Tag: Ossie Davis

  • Joe Versus the Volcano (1990, John Patrick Shanley)

    Joe Versus the Volcano’s final punchline comes during the end credits when it turns out Industrial Light and Magic did the special effects. Volcano’s got terrible special effects, especially for an Amblin production, but for ILM to have done them? Yikes. Now, the film’s an absurdist riff on sixties comedies, so the obvious artifice could…

  • Grumpy Old Men (1993, Donald Petrie)

    If Grumpy Old Men weren’t so scared of its ribald humor—giving almost all of it to dirty oldest man Burgess Meredith, who’s just there to make sex jokes and serves no other purpose in the film—you could probably just as well call it Horny Old Men. At least in Jack Lemmon’s case. He hasn’t gotten…

  • The Hill (1965, Sidney Lumet)

    The Hill is quite a few things–Sidney Lumet doing another stage adaptation, almost in real time, a la Twelve Angry Men, a prison drama, a race drama, a military drama, and an example of a decent Sean Connery performance (not a particularly good one, but a decent one). It’s incredibly contrived–desert British prison camp in…

  • Bubba Ho-tep (2002, Don Coscarelli)

    I wanted to see Bubba Ho-Tep back when I first read about it because it sounded weird–Bruce Campbell as an old Elvis versus a mummy with Ossie Davis as JFK as his sidekick. The pairing of Davis and Campbell is weird enough–they seem at odds, style-wise, not to mention Davis is actually old while Campbell’s…