Christopher Lloyd

  • Schizoid (1980)

    Schizoid (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) There’s a long list of reasons why I loathe slasher movies, with gore and nihilistic disregard for human life being near the top of the list. But the inherent misogyny of the genre, especially in its first flash of early-1980s popularity, is right up there with the worst. It’s always young women being targeted, with the desecration of their bodies being integral to the murders. Schizoid, while better than many other slashers from a narrative perspective, is harder to excuse when it comes to violence directed at women: the targets are older, they’re not necessarily a cheerleader squad and the identity of the killer underscores its misogyny badly enough. From a narrative point of view, Schizoid has a few more things going for it than the usual summer camp bloodbath slasher: As a psychiatrist receives threatening letters and sees members of her therapy group being murdered one by one, she wonders: who’s the murderer? Could it be… creepy Klaus Kinski? Well, maybe—terribly miscast as what’s supposed to be an irresistible senior psychiatrist, he rings off red herring alarms the moment he walks on the screen. Could it be… creepy Christopher Lloyd as an unhinged handyman? Well, maybe—except how about that weird teenager with an axe to grudge against the protagonist? There are plenty of possibilities and Schizoid, once it moves away from the gruesome murders, does have some interest as a whodunnit. Alas, it does remain a slasher and not a particularly well-handled one. Whatever attempts at giallo style are there fall flat and there’s not much more to compensate. Kinski is a presence by himself, but Marianna Hill is merely beautiful-but-bland in the lead role. I’ll tolerate Schizoid as being slightly better than the average slasher, but that’s not a very high bar to begin with.

  • The Dream Team (1989)

    The Dream Team (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) Michael Keaton spent much of the 1980s starring in various comic vehicles of varying interest, and it’s interesting to note that one of the least engaging of them, The Dream Team, was released the same year that Batman raised him to a different class of actor. Little superheroism shows up here as the film sets up its dicey premise: what if a psychiatrist took four patients from the asylum to a baseball game in the heart of Manhattan? What if, to make it even more interesting, he was suddenly incapacitated and his charges were left to roam the city? Fortunately, The Dream Team is a comedy rather than anything else, and so the film sets out to show how our characters can act sane in an insane city and do some self-therapy along the way. Mix in a criminal subplot and you’ve got the bare essentials of an unthreatening Hollywood mental illness comedy in which all you need is love and unsupervised time. The biggest problem with The Dream Team is that while it has the bare foundation for a comic film, it doesn’t have much more. There are few laughs, few comic set-pieces, and quite a bit of excessive sentiment that often gives the impression of trivializing the issues it touches. Keaton is fun to watch—especially given that the film makes sure that his issues are not too severe—and the film does benefit from such comedy notables as Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle. But the potential of the film remains largely unrealized.

  • Suburban Commando (1991)

    Suburban Commando (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2019) The problem with star vehicles is that they make sense when the star is a star that people want to watch, but not so much once everybody wonders what the fuss was about. Made near the peak of Hulk Hogan’s fame, Suburban Commando is a pure vehicle that seems to revolve around a single gag: A super-strong extraterrestrial having trouble coping with the peculiar customs of American suburbia. Washi, rinse, repeat: It’s not very different from that other star vehicle Hercules in New York, which is somewhat ironic considering that this film was originally also intended for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Considering that Hulk Hogan was almost a comic character himself, the film logically lends itself to much comic violence. The script is meant to be a buddy-comedy kind of thing with a meek earthling learning how to be courageous from the fearless alien, so it’s Christopher Lloyd who gets the ingrate role of assuming the film’s character development quota. Meanwhile, Shelley Long doesn’t have much to do, although she does have a fun scene with a curly wig. Still, much of the film writes itself with few surprises along the way. You can watch the trailer and have a near-exact idea of Suburban Commando’s tone, plot and best jokes.