Movies and TV (#SFWApro)

Mia Farrow is ALICE (1990), a frustrated Manhattan housewife who gets a chance to remake her life in Woody Allen’s magical realist comedy (she’s very much in the tradition of Allen’s frustrated heroines). The magic comes in the form of mystic Keye Luke (his last film) whose magical herbs turn Alice invisible among other wonders, allowing her an affair with Joe Mantegna, reconciliation with sister Blythe Danner and discovering her husband William Hurt is a womanizer. This is second-string Allen, at best, largely because Farrow is too wispy and weak to carry the film (she’s much more the center than she was in Purple Rose of Cairo). I’m not sure, though, this would have worked even with a stronger lead—all the supposed deep discoveries come off like the results of psychoanalysis sessions, for instance. The cast includes Cybill Shepherd as a network executive, Gwen Verdun as the mother whose mistakes Farrow is repeating, and Alec Baldwin as the ghost of a lost love. “They want it sordid, immoral, rich, sexy—they don’t need nuns.”
I found SHRIEK OF THE MUTILATED (1974) something of a nostalgia trip as I don’t think I’ve watched such a low-budget piece shot-on-video piece of crap since the 1980s. The story concerns a professor leading a group of students to hunt Bigfoot, only to have them fall one-by-one to the monster (which looks like someone stole the costume from The Shaggy DA) before learning the truth—the professor is part of a cannibal cult luring the students into a trap so they can be killed and devoured (the Yeti is fake)! Bad acting and a shit-ton of gratuitous gore make this memorable, but not in the good way. “I teetered on the edge of insanity for years—some say I’m still mad!”
The final series of SAPPHIRE AND STEEL has them show up at an eerie, abandoned roadside diner where a couple of timelost travelers are trying to figure out where and when they are. Before long, it becomes obvious that something’s very wrong with time, and that the ultimate goal is the destruction of the protagonists … An effective story, but badly undercut by the general lack of development of the background: We learn the bad guys come from higher-up in the duo’s organization but the explanation why they’d want them purged doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor does the idea their leaders engage in that much politicking (they don’t come off human enough for that). This series was second-string at best, but this wasn’t a bad finish, even so.