Book Review: Box Office Poison by Tim Robey

 Box Office Poison by Tim Robey

 

 

 

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a bomb from Hollywood!

Between 1978 and 1986, the brother writing team of Michael and Harry Medved published several books that occupy space on my bookshelf, beginning with The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, The Golden Turkey Awards, which was followed by the 1986 sequel, The Son of Golden Turkey Awards. In 1984, the two also banded together for another book, The Hollywood Hall of Shame: The Most Expensive Flops in Movie History.

The first three books mentioned dealt with the kind of cheesy low-ball crap that I love to watch and write about. But that last one veered away from the main theme to point out some movies that had HUGE production budgets, but failed to end up on the right side of the ledger when it came to making money at the box office.  However, since it was published in 1984, and no sequel ever came from the two, that left about 40 years of flops that were never touched upon by them.  I never really thought about it until I finally did acquire that volume, but then I started thinking... What about the failures since 1984?

So it was with great pleasure that I discovered this new book. And although the author does delve into some pre-1984 movies, only 8 of the 25 movies are from that era. And Robey only covers one movie that the Medved brothers covered in their volume.  That movie, BTW, is Intolerance, the D.W. Griffith silent film fiasco from 1916.  (And, after all, any author with serious ambitions to talk about flops almost HAS to include the first REAL flop of the industry.)

Over the course of his volume, Robey spends about 5 or 6 pages talking about the background of each movie and the factors that lead  to these films being such colossal money spenders and why they failed to find a niche in the public eye after their release.

The book is fascinating, although I have to admit that occasionally the author's own politically correct feelings would annoy me.  To wit: some of the treatment that women received in certain movies...  One in particular is when he laments the way Uma Thurman was treated on the set of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. So Uma was treated as a sex object?  Oh, boo hoo! Whether the PC crowd of today, in retrospect, frowns upon such behavior, it was something that happened, and probably quite frequently, before the advent of Political Correctness. And whether it affected the financial failure of said films is debatable.

The best sections of the book cover movies I already had a familiarity with, and, (dare I say it?) even paid money to see in the theater.  And a few of them I actually enjoyed, although my $5 ticket wasn't much in the coffers to profit the movie (obviously). Among those that I either saw or even liked that he covered are: Dune (1984), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Cutthroat Island (1995), Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), Rollerball (2002), and The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002).  (I'll leave it up to you to guess which ones I actually liked, but if you've read this blog much, you probably already have a good idea, even though I haven't actually blogged on any of them... yet.)

With the exception of a few, in my opinion, unnecessary moralistic judgements, I think Robey treats each movie pretty fairly. And he even inspires me to seek out a couple on my own to watch that I never got around to seeing the first time.  One in particular, A Sound of Thunder had completely escaped my notice.  Which is surprising since the movie involves time travel and I absolutely adore time travel stories and movies.

One other thing to note about this book (one that has nothing to do with the content). The library director at Denison Public Library acquired this book and it just arrived and was processed for circulation last week.  My sister, who knows I like books about movies, set it aside for me.  Thus, I was honored with being the very first patron to check it out.  Thanks, Karen. 

Give this book 4 out of 5 stars.

Quiggy

 

 

Safety Last

 

 Unsafe on Any Screen by Scott Phillips

I was browsing the books at the local used bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and I think I found my long lost twin brother.

Well, not really, since I only have one sibling and she's my sister.

But I did find a book written by someone who must have come from the same malcontent group of angels waiting in line to be born into this world.  The guy's name is Scott S. Phillips.

Not to be confused with the Scott Phillips of The Ice Harvest fame.  This Scott Phillips is also an author, but his output is as far removed from The Ice Harvest as, say Citizen Kane would be from Bloodsucking Pharaohs in Pittsburgh. 

Some of the other books written by this Scott Phillips are Pete Has Risen From the Grave and the screenplay for The Stink of Flesh.  Quality stuff, as you can probably tell...

According to the introduction, Phillips worked for a time as a movie critic for an alternative newspaper in Albuquerque, NM, The Weekly Alibi. As far as I can tell, it was probably something along the lines of a local alternative newspaper here in south Texas, The Austin Chronicle.

Anyway, by what I gather, Phillips was given free reign to watch whatever movies he wanted and write about them in his weekly column.  The type of movies he gravitated towards during this jaunt are a like a wish list for me to seek out in the future.  

My hero, whom I have mentioned before, Joe Bob Briggs, also did these kinds of movies when he wrote his column (although Briggs was doing recent releases that were then playing at the local drive-in.) 

The movies that Phillips covers run the gamut of time from the early 60's until the early 2000's., and he rates each one based on a scale he invented that comes in two parts: One is an Apes scale (in which he rates it from 0-5 as to how many greased apes he'd wrestle to watch said movie: ) being bad and 5 being pretty damn decent.) The second part of the rating system he calls the Bourbon scale (in which he rates on how many shots of bourbon he'd have to drink to wrestle those apes. In this case, the 0 is good and the 5 is near godawful).

It takes a twisted mind to watch some of these movies in the first place.  (And since I am 15 years sober, I have to avoid drinking bourbon or anything else to get up the gumption to watch movies.)

After reading this book, there are a number of them I have already watched, proving that we have some rapport in tastes.  The best part about his book is that no matter how bad he thinks a movie is, he makes most of them sound like they are worth giving them a shot.  One that falls into that category is The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, one that has been on my radar for some time.  I always say if someone tells me a movie is a crock of excrement that's like saying "I DARE YOU: to me.

I have reduced the number of movie books on my shelf over the last few months in anticipation of making a move to a new location, but this is one i will be keeping.

Quiggy

Wise Guy: Book Review of Robert Wise: The Motion Pictures by J. R. Jordan

It's astonishing that I have seen so many of Robert Wise's movies that I like and yet never really added him to my list of favorite directors.  Maybe it's just the fact that he stayed under the radar over the years.  A workman-like attitude towards his craft without actually having to be the face of his movies (unlike some I could name). Some of those movies I wasn't even aware that his name was lisyed as director.

Robert Wise: The Motion Pictures by J. R. Jordan:

The format of the book is well laid out.  It takes a look at each of the movies that Wise directed in chronological order.  One of the things I like about this book is that it is not a biography as such, which I probably would have found tedious.  Although it does include a few tidbits about his life, the author keeps that at a minimum.

The depth of the research behind the movies was really impressive.  The film analysis portion of each chapter gives one a better viewpoint into the content of the movie.  And it opened my mind up to movies that I'd either heard about or knew of remotely but hadn't seen.  It was a discovery that Wise had directed them.  Being a big fan of film noir I discovered several movies that fit the film noir mold that I should check out.

Of course, Wise is also an Academy Award winner, albeit two of those Oscars are for movies that I would be hard pressed to watch (much less review) since they are musicals  (The Sound of Music and West Side Story).  But given his talents, it was a phenomenal career and the author doesn't stint on the info.

One thing that bothered me about the book was that sometimes I got lost when reading the encapsulations of the films.  It seemed to me that the author talked as if his readers had seen every movie, kind of like as if we had watched it together and were discussing it after the fact.  I was OK when it was a movie I had seen, but in some cases, if I hadn't seen the movie, I got lost with what was happening. 

Overall, if you are a fan of these films, you will be sure to learn some new things.  The author is engaging without being overly gushing about the man himself.  And I liked that.

I am going to review a few of the movies that Wise directed over the next couple of months as a result of reading this book.  (It has been WAY too long for a scheduled comparison of Wise's classic The Day the Earth Stood Still with the less than stellar remake from a few years back... I get way too bogged down with life and blogathons, it seems.)

Quiggy

Book Review: Five Came Back

This is my third entry in the WW2 Blogathon hosted by Maddy Loves Her Classic Films and Cinematic Essentials





Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and The Second World War by Mark Harris: (2015)


I just love history books.  I also love reading about Hollywood and it's denizens.  Mark Harris has written an extremely intriguing book Five Came Back (2015) which chronicles the adventures of five Hollywood directors and their work in filming documentary film for the War Dept. during WWII.  I came across this book last year in the stacks of books at the library where my sister works when I was on Christmas vacation, and spent virtually every free hour devouring it.

I'm just guessing it must have sucked to be a gung-ho American patriot and be deemed too old to serve your country in the Armed Forces.  Many of Hollywood's elite men went off to fight the good fight, while older men like John Ford and Frank Capra had to basically watch from the sidelines with something like envy.

The five men whose work behind the lines chronicled here were all beyond the age of what was considered the upper scale for military service.  The young tyke, John Huston was 36, and possibly still eligible, but had been classed 4-F, while John Ford was virtually an old fogie at age 48.  Still these guys got to be used in support of the war effort, being drafted as officers and assigned to film the action (or in many cases to re-create the action) of the efforts of the military in the war effort.

At the very start of the war, directors like Capra and Ford were busy with the details of just filming the average movie (and dealing with the brass which were involved in trying to insure the film industry as well as the country remained neutral in their depiction of the war).  That is until the events of Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into the war.

All of the directors made appeals to be included in the mix, although the really gung-ho Frank Capra had probably the most pressing interest in being considered patriotic.  He had emigrated to the US as a young boy, but he was still considered an outsider because of his foreign origin.  He thus felt he had to strive harder to prove his patriotism.

John Ford, on the other hand, was as patriotic as they come, although he comes off (at least in the telling of his trials and travails by the author) as a bit of a glory-seeker.  (I mean, it seems a little self-seeking to actual petition to be given a Purple Heart, whether you actually deserve it or not...)

Each of the directors is giving an equal amount of time in focus, but I found John Huston's story to be the most intriguing.  Perhaps because I find Huston's personality to be similar to my own.

Harris' writing makes for extremely entertaining reading.  He skips around, discussing each director in a linear fashion so you won't get bored just reading one long detail about one director at a time.  

All of the films chronicled in he book are available for your perusal.  I recommend the "50 Movie Pack: War Classics" available from Mill Creek.  While the quality of each is not consistent, you do get all of the documentaries in one volume.  I already had the entire Capra output ("Why We Fight") on a separate collection, but it was worth buying for the rest of them.  Especially if you are interested in the history as experienced first hand. 

If you find this book interesting enough, I highly recommend a Netflix series that was based on it.

Enjoy.

Quiggy

Book Review: The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films--Their Stars, Makers, Characters,and Critics

Coming a little later this month I will be co-hosting a blogathon, the Gender-Bending the Rules Blogathon.  Although I am an avowed heterosexual male, I am nevertheless interested in movies of any kind or stripe.  I enjoyed the hell out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I also liked To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, all of which have been reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

Homosexuals (men more than women, admittedly) had been a source of ridicule in film for most of the 20th century.  That is when Hollywood even deigned to admit that a character was a homosexual.  It must be noted that the Hays Code insured that for the most part that people of "aberrational" sexual attraction were basically verboten in film during the heyday of the Hays Code.  And even when the movies included characters that were gay, there were often cast as the villain or were just the source of comic relief.

It is refreshing therefore to have a look at the history of movies in which gay men and women were at least nominally sympathetic characters.  These are not movies that ridicule the gay community.

The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Films--Their Stars, Makers, Characters,and Critics by Boze Hadleigh

From the beginning, Hadleigh covers a range of movies that dates back to the early 30's.  The introduction includes a preface by a guy who was one of the actors in a silent epic, Salome',  who claims that that movie featured an entire cast that was either gay or lesbian.  From there the author segues into the first feature, a pre-Nazi era German movie called Madcen in Uniform.

Down through the years, Hadleigh touches upon such classics as Suddenly, Last Summer, The Killing of Sister George, and The Children's Hour as well more modern movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, The Birdcage, The Hunger, and Kiss of the Spider Woman.

He of course delves into movies that confront Aids.  A movie I have garnered an interest in seeing, Longtime Companion, covers an entire decade of the lives of several gay couples as they deal with this devastating disease.  Some more obscure movies, at least to me, are covered too with a loving but not altogether sycophantic eye (as should be if you are going to be classified as a critic).

There are a couple of issues that I had with the book, however.  For one, Hadleigh quotes other contemporary reviews of movies, and one person he quotes often, early on, is John Simon.  I always considered John Simon to be an obnoxious twit, and that was before I even saw any of his mostly homophobic reviews quoted herein.  But then, maybe that was part of the point for Hadleigh to quote him.

The other issue was for Hadleigh to let his political viewpoint enter into the fray on occasion.  OK, so Republicans don't particularly like the gay culture, we get that, but I hate being beat over the head with it, especially in a piece that is not supposed to be about politics (unless the movie is about the politics of the issue, that is.)

The book was first published in the early 90's and my copy was a second edition, published in 2001.  As such, it misses out on 17 years more of movies, and a couple of comments are outdated.  One especially apparent was Hadleigh's opining that a movie made on the story of Harvey Milk, the openly gay politician in San Francisco who was murdered back in the 70's would probably never get made.  (It did, and Sean Penn even won the oscar for his portrayal of the politician).

