'THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT'......FOX'S BIG SUMMER 1977 BOX OFFICE BLOCKBUSTER!......UH...SERIOUSLY?.....FOR REAL?....HONEST?.....

 The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

      No mistake. Yes, you read the sub-title of this post correctly.....

       The studio pinned all its summer 1977 hopes on this lavishly budgeted romantic melodrama based on yet another trashy best seller cranked out by Sidney Sheldon.

       Fox executives held little or no hope for their other summer release of that year.....that bizarre little outer space fantasy concocted by its equally oddball young movie brat writer-director.....George Lucas. Something with robots, furry creatures and laser swords called.....what was the name of it? Star something.....Star Wars?

        Who in hell's gonna watch that thing except little kids dropped off by their parents?

          Playing hardball with theater owners, Fox forced them into booking "Star Wars" if they wanted their chance to play a sure fire crowd pleaser like "The Other Side of Midnight". 

          Of those two films, anybody care to guess which one audiences mobbed theaters to see and which one sank like a cement stone faster than Donald Trump's approval ratings?  Anybody? Anybody? 

          Which is why BQ felt burning curiosity about 'Midnight' and decided, after all these years, to check it out......

          And now here we sit, mourning the precious 165 minutes of our life we wasted enduring this mind-numbing, unwatchable molasses-paced, dead-on-arrival, worthless-on-every-level turd of a movie. 

          A Guilty Displeasure to live in infamy.

         Keep in mind, we're far from snobs in regard to high-gloss Technicolored soapy wallows. We love luxuriating in grand, Golden Age weepers like Douglas Sirk's "Imitation of Life", "Written On The Wind", "All That Heaven Allows" and "Magnificent Obsession" and also Delmer Daves "A Summer Place", "Spenser's Mountain", "Youngblood Hawke" and "Rome Adventure".

         But 'The Other Side of Midnight' fell into the incompetent hands of Charles Jarrott, an unimaginative British journeyman director whose credits included the catastrophic, laughable musical re-make of 'Lost Horizon'. 

          'Midnight's lengthy storyline certainly doesn't lack for historical sweep, high emotions, passionate sex, wounding betrayals, lush backgrounds and a twisty ironic finale.  Sirk or Daves would've had a delicious romp with this material, pumping up an audience to swoon and gasp.

          But non-entity Jarrott directs the film as if he's half asleep.....or possibly even unconscious. With a complete lack of energy or urgency, his actors plod through their scenes like they're still doing the initial table read while sipping coffee and munching donuts.  From the way the film's cut together, we can only assume the editors were on the same heavy sedatives as Jarrott. 

         To put it mildly any oil painting moves infinitely faster than this film. We were barely an hour into it before we'd lost the will to live. 

         On the eve of the German occupation of France, sweet young Noelle (Marie-France Pisier) falls for charming hunka-hunka American pilot Larry (John Beck). Larry's actually a world-class dick who abandons girls after impregnating them. A heartbroken Noelle gives herself a coat hanger abortion then becomes first a movie star than a trophy wife on the arm of a ruthless Greek tycoon Constantine (Raf Vallone). Meanwhile across the pond, the odious Larry has hooked up with poor, quirky, deer-in-the-headlights Catherine. (Susan Sarandon, trying her level best as she delivers lame pseudo-witty gag lines.)

        Post war, Larry's mostly drunk and unemployable, but revenge-fueled Noelle has Constantine hire him as her personal pilot to further humiliate and destroy him. But with hormones raging, Larry and Noelle fall back into their hot 'n heavy love affair and then conspire to kill off Catherine.....who turns out difficult to bump off. 

        This all sounds like juicy fun, right? Lifestyles of the rich, rotten and infamous.....perfect for ooo-ing and ahh-ing the scenery and watch the leads do the horizontal mambo. 

         Forget it. Not a chance. Not when the movie's constructed like a slow motion funeral and two of the lead actors (France-Pisier and Beck) are about as exciting together as grass growing. 

         As the entire world flocked to 'Star Wars', 'The Other Side of Midnight' played to empty theaters and instantly forgotten.  (As screenwriter William Goldman once remarked about studio executives, "Nobody knows anything").

         And now it's our turn to forget it forever.....as should everyone else. Unfit for all. Zero Stars (0).

'THE SCOOP'.....A NO HOLDS BARRED TABLOID TAKEDOWN....EXECUTED WITH KNIFE EDGED WIT.....

 The Scoop by Erin Van Der Meer (2026)

     Fasten your seatbelts for this one......a book that takes a reader on a cringe-filled safari through the most vicious Heart-of-Darkness contemporary jungle imaginable......the absolute abyss of a tabloid website. It's where the moral compasses of journalists spin faster than helicopter blades in the pursuit of click-bait dirt. It's where misery, tragedy and celebrity collide and we just can't help ourselves if we stop in to munch on a few tasty McNuggets of bad news for the Rich and Famous among us.

