Ask FlickChick

Questions about a two-headed rabbit movie, a killer hypnotist and why credits moved to the end of the movie from the start and more.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Hear Maitland on the weekly TVGuide Talk podcast.

Question: In a film class a few years ago I saw a movie about a man trapped on an island. He falls in love with a woman, who is in love with or engaged to a different man. The image that's stuck in my memory is of the three of them in a garden: They make shadows on the ground, but the statues in the garden cast no shadow. I was just sitting in on the class and have absolutely no memory of anything else in the film but that scene. I tried googling what I could remember with no luck- can you help me? -- Penny

FlickChick: Something about the shadows (here's a larger image) makes me think Last Year at Marienbad (1962), which involves an oblique, almost ghostly relationship between a man referred to as X (Giorgio Albertazzi), a woman referred to a A (Delphine Seyrig) and A's husband or lover (Sacha Pitoeff). It's a classic film-course film and while they're not on an island, they are isolated within the grounds of a luxurious European spa hotel (the real Marienbad spa is in the Czech Republic). The plot, such as it is, involves X's attemps to convince A that they met and fell in love the previous year, and that she promised to run away with him. It's one of the love-it-or-hate-it greats of sixties art cinema and interestingly, it was inspired – uncredited - by a novel called the Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares that does take place on an island. Reading it sheds an interesting light on the movie's notoriously slippery narrative.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: Here's something that's been bothering me for some time. When and why did movies change from the credits being in the beginning to the end? Older movies have all the credits prior to the beginning of the film and now the information is at the end. Why and when did it change? Thanks. J. S.

FlickChick: Sometime in the mid-sixties, and it was because credits got longer. That, in turn, I can only assume is because various unions militated for greater onscreen representation as part of their contracts and got it. If you look at movies made in the 1930s and '40s, the number of behind-the-scenes personnel credits onscreen is extremely small, whereas now the end credits can run for five or ten minutes (or more for a movie with heavy-duty special effects), which is a long time to expect moviegoers to wait for something to happen. The concession is that now you get the top credits at the beginning – stars, director, writer, producer and a handful of others – and everybody else goes to the end of the line. And almost all movies now show the credits over the movie's first scene, so even as you're seeing the names of high profile you're also getting into the movie. The downside is that moviegoers tend to walk out during the end credits. The upside is that you stand a far better chance of finding out who "laughing girl in elevator" was than you do with older movies. That may sound silly, but maybe "laughing girl in elevator" made a real impression in her two-minutes on screen and you want to look out for her in future. Fuller credits make it much easier to trace an actor's career from bit parts to starring roles than it was when you had to really on anecdotal evidence (an interview with someone who worked on a movie and remembers that she met a sweet girl named Marilyn Monroe who played the other cigarette girl) or squinting and saying "Wow, could that kid be a really young Burt Reynolds?"

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I remember a horror movie about women who disfigure their faces after seeing a hypnotist or something like that. One sticks her face over the gas stove thinking it was a steamer or the sink or something. It was B&W and no, it wasn't The Wizard of Gore. Know the title? -- Kevin

FlickChick: You saw The Hypnotic Eye (1960), a nasty little shocker about a deranged mesmerist billed as "The great Desmond" (Jacques Bergerac) who hypnotizes women into mutilating themselves when they go home after his show. Is it good? No. Is it pretty amazing in a super-sleazy way? Yes, yes, yes. Especially when the "hypnotic eye" -– a swirling op-art disk – fills the screen.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I saw part of this movie over 15 years ago, when I was a child. It was back when you got charged for pay-per-view movies if you watched the channel for a longer then a few minutes. The movie had something to do with infected rabbits: I remember one scene in which a man and women character looked into a rabbit cage in some kind of medical building and the rabbit had two heads and scary teeth. Do you have any idea what it is? -- Michelle

FlickChick: I haven't seen Night of the Lepus (1972) in a long, long time – frankly it's such a bad, slow movie that I'm loathe to sit through it again, even with my finger on fast-forward – but when I hear about a scary movie with rabbits it's the first thing that comes to mind. A pair of zoologists are hired to try to disrupt the rabbit breeding cycle on behalf of a rancher with a serious bunny problem. But their research instead mutates their test rabbits into giant, meat-eating killer rabbits. Are you scared yet?

However, I also wonder whether you might have seen a few minutes of The Thing With Two Heads (1972), whose special effects team includes future effects guru Rick Baker – I remember a couple of lab scenes involving two-headed animal try-outs for the final transplant, which involves grafting the head of a white racist (poor one-time major movie star Ray Milland) onto the body of a black man (football player-turned-actor Rosie Grier) , whereupon the two heads launch into a screaming match across the inch or so that divides them.

Readers, any other thoughts?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane: A pop masterpiece that plays like breaking news.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Everyone's heard that Citizen Kane (1941) is the best of the best: It just topped the AFI's most recent list of the all-time greatest films, and critics, academics and movie buffs all genuflect before its flawless mix of technical invention and lacerating dissection of the American Dream gone wrong. But what sometimes gets lost in the adulation is the fact that it's a blast, and that's why it's this week's DVD Tuesday pick.

