Word: bensonized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sketches--particularly those in which Martin does not perform--maintain a heavy--handed pretentious quality. Rather than portraying a situation they strain after some large generalizing statement about the nature of man, beauty and hope. The other performers, Martin's students, cannot match their teacher's brillance. Cindy Benson is too earthbound as the dancing doll that comes to life in the "Dollmaker's Dream" and both she and Stephen Driscoll, who is quite good as the dollmaker, seem to fight against the familiarity of their material...
...second half of the program, Unnatural Acts, is billed as an experience in "total" theater and, while it isn't quite as total as all that, it is an hour of funny, raucous burlesque. The four performers, Benson, Driscoll, DruMarkle and Peter Kovner, race hysterically around the stage in baggy, decorated long johns. The skits are shorter and faster paced than the ones in Beyond Words, and the humor here is largely verbal. The performers in the second half of the show seem possessed by a manic energy and a keen sense of the absurdity potential in any situation...
...threatened humanists who run out to sound the alarm. In The Terminal Man, the machines, true to form, run amuck, but it is only a two-alarm panic. The twist-it can hardly be called a novelty-is that this time the machine is a man, one Harry Benson, who has had a computer implanted in his brain. Subject to unpredictable fits of rage, Benson used to beat his wife and take potshots at the neighbors. He has been diagnosed as a paranoid psychotic and has volunteered for the implantation. Still the operation reinforces his deepest fear: that mankind...
Hodges apparently realized this, because he takes great pains to bury the thematic superficiality beneath a superstructure of desperate metaphor and elaborate production. The movie is rendered largely in frosty, antiseptic hues, giving every scene the air of the laboratory. The hospital where the operation is performed on Benson (George Segal) is called Babel. The doctors (Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Donald Moffat, Michael C. Gwynne) dress in white uniforms that make them look almost military, like shock troops of the future. After Benson has had the operation, which misfires, he runs all over Los Angeles killing at random, until...
...Frankenstein revamped, of course, but the signals seem to have gone wrong somewhere. Clearly, Hodges intended a caution against science that can mistake mind warping for mind mending. Despite all the patent disapproval, though, the operation still seems feasible, the only alternative to Benson's previous condition. The unresolved conflict lends the film a rather archaic tone, like those old horror movies that ended in the smoldering ashes of some laboratory, where a dim but wise policeman would shake his head and say, "Man wasn't ready for such knowledge...