This week, Siskel and Ebert review gambler Matt Dillon and chorus girl Madonna in the gangster spoof Bloodhounds of Broadway.
Financial trader Rebecca DeMornay mixes work and love in the drama Dealers, and an executed killer finds new life through TV in Shocker.
It's all coming up next on Siskel and Ebert.
["Bloodhounds of Broadway," main theme, by Matt Dillon & Rebecca DeMornay playing in the background.]
Madonna and Randy Quaid are prohibition-era party animals in Bloodhounds of Broadway,
one of five new movies we'll be reviewing this week on Siskel and Ebert, and I'm Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times.
And I'm Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune. Our first film is Bloodhounds of Broadway,
the promising movie homage to films of the 30s that fails completely, however, to tell a good story or really honor those old-style films.
Rather, Bloodhounds comes across as a dress-up time for a bunch of celebrities.
The time is New Year's Eve, 1929, the Jazz Age, the Flapper era,
and among the many stories told here is the strange romance between chronic gambling user Matt Dillon and showgirl Jennifer Grey.
Another bit of unrequited love involves another showgirl, played by Madonna,
who often rejects the constant attention of her good-hearted, oafish friend, Randy Quaid.
Among the hangers-on in the Broadway nightclub scene here is Esau Morales trying to make time with a flapper.
That's Julie Haggerty there with the distinctive nasal voice. The tone of the whole film is aggressively colorful in the style of the four Damon Runyon stories that inspired it,
but it's always hard to try to pull so many stories together, and it certainly doesn't work here.
The filmmakers, I think, should have concentrated on just one, perhaps.
As a result, we count the stars, we look at their clothes, and we remain profoundly bored.
I found the movie extremely boring, and one of the reasons it was boring was that everybody on the screen seemed to be excited about a joke that they hadn't let me in on.
One of the things that the 30s movies always did was make it very clear to the audience where you stood, what the story was about, and how it was going to be told.
This doesn't mean it didn't have style. They had great style in the 30s, but they also had clarity.
This film is style without clarity, and so it's just a lot of sound and fury.
The style of the 30s films really didn't have to do with what the people were wearing.
It had to do with a pacing, with an energy in the camera movements, and a Christmas in the dialogue.
And this film went for the most easy thing to do, just by the 30s look, the clothes.
You know, I like your line where you call the movie dress-up time for celebrities, because the movie that this one could be compared to, and unfortunately wouldn't stand up, is Guys and Dolls.
Now, Guys and Dolls is also a musical based on Damon Runyon with famous people in it, people as famous when it was made as Madonna is now, people like Marlon Brando, for example.
But the difference is in Guys and Dolls, the actors really did deliver performances.
They believed in those characters, and here it all seems like a lark for these actors, as if they're having fun being in a 30s movie and wearing the hats and smoking the cigarettes.
The other thing is that Guys and Dolls had a great musical score. This one is forgettable.
That is also quite true. Okay, next movie, and our next movie is named Dealers.
It's sort of a cross between a love story and a thriller about high finance.
We've seen the formula for this movie maybe once or twice before. It's about a man and a woman who can't stand one another, so of course they're assigned to work together.
And so, of course, they disagree violently all of the time until, what do you know, they fall in love.
The movie stars Paul McGann as an aggressive young trader at a London financial institution that has just been forced to eat a $100 million loss.
His bosses hope he can win the money back, but they're afraid of his reckless style, so they team him up with the much more conservative Rebecca DeMornay.
Look, you're going to be all year digging yourself out of this position unless you commit yourself to some major moves.
I don't like the risk. What's risky about this? It's, Max, one of your spectacular deals. It works!
It's like some heat-seeking missile.
Of course, they have radically different approaches to the money market, and, of course, they discuss them over a candlelit dinner.
Well, I might take a dive now and again, but I always bring it back. Every quarter, I'm never less than even.
Last return showed I made $3 million for the book in a nine-week stretch. Take a look.