     29 year old magazine writer Frankie Miller, unemployed and desperate to continue living her dream of a journalism career, sells her soul to 'The Scoop' an on-line tabloid ruthlessly overseen by its Editor-in-Chief David Brown. Newly installed as the 'The Scoop's night editor, Frankie at first tries holding on to what's left of her scruples but....fat chance. David's brutal tirades give her a boot camp schooling in the world of the take-no-prisoners tabloid meat grinder. that needs constant feeding.

     When a long forgotten pop singer's spotted in less than flattering photos, David targets her for non-stop humiliation, contrived scandal and around the clock paparazzi stalking. And Frankie, now enraptured with the nationwide and worldwide attention her bylines earn for her, succumbs and embraces her notorious success, even at the cost of losing her closest friends. But what happens when the repercussions of her choices finally come back to shake her to her core?

     I can only say that you do NOT want to miss Frankie's response and ultimate ironic fate. .

     Author Erin Van Der Meer not only eviscerates the tabloid world but takes a knowing, unflinching look at the challenges faced by ambitious, talented working women in a Patriarchal marketplace.. And I was amazed at how absorbed I became with Frankie's calamities given that her shifting morality renders her unlikable and the book spends a little too much time with her repetitious internal anxieties.

     There's real live wire energy in the storytelling here and a sense of cruel wit runs through the entire book. Not a pretty picture of the way we digest news these days, but you won't want to stop reading till Frankie (and author Van Der Meer) have the last word.

     4 stars (****).

'THE PATRIOT'S DAUGHTER'.....A BEAUTIFUL CIA AGENT VS. A DIRE RUSSIAN PLOT TO UPEND U.S. DEMOCRACY.....

 The Patriot's Daughter by Brittany Butler (2026) 

     I expected to shower unconditional love on this book because it contains the mixture of everything I crave in a contemporary espionage thriller.......American and Russian spies facing off with the fate of U.S. and the entire civilized world hanging in the balance......suspenseful stealing of top secrets....double agents, triple agents, maybe even quadruple agents, none of whom trust each other for a single second (nor should they.)

     Chases.....daring escapes......startling twists......bullet-riddled action a plot that corresponds to today's current events......and to top it all off, a fast boiling romance between Ava, our fearless lead CIA spy and Ben, a tradecraft-savvy battle hardened counterintelligence agent.

     The stakes and the danger levels couldn't be higher here. And I was fully enthralled with Ava's combing her save-the-world-as-we-know-it mission with her clandestine agenda to discover the secrets surrounding the betrayal and death of her mother, also a CIA agent.

     While I had an exciting time reading everything I've detailed above, the book's incredibly poor editing (or complete lack thereof) threatened to sabotage the novel even worse than what its Russian villains were trying to do to U.S. democracy..

     I grew increasingly frustrated with the gaping plot holes, continuity gaps, jarring transitions from one scene to another, a last minute introduction of a formidable villain who then disappears altogether and twists with no rational explanation to back them up.

     The overall effect was similar to watching a two hour movie thriller that looked like a half hour of footage was randomly chopped out of it, rendering parts of it senseless.

     If all these grievous errors in story construction and plotting had been addressed, I would've easily given "The Patriot's Daughter" 2 more stars than its getting now. And yet I wouldn't mind seeing Ava take on more global adventures, but only if there's huge improvements made from this first one.

      3 stars (***).

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP.....SPECIAL "DIDN'T YOU ALL GET IT? I'M A DOCTOR WHO COSPLAYS CHRIST!" EDITION.......

 

Have a blessed weekend free of more madness....see you all Monday!

'THRASH'......STORMY, WITH A 90% CHANCE OF SHARKS.......

 Thrash (Netflix-2026)

    Once again, after joyfully giggling at the Kung Fu Ballerinas of "Pretty Lethal", we're faced with yet another monumental Guilty Pleasure, which we couldn't possibly defend on any artistic level.....

     .....not with a straight face, anyway. 

     If you want the key to enjoying a film like this, we'd refer you our reviews of 2020's "Crawl" on 9/23/20 and Netflix's 2024 "Under Paris" on 8/824.

      Think of them as successor to the infamous, notorious "Sharknado" movies. You either go with the lunatic flow of these things or avoid them altogether. 

       As in "Crawl", we're back in what's now a favorite horror movie destination.....a small Florida town hit with a Category 5 hurricane. This time the storm's flooded the town not with alligators, but with bull sharks....and one jumbo Great White.

       As in "Under Paris", Climate Change is front and center as the genesis of monstrous death facing us if we don't start cleaning up our act.....(much like radiation and atomic bomb testing in sci-fi monster movies of the 1950's.)

       But enough explanation, let's get right to the good stuff.....what we crave and demand in a film like this - plenty 'o hapless humans served up as shark chow. 

