The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Directed by Stephen Hopkins
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A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child is inept. Some of the ineptness isn’t too damaging–director Hopkins can’t make anything scary, even though he’s got his cast in these scary looking sets and so on. He handles it too matter-of-factly. But, after the first couple times, that ineptness stops surprising. By then, the film’s…
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For maybe forty minutes–from twenty minutes in to the hour mark–Lost in Space is actually rather engaging. It’s not any good as a narrative, but Hopkins’s direction of the space sequences is phenomenal. The film opens with something familiar, a dogfight out of Star Wars, but the later sequences are not. They aren’t original, but…
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There are two significant problems with The Ghost and the Darkness. Its other primary problem corrects itself over time. The score–from Jerry Goldsmith–is awful (he basically repeats his terrible Congo score). It makes the film silly, like a commercial. A great deal of the film is about the wonderment of Africa, something Hopkins and cinematographer…
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Quite stupid sequel with an all-new cast (except PREDATOR performer Kevin Peter Hall) has almost nothing going for it except some gorgeous direction from Hopkins. He’s got a great sense for what’s going to at least look good in the film. Good performance from Danny Glover in the lead, but bad performances from almost everyone…
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If Dangerous Game were an American movie from the 1980s, Steven Grives’s jerky cop turned psycho killer would undoubtedly be a Vietnam vet. Since Game is Australian, he’s not. Instead, with no explanation of mental trauma in his past given, he’s just from Ireland. That’s it. Nutso cop is an Irish immigrant to Australia. Some…
The Stop Button 