22. One Woman or Two (1987) - ½ Director: Daniel Vigne From
Add it all up, and what you've got here is a waste of good electricity. I'm not talking about the electricity between the actors. I'm talking about the current to the projector.
21. Prison Girls (1973) - 0 Stars
Director: Tom DeSimone
Roger Eberts review of the 1973 3-D spectacle Prison Girls is possibly the funniest review he ever posted. He weaves into this review comments about The Blind Dead and The Devils Widow, two films he also saw during the same week. His comments on Prison Girls were few because of a difficulty he had during its screening.
Prison Girls was the toughest because the right lens fell out of my 3-D glasses and got lost on the floor. That was the whole ball game right there. Ebert laments the fact that, as far as he could tell with the 3-D effects overlapping his vision, there were no scenes that took place in a prison. I was disappointed, because whenever I go to a prison movie, I always look in the cell next to the cell where the main characters are. Burgess Meredith always used to be the guy in the next cell, and I wanted to see if he ever got out. You can read the full review
here.
20. Jaws (1976) -
Director: Steven Spielberg
Ebert called Jaws a sensationally effective action picture, a scary thriller that works all the better because it's populated with characters that have been developed into human beings we get to know and care about. This is one of those reviews Ebert gets really excited about. His fluid prose underscores how much he really enjoyed this movie. Jaws is a great adventure movie of the kind we don't get very often any more. It's clean-cut adventure, without the gratuitous violence of so many action pictures. It has the necessary amount of blood and guts to work -- but none extra. And it's one hell of a good story, brilliantly told.
19. Jaws: The Revenge (1987) - 0 Stars
Director: Joseph Sargent
Jaws the Revenge is not simply a bad movie, but also a stupid and incompetent one. When Ebert hated a movie, he didnt hold back. He was always an honest reviewer, true to his sensibilities as both a critic and more importantly a movie fan. This review is littered with nuggets like: a series of meaningless episodes of human behavior, punctuated by shark attacks. The sharks skin looks like canvas with acne. What shark wouldnt want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it? That the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence. Up until the ludicrous final sequence of the movie, the scariest creature in the film is an eel. The oft-repeated story about the making of this movie has little to do with the poor mechanical sharks or the ridiculous story. Its that its star, Michael Caine, was unable to personally accept his Oscar for best actor in Hannah and Her Sisters because he was in the Bahamas shooting Jaws: The Revenge.