In what is not officially an Airport sequel, but let’s not kid ourselves, because it may as well be, a Boeing 707 commercial jet en route to Minneapolis encounters some turbulence — in the form of James Brolin as a whacked-out Vietnam vet, mind you. Unbeknownst to the crew until Susan Dey happens upon it, Brolin’s character scrawls a message in lipstick on the lavatory mirror that states a bomb is on the plane and demands the flight be diverted to Anchorage, pronto.

When this is not done right away, said message is passed on to sexy stew Yvette Mimieux via napkin. Then the crew’s all like, “Holy shit, a paper product? This guy must be for real.” Directed by master of disaster John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno, 1976’s King Kong), Skyjacked stars Charlton Heston as the clenched-teeth hero pilot, Capt. Hank O’Hara, who you know isn’t gonna take this crap. On the ground, Claude Akins tries to help: “Trust your soul to God, captain, because your ass belongs to me.” (I don’t think he was making a pass, but with Sheriff Lobo, you never know.)

As was de rigueur for the all-star disaster genre, this one’s rife with subplots, such as Mariette Hartley about to give birth, or Walter Pidgeon’s senator trying not to appear like an out-of-touch D.C. asshole by rapping with Rosey Grier about such alien concepts as “rock” and “jazz.”

Both as engaging and lasting as a complimentary package of dry-roasted peanuts, Skyjacked clearly comes from a different era. The clear giveaways include:
• The token black guy’s name? Why, Mr. Brown, of course.
• Heston smokes a pipe in the cockpit.
• When the plane’s passengers board, they look relaxed and prepped for fun. —Rod Lott

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A good (albeit loose) adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic story, this Tell-Tale Heart finds a foppish nerd named Edgar (Laurence Payne, Vampire Circus) obsessing over Betty (Adrienne Corri, A Clockwork Orange), the hot babe who works at the flower shop. An utter loser, he asks his friend Carl (Dermot Walsh, TV’s Richard the Lionheart) how to land such a foxy chick. He takes Carl’s advice and asks Betty out to dinner, which goes well until he attempts a full-throat French kiss afterward.

From then on, she turns her affections (and ultimately, her pelvis) toward Carl, leading the hopeless and heartbroken Edgar to kill his pal and bury him in the floorboards. Soon, he’s haunted by the sound of Carl’s beating heart, so Edgar cuts it out of the corpse. But even after that, the sound plagues him, and it’s neither a dripping faucet nor ticking clock.

Whether you’ve read the original story or not, you know how it goes from there, and that’s why the movie holds no suspense. But it’s made well, in a crisp, buttoned-up, British style, co-written by Brian Clemens, who brought equal class to so many Avengers episodes. More thrillered up than Poe intended, director Ernest Morris’ film comes with a “surprise” ending. —Rod Lott

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A mixed-bag movie franchise comes to a disappointing end (or at least one assumes) with Hannibal Rising, a prequel tale of literature and film’s most beloved cannibal. The movie follows Thomas Harris’ book so closely, once wonders if he didn’t write them simultaneously. But it just goes to show that a writer who excels in one medium isn’t necessarily going to excel in another; what worked there falls flat as a day-old Coke here.

The oddly named and miscast Gaspard Ulliel plays the young Hannibal, orphaned after Nazis kill his parents and out for the blood of the soldiers who slaughtered and ate his little sister eight years prior. Stepping into a role made famous by Anthony Hopkins is no easy feat, but Ulliel doesn’t have anything going for him but the ability to cop an evil sneer. He neither sounds nor looks like Hopkins’ take on the character. In fact, if we’re going to play dopplegänger, he most resembles Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer.

The only scenes that resonate are those in which Hannibal exacts his revenge, and we’re made to cheer him along. Yet they’re not built with any shocks; they simply go through the motions. And what to make of his third-act transformation into Action Hero, leaping atop ships to save Gong Li? At least on the page, scenes like this can’t look silly.

Director Peter Webber’s film at times looks beautiful, almost classier than a genre exercise like this should. I’m sure when Jonathan Demme lensed The Silence of the Lambs, he had no idea it would nominated for an Academy Award, much less take home the top five, but Webber and company act as though they’re intending on a sweep. In going so serious, Rising lacks any sense of diabolical fun that so endeared us to Lecter before, no matter the medium. —Rod Lott

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Christopher McQuarrie, Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, made his directing debut with — now here’s a step up! — a thriller, centered on two low-life criminals. For The Way of the Gun, he wisely cast Benicio Del Toro as one of them and unwisely cast Ryan Phillippe as the other. I take issue with the latter’s casting because: a) he looks girlie, and b) he attempts an accent that is just so wrong and distracting, mainly because he’s invented his own new accent altogether!

Anyway, while donating sperm, they hear of a woman (Juliette Lewis) who is being paid big bucks by a multimillionaire family to carry their child. Hearing that little “ka-ching” in their head, they kidnap her and hold her ransom for something like $15 million. Of course, things don’t go as smoothly as they planned, because otherwise, this would be a short subject. And maybe it should have been.

On their tail are Taye Diggs and Nicky Katt as Lewis’ expensive-suit-wearing bodyguards. Also on their tail is James Caan, who never once moves his neck. Also also on their tail is Geoffrey Lewis, for reasons that simply clutter up what should have been a simple story. And we haven’t even gotten to the cops.

After a strong start (albeit containing more utterances of “fuck” than the entire running time of Next Friday) and a painfully slow middle, Gun reaches a less-than-rousing conclusion in a whorehouse shootout, with bullets a-flyin’ as a doctor performs an emergency C-section on Lewis. At least I haven’t seen that before. Not that I want to see it again. No Way. —Rod Lott

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One has to love how direct The French Sex Murders is, not only in title, but making good on that title. Viewers will get healthy doses of all three things in B producer Dick Randall’s shot at a giallo. Heck, the opening of a man leaping from his death (partly rendered in crude cartoon) from atop the Eiffel Tower is even repeated at the end. What scenery!

And I don’t mean just the Eiffel Tower, either, because much of the film is set in an exclusive Parisian brothel headed by Madame Colette (Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita). One of its hottest whores (Barbara Bouchet, Don’t Torture a Duckling) is discovered murdered, and her last client (Peter Martell, Death Walks at Midnight) is fingered for the crime. He accidentally beheads himself fleeing the police, yet the call-girl killings do not stop with his grisly death.

Inspector Pontaine (Humphrey Bogart lookalike Robert Sacchi, in his debut) continues to hunt for the real killer, taking him from the bosom of Lady Frankenstein‘s lovely Rosalba Neri to the laboratory of Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon, The Awful Dr. Orlof), who proposes an intriguing theory.

The mystery is so easy to crack, it hardly qualifies as one. But that’s not the point; a giallo is less about the killer, and more about the kills. Director Ferdinando Merighi likes his so much that he shows you the exact same shot of the violent act in several times’ succession, but each in a different colored tint. He also shows you many women in the altogether nude, but keep in mind that some of them are French, which means their armpits match the drapes. —Rod Lott

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