Ask FlickChick

Ask FlickChick: 10 great rock-'n-roll pictures, and more movie questions answered…

Question: I really liked the last two "Ask FlickChick" columns — I love best and worst lists, especially when I disagree with them! So now I have a question: What do you think is the best rock movie? My favorites include Quadrophenia and Almost Famous. — Steve R.

FlickChick: This is a tough one, because it depends on how you define a rock-'n-roll movie: I love Quadrophenia (1979), for example, but it's not really about rock 'n roll, even though it's powered by the music of The Who.

And I'm inclined to separate documentaries and fiction films: Movies like Woodstock (1970), The Last Waltz (1978), Stop Making Sense (1984), The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), Don't Look Back (1967) and Gimme Shelter (1970) are breathtaking documents of particular places and times in the cultural history of rock music.

But I don't think you can judge them by the same standards as fiction films trying to grapple with rock music's power, its appeal to both fans and musicians, and the ways in which it affects and is affected (and co-opted) by larger culture forces. I know, that sounds very academic: But I think what makes Almost Famous (2000) great is exactly the way in which it parses the allure, the passion, the pretension, the pettiness, the compromises and the sheer inchoate power of rock music.

So here are my picks:

1. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Why it's great: Because if any movie ever epitomized the axiom that if you didn't laugh, you'd cry, it's Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer's mock-rockumentary about the outrageous fortunes of the ultimate rock-'n-roll survivors, from their flower-power beginnings to their umpteenth incarnation as heavy metal morons. There's a fine line between stupid and clever, and Spinal Tap negotiates it flawlessly.

2. Expresso Bongo (1959)

Why it's great: Because it evokes both the innocent verve of early rock music and the brilliant cynicism of opportunists waiting to exploit it, and because it showcases perennial U.K. pop star Cliff Richard as overnight sensation "Bongo" Herbert and future Manchurian Candidate Lawrence Harvey as the small-time hustler convinced he's found his ticket to the big time.

3. A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Why it's great: Because director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen simultaneously capture The Beatles at the height of their youthful exuberance and evoke the moment when rock music helped lift England from its post-World War II doldrums.

4. Privilege (1967)

Why it's great: Because pioneering mockumentarian Peter Watkins saw exactly how rock's rebellious posturing was going to be co-opted by mainstream corporate and political interests, and because it stars charismatic Manfred Mann frontman Paul Jones and '60s It Girl Jean Shrimpton — a supermodel long before the term was coined.

5. Almost Famous (2000)

Why it's great: Because writer-director Cameron Crowe's quasi-autobiographical paean to the music that shaped and defined his generation both captures the allure of the arena-rock '70s and acknowledges that that was when rock 'n roll well and truly sold its soul.

6. Performance (1970)

Why it's great: Because directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg cut to the heart of rock stardom's sympathy for the devil, because übergroupie Anita Pallenberg was never lovelier (in a dazed and confused kind of way), because Mick Jagger's eerie evocation of founding Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who died in 1969 at the age of 27, is almost too painful to watch, and because the stand-alone "Memo from Turner" sequence is the best MTV video made before MTV was so much as a glimmer on the cultural horizon.

7. Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains (1981)

Why it's great: Because it nails the amoral, opportunistic allure of U.S. punk, and showcases an astonishing array of up-and-comers and bona fide rockers: Fee Waybill of The Tubes ("She's a Beauty"), The Clash's Paul Cook and Steve Jones, alongside fresh faces Diane Lane (17), Laura Dern (15) and Marin Kanter (virtually superannuated at 22) as teenage wastelanders scrambling for a way out of blue-collar lives of quiet desperation. Directed by Rocky Horror impresario Lou Adler and written by Jonathan Demme and Nancy Dowd, it may be the greatest rock movie you can't rent or buy.

8. Sid and Nancy (1986)

Why it's great: Because Alex Cox saw through the posturing to the dark heart of prefab punk nihilism, and because Chloe Webb and Gary Oldman are nothing short of brilliant as hapless Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and bipolar groupie Nancy Spungen, whose amour fou could never have gone anywhere except where it did: straight to Hell.

9. 24-Hour Party People (2001)

Why it's great: Because no one will ever make a wittier, more clear-eyed film about the emergence of the Manchester sound and the way the 1970s U.K. punk scene — equal parts politics and working-class despair — imploded in the go-go '80s.

10. Prey for Rock & Roll (2003)

Why it's great: Because it's not — it's a scrappy, desperate, besotted paean to the price of staying too long at the party. Based on a play by onetime punk rocker Cheri Lovedog, it stars Gina Gershon as the tattooed lead singer of Clam Dandy, a dedicated rock chick who's pushing 40 and still playing entry-level gigs.

Question: When I was just a kid, I saw part of a movie on TV that I think was based on the story The Most Dangerous Game, because there was an African-American man running from a bunch of men with guns, and there was someone else following in a helicopter and another man tracking him from some kind of security center. My babysitter turned it off and for years I've been trying to figure out what it was. Whenever I describe it, people say it's Hard Target, but it's not — it was older. Can you help? — Harvey

FlickChick: I think I can. I see why people keep suggesting that you're looking for Hard Target (1993), John Woo's first U.S. film: It's very much a variation on The Most Dangerous Game and the human victims of the depraved millionaire's club who get their kicks hunting humans, including an African-American man. But given that you're looking for something older, my mind goes to The Beast Must Die (1974).