Tell people you're a movie critic and they want to know your favorite movie of all time. There are a lot of ways you can go at that one: After flailing embarrassingly at the question on more than one occasion, I decided to come up with an answer and a rationale. So now I say my favorite movie is the one I'd take to a desert island if I knew I'd be stuck there for years and would have to watch it over and over again. And that would be Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, because every time I see it I see something new, and it never fails to thrill me with its sheer, giddy intoxication with what you can do with a camera and an idea. I taught film history/theory/criticism for years, and Kane never failed me: It hooked students who recoiled at black-and-white and thought anything made before Jaws (1975) was as antiquated as a bunch of cave paintings.

The story was inspired by the life and career of tabloid pioneer William Randolph Hearst (grandfather of kidnapped heiress-turned-brainwashed revolutionary Patty), but it could have been ripped from today's headlines: Catapulted into the heart of the wealthy WASP establishment through a combination of luck and his steely mother's determination that he not become a drunken wastrel like his father, Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) builds a media empire on idealism and betrays it, grabs for the gold ring of political power and sees it slip away. Kane impulsively buys a newspaper (and then another and another), flamboyantly formulating a declaration of principles — a public promise to his readers of fairness, objectivity and dedication to hard facts over shallow sensationalism — and subsequently breaks every one. He marries a president's daughter and destroys their marriage — and his gubernatorial campaign — for a fling with an uneducated, none-too-bright girl who likes to sing; his relentless determination to mold her into a respectable opera singer destroys theirs. How did a man who once held the world in his hand wind up dying alone in a half-built estate gone to seed, whispering the enigmatic word "rosebud"?

Structured as a reporter's investigation into the meaning of rosebud, Kane is a mystery, a cautionary fable, a psychological drama and an epic tale of hubris going before the fall. Contrary to some claims, Welles didn't single-handedly reinvent cinema with Kane: Preston Sturges' script for The Power and the Glory (1933) anticipated Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz's flashback-driven Kane screenplay and veteran cinematographer Gregg Toland's audacious, stylized, deep-focus compositions (in which everything is unnaturally sharp focus, from the foreground to the farthest recesses of the background) are as much a part of Kane's greatness as Welles' endlessly inventive storytelling. But Welles brought it all together: off-kilter angles, offbeat but perfectly motivated scene transitions, time-defying editing and vivid performances from Joseph Cotton, Everett Sloane, Agnes Morehead (yes, Endora from Bewitched!), Ruth Warrick, Dorothy Comingore and Welles himself. It's all wrapped around a story that raises genuinely provocative questions about power, wealth, integrity, class, ambition and the million ways in which men and women compromise their ideals, delude themselves and destroy their better natures, taking others down with them.

Now that's what I call a movie.

Things to consider:

Is there such a thing as "the best movie of all time?"

Is Charles Foster Kane a product of his environment, his nature or both? Was he ruined by a sudden windfall that made him so rich he never had to work, get an education (he was thrown out of one top-flight college after another for carousing), or shoulder any of the responsibilities that shape most people's lives? Did wealth free him to dream extravagantly? He could buy a newspaper chain and run it any way he wanted, uncompromised by money-based pressure. If he had been a stronger man, might he have resisted the temptation to betray his ideals? Or would he have destroyed himself and others just as surely if he'd been raised as he was born, the son of poor Colorado rooming-house owners whose marriage was poisoned by alcoholism (his father's) and frustrated ambition (his mother's)?

Is there a movie that changed the way you look at movies? What was it and why did it make such an impression?

Do you read them movie lists (best, worst, most influential)? Do you make them? Do they help make sense of the bewildering number of movies there are to see, or do they perpetuate the reputation of a limited number of titles at the expense of others?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

La Jetée (1974)
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Questions about serial murderers in movies, a shower of blood, The Godfather II's Troy Donahue/Merle Johnson mystery and more.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Hear Maitland on the weekly TVGuide Talk podcast.

Question: I love movies about serial killers and that got me to wondering: What was the very first serial killer picture? -- Alex

FlickChick: I love "first" questions, because they always get the discussion going. I'd argue that Alfred Hitchcock's silent The Lodger (1926) gets the credit for being the earliest movie about a serial murderer. That said, it focuses less on the killer and his victims than on the increasingly concerned landlady who comes to suspect her upstairs lodger might be this "Jack the Ripper" fellow she keeps reading about in the newspaper.

Fritz Lang's M (1931) seems to me the first film whose structure resembles that of contemporary serial killer pictures: It focuses on both a murderer (Peter Lorre) – a child killer, no less -- and the efforts of the Berlin police to catch him before he kills again. Unlike the bulk of later films, though, Lang throws your sympathies to the devil: Rather than being a slick, entertaining uber-fiend, Lorre's Franz Becker is a pathetic, driven, sweaty, self-loathing addict whose vice is killing. The police eventually recruit the underworld to help them – even criminals hate child killers – and Becker is hunted down like a jackal pursued by two ravening packs of wolves.

