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Connections, in both directions
The original 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives, itself based on the novel by Ira Levin, starred Paula Prentiss and Katherine Ross and was a dark, genuinely creepy horror flick with a relevant point to make about men’s fear of feminism.
A wholly uninspired and shoddily constructed remake of the 1975 original, this version of The Stepford Wives is a big budget affair replete with a great cast that’s forced to flounder with poor material that only works once in a great while; the material itself isn’t helped by a lead performance by Nicole Kidman that is all shrill, all the time; a one note performance if I ever saw one.
Nicole Kidman stars as a New York TV executive who retreats to an idyllic Connecticut community in the comedic remake of "The Stepford Wives."
Now, nearly 30 years later, director Frank Oz and scripter Paul Rudnick update novelist Ira Levin’s darkly satiric work and give it, and the term, a happy face in “The Stepford Wives.”
Venom (2018)
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
influenced by Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Characters Visuals Music
In fact, the dynamic is reminiscent of the one between Little Shop of Horrors ’ hapless shop clerk and his bloodthirsty plant, if Seymour Krelborn spent all his free time doing bicep curls.
The parasite, Venom, has a tendency to insult Eddie, who doesn’t much care for Venom either, especially when Venom erupts from Eddie’s body as a toothy, lacquer-black, Tim Burton–esque fusion of Alien and Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and bites off people’s heads.
Venom renders the anti-hero’s mano a mano fights against obsidian snot monsters with the latest CG globule technology, but the movie’s highs come when Hardy treats the Spider-Man spinoff like a Little Shop of Horrors remake starring mid-’90s Jim Carrey.
Venom “speaks” to Eddie in a guttural bark not far removed from the carnivorous plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” and the inner banter between host and host-ee, while not reaching Nick and Nora Charles levels of wit, are reasonably amusing.
There are moments that are just plain silly – you practically expect the deep-voiced Venom to burst out singing “Feed Me” from LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS – but since the movie never seeks to get too deep, this is amusing rather than a tonal violation.
Director Frank Oz ("The Score," "Bowfinger") just doesn't seem right for this material, although he had something going in the opening "Network" segment with Kidman in the field she wanted "To Die For." Things get mired down in the obvious as soon as Joanna and Walter attend a Stepford social function and witness Sarah Sunderson (prominently billed, but blink or you'll miss her Faith Hill) go haywire on the dance floor.
In the beginning there's Kidman, exuberantly strident, as a roaring TV executive, heir to the mania of Faye Dunaway in ''Network.''
It's as if scripter Paul Rudnick and director Frank Oz were suddenly inspired to take a page from Network, not realizing that they're running behind the times rather than ahead of them.
Norton's double-play, borrowed from his Oscar-nominated role in Primal Fear, gives him a chance to show his chops among the more seasoned veterans.
Sure, he too has done better work, sometimes with similar characters: he's switched between different personalities in both "Primal Fear" (which got him an Oscar nod) and "Fight Club" (which should have earned him another), and the arrogance of his Jack here somehow reminds of his Worm in "Rounders".
(As in Primal Fear, and sort of in Fight Club , he's playing two personalities within the same body.)
The film gets away with this amusingly tasteless stunt only because Norton, in a variation on his debut in ''Primal Fear,'' does it with such skilled gusto; he makes it seem not a gimmick but a virtuoso ruse.
Norton gets the flashiest parts, reminiscent of his schizoid Primal Fear role (perhaps aided by Oz agreeing to let him write some of his own scenes), since he plays the impatient, smart, young punk looking to make his mark within the inner sanctum of world-class heist artists.
Peele has counted the thrillers of Ira Levin (writer of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) among his inspirations, and most of Get Out finds Chris uncertain whether he’s the victim in a horror plot — or whether everyone just acts bizarre around him.
Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , would have cracked a wry smile at the cackling satire of this chilling “social thriller”, the directorial debut from MadTV alumnus Jordan Peele.
Mashing up Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner with Ira Levin stories like Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives , it’s a sickly hilarious skewering of liberal paternalism in which white condescension reveals sinister ends.
A reconfiguration of 1975’s The Stepford Wives , the Bryan Forbes adaptation of the Ira Levin novel, about a community of white suburban housewives who become hollowed out robots for their passive aggressive husbands, Peele brings his own new twists to a similar idea.
Slivers of Ira Levin's "The Stepford Wives," and a hint of L.Q.
Nick's caution, his watchful radar armor, is a kind of quiet mania, and De Niro, evoking James Caan's brooding nihilistic cat burglar in ''Thief,'' draws you right to the center of what Nick is guarding against: not just getting caught but losing his edge on the world.
But here's a bonus: The three co-star in The Score, a polished, engrossing heist film in the grand style of such classics as Topkapi, Rififi and Thief.
Nick Wells (De Niro) specializes, like James Caan in Thief and Christopher Walken in The Opportunist, in cracking safes of any variety.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
Directed by Andy Serkis
influenced by Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Music
While I equate that to Levi Stubbs (the carnivorous Audrey II in the 1986 film version of Little Shop of Horrors ) with a mouthful of gravel, Hardy, in an interview with Screen Rant, offers his inspiration.