The hitch is that it's not a Most Dangerous Game variation: It's a horror/mystery hybrid in which an eccentric, hugely wealthy hunting enthusiast who believes that one of his friends is a werewolf invites all the candidates to his private island in hopes of unmasking — and bagging — the beast. But it opens with a long sequence exactly like the one you describe — the twist is that the hunted turns out to be the hunter. The man on the run is actually fabulously wealthy Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart), testing the state-of-the-art tracking and surveillance systems he's had installed in preparation for his werewolf hunt.

Not a good movie by any standard, but one of which I have fond memories: The Beast Must Die is one of the very first films I ever saw on 42nd Street, on a double bill with Oliver Stone's directing debut, Seizure (1974). The stellar exploitation cast includes Anton Diffring, Peter Cushing, Charles Gray (The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Dr. Scott), blaxploitation favorite Marlene Clarke and a young Michael Gambon, who took over the role of Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore from the late Richard Harris.

The film is also famous (in a very culty way) for its 11th-hour "Werewolf Break," during which viewers were supposed to review the clues and decide which guest was the secret wolf.

Question: When I watch Pirates of the Caribbean, with Johnny Depp, I see the character of Davey Jones as being developed or based upon the great actor Jack Palance. Is there any fact or storyline behind them basing it on him? — Tim

FlickChick: None at all, though Jack Palance did play pirate Long John Silver in a generally reviled 1999 version of Treasure Island. But I've heard a number of people compare Palance's voice to that of Bill Nighy, the U.K. actor behind the computer-generated Davey Jones — perhaps that's what made you think of Palance.

Question: I know I'm in the minority of people who liked the Harold Pinter version of Sleuth that just came out, and Michael Caine was, of course, great in it. I was looking him up in IMDb, and it claims there that "Upon meeting Laurence Olivier for the first time on the set of [the original] Sleuth (1972), he was unsure of how to address Olivier. Olivier told him that he should be called Lord Olivier the first time, and after that, he could simply call him 'Larry.'" I don't know, that just sounds weird. I can't believe Lawrence Olivier would be like that. Is that story really true? — Julie

FlickChick: That anecdote does make Laurence Olivier sound like a jackass, doesn't it? Michael Caine addressed this long-standing story, whose roots lie in the intricacies of England's class consciousness (the upper-middle-class Olivier was knighted in 1947; Caine was the epitome of the 1960s rough-edged cockney upstart), in a recent interview in Newsday.

Caine says that "[Olivier] sent me a letter before we ever met and said, 'When we meet, you may be wondering what to call me. From the moment we meet, you must call me Larry,' and that was that. Because at that time, though [England's] class system was dissolving fast, there was still that thing where he was Lord Olivier and I was just a half-assed Cockney guy from the wrong end of town. Anyway, we started off like that and we had a very good relationship."

At this stage of his career, I can't see why Caine would be putting a good face on the late Sir Laurence's behavior, so I'm inclined to take him at his word.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

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

DVD Tuesday: Severance demonstrates that corporate team-building retreats aren't just wastes of time and an excuse to squander money on high-priced consultants — they're honest-to-God murder!

Halloween is almost over, and how could I let it pass without recommending just one more scary movie? But non-horror buffs take heart: Severance, like three other recent favorites of mine, Shaun of the Dead (2004), Slither (2006) and Black Sheep (2006), is both genuinely funny and genuinely scary. Contrary to what many filmmakers seem to think, it's a tough mix to pull off... but when you get it right, it's magic.

The setup is a horror-movie standard: Strand a squabbling cross-section of humanity in the middle of nowhere (old dark house, uncharted island, lost space scow, desert shack, unmapped cave complex et al) and unleash hell on them. And who better to unleash hell on than a pack of slick sales-and-marketing types, say, the seven-person team responsible for putting a kinder, gentler face on amoral multinational arms manufacturer Palisades Defense while helping launch the company's initiative to fatten its coffers by arming Eastern Europe's most volatile hot spots? The team leader is a pompous tool, and his underlings include all the standard types: The arrogant beta dog snapping at the boss' heels, the idealist (female), the computer whiz, the one with qualms (also female), and a couple of slackers, one of whom is high on magic mushrooms before they get to their destination, a "luxury lodge" deep in the forests of Hungary… you know, somewhere in the same general area as Slovakia and its fantastic hostels.

The bus driver manning their luxury caravan freaks out when he finds a tree blocking the main road and wisely refuses to take the detour, so the group is forced to walk the rest of the way to a gloomy dump chockablock with nasty surprises.

U.K. cowriter and director Christopher Smith's pointed digs at office politics and the transparent exercises that are supposed to build team spirit and teach cooperation and trust are dead-on, and the trap-them-and-kill-them shocks don't pull any punches.

Even the none-too-subtle irony of the pencil pushers getting a taste of what their products do in real life plays remarkably well. I'll refrain from the kind of "you'll die laughing" clichés much loved by quote whores and simply say that for my money, Severance delivers on the promise of its deadpan U.K. ad tagline: "Another bloody office outing."

Things to consider:

Humor and horror: Examples of films that mix the two successfully?

Worst examples of films that try but fail?

Given how much time we spend at work and how many of us work in office jobs, movies — especially good ones — about the nine-to-five are relatively rare. My favorites include Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Clockwatchers (1998), How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) and the ultra low-budget The New Guy (2003)… I must confess that I've never seen Office Space (1999), which I know regularly tops lists. Your favorites?

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:

Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
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: Top Five Guilty Movie Pleasures and More....

Question: I like challenging, thought-provoking movies as much as the next guy, but I also love pure, unadulterated cheese — real Mystery Science Theater 3000-quality junk. My biggest guilty pleasure is Ed Wood movies. Do you have any guilty pleasures, or are you strictly into quality movies? — Eli

FlickChick: Oh, I have a soft spot for junk. I also have a rant about guilty pleasures — indulge me, please — that goes something like this: The fact that you love Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) doesn't inherently make you stupid or invalidate your love for Citizen Kane (1941), so stand by your low-brow passions!

