Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

JohnHowardReid You could write a whole book on the topic, "Movies About Movie-Making" – indeed Rudy Behlmer and Tony Thomas did just that with their Hollywood's Hollywood back in 1979. For this movie, they give a rave review. However , I disagree. Even though it is superbly photographed and set, I would describe Day of the Locust as an over-rated, pretentious, and disappointing production. Admittedly, Burgess Meredith , brilliant actor that he is, adds some zing to the turgid goings-on , but, aside from William Castle's curiosity-value brief appearance as the Waterloo movie director and the spectacularly staged "accident" on that set, the movie tends to out-stay its welcome. Donald Sutherland is a drag and some sequences like the cock-fighting episode (which doesn't figure in the book at all) could well be eliminated to tighten the very meandering, self-indulgent plot. Paul Stewart in an all-too-brief scene as the Zanuck-style studio head, plus Black and Atherton are mildly effective. The precocious brat of a kid is also very credible, but the film's longueurs and its arty climax destroy pace, illusion – and believability.

mark.waltz As if they were mocking the love of everything 20's, 30's and 40's on TV, Broadway and the movie screens, the writers of this screenplay tear apart the legend of movie's so-called "Golden Age". Karen Black, fresh from flying the plane in "Airport '75" (and free from that knife-wielding monster in "Trilogy of Terror"), is a blonde bombshell in 1933 Hollywood who appears in a 1937 Eddie Cantor movie called "Ali Baba Goes to Town" and is upset when most of her one scene is deleted. She selfishly leads lovers along until she meets Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a not-so-cartoonish loner who saves her father (Burgess Meredith) during an attack of exhaustion. Black gives a really mesmerizing performance, especially in scenes where she deals with her father's death and her own insecurities, but ultimately her character is too unlikable.Billy Barty, who in 1933 was making cameos in Busby Berkley musicals, plays a troubled neighbor, and Geraldine Page has a dramatic one-scene cameo as an Aimee Semple McPherson type evangelist. Vintage 30's music, like the previous year's "The Great Gatsby", provides the only real nostalgia since the theme is actually dark and depressing. Burgess Meredith's funeral sequence is interrupted at the Hollywood Cemetery when it is announced that a movie star named Mr. Gable has just arrived. The attitude is satirical but inappropriately so, since the comedy is actually pretty mean spirited. A genuine 30's atmosphere is felt, but this is is not a pretty look at Tinsel Town. Audiences who expected "The Sting" or even "Gatsby" got stung here, and I'm sure many walked out. There is a violent scene involving an attempted rape over jealousy between two men organizing a cock fight. Backstage scenes at Paramount where a film about Napoleon is being shot while everything goes wrong seem genuine, although "College Swing", advertised in the background, wasn't made until several years after this took place. But get a load of "Gilligan's Island"'s Natalie Schafer as a Hollywood madam who shows porno at her parties, a drag queen who performs Dietrich's "Hot Voodoo", and a Shirley Temple like performer so hatefully obnoxious that she (?) makes Temple's rival Jane Withers seem like an angel.If director John Schleshinger's goal was to create a film audiences wouldn't soon forget, he reached his goal. Technically (especially visually), it is outstanding. However, for me, it was not in the way he intended to. This moves past the darkness of his previous nostalgic film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", taking tastelessness to a new level that only seemed appropriate in 1975 in John Waters' underground movies.

PippinInOz This is a remarkable film for so many reasons.I first discovered this film completely by accident about 16 years ago - there used to be a mid -day movie everyday on a free to air channel. If I was home, would switch on in the fast vanishing hope that one day, just one day, something half decent would be screened. Most of these films were abysmal, so you can imagine my shock when this started. I was glued to the screen. The feelings of shock and horror that 'The Day of the Locust' left me with have never left. So when I saw it was being shown on Foxtel the feeling was one of excitement and fear. Fear that after so long maybe this film was not quite as good as I remembered it being. Fear not! But on the other hand, do fear. This is a classic film.1. In the year 2011, 27 years after it was made, the themes it engages with are never more appropriate. The 1930s world of Celebrity culture in Hollywood and the desperation of the characters we get to meet, hold powerful 'truths' for the Western World of 'now' - you know, the world of everyone wanting FAME FAME FAME FAME FAME - (as David Bowie sang it).2. The acting is superb. Watch out for those moments when the lead characters are trying SO HARD to be jolly and happy, that their forced jollity splits into anger laced with madness. 'Beepers, Peepers......' the stuff that nightmares are made of. 3. The film reveals a world where everything is a simulacra (a perfect copy of an original that never existed - Jean Baudrillard). The sets, the costumes. The young Shirley Temple would be who lives in the apartments is a boy dressed as a girl by a mother desperate for fame. ('Toddlers and Tiaras?') 4. There are subtle reminders throughout the film that Nazi Germany is on the rise. The parallels with the hysteria of the crowds cheering Adolf Hitler, particularly in that final horrifying scene (listen: you can hear the click click click of locusts on a feeding frenzy), where the crowd 'devours' - smashing windows - reminiscent of Kristalnacht, when the equally crazed hysterically 'whipped up' crowd attack Jewish businesses and Jewish people. While the focus is different, the hysteria of the crowds is linked. So too, the hysteria of the crowd at the 'Sister's Religious Revival meeting' (Geraldine Paige playing a character based on the real life Amy Semple). It isn't that there haven't been other films in the past ten to fifteen years that have passed comment on celebrity and Hollywood, but what marks this one out - even after so much time - is the complete refusal to allow you, me - the audience - to stick our tongue in our cheek and nod with post modern knowingness, maybe even have a little laugh. No, this one hits you right between the eyes. Still brilliant. Still terrifying......and for me at least, has some important reminders for all of us living in the Celebrity obsessed Western World. If it has all started to get a bit too much for you and you suspect it is all getting a bit, well, weird, - get this film!If you haven't seen it yet, get ready to have this film indelibly stamped on your mind. Lend it to your mates, because you will want to talk about this one. It is THAT powerful.

Peter Hayes Under the dry and dusty Hollywood(land) Hills of the 1930's, dispersant characters and chancers gather to harvest what they can get from the studio system or else become leeching camp followers. Based on a celebrated novel by Nathaniel West.(Who presumably knew the scene first hand from his date of birth and working C.V.) America, being a republic and a relatively new country does not have that many unique stories in its foot-locker. The western, the gangster/American Mafia cycle and Hollywood backstage story are the only three I can think of right now. The latter - naturally - being today's quarry.Like the other two, lots of free gifts, built-in charms and easy plot devices. Human ego, sex and exploitation are never more to fore than in showbiz. The prize of success and the cost of failure mean that morals are more easily put to one side. Nothing being as cheap as human beings out here in the Cali sunshine.While I used the term "chancers" in one of the early paragraphs above I should have used the term "no chancers." Only lead male - William Atherton - has any clear and discernible artistic talent and even that seems depressive and obsessive.(Judging solely by what he produces. Unless he was trying to do early sketches for Pink Floyd's The Wall - which his drawings curiously mimics!) Karen Black is a standard over-verbose ten-a-dime peroxide dreamer. Taking everything from fan magazines and the movies. An extra with no chance of progress beyond Central Casting because she can't really act (although Black certainly can!) Seems loyal to her ageing father (a brilliant pre-Rocky Burgess Meredith) and her odd-ball friends though.(Her interactions with a dim accountant - brilliantly played here by Donald Sutherland - shows a hint of a darker and more exploitative side. Or is the reality of her own situation beginning to sink in? Is he the future meal ticket when her looks fade?)To add perspective the film takes an upstairs/downstairs look at the big studio. With Atherton walking between the two storeys. However this does little other than to illustrate a fairly healthy props budget. With money comes sex, privilege and opulence, the movie tells me. Hold the front page.The central problem is that there is very little subtle about this production from the title (humans being locusts) onwards. What could be almost a soap-opera-come-tragedy is brought to a climax that brings to mind Apocalypse Now. Real bizarre and heavy-handed stuff.(In 1930's Hollywood even the street by-standers are mad as hatters?)In short summation, Locust is a more interesting film for its parable and its moral than the often tepid (ludicrous and over-the-top finale accepted) on-screen action. My closing thoughts are that in Hollywood nothing has really changed other than the clothes and the technology. It is still the wheel on which a thousand dreams are broken.