This sets us up for the central, very uncomfortable tension in Frenzy. For one, Hitchcock is returning to his British filmmaking roots and sensibility; it’s his first film shot entirely in Britain since Stage Fright. We’ve seen in that film, among others, that Hitchcock tends to let his whimsical sense of humor and distinctly British peculiarities emerge whenever he sets and shoots a film in England. It is not a matter of simply moving a filmmaking unit from one city to another, but a total sublimation of cultural values, language, and especially sense of humor. Indeed, Frenzy is one of Hitchcock’s more blatantly comic films, with a few moments of downright broad gags. An extended conversation at dinner in which Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) tries to avoid eating the disgusting gourmet experiments of Mrs. Oxford (Vivien Merchant) — slimy fish soup, a tiny overcooked quail — feels like it could be in a sitcom. And several portions of the plot have a comedy-of-errors cadence, one thing going wrong after another. The central image — a naked corpse wearing a fancy necktie — tells an ironic story on its own.

But I don’t want to be accused of burying the lede, because I don’t think most people remember Frenzy first and foremost for its comedy. No, what most stands out is how seedy and explicit it is. In his time, Hitchcock was known as a purveyor of cheap thrills and violence, and some of his movies, including Psycho, broke new ground in how dark a mainstream, prestigious film could get. But compared to Frenzy, Psycho looks like an episode of Paw Patrol. Frenzy features multiple instances of nudity, including in the context of sexual violence and sadism. One of its signature set pieces involves a serial killer snapping the bones of his recent victim. Hitchcock had been so good at using suggestion, innuendo, and careful concealment throughout his career, allowing us to imagine evil deeds more often than we see them, that Frenzy’s cruelest moments had me flabbergasted that I was seeing what I was seeing. It’s not the smuttiest or most violent film of its era — indeed, if you’re well-versed in any true pieces of exploitation, you might wonder what the fuss is — but in the context of this filmmaker and his continuing mastery of suspense and control of our attention, it has more impact than many films that surpass it in graphic content.

And so those are the two modes in collision in Frenzy: Hitchcock at his most British, comic, and idiosyncratic, and Hitchcock at his most searingly brutal. It is not a matter of alternating between them and wondering which mode will win out, but of both existing in abrasive, compelling tension at the same time. (Case in point: Oxford describes over dinner how the killer “had to break the fingers” of a corpse while Mrs. Oxford noisily crunches a breadstick.) As such, I think Frenzy works best as a Hitchcock deep cut, one that plays with some of his greatest hits of narrative and thematic preoccupation, but in new and provocative tones, with some visual ideas and, frankly, boundaries pushed that make it stand out as a curiosity in his filmography.

London is in the grip of the “Necktie Murderer,” a “sex killer” who strangles women with his tie. Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), a hot-tempered former RAF squadron leader, gets sacked from his bartending job near Covent Garden. When his ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is found strangled in her match-making agency a day after the two were overheard rowing, Blaney becomes the prime suspect and goes on the run with his girlfriend, barmaid Babs Milligan (Anna Massey). Also in his corner: chummy pal Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), a Covent Garden fruit merchant. Hitchcock tips his hand early, though: the cheerful Rusk is the Necktie Murderer, making Frenzy less a whodunit than a wrong-man thriller marinating in poisonous dramatic irony.

What really stands out about the film and makes it distinctly Hitchcockian is the attention and cinematic savviness he pays to each of its key moments. He uses visual language as well as writing and acting choices to convey story detail and observations about human nature. The rape-murder scene that reveals Rusk as the killer plays not as a kinetic bit of violent thrashing but as a degenerating, dissociating experience: Rusk repeats “lovely, lovely” like a man hypnotizing himself, while Brenda retreats into the 91st Psalm. The grotesque images at the scene’s climax — Brenda’s tongue lolling from her lifeless face, Rusk taking another bite of her half-eaten apple and picking his teeth with his tie pin — are all the more chilling because this isn’t just mere havoc. It’s almost transactional and routine, sexual violence and imbalance unpunished.