I have already reviewed several of the movies contained in these pages, and now I have several more that are on the list to be reviewed in the future.  Notably, for the aforementioned blogathon, I will be covering The Birdcage and Kiss of the Spider Woman.  I have to admit Fellini's Satyricon probably won't end up here, however.  Even without watching the movies, however, this is still an interesting read.

Quiggy

Book Review: Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies

It's time for another book review!  I found this book on the shelf at my local used bookstore and just based on the title, I clutched it with both hands tightly and rushed to the checkout counter immediately. And you can see why.  Being a movie masochist, I like to watch movies that others consider to be bad, just to see if my tastes come any where close to the average viewer's.  Spoiler!  If you haven't read my blog except for the occasional entry, they don't.  I absolutely love Ed Wood, and especially Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is on a lot of lists as the "worst movie of all time".  Low rent movies, the kind that were made for, like, change from selling scavenged aluminum cans are among the kind I like to watch.  I get a kick out of The Brain that Wouldn't Die which a lot of people would probably turn off about 20 minutes in.

Not that all cheapjack movies are gems, though.  I watched Teenage Zombies and I thought it was the second most boring piece of crap I ever watched.  (Kevin Costner's The Postman still reigns supreme on that list.)  My review of Robot Monster and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, although tongue-in-cheek, is a tribute to two low-rent features that can be entertaining under the right circumstances.  So needless to say, I was interested in a fellow reviewer's insights into the nadir of movies.

So I bought this movie book last Saturday, and despite having to work a 60-hour work week, PLUS keep up with my regular duties for watching  movies I need to review for this blog, I still managed to devour this book in a week.  And it was worth it.

Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find The Worst Movie Ever Made:  by Michael Adams

Michael Adams, at the time of writing this book, was a movie reviewer for the Australian edition of Empire magazine.  One day, after having seen the then currently released Material Girls, was browsing on the internet sit The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and found that Material Girls was currently holding the number 1 spot on that site's list of the worst movies ever made.

Inspiration comes at the oddest times.  While he agreed that the movie was pretty bad, he wasn't quite so sure it was the absolute worst.  So he decided to embark on a year-long quest to find the absolute worst movie.  Now if he had watched every movie ever made, he would have still been watching movies and would never catch up.  But he limited himself to movies that were on other people's lists of worst movies, and included many of the entertainment people he encountered in his position on the  Empire staff during the crusade.

With the initial blessing of his wife Clare (who probably internally thought she'd married a whack job), he began the quest.  The biggest hurdle was buying all those movies, of course.  (It did occur to me initially that he could probably have used Netflix, but after seeing many of the titles he reviewed, I'm not so sure Netflix would have been much help.  Is there a site called "Crapflix"???)

This is sort of a diary of his quest rather than a brief synopsis of the movies.  Adams entertains his audience not only with the reactions he had to watching these movies, but some of the friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) interactions he has with his wife and his co-workers about this somewhat insane quest.

He does give some details about the movies, although I suspect he doesn't go into details of ALL the movies he watched.  He did, after all, make a goal to watch enough movies to make it come out to be at least one a day for an entire year (in other words, at least 365).  I admit I didn't count the titles he mentions, so I can't be sure about that.  But he does give us enough details to make it interesting reading.

And what movies!  Some of them I have never seen, or even heard of, and some of them, based on his descriptions of the content, I probably wouldn't even watch on a dare.  (Some of them are extremely graphic and borderline pornographic.  Yes, I did watch and review A Clockwork Orange and Myra Breckenridge and Midnight Cowboy, all of which could fit in that "borderline pornographic"description, but some of these sound even more bizarre.)

I definitely don't envy Adams on his quest.  At some point prior to the end I might have conceded the quest, but he kept it up right to the bittersweet end.  There were many movies that I had seen that he also watched.  I love the fact that almost 10 pages of the book were spent discussing my beloved bad movie director, Ed Wood.  How Adams decided what to watch is also interesting.  He assigned each bad movie to a category, then assigned each category a number.  He used a bingo ball machine which he fired up whenever he had to choose a category, thus letting the capricious hand of fate to determine which movies he was going to torture himself each viewing session.

I must admit I have several of the movies he watched on my radar.  You can expect my take on some of them in future blog entries.  On the other hand, you can be sure I won't delve into those really bizarre ones I referenced above (the ones that sound as if they are pornographic).  The book is a keeper, however, and will be on my shelf for reference in the future.

