Ask FlickChick

Ask FlickChick: When movie animals attack, gill men and more movie questions...

Question: I just saw that there's a movie about killer sheep being released on DVD. Is it some kind of joke or is it serious? I started wondering about other "horror" movies with animal killers, but after the one about the killer rabbits, I couldn't come up with any others. Can you? — Carlos

FlickChick: First, the movie you're talking about is the New Zealand-made Black Sheep (2006) and it's neither entirely serious nor seriously joking. Hard though it may be to believe, it's really clever, occasionally very funny and gets in a couple of genuine scare sequences. And really, are killer sheep so much sillier than killer birds? Not eagles and hawks and other major winged predators, but finches and seagulls and other run-of-the-mill birds — they're the villains in The Birds (1963), and while it's not one of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock films, it's generally well regarded.

The ridiculous rabbit film you mention is, of course, the notorious Night of the Lepus (1972), and I don't care how big the mutated bunnies are… they're bunnies and I just can't get too scared. The same goes for The Killer Shrews (1959)…. Again, they're shrews, and I don't care how big they are. That said, the fact that they're clearly dogs strapped into some kind of half-assed hairy shrew costumes doesn't help.

Absolutely terrible special effects also sink the monsters of Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959); leeches at least are nasty and blood sucking, so I could buy them being scary if they didn't look like men wearing garbage bags. Sharp little teeth and claws notwithstanding, I also didn't buy the menace in Eye of the Cat (1969). "Cat" like pussycat, not tiger.

Worms also don't strike me as inherently scary, but there are actually some pretty good moments in Squirm (1976) due to the fact that these particular worms have become electrified and bite and there are a whole hell of a lot of them. Killer frogs… hmm, even if they were giant frogs like the one on the poster with the itty-bitty human hand hanging out of its great green maw, I'm not so sure. But the frogs in Frogs (1972) are just little guys. Some people find the film camp fun, but I'm not one of them.

Pigs, on the other hand, I can sort of buy — I remember thinking Razorback (1984) was a pretty nifty little thriller.

Suggestions, anyone?

Question: You probably can't answer this question because the only thing I remember about the movie I'm looking for — which was most likely made in the 1950s or '60s — is the line "The food... it burns." It was a scary/eerie type of movie. Any ideas? — David

FlickChick: I actually recognize that quote, mostly because it comes from one of my favorite low-budget sci-fi/horror films of the 1950s: Quatermass 2/Enemy from Space (1957). As the U.K. title makes clear, it's the middle film in the trilogy that began with The Quatermass Experiment/The Creeping Unknown (1956) and ended with Quatermass and the Pit (1968).

The plot involves scientist Bernard Quatermass' (a miscast Brian Donlevy) efforts to find out exactly what's going on in a remote facility hidden deep in the English countryside. The complex, dominated by a series of geodesic domes, is supposedly producing artifcial food and has the support of a number of highly placed government figures. Quatermass persuades a sympathetic member of parliament, Vincent Broadhead, to let him join an official tour of the place, and while sneaking around on his own, Broadhead slips and winds up in a vat of whatever is actually being produced. His skin blackened and bubbling, he moans, "The food… it burns." To say more is to reveal the film's spectacularly paranoid twist.

Question: I heard a while ago that Hayden Christensen was filming a movie with Johnny Depp and Leelee Sobieski called something like Nailed Right In. Then nothing. Can you tell me what happened to it? — Juliet

FlickChick: Nailed Right In first surfaced in 2001 as a semiautobiographical project scripted by Sopranos writer-producer Terence Winter. Griffin Dunne was scheduled to direct, with Hayden Christensen as Michael Turner, a young man living in a 1985 Brooklyn neighborhood where being part of the mafia was a great career move; though he wants to move up and out and has taken the first step by being accepted at Columbia University, loyalty to his old friends keeps dragging him back into the kind of situations he wants to escape. Johnny Depp was supposed to play a midlevel mobster and Leelee Sobieski was attached as the Connecticut WASP Michael meets in school.

It was scheduled to begin shooting in New York in September 2001, but production was delayed because of the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center. By the time the project came back together, the entire original cast was gone, replaced by Freddie Prinze Jr., Alec Baldwin and Mena Suvari. Michael Corrente took over as director and the title was changed to Brooklyn Rules. It finally opened in May 2007.

Question: I promised myself it would never come to this, but after years of searching — Internet, movie guides, etc. — I am forced to bow to your wisdom. Many years ago (how often do you read that old line?) I saw a movie on TV. It was about a group of people who venture to an underwater base (or submarine) and encounter a deranged scientist who transforms people into sea creatures who would do his bidding. The people were placed into tubes and exposed to some sort of chemical that caused them to grow gills and webbing on their hands and feet. The movie may have been made in Japan and my recollection is that it was an older movie, maybe from the late 1960s or early '70s. I still have delusional flashbacks about this film and was wondering if it rings any bells. — Ray

FlickChick: Yes and no. I haven't seen this movie, but the description sounds like Terror Beneath the Sea (1966), which was produced by Japan's Toie Studio and features future martial arts favorite Sonny Chiba as a reporter doing a story about an atomic submarine. He and a female American journalist stumble onto a mad scientist who's creating an army of computer-controlled gill men as part of some vague plan to create an underwater utopia. Dark Star Films put it out on DVD a couple of years ago — if you have a chance to check it out, let me know whether it's the source of your "delusional flashbacks."

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

So, Denzel Washington is starring in a remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) for director Tony Scott, with a new screenplay by David Koepp. Now, Washington and Koepp are very talented and Scott can get a movie made, but among movies in no need of remaking, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three ranks high on the list. So this week's DVD Tuesday is dedicated to the original, in all its grimy glory.

How do you steal a New York City subway train? Former movie publicist Morton Freedgood figured out a way, and his 1973 novel, written under the pseudonym "John Godey," was snapped up before publication and immediately put into production under director Joseph Sargent and screenwriter Peter Stone. Needless to say, city officials and representatives of the Metropolitan Transit Authority weren't wild about the story of four identically dressed hijackers, hiding behind color-coded nicknames (what's betting this is where Quentin Tarantino, connoisseur of all things down and dirty, got the idea for Reservoir Dogs?), separating the first car of a Manhattan-bound number 6 train (yes, the line Jennifer Lopez immortalized with her album On the 6) from the rest and holding the conductor and 17 passengers hostage for $1 million. If the City of New York — which, bear in mind, was in such severe fiscal distress in the early 1970s that it was bankrupt by 1975 — doesn't deliver the money in exactly one hour, they'll begin executing hostages. One hostage every minute until the money arrives.

Transit Authority Police Lieutenant Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), who's busy making an ass of himself in front of a group of executives from the Tokyo Metropolitan Subway System taking an official tour of New York's internationally acclaimed public transportation network, winds up being the official liaison between the hijackers — Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), Mr. Green (Martin Balsam), Mr. Grey (Hector Elizondo) and Mr. Brown (Earl Hindman) — and everyone else, including the mayor, the NYPD (the transit police and the aboveground police were two different forces then, under the same ultimate command but functioning independently) and his own bosses, including the controller (character actor Dick O'Neill), who sputters "Screw the passengers! What do they expect for 35 cents — to live forever?" Uh-huh, back then it cost a whole 35 cents to ride NYC's dirty, dangerous, graffiti-smeared trains, and "screw the passengers" pretty much summed up what riders figured the MTA thought of them.

I love movies set in New York during the 1960s and '70s in general, and I love movies set in subways, including The Incident (1967), The Warriors (1979) and even the recent Hungarian feature Kontroll (2004). So it stands to reason that I especially love a deeply cynical, bitterly funny movie set in the New York subway in the '70s. The back-and-forth between Matthau and Shaw is priceless, and Tony Roberts and Jerry Stiller deliver excellent supporting turns — especially Roberts, as the ruthlessly pragmatic deputy mayor.

PS: "Pelham One Two Three" alludes to where and when the train left its home base: Pelham Station in the Bronx, at 1:23.

Things to consider:

Claustrophobic thrillers set in subways, submarines, airplanes and the like — do you have a favorite, or do they set your teeth on edge?