A bit later comes the remarkable shot where Hitchcock shows us nothing at all. Rusk leads Babs up to his flat and trots out the line he used on Brenda: “You’re my type of woman.” The door closes, and the camera backs away in one long, unbroken retreat: down the stairwell, out the front door, and into the bustle of Covent Garden, where passersby go about their business, oblivious. It’s a stunner. Having made us watch everything once, Hitchcock doesn’t need to show a second murder: we know exactly what’s happening behind that door, and our imaginations do the dirty work. The master of concealment reasserts himself in his least concealing film, the camera slinking away like a bystander who’d rather not get involved.

The potato truck sequence that follows fuses the film’s two modes into one gnarly set piece. Back home, Rusk realizes his tie pin, a signature item of his wardrobe, is missing: Babs tore it from his lapel in their struggle, and now it’s clenched in her dead hand inside a sack of potatoes on a lorry bound for Lincolnshire. Cue a slapstick nightmare: Rusk burrowing through sacks in the back of the moving truck, getting smacked in the face by the corpse’s leg, coated in potato dust, and finally snapping her rigor-stiffened digits to pry the pin loose. It’s horrifying, and it’s also, God help me, grotesquely funny. As with Norman Bates’ cleanup in Psycho, Hitchcock has us anxious on the killer’s behalf.

Where the movie fails to elevate is its ending, which relies on a major bout of coincidental timing and an undercooked prison escape. Blaney, convicted and imprisoned, throws himself down a flight of iron stairs to land in the prison hospital, where fellow patients help him slip sleeping pills into a guard’s tea, and in no time he’s hot-wiring a car. Then the key players converge on the same room within moments, the climax arriving by convenience rather than the slow-tightening knot Hitchcock ties so carefully elsewhere. The last line is a perfectly dry punchline (not too far off, in spirit, from “The Aristocrats!”), I’ll grant, but getting there feels like Hitchcock checking his watch after he got past the bits he was most interested in.

Frenzy has a look all its own. The production design and fashion are a blend of mod and grimy street life. Everything about the style screams British, including the look of the cast and the thick accents and slang they toss around. Finch’s Blaney is an especially rough-edged hero, a bit of a jerk and a loser even when he’s sympathetic and has good instincts. When old RAF mate Johnny Porter (Clive Swift) lets him crash to hide from the cops, Blaney goes off on him the next morning because Johnny, cowed by his wife Hetty (Billie Whitelaw), won’t put his own neck on the line to provide an alibi.

While Hitchcock’s work has always had a complex relationship with women, often subjecting them to terrors but giving them a fair share of dignities and complexities, Frenzy is the first film of his that really feels mean-spirited towards the fairer sex. Though the film offers its women several substantive roles, almost all of them end up either unpleasant nags — like Hetty, who hounds Blaney for things he didn’t do — or raped and murdered — like Brenda, defiled and killed in slow motion. Even Mrs. Oxford, who correctly doubts Blaney’s guilt well before her husband does, is mostly a punchline about inedible cooking. Babs is plucky, loyal, and courageous, until she’s disposed of as a convenient plot device, too. I usually give Hitchcock the benefit of the doubt on his gender politics because his women are so often brave and developed with nuance and depth, even when they’re put through the wringer, but this one is just nasty: when a barmaid asks whether the killer rapes his victims first, a customer quips that “every cloud has a silver lining,” and Hitchcock plays it for a laugh.

Frenzy isn’t top-shelf Hitchcock, and it isn’t always pleasant company. I’ve written before that Hitchcock has three filmmaking gears: coasting, locked-in, and getting weird. Frenzy grinds through all three, but its heart is in the third: brutal and broad, mean and mordantly funny, often in the same breath. It’s not the Hitchcock I’d hand to a newcomer, but for those of us Hitch-heads deep in the filmography, it’s a thorny, fascinating deep cut, proof the old master still had a few nasty surprises to float up out of the Thames.