There. Now here are my top five really trashy movie faves, in ascending order.

5) Barbarella (1968)

What it is: a sexadelic adaptation of the erotic comic series about a beautiful space tart (Jane Fonda) — sorry, astronavigatrex — and her adventures across the universe.

What's so bad: Tacky, tacky, tacky in that oh-so 1960s cool way! Zero-gravity strip tease, sex with a blind angel alien, a sex machine, an army of marching dollies with fangs, Anita Pallenberg as an intergalactic dominatrix. No wonder Robert Rodriguez wanted to do a remake!

4) Fiend Without a Face (1958)

What it is: A B&W sci-fi/horror picture about a scientist whose efforts to harness telekinetic energy by siphoning off atomic energy from a nearby military base go terribly wrong. The result: Crawling brains with spinal cord tails and bobbly antennae that slither around killing people.

What's so bad: It's kind of dull and the killer brains are invisible until the very end — up until that point you just hear them making clanking chain noises (?) as they creep around. And there's a radiation surge in which the brains are suddenly flying through windows, crawling down chimneys and wrapping their spinal cord tails around people's necks while they suck out their brains. Awesome!

3) Requiem for a Dream (2000)

What it is: Darren Aronofsky's adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s raw novel about drug addiction. It's got a great look and a good cast, but don't let that fool you — it's dazzling junk.

What's so bad: pretension! It's a vintage drugsploitation picture in flashy drag. At least Reefer Madness (1936) didn't pretend to be cutting-edge art. But that scene where the refrigerator comes after sweet old Ellen Burstyn, who's hooked on diet pills because she wanted to wear her old red dress on a TV game show, is priceless.

2) The Beastmaster (1982)

What it is: A low budget sword-and-sorcery picture starring hunky Marc Singer, his teeny-weenie leather bikini and his animal friends, including a pair of ferrets in a bag. When my roommate and I first got cable, it was on all the time. Seriously, it didn't matter when you turned on the TV, Beastmaster was playing. We were mesmerized, and I'm clearly still under its spell.

What's so bad: The earnest cheapness. Tanya Roberts as the bombshell slave girl. The little skull barrettes on wild-eyed baddie Rip Torn's long gray braids. The "death guards" in S&M leather getups and the scruffy, dyed-black panther. The monsters that reduce you to a skeleton in no time flat. Fun stuff.

1) The Apple (1980)

What it is: A tale of good and evil set in the far-off future of 1994, when the entire music industry has been co-opted by devilish Mr. Boogalow and his BIM — Boogalow International Music — empire. A couple of wholesome young folksingers from Moosejaw, Canada, wander into his clutches and are seduced by sex, drugs and spandex. Really.

What's so bad: Where to begin? The sequined jockstraps, the disco orgy number "Coming," soulless glitter-pop whores Dandi and Pandi and their song "Bim," the sulfurous machinations of "Mr. Boogalow" and his queenie sidekick Shake (who sports a very fashion-forward set of grills), the fanged BIM goons, the vision of Hell, the peaceful hippies fighting BIM's fascist regime with flower power, God's 11th-hour arrival in a gold car, the lyrics to "The Apple" ("Magic apple/Mystery apple/Take a little ride/Let me be your guide/Through the apple paradise")... I could go on. It's all what makes The Apple great.

Question: I love the movie Death Becomes Her, with Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Wilson, especially the part when Streep goes to get the eternal-life potion from Isabella Rossellini. Rossellini tells Streep she'll have to disappear after 10 years or people will start getting suspicious, and goes on to say "... as one of my clients said, 'I want to be a ... '" Streep gasps and says, "She didn't!" and Rossellini shakes her head yes. Do you know what was she referring to? It's been driving me crazy. Thanks!

FlickChick: The client said "I want to be alone," the famous quote credited to early movie star Greta Garbo (which is in fact a misquote of the line, "I want to be let alone," from 1932's Grand Hotel). But it beame permanently associated with Garbo when, at the age of 35 and at the height of her stardom, she abruptly abandoned moviemaking.

Question: I recently saw a trailer for the movie Funny Games. I was intrigued so I looked it up, only to discover it was a remake of a foreign film and that the original director, Michael Haneke, was redoing his own film. I rented the original version and enjoyed it very much. It seemed pretty unusual to remake your own movie in a different language. Do you know of other instances in which directors have done this? I feel like there was a Japanese horror director who did this, but the name escapes me. — Jenny

FlickChick: Off the top of my head I can think of five: Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on: The Curse (2000), which he remade as The Grudge (2004); George Sluizer's Spoorloos (1988), which he remade as The Vanishing (1993); Ole Bornedal's Nattevagten (1994), which he remade as Nightwatch (1997); Francis Veber's Les Fugitifs (1986), which he remade as Three Fugitives (1989); and Jean-Marie Poiré's Les Visiteurs (1993), which he remade as Just Visiting (2001). Poiré even kept his main actors — Jean Reno and Christian Clavier — for both versions.

Question: Back in the mid-1990s, I saw a movie about two girls who had this really tight friendship and they kill a woman. Everybody I ask tells me I'm looking for Heavenly Creatures, but I know I'm thinking of a different movie. Can you help? – Alix

FlickChick: I think you're looking for Fun, which opened the same year as Heavenly Creatures — 1994 — but lacked the vivid visual imagination that made Peter Jackson's film a critical favorite. Fun starred Renee Humphrey and Alicia Witt (currently of TV's Law and Order: Criminal Intent) as the killer teens.

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: Celebrity scoop-mongering gets the once-over in Sweet Smell of Success.

When I hear people bemoan the fact that in a world full of serious, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan dominate the front page, I want to direct them to Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Not because it proves them wrong, but because it's 50-year-old proof that the voyeuristic allure of celebrity journalism is nothing new.

Based on screenwriter Ernest Lehman's 1950 story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," Sweet Smell is rooted in the toxic relationship between small-time publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and big-time gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), who revels in the glamour, the scandals and the sordid backbiting of New York City nightlife. "I love this dirty town," he declares as the neon lights of Broadway glint off the inky-black streets.

Hunsecker's column is the place to be mentioned, and he panders to the powerful and exploits the desperate. Hunsecker's only weak spot is his younger sister, Susan (Susan Harrison, whose daughter is Darva Conger, of fleeting Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? fame), to whom he has a positively creepy devotion. When she persists in dating a handsome young jazz musician (Martin Milner), Hunsecker alternately bullies and cajoles Falco into breaking up their relationship by any means necessary. Falco uses the tools of his trade, first surreptitiously smearing the musician's reputation and then getting him arrested as a hophead.

Shot in ominously seductive black-and-white by James Wong Howe and dipped in acid by director Alexander Mackendrick, Sweet Smell of Success is about the glittering prizes that turn to coal in the sunlight and the addictive rush of the spotlight, even if only at second hand. Lancaster is phenomenal as the bitter, petty, ruthlessly calculating Hunsecker, and Curtis has never been better, his pretty-boy looks the veneer that mask Falco's abject, degraded desperation to claw his way out of obscurity.

Things to consider:

Do most people think about the relationship between people who write about celebrities and trends and the publicity machine that feeds and tries to manipulate them, or do they take what they read at face value?

Walter Winchell, the model for J.J. Hunsecker, was one of the first writers who used celebrity dish to turn himself into a brand name — a celebrity in his own right. Do you think there's a difference between someone like Winchell/Hunsecker and, say, a gossip blogger like Perez Hilton?

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:

Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
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: Top 14 Movie Misquotes, the Scream That Will Not Die and More...

Question: I don't want to sound like a complete geek, but it bugs me when people misquote famous movie lines like "Luke, I am your father," which just isn't what Darth Vader said. I feel that if you're fan enough to quote a movie, you should be fan enough to quote it right. Please tell me I'm not the most compulsive person ever. — Don

FlickChick: The most compulsive ever? No way — I basically agree. If you're going to quote the quote, quote the quote.

That said, there's a pattern to a lot of common misquotations. Here's the thing: Screenwriters can't predict what's going to seize the public imagination when they're writing, so that kickass line is often embedded in a larger, less pithy piece of dialogue.

1. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Misquote: "Luke, I am your father."

Actual quote: "No. I am your father."

Your bête noire, spoken during Luke's illusion-shattering confrontation with his nemesis, Darth Vader, is a perfect example. The pertinent part of the exchange goes like this:

Darth Vader: "If you only knew the power of the dark side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

Luke: "He told me enough! He told me you killed him."

Darth Vader: "No. I am your father."

Wow — great moment. But as beautifully as "No. I am your father," plays in context, it's not a one-liner without the specificity of Luke's name. So people remember it as "Luke, I am your father."

2. Dirty Harry (1971)

Misquote: "Do you feel lucky, punk?"

Actual quote: "Ah, I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking, 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, I've forgotten myself in all this excitement. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya punk?"

Clint Eastwood sells the hell out of that speech, but the misquoter boils it down to five key words that never occur together.

3. Wall Street (1987)

Misquote: "Greed is good!"

Actual quote: "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA."

Gordon Gecko's (Michael Douglas) go-go '80s mantra isn't — it's a full-blown speech.

4. Apocalypse Now (1979)

Misquote: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning… it smells like victory!"

Actual quote: "You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smells like… victory."

Once again: Captain Kilgore's (Robert Duvall) signature line is actually a speech.

Even shorter pieces of dialogue get pared down:

5. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Misquote: "Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"

Actual quote: "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"

This is the scurvy Mexican bandits' retort when savvy treasure hunter Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) challenges their claim that they're lawmen.

6. Casablanca (1942)

Misquote: "Play it again, Sam."

Actual quote: "You played it ["As Time Goes By"] for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can. Play it!"

The world-weary line disillusioned Rick (Humphrey Bogart) lays on piano man Sam (Dooley Wilson) is among the most frequently misquoted — thanks Woody!

7. White Heat (1949)

Misquote: "Top of the world, Ma!"

Actual quote: "Made it, Ma. Top of the world!"

That's sociopathic, mother-fixated gangster Cody Jarrett's (James Cagney) parting shot from the top of the oil tank he's about to blow to kingdom come — take that (S)mother.

That said, mental editing doesn't account for all the common misquotes. Some are just careless.

8. The Graduate (1967)

Misquote: "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?"

Actual quote: "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?"

That's callow college boy Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) to cougar Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft).

9. Casablanca (again)

Misquote: "I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship," or "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Actual quote: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Rick to Captain Renault (Claude Rains) after everything has gone to hell.

10. All About Eve (1950)

Misquote: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

Actual quote: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

Fading star Margo Channing (Bette Davis) — role model for generations of drag queens — to her party guests.

11. Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Misquote: "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Actual quote: "What we've got here is… failure to communicate."

It's the pause that makes the sadistic chain-gang guard (Strother Martin) challenge to headstrong prisoner Luke (Paul Newman) so flawless, but tell that to the misquoter.