New York movies — do you have a favorite period? The glamorous '50s? The anxious '60s? The jazzy '40s? Specific films?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
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

Question: There's a new movie with Brad Pitt as Jesse James — can you tell me who else has played him and who was the best in the part? — Sean
FlickChick: The role of the legendary bad man, most recently undertaken by Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, has traditionally been a favorite of handsome leading men, including Colin Farrell in American Outlaws (2001), Rob Lowe in the made-for-cable Frank and Jesse (1994), Tyrone Power in 1939's Jesse James (he appears briefly in 1940's highly historically inaccurate sequel The Return of Frank James, but Jesse's older brother, Frank, was played by Henry Fonda), future TV Superman George Reeves in The Kansan (1943) and Robert Wagner in The True Story of Jesse James (1957). Even James Dean gave it a whirl in the second episode of popular historical reenactment series You Are There (1953-56), hosted by Walter Cronkite.

But pretty boys don't have a lock on the role. Witness Kris Kristofferson in the 1986 made-for-TV movie The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (Johnny Cash was Frank), Robert Duvall in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), acclaimed stage actor Harris Yulin in the made-for-TV Last Ride of the Dalton Gang (1979) and James Keach in The Long Riders (1980). Walter Hill's Long Riders was built around what could have been a mere PR stunt: The James gang was full of brothers, so Hill assembled a cast of real-life brothers — James and Stacy Keach as Jesse and Frank; David, Keith and Robert Carradine as Cole, Jim and Bob Younger; Dennis and Randy Quaid as Ed and Clell Miller; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as Charlie and Bob Ford. But since they're all terrific actors, the ploy worked beautifully.

Legendary film-noir tough guy Lawrence Tierney (whose dormant career got a late-life shot in the arm via Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs), was as truculent and troublesome off screen as he was on; he played James in Badman's Territory (1946) and Best of the Badmen (1951). So did Clayton Moore, right before he shot to early TV fame as the squeaky-clean star of The Lone Ranger (1949-57), in Jesse James Rides Again (1947) and The Adventures of Frank and Jesse James (1948). "King of the Cowboys" Roy Rogers played both a virtuous James and the look-alike baddie out to ruin the outlaw's good name in the novelty Jesse James at Bay (1941).

Silent-Western star Fred Thomson played him in Jesse James (1927). Although he's forgotten today by all but hardcore old-movie/Western buffs, in his day Thomson was as popular as Tom Mix. And in one of the odder intersections of fact and fiction, Jesse James' son, a lawyer, played his father in two silent films: The Outlaw and Jesse James Under the Black Flag (both 1921). He was billed as Jesse James Jr., though his name was actually Jesse Edward James (his father was Jesse Woodson James) and for a while he called himself Tim Edwards to escape his notorious heritage. James' sister, Mary, appeared with him in Jesse James Under the Black Flag.

Other movie Jesse Jameses include:

Low-budget Western regular Donald Barry, in Days of Jesse James (1939) and Jesse James' Women (1954); Alan Baxter, in Bad Men of Missouri (1941); Keith Richards, in The James Brothers of Missouri (1949); Reed Hadley, in I Shot Jesse James (1949); Dale Robertson, later star of the TV Westerns Tales of Wells Fargo (1957) and The Iron Horse (1966), in Fighting Man of the Plains (1949); war hero turned actor Audie Murphy, as a young and impressionable Jesse in Kansas Raiders (1950) and the aging outlaw in A Time for Dying (1969); Macdonald Carey, who went on to a three-decade run in the popular soap Days of our Lives, in The Great Missouri Raid (1951); Willard Parker, in The Great Jesse James Raid (1953); Harry Lauter, in Outlaw Treasure (1955); Henry Brandon, in Hell's Crossroads (1957); Wendell Corey, in Alias Jesse James (1959); Ray Stricklyn, in Young Jesse James (1960); TV sportscaster Wayne Mack, in the Three Stooges feature The Outlaws Is Coming (1965); John Lupton, in the ludicrous Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966); and Stuart Margolin, in the made-for-TV The Intruders (1970).

As to who was the best Jesse James, I suppose that depends on how you define best. And I must confess that I don't much care for Westerns, so I haven't seen most of these films. I love both The Long Riders and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, and Keach and Duvall — both thoughtful, subtle actors — are excellent in them. But for a Jesse James fan, there might not be enough James, since both are ensemble pieces.

The consensus is that Tyrone Power — then 24 and at the height of his youthful handsomeness — gives a hugely charismatic performance as the Jesse James of legend: dashing, honorable and oh-so-sexy. And a lot of people think highly of Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James (1957), which layers a heavy '50s psychoanalytic spin (ΰ la Rebel Without a Cause) onto the same basic story as the Power version. That said, there's a widespread feeling that Robert Wagner — the quintessential pretty boy — wasn't up to Ray's ideas, and that had James Dean not died two years earlier, Ray would certainly have given the part to him.

Question: I seem to remember an Inspector Clouseau movie that did not star Peter Sellers and wasn't directed by Blake Edwards. What's the story? — Stephen
FlickChick: That would be Inspector Clouseau (1968), the third film in the Pink Panther series.

The Pink Panther (1963), written by Blake Edwards and Maurice Richlin and directed by Edwards, was a flukey success for the Mirisch Corporation and United Artists. A light crime comedy, it revolved around an aristocratic jewel thief, Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven), and his plan to steal a fabulous pink diamond — the titular Pink Panther. Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau was a secondary character, but audiences loved him and the Mirisch Corporation immediately put into production a sequel built around Clouseau.

Edwards and his cowriter, William Peter Blatty (yes, the author of The Exorcist), took a Broadway play called L'Idiot, originally penned by French screenwriter Marcel Achard and then rewritten for the American stage by playwright Harry Kurnitz, and turned it into a Clouseau story. That was A Shot in the Dark (1964). It, too, was a success — many people consider it the best film in the series — and the Mirisch Corporation, naturally enough, wanted another Clouseau picture.

But Edwards and Sellers wanted to move on and were developing a satirical project called The Party. Writers Tom and Frank Waldman, who had collaborated with Edwards in the past and later worked on The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) and The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), concocted a script, and Bud Yorkin, who later cocreated TV's All in the Family with Norman Lear, signed on as director. Alan Arkin was tapped to step in for Sellers. That was Inspector Clouseau (1968), and it was not a hit. So there were no more Pink Panther films until Edwards and Sellers were willing to come back, which wasn't until 1975's The Return of the Pink Panther.

Question: What's the name of the toy store in Home Alone 2, and is it the real name of the store? If not, what is the real name? — Lynn
FlickChick: It's Duncan's Toy Store, and was obviously meant to evoke the legendary FAO Schwarz. Duncan's is a set.

Question: I'm trying to remember a movie from the early 1990s, I think. I thought the name of the movie was "Median," but I can't find it on IMDb. I know it was a horror/suspense/murder movie about a psychiatrist who wore a leather mask to brutally kill people, while another man was blamed for the murders. Somehow he winds up in a town called Median. Can you help? — Teresa
FlickChick: You're looking for English horror writer Clive Barker's Nightbreed (1990), his follow-up to Hellraiser (1987). Median is where the monsters go, and it's where a troubled young man (the reliably wooden Craig Sheffer) winds up after being killed by the police, who have been convinced by his psychiatrist that he's a serial murderer. The psychiatrist is played by none other than Canadian director David Cronenbeg, whose credits range from They Came from Within (1975) to the new Eastern Promises (2007), and who's not a bad actor — a damn sight better than Sheffer, that's for sure.

Despite the fact that Hellraiser became an instant genre hit and spawned both the cult of Pinhead and a slew of sequels, Nightbreed was dumped into a handful of theaters with no ad campaign. It's a deeply flawed film, but it deserved better and has found an appreciative audience on video and DVD.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

David Fincher's Zodiac (2007) strikes me as a fascinating companion piece to last week's DVD Tuesday pick, Manhunter (1986). While both are about the hunt for a serial killer and the toll it takes on the investigators, Manhunter is pure fiction inspired by the work of the FBI's behavioral science unit, while Zodiac (unlike 1971's Dirty Harry or the 2006 Zodiac, which also took their inspiration from the case) hews closely to the facts of a nearly 40-year-old unsolved case.

