A great poster. A legendary director. An all-star cast. Based on Robert Ludlum's best-selling novel, Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend  seemingly had all the ingredients to be a classic thriller. I've had a copy in the library since Anchor Bay released a deluxe Divimax Edition in 2004, featuring both the theatrical release and Peckinpah's original cut, so it was due a screening in The Slaughtered Lamb Cinema.  As one might expect from the likes of Robert Ludlum, it's a tale full of intrigue and double-crosses, with surprise revelations throughout. John Hurt portrays a CIA operative working for Burt Lancaster to get to a group of three Americans (Chris Sarandon, Dennis Hopper and Craig T. Nelson) working with a Soviet spy network ( Omega ). His plan is to enlist a close friend of the three men, an investigative TV host (Rutger Hauer), to turn one of the men to work against the Russians. The basic storyline is interesting, and while enough of that comes through the...

The Ninth Gate is Roman Polanski's adaptation of the novel The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez Reverte. I had read and loved the novel shortly after its release, and have wanted to watch the film for many years, so it was an ideal choice for the 52 Pick-Up series. Johnny Depp stars as Corso, a rare book dealer who gets caught up in a mystery tracking down a book for a rich collector that can supposedly be used to summon the devil. It's an intriguing puzzle, with many humorous bits along the way (such as the manner in which people handle these incredibly rare and precious tomes), and it gets wilder and wilder as the film progresses. A mysterious woman appears at different times to involve herself in Corso's quest, giving the viewer more to consider about who all is really involved in the mystery. The film veers from the book in a number of ways that don't prevent it from being entertaining on its own, though the ending probably left many viewers wanting (though not this one...

I first heard about The Medusa Touch in 2019. I was intrigued by a reference to an airliner crashing into a skyscraper, and after watching the trailer, placed an order for an import Blu Ray. It's been in our collection of to-be-watched films since then, so it was an easy selection for this series. The film starts off with novelist John Morlar (Richard Burton) watching the events of a manned space disaster unfold live on television, during which someone he knows comes into his apartment and bludgeons him to death with a Napoleon statue. Or so we are led to believe. A French investigator shows up on the scene, and is surprised to find that Burton is not quite dead. As he investigates the crime, he is led to Morlar's shrink, played by The Omen 's Lee Remick. We soon discover that Morlar believed he had the power to control catastrophic events involving people who have wronged him. As he lies in a coma in the hospital, through flashbacks we learn of multiple examples where peo...

  I had already planned for The Last Boy Scout to be our 'L' movie when the news broke that Bruce Willis was withdrawing from acting due to the onset of cognitive issues.  The Last Boy Scout  is a Tony Scott film written by Shane Black, so I'm not quite sure how I managed to dodge this one for so long, aside from what I recall were scathing reviews at the time of its release. When I realized that the film was in our library on a multi-feature disc with Walter Hill's Last Man Standing , I thought, what better way to celebrate Bruce's sad news than a double (or double-L ) feature of these two films that had never been screened in The Slaughtered Lamb Cinema. I was pleasantly surprised how entertaining  The Last Boy Scout  was, even though all the ingredients were there for an enjoyable Tony Scott concoction. Sure, Damon Wayans took some getting used to, but I got over whatever reservations I had about him midway through the film. It's got all the glitz, gloss and...

Back in the day, the 3pm after-school time slot was the home to many a great movie during the week. My recollection is that  Kelly's Heroes is one of those films I first experienced that way. As a long-time Clint Eastwood fan, I'm sure I had watched parts of the film multiple times over the years. But as with many of the films in our library, I hadn't gotten around to watching it on the big screen until now. The film has a great cast, from Eastwood and the rest of the headliners (Telly Savalas, Don Rickles and Carrol O'Connor — all playing roles they were perfectly typecast for), to a wild Donald Sutherland as a free-spirit/hippie tank commander, to a number of smaller roles by recognizable faces: Stuart ( Rockford Files ) Margolin, Gavin ( Love Boat ) McCloud, (Harry) Dean Stanton... and Karl-Otto Alberty as the German Tiger commander who I recognized from The Great Escape (and who had quite a career playing German soldiers!). I kept my eyes out for John Landis in an...