I did take a look. I read every major deal you've made over the past 24 months, and I know that you're dangerous.
McGann lives on a luxurious country estate where he's providing a temporary home for his old mentor, now a broken-down and bankrupt ex-trader who is played here by Derek O'Connor.
You got GMP figures coming in a couple of days. Margaret's going to get a boost.
Double your position. Tough it out.
It's another $100 million she'll never pay.
Doesn't have to know, does she?
A crisis arrives when DeMornay discovers that the man she loves has positioned the company out at the end of a very long limb.
What are you going to do?
I think we should go with it. I mean, if Pasco's right, we can clean out this position.
Now, if he's wrong...
Now, even though the formula of dealers is familiar, the man and the woman argue themselves right into each other's arms,
there was a lot in this movie that was perceptive and intelligent, and it also had a lot of style.
I like the way Rebecca DeMornay showed how her character kept a steel wall between her heart and her business sense.
I like the hard-edged brassiness of Paul McGann, an actor I saw for the first time with Withnail and I.
And I appreciated the subplot about a broken-down older trader, which helped to put everything into perspective.
You're going to be rich today, but you've also got to think about tomorrow.
This may not be an amazingly original movie, but it's a smart one, and I liked it.
Boy, you swung totally around in your review. You start out knocking one thing after another, and then you come back and you say you like it.
I didn't knock, I just recognized. I just said, I recognize this, I recognize that in terms of the formula.
But you know, formulas can be done well or badly. Bloodhounds of Broadway is bad formula. This is good formula.
Not in my opinion. I mean, it is formula, and I'm sitting there thinking to myself, gee, the English can do this kind of bad formula film as badly as Americans can do.
And I was really disappointed because I thought that there might be a harder edge to this story.
It's something that people, I think, are interested in. Wall Street, to my mind, that film, was a little bit too glamorous.
And I think that there could be a really interesting picture that had a real heart of darkness to it.
But that isn't it, and I was hoping for it. Instead, it goes for traditional things like the romance between people who wouldn't have one and the obvious thing that happens to the old guy.
I mean, you know that, Roger, as soon as you see him for the first time, you know his fate is going to be, he's going to go down for the comp.
Well, I knew that, but of course, at the same time, the pathos of the performance kind of redeemed that.
I felt that this was a believable character, a person who used to be a cook, then he got into finance, he made it to the top, he made it back to the bottom again.
He made it open a restaurant. This was the kind of detail that interested me.
Wouldn't you be interested, though, in a picture that took you into this world of high finance, where a lot of people think this whole world is worthless and is cause for financial disruptions that are going on in the world right now?
Wouldn't it be interesting if a picture told you something you didn't know?
And as a journalist, you know that there's stuff that you don't know that you'd be fascinated by.
Obviously, I'd like to see that picture. Wouldn't you like to see the greatest picture ever made right now for the next two hours?
Of course you would. I'm reviewing the movie that was made. I liked it. I didn't think it was the greatest movie ever made.
But for you to ask a question like that, hypothetically, is meaningless.
No, I'm just saying I'm revealing to you what that picture, and particularly with an English cast in the international world, I thought it could have been there, and it wasn't there.
It came to me as a blinding revelation. Anyway, coming up next, Shocker, another story of a mass murderer who will not die from the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Shocker is dead, John. He's at home, getting drunk or something.
I don't think he's dead.
If you love spaghetti, just like I know you do, then my soft breadsticks will be a dream come true.
So crispy outside, so soft right through, you'll love my breadsticks as much as I love you.
Nothing says loving like my soft breadsticks.
What a difference, what a studio
I've never seen 10,000 tapes in one store.
There's so much kids' stuff.
And I can keep them for three evenings.
Now, this is a video store.
Ordinary video stores don't even come close to blockbuster video.
You've just got to see it to know what we mean.
Wow, wow, wow.
What a difference, blockbuster video.
Come discover the blockbuster difference.
Wow.
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Wow.