It’s simply played too flatly, and it certainly pales in comparison to, say, Bryan Forbes’ much darker The Wrong Box (1966) with its coffin mix-ups and venal undertakers, who try to palm off a 3-foot box (“Get the flag, they’ll never notice”) as the remains of a loved one.
(Perhaps in homage to the funnier The Wrong Box, undertakers first bring...the wrong box.)
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) started things rolling in the U.S., then came Jules Dassin's Rififi (directed by a blacklisted American) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (both 1955) in France, then Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) back in the U.S., and finally Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), a hilarious Italian parody of Rififi.
The handful that actually manage to find their way out of this thicket are so few and far between that they are just a handful, most of which, like "The Killing" and "Rififi," center on failure rather than success.
He is Don Logan, a fear-of-God- inspiring bloke who reaches for the scope and menace of Don Corleone, Keyser Soze and Bill Murray in "What About Bob?"
Alas, it can’t quite outdo the many films it culls from, particularly The Stepford Wives (the 2004 remake of which was and is often underrated).
Ricalca anche le atmosfere e la storia della pellicola di Frank Oz “The Stepford Wives“, (La Donna Perfetta, 2004), pellicola tratta dal romanzo del 1972 scritto da Ira Marvin Levi.
No fundo, “Don’t Worry Darling” é um remake não assumido de “The Stepford Wives” e talvez seja melhor assim, para não ficarmos presos a legados.
Nor is it a “What About Bob?” situation, where someone is insufferably obnoxious but only one other character sees it and everyone else chides him for being such a grump.
The genre goes back to the ’60s sitcom “Green Acres” (where a whole town of fruitcakes addled poor Mr. Douglas) and to movies like “What About Bob?,” which gave Bill Murray one of his catchiest roles.
Goldie Hawn played this sort of sociopath with Steve Martin in HouseSitter, a so-so farce from 1992.
Long-suffering son Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen, "Pride and Prejudice") shoulders the burden of handling arrangements while prodigal son and novelist (Rupert Graves, "V for Vendetta") breezes in from New York to sop up praise from admiring townspeople.
(This is the same guy who was Mr. Darcy in the recent version of Pride and Prejudice.
Things begin farcically enough, with funeral managers delivering the wrong coffin to the country house where Daniel (MacFayden, the dashing Mr. Darcy of 2005's Pride and Prejudice, here playing lumpy and deferential) lives with his wife (Hawes, his real-life spouse), his mother (Asher, who's looking damn good — Paul McCartney could do worse than to look up his longtime ex), and, up until recently, his father, he of the titular funeral.
Macfadyen appears pastier and puffier than the dashing Mr. Darcy he played in Pride and Prejudice.
In the film, Matthew Macfayden (Pride and Prejudice) plays Daniel, a struggling writer who faces the challenge of keeping his family together after the death of his father.
Matthew Macfadyen (from the Keira Knightley "Pride and Prejudice") heads the ensemble, playing a British man at his parents' country house nervously trying to arrange his father's funeral.
Potty mouths, potty jokes, and dotty performances are the chief selling points of Death at a Funeral, Neil LaBute's alternately sidesplitting and poop-splattered remake of the 2007 Frank Oz movie about everything that can go wrong at a patriarch's last rites.
The original Death at a Funeral , the 2007 British farce directed by Frank Oz, opened to mixed reviews (critics loved it or hated it) that foretold the film’s fate at the box office.
An unnecessary remake of the 2007 British comedy directed by Frank Oz, "Death at a Funeral" opens well enough as the heaping ensemble is introduced.
Part of the problem with this Death at a Funeral lies with the fact that it begs to be compared with the 2007 film.
Before that, he popped up in potent bit parts in "Caddyshack" (1980), "Tootsie" (1982), and "Little Shop of Horrors" (1986), and laid it all on the line for his own pet project, "The Razor's Edge" (1984), which was unsuccessful, but interesting.
Finding Dory (2016)
Directed by Andrew Stanton
influenced by Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Characters
Except for Marlin, who learns a valuable lesson in empathy after hurling a hurtful observation at Dory when she inadvertently puts Nemo in harm’s way, almost every creature encountered from a bird-brained loon to an immense chatty clam that recalls Audrey II in “ Little Shop of Horrors ” gladly helps out our heroine with her mission.
And then there's the anaesthetic-free dentist scene, which is so twisted it puts Steve Martin from Little Shop of Horrors to shame.
La La Land isn’t just the best made-for-the-screen musical to reach theaters in a very long time, it’s arguably the best (non-animated) cinematic musical of any kind since 1986’s delightful Little Shop of Horrors .
In that sense, one can look at the first portion of Beau Is Afraid as being like What About Bob? on steroids, complete with Bob’s (Bill Murray) extreme phobia of leaving the apartment.