Nice effects though.

Dreadfully Boring

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Diabolique (1996): Dir: Jeremiah Chechik / Cast: Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani, Chazz Palminteri, Kathy Bates, Spalding Gray: Remake of 1955 French classic about limitations of mind and body before madness sets in. Reduced to dull slasher clichés and slow pacing. Chazz Palminteri stars as a school headmaster who is involved with two women. He abuses them until they sum up the urge to kill him. They dump the body in the pool outside but he survives and seeks revenge. Story relies on formula but director Jeremiah Chechik uses style to execute it. This is an odd choice of material for a director who made National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Benny and June. Sharon Stone is reciting her Basic Instinct territory as a teacher with an icy personality, while Isabelle Adjani plays a fragile mistress whom Stone will become involved with. Palminteri's role is that of questionable fate when his body goes missing. Kathy Bates appears as an inspector in a role that is both standard and corrupt. The original is thrilling entertainment at its best and scary at that. It was haunting and suspenseful while this remake is well crafted yet reduced to a sexed up slasher film with a climax bent on violence. It sucks that modern audiences cannot view a film like this without manipulative crap thrown in. This version is stylish but an outright peep show with its grim images but the original is still head of the class. Score: 2 / 10

**SPOILERS** Decent remake of the French 1955 film noir classic of the same title about two women, wife and mistress, planning the murder of their both sleazy and ape-like husband and lover that ends up boomeranging on both of them.In this modernized version of "Diabolique" the story takes place in Pennsylvania not France with headmistress and owner of an all boys private school Mia Baran, Isabelle Adjani, having her fill of taking all the abuse she can from her caveman like husband Guy, Chezz Palminteri. Mia gets together with Guy's also abused mistress, who got her left eye blackened by him, Nicole Horner played by an ultra sexy looking Sharon Stone who's also a teacher at the boys school. The two abused women plan to finally do away with the creep and make his death look like a drowning accident. It takes a while for the very Catholic observing Mia to agree to Nicole's plan to murder Guy but the way he treats her,like dirt, pushes her over the edge in willing to do him in.Luring Guy away from the boys school where he resides both Nicoel and Mia have him secretly travel to a friends home, the Danzingers, in Pittsburgh where they plan to murder him. It's there that Mia got the brutish Guy drunk, which wasn't that hard top do, on booze that was spiked with a number of strong sleeping pills. With Guy out cold the two dumped him into the bathtub and with the help of what looked like a ten gallon bottle filled with water,to keep him from floating to the surface, ended up drowning him. It's when back at the boys school when Nicole & Mia dumped the boozed and drugged up as well as dead Guy into the school swimming pool that strange things started to happen! Guy not only didn't go to the bottom he didn't even go to the top of the pool? In fact he just plumb disappeared from sight over or under the water line!The rest of the movie has Mia, the weaker of the two murderesses, slowly going to pieces in not only what she did in murdering her husband but far worse in not knowing where his body is in order to give it a decent Catholic burial! Going to the local police to have them track down her missing husband Mia is spotted by retired lady detective Shirley Vogel, Kathy Bates, who smells a big story and takes over the investigation in the missing Guy Barnan.***SPOILERS*** It doesn't take long for Vogel to realized that something isn't exactly kosher in Guy's mysterious disappearance. Checking out all the facts Vogel finds out that Guy was embezzling the funds for the boys school and planning to bankrupt it in order to throw off suspicion on himself by the local police. What's even more interesting is that Guy's partner in crime was non other then Nicoe Horner! His mistress whom, as Vogel soon suspects, was very possibly his murderer as well!The unexpected and shocking final in the film in fact outdoes the original, the 1955 French version, with the truth coming to the surface in what was the real reason in murdering Guy and who were the one's who cooked it up in the first place! This was enough to give you, like one of the principle characters in the movie, an almost fatal heart attack! The fact that the intended victim of this elaborately planned scheme didn't end up dropping dead from fright turned out to be disastrous for those who planned it!