It's interesting to me that while today serial killer movies are generally considered pretty disreputable, with the exception of a handful of high-class pictures like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1995), these two early examples are both the work of very serious filmmakers. Hitchcock, to be sure, was at the very beginning of his career, but Lang already had Metropolis (1927) under his belt, so he wasn't desperate to make a name for himself via lurid subject matter.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: This is weird. I was just watching The Godfather II and in the end credits it lists Troy Donahue playing the part of "Merle Johnson!" So he's supposed to be in the movie, playing a character with the name he was born with? I can't find him in any of the scenes, nor did I notice any character named Merle Johnson. Help me out here… Is he in this movie? And if so, where does he show up? Confused, amazed, bewildered. -- Skagdrager

FlickChick: Former teen idol Troy Donahue – born Merle Johnson Jr. – is indeed in The Godfather, Part II. He has a small part as Connie Corleone's (Talia Shire) boyfriend. He has a scene with Connie and her older brother, Michael (Al Pacino), during the movie's opening, which takes place at a lavish Corleone-family first communion party. They meet in the boathouse, where Connie asks Michael for money so she and Merle can get married. Michael lectures her about her jet-setting ways, and it's obvious that he figures Merle for a gigolo.

As to the character's name, that has to have been a joke between former teen idol Donohue and Coppola, who had known each other since they were teenagers: Both attended the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson. By the early '70s, their careers were in very different places: Donahue, whose career ebbed as he got older and who had a history of drug and alcohol problems, was making low budget genre movies while Coppola was an A-list director. Even though Godfather, Part II was an extremely high-profile project, it didn't jump start Donahue's comeback. That said, he worked pretty steadily in movies and TV until shortly before his death in 2001, aged 65.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I saw this movie in the early 1980s on late night TV. The only scene I remember was the actress getting into the shower and turning it on, the shower starts out as water but then turns to blood. I don't know what happens after that because the babysitter came down and was horrified to find me watching it, and she turned it off immediately. It's been bugging me for 20+ years that I never found out what happened. -- Sonya

FlickChick: I feel as though you're describing an incredibly common image, but when I actually started to think about it the only movie I could come up with was Death Ship (1980). The early '80s sounds a little early for it to have made its way to late-night TV, but you had cable it's certainly possible.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I saw and really loved an obscure B&W movie on TV years ago, and it's driving me crazy that I can't remember the title. I also can't remember anyone who was in it, but I do recall the plot pretty well. It takes place just after WWII, when there's a housing shortage. An old tramp moves into a mansion whose owners are away for the summer and winds up inviting a whole bunch of friends and their families to stay there too. A soldier who's living there falls in love with a girl: What he doesn't know is that she's the daughter of the owners, and she doesn’t tell him. Anyway, at the end everybody moves out, leaving the place exactly the way it was when they found it. Do you have any idea of the title – I'd love to see it again? -- Sue

FlickChick: That would be prolific director Roy del Ruth's It Happened On 5th Avenue (1947), which actually earned an Best Original Story Oscar nomination. The cast includes veteran theater and movie actor Victor Moore as the down-at-the-heels Aloysius T. McKeever, who keeps a roof over his head by moving from temporarily unoccupied mansion to another and singer-starlet Gale Storm, who went on the star in TV's My Little Margie (1952-1955) and The Gale Storm Show (1956-1960). A lot of people absolutely love this movie, and apparently some TV stations used to show it regularly around Christmastime. The bad news is that it's out of print, but there's at least one site that offers the film: freemoviesondvd. This is a grey-market site that offers out-of-print movies – the way it gets around copyright issues is by charging you for postage & handling, not for the film itself – and from what I hear the quality of the prints varies greatly. But for the time being it's a place where you can get It Happened On 5th Avenue and relive your cherished memories.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Could La Jetée -- the original Twelve Monkeys -- just be the most perfect science fiction film ever made?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

This is the shortest movie I'll ever feature in DVD Tuesday, and it's the ultimate vindication of the saying that good things come in small packages: Chris Marker's 28-minute, 1963 science-fiction jewel La Jetée, which Terry Gilliam reworked into the film many fans consider his masterpiece, Twelve Monkeys (1995). La Jetée is also the most unconventional film I've featured to date: It's composed almost entirely of black-and-white still images and has no sync sound, just a narrator. It's Marker's only fiction film. And it's mesmerizing, thought-provoking and utterly haunting; I like Twelve Monkeys, but I love La Jetée.

It begins in Orly airport, where a boy on a family day-trip to watch planes take off instead sees a commotion on the ground. Allow me to quote the film's narration: "A sudden roar, a woman's gesture, the fall of a body and the cries of the crowd. Only later did he realize that he had seen a man die. And soon afterwards, Paris was blown up."

