MY SCIENCE PROJECT

year: 1985
rating: **

Hippie-burnout Dennis Hopper plays a hippie-burnout but as an ex-political science teacher who is about to flunk a slacker student played by John Stockwell, who'd rather fix cars in auto shop than to create a science project. Stockwell joins a nerdy girl and his confident Italian buddy Fisher Stevens and they find a contraption in a shut-down army barracks: that just happens to be created by aliens and dumped by the military in the fifties. With the devise they head back home and, because of it, Stockwell's car breaks down and so does the movie: becoming a cold-war science-fiction yawner that makes little to no sense, and involves time travel that, in most cases, is an intriguing concept... but not here. The only place I wanted to travel back too is the first twenty minutes as the film was being set up: that was at least entertaining.

NIGHT TIDE

title: NIGHT TIDE

year: 1961

cast: Dennis Hopper, Linda Lawson, Luana Anders, Gavin Muir

director: Curtis Harrington

rating: ***1/2

Many early sixties movies had quick, choppy dialog, a million dissolves (scenes fading in and out), and didn't know exactly what they wanted to be. But this, an independant 1961 low-low budget film, knows exactly what it is, even if the audience isn't sure. In Venice Beach a sailor meets a women in a bar who works at a carnival as a mermaid in what seems like a fake attraction. But she might really be a mermaid, i.e. a siren... and men she's dated have turned up dead. A young cupid-faced Dennis Hopper is fun to watch as the gullible love-sick sailor. He won't listen to all the warnings he's given about her track record. Let's face it, the guy is hooked. It's nice seeing Hopper as a normal person, not a burn-out, weirdo or psychopath. The B&W cinematography is gorgeous, the dialog is tight, and the other performances are also very good, including the lovely Linda Lawson as the seductive vixen who might be a water nymph, or murderess, or both.