Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: To make a film straddling the prequels and the "real" Star Wars trilogy would tax even a great film-maker....Mr Lucas is not that film-maker.

To portray the fall of a good man into darkness needs a good actor...Mr Christensen is not that actor.

The first 60-80 minutes are overwhelmingly boring with only a few pockets of yet more light sabre fights but there is a lack of edge because you already know which main characters survive to the original Star Wars.

Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) has a very fleeting role here and about the best idea is to have Jar Jar Binks silent!

No the film only picks up with the Chancellor turning on the Jedi and has one great (overlong) sequence at the lava falls

Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer: Bizarre horror movie filled with famous faces but stolen by Cristina Raines (later of TV's "Flamingo Road") as a pretty but somewhat unstable model with a gummy smile who is slated to pay for her attempted suicides by guarding the Gateway to Hell! The scenes with Raines modeling are very well captured, the mood music is perfect, Deborah Raffin is charming as Cristina's pal, but when Raines moves into a creepy Brooklyn Heights brownstone (inhabited by a blind priest on the top floor), things really start cooking. The neighbors, including a fantastically wicked Burgess Meredith and kinky couple Sylvia Miles & Beverly D'Angelo, are a diabolical lot, and Eli Wallach is great fun as a wily police detective. The movie is nearly a cross-pollination of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist"--but what a combination! Based on the best-seller by Jeffrey Konvitz, "The Sentinel" is entertainingly spooky, full of shocks brought off well by director Michael Winner, who mounts a thoughtfully downbeat ending with skill. ***1/2 from ****

Problem: OPTIONS:
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Answer:
I tuned into this thing one night on a cable channel a few minutes after the credits ran, so I didn't know who had done it at first. The longer I saw it, the more I started thinking, "Jesus, this looks like an Albert Pyun flick." Wasn't quite sure, though, for two main reasons: the photography was quite good (and the Utah desert scenery was beautiful), and Scott Paulin gave an hilarious performance as Simon, a murderous cyborg, but with some style and a sense of humor. Paulin must have ad-libbed the many clever one-liners he shot out, because Albert Pyun hasn't written anything even remotely funny or coherent in his career. Unfortunately, Paulin doesn't have all that much screen time before he's gone, and the movie's the worse for it. Lance Henriksen, playing the evil head cyborg, growls his way through his part, as he's done in countless other movies like this. I don't know what the hell Kris Kristofferson is doing in this thing; maybe he wanted to see what the Utah desert looked like and get paid for it. He goes through the movie looking (and sounding) like he just woke up, and in fact spends most of the last half of the movie on his back in a tent. Kathy Long, the nominal hero, has a great body, is attractive, has a great body, fights extremely well, has a great body, and doesn't have an iota of acting talent, but that doesn't matter in a movie like this. This being an Albert Pyun film, it's full of the trademarks that we've all come to know and love: inane and idiotic dialog, choppy editing, and the impression that they lost a reel in the middle of the picture and figured, "Ah, nobody'll ever notice."

As bad as this movie is, however, it's a shade above most of Pyun's other efforts--this is "Citizen Kane" compared to his brain-numbing "Adrenaline: Feel the Rush", for example. The fights are pretty well done, if repetitive (after she knocks down eight or nine guys one after the other, you find yourself saying, "Alright already, go to something else"), and Long is very athletic (and, as a previous poster has noted, has a great derriere). It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not anywhere near as incoherent and incompetent as Pyun's usual extravaganzas. You could do worse than rent this movie--not much worse, granted, but worse nonetheless.