Category Archives: Sequels

Oh, God! You Devil (1984)

Posted on September 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: God versus the devil.

Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass) is a struggling songwriter who is becoming increasingly frustrated at his inability to make it big. He blurts out at one point that he’d be willing to sell his soul if it could get him success and this catches the attention of the Devil (George Burns) who goes by the name Harry O. Trophet. He offers to become Bobby’s agent as long as Bobby signs a contract that gives him his soul after an indefinite period of time. Bobby, so desperate to reap the benefits of fame and fortune that has alluded him all his life, decides to take him up on the offer and soon becomes a world famous rock star named Billy Wayne. Yet Bobby misses his girlfriend Wendy (Roxanne Hart) who he can no longer see because he’s inhabiting a different identity. He longs to go back to his old way of life and tries to contact the services of God (George Burns) to dissolve the contact he signed and return him back to the way it was before.

After the critical shellacking of Oh, God! Book II the studio realized their mistake and attempted to take the theme in a whole new and hopefully fresh direction. They commissioned both Josh Greenfield and Andrew Bergman to write separate scripts and then ultimately choose Bergman’s over the other one. While the idea may sound funny the way it gets handled is not. All Bergman does is simply rework the Faust legend while offering very little that is new or inventive to it. The plot gets handled in an extremely heavy-handed and melodramatic manner that is neither funny nor engrossing. Bergman shows little feeling for the material and the story plods along in a predictable and boring way.

Wass, who no longer performs in front of the camera and has since 1995 worked exclusively behind-the-scenes as a director, is extremely weak. His performance is one-note and his constant deer-in-headlights expression is annoying. The film doesn’t do a good job of portraying his desperate situation either. Despite making very little money he’s still able to somehow afford a chic-looking apartment and maintain a relationship with a very hot-looking woman. I realize the point of the movie is to show that he already had a good thing going and just didn’t realize it, but his situation should’ve been shown to be more bleak in order to have his signing of the contract make more sense.

Burns is the only thing that saves it. He had never played a bad-guy before, so seeing him fall into the devil character as well as he does is fun and some of the lines that he conveys are the only amusing bits in the movie. However, the big showdown between God and the devil in which the two play a game of poker is not interesting at all and they needed to do something that offered more action, which is badly missing from the film otherwise.

This marked the final movie to date in the Oh, God! franchise. There were discussions a few years back about reviving it with Betty White playing the role of God, but because of her advanced age no insurance company would back it, so the idea got scrapped, which is a shame as this would be one reboot I’d be interested to see.  It would be nice if someone would make a film that more closely resembled the ‘Oh, God!’ novel by Avery Corman, which had a satirical tone that none of the three films replicated.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: November 9, 1984

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Paul Bogart

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Sequels, Spiritual Movies

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Oh, God! Book II (1980)

Posted on August 30, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: God returns to earth.

Tracy (Louanne) is an 11-year-old girl who one day meets God (George Burns) when he invites her via a fortune cookie into the lounge of a Chinese restaurant where he asks her to help him spread the word that he exists. She then, with the help of her friends, creates posters that say ‘Think God’ which she puts up all over town, but this gets her suspended from school and then her parents (David Birney, Suzanne Pleshette) consider having her sent to a mental hospital after she keeps insisting that she’s spoken to the Almighty directly.

This follow-up to the 1977 hit lacks the freshness and originality of the first. The studio had initially wanted the John Denver character to return, but the producers insisted they wanted a ‘fresh start’ and not just continue the storyline from the first film. While the characters are different, the plot line remain the same causing the film to come-off like a boring reworking of the first one instead of a continuation.

Louanne, who now goes by Louanne Sirota, is adorable, which helps, but her hairstyle looks like something out of the 1940’s. She also believes in God right from the start even before she meets him, which doesn’t allow for any type of interesting character arch. It’s also quite  hard to believe that her ‘Think God’ poster campaign would have any affect and that a nonbeliever would somehow suddenly become a raging theist after spotting one of the amateurish looking signs.

Another issue is the God character who is full of idiosyncrasies. For one thing the concept of evolution gets glossed over and the film makes it like how we see things now in regards to animal and plant life is exactly how God envisioned them when they were created at the beginning of time. He also mentions having to sometimes sneeze, but why would a spirit need to do that? At another point he talks about answering phone calls, but why would there be telephones in Heaven?