Marker then flashes forward to a postapocalyptic future, in which the ragged survivors live underground and a group of scientists have developed a way to travel through time. Their plan is to appeal to the human race of the future for help — food, medicine, or new technologies that could help them rebuild the world — and they've found a guinea pig in a nameless survivor (Davos Hanich) whose memories, especially his memory of a childhood outing to Orly, are so powerful that they can be used as a bridge out of the present.

The scientists send him into the past as a test, and he meets the woman (Hélène Chatelain) whose face made such an indelible impression on him all those years ago; he falls in love with her. He's abruptly recalled by the scientists and sent to the future, but all he wants is to return to the past. He finally gets what he wants, but time and memory are tricky things.

The difference between La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys is one of scale and detail: Marker doesn't care about fantastic machines or bizarre imagery, whereas Gilliam does, and Gilliam hopscotches his protagonist (Bruce Willis) around various pasts and alters his mission — he's supposed to find the origin of the virus that poisoned the world and bring back a sample so future scientists can find a cure.

Marker's interest lies in the vivid, almost brutal power that fragments of memory — unreliable, subjective, easily misunderstood — have to shape our thoughts, character and perception of the world. A single blinding memory can color everything, and yet who hasn't shared some childhood recollection — a story you've told dozens of times — with a relative who was there, only to have him or her say, "But that isn't the way it happened at all"?

La Jetée came out on tape in 1998, but it's just been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, paired with Marker's tricky 1982 documentary Sans Soleil. It looks breathtaking and includes some interesting extras.

Things to consider:

The cliché of science-fiction movies is that they're all rockets, robots and ray guns; the reality is more complicated. What makes a sci-fi movie (or TV show) sci-fi?

Genre historians often argue that Dracula was the first horror novel and Frankenstein the first science-fiction novel. What's their point?

La Jetée is consistently ranked among the cream of sci-fi movies, and its influence can be seen in places as diverse as Blade Runner (the scene in which the photo of Rachael's "mother" briefly animates, the overall theme of unreliable memory), the video for David Bowie's "Jump They Say (in fact, sci-fi imagery is a recurring element in his songs), Jack Finney's 1970 novel Time and Again (time travel through mental connection to the past) and The Terminator (a man from the future drawn to the preapocalyptic past by the image of a woman). So what's so special about it?

They're called "movies" and "motion pictures" because they move and "flicks" — short for "flickers" — because of the visible flicker your eyes perceive when a movie is projected at slightly more or less than 24 frames per second, as often happened in the earliest days of the medium. La Jetée doesn't move, except for a few seconds, and yet it's undeniably a movie. Thoughts?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Questions about the mayhem In the Mouth of Madness, alien grashoppers, The Fantastic Four and more.


See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I recently went to Shrek the Third and saw a trailer for the upcoming Evan Almighty. It's rated PG (for mild humor and peril) and is being advertised as a family movie. I remember the Jim Carrey original, Bruce Almighty, which was rated PG-13 and earned every bit of that rating with Carrey's typical crude humor, language and sexual content. This got me to thinking: Can you recall any other situation where a movie came out, obviously aimed at adults and with adult themes, where the sequel was toned down and aimed at kids? I can't come up with anything. — Bill

FlickChick: Off the top of my head, the films that come immediately to mind are the PG-13 Fantastic Four (2005) and the PG-rated Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which just opened. Though Fantastic Four was pretty mild, Rise of the Silver Surfer is clearly aimed at a younger audience and was made to the specifications of a PG rating. There's also the Godzilla factor: The original Godzilla (1954) was very much a film aimed at adults — I'm talking about the Japanese Gojira, not the American cut — and the first sequel, The Return of Godzilla/Gigantis/Godzilla Raids Again (1955) was also pretty serious in its tone and intent. But subsequent sequels, starting with King Kong vs Godzilla (1964), were aimed at kids — some of them turned the onetime King of the Monsters into little more than an oversized doggie.

Readers, other examples?

Question: I am looking for the title of a movie, probably from the 1980s or '90s, that I saw many years ago. I only remember fragments: It was a kind of psychotic horror film and I think it involved a writer who was being haunted by creatures from his novels. The blurring of nightmarish images and reality was a theme of the film. I remember scenes where the main character, driving in his car, was being chased by bloody, zombie-like creatures in the middle of the night; I think he was trying to get out from a town possessed by these scary characters, but again and again he ended up in the same town. I remember that the song "In the Year 2525" was playing as the credits rolled in the end. The atmosphere reminded me of the end of Lost Highway. I have googled and searched the Internet for movies fitting the description and have checked out The Dark Half, Brain Dead (starring Bill Pullman) and Jacob's Ladder, but it's none of these films. Do you have any clue? — Adam

FlickChick: I feel confident suggesting that you're looking for John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (1995). Best-selling horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow) — think Stephen King — vanishes and his publisher hires detective John Trent (Sam Neill) to find him. Trent instead finds himself trapped in Hobbs End, the supposedly fictional town (à la King's Castle Rock) where Cane's scary stories are set; no matter how hard Trent tries to leave, all roads lead back to Hobbs End, where Cane made a deal with dark forces and opened the gates to hell. There's lots of toggling back and forth between Cane's vaguely Lovecraftian fictional world and the real world into which it's leaking, and there are lots of lost-highway shots as Trent tries to escape.

