We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969)
Sydney Pollack was a highly respected filmmaker who earned Academy Award nominations for his directing the films Tootsie and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and won an Oscar for Out of Africa, which also took home the gold for Best Picture. He passed away in 2008 at the age of 73... and I’m embarrassed that it has taken me eighteen years since his passing to realize just what a fascinating filmmaker he was. Even before he passed away, I had seen movies he had made. Tootsie in particular, as it was one of those movies I saw on cable a lot during my childhood. But I never looked deeper – and if I had, I would have discovered that Pollack was an interesting guy. He grew up going to popcorn movies in Indiana, but that never gave him the impression that film was an art. He wasn’t a cinephile. But he knew how to direct actors. He knew if a scene worked or didn’t. And that intuition led to the creation of some classic films – some of which are quite artistic films rather than popcorn movies.
One of those artistic classics is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? A directing job he got because star Jane Fonda was impressed by his willingness to collaborate and the producers appreciated the fact that he had a lower asking price than other contenders like William Friedkin and Jack Smight. Pollack was paid $150,000 to direct this movie, which had a budget of just under $5 million.
Scripted by Robert E. Thompson and James Poe, the film is based on a 1935 novel by Horace McCoy that was itself inspired by events that were really going on during the Great Depression. Dance marathons became exploitative entertainment events during that time, human endurance contests that were held in nearly every large American city. This story takes place in a ballroom on the Santa Monica Pier, where dancing couples compete for a $1,500 cash prize. Dancers must keep moving at all times and no part of their body can touch the floor. They get a 10-minute break every two hours to eat, sleep, and use the restroom. That’s it. Otherwise, they have to be moving on the dance floor. Every once in a while, the organizers will make the event “more interesting” for spectators by having the exhausted dancers compete in fast-paced races.
The lead character is a weary young woman named Gloria, played by Fonda. When the partner she arrived at the ballroom with is disqualified for having bronchitis, contest promoter Rocky (Gig Young) pulls in a homeless man who was drifting through the area, Michael Sarrazin as Robert, and has him partner with Gloria.
Almost the entire movie takes place in this ballroom, but Pollack and the writers managed to keep it engaging every step of the way. There’s drama, laughs, tragedy, and even some action when the dancers have to break out in a run. A great supporting cast was assembled around Fonda and Sarrazin; in addition to the Oscar-winning Young, there’s the Oscar-nominated Susannah York as a woman who tries to stay glamorous throughout the competition, Red Buttons as an old sailor, Bruce Dern and Bonnie Bedelia as a couple that’s expecting, Al Lewis as the promoter’s right-hand man, and more.
We know from early on that something’s going to go horribly wrong. Not only is there the title of the film, which is reflected in an opening title sequence that shows a horse having to be put down due to an injury, but there are surreal flash-forwards that show Robert facing some serious legal issues. We don’t find out exactly what happened until the final moments, which leave They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? feeling like an extremely depressing movie. For that reason, this isn’t a movie I would choose to share with a friend or loved one, but it’s a great film nonetheless.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was nominated for nine Academy Awards but, oddly, not for Best Picture. In fact, as of 2025, it still held the record for obtaining the most Oscar nominations without receiving one for Best Picture. Its only win was for the performance of Gig Young, who would have a dark and tragic ending himself nine years later, murdering his much-younger wife just three weeks after their wedding and then killing himself.
PLEASE DON’T FEED THE CHILDREN (2024)
Steven Spielberg has had one of the most amazing careers in Hollywood history, but he got started in a humble way, directing episodes of ‘70s TV shows before getting the chance to make some TV movies. One of those TV movies, Duel, is still popular to this day, but a couple of others – Something Evil and Savage – have faded into obscurity. Which is not something you can say about many Spielberg movies. Now, Spielberg’s daughter Destry Allyn Spielberg is following in his footsteps, and has gotten her own directing career started in a humble but classic way, by making a low budget horror movie.
Scripted by Paul Bertino, Please Don’t Feed the Children is set sometime in the not-too-distance future, after a large portion of the adult population was wiped out by a viral epidemic – something like a zombie outbreak, since it turned people into cannibalistic creatures. Only 1% of children showed any symptoms of the disease even when bitten... so kids became public enemy number one. They were accused of being the carriers of the viruses, and all kids are to be rounded up and placed in camps where they can be monitored to make sure there won’t be another outbreak.
Zoe Colletti stars as a youngster named Mary, who is looking to escape from her homeland and cross the border into a country that doesn’t lock up its children. While on the run, she falls in with a group of other kids that have managed to avoid being placed in camps, Andrew Liner as Ben, Dean Scott Vazquez as Jeffy, Regan Aliyah as Vicky, Joshuah Melnick as Seth, and Emma Meisel as Crystal. After a situation in a convenience store ends with one of the kids getting shot, they seek help at an isolated house in the countryside. There, they’re greeted by a widow named Clara (Michelle Dockery), who lost both her husband and their daughter to the virus.
At first, Clara appears to be an ally. She takes the kids in, patches up the wounded one, gives them some treats. But those treats were drugged. Most of the kids are locked up in her attic. One gets fed to the cannibalistic creature Clara is keeping in another part of the house. And Mary gets cleaned up, dressed up, and made to pretend that she’s Clara’s new, replacement daughter.
That’s an interesting set-up for some thrills. The “locked up kids” element is reminiscent of Flowers in the Attic, but this weirdness is taking place in a devastated world where you can still find the occasional zombie lurking around. It’s a unique mix that worked pretty well. The opening stretch of the film felt a bit rough to me, it wasn’t quite doing the job of drawing me in, but once the kids reached Clara’s house, I became invested and wanted to see how this was going to turn out. Would any of the kids be able to escape the house? Would the lawman played by Giancarlo Esposito make any difference in the situation? And what would happen if that zombie got loose?
Overall, I feel that Spielberg did a fine job with her feature debut and I look forward to seeing how her career will progress. Shaky start aside, my only issue with Please Don’t Feed the Children came toward the end, when the kids repeatedly made stupid mistakes with how they handled an escape attempt. Who goes to get the car before releasing their friends? Who doesn’t take the gun away from the captor they’ve managed to knock down? These dumb kids.
I don’t know how filmmakers let their characters make such dumb mistakes, but maybe they just like to cause people to yell at their screens and call the characters stupid.
TIME OF DEATH (2025)
Directed by Will Wernick from a script by Jason Rosen, the mystery thriller Time of Death has a throwback vibe that drew me in from the start. Although set in December of 1987, it doesn’t hit you over the head with that fact. This isn’t the sort of ‘80s-set project that’s filled with bright colors or toe-tapping music tracks. Instead, it feels like something that was directly lifted out of the time it’s set in. I was a kid in ‘87, and this felt like the sort of movie I would have seen my father watching on primetime cable back then.
It’s also interesting in that it doesn’t seem to have made any compromises in an effort to draw in a wider (or younger) audience. It has a strong cast, but it consists largely of that-guy character actors who are usually given supporting roles, including lead actor Michael Kelly, who has over 70 screen acting credits to his name, having had supporting roles in the likes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, The Sopranos, Man of Steel, House of Cards, Lioness, The Penguin, Jack Ryan, etc. Kelly takes center stage here, playing Detective Frank Morley of the Bureau of Corrections, a man with a dark, painful history who sets out on an investigation in a place that has a dark, painful history of its own.
That place is the Seneca Ridge Penitentiary, an isolated prison that has been standing since the Civil War. It’s an old-fashioned place that still uses iron locks and keys. A fire took out one of the blocks back in ‘74, and there hasn’t been an execution there since a particularly messy incident in ‘78. When an inmate goes missing, Morley passes the investigation over to a younger, less experienced co-worker. And when that co-worker has a meltdown over what he’s discovering and then turns up dead, Morley takes over the investigation himself. And that’s when things get weird.
Time of Death straddles a line between genres, often leaning into horror but never going too far in that direction. Seneca Ridge seems to be haunted to a degree and the water that flows through its pipes looks like blood (the coloring is blamed on algae), but it’s mainly Morley who’s affected by the “ghosts” lingering around the property. He’s a haunted man before he even arrives at the prison, plagued by nightmares and guilt associated with the deaths of his wife and child two years earlier, and he becomes much more haunted once he’s at Seneca Ridge. If not for the fact that he starts seeing visions of what happened in this prison years ago, he might never be able to solve the mystery he’s investigating.
Kelly’s co-stars include Kevin Pollak as the country-fried Warden Beau LaRue (a third-generation Warden at Seneca Ridge), Dennis Haysbert as helpful guard Dale Aarons (the most likeable character in the film), Noel Gugliemi as the Warden’s assistant (and yes, he’s playing a character named Hector again!), and Mena Suvari as a doctor co-worker that Morley is in a sort-of relationship with. David Ury, Jeff Kober, Alex Solowitz, Sir Brodie, and Trevor Morgan also have some intriguing moments along the way.
I wasn’t always entirely sure what was going on in Time of Death, as the film blurs reality, nightmares, visions, and flashbacks, but all it comes together in the end (just in time for a bit of action), and I was engaged every step of the way.
If you’re interested in watching a dark, grown-up throwback movie with a lot of mystery and a bit of thrills, check out Time of Death. It might even occasionally make you feel like you’ve been transported back in time.
The Time of Death review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
COPYCAT (1995)
Released in October of 1995, the serial killer thriller Copycat was largely overshadowed by a different serial killer thriller, Seven, which was released a month earlier. Still, Copycat had a decent theatrical run, drawing in $79 million on a budget of $27 million (compared to Seven, which earned $327 million on a budget in the low thirties), and still has some appreciative fans to this day.
Director Jon Amiel brought a rather lackluster style to the film, but the script by Ann Biderman and David Madsen tells an interesting story and Amiel was able to land a strong cast. Sigourney Weaver stars as Dr. Helen Hudson, a psychologist who specializes in serial killers. The film begins with her giving a lecture at a college – and then being attacked in the restroom by Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr.), a serial killer who has escaped from prison. The attack results in Helen becoming an agoraphobic shut-in, never leaving her apartment in San Francisco.
When a serial killer starts striking in the area, lifting methods from famed serial killers of the past (Albert DeSalvo, The Hillside Strangler, David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy) and meticulously recreating crime scene photos, detectives M.J. Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Ruben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) seek her help. And they’re not the only ones who take an interest in Helen. This copycat serial killer happens to be obsessed with her, and even sneaks into her apartment on more than one occasion.
You know where this is going: eventually Helen is going to have to have a face-to-face confrontation with the killer that takes her out of her apartment. But getting there is an interesting ride, even if the movie does go on a bit too long – and verge on the edge of over-staying its welcome – with a running time of 123 minutes.
Copycat was a hit on video, becoming the 11th most-rented film in the United States for 1996. Due to Amiel’s bland style and some awkward plotting and structural issues, it doesn’t hold up extraordinarily well, but it’s still worth checking out more than thirty years later.
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