input question: Select the correct sentiment of the following review: Couldn't go to sleep the other night. So I got up, flipped on the tube & this movie was on.

Film makers bit off more than they could chew. Just as ambitious in scope as "Forrest Gump" was. But Gump read like an fairy-tale where an extraordinarily lucky man guides us through the era. TGMB just relies on tired cliches to tell the story. Almost like a Broadway musical where actors have to ham it up. Every character's purpose was to fill a silly 60's archetype.

Take how we're introduced to Finnegan: Hugging his black maid & receiving a framed picture of MLK. Criminey, talk about heavy-handed. Why not just give him a t-shirt saying "I Heart Black People"?

Sunshine: "Isn't free love groovay, man? Oh no, I didn't have my period."

Mary Beth: "I want to go to Berkeley, not square UCLA." Uh, excuse me? There was nothing square about LA in the 60s. Rather than take the time to demonstrate what made Berkeley unique, we just hear this brat whine about not going there.

Can't even remember the black kid's name. He was just a prop used to show how racially tolerant the other kids are.

Thing is, period pieces don't have to be this cheesy. Take "Dazed & Confused." Look how we're introduced to the football hero, Randall Floyd. We don't first see him on the football field. In fact, we never see him play football. We're introduced to him in class, inviting his nerdish poker buddies to a party.

In "Dazed" feminism isn't a casual by-product of some chick getting knocked up. It's much more organic, more serious than that. It's refined in the ladies' room over a flip discussion about Gilligan's Island. Serious ideas can grow in the most mundane settings. But real life is like that.

Some of the warm comments here note that the themes in this movie are still relevant. I agree! Which is why I feel so disappointed by this piece of Baby-Boomer pornostalgia.
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output answer: negative

input question: Select the correct sentiment of the following review: This is the worst film I have ever seen.I was watching this film with some friends and after 40 minutes we had enough. The plot was bad and there wasn't a single likeable character.I could get more entertainment watching static. I gave this movie a 1 only because the scale didn't go into negative numbers. Avoid this movie at all costs.
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output answer: negative

input question: Select the correct sentiment of the following review: The third collaboration for Karloff and Lugosi sees a move away from Poe and into the realm of the science fiction serial. Karloff plays Dr. Janos Rukh, creator of a device that can capture light rays through his telescope in the Carpathian Mountains and translate them into pictures that form a visual history of the universe.

Before several guests, including Lugosi as Dr. Benet, an astro-chemist who had previously scoffed at Rukh's theories, he demonstrates the existence of an unknown radioactive element, here termed "Radium X", contained in a meteor that fell to Earth in darkest Africa several thousand years ago. Karloff joins the expedition to prove his theories, but Radium X is a tricky compound - it levels mountains at long range, and cures blindness at short range. Rukh is careless, however, and poisons himself, glowing in the dark rather like those old Ready Breck commercials! Dr. Benet is on hand to devise a counter-active for the radiation, but combination of poison and cure drives Rukh insanely paranoid. Convinced he has been cheated, he seeks out the members of the expedition in Paris, including his estranged wife, and his very touch while in his radioactive state means death...

Along the way we get the old pseudo-scientific idea that a dead person's eyes record the image of their killer (a remarkably distinct Karloff!) and the Radium X device used to symbolically melt statues that represent the expedition members. And even a touch of James Whale in a cockney landlady in Paris!

The Invisible Ray is great fun, aside from the Gothic opening it's interesting to see Universal move the action around to Africa and Paris. The film lacks pace, but is always absorbing. Karloff slightly overdoes his performance but Lugosi is terrific. Universal used the basic story outline again in Man Made Monster, this time with Lon Chaney Jr. as the glowing menace (this time caused by electricity) and Lionel Atwill as a much madder doctor than Lugosi is here. The Invisible Ray is a sombre and clever little film with much to admire. Not as famous as other Universal Horrors, perhaps, but it works and is highly entertaining.
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output answer:
positive