Lawrence Kasdan
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Their not-too-well visitor ups and dies, but not before a giant worm-like creature exits his body a la "Alien" (from a body orifice, rather than bursting from his stomach).
"Dreamcatcher" is mildly entertaining for a while; think "Stand by Me" meets "Alien," with a soupçon of "Starship Troopers" tossed in.
If you've seen any of the "Alien" movies, as King clearly has, you don't have to be told what's coming next.
The creatures (aptly dubbed “shit weasels”) feed off their human hosts from the inside out, using one’s backdoor as an entrance and exit; the film’s acute sense of the terror derived from penetration and expulsion—farting is used as ominous foreshadowing—is reminiscent of Alien.
A plot element lifted from "Alien" -- extraterrestrial invaders using humans to incubate their wormlike larvae -- jumps straight into a "Dumb and Dumber" gambit: Two guys find one of the worms in a toilet and try to keep it captive by sitting on the john.
In opposition to this lot is Col. Abraham Curtis (Morgan Freeman), who, in a blend of Men in Black, Outbreak, and X- Files, has been secretly chasing aliens with his secret team of soldiers for 25 years, and whose solution to the residue they leave on human beings, a red stain nicknamed Ripley (after Alien), is to destroy all the residents of any given community whom the aliens have visited and "infected."
This is their The Big Chill.
Co-written by Sandler with Fred Wolf (“Joe Dirt”), “Grown Ups” is a cliched variation on “The Big Chill” with a quintent of friends from childhood reuniting after the death of the coach who long ago guided them to a basketball championship.
Whether it’s the drama of “That Championship Season” or the sardonic humor of “The Big Chill,” this is a pretty sturdy plot.
If you’ve ever wondered what “The Big Chill’’ would be like with old “Saturday Night Live’’ castmates — well, why would you ever have done that?
Imagine if " The Big Chill " were made today.
Reminiscent of "The Big Chill" and "The Great Outdoors," only less wise than the former, less clever than the latter, and more juvenile than both combined, the picture goes about its laid-back way without working up a sweat.
Then again, King’s novel was never more than a hodgepodge of Alienisms, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the author’s own The Tommyknockers and The Stand.
Borrowing from John Carpenter’s variation of “The Thing”, four men go up to a cabin in the woods to meet after years of separation and must take on an alien entity that can possess bodies; and borrowing from “Invasion of the body snatchers”, many people are getting overtaken by an alien that uses spores to enter one’s body and take over them.
Unfortunately, the conversion from the printed page to the big screen has made many of the story's already sketchy elements even more sketchy, and the film is derivative of such gory alien-possession movies as "The Thing."
Perhaps the main problem lies in the fact it is too derivative--of other alien movies ( Independence Day meets Alien meets The Thing ) and worse, of other Stephen King movies ( Stand By Me meets It meets The Tommyknockers).
The Monster"), but it also filches ideas from the movies Alien (1979), the John Carpenter remake of The Thing (1982), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Hidden (1987), and even the overheated plague picture Outbreak (1995).
While watching this messy and overlong effort, viewers are apt to be reminded of "Men in Black," "The Thing," the "Alien" films, "Tremors," "Outbreak," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The X-Files" and even King's "Stand By Me."
You’ll also detect echoes of Rosemary’s Baby (questionable psychiatrists involved in Manhattan highrise hijinks) and the 1981 Body Heat (an attractive couple whose passion turns toxic).
That world is only a savvy backdrop for what screenwriter Scott Z. Burns has accurately characterized as a twisty adult thriller in the vein of "Double Indemnity" or "Body Heat."
See it by all means — especially if you love “Body Heat” and “The Usual Suspects” — but be careful who you trust.
Similarly constructed films that followed were superior (Altman's own Short Cuts, 1993), stranger (The End of Violence, 1997), more ambitious (Magnolia, 1999), and more shameless (Crash, 2004), but it was Grand Canyon that tilled the soil.
Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
As in other films set amid the amorphousness of Los Angeles -- P. T. Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon -- his solution is to counter the sprawling milieu with a sprawling cast shoehorned into a connect-the-dot plot.
Crash bears uncanny similarities to Grand Canyon, Lawrence Kasdan 's overearnest 1991 meditation on urban life, which starts with a scene similar to the real-life impetus for Crash and features a filmmaker who changes his life after he becomes a crime victim.
Opens Friday in select cities Crash has echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia and Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, two other L.A.-centered films about intertwining lives told in a fractured narrative, though it is not as heart-wrenching and complex as the first and not as superficially glib as the latter.
The difference between Crash and other depressed L.A. films (Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon) is that it focuses entirely on race -- its tensions, its stereotypes, its misunderstandings.
