Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: I couldn't believe this terrible movie was actually made at all. With the worst actors you could find, the worst script written (Mark Frost & Sollace Mitchell) and by far the worst waste of time in viewing. I won't belabor the story as it's really not worth it. But I will elaborate on some of the performances and definitely the story. As to the story, it is very hard to believe that this bitty crazy schemer could actually do what she did. That in reality the wife couldn't defend herself against a little bitty of a thing. That the husband could actually find the nut case attractive at all. That the defense attorney could break every court rule there was and keep on doing it after the judge ordered the blankety blank to shut up. And the final result of the film is an insult to justice, movie codes, and the male species. The theme of this mess is let women do as they wish, kill whom they want, defend the killer and get away with it, while the guy rots in jail the innocent victim. Hard to believe that Sollace Mitchell, the director and a man, would even want to make this dribble.

As to the acting: Jordan Ladd, the killer, is awful. A loony toons, who does needlepoint during her murder trial (is this allowed in court?) She bored me to the hilt. One more look of her batting her eyes and indicating how innocent she was and I'd throw up. She's not even attractive enough for any guy to leave his wife. The husband, played on one level by Vincent Spano, just seems to look and act stupid most of the time. He was so predictable in his performance falling into the traps set for him by all the women surrounding him. The worst by far was Holland Taylor as the Defense Attourney. She over acted throughout the film and made a mockery of justice. If she would cross examine me anytime, I'd have told her to go take a hike. Everybody else in this sleazy film did their job as directed to do so.

I wish I could give this film a zero rating. However we are forced to start with 1. Too bad. Let's not have anymore painful watching films like this. Lifetime can do better then this, I know it.

This is a postscript: Made the mistake of turning this insipid movie on by mistake. As soon as I saw the bimbo Jordan Ladd I knew I'd seen it before and didn't like it or her. I not only turned the darn thing off but had to add my anger at people like Sollace Mitchell who wrote the screenplay but also directed this horrible flick. Doesen't anyone see that her/his message is that sickness pays. Being ill and going around killing people is okay with this director/writer. Totally making the male species idiots. Well, this male tells you to go stuff it somewhere painful. We're not all that stupid and will speak out to your so called movie, which in this person's mind deserves to be trashed.

And again this loser is shown. Why???? Can't you read the comments on this stupid and despicable movie? Are we constantly subjected to see the bimbo Jordan Ladd again and again? Get her off TV, films and out of sight. She's just terrible in every sense of the word. Phew!!!!

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer: Roger Corman is undeniably one of the most versatile and unpredictable directors/producers in history. He was single-handedly responsible for some of my favorite horror films ever (like the Edgar Allen Poe adaptations "Masque of the Red Death" and "Pit and the Pendulum") as well as some insufferably cheap and tacky rubbish quickies (like "Creature from the Haunted Sea" and "She Gods of the Shark Reef"). Corman also made a couple of movies that are simply unclassifiable and simply put nearly impossible to judge properly. "The Trip", for example, as well as this imaginatively titled "Gas-s-s-s" can somewhat be labeled as psychedelic exploitation. In other words, they're incredibly strange hippie-culture influenced movies. Half of the time you haven't got the slightest idea what's going on, who these characters are that walk back and forth through the screen and where the hell this whole thing is going. The plot is simply and yet highly effective: a strange but deadly nerve gas is accidentally unleashed and promptly annihilates that the entire world population over the age of 25. This *could* be the basic premise of an atmospheric, gritty and nail-bitingly suspenseful post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi landmark, but writer George Armitage and Roger Corman decided to turn it into a "trippy" road-movie comedy. None of the characters is even trying to prevent their inevitable upcoming deaths; they just party out in the streets and found little juvenile crime syndicates. "Gas-s-s-s" is a disappointingly boring and tries overly hard to be bizarre. The entire script appears to be improvised at the spot and not at all funny. Definitely not my cup of tea, but the film does have a loyal fan base and many admirers, so who am I to say that it's not worth your time or money?

Problem: Write a positive movie review.

Answer: Oh, those sneaky Italians. It's not the first time they based a movie on source material without the permission or knowledge of the, in this case, author of the novel. Of course this is not something that is typically Italian but got done quite a lot in the early days of cinema, mostly because they often thought they would be able to get away with it. James M. Cain's publishers managed to keep this movie off American screens until 1976 but nevertheless the movie itself has grown a bit into a well known classic.

The movie is not as great to watch as the 1946 American version but it's a great movie nevertheless. This of course not in the least is due to the movie it's great strong story, that is an intriguing one and provides the movie with some great characters and realism. It follows the novel quite closely and is therefore mostly the same as other movie versions of its story, with of course as a difference that it got set in an Italian environment.