       Among the unlucky Floridians who chose to stick it out as the incoming Atlantic turns their town into matchsticks......three plucky foster kids under the abusive rule of their greedy caretakers, who've deprived the kids of their secret stash of prime steaks and kept the government payouts for the kids' care for themselves. And then there's teenage Dakota who won't leave her recently deceased mom's house and very pregnant Lisa, who finds herself constantly trapped in small spaces with the water rising over her head.....and her on the verge of popping out her baby.....

       To paraphrase Thelma Ritter's immortal line from "All About Eve"...."Everything but the wolves yappin' at their heels....."

         Not wolves, but sharks..... flowing through the flooded town like it's an all-you-can-eat human buffet. 

          Let us now salute Whitney Peak as the terrified but resourceful Dakota and Phoebe Dynavor as the universe's most unluckiest, besieged woman who shrieks with labor pains as the sharks circle and the water's hitting glub-glub-glub level......

        What can we say?  Unrepentant brainless junk but expertly designed to get a rise out of you even as you're snickering at every minute......(and having no trouble whatsoever guessing which people end up on the menu.....)

         How can we deride a movie so without shame as to rip off the climactic crowd-rousing moment of the "Jurassic Park" finale?  (And found ourselves still laughing nonetheless....)  So bravo to writer-director Tommy Wirkola, for fully reveling in the outrageous nonsense of it all, showing us the good time we demanded.......which, in a movie like this, is all you can reasonably ask for. 

         That one-last-sting-of-the-tail at the very end may be an all too typical trope but in this case, pay attention to this one....... funny and frightening all at once, but it's not fantasy and perfectly illustrates the written warning given at the movie's start.   

         3 stars (***). For all Guilty Pleasure-seekers, a pre-summer splash in the pool......

'PRETTY LETHAL'......WELL, AT LEAST THERE'S MORE LAUGHS IN IT THAN JOHN WICK'S' 'BALLERINA'.......(MORE BALLET TOO).....

 Pretty Lethal (Amazon Prime 2026)

       As action fans well know, this is not the first movie to point out that ballerinas are, physically, some tough cookies......called upon to exhibit more strength and endurance than Tom Brady....put together. 

        Their training, exact, demanding and never ending, takes a punishing toll on their bodies, especially their feet. (Even Quentin Tarantino, that great admirer of women's feet,  would hurl if he ever tried to gaze at a ballerina's brutalized, bloodied tootsies. 

         So no wonder more than one filmmaker thought showing  delicate dancing divas kicking ass could pump up the carnage level to delirious heights. 

        But director Vicky Jenson and writer Kate Freund may be the first to put the tutu-tiara corps into take-no-prisoners action while they're actually dancing....

         Oh yeah, baby.....there's a reason these Red Shoes are a deeper shade of red......

         You heard that right. If you've ever dreamed of seeing the 'Nutcracker Suite' performed  with actual guys' nuts getting cracked, here's your vision come true. Not to mention assorted throat cuttings delivered by the ballerinas via blades stuck into their toe shoes.  And you don't even have to wait til Christmas to savor every lip-smackin', splattering kill.  Think of it as Ballet-Fu, or TaekwonTutu.......

         Our five lovely girls (Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Avantika, Millicent Simmonds, Iris Apatow) were on their way to strut their stuff in Budapest when their bus breaks down. They end up at a castle-like, middle-of-nowhere Inn run by a former legendary Prima Ballerina (Uma Thurman, reveling in villainy, sounding like she's also looking for payback on Moose and Squirrel.)

        But the place is also a major hangout for the world's worst Euro-gangsters, one of whom murders the girls' coach right in front of them. Ooops, time for  Madame Uma and her unsavory customers to dispose of the witnesses......

        But they didn't the reckon on the ferocity and survival instincts of the girls' unofficial Alpha (Ziegler), who rallies the troupe into extended 'Kill Bill' slaughterfests against the equally determined Euro-Goons. Leotarded feet fly in perfect choreographed unison as these Sugar Plum Fairies knock 'em dead.....literally. 

        Okay, we'll admit we laughed and cheered through all the lunacy. And the film's clever enough to include a scene where powerhouse Ziegler confounds the gangsters' on-call torturer by laughing as he pulls out one of her toenails. For her, it's just another painful day at the office, since as a battle hardened dancer,  she's more than used to pulling out her own toenails..... 

        One of the best Guilty Pleasures we've enjoyed this year so far...indefensible on any level, but as BQ always says, you can never have enough sweet, pretty girls decimating thugs until their ballet costumes are decorated with arterial spray. 

          3 stars (***). 

          

'THE OMEN REBORN- PART 2'.....JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE.....HE'S BAAAAAAAACCCCCCK.....

 

Welcome to 24 hours a day of Maga Madness.....

The actual caption reads:

     Jesus:  "I'm sorry, Donald, but you've hurt so many people, committed so many sins, done so many stupid things......I tried to plead your case with Dad, but His decision is final. You're going straight to hell, with no chance of a pardon....bring comfortable clothing, summer stuff, know what I mean?  Oh and by the way, that 'I was a doctor in that picture' excuse you tried? Nobody but Lindsay Graham bought it....."