie cheerfully admits by virtually recreating that 1978 picture’s schoolroom scene! And the picture owes a lot to A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the J-horror style, and also, it seemed to me, to Phantasm! But it chooses smartly from all these pictures, and if it’s something of a cinematic collage, like so many other films of recent years, it’s a marvelously-done one! And I’m a fellow who appreciates the art form of collage very much!

I also appreciate when horror movies take the time to be scary! This one does, and it’s a pleasure to watch! The photography is generally nice: parts of Detroit look as bombed-out and decrepit as they did in Only Lovers Left Alive, though the digital photography is occasionally a little too evident! Ha ha! The characters make some pretty boneheaded decisions throughout the picture, I do have to say, and there is some ineffective staging near the end; and one must admit that the score frequently over-eggs its synth-80s pudding!

But it’s a fine picture with some pleasant eccentricities and a bold style! It’s a real pleasure to watch, frankly, and I’m glad to have caught it in a movie theatre with an audience! It’ll pop up at a few festivals yet, so keep an eye out and watch it if you get the chance! I liked It Follows and am pleased to award it three and a half seashell readers!

Burl reviews Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It! (2015)

Ha ha, it’s Burl, here to review an African version of Prince’s 1984 picture Purple Rain! That’s another movie I know strictly by its Mad Magazine parody, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be getting all the enjoyment I could from Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It, which is a remake of the Prince film, or a tribute anyway, shot recently in Niger!

It’s the story of Mali-born guitarist Mdou Moctar, playing himself! Mdou is almost thirty, but here I guess he’s meant to be playing a version of himself as a teenager! Ha ha, I didn’t realize it until a scene where he argues with his dad, who hates the idea of his son being a musician! And this is but one of the obstacles Mdou faces!

He’s also the new guy in town, the town in this case being Agadez, in central Niger! The local hotshot guitar player is a guy called Kader, and eventually a rivalry springs up between these two! Kader manages to steal Mdou’s new song, which Mdou had been saving specially for an upcoming Battle of the Bands being held to determine who is really the best guitarist in Agadez! In the meantime, Mdou has met a pretty girl, and is wooing her with trips into the desert riding pillion on his purple motorcycle! He almost loses this girl by acting like a jerk later on, but his music redeems him, and also solves the problems with his father! Good times, ha ha!

The story offered by Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It is pretty basic, but the culture depicted within is fascinating! Ha ha, I hate to sound all anthropological, but the most valuable thing this movie offers, besides Mdou Moctar himself, is a crazy peek into the musical scene found in and around the Sahara! It’s all about trading and even listening to music by cell phone, the informal network by which Moctar became famous in the first place! “You’ve heard him on your cellphones, and now here he is in front of us!” cries the MC at whatever show or event he’s playing!

Despite the melodrama (in the truest sense) and the sometimes stilted acting or more likely because of these things, the seventy-five minute movie is consistently and thoroughly entertaining! The music is terrific, and the songs are all about peace and love! I’m not sure how closely it hews to the story of Purple Rain, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen that one or not: Rain the Color of Red With A Little Blue In It is a fun and culturally fascinating picture any way you slice it! I give this musical motion picture three headscarves!

Burl reviews For Your Eyes Only! (1981)

Ha ha, Burl here! It’s not a very controversial position, but Roger Moore has always been my least favourite Bond! (I’ve liked him elsewhere though, like in ffolkes! Ha ha, ffolkes!) However, his were the ones I sort of came of age with, as it were, so there’s still plenty of extratextual enjoyment for a guy like me! I’ve always thought of For Your Eyes Only as the “good” late-Moore, even though Octopussy is the one of which I am truly fondest, the Walken/Jones evil team and their blimp in A View To A Kill notwithstanding!

But it was For Your Eyes Only I recently rewatched, and though it wasn’t quite as serious-minded as I remembered, it was hardly the gagfest that was its immediate antecedent, Moonraker! I remembered it better through its Mad Magazine parody than through the movie itself! But it wasn’t a standout in any way, just one of the acceptably decent ones in the middle of the pack!

It opens with a pretty good remote-control helicopter scene, then shows us the fate of a British spy ship which pulls a mine up in its fishing nets! Ha ha, boom, and the McGarnigle of this film, The ATAC System! Everyone wants The ATAC System, and it seems that a beautiful lady’s parents are killed about it, and then she, being half Greek, is seeking vengeance as Bond is trying to beat a legion of swarthy Greek toughs and an East German supermen to the prize, The ATAC System!

Lynn Holly-Johnson from Alien Predators is a childlike figure skater who develops an old-man crush on Bond! Julian Glover from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the initially friendly fellow who may be more nefarious than he appears! And Michael Gothard from Lifeforce (a picture I can’t believe I haven’t reviewed for you yet) is skulking around everywhere, wearing little glasses and causing mischief, and eventually meeting a curiously satisfying fate! And Bond’s ally in the last third of the picture is Topol, whom we know from Flash Gordon, deedle-deedle-dum, and who munches incessantly on some kind of nuts through every one of his scenes!

It’s on the whole pretty simple for a Bond movie, and unusually unambitious! But that works in its favor too – the stakes are mentioned at one point, and while they weren’t low (bad guys could use The ATAC System to shoot off the UK sub fleet’s own missiles at her own cities!) they are not worried over, or even mentioned, thereafter! It’s kind of nice, especially for this period, that the very planet itself isn’t in danger, and that whatever the case nobody was much worried about it! Ha ha!

It was John Glen’s first movie as a director, ha ha, and that must have been a bit of a trial by fire! It’s a pretty big picture to start off with, and maybe that’s why the results are a bit workaday! It’s certainly better than many of the movies, but it doesn’t take many risks either, and so its failures are not spectacular! The scene on the mountainside is pretty good, though spatially it didn’t make much sense! Well, ha ha, it’s Bond, what can you do! I guess after some thought, and taking into consideration that it never subjects us to that Southern sheriff guy, I’m going to award For Your Eyes Only one and a half yellow Citröens!

Burl reviews When Harry Met Sally! (1989)

Ha ha, potato po-tah-to, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review  one of the godfathers of the modern romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally! Ha ha, movies don’t get any middlier than this, but I have a slight fondness for it based on Burl’s own personal experiences surrounding a theatrical viewing of the picture! Plus it fits into a microgenre I don’t exactly like, but that intrigues me: Movies That Take Place At Different Times Of Year And So Were Probably Difficult To Schedule! Funny Farm is one of those as I recall as of course is Alan Alda’s cardigan-wearing The Four Seasons! Ha ha!

An added bonus in this genre is, of course, when the seasons are distinct and well-used and the holidays are given prominence! Yes, ha ha, in When Harry Met Sally you get your summer, your leaf-dropping fall, your Christmas scenes and New Year climax! In between you get comedic misanthropy, bonding over classic films, some repetitiveness, a few laffs and a fair bit of gurning! The conclusion is a’foregone, of course, ha ha!

There’s a sense of character progression as the two characters, who initially seem like caricatures, edge toward, though still keep a ways from, the corral wherein the real people graze! We know the plot of course: Harry and Sally drive from Chicago to New York not having known each other previously, fail to get along, and over the next decade and change become friends, then lovmakers, then enemies, and ultimately spouses! Ha ha, pretty rote, though it was mildly fresher back then, probably!

I’m a wild fan of neither Billy “Running Scared” Crystal nor Meg “Innerspace” Ryan, though I certainly have nothing against them! Here they seem a bit shticky, ha ha, but have good moments throughout! Rob Reiner had some successes under his belt, like Stand By Me and The Princess Bride and that sort of thing, plus Spinal Tap; this, I guess, continued it as far as he was concerned! I’ve never seen the military courtroom one, so don’t ask me anything about it, ha ha! Nor can I explain why Reiner suddenly seemed to stop being able to make this sort of picture after a certain point!

I don’t guess there’s a lot left to say about this picture! I’m no expert in the development of the romantic comedy, but as I’ve mentioned, I think this can reasonably claim to be an important part of it! Anything that gets held up as an exemplar of its genre has some standing, I suppose! I give When Harry Met Sally two and a half baby fish mouths!

Burl reviews Goin' Down the Road! (1970)

Lock up yer daughters, it’s Burl here, reviewin’ and a laughin’ ha ha! I’ve got a startling new movie review today, namely of that fine picture Goin’ Down the Road, the movie that bestrode the top of the Best Canadian Movies Ever charts for years and years, and may bestride it yet for all Burl knows, ha ha!

I recently had the chance to watch the picture in the company of its director, Mr. Don Shebib, who of course also graced us with the exemplary Rip-Off and the better-than-you’d-think sequel/companion film to this one, Down the Road Again, which I recently reviewed for you! Shebib, a very friendly fellow, seemed of the opinion that his sequel was a better movie than this one, but while I can see why he might say such a thing, it’s patently untrue, ha ha! The original might be a little rough around the edges, but it’s a far superior picture!

If you haven’t seen the picture, you must at least have seen the spectacular SCTV version of it, ha ha! (And if you haven’t seen that either, by garr, YouTube that old boy post-haste!) The plot of the movie is simplicity itself, of course: Pete and Joey, two hoseheads from Nova Scotia, hop in their beater convertible (complete with amateur flamejob and bluenoser slogan) and head for Toronto! Ha ha, to quote an unknown genius, “Better things wuz what they want, so off they go to Hogtown, Ont.!”

Well, they don’t quite fit in with Toronto’s café society, ha ha! No, these old boys quickly find themselves hauling glass at the bottling plant, and then quick as you please they’re back out the door again! Romance is in the air of course, and then a bungled Loblaws heist when things get really desperate! Pete convinces Joey to commit a rather heinous act, and off the two bozos go, down the road again!

Ha ha, this is a picture filled with really marvelous acting! Doug McGrath, that old familiar face from Black Christmas and Porky’s and Ghosts of Mars, plays Pete, whose thoughtful face looks like a stony glare! The late Paul Bradley is great as Joey, and Jayne Eastwood plays his waitress/paramour, and she’s excellent too, and you get to see her bum! Ha ha! And then there’s just all the little details and the fly-on-the-wall mise en scène, and the fine folky musical score and the gritty cinematography from Richard “Watchers” Leiterman! Ha ha, it’s all so great!

 

Well, it’s a fine picture, if a little bit of a bummer now and again! But you get great little moments, like when the boys go to the A&A record store on Yonge, or when they find, to their absolute delight, a maritime singer in one of the local bars, or when Pete becomes a pin monkey! Ha ha, I’m going to give Goin’ Down the Road three and a half stubbies, but you’ll see a heck of a lot more of ‘em than that in the movie!

Burl reviews Single White Female! (1992)

Ha ha and boogaloo bread, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here with another movie review, and this one comes to us from the summer of 1992! I’m not sure what I was doing in the summer of 1992, but I remember what the movies were doing: showing us example after example of how people we should be able to trust – nannies, roommates, stepdaughters, cops – are actually kill maniacs likely to stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is their psychological deficiency demands they have! Ha ha, this important message was delivered that year in pictures like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy, Unlawful Entry and this movie, Single White Female!

Now, I never cared much for this genre, and, outside of its 1987 godfather, Fatal Attraction, I never saw any examples of same in the theatre, or even on video! But because I’ve always enjoyed the work of Barbet Schroeder, who directed this (as well as Barfly, More and, crucially, La Maitresse), and because the VHS was just sitting around in my basement, I recently thought I’d give it a shot! Ha ha, and why the heck not!

Well, we all know the story, I guess! Allie, a young lady, whose job appears to be designing some kind of fashion software, has a contretemps with her gentleman friend and finds herself in need of a roommate! She advertises for same and soon takes on the mousy Hedra! But as Allie, contrary to her promises, creeps towards a rapprochement with her faithless swain, Hedra, who is secretly cuckoo-bananas, objects to being pushed aside and told to move out! Ha ha, I think she has a quite reasonable grievance, myself!

Well, soon an adorable puppy takes a header out a twelfth-story window! Ha ha, he seems to have been brought on the scene for just this purpose, both within the story and for the writer’s own narrative needs! (This might have been the catalyst for my friend Sean’s vow to boycott any movie where they needlessly kill a dog!) Soon there are more bodies falling to the floor, but only a few of them, for this would style itself no slasher movie, despite its later being labeled one in many critical notices! (One of the bodies even gets up later to tell the tale!)

But, while silly and a little mean to puppies, Single White Female has nice photography from Suspiria cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, and fine performances from the leading ladies, Bridget Fonda from Frankenstein Unbound and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is probably best known for her role in Grandview U.S.A.! We also get more nuance than is usual: as I mentioned, Hedra can’t be blamed for complaining about Allie’s jerkish behavior, and her character is easy to pity, even after she starts delivering high-heel pokings to the eye and such! The tables are turned in the stalking scenes as well, and, as in Death Proof, it is the crazy maniac who gets scared and pleading!

Now, Single White Female is hardly the greatest thing since French toast! It may have the virtues already mentioned, it may boast an effective suspense moment or two, it may feature a Ken "It Came From Beneath the Sea" Tobey cameo, and it may provide a shoe in the eye! But it’s still just another one of those cuckoo-in-the-nest pictures, as silly as that implies, and overlong in the bargain! By garr, this cycle of pictures seem very much of their era – early stirrings of pre-millennial anxiety or something, maybe! Ha ha! Anyway, they never did much for me, so I’m giving Single White Female one and a half screwdrivers on a chain!