Question: I saw a movie — I believe it came out in the 1990s — where these two teens are making prank phone calls, like in the '60s movie I Saw What You Did. In the newer movie the teen makes a date with someone she calls on her mother's behalf, not realizing that she's just set her mom up with a murderer. I would really like to see this movie again — do you know the name? — Annie

FlickChick: I'm pretty sure you're describing Lisa (1990), a really terrific little thriller that has never developed the reputation it deserves. Lisa (Staci Keanan, of TV's My Two Dads) is a 14-year-old whose overprotective mother (Cheryl Ladd) got pregnant much too young and is determined to save her daughter from making the same mistake. But she keeps Lisa on such a short leash that the girl is constantly looking for ways to rebel. One way she finds of rebelling is by following and phoning strange men, one of whom she manages to set up her mom with. What Lisa doesn't realize is that he's the serial murderer the press has dubbed "The Candlelight Killer." Well worth seeing.

Question: When I was a kid I watched this old black-and-white movie on TV and all I remember is that it's about a whole sack full of mail that somehow gets lost. When it's found years later all the letters get delivered. But because peoples' lives have changed so much, some of the letters stir up a lot of trouble. I can't remember any stars in it, but I hope you can help! For some reason I keep thinking about this movie and I'd love to see it again. — Ruth Rock

FlickChick: The fact that you remember it being black-and-white makes me think you're looking for The Postman Didn't Ring (1942), in which a bag of mail stolen in 1880 turns up 50 years later. But it's really only about one recipient, a storekeeper who suddenly finds himself in possession of a valuable stock certificate but has to fight the bank to get his windfall. So I wonder if you might have seen the made-for-TV The Letters or its sequel, Letters from Lost Lovers, both from 1973. Each of those movies featured multiple story lines prompted by the recovery of letters that were lost when a mail plane goes down and is recovered a year later. They were intended as pilots for an anthology series, but it never happened.

Question: I once saw a campy movie on sci-fi about valley girls called Night of the Comet and it reminded me of a movie I saw a long time ago that had something of a similar plot: People turned to dust, although in the older movie I don’t think the people who were infected turned to dust but instead became zombies. All I remember was that it starred Peter Graves and it's basically him and his kids, who have some kind of immunity, trying to get back home. — Alberto

The older movie was the made-for-TV Where Have All the People Gone (1974), which I remember as a pretty creepy little number. It's solar flares rather than a comet that cause the trouble, but what trouble it is! Animals go insane, most of the human race is reduced to heaps of white dust, and there's some kind of killer virus picking off most of the survivors; Graves and his family, who are on a camping trip when the chaos starts, try to make their way home through the rubble of the world they knew. Like many TV-movies of the '70s, it's sadly unavailable on video or DVD.

Question: Can you tell me the name of a sci-fi flick with Glynis Johns that was made, I think, in the 1940s? It took place during WWII, when a bomb in the subway uncovered alien beings that looked like giant grasshoppers. Thanks for your reply. — Saralee

FlickChick: I'm pretty sure you're looking for Five Million Years to Earth/Quatermass and the Pit, even though it was made in 1968, isn't set during WWII and doesn't star Glynis Johns (the female star is Barbara Shelley). Instead, the story starts when construction workers digging under London break through to a stretch of unused underground track and find what they think is an unexploded bomb. It turns out to be a space craft filled with — this is the giveaway — aliens that look like giant grasshoppers and, unfortunately for the human race, aren't as dead as they appear.

The original Gone in 60 Seconds: Until you've seen it, You don't know car chases.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

I'm surrounded by squealing tires, crunching metal and shattering glass… and that's just when I go to the movies.

And not just your the run-of-the-mill car chases, the ones every action picture is contractually obligate to have. These are chases that take center stage: The double-whammy of Nascar creep and the success of the Fast and the Furious franchise spawned a slew of moto-maniacal progeny, from the comic Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) to Redline (2007) and Collier & Co.: Hot Pursuit (2006) – a pair of home movies on a theatrical scale, the former an excuse for exotic car collector Daniel Sedak to show off his expensive toys and the latter former Dukes of Hazzard star John Schneider's bid to make a family-friendly hot-cars picture -- and even the new reality show Fast Cars & Superstars. All of which reminded me of the granddaddy of all pedal-to-the-metal car chase pictures, and I don't mean 1968's Bullit. I mean H.B. "Toby" Halicki's Gone in 60 Seconds (1974). Not the glossy, CGI-heavy Nicolas Cage remake, but the indie movie whose 40-minute car-chase climax is the gold standard in pure, kick-ass stunt driving.