The killer dubbed "Zodiac" — after a cryptic symbol with which he signed a series of taunting letters to the media and the police — is credited with seven murderous attacks committed between December 1968 and October 1969 in and around the San Francisco Bay Area; two victims survived and five died. Zodiac (and/or one or more copycats) played ruthless games with the police, claiming dozens of victims who died or vanished both before and after the acknowledged 1968-'69 spree. He or they sent ciphers, postcards, poems and various other communications through the mail, made taunting calls and even arranged a televised telephone conversation with noted attorney Marvin "King of Torts" Belli (perhaps better known today for his appearance on the Star Trek episode "And the Children Shall Lead" than for his then-stellar roster of celebrity clients, and played by Brian Cox, Manhunter's Dr. Lector).

Zodiac played on popular fears of the counterculture, cults, Satanism, sex- and drug-crazed hippies, and the general unraveling of conservative, law-abiding mores like a pro. Fincher's film was a critical hit, but audiences didn't warm to it; I suspect part of the reason is that a lot of younger moviegoers weren't familiar with the case and, having no idea it was unsolved, were disappointed when the film ends on an ambiguous, unresolved note.

I think if you go in knowing there's no resolution in the offing, you're in a better position to focus on the personal turmoil of the cops, reporters and forensic experts who immersed themselves in the hunt for a vicious killer who got away and publicly humiliated them in the process.

Fincher opens with the 1969 lover's-lane shootings of Michael Renault Mageau and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin (he survived, she didn't) and ends more than 20 years later with the tantalizing suggestion that one of the suspects (John Carroll Lynch) interviewed during the original investigation may well have been the killer. Fincher re-creates the killings, but his focus is the men in the eye of the storm: San Francisco PD inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) — the model for Steve McQueen's character in Bullit (1968) — and his partner, Inspector William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), Vallejo Police Department Sergeant Jack Mulanax (Elias Koteas), hard-drinking and -drugging San Francisco Examiner reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Avery's colleague editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose gift for working puzzles thrust him into the forefront of the investigation (his books about the Zodiac killer were among Fincher's primary source materials). All emerged from the investigation changed men, touched by a malignant darkness they could neither understand nor escape.

And just as Manhunter owns "Innagadadavida" for all time, Zodiac now owns Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," whose slyly insinuating tune and hippie-dippy lyrics will now forever sound to me eerie and faintly menacing.

Things to consider:

What are your thoughts about the argument that people like crime movies because they deliver a sense of closure and the restoration of order that's all too often missing in real life?

What true-crime cause haunts or fascinates you?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
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

Ask FlickChick: Yes, there is a real "body-snatching psychosis, why Hollywood loves remakes, why critics hate Stephen King and more...


Question: I just saw the new Nicole Kidman movie Invasion with my girlfriend and she insists there's a real disease where people think their friends and family have been replaced by duplicates. That sounds crazy to me — I think there have just been so many versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that people think it's a real thing. What do you think? — Erik

FlickChick: Amazingly enough, there is a real psychological disorder called Capgras Syndrome whose sufferers are convinced that their loved ones are no longer their loved ones, just like the characters in the four adaptations to date of Jack Finney's allegorical science-fiction novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The delusion is named for French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, who first described it in 1923. It remains something of a mystery and can take several forms: Sometimes people don't recognize their own reflections, others think that their pets or possessions have been mysteriously, inexplicably replaced.

I've never been able to find any evidence that Finney was aware that Capgras Syndrome had a name, but he describes it flawlessly in his book, the metaphorical underpinnings of which are flexible enough to support a variety of readings. And while The Invasion (2007) really is a disaster, the 1956 and 1978versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are both terrific movies, and Abel Ferrara's 1994 Body Snatchers is a solid enough variation on a theme.

On a vaguely related note (truth is stranger than fiction), researchers have just discovered that moray eels have a second interior set of jaws that jut out of the eels' throats when they feed. Sound familiar? Think Alien (1979) and its sequels. H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the alien, sounded just about as surprised as felt when a journalist called him for a comment. "The double teeth came when I did my first drawings," he told the New York Times. "[Director] Ridley Scott told me to make it so that it could move. I hadn’t studied any animal. My instructions were that it should be somehow frightening and horrible, and I did my best."

