Gloriously weird, Crispin Glover's performance seems to boil out of the rage-fueled emotionalism of an era before Botox: think Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, blended with the latter-day fragility and introspection of Sean Penn. This role gives him the room to show off some astonishing gifts.
Glover is the best but far from the only reason to recommend this remake, superior in most ways to the 70s original. (There's some homage along the way, including a tongue-in-cheek set piece done to Michael Jackson's famous warble, "Ben". How time has made that hymn to interspecies love sound creepy!) Writer-director Glen Morgan has crafted a chewy little parable about capitalism, and his sardonic depiction of the real rat race, with a reliably savage Lee Ermey flogging his office employees behind a motivational sign reading "Prudent Aggression," gives the film more than the usual B horror subtext. The production design is sweet, too.
A terribly nice 100 minutes, and one of the best B horrors since Reanimator.
Glover is the best but far from the only reason to recommend this remake, superior in most ways to the 70s original. (There's some homage along the way, including a tongue-in-cheek set piece done to Michael Jackson's famous warble, "Ben". How time has made that hymn to interspecies love sound creepy!) Writer-director Glen Morgan has crafted a chewy little parable about capitalism, and his sardonic depiction of the real rat race, with a reliably savage Lee Ermey flogging his office employees behind a motivational sign reading "Prudent Aggression," gives the film more than the usual B horror subtext. The production design is sweet, too.
A terribly nice 100 minutes, and one of the best B horrors since Reanimator.