Make no mistake: Gone in 60 Seconds is rough around the edges. The stripped-down plot involves a gang of high-end Southern California car thieves who take an order for 48 luxury vehicles, to be delivered within the week, and then set about boosting them. But the posse's leader, Maindrian Pace (writer-director-producer Halicki), is betrayed by a disgruntled former partner, who tips off the police that Maindrian is boosting a coveted mustard-gold, 1973 Mustang nicknamed "Eleanor." And the chase begins… Halicki wasn't an actor – believe me, he wasn't – or much of a writer or, for that matter, a director -- at least when it came to getting performances of human beings. He wasn't even a stuntman. But he could drive and he knew cars, especially what they could take and keep going: Halicki made his money restoring wrecked luxury cars. He bought and destroyed nearly 100 cars for Gone in 60 Seconds, and they gave their metal lives for a classic "you have to see it to believe it" series of car stunts that are as breathtaking a fusion of discipline, grace and nerve as any ballet, trapeze act or high wire stunt. All shot on real city streets and highways, with no post-production sweetening.

You can see it all here:

Eleanor Chase Part 1
Eleanor Chase Part 2
Eleanor Chase Part 3
Eleanor Chase Part 4

Now that's stunt driving -- no wonder Halicki walked away from Gone in 60 Seconds with the title the "Car Crash King."

Halicki was killed in 1989 in a freak accident on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds 2 – a really freakish accident. He was sitting in parked car when a water tower that had been rigged to breakaway during a stunt collapsed and hit a power pole that crashed into Halicki's vehicle, killing him instantly in front of a crowd of onlookers.

Things to consider:

What's the appeal of car chases in movies?

Your favorite auto stunt?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases

Questions about Pirates, the He-Man movie and what became of that extended DVD of Kill Bill.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Question: Is this the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie or are they going to make a fourth? -- Russell

FlickChick: I'd say the odds are good that there will be a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, but it's not a sure thing. Assuming that you've seen Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End – and why would you be asking otherwise? – you know it sets up the possibility that Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and who knows who else will embark on a quest for the fountain of youth. Involved parties have alluded vaguely to various possibilities in promotional interviews for World's End.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Australia's Herald Sun that "This is the end [of the current trilogy], but whether one of the characters or a couple of the characters continue on, it's a possibility." Screenwriter Terry Rossio told Moviehole.com that it could go either way, but that he and writing partner Ted Elliott were probably going to write a script, but that there are "forces in play to make it happen, and forces in play to make it not happen."

London's The Sun quoted Depp saying, "I've never really felt I'm done with playing the character, so why shouldn't we try a fourth and a fifth? If I were approached to play Captain Jack again, under the right circumstances you know, with all the right and proper elements involved and a good script, I would definitely give it some serious thought." Orlando Bloom, on the other hand, told Contactmusic.com that he thought the story had run its course and should remain a trilogy, while allowing that the producers "haven't said for sure that this is the end of the road." It's been suggested that if there's a fourth film, it might be a prequel or a spin-off that focuses on a couple of characters.

If you read between the lines of the bet-hedging, I think it boils down to this: Disney would love to make another Pirates film, because the brand is a thoroughly established moneymaker. But the second and third movies were insanely expensive, and there's only so much they can do to get the costs down. Audiences have been trained to expect lavish special effects, and they cost money. And they've grown attached to certain characters: I can't imagine a Pirates movie without Depp, which is why the fact that he appears willing to consider a fourth film bodes well. And the consensus seems to be that Keira Knightley's Elizabeth is also a must-have. Beyond that is anyone's guess, but there have been rumors that if there is a fourth film, Bloom won't be aboard. Rumors, incidentally, that predate his reservations.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: Are there any plans to release the combined Kill Bill Vol 1. and Kill Bill Vol 2. on DVD? I am hoping that there will be an ultimate director's cut with even more great footage! – Lisa

FlickChick: Plans, yes. But I get the feeling they're very vague and subject to Quentin Tarantino clearing the decks, and given the number of projects he's always juggling, that may not happen any time soon.

As far back as 2005, Tarantino was talking about the DVD special edition, saying that he wanted to cut the two Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003) and Kill Bill Vol.2 (2004) together, release the integrated version into theaters at the end of 2006 and then put it on DVD with a "big supplementary" package.

Then along came Grindhouse, followed by all the hand-wringing and Monday-morning quarterbacking occasioned by its less-than-bountiful box office, which industry wisdom has it was mostly the result of its three-and-a-quarter hour running time. And then the stand-alone cut of Death Proof (complete with the missing lapdance sequence!), which just played at the Cannes film festival and will open across Europe in July 2007. It's already in theaters in Italy (a stand-alone version of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is scheduled for August).

All that said, maybe the experience of cutting Grindhouse apart will prompt Tarantino to put Kill Bill back together. I'll be first on line, money in hand.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: Tell me it's not true that they're making a He-Man movie with actors – Joey

FlichChick: How I wish I could. But there's a live-action version of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe in development, despite the fact that the live-action Masters of the Universe (1987), starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man (I never tire of typing that ludicrous name) and Frank Langella as the evil Skeletor, was a flop of legendary proportions. The pitch that sold toy-corporation Mattel -- which has been very cautious since Masters of the Universe -- apparently involved visual comparisons to 300 and the idea of creating a Lord of the Rings-style mythology that could be mined repeatedly.

Producer Joel Silver is the driving force behind the project, but I'm sure Warner Bros. was sold by the prospect of a lucrative merchandising deal. The thinking seems to be that moviegoers who grew up on the 1980s' animated series (which came after the action figures -- the show was basically one long commercial) will flock to a feature film for the nostalgia value. The same reasoning produced Transformers, and unless it tanks colossally I'm sure we'll be seeing He-Man next year.

Warners and Silver are also behind a live-action version of the Japanese cartoon series Speed Racer that's pretty far into preproduction. The cast includes Emile Hirsch as Speed,
Susan Sarandon and John Goodman as Mom and Pops and Christina Ricci – who was born to be an anime girl – as Trixie. Matrix directors Larry and Andy Wachowski began shooting Speed Racer in June for a Spring 2008 release.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: Does Ralph Fiennes have some kind of famous uncle? My girlfriend swears he does, but she can't remember where she heard it or any details. – Rob

FlickChick: I'm sure she's thinking of Ranulph Fiennes, who's actually Ralph's cousin. But it's an easy mistake, since Ranulph, 63, is certainly old enough to be the 44-year-old Ralph's uncle. Ranulph Fiennes, is a professional adventurer who spends his time doing things like discovering lost cities, crossing Antarctica on foot and writing books – lots of books. He apparently made it to the short list of candidates to replace Sean Connery in the James Bond franchise – this was at a time when producer Albert Broccoli was casting a wide net that went beyond professional actors -- but was rejected after his first face-to-face meeting with Broccoli. The story is that Broccoli declares that Fiennes had a "face like a farmer," the irony being that he's a bona fide Baronet.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Bob Le Flambeur: A cool, stylish and oh-so-French heist thriller.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

With Ocean's Thirteen opening this Friday, I found myself thinking about some of my favorite heist and caper movies, et voilà, Bob le Flambeur was one of the first to spring to mind. It's this week's DVD Tuesday pick.

The plot is a variation on classic caper themes: 50-year-old Bob Montagne (Roger Duchesne) is a reformed bank robber turned compulsive gambler (a flambeur), currently down on his luck and sensible enough to know he's getting too old to be living hand to hand. But he still has his formidable reputation, his silver-fox good looks and his admirers, including young Paulo, who'd love to be just like Bob when he grows up, but just doesn't have the right stuff. Bob is so effortlessly cool that when he needs a lift home after a night of high-stakes cards, the cops give him a lift. And he maintains a fundamental sense of decency… or perhaps correctness is a better word. In any event, it leads him to rescue superficially tough, teenage Anne (Isabelle Corey) from the clutches of a would-be pimp. She and Paolo begin an affair while Bob and his superannuated pals, acting on an inside tip, put together an elaborate plan to rob Deauville Casino — a job big enough that they can start thinking about genteel retirement.

I'm sure it goes without saying that all does not transpire as planned, because that's also part of the heist formula: the hitch, the last-minute adjustments, the tense moments where it looks as though everything's going straight to hell. Bob le Flambeur has them all. But if it were all about the heist it would bore me to tears. What keeps me coming back to Bob is Bob — or rather, sleekly dissolute star Roger Duchesne — and Paris, which writer-director Jean-Pierre Melville treats as a full-fledged character in her own right. (Come on, you know Paris is a woman.)

Melville, who financed Bob independently and was working on a shoestring budget, shot on the fly, using handheld camera and a skeleton crew to capture the streets of the seedy, sexy quartiers of Montmartre and Pigalle by night. At a time when most French movies — and most American ones as well, for that matter — were shot largely in studios, the guerrilla cinematography gives Bob a stunningly rooted sense of time and place.

Historically, Melville helped pave the way for French New Wave filmmakers like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who also took their cameras to the rues et boulevards and spun variations on American pulp fictions. But on a personal level, I would just love to step into Melville's streets.

Duchesne, who had been a genuine movie star before WWII, was in disrepute when Melville recruited him for Bob: Some accounts said he was a collaborator. Others — including Melville's (and he was Jewish and had no reason to make excuses for Nazi lovers) — claimed Duchesne had gotten involved with gangsters who ran him out of Paris on a rail. In any event, the seductive, lived-in air of world-weary, down-at-the-heels glamour that Duchesne brings to Bob is clearly not just acting. He made only one subsequent film, and by 1971 Melville was claiming that the last he'd heard, Duchesne was selling "cars near the Porte de Champerret."

Bob le Flambeur is one of Melville's lighter films, breezy and knowing, but with that oh-so-French hit of doom beneath the frivolity. It's a glittering, dreamy slice of vintage cool, perfect for a cool summer night or a rainy day.

Things to consider:

Bob le Flambeur is as much about Paris as it is about Bob or the casino heist. What are some of your favorite movies in which a city — London, New Orleans, San Francisco, Tokyo, New York — is a real character, not just a backdrop?

Do you love movies about the city you live in? Cities you'd like to live in?

What's the appeal to filmmakers of gamblers and gambling, the subjects of comedies, Westerns and gut-wrenching dramas alike?

English filmmaker Neil Jordan remade Bob le Flambeur in 2003 as The Good Thief, which I think is a terrific movie in its own right. Are there any remakes you like as much as the original?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases

The 15th MTV Movie Awards were a transformative experience. Really… and not just because of MTV's mega cross-promotion with corporate cousins DreamWorks/Paramount, designed to ensure that no living thing on earth is unaware of the upcoming Transformers movie. I mean, when The Hills' Whitney Port goes shopping for something to wear to the awards, picks a bunch of cool clothes, and then shows up on the red carpet (sorry, the "pink magenta red raspberry carpet," per pre-show correspondent Tim Kash) in her sister's prom dress, she was transformed, all right... into a girl in a second-hand prom dress. And Transformers' win in the Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet category — does anyone really think the fix was in? Come on, everyone wants to see cars turn into CGI robots and scare the bejesus out of Shia LaBeouf, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel and Megan Fox (who also went shopping on camera and was transformed into something resembling a Barbie cake-topper stuck on an oversized lampshade with a pink ruffle; the spaghetti-strap top guaranteed that no one, not even the legally blind, could fail to see the huge, awesomely misguided Marilyn Monroe tattoo on her forearm). But enough about the sponsors.

Sarah Silverman: love her. Presiding over the first MTV Movie Awards to be broadcast live, she noted every technical slipup (like that hilariously late sound effect when she slammed down a great big switch) and jumped on every gaffe. She took Spider-Man 3 to task for racism — Exhibit A: the minute Spider-Man turned black, Peter Parker could dance. At that moment the director cut to Samuel L. Jackson's reaction. Hey, is the black guy laughing?

Silverman apparently offended rambling, shambling, randy old goat Jack Nicholson — who beat out Saw III's Tobin Bell, Pirates 3' Bill Nighy, 300's Rodrigo Santoro and The Devil Wears Prada's Meryl Streep in the Best Villain category — by gushing that he's been in all her favorite actresses. Good girl. And getting a big, sulky pout out of 100 percent talent-free celebutante Paris Hilton for joking that when she goes to jail, the guards plan to make her feel at home by painting the bars to look like penises? Even better: It almost purged the memory of pink-carpet puff-slinger SuChin Pak commiserating with poor, pitiful Paris about her fear of going to the slammer. Silverman only said the word "vagina" once, and she handed Johnny Knoxville the opportunity to simultaneously mock Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep while inviting her to "ride his purple pony." She also demonstrated that "t-ts" is no longer one of the seven words you can't say on television (note to George Carlin: rework that riff) and warned winners to "please keep your speeches short. Nobody cares." Slash and burn, baby… slash and burn. And yes, I googled "Cisco Adler's balls." Thanks for that, Sarah.

Worst presenter banter: Knocked Up's Seth Rogan and Ghost Rider's Eva Mendes on "schlubby Jew sperm." Not funny and seriously cringe-worthy. (Note to Sony: you can flog the upcoming Ghost Rider DVD on every corner of the MTV site, but it will still be flamingly lame.)

Most sincere thanks to Andy Signore, who took home — and richly deserved — the Movie Spoof award for his mash-up United 300. "Oh, my god, I won," he yelped" "Un-bleeping-believable!" Even his prefab quip à la Leonidas — "Tonight I dine at Spago!" — was pretty funny. Now if he could just learn to pronounce "tyranny." Note to Andy: it doesn't start like "Ty-rese."

Biggest hand of the evening to the unkempt Johnny Depp, winning Best Performance for Pirates 2. The guy couldn't get a word in — though he did gamely promise to "take it all off." He didn't. But he did come back for Pirates' Best Movie win, thanking everyone but la famille. Maybe his significant other back home in la belle France told him not to waste his time making bourgeois Hollywood pabulum. You know how the French are about le cinéma.

Most disingenuous moment: The "we're just folks" Will Smiths pitching in to help 9-year-old Jaden — who was on location and couldn't collect his Breakthrough Performance award for playing his father's son, better known as himself, in The Pursuit of Happyness — deliver his pretaped acceptance speech. Gag me.

Best Shameless But Clever Commercial Tie-in: The Orbit Dirtiest Mouth Moment, presented by Orbit gum girl Vanessa Branch (who, by the way, has a small part in Pirates 2 and 3 as a lady of ill repute). Clerks II took the prize in an admirably potty-mouthed field, beating out Smokin' Aces, Jackass: Number Two and Employee of the Month. How did MTV not come up with a "copious cussing" category way back when?

Most Amazing Achievement: No, not that Amy Winehouse managed not to pass out while performing "Rehab," scary skinny as she is. It's that the show came in on time: two hours, on the nose, live. Note to the Academy: Are you taking notes?