12. She Done Him Wrong (1933)

Misquote: "Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?"

Actual quote: "Why don’t you come up sometime… and see me."

Given that saucy Mae West was the mistress of the devastating double entendre, this misquote is just inexcusable. And again, it's the pause that takes it home.

13. 42nd Street (1933)

Misquote: "You're going out there a youngster, but you've got to come back a star."

Actual quote: "You're going out a chorus girl, but you're coming back a star!"

An oldie that's still got juice — that's Broadway director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) to chorine Peggy (Ruby Keeler).

14. Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Misquote: "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Actual quote: "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."

Deranged former silent-movie goddess Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) to all those beautiful people out there in the dark.

Readers, weigh in!

Question: I'm trying to figure out a movie from, I think, the 1960s. It was about a haunted house and there are groups of people searching in this house/castle. One group is a gang of leather-clad bikers and at one point one of the bikers is making a scary "ooooo" noise; the rest of the group thinks it's a ghost and when they realize it's just one of the guys they hit him. There's also a big-haired go-go ghost dolled up in a furry white bikini who keeps popping up randomly. My husband and I saw about 20 minutes of it about five years ago on AMC (I think), and we're dying to know what it was so we can get it and watch the whole thing. It looked to be more a comedy than a horror movie. I hope you can help, and thanks. — Cori

FlickChick: Add The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) to your Netflix queue: It's got classic horror-movie stars Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone, plus a dopey biker gang, a lovely bikini-clad ghost (Susan Hart), Nancy Sinatra, former Mouseketeer Tommy Kirk and Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) star Deborah Walley. The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini was the last entry in American International Pictures' beach-party series, and while it's by no stretch of the imagination a good film, it's entertaining if you're in the right frame of mind.

Question: Someone told me that there's this one scream that gets used in tons of movies, but he couldn't tell me anything specific. Is this true, or was he pulling my leg? — Nicole

FlickChick: It's true and it even has a name: It's the Wilhelm Scream. The Wilhelm Scream was first recorded for a 1951 Warner Bros. movie called Distant Drums, for a scene in which a guy gets his arm ripped off by an alligator. But it got its name, bestowed by alert sound engineer Ben Burtt, then a LucasFilm employee, from the character who lets out the recycled yelp in 1953's The Charge at Feather River. Until Burtt found the old stock scream recording while researching existing sound effects for a little sci-fi movie he was working on, it was only used in Warner movies.

But after Burtt put it in Star Wars (1977), word got around the sound-engineer and tech-head community — sometimes encouraged by geek film directors like Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino and Peter Jackson — and people began slipping it into all kinds of movies. At last count, sharp-eared movie buffs had identified the Wilhelm Scream in more than 100 movies, ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Toy Story (1995) and Planet of the Apes (2001) to Dante's Hollywood Boulevard (1976), Jackson's King Kong (2005), and Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), and Death Proof (2007).

Now you may be wondering, who screamed that immortal scream? The answer appears to be that it was actor-singer Sheb Wooley, probably best known for the novelty hit Purple People Eater. Wooley, who died in 2003, was one of four actors who both appeared in Distant Drums and recorded additional sound bites for the film. (Burtt also dug up that tidbit.)

A 2005 London Times article quotes Wooley's widow, Linda Dotson, saying, "He always used to joke about how he was so great about screaming and dying in films. I did know that his scream had been in some films, the older Westerns, but I did not know about Star Wars and all. He would have gotten such a kick out of this. He would say, 'I may be old but I'm still in the movies.'"

So what makes the Wilhelm Scream so special? Beats me. It's just a sort of strangled "Owwwwwww" — listen http://www.hollywoodlostandfound.net/wilhelm/wilhelmtk4.html for yourself.

Question: There was a Disney Channel Original Movie a few years ago about two completely different sisters who each wish on a star that she could be the other. I remember some parts of it, but I have no clue as to the title. Can you tell me? — Victoria

FlickChick: You're going to want to kick yourself: The title is Wish Upon a Star (1997). The teenage sisters are Danielle Harris, who plays the smart but plain sib and — get this! — Grey's Anatomy star-to-be Katherine Heigl as the airheaded cutie.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Ken Fox and Maitland McDonagh on the weekly Movie Talk vodcast.

I love vampire movies and I've devoted lots of time to tracking down fabled but hard-to-get titles in the undead canon. But Daughters of Darkness (1971) was one that caught me by surprise: I saw a promising poster, paid my money and sat down in the dark — three decades later I still remember what a weird surprise awaited me.

Cold, dark and sublimely creepy, it unfolds during the off-season at a deluxe seaside hotel in Belgium. The only guests are a pair of honeymooners, Valerie and Stefan (Danielle Ouimet, John Karlen), whose marriage seems to be off to a rocky start (why is he always on the phone to his mother?), the Countess Elisabeth Bathory (French actress Delphine Seyrig, star of the sublimely puzzling Last Year at Marienbad), and her personal assistant/traveling companion, Ilona (Andrea Rau). Dressed like a silent-movie star and yet given to such down-to-Earth amusements as knitting in the palatial sitting room, the platinum-blonde countess looks to be in her thirties… yet the concierge does a double take when she glides across the lobby. She resembles "a lady who must have changed a great deal" since he last saw her, several decades earlier. "My mother, perhaps?" she says mildly. Yeah, perhaps.

The countess lavishes attention on the young couple: They're "so sweet," "so perfect," "so good-looking" — good enough to eat, you can't help think, and perfect for what? Not each other, certainly. Stefan is mean to Valerie and she's more than a little frightened, especially when she sees the gleam in his eye after they stumble across a crime scene. A serial killer is murdering young women, and Stefan seemed oddly thrilled to catch a glimpse of the latest corpse. And there's worse to come.