Quiggy

Book Review: The Razzie Guide

Unfortunately, kids, I've been way over booked on my time this week and did not have time to watch any movies.  Which is a shame, because this is one of the first weeks in a while that I have not had a blogathon in the works and had time to review movies just for my own sake.  But in the meantime, to tide you over until the next review, I decided to do a review of one of the best movie reference books to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor ( alternately known as Warner Books).

The Official Razzie Guide: Enjoying the Best of Hollywood's Worst by John Wilson

John Wilson, in case you didn't know, is the creator of the Golden Raspberry Awards, affectionately known as the Razzies, which is an award given each year (since it's inception in 1980) to the worst movie, actor, actress etc. of the year.  Much like it's bigger brother, the Oscars, movies and personnel are nominated for the annual Razzie.  The awards are usually given the day before the Oscars ceremonies and celebrates, sometimes even revels in the worst that Hollywood has to offer.

In 2005, the Razzies celebrated 25 years with the publication of this book.  Divided into several sections which include such titles as "When Mad Scientists Go Bad", "Disasters in Every Sense" and "They Came From Planet Razzie", the book delves into movies over the span of history (or at least sometime before the inception of the Razzies).  While the book does spend a lot of space covering movies that were nominated for Razzies in the release year, Wilson also devotes time to some entries that came out before the Razzies were introduced.

One such movie is "The Ten Commandments".  A beloved tradition, especially among fundamentalist Christians, even this movie gets the Razzie treatment from Wilson.  Noting the over the top performances and sometimes ridiculous dialogue, the author sends the beloved movie to the showers, so to speak.  And he does the same for a couple of other movies that have a devoted following.  But mostly he spends time on such ridiculous (and acknowledged "worst") movies as "The Brain that Wouldn't Die", "Battlefield Earth", "Robot Monster", "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" and the two movies featured on a double bill that inspired Wilson to create the Razzies, "Can't Stop the Music" and "Xanadu".

Each entry includes a couple of excerpts from movie reviews, both contemporary newspaper ones and ones from fellow movie reference books.  There is a list of the major cast and crew behind the movie, and then an encapsulation of the plot ("Plot?  What Plot?") that is  at times both informative and hilarious.  Included in each review is also an example of "Dippy Dialogue", which even taken out of context of the movie is pretty freaking funny.

There are about 100 such reviews included in the book.  A great night time bedside reader.  The book, I might add, is also a preview to some movies you will see reviewed in future entries on this blog.

Quiggy says check it out.

"As you wish.": A Look at The Princess Bride from Book to Film

Note: Later this year (early April) Now Voyaging is sponsoring a book to movie blogathon.  I have already entered that one with a separate title.  But in the spirit of that blogathon, I present this little gem.

William Goldman published the novel The Princess Bride in 1973.  Some of the facts behind it: It was originally published as a supposedly abridged "good parts" version of an original novel by "S. Morgenstern".  ("S. Morgenstern" is a fictional person.  Goldman was the actual writer.)  Goldman writes the prologue to the book telling a story of having heard his father read this book to him as a boy, and buying a hard-to-find out of print copy of the S. Morgenstern classic for his son.

His wife, a child psychologist, pressures him not to berate the boy when the son does not respond enthusiastically to the book as he did.  When he gets a hold of the book and reads it, he finds it is not exactly the same book as the one his father read to him.  Sure, the story is there, but there is a lot of political intrigue and mumbo-jumbo that his father had left out.

Goldman decides to edit the book and bring it out as "the good parts version", editing out all the mumbo-jumbo and just printing the fantasy/adventure/love story in the middle of the book.  Occasionally during the story, Goldman interjects with some commentary on the parts he is leaving out, as well as some reminisces of how he, as a boy, responded to certain scenes and interrupted his father as his father read them.

There are several things to note in the book.  For one, the author Goldman has no son.  (He does have daughters).  For another, his wife is not really a child psychologist.  And, obviously since he is truly the author, it is a fiction that his father read this to him as a child.  Hence even the prologue is a part of the fiction of the novel.

A note on the book itself.  If you have seen the movie, but not read the book, you will almost surely believe the book is a novelization of the script for the movie.  Undoubtedly both are almost exactly the same.  But the truth is, as noted earlier, the original novel was published in 1973, and the movie was released in 1987.  William Goldman, a fantastic scriptwriter in his own right (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men both of which won Oscars, and numerous others) wrote the screenplay for this from his own book, proving he has an excellent ear for dialogue.