It’s also confusing why God, who is supposedly an omnipotent being that knows what each person is thinking and feeling would need the help of a young child in order to ‘reach people’. He also seems like a cruel jerk as he coaxes this girl into this ad campaign, which puts her into a very traumatic situation as it gets her suspended from school and even on the brink of being put into an institution. If God is all-powerful why can’t he simply make himself appear on everyone’s TV at the same time in order to let everyone know that he exists instead of putting a young child through such unnecessary stress?

The humor is lacking and the only funny lines are the ones dealing with the big breasts of David Birney’s girlfriend (Denise Galik). I also didn’t understand why the word book gets put into the film’s title as there was never any second Oh God! novel written. Was this supposed to be a play-on-words in regards to the books of the Bible? If so then that joke, like just about everything else in the film, falls flat.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: October 3, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Gilbert Cates

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Movies for the Whole Family, Sequels, Spiritual Movies

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The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979)

Posted on March 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Bumbling buddies cause havoc.

Amos and Theodore (Tim Conway, Don Knotts) are two former members of an outlaw gang who are now trying to go straight, but as they enter the western boom town of Junction City they find their hopes of living life free of their old criminal ways to be dashed when they get mistakenly accused of robbing the town’s bank. They go on the run from the town’s relentless sheriff (Kenneth Mars) by enlisting in the United States Calvary, but accidentally cause a fire there that ends up burning the whole fort down and getting them into even more trouble.

This very weak sequel to  The Apple Dumpling Gang, has little to recommend and barely any connection to the first one. Besides Knotts and Conway no one from the original cast appears here except for Harry Morgan who plays an entirely different character. It was also the kids in the first film that were called the Apple Dumpling gang and not the two bumbling men, which just cements how unnecessary this film really is.

It’s not like any of the cast from the original film was all that memorable, but they at least helped balance the story from being just one long inane slapstick act, which is all you end up getting here. Knotts and Conway can be good comic relief in brief sporadic spurts, but trying to tie a whole movie around their bumbling act makes it quite one-dimensional.

The supporting cast isn’t any good either with Tim Matheson as bland and transparent as ever as a heroic officer and his romance with the feisty Elyssa Davalos is formulaic and cliched to the extreme. Mars goes overboard with the arrogant sheriff who goes crazy act until it becomes just as annoying and overdone as everything else in the film.

I’ll admit as a child I thought this movie was entertaining, but as an adult I got bored almost immediately despite finding the first installment to be genuinely enjoyable. Part of the problem is that the first one was based on a novel and had an actual story mixed in with the gags while this one is centered exclusively on extreme coincidences to help propel its thin plot along while throwing in slapstick bits that are predictable and unoriginal.

The only thing that surprised me at all was seeing Conway get top billing even though Knotts displayed a wider acting range while Conway merely stands around looking perpetually befuddled. Knotts also had the majority of lines and a little more dimension to his comedy while Conway just acts like a cross-eyed dope, which to me got boring real fast.

I understand that these films have a certain nostalgic appeal for those adults who remember watching it as a kid, but I honestly think that appeal will wear off quickly after about 5 minutes. If you’re under 10 you may like it better, but others should beware.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: June 27, 1979

Runtime: 1 Hour 29 Minutes

Rated G

Director: Vincent McEveety

Studio: Buena Vista 

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Buddy Movies, Movies for the Whole Family, Sequels, Westerns

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Oliver’s Story (1978)

Posted on March 8, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Adjusting to wife’s death.

It’s been 6 years since Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) lost his wife to leukemia and he’s still having a hard time learning to move on from it. He hasn’t been in a serious relationship since and his friends including his step father (Edward Binns) are pressuring him to start dating. Finally by chance he meets Marci (Candice Bergen) while she is out jogging. She is secretly an heiress to a massive fortune, which allows the two to connect due to their similar well-to-do upbringings, but when things start to get serious Oliver finds himself  resisting unable to cut the ties from his past and move forward.

This is definitely a sequel that nobody asked for and in fact both O’Neal and Bergen initially had no interest doing it. The original film worked because it centered on the couple and when you take away one of them you have only half a movie. Oliver on his own is boring and watching him learn to adjust to life as a single person is not compelling and no different than the hundreds of other movies dealing with the dating scene.

John Marley, who played Jenny’s father in the first film, refused to appear in this one because he was unhappy with how his name was going to be placed in the credits, so he got replaced by Edward Binns who seems to be playing a completely different character. Here the father-in-law and Oliverhave acquired a chummy friendship and even hang out together despite this never having been established in the first film. Ray Milland reprises his role as Oliver’s father, but gets portrayed in a much more likable way while in the first one he came off more as a heavy.