Like Near Dark (1987), another of my favorites, this is a vampire movie with no fangs or cobwebby castles. Vampire buffs will recognize the countess' name, but her demeanor couldn't be less like that of the bloody countess: She's so gracious, so affectionate, so theatrically soft-spoken.

Belgian director Harry Kümel revels in the vast, ornate, near-empty resort, as well as the contrast between the troubled, thoroughly modern young couple in their bell-bottoms and suede boots, and the elegant countess and Ilona, with her Louise Brooks bob — they recall the suggestion that movies are ghostly because people who lived and died decades earlier drift through them in all their youthful perfection, never growing old or fading.

Daughters of Darkness privileges atmosphere over shocks — though it tosses off a couple of nifty twists — and it's not for all tastes. But I love it, especially its suggestion that the worst kind of vampire doesn't want your love — she wants your soul. "You must be nice to me," says the countess to Valerie with a chilling smile. "Soon you will love me as I love you now." Brrrrrrrrrrr!

Things to consider:

Daughters of Darkness is a coolly erotic vampire movie — name your favorite sexy vampires.

Can a horror movie truly be an art movie as well? Examples?

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:

The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
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

The sequel to 28 Days Later (2002) — that would be 28 Weeks Later, in case you hadn't guessed — streets today, and it's a good follow-up to one of those films that came from out of the blue and reminded horror fans like me that there's still life in the classic monsters: All it takes is a director/screenwriter team like Danny Boyle and Alex Garland to put a fresh spin on the old tropes.

But my pick of the week is an older and shamefully overlooked movie: George Romero's The Crazies (1973), whose influence is all over films as various as a cluster of '80s horror pictures — Impulse and Mutant/Night Shadows (both 1984), Warning Sign (1985) — the mainstream, "respectable" Outbreak (1995), the video-game inspired Resident Evil series and, of course, 28 Days Later. And frankly, The Crazies' core concerns are as timely now as they were in the wake of the 1960s counterculture — if not more so.

Following the runaway success of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero tried to branch out of horror with a pair of relationship films rooted in 1970s cultural anxieties: There's Always Vanilla (1972) and Hungry Wives (1973). Though Wives had a witchcraft twist and was marketed as a thriller, it's not — it's basically about unhappy suburbanites looking for kicks — both were financial disasters, and The Crazies marked Romero's return to genre filmmaking.

But like Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies is deeply rooted in '70s concerns: disenchantment with American involvement in Vietnam, distrust of government and the military, small-town isolationism, and the panic and intolerance disaster sows among neighbors and friends.

Shot in Evans City and nearby Zelienople in western Pennsylvania, it begins with the crash of a small military plane in the hills surrounding "Evans City," pop. 3,613. Six days later, a local man goes berserk, murdering his wife and burning down the family home with his two small children inside. Local volunteer firefighters David and Clanker — old buddies and Vietnam War veterans — respond to the blaze and David's pregnant girlfriend, Judy, a nurse, shows up for work at the local doctor's office only to discover the place crawling with soldiers. The downed plane, it turns out, was carrying containers of a bioweapon called "trixie" (the film was originally called "Code Name: Trixie") that's leached into the groundwater.

Infection has two outcomes: violent insanity and death or just plain violent insanity... permanent. There's a vaccine, of which the military only has enough to inoculate necessary personnel — i.e., not local residents — and there's no cure. Since trixie has had six days to spread, it's pretty obvious that it's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose. The military mandate is containment: Establish a secure perimeter, disarm the locals, round them up, and make sure they're all accounted for and in one central location. There's also a scientist on hand to try to rustle up a cure, but since he wasn't able to find one in the three years he worked on Project Trixie in a state-of-the-art lab, the odds that he's going to get anywhere working in a bare-bones local doctor's office are slim to none.

I've heard the complaint that The Crazies is an antimilitary rant steeped in extreme left-wing paranoia, but I disagree. Romero is an old-school liberal, but The Crazies is pretty even-handed. Sure, the image of hazmat-suited soldiers hauling townspeople — old folks, women, crying children — out of bed at gunpoint and locking them up in the local high school, which quickly devolves into bedlam as more and more of them show signs of infection, is frighteningly potent.

But Romero also makes it clear that the soldiers are panicky and underprepared because they've been deliberately kept in the dark by their superiors and aren't expecting to be attacked by sweet little old ladies with knitting needles or fired upon by locals who may be infected or may just be defending their homes against what looks to them like an invading army.

Some soldiers loot, break ranks and turn on each other; others perform small acts of kindness amid chaos, pausing to let a frightened little girl pick up her doll before taking her to the detention center or comforting a small boy whose parents have just been shot to death. The ranking military commanders are middlemen who weren't told what was going on until they were in the thick of it and now have no-argument-broached orders to keep the outbreak secret, even if it means dumping a bomb on Evans City to "burn out the infected area" and pretend it was a nuclear mishap.

Some of the townspeople are hotheaded rednecks, and when the real chaos descends, it's almost impossible to tell who's infected and who just looks crazy because they're reacting to a crazy situation. Romero's beef is with abuse of authority, institutional incompetence and prioritizing the government's image over the rights of ordinary citizens.

And that's why I say the movie is as timely as ever. There's been a remake in development since 2005 and since the weakest thing about The Crazies is the uneven performances and low production value, both the nearly inevitable product of a tiny budget, it's possible that a remake could be stronger than the original. On the other hand, that's rarely the case,and since director Brad Anderson abandoned the project to do another thriller, Transsiberian, I can't say I have high hopes. But I am eager to see Romero's upcoming Diary of the Dead: He may be nearly 70 years old, but he's still mad as hell and committed to stirring up debate via horror movies. Go George!

