Video Store Rental Reviews #4: The Shadow (1994), The New Kids (1985), The Pelican Brief (1993)
DVD reviews in the year 2024.
Netflix holds roughly 6,500 titles.
Max and Peacock are about the same.
Hulu has a bit more, at just over 7,000.
My local video store has over 31,000 distinct titles that don’t disappear at the end of every month.
Here are reviews for three of them:
The Shadow (1994)
(The Shadow) puts the hero up against his arch enemy, Shiwan Khan, who plans to take over the world by holding a city to ransom using an atom bomb. Using his powers of invisibility and “The power to cloud men’s minds”, the Shadow comes blazing to the city’s rescue with explosive results.
section: sci-fi/fantasy
I wonder why this script based on a '30s/'40s comic strip and radio program that bounced around from writer to writer in the '80s suddenly got the green light in 1990...
Well yes, it's because of Tim Burton's Batman.
But while Burton's movie feels like film noir, The Shadow still feels like a radio program. I don't mean that negatively (visually the film is very clearly inspired by the production design of Batman and is never as interesting - but it was shot on the Universal backlots! I miss sets!), I just mean that the radio roots come through.
I think you could just listen to this movie. It's quite dialogue-heavy, there's minimal physical action (normally this would bother me, but I was just really vibing), and it's populated with actors who have such great voices. Alec Baldwin, of course, is doing his best Orson Welles/mysterious radio play performer performance. But everyone else too: Tim Curry, Ian McKellan, James Hong, Jonathan Winters, and John Lone really hamming it as a Genghis Khan descendant.
It also has a score by 18-time Academy Award nominee Jerry Goldsmith, which sounds like a temp score for Burton's Bat.
If it wasn't for Penelope Ann Miller, I think they could just play this on the old-timey radio Sirius channel that my grandfather listens to.
The New Kids (1985)
A brother and his young sister come to a small town to find out a local gang terrorizes the population.
section: horror
Both my local video store and Letterboxd label this film as "horror" (it even opened the New Beverly's 2023 Horror Show!) and although I'm usually inclined to defer to all of those sources for all cinematic classifications (and I can't really think of a better genre fit), horror is such an interesting place to put this.
Yes, it's scary. Shannon Presby (now a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County) and Lori Loughlin (not exactly a big fan of District Attorneys) are the titular new kids in town. After their mom and dad (Tom Atkins, seen almost exclusively in slow motion) are killed, they go to live with their aunt and uncle in Florida, working for them at the gas station/Christmas-themed amusement park they run. The boys in town (led by a bleached-blonde, coke-snorting James Spader) want a piece of Lori Loughlin because she's Lori Loughlin, but she's too good for them because she's Lori Loughlin.
They take offense to this and begin to terrorize Lori Loughlin's family. Horror, right? Well, not really until the film's final scenes. Until then, they kinda just harass Lori Loughlin in the school's cafeteria or key her uncle's Caddy. It's a punk teen bullying movie, that doesn't crank it up until a climax at the amusement park. That scene is a ton of fun and I will never complain about Lori Loughlin and James Spader duking it out, complete with shotguns, funhouse mirrors, rabid dogs, and Lori Loughlin...but horror?
The Pelican Brief (1993)
Two Supreme Court Justices have been assassinated. One lone law student has stumbled upon the truth. An investigative journalist wants her story. Everybody else wants her dead.
section: thrillers
The '90s were stuffed with John Grisham adaptations. Looking back, I'm blown away by the directors attached to these projects: Sydney Pollack made one, Francis Ford Coppola made one - hell, Joel Schumacher made two of 'em! But perhaps the most obvious choice for a movie about government conspiracies and coverups would be Alan J. Pakula, the guy behind that '70s run of Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President's Men.
If there's one thing about Pakula, it's that he knew how to make a movie steaming with paranoia. And if there's a second thing he knew how to do, it was populate his movies with movie stars. Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford all appear in that unofficial trilogy.
The Pelican Brief does give us the '90s version of those movie stars, with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington in the lead roles. The supporting cast is also a who's who, with Sam Shepard, John Heard, John Lithgow, Cynthia Nixon, Tony Goldwyn, and Stanley Tucci (my personal favorite performance in the film) , rounding out the cast.
It doesn't exactly give that same intensity or horsepower as those '70s entries, but I didn't mind. At 141 minutes, it's the perfect Sunday afternoon watch. The kind of thing we used to watch on TNT that would take four hours with commericals. Relax, check in for the great setpieces and for Julia being Julia, check out when you have to answer the door for pizza delivery. Don't think about work tomorrow, just enjoy this Sunday off.
Credit: Each plot synopsis from Letterboxd via TMDb.