Desperate Hours

1990, 1080hd

Johnny's comments:

If I was to sum up Desperate Hours in a word, I would call it a 'mess'. The tone of the movie is all over the place, characters seem to be working in different movies and some scenes are utterly baffling. Mickey Rourke is actually pretty good in the lead role as an intelligent psychopath who takes a family hostage as he waits for his girlfriend (Kelly Lynch) to arrive. Mimi Rogers is alright too as the mother Rourke takes hostage but everyone else is doing their own thing. Anthony Hopkins' character is playing the tough patriarch who's looking to overpower Rourke and his cronies but in one scene where he empties his account at the bank, he plays it as if he has a bomb strapped to him and it'll go off it her doesn't get the money. Lindsay Crouse as the lead cop seems to be playing her character as if she's in the 1950s original and constantly makes baffling decisions. Kelly Lynch goes from cold and calculating lover of Rourke to anxious wreck from scene-to-scene and drives her car at racing car speed constantly for some reason. One scene where David Morse emerges from burying a body a bloody mess and wanting a lift is so baffling it only seems to exist to end a stalemate in the plot and thank fuck for that because the cops are so inept, the only people more inept are Rourke's cronies.

It goes on and on, just a disastrous mess of a movie which might be explained by a revolving door of directors ending with the out-of-favour Michael Cimino. I heard Desperate Hours was bad but was unprepared for how bad it turns out to be.

Scoop's comments (spoilers):

The movie was based on a 1940's Broadway play by Joseph Hayes, which had already been turned into a previous film, a 1955 B&W starring an aging Humphrey Bogart. Mickey Rourke plays the Bogart role as Bosworth, a genius, but also a rabid killer who uses sexual control over his female lawyer to get her to smuggle him a gun into lock-up and leave him a getaway car at a remote spot. He chooses to hide out in a random suburban home, and in the process he and his psychotic gang terrorize the family.

Now the truly bizarre thing about the plot is that the (divorced) suburban couple use the strain and panic behavior of the hostage situation as a freebie marriage encounter, and she learns to trust her lying, philandering ex-husband more than a crazed sociopathic killer. Whoa! That was some breakthrough, eh? Too bad the psychopath was gunned down in the end, because he could have had a great future career as a marriage counselor.

Desperate Hours is just a really bad movie in which neither the director nor the actors employed any subtlety or restraint at any time. It looked like the final round of the Bill Shatner Memorial overacting contest.   

• Mickey Rourke played a genius killer, and showed his high IQ by raising his eyebrows pompously and looking down his nose, ala William F Buckley, Jr. 
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• Lindsay Crouse delivers a performance which we should have nominate for the worst performance ever from a female with a major part in a major film. I don't think she was as bad as Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment, but she was a contender. Playing an FBI agent, she did a perfect impersonation of what Foghorn Leghorn would sound like if he were a castrato.
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• Anthony Hopkins was supposed to be playing a kindly, suburban American dad, who screwed up his marriage by being a pussy hound. (Good casting, eh?) Although he has turned in some of the finest film performances in history, here he turned in a bellowing, Shakespearian, overacting performance that would have embarrassed Richard Burton. In fact, compared to Hopkins in this film, Burton delivered a masterpiece of understatement in The Exorcist, Part 2
  

The dialogue was even stranger than the acting, and in fact probably explains why the acting was so eccentric. Some of the dialogue was retained from the 1940ish original, and it made no sense in the 1990's. The female FBI agent never said anything that made any sense through the duration of the movie, but she certainly found colorfully cliched ways to say it all. Imagine a female version of Jon Lovitz doing the quaintly anachronistic Master Thespian, and you'll have the general idea. Lindsay Crouse actually made this film worth watching in the sense that you'll end up laughing at almost every line of her dialogue. This film may not be a great drama, but it's a helluva genre parody, albeit an unintentional one.

Believe it or not, this film was directed by Michael Cimino. No wonder the guy can't get the bankroll for a decent film any more. Every time he gets another chance, he comes up with some dung like this. 

Kelly Lynch film clip (samples below)

Summer of Sam

1999, 1080hd

Patti LuPone film clip (sample below)