Gimmick
Terror on the 40th Floor
Sometimes, a review just doesn’t tell you whether you want to watch it. Sometimes, writing a review just isn’t appealing.
With these two things in mind, I present to you the ultimate im gimmick-y blog posting: the first 30 minutes of the film, blow by blow. There’s no spoilers (there’s hardly a plot), but hopefully it’ll give you an idea of whether you want to watch it (you don’t).
Here, then, is Terror on the 40th Floor. A disaster movie about a skyscraper. Die Hard, this ain’t.
29secs: Awesome synth tune kicks in. This has started well. And look! Father Christmas. It must be set at Christmas.
1min: The strings kick in. The music’s nice, but the credits are otherwise pretty dull.
2mins: There’s an office party going on and they’re all drunk.
3mins: Woman on the phone is arguing with her mum about whether she should be with her son,
rather than at the party. She probably should. This is all going to end badly.
5mins: A guy sneaks off with two girls and bursts in upon his morose father brooding in his office. They’re invited in for a drink.
6mins: It’s champagne. Wow.
7mins: Another guy burst in with two girls. Suddenly the party is relocating to the office.
8mins: Most of the drunken revellers are heading home, the security guard shepherds them out.
9mins: Kelly who should be locking up and checking the building is clear is encouraged out of the building by the boss.
10mins: Charley arrives and er… rather implausibly has been demanded to perform maintenance work on the building ON CHRISTMAS EVE.
11mins: Back to the remaining party group upstairs. Champagne flows as they begin to flirt…
12mins: Oh noes! Charley the maintenance man is drinking from a bottle of liquor! How terribly irresponsible. He just knocked something on the floor too.
13mins: More boring flirting. The dialogue is pretty crappy.
14mins: Charley is doing something strenuous in the dark. Not sure what. He takes another big swig of liquor.
15mins: Ahahaha, he just kicked over a tiny lantern, which set everything on fire. Including his legs. What a shame. The security guy is running around too.
16mins: Oh, the ambulance has arrived ever-so speedily. But one of them has already died. Hard luck, buddy. The other man, merely injured, was the security guard who has informed the emergency services that there’s no-one inside the building. BUT THERE IS!!!11!!!!
18mins: The fire has climbed seven floors in the last three minutes of film. What’s going to happen in the next 80 minutes?
20mins: There’s a little bit of boozy seduction going on here. And some comparison of notes between old flame and new.
20mins + 30secs: He has a wife! Eeek!
21mins: Guys are fighting fire. It’s not very clear what’s going on. Sirens wail. They’re cutting the power.
23mins: He seducing her by describing the boardroom. What a player…
24mins: The music’s gone really dramatic… not a lot’s happening though. Until…. Snogging!
25mins: Ah! But up comes the topic of his wife.
26mins: Hazy flash-back (or is it flash-forward) to games of badminton in the sunshine. And then she drops the bomb: “Jim.. I…I’m pregnant”
28mins: “So.. we can have an abortion or get married?”
29mins: He’s gotta think about it.
29mins: Back to the now, sirens wail. Not a lot else is happening.
In conclusion: unless you’re gripped by these details and care about the cheating businessman or any of the other boring, thin characters… I really wouldn’t bother with this one.
Thank you and goodnight.
Wicked Wicked
From film diary
Challenge your imagination? That might be a little optimistic…
This is quite a weird one. As you can see from any of the pictures, Wicked Wicked is a film based entirely around the gimmick of duo-vision. Yep, that’s two screens at once. Mostly they’re different angles of the same scene but sometimes they show wildly different things: a character pauses for thought whilst a flashback plays out on the the other side.
The sad thing is that the gimmick actually works pretty well and is dragged down by a god-awful plot. In some moments, with the killer hiding on one screen and the others looking for him on the other screen, the two screens device really does actually add a bit of tension.
Kinves!
They can talk on the phone between screens
Sadly, the story is rubbish, the acting pretty laughable and the pacing even worse. It’s only 90ish minutes long; it really shouldn’t drag like it does.
That said, the first 20 minutes or so are pretty good and the last 20 are really good fun. It’s just the middle 50 that crawl past… It suffers from being one of those slasher flicks with very little slashing.
Although the killer has a bit of a thing for stabbing blondes, and mostly just after they’ve come from the shower, the film isn’t sexy in the slightest. This doesn’t stop it producing what is possibly an all time classic line though: the secretary lady, who is having a bit of a fling with the doctor/dentist/security man slyly says:
“I think I feel another toothache coming on, Doctor…”
“Sorry love, I’m not drilling today”
(Well it made me laugh anyway…)
Mostly crap. Fun at the end.
How moody…
Fake blood to the face!
Fairly impressively the trailer below, though it makes a fuss at the start about “Duo-Vision” doesn’t actually show any of the parallel screens. How odd…