The film’s only interesting aspect is seeing how much the social norms have changed. Here being single is considered like a disease and his pesky friends are emboldened enough to set Oliver up on dates and openly telling him that he needs to ‘get out more’ even though by today’s standards the single lifestyle is much more prevalent and accepted and doing these same types of actions now by well meaning friends would be considered intrusive and obnoxious.

Having one of the women that he meets at a dinner party invite him back to her place despite barely knowing him is something not likely to occur today either. The way though that Oliver meets Marcie is the most absurd as he quite literally chases her down while she is jogging, which would scare most women into thinking that they had a crazy stalker on their hands.

On the production end the film is competently made with the springtime scenery of New York as well as shots of the couple’s trip to Hong Kong being the only thing that I enjoyed. The story though lacks punch and drones on with too many side dramas. O’Neal’s performance is good, but his chemistry with Bergen is lacking, which ultimately makes this a production that had misfire written all over it before a single frame of it was even shot.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: December 15, 1978

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: John Korty

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video,  YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with Nudity, Romance, Sequels

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It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987)

Posted on October 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer babies shipped away.

Stephen Jarvis (Michael Moriarty) is the father to one of the mutant babies who agrees to have his child shipped away under a court order to a deserted island where it can live freely among the other mutant babies while no longer being a threat to the rest of society. 5 years later Stephen is then asked to join in on an expedition by a group of doctors who want to go to the island to monitor the growth of the children, but when they arrive the children overpower them and force Stephen to return to the mainland in order to meet-up with Stephen’s wife Ellen (Karen Black) who gave birth to one of them years earlier.

Larry Cohen has stated that he wanted to take the theme to its logical conclusion and see what the babies would become like when they grew older, but it was the killer baby plot-line that is what made it so unique and by his point it no longer represents what it initially did. Now they look like overweight versions of the aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the setting like a whacked-out revision of The Island of Dr. Moreau and instead of being a horror film it’s more like a sci-fi flick and not a particularly good one at that.

It’s only mildly interesting when it’s on island anyways, but surprisingly the story doesn’t remain there and the  ill-advised humor that gets thrown in does nothing but make this already silly idea seem even sillier. We do however get to see more of the babies than in the first two installments, but this doesn’t help because they end up resembling second-rate clay animation figures, which looks tacky as hell.

Moriarty elevates it with a much needed edge and the fact that he’s staunchly pro-life in real-life gives the part an added layer of genuineness.  The only problem is that the character has the same arch as the father’s in the first two films had, which makes it redundant.

Black isn’t in it much, but manages to come on strong at the finish. I was perplexed however as to why in all three films it was the father who went on a crusading mission to save the babies and never the mother. Why couldn’t the wives/mothers have worked with their husbands as a team on this endeavor and the fact that they don’t seems sexist.

Per Leonard Maltin’s review there’s some ‘serious comments’ here on many modern-day social issues, but when it’s as cheaply made as this you really don’t care. There’s also too many tangents including a poorly staged street gang fight that is unconvincing. The first film was a novelty with a few redeeming qualities, but the  sequels do nothing but drive that original idea into the ground and turn the entire concept into a laughable, forgettable grade-Z farce.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 15, 1987

Runtime: 1Hour 34Minutes

Rated R

Director: Larry Cohen

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Campy Comedy, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Offbeat, Sequels

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It Lives Again (1978)

Posted on October 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Three more monster babies.

As Jody and Eugene (Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest) hold a baby shower in excited anticipation for their newborn they meet Frank (John Ryan) the father whose wife gave birth to the monster baby in the first film. He warns them that their baby may be the same way and advises them to give birth to it in the back of a semi-truck specially equipped to handle the mutant child. The couple initially resist, but then come into contact with Malory (John Marley) and a police force intent on killing it. Frank manages to get their baby to a secret underground home where two other mutant children are being held under the observation of Dr. Perry (Andrew Duggan) who wants to raise the monster babies and have them multiply in order to create a whole new race of people.

This sequel to the surprise cult hit starts out with potential despite neglecting to explain why these mutant births are occurring. In the first one it was intimated that contraceptive pills were the cause, but here that gets forgotten and never even mentioned. Keeping the babies in an underground facility bogs the action down and eventually turns this into a talky drag and the idea of having three killer babies isn’t all that impressive either as I would’ve imagine that by now, given that four years have passed from when the first story took place, there should’ve been hundreds if not thousands of them.

The film’s biggest drawback though is that we don’t see much of the babies and instead get treated to extended shots of the adults talking while only hearing the baby’s crying in the background, which is boring. If the budget didn’t allow for elaborate special effects, which forced them to keep the footage of the little monsters to a minimum, then this cheesy excuse for a horror film should never have been made at all because what’s the point of watching it otherwise?

Lloyd and Forrest are good, but their characters shift perspectives too quickly. In the first film Frank’s changing opinion of his newborn came about slowly and realistically, but here the parents see-saw from loving the baby one second to wanting to kill it the next. The jump cuts are also an issue, which makes the intended scares  hard to follow and the film’s message is a muddled mess too. The first one had a seemingly a pro-life point-of-view while here those who want to save the babies are portrayed as being fringy lunatics.

Alternate Title: It’s Alive II

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: May 10, 1978

Runtime: 1Hour 31Minutes

Rated R

Director: Larry Cohen

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Sequels

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“Crocodile” Dundee II (1988)

Posted on August 29, 2018 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Now that’s a knife.

Mick (Paul Hogan) and Sue (Linda Kozlowski) having been living together in her New York apartment for a year since their last adventures from the first film. Sue’s ex-husband Bob (Dennis Boutsikaris) is working for drug enforcement in South America. He witnesses and photographs the murder of a rival drug cartel leader at the hands of Luis Rico (Hechter Ubarry) and his men. Once Bob realizes that he’s been spotted he runs for cover to his hotel, but the men chase after him and kill him, but not before he sends the film negatives of the killing to Sue. The drug gang then kidnaps Sue in order to get their hands on the negative and it’s up to Mick to find a way to free her while also single-handedly fighting off the gang.

This sequel manages to avoid the missteps of so many others by wisely not trying to replay what we saw in the first installment, but instead taking it into a new direction and therefore allowing the theme and characters to progress. To some degree the plot does come off like an episode of ‘Miami Vice’ and the villains are also incredibly dull and generic. Do we really need bad guy Luis explaining to Sue why he got into the drug dealing business, because of the ‘money’ and ‘power’, as if there would be any other reason?

Having her ex-husband, someone who was never seen at all in the first film, act as a catalyst is problematic too. It seems like one’s ex-spouse; especially someone he hasn’t spoken to in years would be the last person to send crucial photographs to. He works for the DEA, so why not send it to them?

However, even with these issues I still kind of liked seeing Mick forced into action. The first film consisted mainly of him bragging about his exploits, but here we get to see first-hand some of his actual survival skills. It also puts to test his easygoing personality and we see if he can remain amazingly low-key and likable in situations that most other people couldn’t.

Unfortunately unlike in the first flick the comedy does not come from Hogan’s character, but instead from others around him that witness his exploits. Outside of an amusing segment that comes early on in the film where Mick tries to talk a man out of jumping off a ledge his character is portrayed in a darker more intense way although not enough to erase his ever going charm.

Kozlowski, who ended up marrying Hogan in real-life 2 years after this film was released, is stuck in a thankless supporting role where she doesn’t have much to do. The film poster portrays the idea that the two fight the bad guys side-by-side, but in reality Hogan does most of it while Linda simply tags along and observes. The real scene stealer is John Meillon whose last theatrical film this was. He was in the first one, but his presence there didn’t amount to much, but here his character, working in tandem with Mick, is an integral part of sending the drug gang on a wild goose chase.

The scenes shot in Australia are gorgeous and in fact the spot where the drug gang campout is the same place where Picnic at Hanging Rock was filmed. Charles S. Dutton who plays a man by name of Leroy Brown and pretends to be a drug dealer even though he really isn’t is quite amusing too and overall the film is a mildly entertaining way to spend two hours.

Spoiler Alert!

My only problem is in regards to Leonard Maltin’s review of it where he states that he felt the film was too leisurely paced and wished they’d “get on with it especially when all suspense about the outcome is eliminated”, but after watching it this makes no sense. The bad guys are not fully defeated until the very, very end in fact it quickly cuts to the credits once they are. There’s even some concern that Mick may have accidently been killed, which also occurs at the very end, so it seems that Maltin, who I generally like as a critic, either didn’t really watch the movie, or the whole thing, and therefore has no idea what he’s actually talking about.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: May 20, 1988

Runtime: 1Hour 52Minutes

Rated PG

Director: John Cornell

Studio: Paramount

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Action/Adventure, Comedy, Foreign Films, Kidnapping Movies, Movies from Australia, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Sequels

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Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)

Posted on August 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Rich guy goes broke.

Arthur (Dudley Moore), still a boozing and irresponsible cad with a lot of money, finds out that Linda (Liza Minnelli), his wife of 6 years, wants to have a baby, but she can’t have one naturally, so they’re forced to consider adoption. They have a good initial meeting with the representative (Kathy Bates) at the adoption agency only to find that Burt (Stephen Elliot), still upset at the way Arthur jilted his daughter Susan (Cynthia Sikes) at the altar 6 years earlier, has taken control of Arthur’s inheritance through some wheeling-and-dealing and turned him into a poor man. Now for the first time in his life Arthur must find a job despite having no experience in the working world at all.

This sequel takes the idea of what I thought should’ve happened in the first film, but unfortunately botches it badly by creating a concept with too many loopholes. Exactly how does a man worth 750 million lose it all just like that? Wouldn’t he have some of that money stored up in the bank or in stocks? What about the money he would most certainly have tied up in assets and equity like the 6 homes that he mentions owning? Couldn’t he just sell those and everything he owns inside of them and use that money to remain solvent instead of going from super rich to super poor overnight?

Things get really overblown when Burt buys up every apartment building Arthur moves into and every company Arthur works for, so that no matter where he goes he’ll be assured of always getting fired or evicted. Yet Arthur was already doing poorly enough at his hardware store job, which would’ve gotten him eventually fired anyways without having to have Burt intervene. It’s also never made clear how Burt is able to find out which new company or apartment building Arthur is moving into or working for. Was there some person/spy following Arthur around and reporting back to Burt everything he was doing and if so this should’ve been shown, but never is.

There is another scene where the lady from the adoption agency arrives at Arthur’s and Linda’s new apartment in order to check-out their living conditions. Yet the couple had just agreed to rent the apartment five minutes earlier, so how would the adoption agency know that the couple was living there since they hadn’t yet informed anyone of their new address?

Jill Eickenberry, who had played Susan in the first film, was unable to reprise her role due to working in the TV-show ‘L.A. Law’, so director Bud Yorkin had her replaced with his wife Cynthia Sikes. Sikes though plays the part much differently. In the first film Susan came off as a naïve, wide-eyed innocent, but here she is deliberate and mean. The contrasting personalities of the character don’t work and the film would’ve been better had the character just been killed off maybe in a suicide because she was so distraught at losing Arthur, which would’ve then made Burt’s nasty scheme at trying to get back at him make more sense.

The cast though does a decent job and there are some scattered laughs, but overall it’s flat and draggy. Chris de Burg’s opening song pales in comparison to the chart topping, award winning hit that Christopher Cross did in the first film, which only helps to set the lifeless tone for the rest of the movie.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: July 8, 1988

Runtime: 1Hour 53Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Bud Yorkin

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Christmas Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Comedy/Drama, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Sequels

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Jaws 2 (1978)

Posted on July 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Another shark terrorizes Amity.

Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) fears that another shark is stalking the beaches of Amity when two divers disappear and then later a water skier and her speedboat driver are also killed. When Body goes to Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) with his concerns the mayor and the rest of the council dismiss it and eventually fire Brody from his position when he continues to argue. His concerns are worsened when he finds that his two sons (Mark Gruner, Marc Gilpin) and their teen friends have snuck off onto a sailboat right were the shark attacks have been occurring.

Only four cast members return from the first one which includes the aforementioned Scheider and Hamilton as well as Lorraine Gary as Brody’s wife and Fritzi Jane Courtney as one of the council members. For me the biggest surprise was the return of Hamilton’s character as most likely he would’ve been voted out after making such egregious error in the first film and leaving the beaches open to further shark attacks after being told not to. I was also surprised that anyone would still want to come to the beach to swim anyways as the stigma of the area would most likely be quite strong.

Director John D. Hancock and his wife Dorothy Tristan who were first hired to direct the sequel had a much better, more believable plot idea. In their script Amity had become a ghost town and the economy in ruins. Mayor Vaughn and developer Len Peterson (Joseph Mascolo) build a resort on the island hoping to boost the tourism, but they use mob money to do it, which is why they end up resisting Brody’s dire warnings. Unfortunately the studio felt this concept was ‘too dark’ so Hancock and his wife were fired and replaced with a script by Howard Sackler and Carl Gottlieb that is basically just a bland rehashing of the storyline from the first one.

