Wolf, The Hills Have Eyes, Harper

Wolf (1994, Mike Nichols)
Perhaps the most plainly enjoyable Mike Nichols movie that I've seen. With its zooms it seems heavily influenced by Kubrick's "The Shining," although Jack Nicholson's performance here is much more restrained, despite scenes requiring him to leap out of view and transform into a wolf. Nichols cleverly and rightly treats the wolf man aspect of the film as an everyday phenomenon, like a kind of sickness; there is little feeling of the supernatural. And Nichols just as rightly gives a great deal of focus to the simplicities of the characters' daily lives -- the movie works just as well as a story of corporate mergers and wheeling-and-dealing. James Spader brilliantly plays the conniving and sniveling foil to Nicholson's editor-in-chief role.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977, Wes Craven)
Some people may prefer the crazy-hick insanity of this film to Wes Craven's more glossy, commercial (and enjoyable) work, but I found it to be a second-rate impression of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the kind of morally bankrupt freak-fest that shouldn't be idolized anyway.

Harper (1966, Jack Smight)
A movie that has signs of the cool factor of the '60s -- and even overripe spoofing of it, as with the dancing pool girl -- and yet the overly-convoluted plot goes on far too long and the script by William Goldman, a writer famous for the fraudulent, chintzy cleverness and sentimentality of scripts like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Princess Bride," regards itself too highly to even make for a throwaway charmer vehicle for Paul Newman.