Film Freak Central

Orca: The Killer Whale (1977) - DVD

Orca
***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek
screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati
directed by Michael Anderson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I was scared off of Orca, widely considered to be one of the worst films of all-time. The movie had a reputation as a bad Jaws rip-off and my last viewing of a bad Jaws rip-off was Lamberto Bava's Devilfish on "Mystery Science Theater 3000", which was awful enough to make me question what I was doing spending my Saturday mornings watching "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Well, I'm pleased to report that Orca's reputation is completely unwarranted. Critics and audiences were wrong, they just didn't get it. They labelled it a "Jaws rip-off" before setting foot in the theatre and watched it on autopilot.

Jaws (1975) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, based on the novel by Benchley
directed by Steven Spielberg

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw What's not mentioned in very many conversations about Jaws is the pleasure it takes in work. That it's one of the most influential films of all time--a picture commonly identified as the one responsible for the studio summer-blockbuster mentality--is a given by now. The miracle of it, though, is that it gets better every time you see it. I have the movie memorized at this point; I can recite it like a favourite song. I still jump when Ben Gardner appears in the hole in the hull of his boat, and I still laugh when Hooper helps himself to Brody's uneaten dinner. More than a fright flick, Jaws is a beautifully-rendered character piece, establishing Spielberg as--a little like Stephen King, oddly enough--a master of the easy moment. (They're artists I've conflated in my head for their popularity with and influence on a generation of people my age.) It's a little nasty, too, Jaws is, in throwaway moments like the one on the beach where, after a giant fin appears in the water, Spielberg cuts to a group of old men picking up their binoculars. They're there to looky-loo; they're expecting carnage. It's not a Hitchcockian moment of audience critique (though it functions that way), but a brilliant character beat expressed with Spielberg's savant-like visual genius. But above all, Jaws is about function and work--not unlike Star Wars, the final nail in the New American Cinema, will be two years later.

The Deep (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset, Nick Nolte, Eli Wallach
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Tracy Keenan Wynn, based on Benchley's novel
directed by Peter Yates

by Bryant Frazer English cinematographer Christopher Challis got his start working on newsreels and travelogues before getting a gig with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's production company, The Archers. There, he worked on a team with the great Jack Cardiff before serving as the DP on The Tales of Hoffmann, a lush Technicolor envisioning of the Jacques Offenbach opera. While Challis isn't among the best-known directors of photography, his technical facility kept him in demand for the next 40 years. He shot films for Stanley Donen, Carol Reed, and Blake Edwards, but there may have been no movie where his sense of colour and light was more critical than on The Deep. Rushed into production at Columbia Pictures to capitalize on the success of Jaws, another seafaring adventure based on a Peter Benchley novel, The Deep has a humdrum story, generally uncommitted performances, and a phoney Moray eel (nicknamed "Percy" on set) that gives the much-maligned mechanical shark "Bruce" from Jaws a run for its money in the department of unconvincing animal attacks. Yet the quality of the imagery is something else.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) [Special Edition]; The Towering Inferno (1974) [Special Edition]; Earthquake (1974) - DVDs

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extrss B+
starring Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes, based on the novel by Paul Gallico
directed by Ronald Neame

THE TOWERING INFERNO
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extrss A
starring Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, based on the novels The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson
directed by John Guillermin

EARTHQUAKE
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Lorne Greene
screenplay by George Fox and Mario Puzo
directed by Mark Robson

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's the politically-sensitive early-'70s. Action movies are now Balkanized along ideological lines. Bona fide westerns have become completely hippefied (Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), while the values of the traditional western have been transplanted whole into a new genre of gritty law-and-order cop movies (Death Wish, Dirty Harry). The question facing Hollywood is: how do you make an action movie with across-the-board appeal? Irwin Allen hit on a temporary solution with his series of disaster flicks. In 1977, George Lucas stumbled upon a permanent one. I'm not sure it really sank in until I watched Allen's The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno back-to-back just how deeply Lucas' little space opera changed the face of popular entertainment. The broadly allegorical Star Wars films were not only a collective experience, they were a powerful collective experience, too. They placed serious religious issues in a palatable context and provoked a deeply spiritual response from the masses.