SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES

SISTERS (AIP) — The niftiest product out of A. I. P. since Boxcar Bertha, Sisters takes the best plot elements from Rear Window and Psycho, while Brian de Palma succeeds in tripping up Hitchcock with a directorial style which works as straight thriller and flirts with outrageous self-parody, the most extraordinary since �Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.� It�s about Siamese twins, one good, one evil, and a Jane Fonda type liberal reporter who watches some dude get murdered from her apartment across the courtyard (he writes �HELP!� on the window in his own blood); then this weirdo Aryan with thick glasses comes in and cleans up the whole mess with Janitor In A Drum just before the cops arrive, and this is only the beginning. Nothing will be able to touch this one at the drive-ins this summer, believe me.

Brian Zabawski

TEN FROM YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS (Continental): Here�s one to determine the real generation gap: Do you remember �Your Show of Shows?� It was one of the premier programs back in the days of live TV, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca,� and was considered about the best of its field. If you�re one of the old-timers, now you can test your memory and see if it was as good (or bad) as you remember. They�ve culled ten early bits from the show to make this retrospective look at the roots of television, and if that doesn�t necessarily seem like a tag to be proud of, you can see for yourself some of the promise that TV has never fulfilled or hardly improved upon. Caesar and Coca, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner, make up a great, inventive cast, but the film over all suffers most from similarities to the daily dredge that�s been rehashing variations on themes that were only original and imaginative in the early 50�s.

Greg Popek

ACE ELI AND ROGER OF THE SKIES (Fox): This looks like a made-for-TV flick that didn�t live up to the high standards of television and got palmed off onto the paying public. Cliff Robertson plays a hotshot blowhard (good casting) barnstorming small towns in his biplane in the early 20�s, and messing up his kid�s formative years. The crisis comes when he finally realizes he really is a lousy lay, as all the ladies kept telling him. There�s a cock fight during the film and I couldn�t help thinking that, over all, this wasn�t worth the life of a good chicken.

Greg Popek

L�AMOUR (Altura Films International): Bad Warhol films always had their fascination but bad Morrissey films are the worst and L�Amour, which credits them both as directors, is for the most part bad Paul Morrissey. Shot in Paris god knows how long ago, it�s the story of two dumb highschool girls (Donna Jordan and Jane Forth) who are made-over into glamour models and thrown together with Michael Sklar (the welfare investigator from Trash, here a rich, manic young American with theatrical delusions) and a pretty young French boy he is keeping. What these four people are doing together I don�t know (Donna & Jane are the only ones who make any sense as a couple), but the plot eventually pairs Donna and Michael and Jane and Max Delys (the pouty kept boy). The guys are unbearable, especially Sklar who you just want to kick after 10 minutes on the screen, but the girls have their moments. In one, Forth is struggling on a couch while Delys attempts to undress her and she won�t stop talking for a second, even while he�s kissing her, rambling on in this fabulously dumb way about how she misses America, the Blimpy Bases and talk shows on tv, finally confessing she doesn�t much care for fucking. �I get more excited by make-up,� she,says. Donna�s best scenes take a similar turn: screaming about cheeseburgers, going into a rhapsody over the thought of a breakfast bowl of Rice Krispies. Mainly, though, it�s another one of those overacted, over-directed Morrissey movies — I mean, who needs all this camera movement, pans back and forth, dumb editing, involved plot? I get more excited by make-up.

Vince Aletti