ginnymason

Some might find My Sister Eileen a bit trite and old fashioned, but if you're in the right mood, it's easy to fall under its spell. There are tons of well executed song and dance numbers and Bob Fosse fans will be delighted to see him turn up in large supporting role. Betty Garrett is wonderfully funny as Ruth, an Ohio native who moves to New York with her sister, Eileen (Janet Leigh) to make a career as a writer. She falls for a magazine editor (Jack Lemmon) and Eileen attracts two men who are willing to fight for her.

The score might not be quite as memorable or bouncy as Wonderful Town (which was also based on the same source material), but it's not bad and Garrett and Leigh show genuine vocal chops.

Rarely have I ever felt a film deserves merely one star, but when you're bringing as little to the plate as Silent Night, Deadly Night 3 does, it's hard to find much to recommend about it.

After surviving his moral wounds from the last sequel, Ricky now spends his days in a hospital with his brain surrounded in some sort of bizarre fish bowl looking thing and, now, he's got a psychic link with a blind girl who is all sorts of insufferable and annoying. As expected, he wakes up and breaks out of his prison just in time for Christmas and starts killing people in a variety of uninspired, suspense-free ways.

Besides a few trippy dream sequences sprinkled throughout the film, this one is a big bore. Part 2 looks like Citizen Kane compared to this.

Much like other sexploitation films of this period, looking back on them can be quaint. They have plenty of nudity, but it's not as if they ever get into hardcore sex. This adaptation of Dorian Gray promises tons of sex and depravity, but its fairly chaste when all is said and done. What's most surprising about it is that it's not a half bad adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story from which it's based.

Helmut Berger plays Dorian Gray, an impossibly beautiful young man who falls for an actress named Sybil, but as he starts to make it way up through the London society crowd, he no longer has much use for Sybil and after he discards her, she kills herself. This leads Dorian to harden and only rely on his looks until people begin to get suspicious as to why he never seems to age after many years. Perhaps the secret involves a painting hidden away in his attic.

Despite adding in some sex and nudity to spice things up, this version of Dorian Gray plays out, more or less, like the original story. It might dwell in the sexual depravity a bit more than most adaptations, but at least it works for the story it's telling. It's a bit slow at times, but at least it's trying to tell a somewhat interesting story.