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wtbradley
Reviews
Fantasy Island (1998)
Another outstanding show mishandled by ABC
This was NOT just a rehash of the original.
In the late 90s, rather than just repackage old formulas, ABC had the guts to run out a litany of intelligent, creative, entertaining new programs every year. Unfortunately, they then pulled the plug on them before they had a chance to find an audience. (Another glaring example was Jeremy Piven's 'Cupid'.) Fantasy Island-1998 was a darker version, with tongue-in-cheek references to the original. Malcolm McDowell's Roark was outstanding, and the frame intros with Sylvia Sidney and Fyvush Finkel would have made a good show on their own. Repeated, veiled references to a back story explaining the Island's existence and the reasons for the staff being there would have been very intriguing if this show had ever been given a chance.
Nightfall (1988)
A movie well worth walking out on...
One might guess that this movie gets so many bad reviews because Asimov fans felt it wasn't entirely true to the original story. But it's more than that, it's just bad. True, it was a complete sodomization of the wonderful Asimov story. And it seems likely that only Asimov fans ever saw it. However, likely as that may be, allow me to warn you that this is hands-down one of the worst movies ever. The only thing keeping it off the bottom 100 list is that there probably weren't 625 people who are dumb enough to have seen it and masochistic enough to want to relive the experience by looking it up here. The casting was atrocious. The acting was terrible. The story was appallingly bad. The lighting was so dark you couldn't tell who was speaking. If you want to compare my opinions with those of real people, I actually liked 'Howard the Duck' and 'Transylvania 6-5000'. This is lightyears worse than those. This is not even "so-bad-it's-funny"-bad, like 'Plan 9', this is just plain superlatively bad, with no redeeming features.