Like the other two movies, which paid homage to a specific genre (zombie and Hollywood action movies), The World’s End is a lot more than a Brit take on The Big Chill, although to reveal the craziness that erupts halfway through the movie would spoil the fun.
Even as it draws on obvious inspirations like The Big Chill and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, it’s a fresh, personal statement from director/co-writer Edgar Wright and star/co-writer Simon Pegg.
Apart from a few funny lines (and a brilliant Madchester soundtrack) the movie is a total failure as a beery “The Big Chill.”
With “the World’s End,” Wright has stated that he watched “The Big Chill” and “It’s Always Fair Weather” in order to get in the mood for a reunion films.
It's kind of like The Big Chill, but without the heavy-handedness.
One minute it’s The Big Chill ; the next it’s Children of the Damned .
Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat may have codified onscreen sex (not to mention the “erotic thriller” template) for normies in 1981, but Lyne’s Flashdance , 9 ½ Weeks , and Fatal Attraction were important cultural flash points that not only attracted audiences in droves but inspired a host of imitators of their grown-up content and muscular visual language.
It’s possible, while streaming “Deep Water,” to feel a stab of nostalgia for the big-screen heyday of the Hollywood erotic thriller, a genre to which Lyne and several others — the Lawrence Kasdan of “Body Heat” and the Paul Verhoeven of “Basic Instinct” among them — made indelibly sweaty contributions in the ’80s and ’90s.
The would-be mastermind who’s nowhere as smart as he thinks he is has long been a staple of the noir murder mystery, with Double Indemnity and Body Heat being classics of the genre.
Psycho is a touchstone (as is Body Heat ), though Fincher utilises suspense as a smokescreen for social critiquing.
I kept thinking of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981).
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Directed by Joachim Trier
influenced by The Big Chill (1983)
Themes
This conception isn’t entirely wrong, of course, but it belies the fact that the oldest members of the cohort are hurtling toward something which looks an awful lot like middle age; I recently realized, with no small amount of horror, that I am now older than most of the characters in The Big Chill.
Julie’s restlessness makes her a love/hate fascination; the film may speak to millennials much like “The Big Chill” did to boomers and “Reality Bites” to Gen-Xers.
This all adds up to a monster movie reminiscent of poorly received Stephen King adaptation “Dreamcatcher,” only not as endearingly convoluted and not half as fun; a redo of “Alien” with a mean reductive streak.
Douglas is always believable as the half-rotten hero, Jeanne Tripplehorn is a real find as his ex-lover, and Stone (who played Arnold Schwarzenegger's devious wife in Verhoeven's "Total Recall") comes through with the kind of dazzling icy/hot performance that made a star of Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat."
In this regard, the film is a perfect bookend to Body Heat , which doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's nothing but Double Indemnity with Kathleen Turner's tits on display, only where Body Heat was still trying very much to be erotic (and succeeding), Basic Instinct is too cerebral and curdled to really land on that level, and it's not aiming to, I don't think.
But the script, by Joe Eszterhaus (which reportedly got Hollywood into a bidding war and ultimately sold for the record-breaking price of $3 million), is a rag-tag mishmash that recycles everything from "Dressed to Kill" and "Body Heat" to "Cruising" and even Eszterhaus' own "Jagged Edge."
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced by The Big Chill (1983)
The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was penned by Lawrence Kasdan ( The Big Chill) whose unavailability for the sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) led Lucas back to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who'd written American Graffiti for him).
What follows is a macabre variation on the Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin comedy "All of Me," as the body runs around butchering people while the brain tries to stop it.
Why does an alien fern capable of shape-shifting and possessing humans need to resort to shit weasels ( Alien ) and evil fungi (Creepshow) of indeterminate intent?
The Monster"), but it also filches ideas from the movies Alien (1979), the John Carpenter remake of The Thing (1982), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Hidden (1987), and even the overheated plague picture Outbreak (1995).
Is it the former neo-noir sexpot of ''Raging Bull'' or the former neo-noir sexpot of ''Body Heat''?
Warm and yet snarky, its comic tone, if not its story, reminded me of “Parenthood” or “Grand Canyon,” which I guess is a way of saying it’s an ensemble comedy about adults and how they feel.
It began quite well, actually, but what Stephen King film doesn’t (except King’s directorial debut “Maximum Overdrive,” which stunk like a dead sewer rat from frame one)?
Kelly, the hot daughter of blue-blood trophy wife Sandra Van Ryan (Russell, apparently playing Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat"), keeps inviting herself into his jeep or his home.
“Sex Tape” was directed by Jake Kasdan (son of “Big Chill” and “Body Heat” director Lawrence Kasdan) and its screenplay is credited to Segel, Kate Angelo and Nicholas Stoller, all purportedly adult native speakers of English.