Country Life (1994)

When we were younger, we thought Chekov's Uncle Vanya was a bittersweet domestic farce. As we've aged, we've come to see it as vice versa: a terrible tragedy dressed up as comedy. A difficult emotional pitch to achieve but, when you get it right, boy, it's a zinger.

Country Life explores the terribly farcical tragicness of being deeply in love with Sam Neill when he has no idea that you exist. Le sigh. It's also about other stuff - such as a depressed uncle - but the existential jist is really captured in this love non-affair. Because, forsooth, we all have our broken flowers, our expired dreams, our Sam Neills. And this sense of lost opportunities, of waning vitality and fuzzy regrets, remains lodged in our hearts forever - how can we but look back to the halcyon days of Jurassic Park to the tragic detour of Event Horizon, and on into the gloomy twilight of... what has Sam Neill been in recently? Oh yeah, Under the Mountain. Anyway, how can we not look back on this, here now in gloomy twilight, and pine for those majestic days of golden yore, when Sam Neill sailed the high seas and punched Billy Zane in the head and was really, really awesome and hot?

When Alexander Voysey (Michael Blakemore, who also directs) and his much younger wife Debbie (Greta Scacchi) return from England to his Outback birthplace, they throw the family home all askew. Voysey - a pompous lecher and waning art critic - annoys everyone with his high falutin', limp-wristed snobbery, while his wife - a melancholy waif - beguiles all the ruddy Australian men. In particular, the volatile, flamboyant Uncle Jack (John Hargreaves) and the hard-drinking, idealistic pacifist Doctor Askey (Sam Neill!!!). This, while Uncle Jack's hard-working niece, Sally (Kerry Fox), harbors an intense crush on the good doctor. Things get complicated when Askey, by the sheer brilliance of his Sam Neilliness (and a charming sequence where he gets punched in the nose for his pacifist troubles), beguiles Debbie back. Meanwhile, this all happens in 1919 Australia, the first summer after the war, against a backdrop of a wounded generation (literally) limping back home.

There are parts of Country Life that work really well, and parts that clang and plod. It also suffers from that weird problem when not all the actors are on the same page about the tone of the film. Blakemore is great as the fussy, infuriating Voysey, but - if his pitch is anything to go by (and we guess it is, given that he directed) - he seems to lean heavily towards comedy. John Hargreaves gives an intense, almost maniacal performance that can best be described as slapstick tragedy. Kerry Fox is understated and gut-wrenching as the "ugly duckling" Sally, and Sam Neill... well, just acts like he's in a Sam Neill movie.

This all comes together quite nicely in some sequences - such as when Sally half-confesses her love to a half-drunken Askey and gets a heartbreaking half-rejection in reply - but it falls apart more often than not. The characterizations are a bit too flimsy to get a good emotional depth going, and gesturing towards archetypes or caricatures isn't enough. This is the sort of story that requires a Jeff Daniels-esque feat of a rich, warts-and-all portrait.

So, ultimately, the strength of the story is driven mostly by Chekov and our particular Sally-like love of Sam Neill, rather than any innovation or brilliance in this adaptation. Also, be warned: the soundtrack is so, so bad. It's like MIDI elevator music or something.

The Dish (2000)

The Aussie faux historical The Dish is a sweet, wholesome movie exhibiting much of the usual irreverent humanism that characterizes the region's more enduring comedies (think Strictly Ballroom or Muriel's Wedding).

The Dish centers around the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and Australia's involvement via its satellite communication and televised broadcasting of Neil Armstrong's legendary first steps. In the usual style, a motley crew of gently quirky scientists are assembled - led by the wry Cliff (Sam Neill), with the young, spaced out Glenn (Tom Long) and the puckish Mitch (Kevin Harrington) in assistance - and advised by the boorish Yankee NASA representative, Al (Patrick Warburton, Elaine's boyfriend from Seinfeld). The tone is one of ad hoc genius and cobbled-together solutions for the curveballs these scientists encounter in their job to track and broadcast the Apollo 11 communications.

The humor is gentle, the history a bit tweaked and the vibe generally warm and bittersweet. It's a great movie for chilling out with tea (and maybe a blanket), and it leaves you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside. There's also - as with all mainstream films that deal with the Apollo missions - a lot of celebration of man stuff, a relishing of our technological achievements. Think long, loving shots of the satellite. Couple this with some Australiana nostalgia - doo-wop and flower power acoustic guitars feature heavily in the satellite-fetish shots - and the viewer is lulled into a comfortable, warm zone of easygoing optimism.

Sam Neill, one of the gods of our idolatry (OK, our pantheon is pretty big), is his usual craggy, sardonic self - and we love him for it, as we always do. This time we even get the bonus of sweaters and pipes! Oh, our hearts - be still! The people who are not Sam Neill are also fairly decent, but they suffer somewhat from the fact that they're not - in fact - Sam Neill.

We should also note that one character - the comical mayor's comically angry feminist daughter - was a little ruffling to our feathers. Every line Feminist Girl spouted was meant for ridicule, even though some of them were, well, pretty good points. Poverty alleviation or space exploration? It's a good point! And mocking the poverty of India - which was, essentially, the punchline of one of the jokes at her expense - wasn't very funny. Oh, Sam, why did you laugh? For money? We'll give you money!

Daybreakers (2009)

What is it with vampires these days?

Daybreakers is the logical conclusion of our current pop obsession (popsession?) with vampires. Told from their viewpoint, they are the mainstream, the norm, the mundane. They are the bureaucratic drones and the police force. In other words, they are The Man.

The year is 2019, and it's been ten years since this film's release the outbreak of vampiritis. Since then, most people have turned into yellow-eyed undead with prominent canines. The blood of humans is quickly running out, and the few humans left are farmed in big Harkonnen-style warehouses owned by the Sam Neill Corporation of Exploitation. In other words, The Man.

Into this dystopian setting we thrust the usual bureaucratic minion, Edward Cullen Dalton (Ethan Hawke and his cheekbones). Edward is a sensitive, thoughtful pacifist/feminist/insert your sensitive, thoughtful cause here, and he's gone vegetarian. Unfortunately, not drinking human blood makes you turn into a ye olde vampire, the silent film kind, complete with no hair and horrible wings. Edward's brother, police force Frankie (Michael Dorman), severely disapproves of this counterculture tendencies. Edward himself feels pretty lost, until he bumps into the Requisite Female Emancipator, this time a human named (apparently) Audrey (Claudia Karvan), who introduces him to the man (did you read that, right? MAN. it's a MAN, people! the ladies get no love anywhere, it seems) who purports to have found the "cure" for vampiritis. By the way, this man is played by Willem Dafoe.

So there you have it! Is it worth the price of admission or the price of a DVD? Not really. It's a popcorn-churning, bloodgushing B-movie that delights in itself with some self-aware levity (did we mention vampires explode when a stake goes through their hearts? THEY EXPLODE.), though it never manages to break into truly eye-opening weirdness or truly coherent satire. What oppressed class are the humans supposed to be? We thought they were tuna or salmon for much of the film.

Ethan Hawke is a boring hero; imagine Keanu Reeves on a lot of Valium. Our beloved Sam Neill is his usual glorious self, though he does get involved in a very questionable sequence involving his human renegade daughter (Isabel Lucas), Policeman Frankie and a sort of Medieval "I sell you my daughter's virginity" prison rape. Was this eroticized vampirism and dodgy morals supposed to stick it to the Twilight people? Maybe.

Actually, the whole movie feels like an un-Twilight: a reaction to and play against the tired old vampire tropes that seem so pervasive in our fantasy genre these days. While it doesn't take itself as seriously as Twilight, and therefore is slightly less ridiculous, it still takes itself way too seriously: it is, after all, about a brooding vampire anti-hero stuck in the grind of a desaturated life. A little more sparkly color and slapstick might have been a better choice (or a little more feminism/postcolonialism; just sayin'). Overall, it's a C+: not as crafty and clever as other, better B-horrors (Shaun of the Dead, the almighty Slither), but not horrible either.

Event Horizon (1997)

Whereas if the film did any little bit of business in America, if the film did some decent bit of business, then Hollywood would take it, and they'd remake it, and they'd up the budget by 50 million and it'd be called, “The Room With A View of Hell!”
- Eddie Izzard

It's ironic, since Eddie was talking about American remakes of British films, and the cultish pulp monster Event Horizon is a British "of Hell!" to a Russian "Room With a View".


When you're gonna steal iconic images: steal from the best! Solaris.


Blade Runner.

Why did we ever like this silly, disgusting gross-fest that inadvertently lampoons far superior entries into the whole mystery and terror of space subgenre? We think much of it has to do with its high levels of Sam Neilliness - Sam Neill sweating into his bedsheets! Sam Neill floating in a classy spacesuit! Sam Neill losing his shirt! - or does it go the other way around? Do we worship at the altar of Sam Neill because of this terrible film? It was on television an awful lot back in the 90s.

In 2040, Earth launched its first deep space vessel, the Event Horizon, a ship that was supposed to achieve faster-than-light travel using nifty space-bending stuff (Sam Neill thought of that, Simon Pegg didn't!). Instead, it never got past Neptune, where it just went dead in the water, lilting lazily to the side. Now, seven years later, a team of scrappy, reluctant pseudo-military types, led by man o' the people Captain Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and frosty intellectual Doctor Awkward (Sam Neill!), go for the rescue mission.


For long flights, such as those over the Pacific.


The best, most visually fun sequence in the film.

The rescuers do find the Event Horizon, and when they do, plasmic hell goo (literally) starts splashing everywhere, quickly followed by blood, guts and sanity. In an early scene, the laddish military types are resentful to brainy Sam Neill for dragging them into this mess - and their anti-intellectual sulking is later justified: yes, it really all was Sam Neill's fault.

Of course, in an early scene, likable tech officer Peters (a youthful Kathleen Quinlan) also likens a former crewmate to a "corpsicle" - and that pretty much sets the tone of this film. With utter seriousness, a sort of ultra-grim melody supplied by overachieving eyebrows, frosty irises and moody intonations, this film wallows in the most ludicrous scenarios. It seems to have no self-awareness at all; it doesn't realize how over-the-top it is. Instead, it goes for A-grade horror - something it only intermittently achieves, such as the glorious sequence in the green vent - when it should really be basking in B-grade silliness. On paper this is the stuff of Ghostbusters, but - alas - when choosing the form of their destructor, they went for eyeless dead wives instead of a giant marshmallow man.


What is the purpose of long spikes in the engine room? Just, you know, wondering.

So should it be watched? Only at your own peril! We kind of perversely enjoyed watching it in groups when it would be on TV, if only so we could crow at Sam Neill and then make big noises of shock when the bloody stuff begins. But it's not a particularly good film, so we can't really recommend it. It seems much more intent on pushing the boundaries of gore and dressing these up in some visual references to better films, instead of, you know, investing some more thought into the plot.

Under the Mountain (2009)

The low-budget fantasy, Under the Mountain, is an endearingly imperfect and low-key production. Based on a popular Kiwi YA book by Maurice Gee, it clocks in at a rushed 90 minutes - though we reckon something like five hours would have been enough to do the story justice. Instead, this film feels slipshod, with some very dodgy acting, a hasty narrative and a weak conclusion. Despite all this, we kinda liked it. Like, liked it a lot. It was cuddly. It featured Sam Neill. And New Zealand. And blue lakes. And volcanoes. Anyone up for a hug?

Twins Theo (Tom Cameron, awful but sweet) and Rachel (Sophie McBridge, a bit better) share that special twinly connection of telepathy and feeling what the other feels. One day, they come home to find that their mother has been killed in an accident. As Rachel reaches out in her grief, Theo shuts down - he cuts himself off from the twinliness, leaving Rachel alone in silence. Giving their father time to mourn, they are shipped off to live with their Uncle Cliff (Matthew Chamberlain) and Aunt Kay (Michaela Rooney) in Auckland. Guided by their cousin Ricky (Leon Wadham), they explore the mighty volcanoes surrounding Auckland city, marvel at the dilapidated house across the lake owned by the mysterious Wilberforces, and meet a crusty old man who yells at them. This old geezer is none other than Mr. Jones (SAM NEILL) - and, when Theo finds a 19th century picture featuring a not-much-younger Mr. Jones in his Volcanoes textbook, he realizes that Mr. Jones isn't just a crazy curmudgeon. What is up?


Not Weasleys.


The Uglies from the Planet Crap and their ill-tended yard.

Something is up! Like beyond orbit up! It's a (hilarious, unintentionally) doozy of interstellar warfare and colonizing alien species and "twinness". Mr. Jones is the last surviving extraterrestrial expat of a race of Fire Raisers (think Avatar: The Last Airbender, but they only come in pairs). Back in the day (like, waaaaay back in the day), the Fire Raisers warred with the squiggly race of crappy aliens, now embodied in the Wilberforces (think The Matrix's Agent Smith mated with Predator). Then a third alien race came in - okay, we got hazy here - called the Gargantuans, or maybe just Gargantua, and they were trapped by - the Fire Raisers? the Wilberforces? Sam Neill's Sam Neilliness? well, something - under Auckland's seven volcanoes. The mother Gargantua, a kind of Grendel thing with rhinestones for eyes, currently slumbers under the mightiest of the peaks: Rangitoto Island (Māori for "bloody sky").


By our powers combined!

And only twins can defeat the Wilberforces and the Gargantua(n)s! After giving Theo and Rachel some very handsome oversized pebbles - Fire Raiser weaponry - Mr. Jones stresses, in that particularly grumpy way of his, that the only thing that's special about Theo and Rachel is their twinness, and they have to channel this twinness if they ever hope to survive. Theo's like, "Yeah, whatever," and Rachel's like, "What happened to your twin, Mr. Jones? And all the other twins before us who attempted this feat?" and Mr. Jones is like, "THEY DIED."

The acting, especially coming from the younger actors, is terrible. Just dreadful. The pacing is also slow. The cuts are awkward, and the background score seems to have its own ideas about how the story should go. Sam Neill channels his most ultra-serious avatar, often bordering on the camp (especially when he hobbles around and growls about dead alien races). The Wilberforces, while unnerving with their Predator-like jaws and slimy exoskeletons, were also quite funny as an ancient alien race that never quite got the hang of grammar ("Make them dead!" being a good one, though we also enjoyed "Then I will observe you to die, ho ho ho!").


"They? Oh, they died horrible, drawn-out deaths," he wheezed. Yay!

Yet DESPITE ALL THIS, we cannot stress this enough, we deeply enjoyed this film. We are, of course, completely biased by our wild fondness for New Zealand and Sam Neill and young adult fantasy. But it was like Madeleine L'Engle cookies marinated in Sam Neill sauce (which sounds gross, but he even does the thing where he arches his eyebrows and glares crazily and intones some pronouncement on our DOOM). It was like a fuzzy blanket of Kiwi comfort. We just know that if we were 11-year-old Kiwi schoolgirls (as we are, on the inside), we would love the idea of sleeping alien beasts lying beneath Auckland's craters.

"But what if I don't feel any particular fondness for Sam Neill or New Zealand or aliens, PPCC?" you may ask. "What then?"

Well, since we cannot fathom such a bizarre, unnatural perspective, you're on your own. But for the rest of you: beautiful, beautiful trash. (Oh yeah, and since it's a kid's film, we think this is okay for 9-year-olds and up. Or maybe particularly badass 6-year-olds.)

(the soundtrack! the best we could do in American Amazon)

The Piano (1993)

"No, she is a strange creature and her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you. To have a sound creep inside you is not all pleasant."
-The Piano

"What a death! What a chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen life?"
-The Piano

Tender, meditative and wonderfully bizarre, The Piano is truly the end-all, be-all Kiwi film. It's also, incidentally, one of our favorite films ever. The other day, we reviewed another popular Kiwi classic - Once Were Warriors - and wondered how it compared to The Piano. But it wasn't really fair to compare Once Were Warriors to something that could have been romanticized by nostalgia, so we decided to re-watch The Piano. And we're somewhat startled to find that it is that much more powerful and wonderful now, over ten years since we last saw it. It's just... damn.

Silence and expressiveness are the big, meaty themes of The Piano. Set in colonial New Zealand, a mute English woman, Ada (Holly Hunter), arrives for an arranged marriage with a local settler, Alisdair (Sam Neill). With her precocious young daughter, Flora (a precocious, young 11-year-old Anna Paquin, in an Oscar-winning performance!), in tow, she navigates the wild, new country, full of knee-deep mud, sublime and mysterious landscapes and the sensitive "gone native" outcast in the house next door, George (Harvey Keitel).


Ada (Holly Hunter) and Flora (Anna Paquin).

The story builds slowly as George invites Ada to teach him to play the piano - this is basically an excuse, since George is one of the few people that recognizes the intense connection that Ada has with her piano, and he's more interested in giving her a space to express this need than actually learning anything for himself. Indeed, Ada's piano is her lost voice. And, as one character puts it, Ada's playing is not the straightforward, blunt playing of a practicing pupil - instead, it is "like a mood that infects you". This applies to the movie itself. Ada - and the movie - seems to communicate on a different level, an unconventional language made almost entirely of emotion, spirit, the heart, whatever you want to call it. In other words, pure mood (like the CD series!).

The Piano is all about mood, and particularly the ability to transmit this intuitive, human connection via music and love (here, often sex). If there was a moral, it would be: talk is cheap, repression is bad, make love and music instead. Ada's muteness informs several scenes where characters meditate on the "usefulness" of silence, the rubbish of conversation and meaningless chatter, and the potentially soul-plumbing depths of just, well, shutting up and listening to the music, watching the birds, taking it all in. The only traditional villain, Alisdair, is doomed by his inability to connect with his wife, himself and the people around him: as a result, he is repressed, oppressive, exploitative and destructive. (And the film seems to leave an open question whether this is because of Alisdair's Victorian and colonialist attitudes.) All the other characters, however, are much more in tune with the harmony of things. And, using the absolute minimum of dialogue, director Jane Campion tells a rich, nuanced love story using only visuals and melody: it's all gestures, lingering looks and, of course, the soundtrack. At times, it even feels like a silent film.

This might make it sound dull, and it certainly is slow. However, we were never, ever bored. Quite the opposite! It's absolutely enchanting. It pulls you in and, once you're in the rhythm of it, it lulls you into its semi-mystical vibe. When the romance between Ada and George develops, it's exhilarating and entrancing. When it's then complicated by Alisdair the husband, it becomes unexpectedly (and ambiguously) tragic. All three characters are so vulnerable and expressive, it's just - well, really touching! Poor Ada! Poor George! Poor Alisdair! (Or are we blinded by an all-forgiving haze of Sam Neill affection? Very possible.)


Oh, Sam. Oops, we mean "Alisdair". What's gotten into you?

Since music is so important to this film, it should only make sense that the score is by a renowned minimalist composer, Michael Nyman. And, indeed, it is just sublime. It makes the movie. Several tracks, such as the main theme ("The Heart Asks Pleasure First") are well-worn and even overplayed nowadays - but just imagine hearing them back in 1993, fresh and new and with the swooping aerials of New Zealand underneath you. Transcendental, indeed. Other tracks - "A Wild and Distant Shore" and "All Imperfect Things" (our favorites) - are merely hinted in the film, yet they still manage to contribute to the special atmosphere. We highly, highly recommend this film just for the music.

The performances are also uniformly impressive. Holly Hunter, who's Ada is steely and dynamic, is just perfect - she carries the film entirely. Harvey Keitel - apart from his body, which looks like a breathing Bernini statue sometimes! - projects just the right balance of sensitivity and rough ignorance. His fumbled attempts to court Ada, and the slow mutual seduction, are at first cringe-worthy and then you invest in it completely. Sam Neill - our personal PPCC fave - is great, particularly in the scenes after he discovers Ada and George's love. (There's also a running debate whether that is, indeed, his bum in that one scene. Feel free to contribute in the comments. If it is, wow, Sam, how many squats do you do at the gym?!)

There are other interesting things about the movie - things we still haven't quite understood. For example, mirroring and doubling are used extensively throughout the film: little Flora for Ada, the ridiculous pair of settler women who finish each other's sentences and make moral decrees on the community, even just the silly sight gag where a Māori man teases Alisdair by copying him. Then there are those wonderfully surreal grace notes - the sailors carrying Ada and Flora onto the shore, the Christmas play, Flora's vividly weird lies about her father. We don't know what all this means yet.


*art geek glee*


Is that you, Mr. Turner?!

But that's okay! The cinematography is so phenomenally gorgeous - it feels like we're in a moving Turner painting. The pacing is perfect, and some moments - such as Ada plunging into the water after the piano, or when Alisdair confronts Ada in the woods - are so well-filmed, they geeked us out completely as film nerds.

Sam Neill mostly makes wine nowadays, and we're happy the man gave us the demented trashy goodness of films like Jurassic Park and Event Horizon. But this will always be the top of his Sam Neilliness, as well as the top of Kiwi goodness, the top of using minimalist composers in film (sorry, Philip Glass! fear not, we will see Kundun toot-sweet), and in our top ten films ever.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Many people around the world often ask themselves, WWJD? That is, "What would Jeff do?"


The Jeff is pleased.

As we all know from the canon of Jurassic Park, Jeff would disapprove of unchecked scientific progress, especially that which is profit-driven. We cannot underestimate the power of Mother Nature, nor can we think to control it. As Jeff himself proclaimed, "Life... uh, finds a way."

But not only did Jeff warn against the hubris of human beings, not only did he predict our Icarus-like fall when everyone else was still thinking the power was trying to come back on, Jeff was also pretty damn hot. I mean, check out that trendy shirt, half-buttoned up, those trendy glasses, that trendy Adam's Apple. That is one sexy chaotician.

If you are lost, the PPCC can only suggest you watch the wonderful, the inimitable, the highly enjoyable Jurassic Park. Frequent PPCC readers may be asking themselves why we choose to review such a mainstream Hollywood movie. The reason, of course, is Jeff. The PPCC loves Jurassic Park - like love loves - but we also need to recognize the bizarre, cult-like following Jeff Goldblum seems to have. Maybe it was his choice of films in the 70s, 80s, and 90s: many of them creepy, often a little bit sci-fi, a little horror, a little bit eroticized. See, for example, The Fly, or Earth Girls Are Easy, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etcetera and so forth. Or maybe it's the characteristic way he delivers his lines: "Uh, I, uh, I... hope you wash your hands... before, uh, before you eat anything!" Whatever it is, there's just Something About Jeff that makes people remember him and want to emblazon his pop icon status in really bizarre ways.


The Jeff, protector of screaming women.

But we don't want the JP review to become a Jeff review, ergo we will focus now on JP as a film, and not simply as a Jeff Godlblum vehicle.

For those who have been living under a rock, the plot of JP is this: based on a popular Michael Crichton novel, scientists have found a way to clone dinosaurs using the old DNA captured in fossilized mosquitos. Megolomaniac billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) builds a theme park around these next generation dinosaurs, and invites paleontologists Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern), as well as mathematician Ian Malcolm (the Jeff), sleazy lawyer Gennaro (Martin Ferrero, of Miami Vice fame), and, just to make matters worse, his two grandchildren, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Timmy (Joseph Mazzello), for a weekend touring the park.


Check out the color balance in the costume design. Every detail of this film is touched with genius!

Of course, things go terribly awry when evil employee Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) shuts down the security systems of Jurassic Park in order to steal the genetic code. While the guests are alternatively eaten by T-Rexes or trapped in jeeps trapped in trees, game warden Muldoon (Bob Peck) and computer engineer Mr. Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) try desperately to get Jurassic Park back online. Much excitement ensues.


An example of some excitement.

Being that the film is directed by Steven Spielberg, it is rambunctious, thrilling, intelligently shot and completely manipulative. As per usual, we are Spielberg's puppets and we dance to his tune. We enjoyed it the first time, the thirtieth time, the hundredth time. In fact, it's longevity as a PPCC favorite is admirable. Many of the film's dialogues have gone down in PPCC history, and we often judge people on whether they recognize lines such as, "They do move in herds!" or "It's a veggie-saurus, Lex!" Scenes such as when we see our first dinosaur, and Sam Neill clumsily removes his aviator sunglasses to marvel, have been burned into the PPCC consciousness for eternity. And the music!


The iconic Gape scene.


Lovely shot; a raptor with some genetic code reflected onto him.

Gush. The music is a thing unto itself. It is as mainstream as mainstream can get - John Williams - but let that not tarnish it, oh ye of counter-cultural tendencies. The bit when it goes DOO doo doo DOOO DOOOO (main theme), or just the way the music suddenly leaps alive when the jeep crashes above Sam Neill's head, is just choice.


"Say again?" "We have a T-Rex."

The performances are uniformly predictable and uniformly enjoyable. Sam Neill, another veteran of that creepy, sci-fi, horror road (see Event Horizon or Dead Calm), flexes his eyebrows and stares in terror and generally fulfills the Archetypal Scientist Hero role. Laura Dern, likewise, screams very loudly, and little Ariana Richards even more so. Joseph Mazzello is surprisingly good as a mini-Sam Neill, and of course, then there is the Jeff. But everyone is good, and we have no space, but we could continue gushing.

Perhaps what's so long-lasting about JP is that it should superficially be a pulpy B-movie, and yet it was so wondrously alive that it became a surprisingly fun A-movie. While the shocks are no longer shocking (that goat's leg on the car, for example), the thrills are still thrilling and, with each viewing, it becomes a little bit funnier, a little bit more sweetly nostalgic. Ellie, look! They do move in herds!