I’m not a fan of revising old movies, but you can sort of see why Lucas later jazzed up the Sarlacc with CGI.
I once owned a book where the guy raved about this movie. I couldn’t believe it. Moreover, he kept talking about how ‘relatable’ the main characters was. “If you weren’t him, you knew somebody who was,” I remember the guy saying, or somesuch. Since the main character was a homicidal weirdo pervert, I didn’t find these comments very encouraging.
Even worse, every movie he covered with a female antagonist, he went into this theory at length about how the villainess symbolized a fear of female sexuality on the part of the filmmaker, blah blah blah. Fine, not exactly fresh ground, but whatever. However, he repeated the exact same argument, at length, EVERY TIME ONE OF THE 50 MOVIES THE BOOK COVERED FEATURED A FEMALE ANTAGONIST. So about every five films you kept reading pretty much the exact same paragraphs over and over again, as if they were new to his analysis of that one particular film.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking: Ken, that’s exactly what it’s like reading the stuff at your website. Well, yes, but if I collected a bunch of pieces into a book, I hope I wouldn’t keep repeating the exact same observations more or less verbatim (and fervently, like they represented some brilliant insight) over and over and over again.
I eventually sold that book. Too bad, the selection of oddball films was on the face of it pretty exciting. The writing, not so much.*
[*I just checked the one reader review of the book over at Amazon. To quote: “The problem with the book, unfortunately, are the interpretations that the author writes at the end of over half of his reviews. For example, he points out obvious environmentalist messages behind any giant-monster-caused-by-radioactivity movie, or reminds us that the sinners die in any slasher. But he really makes a mess when at the end of ANY movie where the villain is a woman, he interprets the film as being misogynist and against women’s rights. I mean, really, this guy suggests that the people behind “The Corpse Grinders” were actually thinking when they wrote the screenplay and shot the film.*](Emphasis added)
