By Richard Winters
My Rating: 4 out of 10
4-Word Review: Three stories involving feline.
With a screenplay written by Stephen King the film is made up of three of his short stories with two of them taken from his 1978 novel ‘Night Shift’ while the third one was penned directly for the screen. The only connecting thread is a stray cat and actress Drew Barrymore who appear in all three tales though only have major parts in the third one.
The first segment is called ‘Quitters, Inc.’ and involves James Wood playing the part of a man named Dick Morrison who is trying to quit smoking and enters an agency that boasts a high success rate of getting their clients to stop. It’s run by Vinny (Alan King) who tells Dick that if he doesn’t stop smoking instantly that they’ll kidnap his wife (Mary D’Arcy) and put her into a room where she’ll receive electrical shocks. To prove his point he puts the cat in the cage and then through a glass partition Dick witnesses the feline getting shocked, which is enough to scare him into quitting on the spot. Yet as the days progress Dick finds himself constantly getting the urge to light-up, but Vinny warns him that he has people who’ll be watching him and if he does dare to backtrack they’ll immediately grab his wife and bring her into the cage. Eventually though the compulsion to have a cigarette gets to be too much and he sneaks a puff only to then face the dire consequences.
This segment tries for black comedy, but doesn’t go far enough with it. While Woods, who usually excels as the twisted types, is quite good as the straight man, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t go the police when his wife gets taken, or why any of the other clients didn’t either, which should’ve gotten the business quickly shut down and the owners prosecuted for running an unethical operation. Famously brash comedian Alan King isn’t given enough leeway to allow his cantankerous persona to go full throttle though watching him wearing a white leisure suit and lip synch the words to the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ makes it almost worth it. It’s interesting seeing James Rebhorn in a bit part as a drunken business man at a party as he later had a prominent role in the movie The Game, which had a very similar storyline to this one involving a business that overtakes their client’s lives and is constantly watching them.
The second segment called ‘The Ledge’ involves a man named Johnny (Robert Hays) who must walk across a thin, outdoor ledge along a penthouse wall many feet above a busy street. If he succeeds then the penthouse owner, Cressner (Kenneth McMillan), will grant his wife a divorce and allow her to marry Johnny whom she’s been dating.
This story is the best one mainly because it has McMillan who is one of the finest character actors of all time and supplies his role with an amazing amount of energy and dark campiness. The scenes of watching Hays trying to maneuver his way on the ledge while being simultaneously attacked by a pigeon and at times McMillan who throws things at him out his window, is really terrifying. You feel like you’re on the ledge with him and I cringed all the way through this one, but in a good way as I really got swept up in it though the twist ending is a letdown.
The third and final segment called ‘The General’ involves a young girl living in North Carolina, named Amanda (Drew Barrymore) who takes in a stray cat much to her nagging mother’s (Candy Clark) chagrin as she feels the animal may attack Amanda’s pet bird named Polly whom she keeps in a cage in her room. Amanda though likes the cat, whom she’s named General, because he scares away the evil troll, who’s the size of a rat and sneaks into her bedroom at night through a small opening in the wall to steal away her breath while also attacking Polly.
This segment has some interesting special effects, but it’s hard to tell if this is intended to be scary, or comical. It’s probably supposed to be a mixture of both, but I wished it went more for the scares since the movie, which gets billed as being a ‘horror’ doesn’t really have much of them otherwise. This segment also doesn’t really have any twist to it other than the parents finally believing that a troll really does exist in their daughter’s bedroom, but then telling her not to tell anyone about it, but why? It seems like if there’s one of them there could be others and the whole home should be inspected and fumigated and if I were the homeowner I wouldn’t want to spend another minute in there until it was, so having this family just forget about it and go back to normal didn’t seem like a normal response. The troll is also too reminiscent of the devil doll in Trilogy of Terror, which was far more frightening.
My Rating: 4 out of 10
Released: April 12, 1985
Runtime: 1 Hour 34 Minutes
Rated PG-13
Director: Lewis Teague
Studio: MGM/UA
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 