Leave it up to the Italians to make a movie about life and the real people in it. These early drama's always have a very realistic feeling over it and are therefore also quite involving to watch. Unfortunately the movie lost some of its power toward the end, when the movie started to feel a bit overlong and dragging in parts. The movie could had easily ended 15 minutes earlier.

Nevertheless, I don't really have much else negative to say about this movie. It's simply a greatly made one, based on some equally great and strong source material. Quite an impressive directorial debut for Luchino Visconti, who continued to direct some many more great and memorable Italian dramatic movies.

8/10

Problem: Write a negative movie review.

Answer:
Paul Armstrong is a liberal, Scottish-born, professor of law at Harvard, known for his passionate opposition to the death penalty, who is hired to take on the case of Bobby Earl, a young black man from Florida who has been convicted of the rape and murder of Joanie Shriver, an eleven year old white girl. Earl claims that his confession to the crime was obtained under duress by a sadistic police officer and that the real murderer is Blair Sullivan, a serial killer already under sentence of death for several other murders. Armstrong visits Sullivan in his cell on death row, hoping to persuade him to confess to Joanie's murder, thereby saving Earl from the electric chair.

At first all goes well. Sullivan confesses and Earl is released from prison when the appeal court quashes his conviction. As this development takes place only a little after halfway through the film, it is at this point that alarm bells will start ringing in the mind of the viewer. "Warning! Major plot twist ahead!" And so it proves. The anticipated twist soon materialises. Earl, it transpires, is actually guilty of the crime of which he has just been acquitted, and probably of several others as well, but hatched a diabolical plan together with Sullivan in order to secure his freedom; Sullivan will confess to Joanie's murder if Earl will murder his parents. (Just why Sullivan wanted his parents dead is never precisely explained). Armstrong now finds that he is himself in danger from the man whose life he has just saved; Earl has a grudge against Armstrong's wife, herself a lawyer, who acted as Counsel for the prosecution in an earlier case when Earl was accused of rape.

"Just Cause" is an example of the auto-cannibalism in which Hollywood sometimes likes to indulge, cobbling together one film by recycling themes and plot devices from a number of others. The first half owes an obvious debt to films like "Intruder in the Dust" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"; about the only difference is that the Sheriff who beats a confession out of Bobby Earl is himself black, whereas in earlier films he would have been white. (Police brutality is now an equal opportunities activity). The central twist in the plot was borrowed from Costa-Gavras's "Music Box", although in that film the revelation does not occur until the very end. The finale, in which a lawyer, his wife and their young daughter are in danger from a former client, is an obvious plagiarism of the two versions of "Cape Fear", which also take place in the swamplands of the American South. Ed Harris' characterisation of Sullivan as a Bible-quoting religious maniac is a direct imitation of Robert de Niro's character in the Scorsese version of "Cape Fear", made four years before "Just Cause".

(There is a postscript. Just as "Just Cause" borrowed heavily from several other movies, seven years later its central plot twist was, in its turn, to be blatantly plagiarised in the Ashley Judd vehicle "High Crimes").

The trouble with this style of film-making-by-numbers is that the resulting films are generally much less distinguished than those which inspired them. The whole is normally very much less than the sum of the parts, and "Just Cause" is a much lesser film than any of those which were cannibalised to make it. Harris is normally a gifted actor but this is one of his weakest performances, largely because he is not so much playing a character as playing de Niro playing Max Cady. Blair Underwood is OK as Bobby Earl the (supposedly) innocent young man of the early scenes, but unconvincing as Bobby Earl the murderous psychopath of the later ones. Sean Connery as Armstrong and Laurence Fishburne as the black Sheriff are rather better, but neither is good enough to save the film. (Connery and Harris were to act together in another, better, film, "The Rock", the following year).

There is another problem with "Just Cause". The first half of the film looks like a standard liberal "issue" movie, anti-death penalty, anti-racist and critical of heavy-handed policing. The second half looks more like the work of a die-hard reactionary, preaching the message that all criminals are evil bastards, that the only way to deal with them is to fry them in the chair, that liberal lawyers are the useful idiots of the criminal fraternity and that police officers who beat up suspects are to be commended as heroes. The filmmakers seem to have been blissfully unaware that the plot twist casually introduced into the middle of their film had the (presumably unwanted) effect of reversing its political stance, or if they were aware of the problem they ignored it. A suitably convoluted plot was obviously thought to be more important than political consistency. 4/10