Indie horror flicks have creative methods of filming random killings because that can be afforded, and it's what kind of genre it is, but COLLECTOR merely aspires as a mob flick yet lacks the villainous fun in the process... Perhaps because lead actor Cortese (with underused natural-beauty girlfriend Anne Johns) is too grim and one-note serious while his buddy... a non-famous Joe Pesci... is so natural, energetic and involving, he would've made a far better lead while sidekick's sidekick/comic-relief Bobby Alto would be promoted to second banana instead of third, because he and Joe's scenes (foreshadowing Pesci's witty back-and-forth with Frank Sivero in GOODFELLAS) are the only truly human moments... Also featuring another future Martin Scorsese regular Frank Vincent, whose low-rent mafioso foreshadows his violently doomed fates in RAGING BULL, GOODFELLAS and CASINO... Overall, THE DEATH COLLECTOR aka FAMILY ENFORCER has some terrifically shot sequences, and makes for a moody 1970's hybrid of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes... but its uneven story feels more pieced-together than fully realized: ultimately cheating both the characters and the audience. Grade: C—
THE DEATH COLLECTOR/FAMILY ENFORCER (1976)
SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
Set in the mid-1980's during the Reagan Administration: when Russia had nukes aimed at America and vice versa... only here the superhero plot demands the kind of urgency where The Cold War's turned into an impending/existential threat... which it NEVER was... an idealistic and childish plot with schoolchildren calling for Superman to get rid of all the nuclear missiles, and Gene Hackman has returned as Lex Luthor, burdened with godawful teenager Jon Cryer as a geek-punk nephew, so it doesn't even feel like Hackman's involved: His goal to sell nukes to opposing countries while having somehow gained the scientific knowledge to create his very own superhero, Nuclear Man, something so corny even a TV-movie would avoid it...
Meanwhile, Margot Kidder has returned, and even flies around with Superman, but she's wedged in during a romance with b-villain Sam Wanamaker's rich girl daughter Muriel Hemingway, who tries her best only she's stuck in the wrong picture... So don't blame Cannon for a lead actor attempting to manipulate audiences into thinking The Cold War was actually red hot... and by 1987 that anti-nukes concept was tired and dated anyhow. Grade: F
FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994)
Lacking the kind of edge and closure to one-liners
(which there aren't many)... and for the most part his endearingly flaky
persona has a plot-line all its own: to serve the female viewers, as
this one's almost solely for them, a niche audience, before also
relating to the guys who take the girls out, like NOTTING HILL, MICKEY
BLUE EYES, MUSIC AND LYRICS, and a few others where Hugh stretched
beyond the adorably vulnerable dreamboy...However the movie
itself isn't squeaky-clean, and is a bit painfully stretched, especially
the first wedding in which 35 minutes seems its own plodding 90-minute
movie where the British characters, a collective of smug/judgemental
friends serving their outlining more normal friends' weddings, are so
quirky and offbeat there are few characters to balance them out, making
their eccentric personalities roll into a one-note cliche...
Which
improves as soon as the plot of Hugh Grant, basically in the same
smitten-shoes that Emilio Estevez was in for the same actress, Andie
McDowell, in ST ELMO'S FIRE... as in, both want her badly but some
benign older guy's already got her... Yet Andie... always
pretty... isn't all that great here, and hardly compels Hugh to pick up
his game, with American Import written all over her comparably tame
character to Hugh's zany friends that never stop talking...
And perhaps that's the point: she was what he needed because he never had a few beats of silence now and again, for himself... But what WEDDING shapes into by the very end (a kind of THE GRADUATE for the 1990's) is a movie that's told well even when it's not as funny as it should be... with a primary character who both leads the story and watches others working hard (perhaps too hard) around him. Grade: B+
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NICKELODEON (1976)
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