Hey! Chris invited me to blog here, so I thought I'd try it out with a review of a movie I just saw, keeping with the style heretofore ahem ahem...

“Seconds” – See Rock Hudson tied down to a gurney by two football players! See actual footage of plastic surgery! See actual footage of Rock Hudson actually drunk!

There are movie conventions we accept from any film, and the fact that this movie depends on one or two hides how unconventional it actually is. They even tried to make Hudson look as awful as possible for one scene! More movies should be like this. But anyone will balk at Hudson’s willfully ignoring movie convention 42: if a stranger’s corpse can get you out of trouble, maybe you’d better figure out where that corpse came from in the first place.

I’m a fan of Frankenheimer, so I was willing to forgive this and other flaws. Its slow pace kills the suspense. And it’s not like there couldn’t have been more suspense – the subplot with Wilson’s creepy friend could have been given more play. And the plot has enough twists that it seems like a long episode of Twilight Zone, so it’s a shame these twists seem so minor and uneventful. I could not forgive the naked drunken hippies, however.

Despite these problems, it’s gorgeous and interesting. But on neither account does it approach Frankenheimer’s masterpiece “The Manchurian Candidate”.
  ¶ 2:29 PM