THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Sometimes there is a peculiar satisfaction in watching the bottom scrape the bottom—especially when it comes to bargain-bin horror. Mausoleum delivers on that promise: a possessed woman, glowing green eyes, levitation-based dismemberment, frequent breast exposure. It’s all here. And even better: it’s rancid. But it’s also so cheap, so poorly conceived, and atrociously executed that you have to wonder to yourself: is it really worth it?

Bobbie Bresee plays Susan, a buxom heir to a generational curse that involves demons, psychic outbursts, and the occasional transformation into something with fangs and an inflated forehead with bulging ridges, like someone baked it with too much yeast. Victims are seduced, shredded, or both. She can rip people apart with invisible force while standing perfectly still.

Taken individually, these elements ought to have amounted to trashy fun. But this film has no momentum. No scares. No camp. It has supernatural flourishes, but there’s no real logic to back them up. Cause or consequence are akin to foreign concepts. The special effects are occasionally effective in that rubber-and-smoke way, but they never tip into the grotesque. There is gore, but it looks like cold spaghetti. The sets look like they were nicked from a wax museum people forgot to visit. The script has roughly the dramatic range of an unlicensed haunted house.

For a movie that aims for possession, obscenity, and transgression, this is strangely tedious. Albeit it’s tedium with fangy dentures.

A western that’s as playfully rigged as a marked deck. A movie that deals in smirks and close shaves and just enough dust to call itself frontier-adjacent.

Bret Maverick (Mel Gibson) isn’t your typical square-jawed gunslinger. He’s a talker and a schemer. His method of winning is convincing you that he’s already lost. He complains about his bad luck, but he’s palming the ace. He’ll feign cowardice to draw out a bully. Handy with a pistol, but he’d sooner dodge responsibility than bullets. And even though he might rob you blind, you somehow still want to keep him around.

The film opens with him on horseback, rope around his neck, his life hanging by the thread count of his trousers. He might have finally gotten himself into the pickle he won’t be able to escape. This movie mostly plays out in flashback: an episodic ramble through saloons, poker halls, and sunlit outposts while Maverick scrapes together $25,000. His objective is to enter a riverboat poker tournament that promises a million-dollar payout. He pays visits to everyone who owes him money, and he scrounges for the rest.

An obstacle comes by way of Annabelle (Jodie Foster, who is sharp as upholstery tacks). She’s a flirtatious con artist who seems to be just about the only human who can match him trick for trick. Except there’s also Zane Cooper (James Garner, who played Maverick in the ’60s TV show), a genial lawman with twinkling eyes that suggest he’s been in on the gag since before the first shuffle. Angel (Alfred Molina) supplies the villainy, though even his menace feels like it’s part of the show.

The story is strung together like a gambler’s yarn. Embellished, never too concerned with plausibility, but paced with an infectious rhythm. Punchlines, chases, double-crosses, all in close succession. The action is fleet. The banter is self-aware but never smug. This is a comedy that, while it doesn’t dig much deeper than its surface gloss, somehow keeps bluffing its way into being fun. One of my childhood favorites, and I feel like I enjoy it today just as much as I did back then.

This film’s protagonist, played by Hugh Laurie, might be—let’s be honest—a bit of a prat, but this is nonetheless a frequently funny British import. Laurie plays Sam Bell, a screenwriter embedded in the BBC. He’s meant to be an editor, but he mostly spends his time with tightened lips and thinly veiled contempt, navigating departmental egos. But he really doesn’t want this as a career at all; he wants to write his own screenplays. Only, he’s stuck for ideas.

At home, he and his wife Lucy (Joely Richardson, ridiculously charming) are trying for a baby. Or rather, she is. He just seems to be along for the ride, offering little more than sarcasm, mild detachment, and, I suppose, the requisite biological requirements.

But then Sam is struck with an epiphany. He realizes that their situation is exactly the raw material he’s been waiting for. He begins writing a screenplay and even puts it into production. There is only one problem, though: Lucy wants no part in turning their personal life into television. But Sam continues on with it anyway—even borrowing lines from her private diary. The challenge, of course, is keeping it all secret. Or, I suppose, secret for as long as possible before that inevitable house of cards collapses.

The two leads are great, but the supporting cast is stacked with ringers. Rowan Atkinson turns up as a gynecologist whose bedside manner borders on legally actionable. Emma Thompson floats in as some kind of coercively optimistic hippie fertility whisperer who carries incense and conducts ceremonies that involve chanting. These side characters and others get their brief moments in the spotlight, but the film knows well enough not to let them take over the whole thing. This film belongs firmly to Laurie and Richardson.

Much of the humor hinges on Sam’s reflexive sarcasm—his go-to coping mechanism, and clearly part of who he is. And it’s funny. Even disarming. At least initially. But as the story deepens, his tone never does. Every time Lucy makes an attempt at genuine connection, she’s met with a steady stream of glib remarks. And what can I say? They get tiresome. Much like I’d imagine such things get tiresome for Lucy. As much as I appreciate realism in movies, this is supposed to be a comedy. I’m not supposed to feel like I’m in a mildly abusive relationship.

But all in all, this is a small film and unmistakably British. Best appreciated by those who enjoy their comedy with smatterings of polite emotional repression. I laughed more than I expected to, mainly at things I probably shouldn’t have. That might not sound like high praise, but it is.

What’s astonishing about McCabe & Mrs. Miller isn’t just that it shreds every pose the classic western ever struck, but how vividly it conjures the bruised, sodden reality of a frontier. Frontier life here isn’t depicted as mythic. It’s damp timber and crooked scaffolding. It’s the hush of snowfall pressing down on half-built roofs. The people feel lifted straight from the turn of the century. They feel scruffy and self-interested. They’re mostly willing to mind their own mess until someone else’s spills into their lap.

John McCabe (Warren Beatty) stumbles into this muddy backwater. He is a gambler of questionable nerve and an oversized mouth. He drags behind him a rumor (that, wisely, he neither confirms nor denies) that he’s some kind of legendary gunslinger. Most people in this town are after good, but he stakes his claim by buying three women and calling it a brothel. The building will come later. It’s an operation he barely manages, yet it’s profitable enough.

Then along comes Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie). She arrives in a fur coat, stepping off the train in a fog of opium. She has a proposition for him. She’ll run the women, he’ll run the gambling, and together they’ll create a true house of pleasure and milk this boomtown for as long as until someone wises up.

And for a while, it works. That is, until word drifts far enough to catch the attention of corporate men in stiff collars and colder ledgers. In the West, you might strike gold, but don’t expect to keep it once someone wealthier wants the vein.

Beatty’s McCabe is the perfect emblem of Altman’s vision. He’s not a stoic cowboy but rather a fragile opportunist. He has the gall to bluff, but he doesn’t have the grit to back it up. Christie’s Mrs. Miller is sharper by miles. She spots angles and patches up leaks that McCabe misses. Largely because he’s too busy still inflating his own legend.

People like to slap the label “revisionist western” on this film, but that hardly covers it. This isn’t just tidying up old cowboy clichés. This is a story dragged straight out of the mud. It’s a movie that deals in fear and backroom bargaining that shinier westerns often sweep under the rug. It’s also, strangely, a beautiful film. The kind of beauty that could come only from living a harsh existence. It’s also clear-eyed about what happens when greed meets a little success and a loaded gun. But most strikingly, this is a movie that feels alive. Like campfire folklore so vivid that you half-remember living through it yourself.

One of the more dispiriting entries in that curious trend in the 1990s of reanimating long-expired television properties. This movie doesn’t only fail to update the original with anything that feels worth updating—it forgets to bring with it anything resembling a joke. I never saw an episode of the original series, but if it was anything like this movie, television owners at the time should have just given up on the medium entirely.

Tom Arnold stars as Quinton McHale, a supposedly lovable rogue and retired Navy man who now sells beer and soft-serve ice cream in his ramshackle tropical shack. The plot—such as it is—converges on a few clumsily stacked—shall we say—premises. There’s a bumbling new captain (Dean Stockwell, playing stupid with the earnestness of a man who’s never had to do it before) who arrives on a base where everyone seems to be on vacation. At the same time, the base is inundated with some kind of terrorist plot or other involving Tim Curry (in full eye-rolling villain mode) who’s holed up in what appears to be a minor league baseball stadium.

Somehow, this jumble is meant to form the backbone of a military comedy. But all that comes out is a series of half-formed sketches where the actors keep missing their marks. Arnold smirks, Curry flares his nostrils, Stockwell bonks his head on something. Everyone else flails through a fog of bad timing and worse dialogue. Ernest Borgnine shows up, presumably to give the thing his blessing (he starred in the original series). Not that Borgnine was selective in the types of films he appeared in during this era, but the gesture still feels more like a hostage video. David Alan Grier, Debra Messing, and Bruce Campbell are also on hand, though none of them are given anything to do except look vaguely embarrassed.

This is a film that’s loud but shapeless. Confident but without a cause. Whatever nostalgia the studio was banking on emerging out of this dreck never even makes it past the opening titles. This isn’t a revival so much as a reburial.