Introducing Pops Plus with aloe.
This is in the lotion.
It has aloe in it?
This little thing is in this. Pretty good.
Pretty good.
We put aloe in the moisturizing lotion in new Pops Plus, and it's unscented.
Pops Plus is definitely less irritating than my normal tissue.
It's nice.
It doesn't hurt.
My next sore nose belongs to Pops Plus.
New Pops Plus with aloe. First aid for your sore nose.
Number one lover. My boyfriend's number two right now, I think.
Our next film is called Shocker, written and directed by Wes Craven, a creator of Nightmare on Elm Street.
You may have seen the ads.
It's about a mass killer who can't even be put away by the electric chair,
while a college student and his policeman father, Michael Murphy, track the killer to his warehouse home using the kids' ESP.
I thought you said he was here.
I thought he was.
Keep dreaming, Lieutenant.
The father is skeptical of the kid's powers, so the young man, played by Peter Berg, is left to work on his own,
and he quickly confronts the killer in action.
The killer's been energized by his bout with the electric chair.
You want to watch?
Jonathan, do something!
Shut up!
You want to watch?
Watch this.
Get him out of here!
Come on!
After his girlfriend has been brutally murdered by the creep, our young hero has dreams involving her spirit.
Jonathan!
If Shocker weren't so bloody in spots, I would recommend it as an inventive thriller,
because the way it treats video images and electrical conduction is most entertaining.
The killer hops from one body to another and is ultimately the casualty of a TV remote control device.
But because of the extreme violence and some questionable scenes involving a little girl invaded by the spirit of the killer,
I can only give Shocker a marginal thumbs up.
I enjoyed it, but with some reservations.
I can't give it a thumbs up, Gene.
I felt it would have been a better movie if it had played with more rules.
I wanted to know exactly how it was that this guy got out of the electric chair and into the electrical system
so that he could come out of the television set and zap you.
And I wanted to find out why it was the remote control device controlled him.
I didn't understand that.
And I feel that in a movie like this, if anything could happen, then you don't really care what happens.
The movie was all over the map, including, incidentally, a very confusing performance by Michael Murphy as the kid's father.
Now, Murphy's a great actor.
He was in An Unmarried Woman ten years ago.
It's a movie since then, for that matter.
But here, you know, they keep sending you signals about this character that are never followed through on.
He's hostile at one moment. He doesn't understand the next moment.
You know why he's hostile at one moment?
Why?
Because his spirit has been invaded by the killer.
Well, I figured that out. Thanks a lot.
Yeah, uh-huh. I got that one.
But I'm talking about the rest of the time.
Well, I mean, the guy is doubting it's an adoptive situation.
He's doubting the kid's veracity when he's claiming that he can spot the killer.
The kid is threatening to solve a case that the guy can't solve himself.
I think that's all explainable.
As for the business of how he becomes an electrical conduit, that's shown by the fact that, I mean, he gets jolted with all the juices.
In effect, praying to the spirit of the television set, which I thought was fabulous.
The television set is something evil. I think that's great. I always enjoy that kind of story.
I liked it.
Oh, you did that.
I'm going to turn off my VCR and record your explanation, making sense of how this guy becomes an electrical current.
Because you've explained it now, and now I understand it.
Good.
It all makes sense now.
Good. Are you serious?
No, I'm not, exactly.
Why not?
I mean, because I think that they have to set up at least some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation of it.
They did set up a pseudo, very pseudo.
He's an electrician, and he goes into the electrical wire. Is that what happened?
And then he prays to the TV set, and that's how he becomes...
Actually, he prays to the TV. You saw him in the jail cell.
That's right. He prays to the TV set, and the TV set rescues him from the electric chair.
I'm glad you cleared that up.
Coming up next, My Left Foot.
I'm glad you enjoyed my performance. It was more than a movie.
My Left Foot is definitely coming up next.
It's the story of a gifted painter, poet, and writer who can communicate with the world only through the muscles of one foot.