Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this very smart movie, the woman is the lovelorn psycho, the man the not-quite-innocent victim. She (Glenn Close) is an editor; he (Michael Douglas) is a lawyer with a wife (the lovely Anne Archer), a child and a career to lose if his two-night stand is discovered. That the two principals are ostensibly mature professionals, not adolescent airheads, gives the film some of its fatal attractiveness. So do James Dearden's plausible, nicely observant script, Adrian Lyne's elegantly unforced direction, and Close's beautifully calibrated descent into lunacy. Together they bring horror home to a place...
This movie is a handsome machine too, but with a dark, cynical streak. / RoboCop means business -- Big Business. Its plot describes a marriage of venality between psycho punks and white-collar killers, to rule a city in the near nightmare future. One exec (Ronny Cox) has devised a robot, ED 209, to patrol the streets, but ED is too slow in the brain and too fatally quick on the draw. So another schemer (Miguel Ferrer) assembles the spare parts of a mangled policeman (Peter Weller), fuses them with some state-of-the-art plumbing and creates a bionic bobby...
...Trashing My Room Freshman Year. Committed to one of `Canaday Hell's' psycho singles because I had the temerity to ask for a private bedroom, I vented my displeasure on that closet-sized space at the end of the year. Despite destroying the walls and the door with a scuba knife--don't ask--I still was never charged for the damage, thanks to a quick-thinking friend who distracted the super when he was inspecting the rooms. To my knowledge, Canaday D-33 still bears the scars of my sojourn there...
...dialogue is spiced with occasional shots of black humor, all based on our exclusive knowledge that behind the smiling stepdad exterior lurks a raging psycho. Family Number Two is struggling for a reconciliation, and the Stepfather suggests, "C'mon, honey let's bury the hatchet." Gulp. But all you slasher-thrasher fans out there be warned. The Stepfather would rank low on Joe-Bob Briggs boobs'n'blood scale; this is suspense you bozos: protracted anticipation laced with adrenaline, not gory gratification every six and a half minutes, Friday the 13th-style...
Terry O'Quinn as the stepfather carries the burden of this suspense expertly, equally convincing in all his character's twisted levels of reality. His abrupt facial shifts from genial daddy to iron-jawed psycho are scary as hell--the expressions of contained violence, forced cheer, and wistful longing that flicker through this dude's eyes would shame many a Max Factor model. This guy really wants a happy family, and you see it in his face as he pitifully watches happy neighbors prancing around their lawns. Gotta love his end, it's just his means that send Oedipal chills...