There's no doubt about it; director John Landis is a legend. In terms of top genre film making Landis has made the best musical of all time in The Blues Brothers, the best comedy of all time with Animal House, the greatest music video of all time with Michael Jackson's Thriller and the best straight-up horror film of all time with An American Werewolf In London. But there's also a lot of inconsistency in his career including the fantastic (Trading Places, Oscar, Coming To America), mediocre films (Spies Like Us, Three Amigos, Beverly Hills Cop III) and the outright shit ones (Innocent Blood, Blues Bothers 2000, Into The Night). There's only a few of his works I've yet to see and until a couple of days ago that included 1998's Susan's Plan.
Susan's Plan is a comedy thriller, penned by Landis, and stars Nastassja Kinski in the centre of a convoluted caper plot to kill her ex-husband in a murderous life insurance scam. Along for the ride in this Tarantino-esque inspired concoction are C-listers Michael Biehn, Billy Zane, Rob Schneider, Thomas Hayden Church, Bill Duke, Lara Flynn Boyle and Dan Ackroyd who to a lesser or greater degree, get the quirky tone Landis is gunning for. Surprisingly, diva Flynn Boyle nails her role best with a ditzy, airheaded performance as a hustling skank with Biehn giving her a run for her money as a killer with the mindset of a young teen.
Despite the cast and director, Susan's Plan is awful. The script is dire, little of the humour translates through the situations and characters on to the screen and very little of that signature Landis magic is visible in the comic timing. The pacing is slow, tonally it has trouble jumping between serious and humorous the way American Werewolf pulled off so perfectly, and it goes absolutely nowhere.
Thankfully Landis was to redeem himself on the excellent Masters Of Horror episode Deer Woman, but considering this cluster cuss, it's amazing he achieved even that feat.
No comments:
Post a Comment