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Salt Lake Tribune (28/Jun/1993) - Actor/director remakes Hitchcock and - shockingly - pulls it off

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Actor/director remakes Hitchcock and - shockingly - pulls it off

It's one thing to take a comic strip or cartoon and turn it into a movie, as was done with "Dennis the Menace" and "The Flintstones."

But remaking Alfred Hitchcock? Prepare yourself for punishment.

Ron Silver has done just that with "Lifepod," which airs tonight at 7 on "Fox Night at the Movies" on KSTU-Channel 13. And for the most part he succeeds. Chalk one up for chutzpah.

Silver has taken Hitchcock's claustrophobic 1944 film, "Lifeboat," and fast-forwarded the story to the year 2169, somewhere between Venus and Earth, aboard the spaceship, Terrania.

A fusion-reactor core has melted down. The ship is about to explode. Nine people make it into the lifepod and jettison before the mother ship explodes. Fragments from Terrania nearly destroy the pod and severely injure one of the survivors. But the pod is hastily patched and the real story of "Lifepod" begins: Who did it and why?

But this isn't just a shallow display of computer graphics and high-tech wizardry. At its heart, "Lifepod," like "Lifeboat," is a gradually unraveling mystery, with a disparate crew grappling to stay alive and, at the same time, understand that one of them might be a killer.

Our castaways/suspects include:

  • Robert Loggia as Senator Banks, sent on a fact-finding mission to colonized Venus when trouble brews.
  • Jessica Tuck as Claire, a video camera-toting "journalist" who tapes most of the ordeal and unwittingly captures the killer on tape or whatever is used in the year 2169. Technology alert: The Energizer Bunny would be proud. Her camera never runs out of juice, even as the ship slowly dies.
  • CCH Pounder as Mayvene, who is trapped in the command area of the pod and can communicate only sporadically with the others.
  • Ed Gale as Q-Three, part man, part machine whose severed arm has been modified to accept a number of handsome attachments that are the envy of any "Home Improvement" fan.
  • Ron Silver, the director, who cast himself as Miles Terman, a blind man who once worked as a fraud inspector for Earthcorp. Silver takes direction well.

Who else but Hitchcock would have taken the challenge of a feature-length film set in a lifeboat bobbing about in the ocean? An eclectic cast (Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Hume Cronyn) and inventive camera work helped.

Silver, best known as an actor ("Reversal of Fortune," "Enemies: A Love Story," and television's "Wiseguy"), makes his pod roomier than Hitchcock's cramped rubber raft.

And the fact that this desperate group of survivors isn't constantly stumbling over each other does take away a bit of the dramatic edge that was evident in Hitchcock's original.

Still, Silver has assembled an interesting cast and given us a good mystery to chew on. This "whodunnit" is worth checking out. Let's hope future Fox movie offerings are this engrossing.

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