Things to consider:

Exploitation movies can address contemporary anxieties faster, more vividly and under less pressure to support the status quo than mainstream Hollywood movies: Agree or disagree and why?

Do you think it's a critical overthinking or silly to see sociopolitical themes in movies that aren't overtly about politics, current events or social trends?

What movie do you remember because of its subversive and/or provocative themes and why?

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:

Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
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<P><P>

Question: Back when I was a young lad — mid- to late 1960s — WWOR-TV in NYC used to run something called Million Dollar Movie. They would play the same movie for the entire week. I remember one movie that was based on the opera Carmen. At the time, of course, I didn’t know the movie was based on the opera. I don’t remember seeing it since then. I only remember the last scene: The male lead (dragoon) is about to be shot when the female lead — Carmen, I think — gets in front of him and gets shot instead. She dies in his arms and he dies shortly afterwards from an earlier injury; then there's a rush of dragoons into the bandits’ hideout and the movie ends.

I thought it was the Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford version of Carmen, but when I saw that a few years ago it wasn’t the one I remembered. There have been several movies based on Carmen, and I couldn’t even tell you if the movie was foreign and dubbed. If you have any idea about the movie and who was in it, I would greatly appreciate it. — Ted

FlickChick: This is a real puzzle, and it intrigued me in part because I have such fond memories of the Million Dollar Movie — a number of New York- and New Jersey-born directors I've interviewed vividly recall studying movies they liked on Million Dollar Movie and getting their first lessons in how to use editing and camera placement to tell a story in visual terms. WOR came up with the Million Dollar Movie in 1954 as a way of filling up airtime inexpensively; it started out showing only RKO films — the same parent company owned both WOR and the RKO library — but later branched out. I'm surprised no one has devoted a website — or at least some pages — to the Million Dollar Movie series, given the Web presence of, say, ABC's The 4:30 Movie (a favorite of mine because it showed a lot of horror and sci-fi films — click on the link just to see and hear the groovy show-opener!).

In any event, I can't give you a definitive answer about your Carmen, but I can make an educated guess: The Devil Made a Woman (1959), which is the U.S. title of the Spanish movie Carmen, la de Ronda. The other two versions of Carmen that fit the time frame — aside, of course, from the 1948 Hayworth/Ford Loves of Carmen – are Carmen Jones (1954) and a 1945 French/Italian film called simply [i]Carmen, with the charmingly named Viviane Romance as Carmen and Jean Marais, star of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), as Don Jose. That Carmen was only distributed in the U.S. in subtitled prints and wouldn't have been part of a package destined for a U.S. TV station. I think you might have remembered if the film you saw had an all African-American cast, and since you didn't, that eliminates Carmen Jones.

Carmen, la de Ronda/The Devil Made a Woman was distributed in the U.S. in 1962 by Medallion pictures in an English-dubbed version — the posters and lobby cards promised "Lusty Exciting Action in Technicolor" (not to be nerdy, but it was actually shot in Eastmancolor). Carmen, la de Ronda was a musical (it featured original songs rather than selections from Bizet's opera), which is no surprise in that star Sarita Montiel was as famous as a singer as she was for her sultry good looks. But most references to The Devil Made a Woman allude to the fact that it’s a Carmen with no songs, which suggests that Medallion cut the singing sequences.

There are also apparently two versions of the film, one aimed at the Spanish market and the other tailored for the French market. In both Carmen is a cabaret singer rather than a worker in a cigarette factory (which makes the "no songs" thing odder still) and her lover (Maurice Ronet) is a sergeant in Napoleon's army — a dragoon. In the Spanish version she falls in with Spanish resistance fighters, and in the French version they're bandits, which is closer to the Merimee's original smugglers.

Were the movie available, I'd check for myself. But it looks as though the only version ever put out in the U.S. was in 1992, by a small Spanish-language video company.

If anyone knows more, please speak up!

Question: I'm looking for a horror movie I saw on TV in the mid- to late 1970s. It might have been made for TV, but I'm not sure. It was about a film crew making a movie in an old house where everybody who ever owned it had died mysteriously. The last owner was supposedly a witch. First a cat gets killed, and then someone gets shot, and there's a graveyard nearby. — Gerry

FlickChick: I'm going with House of the Seven Corpses (1974), a movie that has its fans but which I find unbelievably boring, especially since the seven corpses are the previous seven owners of the house; their demises are chronicled in a short montage at the beginning of the film, and then no one else gets killed for what seems like forever.

Not that I'm a gorehound or anything, but the title strikes me as more than a little deceptive. John Carradine plays the creepy caretaker who spends an inordinate amount of time lurking, and more than an hour of the movie is devoted to the cast and crew of a B movie being screamed at by their horrible director. There's a book of Tibetan chants lying around, and they substitute something from the book for the second-rate ritual chants in the script, thereby unleashing some kind of bad juju that takes its sweet time actually doing anything.

Yawn.

