And Then There Were None (1945)
Directed by René Clair
Ten strangers are summoned to a remote island and while they are waiting for the mysterious host to appear, a recording levels serious accusations at each of the guests. Soon they start being murdered, one by one. As the survivors try to keep their wits, they reach a disturbing conclusion: one of them must be the killer.
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What critics compared And Then There Were None to
Watching the film, I thought for the first time in years of the series of How to Host a Murder boxed games that were a brief dinner party craze when I was a child in the 1980s, though the real precedent is the body-count thriller as exemplified by Agatha Christie’s 1939 bestseller And Then There Were None (I wonder if Quentin’s copy has the original, more impolitic title?) and its various cinematic brethren.
The Hateful Eight’s premise broadly resembles Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None: strangers confined to one place, motivations and backstories concealed, trapped while the body count rises.
Tarantino's much-ballyhooed Western turns out to be a locked-room mystery, Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" with a wintry blizzard and a lot of raunchy dialogue that leads absolutely nowhere.
So stay alert for this deliciously depraved nest of eight vipers, right out of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, if Dame Agatha had converted to pulp fiction.
"The Hateful Eight" is basically "And Then There Were None" by way of "The Wild Bunch," with MUCH more foul-mouthed and brutal guests trapped in the colorfully named Minnie's Haberdashery.
Odd as it sounds, Ayer and co-writer Skip Woods were loosely inspired by Agatha Christie’s classic mystery “And Then There Were None.”
Patterned after Agatha Christie's classic "And Then There Were None," Sabotage follows an elite DEA special ops team led by Arnold who start getting picked off one by one after their $10 million in stolen drug cartel money goes missing.
Sabotage makes the bold attempt of re-imagining Agatha Christie’s seminal murder mystery novel And Then There Were None as a modern crime-thriller about a DEA special forces team that attempts to rip off a cartel, only to find their stolen loot missing and big target on their backs.
(Or, to be more accurate, it originated as Ten Little Niggers, the 1939 Agatha Christie whodunit whose title was quickly changed to And Then There Were None.)
The plot lifts from Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," but neglects the mystery.
Once it gets into And Then There Were None territory, the movie stalls.
Identity seems at first to be a cross between Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and Alfred Hitchcock 's Psycho but then twists into something even more surprising.
The whole premise of 10 people stranded in an isolated location during a thunderstorm is a classic horror setup (think The Cat and the Canary or The Old Dark House), and having them killed off one by one by a mysterious killer is both classic horror and classic Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None).
Written by Michael Cooney (Jack Frost) and directed by James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold) the film is tightly and cleverly constructed -- both in the way that it follows the And Then There Were None motif and in the way it does not drop the ball in the final minutes, as many horror films do (even last year's above-average Below suffered from a poor ending).
And a lot happens in "Identity": This is a movie in the mold of Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None," except that the killings, once they start, seem to trigger an avalanche of death.
Much like Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery And Then There Were None , a book made into a movie five times, the latter four with the title Ten Little Indians , Identity slowly kills off its characters and reserves the identity of the killer until the cruel end.
The characters realize they have something in common, Agatha Christie And Then There Were None style, sure, but there is a reason why the story of a group of strangers stranded into their doom is so timeless and classic, all the way back to the Queen of Mystery herself.
Rather than delve into the ripe existential phobias that are growing around its cast like coconuts, Old is content with mostly coasting on being a Fantasy Island episode that adapts And Then There Were None —complete with a surprise killer running around.
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The best-known examples of the form – almost all of them Agatha Christie adaptations, such as And Then There Were None (1945), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Death on the Nile (1978) – tend to be clever, star-studded little tchotchkes, eliciting a fleeting sensation of gratification but no lasting artistic impression.
The point, on the surface, is that Rian Johnson has given us a delicious mystery that riffs on Clue, Deathtrap, Columbo, Murder She Wrote , and even a little And Then There Were None .
“And Then There Were None,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Murder by Death” and “Clue” all fit this mold, but while that tradition carried over to television with Jessica Fletcher, Columbo and Monk solving cases on a weekly basis, the genre has been sorely missing from movie theaters for many years.
Most likely René Clair’s “And Then There Were None,” adapted from Agatha Christie’s quintessential “Ten Little Indians.”
Kenneth Branagh and John Malkovich both rebooted Hercule Poirot in various vehicles, and the BBC produced two critically-acclaimed TV movies with And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution .
And “Knives Out” joins a prestigious canon of movie mysteries, alongside René Clair’s 1945 Christie adaptation “And Then There Were None” and excellent early Hitchcock 1938’s “The Lady Vanishes.”
The screenplay by Bragi Schut and Maria Melnik is clearly indebted to Christie’s classic “And Then There Were None,” but the more probable inspiration is “Saw,” though with far less gore.
Obviously inspired by the “Final Destination” franchise (as well as “The Ring” pictures, and, further back, Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”), it’s produced by the Blumhouse factory, which is actually trying to create a brand by promoting it as “Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare.”
Like Devil, which was essentially a modern riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the core of The Visit is rooted in a well-worn cultural narrative, in this case the old Grand Guignol tale of the visitor to the insane asylum who gradually comes to realize that the patients have taken over the asylum and are posing as doctors and nurses (there are, of course, bits and pieces of other familiar narratives in there, as well, particularly fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” although here Grandma and the Wolf and the Old Witch are all one in the same).
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But Bodies can be more precisely classified alongside such “awful rich people dying in a mansion” comedies as Ready or Not or You’re Next (all of which share a common ancestor in Agatha Christie’s blackly comic And Then There Were None).
For years, the whole youth-slasher-movie paradigm — first this kid gets killed off, then that kid, then this kid — has been traced back to the murder-mystery form invented by Agatha Christie in “And Then There Were None.” “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” with its restless camera movement and improv-style acting and general overdramatic rambunctiousness, is like “And Then There Were None” staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
For years, the entire paradigm of teen horror movies has been traced back to the murder mystery form invented by Agatha Christie in "And Then There Were None." ". "Bodies Bodies Bodies," with its restless camera movement and impromptu-style acting and overall dramatic buzz, is like "And Then There Were None" staged by John Cassavetes for the age of Instagram.
They all pretty much exploit the basic idea of a monster on the loose in confined quarters, and they’re all spins on Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None.
As it grows in size, it becomes increasingly voracious, and the plot morphs into a science-fiction version of “And Then There Were None.”
It’s not giving anything away to say that from this point on, Life is basically a zero-gravity bodycount flick — And Then There Were None in space.
For as much as it gussies up its primal scenario with lots of NASA verisimilitude and techno babble, Life doesn’t have much more on its lizard brain than another deep-space round of And Then There Were None.