This is another movie that had clips in "Terror in the Aisles", and I looked it up, and it sounded pretty good. It is by Brian De Palma, and it is a horror movie , and has Margot Kidder in it, it is from 1973. Has anybody seen it???
Posted by mamamiasweetpeaches (Member # 1715) on :
I saw it. It was a little disappointing. I dont know why , it had a really "cheap feel"....but on the other hand it was sort of weird, so it has that going for it.
Posted by StevenHW (Member # 509) on :
Saw it once on TV years ago. I kinda liked it! Interesting early DePalma effort.
Posted by ISIS (Member # 1780) on :
So...like what's the story about???
Steven...was Margot Kidder's sister one of the Hugga Bunch??? She must have been linked to them some how for you to like it.. Posted by aTomiK (Member # 6575) on :
De Palma marathon time! Couldnīt find his early comedies so lets start with Sisters (1972)
"The Staten Island apartment of lovely model Danielle becomes the scene of a grisly murder that is witnessed by her neighbor, Grace, a reporter. But the police don't believe her story, so it's up to Grace to solve the murder mystery on her own." (IMDb)
This was better than i remembered and i have to give some credit to the very nice Arrow release. Of course itīs pure Hitchcock but so well done and it even has a Bernard Herrmann score. Love the disturbing atmosphere and the cast did a good job although Kidderīs french accent took a little time to get used to.
Posted by Nostalgic for the '80's (Member # 37454) on :
De Palma's "Sisters" was a creepy, disturbing film.
Quite unsettling in many ways, with an ending that you could kind of see coming, but still horrifying none-the-less.
The last shot of the private detective (Charles Durning) hanging from the telephone pole while still doing surveillance on the "mysterious package" was brilliant.
On the DVD, there was an article about actual two-headed conjoined twins (from Russia, I think) that was apparently the "inspiration" for this film; IIRC, the Sisters in this movie had originally been conjoined twins.
Posted by Crash (Member # 7484) on :
I love Sisters. Yeah, it's really, really early DePalma so it doesn't quite have the gloss of his later big-budget films, but it does have that Bernard Hermann score and is creepy as all heck. DePalma regular William Finley is truly creepy by himself as the doctor, and the sudden bursts of violence are well handled. It may be early DePalma, but you can see that even at this stage of his career, he had great control over his material. A few years ago, I stumbled across a 2006 remake that I didn't even know existed (!!!) with Chloe Sevigny in the Jennifer Salt part and Stephen Rea as the doctor. It was just dreadful. To paraphrase DePalma on the various Carrie remakes, you watch it just to see everything that they did wrong. Nothing works.
aTomiK, as a huge DePalma fan, I have seen every one of his features. I even tracked down, after all these years, Dionysus in '69, which was surprisingly interesting in a weird time-capsule way. (There's a crazy section at the end, where the actors burst out of the theater while holding up signs "William Finley for President," as Finley shouts his campaign promises. Finley's just terrific, as always.) Of his comedies, The Wedding Party, his first film, does have DeNiro in it and a couple of excellent scenes but really comes off as a student film--which it was. Murder a la Mod, which was finally released on DVD a few years ago, while not a masterpiece, is good--William Finley is wonderful, as usual--and it has DePalma's experimenting with a lot of the cinematic flourishes that he'd use throughout his career.
Greetings and Hi Mom, however, are both great. They may look dated, but again, they are fabulous time-capsule pieces, very, very funny with some good social commentary. DeNiro is excellent too. It's funny that if you read the reviews from back then, critics had pegged DePalma as the next great comedy director, I also recently re-watched his first studio film--one that he was fired from--Get to Know Your Rabbit. It was much better and funnier than I remembered, and it is obvious that it would have been even better had DePalma been allowed to finish it.
All in all, DePalma has had some amazing phases to his career: the early counterculture stuff, the thriller/horror films, the big studio stuff, the gangster films, the comedies, the war films... He has done every genre except the Western!
[ 09. March 2017, 12:33: Message edited by: Crash ]
Posted by aTomiK (Member # 6575) on :
Thanks for your thoughts guys.
I would really like to see somekind of De Palmaīs early films compilation set out there. It would be interesting to see how he developed his style because, like we all can see, heīs pretty much "in the zone" already in Sisters.
Finley is indeed great, i remember liking his totally wacko character also in Tobe Hooperīs Eaten Alive.
Posted by Crash (Member # 7484) on :
It's a shame Finley left us so soon. He was one of those guys you'd see in a movie like Eaten Alive and say to yourself, "It can't be all bad because Finley's always great."
As a Brian DePalma fan, seeing all his films in order would be a fascinating experience. In the documentary DePalma from last year, he goes through his career chronologically film-by-film. It's the best documentary about filmmaking that I've ever seen, even if you only get to see clips from the 29 films featured. He's a brilliant, articulate guy--a film genius really--who is a fantastic storyteller. He is at a point in his life and career where he just doesn't care and tells it like it is. Some of his stories, like the one about Cliff Robertson's tan in Obsession or Al Pacino's running and sweating in a leather jacket during the subway chase at the end of Carlito's Way, are flat-out hilarious. And his comment about Sean Penn's method acting is priceless. "Sean... always interesting to work with..." (Imagine DePalma saying that with a kind of dry delivery implying, "What a pain-in-the-butt Sean Penn can be.") He's also a very good judge of his own work: On Carlito's Way, "I can't make a better picture" to Mission to Mars, "I was in over my head."
If memory serves me, there was a DVD box set of early DePalma films like his short Woton's Wake and Dionysus in '69 out a few years ago. I'm not sure, but I think that it was French. I did a quick search but couldn't find it. Dionysus is available on-line from a film school archive, and though I haven't looked in a while, Woton's Wake, starring William Finley, was up on Youtube. Check them out.
[ 09. March 2017, 12:36: Message edited by: Crash ]
Posted by aTomiK (Member # 6575) on :
I need to track down that documentary, love the poster art
[ 10. March 2017, 01:39: Message edited by: aTomiK ]
Posted by Crash (Member # 7484) on :
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