Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jack Frost (1998)

Probably not called "Frosty the Snowman" because of a copyright, Jack Frost, this peculiar, only very loosely Christmassy family fantasy made for only the most unquestioning of young audiences, never clearly articulates the rules around coming back to life as a snowman, but given his limited ability to move, tendency to melt, and never explained reluctance to be seen by anyone but his son, Michael Keaton's Jack Frost, a musician brought back to life as a snowman by a harmonica - don't ask questions - probably should have just opted to come back as a ghost like Patrick Swayze.

★★☆☆☆

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Mercury Rising (1998)

Thankfully swapping out the title of the book it is adapted from ("Simple Simon"), this uninspired action thriller has Bruce Willis starring as a cop protecting nine-year-old Simon from assassins after Simon cracks a top-secret government "super code", and about the only convincing thing in the whole movie is not its action - a yawn-inducing string of shootouts across busy public spaces like hospitals - nor its depiction of autism, Rain Man-style brilliant savantism used purely only as a MacGuffin that could just as easily have been studiousness or, let's face it, an RSA key on a dog's collar, and not its cryptography (government supercodes published in wordfind magazines as a strength test) but its depiction of gendered home roles: Bruce Willis bumps into a woman in a cafe - a woman he doesn't know - and within minutes, in heated bathroom arguments, he guilts her into passing up career opportunities to be Simon's stay-at-home carer.

★★☆☆☆

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Snake Eyes (1998)

With its aged boxer, femme fatale, and plain-clothes detective investigating a gritty crime, Snake Eyes was clearly intended as a 1940s hardboiled film noir taken to the next level with a mega budget, a new film-age garish colour palette, breathless action, and sweeping camera shots that take in every minute thing happening at an Atlantic City boxing match where an assassination takes place, but the razzle dazzle of producer Brian de Palma's camera tricks (sweeping overhead shots taking in the goings-on of multiple hotel rooms and the like) overwhelms the barest of plots - a macguffin propels the story which is resolved within the first hour, leaving it up to the tricksiness, not the plot, to entertain you.

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

With his scrubbing brush bristles for hair and comical way of Where's Wally-ing himself into every other scene, sometimes darting past in a sportscar, sometimes idling nearby in a green lorry and other times turning up in his grey overalls to stare through gates and windows, Michael Myers, the original movie's six-year-old-now-twenty-six-year-old serial killer, is an object of absurdity, not horror, in this retcon that has, for fans, the pleasing aesthetic of the original Halloween and the crowdpleasing reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now living as a boarding school teacher with a new identity, but is otherwise a movie that is over before it starts, blessedly short but a mere breath of a slasher movie with an overabundance of barely developed characters.

★★☆☆☆

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Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt) (1998)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

Run Lola Run (DVD)

When her boyfriend loses a large bag of cash on a train, Lola has just twenty frantic minutes to find a replacement bag of money and get it to her boyfriend before anyone scary gets to him, and this inventive, low budget German independent film with a pulsing techno soundtrack gives Lola the opportunity of a do-over when things don't pan out, a sensational quirk in 1998 but one that seems pedestrian by today's Memento/Sliding Doors standards.

★★☆☆☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Hush (1998)

This soapy Southern family melodrama has been shamelessly, laughably packaged up as a psychosexual thriller with a sinister title, 'Husssssh' (say it with real menace) and a negative imperative byline on the poster, 'Don't breathe a word' suggesting life-or-death secrets that never eventuate, but what you actually get is Gwyneth Paltrow in a Worzel Gummidge wig appearing as Helen, a New York newlywed who insists on running around Kilronan, her husband's horse ranch, naked and having sex where of course her mother-in-law will encounter her, so really it shouldn't surprise her when the mother-in-law, whom we know to be a rank nutter on account of her collection of wind-up carousel music boxes, starts to engineer Helen's marriage and pregnancy.

★☆☆☆☆

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Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)

After crashing on an island, a pilot and his passenger must overcome their differences (including a significant age gap) in order to survive snakes, dangerous base-jumps and murderous pirates, and in all the excitement, they fall in love, in Ivan Reitman's very minor but inoffensive romantic comedy adventure.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Blade (1998)

The appeal of this film that spawned two follow-ups (Blade II (2002) and Blade: Trinity (2004)) escapes me - it's alright but a rather ugly horror-comicbook hybrid about a human-vampire hybrid charged with saving humanity, primarily of interest for being a pre-MCU era (Marvel Cinematic Universe era) superhero movie, bloody and grim and despondent where today's Marvel blockbusters are all sleek with fast-talking smart-arse superheroes.

★★☆☆☆

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The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1998)

Taking its cues from deadly serious police procedurals like Dragnet, this cornball comedy, the first in a series of three equally eye-roll inducing, groanworthy spoofs, introduces Frank Drebin, a police officer as bungling and accident-prone as The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau, in this instalment charged with protecting the Queen from a troop of remote-controlled killers - oh, and that reminds me: OJ Simpson is in it.

★★★☆☆

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Pi (1998)

A neurotic loner good with numbers has his theory ratified that everything in nature is governed by a mathematical pattern when he strikes upon a mysterious string of digits of such import that ruthless businesspeople and kabbalists start dogging him, wanting to share in the numbers' secret, in Darren Aronofsky's low-budget thriller delivered in minimalist black and white and a shrill, shouty, alarming tone.

★★★★☆

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A Perfect Murder (1998)

A husband's plot to murder his wife by hiring his wife's lover as a hitman comes unstuck in a number of heavily signposted ways and from there this suspense thriller low on suspense and thrills, apparently inspired by Dial M For Murder but really only similar in two ways (Gwyneth Paltrow and Grace Kelly's blonde hair and a logic problem involving apartment door keys) goes on in rudderless, convoluted ways, desperately trying to find a way to wrap up the leaden acting and plodding events.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEW

Disturbing Behaviour (1998)

The Stepford College Jocks is a not very thrilling nor mysterious mystery thriller set in an American high school where the disturbing behaviour of some of the students turns out to be caused not by puberty, peer pressure or substance abuse but something else much less interesting.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS