This pectorial spectacular is so agreeably cheesy, it's pure Velveeta. Sorbo, an actor who has muscled his way to stardom by playing Hercules in the syndicated TV series of the same name, shows off his rippling pecs and buff biceps to advantage as Kull (rhymes with dull), a commoner whose skill at swordplay leads to his being named king of ancient mythical Valusia. To remain king, he must fight off an evil enchantress (Carrere) and a jealous prince (Griffith) and listen to a lot of heavy metal guitar whanging away on the soundtrack every time he goes into battle. And, oh, yes, he must win the love of a beautiful slave girl (Lombard). Wisely, his wooing strategy includes issuing a royal proclamation liberating all Valusian slaves.
If all this sounds a lot like Conan the Barbarian, the 1982 film that made a certain cigar-chomping Austrian bodybuilder a star, it should. Both of these testosterone-saturated characters first appeared in short stories written for magazines by '30s pulpmeister Robert E. Howard, and both films were produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis (daughter of Dino). Who should bother seeing Kull? Fans of Sorbo and the Hercules: The Legendary Journeys series and anyone else keenly interested in seeing well-built actors parade about in luxuriant wigs and scanty body armor. (PG-13)
David Suchet, Lisa Harrow
A homeless man wakes up one Sunday morning in a group home, goes through his morning ablutions and heads out for another day of walking aimlessly through the snowy streets of New York City. An attractive middle-aged woman carrying a large plant spies him from across a road and yells out a greeting. She crosses the street to talk. Doesn't he remember her? They last met in London? She had auditioned for one of his movies? Surely he remembers?
So begins Sunday, a delicate and affecting drama by first-time director and coscreenwriter Jonathan Nossiter, which won both the screenwriting and best-film prizes at last winter's Sundance Film Festival. The movie is about the long day spent together by the homeless man (Suchet), whose life has fallen apart after he was downsized out of his job at IBM, and the woman (Harrow), an out-of-work British actress living unhappily with her estranged husband and child in a cramped rowhouse in Queens. She has mistaken Suchet for a famous English director. He plays along. When he finally tries to tell her the truth, she chooses to ignore it and continue with the deception. But which man is she making love to?
Sunday is about living in exile, whether from one's life or one's country, and about seeing others as we choose to see them, which is not always as they are. Both Suchet, best known to American audiences as Hercule Poirot in PBS's Mystery! series, and Harrow (The Last Days of Chez Nous) are excellent. (No rating)
Javier Bardem, Maria Barranco, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón
Mouth to Mouth, a rollicking Spanish sex farce (with English subtitles), reminds you why Americans used to go to foreign movies in the first place: They were fun and had lots of sex. The giddy Mouth to Mouth offers both, and then some. It tells the story of an aspiring actor (Bardem) who takes a job as—would this be the name for it?—a call boy at a phone sex service. He tells himself his steamy conversations-for-hire are just another form of acting. He soon proves exceedingly adept at panting patter, attracting loyal regulars of both sexes. Eventually, he arranges to actually meet one of his women callers (Sánchez-Gijón), and that's when the plot kicks into comic overdrive. Like paella, Spain's national dish, this movie, as directed by Manuel Gómez Pereira, has a little of everything thrown in, and it all goes together deliciously. (R)
Alicia Silverstone, Benicio Del Toro, Christopher Walken
There's one great gag in Excess Baggage, a muddleheaded black comedy in which Silverstone plays a dippy rich girl who fakes her own kidnapping to get her mondo businessman father's attention ("All I ever wanted was a father who would love me," she explains). The gag? When her cold fish of a father forks over the $1 million ransom she has requested ("It was never about the money," she tells us), the money blows away after the suitcase containing the bills is opened out of doors and a police helicopter flying too close kicks up the wind.
That gag comes early in the movie, and then it's a long, hard sit as Silverstone and Del Toro—the good-guy car thief who accidentally steals the BMW in whose trunk she has hidden herself—joust with each other while on the run from her father, the cops, Del Toro's fellow thieves and Walken, whose hair here is dyed a shade of red one sees only on women in Paris. The whiskey-voiced Del Toro (The Usual Suspects and The Funeral), who always looks as if he has just been roused from an afternoon nap, continues to impress with his flaky way of sneaking up on a line. Silverstone, so winning as the ultimate teenager in Clueless, seems clueless here as to how to play her character other than to pout. Baggage is never as annoying as you fear it might get, but neither is it very good. (PG-13)
Tony Tucci, Michael Parducci, Tom Malloy, Thomas Brandise, Macky Aquilino
New York City unknowingly subsidized this promising first film by writer-director Salvatore Stabile, who was 19 when he began shooting Gravesend. The film was made with $5,000 that his grandmother left him—and by illegally tapping into city lampposts to power his lights. Gravesend, named after the poor Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn where all the action takes place, definitely looks and sounds like it was made on the cheap ($60,000 was subsequently spent upgrading the movie's image and sound quality). But the film shows off a fine sense of drama and mordant humor as it tracks one very messed-up night in the lives of four young men after one of them fatally shoots the brother of another. The four ask a local dope dealer for help in burying the body ("I'll do it for $500 and a thumb," he offers), get into countless fights, shoot more people and end up destroying the bonds of a lifetime. Gravesend is pretty raw, but one understands after seeing it why Steven Spielberg's company, DreamWorks SKG, has signed Stabile, now all of 22, to a two-picture deal. (R)
Renée Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Robert Jacks
Buzzzzzzzz. That chainsaw-wielding maniac (Jacks) in the leather face mask is cutting up again. Texas Chain-saw Massacre: The Next Generation, a gruesomely vile movie, was shot in 1994 but is being released only now to cash in on Zellweger's and McConaughey's newfound fame as stars in, respectively, Jerry Maguire and A Time to Kill. Wisely, neither actor is doing much to hype this dumbbell exercise in gore and mayhem. Next was scripted and directed by Kim Henkel, who wrote the first TCM (1974). He seems intent on proving here that you can go back to the well again if the blood level is high enough. (R)
>CHANGING OF THE LEADS
THE DAYS WHEN FALL AT THE CINEPLEX was a time reserved for sleepy period pieces and earnest message pictures are long gone. This autumn is all bullets and no butlers, and even the British actors are running for their lives instead of ruminating about them. First up is The Game (Sept. 12), starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn in a thriller about a billionaire who, instead of making a killing, tries to avoid getting killed. "Michael Douglas the way you want to see him," says one film exec of the star, who hasn't had a hit lately. In the similar The Edge (Sept. 26), Anthony Hopkins (as another billionaire) and Alec Baldwin get lost in the wild and try to avoid becoming a bear's brunch. Staking out a spot in Chinatown territory, L.A. Confidential (Sept. 19) is a saga of postwar California corruption with Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger. The buzz is "very, very high on it," says an exec from a rival studio. Vying for audiences the same weekend will be the comedy In and Out, with Kevin Kline playing a gay teacher outed at the Academy Awards. It's based loosely on Tom Hanks's 1993 acceptance speech after his Oscar for Philadelphia. October brings such edgy fare as The Devil's Advocate (Oct. 17), with Keanu Reeves as a young lawyer and Al Pacino as a senior partner who turns out (duh!) to be Satan. Brad Pitt heads for the mountains and more credibility as a serious actor in Seven Years in Tibet (Oct. 8), an epic about the Chinese-occupied country whose freedom is the favorite cause of Richard Gere. Gere hits screens twice in November, first in The Jackal, a Nov. 14 political thriller with Bruce Willis partly based on the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal (itself based on the 1971 book). Two weeks later he plays a lawyer arrested for murder in China in the thriller The Red Corner. That film was shot in California because Gere's Tibetan activism would get him arrested for real in China.
November brings in special-effects bonanzas such as Alien Resurrection (Nov. 26), with a reborn Sigourney Weaver and freshly buffed Winona Ryder, and Starship Troopers (Nov. 7), a sort of Independence Day with giant bugs. "The first cut," says one early viewer, "was really gory. They should invent a new rating." Just don't see it after Thanksgiving dinner.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
