Jade

This really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Directing from a script by Joe Eszterhas, William Friedkin brings a professional air to a trashy erotic-thriller that's not that trashy nor that erotic. It's mostly just kind of dull. I don't think Friedkin had ever directed anything sexy before, and there's a surprisingly sterile quality…

Jailbreakers

This kind of reminds me of the Masters of Horror series, the series of short films made for Showtime in the early 2000s, hyping up the talents of filmmakers like John Carpenter and Joe Dante which ended up being largely just an uneven series of random horror-like stories without any real authorial stamps from the…

Blue Chips

I haven't seen this movie in over twenty years. I might have watched it twice (my dad really likes it), and I was surprised to discover that I remember a shocking amount of what goes on. As I've been progressing through Friedkin's body of work, though, I've been wondering how this movie about basketball and…

The Guardian

You know, I was expecting a complete disaster from William Friedkin's The Guardian. All of the ratings everywhere are low. It's mostly forgotten. It sounds silly. And yet...it's competent. I mean, it's not good, denying any sense of mystery that kills any tension across the bulk of the film, its chief flaw, but Friedkin knew…

C.A.T. Squad: Python Wolf

Well, this is a surprise. The sequel to William Friedkin's and Gerald Petievich's network television film C.A.T. Squad, a largely dull affair masquerading as a thriller, is actually…pretty decent? I mean, I still wouldn't go so far as to call it good, but it's perfectly competent. Maybe it's the inclusion of Robert Ward as a…