Word: raimi
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Costner still twinkles and steams plausibly, but all else about the film is ludicrous. The nattering violins, orgasmic from the first moment, alert you that director Sam Raimi has either no control of the production or no belief in the material. And why should he believe? Dana Stevens' script buries the compelling story of an athlete's career crisis under a no-fun affair he has with a charmless woman (Kelly Preston--big mistake) and a daughter problem that adds 15 minutes of emotional lard. As domestic drama, it's down there with Stepmom. And much of the jock stuff...
...genre remains John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Despite some Hollywood credentials (including a couple of name stars), it was shot for a mere $325,000 and had the deep-focus single-mindedness of a true horror exploiter. Imitators came thick and fast after that; by the time of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1982), the genre had descended into gruesome lunacy...
...problem with renegade horror, of course, is that it quickly gets domesticated and respectable. Directors such as Hooper and Raimi went on to big budgets and big stars. Horror villains such as Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger became kids' Halloween costumes. The Blair Witch will undoubtedly reappear in a sequel. But nothing will match those first bone-chilling, totally unexpected nights in the woods...
Possibly the most underrated movie of the year. A Simple Plan seems like a deadly serious version of Fargo--three men's plan to keep an unclaimed $4 million goes awry and spirals into horror. But director Sam Raimi lets the actor's performances do the talking. Bill Paxton gives the film its dramatic electricity. Billy Bob Thornton continues to amaze, this time as Paxton's socially-inept brother who finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into evils he can't even understand. A rich, devastating tale of greed...
...movie, adapted from his own novel by Scott B. Smith and directed by Sam Raimi, whose specialty is cultish horror films, has an addled, feckless sobriety about it. These people think they're saying something serious about greed and how it can cloud people's judgment. They want you to think Fargo or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But there's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner...