The Boys From Brazil
|
Our Price: $13.94 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.62 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Boys From Brazil
Movie Review: HG Wells' 1896 "Dr. Moreau" as real life Dr. Mengele!!! Wow!
Summary: 4 Stars
This film gets 4 stars instead of 3 because it is STILL so timely...
It is "campy", and one would think the key villain (Peck's Dr. Mengele) rather overacted and unbelievably bad, but current science news makes him even more believable now...
as we inch towards human cloning...and as we debate the ethics of human genetics...you know..."adult" vs. "embryonic" stem cells, etc. etc.
Yes, Virginia, there was a real life Dr. Moreau (the fictional HG Wells evil scientist). Fact --or at least probable science advances in the fairly near future---imitates fiction in this film.
Who is our real life 20th Century Dr. Moreau? His name was Dr. Josef Mengele, Nazi concentration camp doctor of death. (the real life Mengele died shortly after this film came out. Wonder if he saw it or read the book???).
And he was an evil scientist who tortured, maimed, murdered prisoners all in the name of Nazi "science". (Shades of the movie "Frankenstein" here also!!!)
In Well's story, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) Deformed humans are scattered on his little island paradise.
In the film Boys from Brazil, look at the persons "littered" around Dr. Mengele's hidden jungle laboratory. Shades of Moreau!!!
Observe the young native boy---with eyes dyed blue. (Nazi Dr. Mengele actually attempted to dye brown eyes blue in his quest for the genetically engineered "master" race.)
And the man who discovers Dr. M's secret abuses of science runs to inform civilization...just as the amateur Nazi hunter does in The Boys from Brazil.
Herein lies the tale, as the elderly Nazi hunter (played by Olivier) takes up the chase...when the young Nazi hunter is murdered...
Gregory Peck shaved part of his eyebrows and grew a sinister pencil thin moustache (see films of 30's & 40's for villains with similar pencil thin moustaches). Good idea. He played so many good guys---this alteration makes him look different & evil.
Peck & James Mason (as an elegant, cultured Nazi who shares the Mengele and evil Nazi vision of genetics) would not be quite believable in their cultured but quite evil villain parts--- except for the fact that they accurately reflect the historic DESIRES of actual Nazi geneticists to make genetics serve their evil purposes.
Mason's evil villain character is more subtle---a genteel, cultured man who is entranced by music. Watch as he closes his eyes & is enchanted by the great classical music. His graceful hands "direct' the recorded music...
but he is as evil as the more abrasive Mengele & commends Mengele's cloning work "Someday schoolchildren will visit this (laboratory)."
CAUTION Preview this movie to mark scenes to skip.
In my quest to view as few hacked up, abused women as possible, I skip a scene where a British young woman is murdered & also recommend skipping (or fast forwarding) thru a scene by the science lab because of female nudity. The plot is unaffected by these gratuitous scenes which were cut from the TV version I saw.
Also, there are some rather violent death scenes. Preview before allowing kids under 17 year olds to see it.
However, much of the movie is a good discussion base for dramatizing some of the evil ways science, particularly genetics & cloning can be abused.
I didn't tell you who the 94 boys from Brazil are...That's the scary secret you will discover for yourself.
(Ps remember: someday we might clone---from just a strand of old hair!!!)
Movie Review: Infamous butcher, the angel of death
Summary: 4 Stars
As others reviewing this item have noted, the cheese quotient is pretty high in "The Boys From Brazil," which has become something of a cult classic for just that reason. Yes, scenery is chewed as if by the vicious dobermans that pop up in the end. Of course, those doggies are beaten by a cast of veteran actors including Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and Uta Hagen, who overact their way through what I suppose was intended as a "prestige picture" back in the day. Nevertheless, this thriller/potboiler/unintentional-laugh-getter ages pretty well despite the limberger. It's slick, efficient and involving: if one is unaware of the infamous plot twist (which I will not spoil, rest assured) it still comes as something of a head spinner.
When Olivier's nazi-hunter Ezra Lieberman (a thinly-veiled version of Simon Wiesenthal) is warned of a mysterious plot launched by real-life nazi doctor Josef Mengele (Peck) he reluctantly leaps into action, or at least as much action as an old guy can leap into. His investigation turns up a plot so fiendish, so evil, so utterly implausible that even a completely bonkers performance by Uta Hagen cannot stop him. At the center of this nefariousness is an adolescent boy (oh Jeremy Black, where have you gone?) with a bad attitude and a chip on his shoulder to match. The boy has a just-as-evil twin, and more than one. What could this mean? Well, I'll leave it to you to find out, dear Amazon shopper.
I suppose you also have to wonder about the taste of placing a real life war criminal (Mengele really was responsible for thousands of deaths during the holocaust) into a fictional thriller as a cartoon villian. I mean, isn't this the kind of thing that allows people like Hutton Gibson (Mel's dad) to deny the realities of history? Okay, that's kind of a heavy load to place on the shoulders of a movie directed by the same guy who did "Planet of the Apes," but I'm just wondering here. If we take enjoyment from this, are we not some sick puppies, or at least cynical? In the film, Olivier's character is considered something of a relic by a world that just isn't interested in his mission anymore. That could describe the audience for this film, which had to include the members of the long-running thrash metal band Slayer, who apparently cribbed some of the dialogue for their signature song, "Angel of Death." Since I've been known to rock out to that song, I guess I'm complicit as well, and what does it say about me that I'm not really all that concerned about it? If you toss Stephen King's novella "Apt Pupil" and even "Raiders of the Lost Ark," with their boo-hiss nazis, into this pop-culture mix, what does that say? I hate to be the voice of moral outrage here, since after all I'm as bad as anyone, but can we really laugh into the face of real world horrors? You can probably call it a coping mechanism, 'cause if you start to consider the reality of events like the holocaust and slavery, you'd just go as bonkers as the plot of this movie, the very ending of which is as disturbing as it was intended to be, and almost justifies the entertaing folderol that preceded it.
