List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
DVD The Ninth Configuration
The lunatics are running the asylum... but are they really lunatics? Is Colonel Kane (Stacy Keach) really a noted psychiatrist, assigned to supervise patients in an experimental government clinic, or is he really "Killer" Kane, a decorated U.S. Marine who committed atrocities in Vietnam before going insane? And why did Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) go berserk just seconds before a scheduled rocket launch? These are just some of the puzzles that will eventually be solved in The Ninth Configuration, a giddy and often brilliant drama created by William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist before directing this adaptation of his own novel, Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane. A satirical study of war's traumatic aftermath, the film uses battle psychosis as the springboard for a delirious and scathingly intelligent human tragedy, laced with some of the wittiest dialogue you're ever likely to hear.
The movie boasts a veritable menagerie of crazy characters, all brought vividly to life by a stellar supporting cast. One patient is preparing a production of Shakespeare with an all-dog cast. Another is convinced he's Superman, and the resident doctor can't seem to find his trousers. But there's a method to this madness, and it takes a barroom brawl--one of the most memorable in movie history--to provide the harsh slap of reality to Blatty's elaborate group therapy scheme. When the true purpose of The Ninth Configuration is revealed, the film (and particularly the fine performances of Keach and Wilson) reveals a depth of compassionate sanity that may take you completely by surprise. --Jeff Shannon
'The Ninth Configuration' is a wonderful, strange, and ultimately profound movie.
That aside, what's with this DVD edition? I understand that the elements used were perhaps the best elements available. But there's some problems with the transfer.
First, there's a loud, piercing hiss throughout the first half of the film. Okay, now, maybe this is attributable to print damage. But what about the brightness? I had to substantially turn DOWN the brightness on my display because the image was abnormally bright. The letterbox bars were gray and not black because of this.
That aside, there's some nice extras on the disc that make it worth the purchase price anyway.
To believe or Not to believe!
With many major VHS Rental outlets going over to DVD, these days you can find them off-loading their VHS stock at aa bargain (say 3 for $10.00). Such was the case for me when I bought this movie on a whim for @$3.50.
What a purchase (and still in it's wrapper)! This movie works on so many levels. Though compared by some as similar to KING OF HEARTS or ONE FLEW OVER THE COOKOO'S NEST, I found it much more complex and satisfying.
Worthy of several viewings consecutively due to its richness of dialogue, visual imagery, characters, storyline,....this movie ranks as one of my all-time favorites.
The fact that it remains virtually unknown to the general public only adds to the feeling of "specialness". The version I purchased was the 118 min wide-screened director's cut.
THE NINTH CONFIGURATION will restore your hope in 'the human condition', and is one of the most convincing fictional testiments ever put on celluloid about why some of us choose to believe in a GOD, and the blessings that belief bestows upon the Faithful.
A movie that makes you think, imagine that.
One of the 100 Best Films Ever Made.
The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980)
There are some movies that will stay with you after you've turned off the VCR or left the theatre. Some of them will give you a couple of days or weeks of mulling over; others are with you for life. The Ninth Configuration is of the latter variety.
The story revolves around Hudson Kane, an Army psychiatrist (Stacy Keach) sent to a remote asylun in the Pacific Northwest during the closing days of the Vietnam War. Together with the asylum medic, Col. Richard Fell (Ed Flanders, a longtime member of the cast of St. Elsewhere), Kane is tasked with figuring out which of the inmates are really insane and which are just faking it to get out of combat duty. His top priority is recently-committed astronaut Bill Cutshaw (Scott Wilson, recently of Pearl Harbor and The Way of the Gun), who takes an almost perverse interest in Kane, with the two of them immediately set at odds by Kane's Catholicism and Cutshaw's aggressive atheism.
While it is the deeper issue of Cutshaw's lack of faith and Kane's immersion in it that turns an otherwise good film into a great one, even without that particular driving force, this would be a worthwhile film. The cast of inmates are simply stunning to a man, and the situations they're given to act are no small potatoes. Jason Miller, who previously collaborated with Blatty on The Exorcist, is Lt. Reno, a man obsessed with adapting the work of Shakespeare for dogs, and Cutshaw's best friend among the other inmates. Robert Loggia's character, Bennish, is convinced he's on Venus and only needs his flying belt to get home. Fromme (played by Blatty himself) is convinced he's actually the camp medic, and keeps stealing Fell's pants. Et cetera. The staff aren't much less crazy than the inmates, and they, too, are perfectly cast. Just putting the ensemble together without a script and giving it free rein to improvise for two hours would make for a good movie. Blatty, however, takes things to another level with the conflict between Kane and Cutshaw, setting up a familiar love story plot (two people who need each other, but refuse to see it themselves) in a therapeutic setting. You never feel, however, that you're in the middle of a bad romance film, or even a buddy-cop picture. Both Keach and Wilson play their roles with more obvious intelligence than the actors in your average genre flick, and as a result, the audience never feels manipulated. In fact, the movie's big plot twists end up taking a back seat to the Kane/Cutshaw relationship; it's not that the revelations of the various mysteries Blatty sets up are any less startling than they are in a mystery film, but that the mysteries are simply stage decoration in Blatty's morality play.
Flawlessly executed, a perfect film in every way. Easily one of the hundred finest films ever made. Do not miss it. *****
I didn't like one single thing about this movie. I really liked the original. Even the idiotic Exorcist II is better than this bomb. The dialogue was forced and very boring. The characters were underdeveloped and completely uninteresting. George C Scott spent a lot of time yelling but it came off as pointless noise. The "light hearted banter" between Scott and his priest friend in the hospital seemed like it was written by a junior-high school student. The plot was pathetic and the whole thing wasn't the least bit scary or even remotely entertaining. This had absolutely none of the ambience or creepiness of the original. The big exorcist scene at the end was so unimaginative, tired and stiff. I would never recommend this loser to anyone. I had a hard time believing that William... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): George C. Scott - Ed Flanders - Brad Dourif Director(s): William Peter Blatty DVD Release Date: Released the 05 June 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $9.97 Your Price: $9.97YOU SAVE $0!
Buy it
Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $14.98YOU SAVE $4.99!
Buy it
Sam Peckinpah knew he couldn't call a movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and get away with it. That's why he did it. When he undertook this nakedly personal project, in self-exile in Mexico, the director was a deeply bitter man out of favor with critics, the media, and the Hollywood establishment, which had just released his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a mutilated version. "Bring Me the Head..." sounded like the parody title of an ultraviolent Sam Peckinpah movie, and he flung it in our faces just as his onscreen surrogate tosses the titular object at the camera.
Thing is, the movie is a masterpiece--raw, shocking, beautiful, and brave--in which Peckinpah confronts his enemies and his own demons. Warren Oates plays a gringo piano-player stuck in Mexico who... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Warren Oates - Isela Vega Director(s): Sam Peckinpah DVD Release Date: Released the 22 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.95 Your Price: $11.21YOU SAVE $3.74!
Buy it
Horror buffs will surely be compelled to compare and contrast Dominion with Exorcist: The Beginning, two films weirdly linked by film history. Director Paul Schrader shot Dominion only to find studio bosses underwhelmed by its horror aspects, at which point Renny Harlin was hired to direct another take on the subject with the same lead actor, setting, and similar storyline. That became the 2004 theatrical release Exorcist: The Beginning.
As expected, the Schrader version has more tortured religiosity and visual poetry than Harlin's cheesier (but admittedly gripping) re-do. Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) carries his guilt from the Nazi occupation to a remote African archaeological dig, where a mysteriously buried church has been uncovered. Strange stuff... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Stellan Skarsgård - Gabriel Mann Director(s): Paul Schrader DVD Release Date: Released the 25 October 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $24.98 Your Price: $18.74YOU SAVE $6.24!
Buy it
