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The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil

List Price: $9.98
Your Price: $9.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Passionate
Review: The love secenes were especially moving. Watching two sensitive caring people commit themselves to lives of devotion and sacrifice for the benefit of children and the world was wonderfully refreshing. Long live the IV Reich !
(and George Bush!)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: HG Wells' 1896 "Dr. Moreau" as real life Dr. Mengele!!! Wow!
Review: 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!!!)



Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The Angel Returns
Review: This film had a good plot, but the cast needed work and they have changed the fate of Mengele from reality.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Interesting....for the wrong reasons.
Review: This film is an interesting and amusing one...but not in the way it tries so hard to be. Far from being a riveting and terrifying plot, the idea of a cloned evil person (replicated 64 times) is amusing--particularly when the 'evil person' is a self centered adolescent, spoiled by doting parents. I was, instead of being terrified by this idea, struck by how much the 14-year-old reminded me of the kids at the local shopping mall. And by how much the final scene show-down between the Aryan and the Jews resembles a meeting of our local planning commission. Intended to be a threatening glance into hell-on-earth, this film is a trivial performance by great actors and the enlightment of its message is reduced to the banal when compared to the conflicts and social trends of the world in which we live in the year 2001.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Deliciously campy!
Review: This is one of the most unintentionally funny movies ever made. The usually stoic and serious Gregory Peck goes against type as the vicious Dr. Mengele and delivers his campiest and most amusing performance. You can literally see the delight on Peck's face as he deliberately overacts and hams it up to perfection. His finale scene with Laurence Oliver is a scene-stealer of the first order. When Olivier asks lamely, "Did you kill Wheelock?" Peck answers with ripping sarcasm, "No! He's in the kitchen, fixing us cocktails." You have to see it to believe it. The last twenty minutes of this film is exceptional.

James Mason is unfortunately wasted here in a small and needless role. Olivier delivers a puny and insipid performance (he was very ill throughout the filming) and the rest of the supporting cast are utterly forgettable. But it's worth seeing for Gregory Peck alone and this campy film belongs lock, stock and barrel to him. If you love films that take themselves too seriously, then "Boys from Brazil" should be near the top of your list. The rousing soundtrack is outstanding, listen particularly to the theme during the opening credits. Rousing indeed!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: WHAT a movie!
Review: This is so weird to write this, BUT... The first time I saw this film I had a roaring migraine headache, complete with severe nausea. IF you're a migraine sufferer, as I am, YOU understand what it's like to be stricken with one of them- you know what it's like to lay in bed, in misery and bordom trying to escape the pain. Normally, you just want to be left alone in a nice quiet, dark room and hopefully go comatose till it's all over. Anyway, early in that afternoon- BEFORE the headache part of the headache came on- the time where the only symptom is the onset of nausea, I read in my TV guide that "The Boys From Brazil" was going to be airing that evening. "Cool." me thinks, "I've been really wanting to see that film, now's my chance!" (This was Pre-DVD, Pre-VHS; Damn, this was SO long ago that it was even PRE HBO! It was plain-old-time-commercial-break-infested-TV-land; which, truth be known, was kind of a blessing for me what with the nausea and all... That night, one could call them: "hurl-breaks" !) Anyway, to shorten an already way too long story: In spite of BLINDING, COLOR ARCHING, NUCLEAR-MELTDOWN BRAIN PAIN, I was SO thrilled by this film, so completely enteretained and SURPRISED by the thing, that, migraine or no, I watched the whole dog-gone thing!
MERCY! Talk about "association strengthening memory"! THIS is one film I will never, EVER forget by virttue of association... SHOOT, to this day, every time I watch it, my forehead sweats, I get kinda' achy at the base of my scull, and my stomach commences to churn. But it was WORTH it! What a GREAT flick, go ahead, buy it. You'll like it. Heck, watch it with a migraine sufferer YOU love. ;o)

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A pretty scary horror flick
Review: This movie has some exceptional acting talent -- Gregory Peck as an aging, obsessive Josef Mengele; Laurence Olivier as aging Nazi hunter, James Mason as an exiled Nazi leader and a fine supporting cast. The plot is one of the sickest ever. Dr. Josef Mengele has continued his sadistic experiments holed up in Paraguay, surrounded by fawning fellow Nazis. He has devoted his post World War II life to cloning Hitler (from a vile of blood drawn and skin scrapings taken shortly before Hitler's suicide). The 99 dark-haired, blue-eyed boys resulting from this work have been adopted into families around the world whose socio-economic profiles match that of the historical Hitler.

The acting is over the top (especially Peck's), as is the plot. The ending is shocking, gruesome and, in two respects, emotionally touching. Don't miss Jeremy Black in the quadruple role of the young Hitler clones. He steals every scene he's in. He is particularly effective as the young Bobby Wheelock. Steve Guttenberg has a nicely-done, all-too-brief role early in the film. Peck is almost unrecognizable (he shaved the front of his head to recede his hairline for this role, and his eyes are black slits), but the character he brings to life his terrifying. I saw this movie 10 years ago and then again just recently. Every scene and every line stuck with me. I can't say the same for some other overrated horror flicks. This is a good film for just relaxing and taking a break -- not completely mindless, not particularly erudite, but very well-acted and well-cast.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Robert Mitchum as Joseph Meingala
Review: This was a weird, weird movie.

Nazi scientists start meddeling with cellular science, and devise a way to build 'super race'. Thousands little dark haired Hitler clones. Made even scarier by the advances that are being made in genetic engineering today

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Exelente, una pelicula de ficción muy bien lograda
Review: Una trama que se revela de manera gradual. Sobrevivientes del alto mando Nazi tratan de revivir la organización y clonar al más infame criminal de todos los tiempos: Adolfo Hitler. Ambientada en los inicios de la década de los 70 esta película es una muestra de que se puede hacer ciencia ficción sin recurrir a los argumentos más trillados. Exelentes actuaciones y un argumento que refleja una real procupación por caracterizar a los personajes y que sean estos y no un montón de efectos especiales los que maravillen al espectador.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Chilling Film about Hitler Clones
Review: What if Hitler was cloned 94 times? Dr. Joseph Mengele has been living in Brazil since his horrific concentration camp experiments; he has masterminded a horrific plot to create 94 little duplicates of Hitler and they are now 14 years old. To recreate the life experiences of the real Hitler, all the boys' fathers must be killed this year. Lawrence Oliver plays Lieberman, a frail concentration camp survivor and Nazi-hunter, who discovers the fiendish plot. He meets several of the nasty Hitler clones who all share the same creepy, superior attitude. As he is trying to save one father from being killed by Mengele (Gregory Peck), he meets the Angel of Death face to face. (What would you do if you were Lieberman??) And what is to be done with the boys?

Peck plays against type as the repulsive, cruel, insane doctor. Olivier is frail, wise, patient, and a victim no more. When Peck and Olivier meet at the chilling conclusion, we see two master actors at work. It's a tough scene to watch, but you cannot take your eyes off the screen.

The subject of cloning was just a theory in 1978 when this film was made; it is now, of course, a reality. The possiblity of new Adolf Hitlers is horrifying indeed; watching this film may well make you sick. Lest we forget, do watch it. It is a movie you will never forget, even if you wish you could.


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