Mystery

Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)

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Four movies in, most series start to show signs of wear and tear, and the Thin Man series was no exception. It’s only partly the fault of Nick and Nora’s kid. He was all right in After the Thin Man, but he poses a bit of a problem in Shadow, as love and chemistry have been replaced with precociousness. That can be annoying, but fortunately, Nick Jr. doesn’t have a lot of screen time. Yay again for nannies! (On the other hand, boo for racially stereotypical ones: “Yas’m, Mrs. Charles! Mr. Charles knew you was makin’ that drink! He must have telegraphy!”)

On the other other hand, Junior does provide one of Shadow’s best bits when he refuses to drink his milk unless Daddy drinks some, too. That horrifies Nick Sr., who’s already on his 12th martini of the day. It’s funny, but it also brings up the real problem with having the tot around. Nick’s alcoholism was amusing before he had a son, but it’s frickin’ uncomfortable to watch him take the boy on a merry-go-round while needing to lean against a horse just to stand upright.

The mystery’s not particularly inspired, either. It has to do with organized crime and betting on sporting events. I yawned just typing that. Nick gets involved because a buddy of his is the prime suspect when someone turns up dead. Barry Nelson, the original James Bond, plays the friend, so that’s cool. And a very young Donna Reed plays Barry’s girlfriend.

Although things are starting to look tired, there are still plenty of laughs to be had. As usual, Nora gets in some great lines and even pitches in on the detective work more than she has before. There’s obviously still life in the series, but — like Nick’s drink — it needs some freshening. With two films left in the franchise, I hope it got some. —Michael May

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Action

Hero and the Terror (1988)

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If you should see Hero and the Terror — and I’m certainly not suggesting you do — pay close attention to the scene in which Chuck Norris works out at the gym. As he’s lifting weights, all these other muscle-bound guys gather ’round to watch him push it real good. Chuck grunts as he does so. Now, close your eyes during this part and tell me it doesn’t sound like gay porn. You can’t, because it totally does.

Pointless experiment over. Anyway, Norris stars as half of the title, and you get one guess as to which half. He’s Danny O’Brien, a cop, who once upon a time, took down the other half of the title, the serial killer of women Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Danny still has bad dreams of wandering into Moon’s dead hooker depository, which doesn’t exactly bode well for the good guy — now reduced to a minimum-wage worker on a Mexican food truck — when Moon escapes and starts killing them bitches all over again.

We’re to believe, of course, that Chuck Norris could defeat Jack O’Halloran, but c’mon! We’ve all seen Superman II. Besides, Moon busts out of prison simply by bending the bars, because, after all, he is General Zod’s sidekick Non, period.

There’s a subplot about Danny inseminating his girlfriend (Brynn Thayer of TV’s Matlock). I distinctly remember that when Chuck was making the promotional rounds for this so-so, by-the-numbers effort, he appeared on The Tonight Show with the clip of him passing out at the hospital on the impending birth of their bastard child. The audience cracked up, because, as Norman Mailer once wrote, tough guys don’t faint! Or something like that. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Visiting Hours (1982)

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I am not a fan of hospitals. I can’t take three steps into one without being overcome with a wave of anxious nausea, keenly aware that somewhere in that building — far closer than I’d like — someone is drawing his or her last breath. Ironically, it’s that same anxiety that draws me to hospital-set and medical-themed horror movies, since they allow me to face my fear without risk or consequence. Having seen a lot of them, I can comfortably say that the 1982 Canadian-made Visiting Hours ranks near the top of the list.

While it admittedly never exploits its setting as effectively as Boaz Davidson’s Hospital Massacre, it manages to avoid descending into the ridiculous camp that mars that otherwise interesting effort and, more importantly, creates sympathetic characters we want to see live, rather than die — the hallmark of every successful horror movie.

The film stars Michael Ironside as a misogynist maniac on a mission to kill the popular female broadcaster (Lee Grant) who has taken on the cause of a battered woman unjustly convicted of murdering her abusive husband. When his initial attack on her is thwarted, he returns to the hospital to finish the job, but only manages to kill a bunch of other people before she is able to use his own knife to end his deadly spree.

Directed with style and tension by Jean-Claude Lord, Visiting Hours succeeds thanks to effective performances from its talented cast, which also includes William Shatner as Grant’s producer, and Linda Purl as the young, single mom/nurse who finds herself also stalked by Ironside after she witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. —Allan Mott

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Comedy

Train Ride to Hollywood (1975)

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In the realm of bad musicals, most know about Can’t Stop the Music and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But Train Ride to Hollywood is so bad, I’m told it was barely released. Before the Village People and Bee Gees made their ill-fated attempts at box-office glory, the four-man R&B group Bloodstone — perhaps best-known for the hit “Natural High,” which you heard in Jackie Brown — gave it a try.

I’m thinking they shouldn’t. Playing themselves, Bloodstone is about to go onstage for a concert when one of the members slips and conks his noggin, forcing him into an unconscious world that we must endure along with him for 80-some-odd minutes. When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, certainly he meant the opposite of this, which casts the guys as train conductors only a step or two above the demeaning level of Stepin Fetchit.

Said choo-choo is headed to Tinseltown, and the passengers are impersonations of movie legends Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Dracula and Clark Gable, who uses the “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” joke more than once. Also aboard are a sheik with seven whores, Caged Heat’s Roberta Collins as Jean Harlow, and most notably, Terminal Island’s Phyllis Davis squeezed into Scarlett O’Hara’s corset. Marlon Brando kills some of the passengers by having them smell his armpits. Oh, sorry: spoiler alert. And one of the guys boxes a gorilla.

Yes, it sure sounds wacky, but it’s a groaner without a clue, much less a successful gag. Admittedly, the songs Bloodstone wrote for the film aren’t bad — a couple of them are even as catchy as herpes — but it’s like wrapping a pizza not in a cardboard box, but a discarded diaper. Would you want to eat that? —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Altered States (1980)

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There’s no need to watch Altered States while in an altered state, because crazed director Ken Russell appears to have done that for us. That very well could be why the science fantasy goes awry shortly after setup.

Professor Eddie Jessup (William Hurt, in his first starring role) is studying man’s ability to enter other forms of consciousness, but his time in the floating tank only takes him so far. So he goes to Mexico to partake in some ritual involving a tribal magic-mushroom concoction that looks like fecal stew. It causes him to have überkooky hallucinations of a seven-eyed goat, rape, sand lizards, a lava closet — in other words, Russell’s mid-morning daydreams and happy thoughts.

Eventually, the effects of the poop soup strengthen when Jessup soaks in a sensory-deprivation tank, causing him to regress into a primal, ape-like man. Speaking of apes, Blair Brown’s armpits are razor-neglected; she plays his love interest/wife/ex-wife (all in the span of about 15 minutes) who had a big, red flag not to continue their relationship when he admits to envisioning a crucified Christ when he orgasms.

Then 5, Drew Barrymore plays one of the Jessup children. (I didn’t check the credits, but perhaps she consulted on the hallucination scenes?) The most interesting portion of the film is when Hurt’s arms and torso start to bubble up mid-morph — nothing a little tough-actin’ Tinactin couldn’t fix — and eventually goes full-devo Darwin, turning the local zoo into his personal Golden Corral. He leaves quite a mess, which is the most apt description for Russell’s film — one full of big ideas, but little coherence and lots of, in the words of one shouting character, “Kabbalistic, quantum, friggin’ dumb, limbo mumbo-jumbo!” —Rod Lott

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