Question: Is it just because I'm 57 years old or is it just that this generation of movie makers has no imagination? Why does every movie, TV show and game have to be "retooled" for a new generation? I'm sick of reruns and refuse to go to the movies anymore. My library card is getting a workout though! — Marge

FlickChick: Nope. It's not just you, Marge. I, too, am sick to death of remakes, do-overs, reimaginings, knockoffs, spin-offs and rip-offs. It's not that "Hollywood" — which I'm using rather imprecisely as a synonym for the American entertainment industry — is bereft of ideas. Most writers, directors and producers don't sit around dreaming of being the visionary responsible for a big-screen remake of cornpone series The Dukes of Hazzard. But they all want to work, so if they have to make The Dukes of Hazzard to pay the mortgage and stay on the industry radar so that maybe one day they can make that movie they've been dreaming about for years, they make The Dukes of Hazzard.

The movie industry has changed enormously in the last 35 years: I'm not going to wallow in the "Jaws and/or Star Wars ruined the motion picture industry" rant, but the one-two punch of their stupendous successes — a pair of cheesy B movies writ large, glossy and irresistible — changed the way studio executives thought about their business.

For most of the medium's history, studio heads sought to spread the risk around: Every year they assembled a large slate of diverse titles — different genres, different lengths, different budgets — and figured the hits would make up for the misses. They were also fine with the idea that popular pictures would pay for prestige movies that lent a little class to the bread-and-butter Westerns, romances and horror pictures.

Post Star Wars and Jaws, executives started looking for the big score, happy to spend a lot of money on the one picture that was going to make a mega-load of money.

The more money studios were planning to pour into one picture, the less studio executives were inclined to mess around. They made a concerted effort to wrest creative control away from unpredictable filmmakers and discover formulas that worked every time. Focus groups took on ever-increasing importance, asking people what they wanted to see and what they thought of what they had just seen. Would you be interested in seeing a movie about this subject? With that established star? This hot up-and-comer? Would you be more interested if the main character were a woman? A talking dog? How about if we made it funny/scary/set on Mars? And the thing about remakes is that they have a high preexisting factor. You may not have watched Starkey and Hutch, but you know it was a cop show and for a while people talked about it constantly. And so, the conclusion goes, if you're looking to go to the movies and you have a choice between a Starsky and Hutch movie and some other picture you don't know anything whatsoever about, you're going to lean towards the devil you know. And that, in a nutshell, is why we're going to be seeing everything from a live-action Speed Racer movie to a feature film remake of the classic PBS miniseries I, Claudius.

Question: I was watching TV Guide Network and saw a review and clip of a movie with a young man — possibly Keanu Reeves — who had a moderate brain injury and befriended another man (Jeff Daniels?) who was blind. It looked like a great movie, but I missed the name. Can you help me? — Sandy

FlickChick: That would have been a great little movie called The Lookout (2007) — the young man is former 3rd Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Leavitt rather than Keanu Reeves, but you're right about the other actor — it's Jeff Daniels, in fine form.

Question: I'm always amused when I see comments like yours about the "generally dismal history" of Stephen King movie adaptations. Guess you've never heard of Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Misery, The Shining and Carrie. I believe all of these (and several others) were successful — both with critics and at the box office. Why is it that King's successes are so often overlooked? (Or maybe the better question is why does he get the blame for the clunkers, while the directors and actors get the credit for the good ones?) — Jack

FlickChick: First, yes I have heard of all the titles you mentioned: They're six of the more than 100 movies (theatrical, made-for-TV, direct to video/DVD) based on Stephen King stories and they're good. Most of the others range from OK to awful, hence "generally dismal."

Second, I won't presume to speak for other critics, but I think Stephen King is a terrible writer. He has great ideas and he pounds most of them into the ground with the sheer weight of careless storytelling, clichιd characters, tone-deaf language, excessive subplots and lazy reliance on brand names to establish atmosphere and ambience. When people say King's writing is "cinematic," what they're really saying is that you sure as hell don't read him for the writing. He writes too much and, especially at this point in his career, gets edited too little.

Good filmmakers — Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Frank Darabont et al — keep the good parts of King's plotting and bring their own imaginations in to replace the junk they throw away. Good actors find layers and subtleties in broadly written characters. Bad filmmakers just slog around in the mire. Hence, filmmakers get credit for the good movies and King takes the rap for the rest.

The odd thing is that King is an astute judge of other people's work — I read his column in Entertainment Weekly regularly. But he can't seem to turn that same discerning eye on himself.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

DVD Tuesday: Dr. Lecter made a stunning entrance in Michael Mann's eerie, seductively stylish Manhunter, and he wasn't Anthony Hopkins!

Let us now praise Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986), one of my favorite movies, the beginning of the twisted Doctor Lecter saga and to my mind one of the most underappreciated films of the 1980s.

Make no mistake, The Silence of the Lambs is a terrific movie and I'm thrilled that it walked away with five top-tier Oscars: best picture, actor, actress, director and adapted screenplay. Genre movies don't ordinarily get that kind of recognition.

But for my money, Scottish-born, Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts-trained Brian Cox (now such a successful Hollywood character actor that people forget or never knew he isn't American) is the ultimate Lecter, a brilliant, cold and utterly remorseless sociopath whose sense of humor is so dry you could pack eyeballs in it. To be sure, Welsh-born Anthony Hopkins is also a RADA grad. But by comparison, he's one great big juicy hambone… heresy perhaps, but true.

And while Brett Ratner's Red Dragon (2002) is more literal-mindedly faithful to the events of Thomas Harris' brutal, dreamy 1981 novel, Manhunter nails every beat of its dark, twisted heart.

In an era when the term "profiler" is so familiar you can use it as the title of a TV show, it's hard to imagine what a disturbing revelation the story of tormented profiler Will Graham (CSI's William Petersen) and his relationship with both the stone-cold Lecter and pitiable-but-lethal head case Francis Dollarhyde (actor-playwright Tom Noonan) was.

The idea that you should "set a thief to catch a thief" dates back to the fourth-century BC Greek poet Callimachus, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) warned that if you look too long and deeply into the abyss, it will inevitably look back at you. But Thomas Harris rolled them into a gripping, compulsively readable story about an FBI profiler who fled the business after his empathetic link with Lecter nearly cost him his life. He's hauled back in by canny cop Jack Crawford (ex-cop Dennis Farina, portrayed in Silence by Scott Glenn) who doesn't care who he sacrifices in the cause of stopping the baroque butcher nicknamed the "Tooth Fairy" (he bites), who's already slaughtered two families and is, even as they investigate, hard at work choosing families Nos. 3 and 4 and 5 and who knows how many more.

The thing about Manhunter — the title was changed from Red Dragon because some marketing guru thought it sounded like a martial-arts movie — is that it's so limpidly seductive: The sequence in which Dollarhyde takes his blind coworker (a very young Joan Allen) behind the scenes at the zoo so she can stroke an anesthetized tiger is simply mesmerizing. I remember picking up a phone message from a friend who was working on the Manhunter trailer campaign — someone who was no fan of genre pictures — telling me that she was working on this movie that I'd probably never heard of, but it had this amazing scene with a blind lady and a tiger... and thinking, this isn't just one for the genre fans. This is one for the ages. Seriously: last week I put the disc in to check a minor detail and the next thing I knew I'd watched 45 minutes.

And let's not forget Mann's use of Iron Butterfly's dope-addled "Innagadadavida." Quentin Tarantino famously said, "If a song in a movie is used really well, as far as I’m concerned, that movie owns that song, it can never be used again." Like, say, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and "Stuck in the Middle with You" or Pulp Fiction (1994) and "Misirlou." Manhunter owns "Innagadadavida," the song playing as Graham intrudes on Dollarhyde's William Blake-inspired fantasies. Before Manhunter, "Innagadadavida" smacked of cheesy high-school basement parties. Now it's tinged with throbbing existential horror.

Things to consider:

What song is inextricably linked in your mind with a movie?

What's the first serial-killer film you ever saw (for me it was M, with Peter Lorre), and what's your favorite?

Why does Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter appeal so strongly to the popular culture?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetιe
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