A follow-up could have chased either half of that split personality: the introspective guilt trip or the slick slasher. Greenlit on box office returns in the thick of the post-Scream teen horror wave, this one is, unsurprisingly, a frothy slasher first and foremost. Neither screenwriter Kevin Williamson (busy with Dawson’s Creek and The Faculty) nor director Jim Gillespie (who has since said he didn’t like the premise) came back, and the producers chose Trey Callaway’s script over a rival draft, reportedly set in New Orleans, from a pre-Traffic Stephen Gaghan. The result is dumber than its predecessor and, frankly, most of its 1998 classmates, from Disturbing Behavior to Halloween H20, the latter of which Williamson was reportedly off punching up instead of writing this. With half of the original’s leads already killed off and the setting moved to a tropical resort, it barely even feels like a sequel.

A year after the Fisherman (Muse Watson) came for her, Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is in Boston for summer classes but suffering from recurring nightmares. Her roommate, Karla Wilson (Brandy), wins a Bahamas trip from a radio contest by naming Rio the capital of Brazil. (The fact that it’s actually Brasília ends up being a plot point.) Julie’s boyfriend, Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), begs off, citing one fishing obligation or another, so Julie, Karla, Karla’s beau Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer), and tagalong Will Benson (Matthew Settle), who happens to have a major thing for Julie, hit a Tower Bay resort for the Fourth of July weekend, just as storm season kicks off. Pedantry alert: what Julie did was technically two summers ago, so the title is wrong.

From there, a murderer emerges, bodies begin piling up, and it’s one stalking set piece stacked on another. The chaos rolls in with the weather: the radio gets smashed, the boats vanish, and so does the staff. The film turns into a haunted house movie as they brood around an empty hotel infested with a vengeful spirit (The Fisherman). In a couple of moments that are either hallucinated or elaborate setups, the haunting seems literal: a corpse in Julie’s closet vanishes before anyone else can see it, and when she sings “I Will Survive” at karaoke, the lyrics screen spells out the title of the movie instead. The karaoke bit is about as elegant as a hook to the face. I also kind of love it: it’s the closest the movie comes to being in on its own joke. (That, and Jack Black with dreadlocks.)

Otherwise, the frights are all jump scares heavily dependent upon loud stings (John Frizzell’s score is basically a sting-delivery system), false alarms, and POV fake-outs, cycled until the island runs out of cast members. The best mini-heart attack comes right after Tyrell announces he’s tired, hungry, horny, and hasn’t seen any psycho killer, cueing a hook down the kitchen chimney. The whodunit is even flimsier than the original’s (spoiler alert!): Estes (Bill Cobbs), a voodoo-practicing bellhop, is a red herring with flashing lights, but it turns out Will is the Fisherman’s son. The Fisherman’s name is Ben Willis. Will Benson. Ben’s son. C’mon, man! Scream 2 pulled the same trick in reverse a year earlier (the first killer’s mom instead of his kid), but at least tied it to its satire of media sensationalism ruining lives. This one’s just a name scramble.

Director Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd, the TV show CSI) leads the film with a dully competent (hook) hand. He keeps the story brisk, at least. Vernon Layton’s widescreen photography has the same glossy sheen as every other late-’90s slasher. So it looks alright, but it has even less soul than the first film: the gloom of a small fishing town gives way to a Bahamian resort with no texture of its own (it was shot in Mexico and California). In proper slasher form, the camera is also awfully preoccupied with Love Hewitt’s tank tops. She is at least spared the Final Destination 3 fate when the Fisherman locks her in a tanning bed in her skimpy bikini.

All that leering is a disservice to Love Hewitt, who’s better here than she was the first time around, finding fear and interiority in Julie’s trauma that the script barely sketches. Brandy, then riding high on “The Boy Is Mine,” is bouncy and likable but not much of an actress yet. Prinze Jr. is mostly off on a solo side quest. Nobody else in the cast is doing much to write home about, good or bad.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer ultimately has a few fun moments and ideas that make watching it feel like eating a piece of Halloween candy: a quick slasher sugar rush, if that’s your thing. But it’s also the deterioration of all the melancholy and personality that made the original interesting in the first place. I still know what the first movie could have been. This one doesn’t seem to remember.

Kevin Williamson’s script got stuck in development until Scream made him horror’s hottest writer, at which point it was rushed into production. Less than a year after Ghostface entered our lives, I Know What You Did Last Summer became the other pillar of the late-’90s slasher revival (and Scary Movie’s other punching bag). But the two don’t have much in common beyond that, as Williamson wrote them with entirely different visions: Scream is full of snarky meta-commentary, but this one plays it straight, a sincere stab at a proper slasher.

On the Fourth of July after a big post-graduation party, four friends — Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen Shivers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe), and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.) — share the hook-handed-killer legend around a beach bonfire. Then fate crashes into their lives, or rather they crash into it, when they hit a man on a dark coastal road. Rather than call the cops, potentially torching their futures with DUI and manslaughter charges, they dump the body in the water and swear to take it to their graves. A year passes, and nobody’s life has gone to plan: Helen’s acting dreams have fizzled, Ray’s a dead-end fisherman like his dad, and Julie drags home from college pale, hollow, and burnt out on the adult world.

And a note arrives on a plain sheet of paper. No threat, no demand, no name. Just a simple seven-word phrase: the movie’s title.

That first stretch is the film at its best: the harrowing setup, then four kids rotting from the inside before the slashing starts. (The wicked flee when no man pursueth, says Proverbs 28:1.) I haven’t read it, but I understand that guilt is the core theme of Lois Duncan’s 1973 source novel, a suspense story in which the kids run down a young boy on a bicycle. Duncan later said she was “appalled” to see it turned into a slasher. “As the mother of a murdered child,” she added, “I don’t find violent death something to squeal and giggle about.” Williamson bolts a body count onto what is at its core a morality play, diluting the movie’s soul. The film is so much better when it forgets to be a slasher and instead lets guilt and melancholy fester as if it were a bleaker and more devastating film that would fit better in the ’70s, a la Black Christmas, than the ’90s.

The film offers some real texture in how it sours small-town Americana: fireworks, bonfires, beauty queens, parades. And if you’re willing to squint a little, you’ll even see some class current underneath. Barry, the rich jock, owns the BMW that crushes the body, but it’s Ray, the working-class fisherman’s son, who’s behind the wheel and whose hands bear the heaviest burden. The film never does much with the tension, and Prinze Jr. is far too handsome for the idea that Ray has crumbled into blue-collar dreariness, but its presence suggests a flicker of curiosity about America’s soul.

Director Jim Gillespie’s career is just this film and a few little-seen genre pictures. (The biggest of them, D-Tox, was a $55 million Sylvester Stallone thriller that sat on Universal’s shelf for three years before limping into a handful of U.S. theaters as Eye See You.) Here, he and cinematographer Denis Crossan bring the polish of respectable ’90s studio work, including a deliberate color scheme heavy on blues. The night photography pops quite a bit. You can actually see what’s happening (a treat in these underlit days). And as a cherry on top, the film also features a couple bits of impressively legible underwater footage, most memorably in the opening when Barry dives into the drink after Helen’s Croaker Queen crown and we get a corpse-awakening jump scare.

The film has two proper great set pieces. One of them finds Julie hearing something shift in a trunk she believes to be empty, an echo of where they stashed last summer’s body, and popping it open to find hapless local Max (Johnny Galecki) dead and crawling with crabs. (Minutes later, it’s spotless. Where’d all the crabs go?) The second highlight is an even savvier as a piece of slasher-craft: The killer slinks through Helen’s house like Michael Myers while the film cross-cuts to her pouring a Diet Coke and her dad watching football, and she wakes with her hair hacked off and “SOON” in lipstick on her mirror, which she shatters. It’s The Godfather‘s horse head, made of a beauty queen’s own hair and tiara.