If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend that you do. 

The Princess Bride (1987)

The movie opens and is framed by a scene in modern-day in which a boy (Fred Savage)  is home sick.  His grandfather (Peter Falk) comes by to visit and reads to him the book The Princess Bride , which had been read to him as a little boy, and he had read to the boy's father when the father was a boy.  What it's about, says the grandfather is "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles..."

The transition from the book to movie includes several instances where the boy interrupts his grandfather in the reading of the story (and thus the action of the story part of the movie).  Also frequently during the actual action of the film is a voice over that serves to remind us the story is being read aloud, rather than it being an event playing out before us. This helps to endear the grandfather and the boy to the audience, or at least it did to me.

The story part introduces Buttercup (Robin Wright), who is initially a flighty, spoiled girl who enjoys harassing the farm boy who helps out on her daddy's farm.  Eventually she grows to realize that the farm boy, whose name is Westley (Cary Elwes), loves her, and she loves him.

He decides to go to the country across the sea to earn enough money to marry her.  But she receives word that he was killed by an attack of the "Dread Pirate Roberts".  She states that she "will never love again".  But some time later, the prince of the country,Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), who is privileged and spoiled rotten (and egotistical and ruthless and...but I'm getting ahead of myself) decides that Buttercup is the woman he wants to marry.  She agrees even though she tells him she can never love him.

Shortly after the engagement, Buttercup is kidnapped by a trio of cutthroats; Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Inigo (Mandy Patinkin) and Fezzik (Andre the Giant).  

As they try to make their way to the frontier of the neighboring country of Guilder, they are pursued by a mysterious Man in Black.  In succession the Man in Black defeats the three in separate encounters, beginning with Inigo, who is an accomplished swordsman (in an excellent sword fight on the Cliffs of Insanity, which is as great for the fact that both actors did the actual stunts, as it is for the fantastic repartee during the fight, courtesy of William Goldman).

The Man in Black then encounters Fezzik, whom he defeats, surprisingly, in a wrestling match.  In a final battle of wits, the Man in Black defeats Vizzini (which ends up with the death of Vizzini), and takes Buttercup as his own prisoner.  Meanwhile, the Prince, and his right hand man, Count Rugen (Christopher Guest) are pursuing the original kidnappers, but find that they have each been defeated, so they turn to their new prey.  

When they are about to ride up to capture them, the Man in Black reveals to Buttercup that he is Westley.  She, of course, is overjoyed that her love is still alive, and they disappear into the Fire Swamp to hide from the Prince.  But after many adventures in the swamp, they come out to the other side only to find the Prince waiting for them.  He tells Buttercup that he will take Westley to his shp, but after she leaves, has him taken prisoner instead.

The truth of the subterfuge comes out.  Prince Humperdinck did not really want to marry Buttercup for love.  Instead he intended to have her kidnappers, whom it turns out he hired, to kill her on the Guilder frontier, so he could frame Guilder for it and go to war with them.  And he still intends to find a way to kill her and frame Guilder for it.  (see what I meant about ruthless...?)

Buttercup discovers that Humperdinck lied to her about releasing Westley (although not that he is a prisoner in the dungeon of the castle) and tells him off.  Humperdinck loses his temper and rushes to the dungeon where he kills Westley in a rage.  Meanwhile, Fezzik and Inigo, the two surviving kidnappers discover much of the plot, and that Count Rugen is the six-fingered man Inigo has spent his whole life seeking for revenge for the death of his father.  They figure the Man in Black is their best hope for figuring out how to storm the castle, but they find him dead.  They take him to Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) who, along with his wife Valerie (Carol Kane) provide some of the funniest moments of the movie.  (Oh, and they manage to revive Westley, who was  only "mostly dead"...)

Will Westley and the gang rescue the princess?  Will Inigo get his revenge on Count Rugen?  Watch the movie and find out.  

Rob Reiner, the director, made this project his life-long goal.  He wanted it to be his first project, but several obstacles postponed it.  For some great insight on the behind the scenes you should look for As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes.  This book includes some great stuff about the sword fight training both he and Patinkin had to endure.  (Remember I said earlier, they both did the stunts?)

Well, that's it for this time from the back seat.  Hope you enjoyed it.  Until next time, drive safely.

Quiggy