Question: All right, Maitland, here we go… two questions: How excited are you that il padrone Dario Argento is completing his "Three Mothers" trilogy this year? And what did you think of Do You Like Hitchcock?, assuming that you've seen it? — Ray

FlickChick: I await Mother of Tears with a queasy mixture of dread and hope, because Argento's last several films have been, shall we say, disappointing. And the reviews from Toronto aren't making me less uneasy. In fact, the positive reviews disturb me more than the negative ones, because they're predicated on the notion that Mother of Tears is great because it's camp and goofy and not torture porn. Uh-oh…

But of course, I'm still dying to see it, because it's Argento, because it closes out the trilogy he started with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), and because it's crawling with old-time Argento associates. It stars his daughter, Asia, and her mother, his former companion, Daria Nicolodi — Asia's mother, the cowriter of Suspiria and costar of Deep Red (1975) and many other Argento films — reprising her role from Inferno. Also on hand: Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, from Demons 2 (1986), Opera (1987) and Phantom of the Opera (1988); Udo Kier from Suspiria; and Massiomo Sarchielli of Phantom and I Can't Sleep (2001). The music is by former Goblin Claudio Simonetti, the effects are by Sergio Stivaletti, and Argento's brother, Claudio, is one of the producers… the gang's all here! But though I hear mutterings about a U.S. release early next year, I think the odds are good that I'm not going to see Mother of Tears until it comes to DVD.

As to Do You Like Hitchcock?, which Argento made in 2005 for Italian television, I can't say I think much of it, but it was a hell of an improvement on The Card Player (2004). And there is a certain pleasing symmetry to the fact that Argento, dubbed "the Italian Hitchcock" way back at the beginning of his career, pays homage to Strangers on a Train and Rear Window through a story about a Hitchcock-obsessed movie fan who witnesses a murder. Needless to say, I bought a copy as soon as it came out on DVD here — my Argento shelf must be complete!

Question: I remember seeing a Movie of the Week when I was a kid about a guy living behind the walls in a house. Everyone told me that was Bad Ronald, but when I finally found a copy I realized it's not the one I remember. Do you know of another movie with that plot? — Stu

FlickChick: I think you may be looking for Crawlspace. Not the notorious 1986 movie with Klaus Kinski, but a 1972 made-for-TV movie in which a childless older couple (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright) befriend a strange, reclusive young man who takes up residence in the basement crawlspace of their isolated house. Things don't go much better in this film than they do in Bad Ronald (1974), but it's more sympathetic to the high-strung young man — the unfortunate things he winds up doing are prompted by persecution by bigoted locals who peg him for a dirty hippie and a misguided desire to protect his new "family." By fortunate coincidence, Crawlspace has just come out on DVD from a small company called Wild Eye; it's part of the company's "TV Movie Terror Collection," which also includes the Rosemary's Baby-influenced The Devil's Daughter (1973), with Shelley Winters and Joseph Cotten.

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.

I was dazzled by Blade Runner from the first time I saw it, on the day it opened in 1982. The cute 'n' cuddly E.T. killed it at the box office and reviews were mixed (everybody agreed that it was visually dazzling, but most critics were underwhelmed by the story), but over the years Blade Runner's reputation has grown from cult classic to widely recognized masterpiece — it's often called the best science-fiction film ever made, and it's unquestionably one of the most influential. There's a new version of the film — Blade Runner: The Final Cut — coming to DVD on Dec. 18, following a limited theatrical re-release (it was shown at the New York Film Festival last weekend). But Blade Runner is great in any version.

The first movie based on a novel by sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Blade Runner is set in a decaying future Los Angeles where humanoid "replicants" do humanity's dirtiest jobs, from fighting wars to staffing brothels, and everyone who can afford to get out has moved to one of the off-world colonies. Detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is assigned to track down a small gang of rogue replicants — "skin jobs," as his sleazy boss calls them — on the loose in L.A. after defying their programming by hijacking a space shuttle and killing everyone on board. Deckard's investigation takes him through L.A.'s underworld, to the glittering heights of wealth and privilege and, ultimately, deep into his own head. Though the movie differs greatly from Dick's novel, its core concern is the same: What does it mean to be human?

The cast is flawless: Dutch heavy Rutger Hauer as head replicant Roy Batty and Daryl Hannah as lethal sex toy Pris, Brion James and Joanna Cassidy as their partners in crimes of the future, character actor Joseph Turkel (The Shining's enigmatic bartender; ironically, the landscape shots used for the tacked-on happy ending were borrowed from The Shining) as the head of the company that makes replicants and William Sanderson as one of his employees, Edward J. Olmos as Deckard's enigmatic partner, and M. Emmett Walsh as their boss. Even Ford's stiffness works here: Deckard is uncomfortable in his own skin — even he doesn't know how uncomfortable. And forget all the tabloid craziness about Sean Young; she's fantastic as the state-of-the-art replicant who has no idea she's not human.

Blade Runner's production history was notoriously troubled: Perfectionist director Ridley Scott (then fresh off Alien) alienated much of the cast and crew, the film went over budget and the previews went badly, leading to the 11th-hour addition of Ford's widely — and rightly — despised hard-boiled voiceover and a new, less-downbeat ending.

Since its rediscovery on (in order) video, laser disc and DVD, there have been numerous versions of Blade Runner, starting with the 1989 discovery of print minus the "happy" ending and most of the voiceover. Scott wasn't happy with that version either, but it helped further polish the film's reputation by eliminating elements that never felt as though they belonged in the first place. That version also restored a brief but crucial scene involving Deckard's dream of a unicorn, a crucial piece of evidence that the great irony of Deckard's mission is that he too is a replicant.

You can talk about versions for days, but the fact is, Blade Runner's dystopian future is gripping no matter what, and not just because it looks so seductively gloomy or because Scott's design team found such amazingly offbeat L.A. architecture, including the baroque Bradbury Building (also featured in Chinatown and the original DOA) and Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, to incorporate into his vision of a seductively decaying future.

Things to consider:

Where do you stand on Blade Runner: Masterpiece, or style over substance?

What movie do you think is criminally underrated?

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