The trouble is the movie never really figures out how to tie together its teen slasher demands with its more somber imagery and subject matter. Basic slasher structure calls for a shrinking cast as one teen after another gets killed, but these four leads are the story’s whole reason for being, so the film dithers. It’s especially ridiculous when Barry survives what looks like a kill scene for no reason but plot armor. The mystery that Williamson insists on playing up is a muddle of backstory about people we never meet tangentially connected to the person they think they might have killed, and the killer does not cut quite so sharp an image as Ghostface or The Shape or other classic slasher villains. The teens’ sleuthing does turn up one oddball pleasure in Missy Egan (Anne Heche) as a red herring suspect. She lives in a ramshackle farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Heche, who had a gift for seeming slightly off, makes good use of five minutes of screen time.

The worst of it all (spoilers ahoy for the rest of this paragraph) is that the man they hit, Ben Willis (Muse Watson), didn’t even die, and is now the killer. It turns out he survived, climbed out of the water, and had murdered someone that very night: David Egan, the young man the kids thought they’d run down. It’s an idiotic twist. It lets our heroes off the hook in every sense and guts the film’s moral conflict. If they never killed anyone, and even the person they injured was a menace to society, what was all that guilt and angst for? The version of the story I want ends with all four alive, weighed down by real sin, but not ruined by it, which would make a nice coming-of-age metaphor for how most of us carry our worst moments and still trudge along through adult life.

Beyond the fitful sense of dread and sadness, what keeps the movie watchable is a cast that goes four-for-four in heartthrob appeal: Every one of the leads is the platonic ideal of late-’90s teen stardom. Phillippe is perfectly scummy as a pretty-boy d-bag. Prinze Jr. is square-jawed and affable. (He and Gellar met on this set and married in 2002. They’re still together. It’s a happier ending than the one in the movie itself.) Love Hewitt, who is outrageously beautiful, gets the most famous moment, screaming “What are you waiting for?!” in the middle of the street, a broad, dramatic swing that makes more sense once you learn, per the actress, that it was dreamed up by a kid who’d won a contest to come on set and “create a moment for the movie.” Gellar comes out best among the leads: the ostensible mean girl gets the hair scene and a chase in the climax, and thus feels more like the true lead than Love Hewitt’s nominal final girl.

The franchise has kept on knowing and growing ever since. Love Hewitt and Prinze Jr. returned for 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, which ships The Fisherman off to a Bahamas resort. The direct-to-video I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer started over from scratch in 2006, and a one-season Amazon reboot series followed in 2021. Last year’s “requel” (a la 5cream) from Do Revenge director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, brought Love Hewitt and Prinze Jr. back yet again, with a Gellar cameo to boot. It underwhelmed critics and audiences, though I confess I’d watch another one, if it ever gets made.

As for the original, it is both an enduring relic of its time and a disappointment. It generates some images, ideas, and moods, but the script is clumsy, the mystery is a dud, the ending is self-sabotaging, and the slasher craft is rickety. In spite of all that, I have some unearned affection for it, born of my fondness for its specific strengths: that festering first stretch, the rotting American summer vibes, that Vogue Magazine cast. But even those get washed away by the film’s many flaws. At some point, the list of things a movie is bad at grows long enough that you have to admit it isn’t quite good. Close, though. I know what it could have been.

Link to Podbean episode

Episode Number

265

Films Reviewed

• I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Is It Good?

Supplemental Media

Link to Podbean episode

Episode Number

264

Films Reviewed

• Chuck E. Cheese’s University Training (1991)

Is It Good?

Supplemental Media

The complete training video collection on YouTube:

Chuck E Cheese salad bar: Least appetizing food in cinema history?

Brian’s Count Gauntly episode featuring our trip to the Creative Engineering factory:

I’ve been working a new movie adjective into my lexicon: “Black Listy,” named after the famed Black List, which tracks buzzy, unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood executives’ desks. The phrase is not a compliment, although it is not strictly negative. It describes a story built on a provocative high-concept logline, the kind that sounds more like a creative writing exercise than an actual movie. Done right, a Black Listy movie is a real hooky good time: The Menu, a 2019 Black List alum, was satire so broad it would have faceplanted without a sense of fun, and it had fun to spare. Done wrong, you get a gimmicky concept with no real storytelling scaffolding. One Night Only is about as Black Listy as it gets, and not the good kind. Fittingly, Travis Braun’s script didn’t just land on the Black List; it topped the 2024 edition, a year after his horror script Bad Boy did the same.