Movie Review: Very good.
Summary: 4 Stars
The Boys from Brazil (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978)
I think every major director working in the seventies was required to make a Nazi thriller. They cropped up like weeds there for a while, from Schelsinger's brilliant Marathon Man to Marcel Ophuls' The Memory of Justice to Fosse's Cabaret (if you want to stretch it a little, you could even throw in A Clockwork Orange as a freebie). Most of them, surprisingly, are pretty darn good, and Franklin J. Schaffner's entry, The Boys from Brazil, is no exception. Based on Ira Levin's odd horror-fantasy mix, it separates itself from the pack by positing a truly distressing question: what would happen if the Nazis who'd fled to South America, most of them doctors, had managed to perfect cloning technology and come up with a small stable of new Hitlers?
The leader of the pack, not surprisingly, is Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the very real-life Angel of Death who presided over the experimental labs at Auschwitz. Not a stretch to see him embracing Hitler's well-known love of the weird and occult and diving into the idea of cloning. Pitted against Mengele and his thugs are veteran Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), who is contacted out of the blue one day by Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg in an early role), who claims to have found Mengele, and more, puts him at the center of some sort of conspiracy going on in Paraguay. Lieberman initially dismisses Kohler's claims, but when the boy goes missing, Lieberman decides he needs to see for himself what's going on. This throws a kink into Mengele's plans, as his superiors, fearing discovery, decide to shut down the project. Mengele is not happy about this, and decides to go rogue...
Peck, Olivier, and Guttenberg are joined by a truly outrageous cast, roughly analogous to the 1997 Yankees, but with actors. James Mason, Denholm Elliott, Uta Hagen, Rosemary Harris, Bruno Ganz, and a host of other instantly-recognizable seventies icons make appearances here and chew scenery for all they're worth. (You can't expect Shakespeare from the guy who gave the world Planet of the Apes, can you?) The whole thing often plays more like melodrama than science fiction, but in some way that just adds to the appeal of this unjustly neglected film; it's well worth going out of your way for, if you've never seen it. *** ½
Movie Review: Peck vs Olivier as the Nazis try to clone Adolf Hitler
Summary: 4 Stars
Gregory Peck gets about as far away from his Oscar winning role as Atticus Finch as possible with his over-the-top performance as the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele. Once you learn about the plot of "The Boys from Brazil," based on Ira Levin's novel, Peck's hammy performance makes perfect sense. At a South American summit of Nazis, Mengele announces that over the next couple of years 94 adult males with much younger wives and adolescent sons are to be systematically murdered around their 65th birthdays. Mengele had cloned Hitler, implanted the eggs in all of these women, and now wants to recreate what he believes was the Fuhrer's formative experience as a child. Fortunately young Nazi-hunter Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) overhears the plot and right before he is murdered manages enlists the aid of the legendary Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) to stop this horrific plot. Just think of this film as a cross between "Jurassic Park" and "Triumph of the Will." The scene where a scientist explains the cloning process in excruciating detail to Lieberman is a textbook lesson on how too much exposition can stop a movie in its tracks. But then there is the final living room standoff between Mengele, Lieberman and one of the Hitler clones with his pack of trained killer Dobermans.Actually, the actor who impresses me in "The Boys from Brazil" is James Mason, who plays Nazi Eduard Seibert and somehow makes the whole thing seem reasonable. Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Rosemary Harris and Denholm Elliott round out the stellar supporting cast caught up in this madness. Jeremy Black has the interesting role of playing all the young Hitler-Wannabees (Jack Curry, Simon Harrington, Erich Doring, Bobby Wheelock, etc.). Director Franklin J. Schaffner ("Planet of the Apes," "Patton," "Papillion") directs this straight up while Peck spews curses and Olivier trots out his wise old man routine. But to be fair, once we get past the exposition and Olivier tells the scientist that the person who has been cloned is neither Mozart nor Picasso, the story does get into gear. In what other over the top film can you see this much acting talent chewing up this much scenery? "The Boys From Brazil" is a first-class bad movie.
Movie Review: The Boys Are Back In Town
Summary: 4 Stars
Gregory Peck, playing out-of-type, one-dimensional, and over the top is the highlight of THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL as Josef Mengele (quite a turn-around considering he had just played General MacArthur in MACARTHUR a year before). Mengele/Peck is overseeing a plot to clone and produce hundreds of little "Hitlers" and to find the future leader for the hibernating Nazi's. Ezra Lieberman (in an equally great performance from Laurence Olivier) is a Nazi hunter on the trail of Mengele to stop the conspiracy (this character is quite a turnaround equal to Peck as Olvier played an escape Nazi war criminal in MARATHON MAN two years before). The cloning aspect of the story is quite daring for its day and resonates implications of ethics of today's headlines. Also, the film asks the age old question if a person's personality is a result of inherited genes or outside environmental factors. Overall, a film which fits in well with some of the other 1970's paranoid thrillers with the right mixture of action, mystery and suspense. Note: Look for a young Steve Guttenberg (POLICE ACADEMY) in a very early film role as the young Nazi Hunter (Barry Kohler). He is somehow exposed and killed by Mengele's henchmen. Notice the scene following his death, he is in the background (as Mengele/Peck is in the foreground) sitting on the floor slumped against the wall. Guttenberg can be seen blinking when his character is supposed to be dead.