The first film was beautifully paced with each scene adding to the tension, but here there are a lot of lulls and the shark, which wasn’t seen much in the first one, doesn’t get shown enough here. The majority of time I kept feeling frustrated waiting for another shark attack to occur as any time the story is on land the film dies.

A good sequel should also always up-the-ante and having the plot built around just one shark doing all of the attacking just like in the first film doesn’t help to take the tension to the next level. Having a group of sharks attack at the same time would’ve helped add more shock appeal as people would now be battling sharks from multiple fronts and making the chances for survival all that more precarious.

Although it’s great seeing Keith Gordon and Donna Wilkes in their film debuts the rest of the teen cast is unlikable and the type of smart ass kids you wouldn’t mind seeing get eaten. There are also too damn many of them and the film would’ve been better served had it stuck to just Brody’s two sons on the boat and none of the others.

The way the shark ultimately dies is cool, but everything else falls flat. If you’ve seen the first one then there’s no reason to watch the sequel as it adds nothing to the theme and if you haven’t seen the first one then please skip this installment altogether and grab that one as it is far superior.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: June 16, 1978

Runtime: 1Hour 57Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama on the High Seas, Sequels, Thrillers/Suspense

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The Concorde … Airport ’79 (1979)

Posted on April 7, 2018 | 3 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Missile targets passenger plane.

A corrupt arms dealer, Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner), has his deadly surface-to-air missile system target a Concorde airplane while it’s in the air when he finds out that one of the passengers on board, a news reporter named Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely), has incriminating information on him that she plans to report on once the plane lands. Captain Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) uses his superior piloting skills to avoid the missile, but then learns Harrison has installed a device on the plane that knocks-out its cargo door causing the plane to literally rip apart and forcing a dangerous emergency landing in the Alps.

This terrible idea for a movie came from its producer Jennings Lang who greedily wanted to squeeze out a story from an already tired formula if he felt it could continue to make a profit. Sometimes it’s best to get out while you’re ahead, but Lang, who wrote the story for this one, didn’t see it that way and ended up making a clunker that’s even worse than Airport 1975, which was already notorious for being one of the worst disaster flicks ever made. The plot here has all the trappings of being written by someone more interested in turning a profit than creating an actual movie as the characters are one-dimensional and the situations contrived.

The espionage undertone makes it seems more like a James Bond flick with most of the action occurring on the ground than in the airplane. Watching the plane trying to avoid the missile isn’t exciting because the unconvincing special effects clearly look like images being matted onto the screen. The scenes showing the passengers screaming as the plane turns upset down become laughable and get shown with a boring regularity. The part where Eddie Albert’s chair goes through the floor is the film’s unintentional comic highpoint particularly when he states “I thought I had the best seat on the plane.”

Yet the craziest element in the story is the fact that the plane, after the passengers spent the whole flight being terrorized by incoming missiles, lands in Paris and the people spend the night in a hotel. Then the next day they all happily board the plane again, which simply would not happen as there is no way that anyone anywhere would get back onto a plane, especially so quickly if ever, after what they had just gone through.

George Kennedy gives a solid performance and helps to give the film some minor credibility in what would turn out to be his last major film role as he would be relegated to minor supporting roles and B-movies afterwards. The rest of the cast though either gets wasted; particularly Mercedes McCambridge who only gets a few speaking lines, or become just plain irritating.

Jimmie Walker is the most annoying playing a goofball who boards the plane while still carrying his saxophone, which would never be allowed in reality, and even starts playing it creating worse noise pollution than the singing nun did in Airport 1975 and should’ve been enough to have had him thrown off the airline…while it was still in the air. Tacky B-celebrity Charo appears briefly as a nutty lady who tries bringing her dog on board. Fortunately she gets booted off before the plane takes off because otherwise I would’ve been rooting for it to have crashed.

The only interesting aspect about the movie is the plane itself. The Concorde was the fastest commercial jet built that had maximum speeds that were twice the speed of sound. I thought it was cool the way the plane light up signs informing the passengers once they had reached Mach 1 and made me wish I could’ve flown on one, but sadly the Concorde ceased operations in 2003 even though flying in one was quite safe. Ironically the only crash that occurred during its 30 year history happened with the plane that was used in this film, Flight 4590, which crashed minutes after take-off on July 25, 2000, killing all 109 on board.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: August 17, 1979

Runtime: 1Hour 53Minutes

Rated PG

Director: David Lowell Rich

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Disaster Flicks, Sequels

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