I’ve been dodging saying what the concept is, so here goes: The Purge, but sex. People are only legally permitted to have premarital sex on one night per year. The mind immediately boggles at worldbuilding questions: How is this tracked? (You get embedded with a sensor, or something.) What acts constitute sex? (The devices seem to track arousal, so maybe all acts? Maybe even watching a particularly steamy R-rated movie?) Are extramarital affairs policed? (Not addressed.) Masturbation policies? (No idea.) It’s a premise that frustrates: It raises questions the movie isn’t equipped to answer, assuming we’ll accept some brushing off of details. I had a similar gripe with last year’s Eternity, another Black Listy romance, whose afterlife I described as “a half-baked pile of rules that appear when the plot needs them,” of which you could say the same here.

The law, known as the Mandate, allows 12 hours of legal fooling around, and New York treats the occasion like a horny holiday, brands cashing in and all. Owen (Callum Turner), a pizzeria owner, has the night planned with his longtime girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), until she ditches him for someone else. Across town, Allie (Monica Barbaro), a commercial jingle singer with stage fright (the kind of profession that exists only in movies), is sick of getting ghosted after the annual free-for-all and wants someone who’ll stick around until morning. They meet, they click, and then a string of mishaps keeps bouncing them in and out of each other’s orbit all night.

If a movie is going to build itself on a hook this wild, I’d at least want it to take a swing. Get goofy with it. One Night Only doesn’t. It is content just to be a down-the-middle romantic comedy that uses its scenario no differently than a hundred other stock setups. You could make almost this exact movie, with only minor rewrites, about two people lonely on Valentine’s Day or two bickering singles at a destination wedding. The latter, in fact, is what Will Gluck most recently made before this, the surprise 2023 hit Anyone But You starring ascendant Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Curiously, Braun has said that film’s success, proof that R-rated romcoms could still work in theaters, is part of why he wrote this script in the first place. (Gluck sneaks in both of them, too: Sweeney turns up on Owen’s dating app, and Powell, seen only in a phone photo, is the hunky neighbor Malika ditches him for. It’s as if he wants to remind you of a movie you’d be better off watching.)

For a film about a world where everyone is desperate to hook up ASAP before the clock runs out, One Night Only is weirdly sex-averse. Compared to Anyone But You, which was popping with steam and sexual tension even if its execution was phoned in, this one is scripted like a PG-13 movie about 90% of the time, and a mediocre PG-13 romcom at that.

The first act makes a couple of satirical jabs at the zealots and hypocrites who’d dream up a law like this, and yet the ending lands on a very ambivalent note about sex, as if the movie doesn’t have any strong opinions one way or the other about the topic it’s built around. It doesn’t help that Gluck, who rewrote Braun’s script himself, has said he cut “so much nudity” after test audiences squirmed, citing Gen Z’s (and, he argues, everyone’s) diminishing appetite for sex on screen. This from the director of Friends With Benefits, exactly the kind of frank, R-rated studio romcom the world needs more of. Okay, but why make this specific movie, Mr. Gluck?

A couple of smaller complaints, since I’m already venting. Visually, the film is deeply generic, with the frictionless sheen of a pharmaceutical ad, which at least suits Allie’s day job singing pop hits rewritten as drug jingles (the thread about which is the movie’s sharpest satire, honestly). Less fitting is the product placement — Dunkin’, Durex, and Equinox all cash in on the big night — so relentless that it’s hard to tell where the satire of advertising ends and the advertising itself begins. (Gluck swears none of it was paid. He says he had to beg brands to let the movie twist their products into “one night” jokes, which means the brands got to approve the jokes made at their expense. Corporate sanctioned satire; hooray.)