I've read through many perspectives on this film, and one that seems to crop up time and again is the word 'camp.' Unfortunately, the film never establishes itself as camp, or indeed anything. It's pointless. There being little to add to the dissection of this film's problems, let's concentrate for a second on how a script this revolting gets made into a film this unsatisfying.Firstly, you have to have a screenwriter who really wants to make a point about how he understands the original. But another trait he has to have is that he doesn't think many other people understand the original. Then, you have to have him working with a culture he doesn't understand. How Sharon Stone got a job in a Catholic boarding school is amazing! Let alone how Palmintieri could stand over his dying wife, or how a boy could break through into the headmaster's quarters, witness the entire scene, and not be sent away. I had nine years in boarding school, and not once, thankfully, did I get to see my headmaster bare-chested. I can understand the chap's fascination with his naked language teacher, and it's very plausible he might find his way to a window to watch from a distance, but he must be the most intuitive, caring boy in the world to have grasped that something was very wrong - and then, if he had done so, he would have gone straight for that adult that Palmintieri has to tell him to go and find. Perhaps he is desperately in love with Miss Adjani. Whatever.Then you have two other awful, awful pieces of writing/casting. (a) the video team - straight out of the 'Titanic' school of cheeky-chappy enthusiasts who say dude all the time and really don't give a fiddler's toss about anything other than the geeky enjoyment their jobs bring them. This kind of embarrasiing stereotyping wiped at least a star off my rating of 'Lock, Stock' (the scousers) and it's just insulting to camera technicians everywhere. Hollywood's presentation of enthusiasts has often been has often been unkind in a 'let's laugh at them' kind of way; here,it's unwatchable. And (b) the other members of staff. You kind of wish the two girls could have chosen their victims more wisely. That would have made the ending much more acceptable. While they were about it, they could also have knocked off that bug-eyed monster whom someone has come back later on in order to introduce a "mystery" element with the sunglasses.Then, you MUST have a director who wants to refer back to the original with as many 'atmosphere shots' as he can find. Probably in homage to it, but again, with no real point. In the original, the dripping tap serves a purpose of heightening the atmosphere of tension. In this film, there IS no tension until right near the end, when KB is wandering through the garage. But why is she wandering through the garage? So the director can 'explain' where Palmintieri has been hiding all this time.By trying to do the original film homage while making his own point about what a great scriptwriter he is (is he?) or what a great director he is (is he?), the person or persons most responsible for this film, clearly told to cut down on the length of the original, never pauses long enough to let anything sink in. Thus the rhythm of the piece goes sideways. And I found myself thinking there must have been a moment during production when some studio heads said, "But, you see, we MUST have some violence, and a chase, some nudity and a sex scene." What began life as a vicious rape of his wife in the 50s classic becomes a ludicrous idea in this, effortlessly summarised by another reviewer here (thank you sir) as words to the effect of, "He terrorises and humiliates her so much that she has to shag him." I must say, though, Stone and Bates give class performances where and when they can - it's just Stone belongs in another film entirely, and Bates is given some classic quips but becomes a pawn in the filmmakers' race for the perfect, satisfying ending. Indeed, as other commentators have noted, halfway through they decide she is Columbo. "Just one more thing," she says, and I kid you not. Anyway, dears, the perfect, satisfying ending would have been for Bates to have locked everyone else in the school, including the scriptwriter and the director, and set fire to it.This film does nothing that you can't find in the French and Saunders videos on Youtube (try the classic "House of Idiot" or "Whatever Happened to Baby Dawn". Except embarrass you, appal you, and make you sick. But you know, there is a plus-side. The film ended!

The original here is one of the best thrillers, energetic in a way that distracts us from the revelation of the con.This is a lesser movie, but adds at least three clever ideas. If you are interested in narrative structure, you'll be interested in remakes of films and how they change. (I think these are changes to the original.)First, in true folding style, they added a film within the film. The film within is a recruiting film, but that hardly matters.Second, they changed the dynamic of the detective by making him a her. This allows for the third change but along the way the possibilities exist for the three types of women: the virgin, the whore and the shrew. It isn't played up well enough to matter, but its clear that someone's intuition was tuned.Third, there is a final twist that I think is quite different than the original's. It bonds the three women, already hinted in a lesbian tendency between the first two. But amazingly, the film didn't work well for me, probably because of pacing problems at various levels. Not that any level was off by the interplay of levels wasn't syncopated according to what engages. Its an intuitive process, I think, but quite rigid in its rules.Isabelle Adjani was cast perfectly, and introduced very skillfully. Beginnings are hard.This in its original incarnation was the first double con movie, I think. Adding a third was inevitable, I suppose.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.