I’d actually be pretty open to the film if not for the astringent mismatch between its premise, which begs for something daring, and its tone, which is not daring in the slightest. That stings, because on paper this is a movie I’d have a soft spot for. One of my sterling rules of filmmaking is the Superbad axiom that a silly sex comedy with a warm relationship at its core, set over one crazy night, is a tough formula to screw up. One Night Only, which has its leads fighting over the last condom in town (a scene less funny than it sounds), gets most of those ingredients right, it just has the wrong recipe. Gluck is one of the industry leaders at this kind of easygoing, cast-focused, not-quite-a-throwback romcoms: Barbaro and Turner have decent chemistry, the story moves at a steady clip (even if the night’s near-misses get repetitive), and you’re really pulling for the pair by the end. Usually, that’s enough to win me over. Not this time; the whole thing just feels off.

My biggest individual gripe as far as the romcom itself goes: Gluck shows the characters finally hooking up, then cut saway to reveal it was only a fantasy. It gives us a meaningless catharsis, the payoff of seeing the characters connect, yanked away the moment it arrives.

As with any romantic comedy, most of what works here comes from the cast. Barbaro is the best in show, and this is a role designed to make her a bona fide movie star like Sweeney in Anyone But You, but it won’t. She projects a complex and lovable human (and, I confess, she’s major crush material here). In A Complete Unknown, Oscar nomination notwithstanding, she seemed a little baffled by Joan Baez; here she’s wonderfully at ease, and she gets to show off her singing once more. Turner’s deal, here as in Eternity, is that he’s tall, handsome, and likable, which is not nothing. Together, they click more as comic partners than as lovers, which, given how little lovemaking is actually on the table, may have been the plan. Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton, as Owen’s mom and her partner, get a few amusing moments but barely enough screen time to matter.

Barbaro deserves a better showcase, and so does the romcom, a genre that can’t afford to squander its rare trips to the multiplex on a failed gamble this hollow. Anyone But You proved romcoms could still work in theaters; One Night Only, which opened to a scant $5.5 million domestically, is an underwhelming counterpoint. It dangles a provocative world it won’t explain, then refuses actually provoke once we’re inside it. I gave the premise its half second. Then I gave it 102 minutes. It’s stupid.

Link to Podbean episode

Episode Number

263

Films Reviewed

• Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Is It Good?

Supplemental Media

The mood on this one is great, shot in Greenwich Village with great scenes set in clubs and on the streets. Legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe gives it groovy, green-heavy lighting; he said he had a blast experimenting with tinted lights and filters on this one. It also benefits from an extremely charming supporting cast: Jack Lemmon playing a gay-coded warlock, Ernie Kovacs as a paranormal-obsessed writer, and, most importantly, a remarkable cat named Pyewacket. Novak’s Gillian is about as bewitching as any woman has ever been on film (this and I Married a Witch make a great double feature of contrasting but magnificent examples of eye-popping beauty and screen command with Lake and Novak). Funny that it’s ever-great Stewart who is the closest thing to a wet blanket among the bunch; he’s a bit too old and stodgy for the part, and it’s no surprise this is generally considered his final turn as a romantic lead.

It’s a lightweight affair, and its ending feels a bit like a selling out of the spirit of witchy, feminist freedom that Gillian displays throughout the film, but it’s a good time nonetheless.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

But the film is completely backbroken by its slim, repetitive story that drags on for a grating two hours. Witch antiheroine Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) ensnares and kills men one at a time like she’s a slasher villain crossed with a black widow, but the cadence and payoff of those scenes never escalate in a rich enough manner to justify making this as more than a short film, or maybe one of those 75-minute turbo-features.

That said, I’m tempted to give the film a passing grade just on how brilliant the production is and how well-cast Robinson is in the lead. The film has gorgeous colors, lovely costumes and makeup, terrific sets, and an overall intoxicating visual vibe. It’s too bad I just couldn’t get on its narrative wavelength.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Where the film stumbles is in the final act when a new conflict emerges after Jennifer and Wallace get together that turns Jennifer’s father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway) into an antagonist. It’s significantly less fun than everything that leads up to it, but not enough to blunt the overall delight of I Married a Witch.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies