UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

huntergerald-34771 I must admit, I don't know how this film has received such a high rating on this site. A good cast? Yes, but a wasted cast. This is basically the Kennedy assassination on Quaaludes. It's a film that simply doesn't hold up well through the years. Stiff direction and substandard cinematography reduce the look to that of a "B" movie. While it's always fun to watch John Huston, he cannot carry this movie alone. Bridges, who has consistently been one of my favorite actors, is wooden here, certainly nowhere near the caliber of his performance in "Rancho Deluxe", made a few years earlier. In short, it tries to be a comedy, drama and a parody all at the same time, and fails on all fronts. Want to watch good political filmmaking? Opt for 3 Days of the Condor for drama, Dr. Strangelove for satire/parody, and Being There for comedy.

Steve Tapp Jeff Bridges' performance was pathetic, almost as pathetic as his character, whining over and over to get a totally unfit woman to marry him. I wanted to barf. I found the Kennedy parallels overdone and distracting from a plot that wound up in implausible territory.No wonder this film isn't very available. I feel I wasted my time obtaining a copy and sitting through it.I must write 10 lines, so it was a trip as usual to see John Huston in a role, and Elizabeth Taylor in a cameo, even sporting extra weight.I guess they mean 10 lines not counting spaces, so I am going to find out by writing 10 lines, even though this film doesn't deserve 10.

MisterWhiplash Until recently that was. If you're a Jeff Bridges fan and look over his previous body of work on IMDb or netflix, you're soon to come across what looks like a small paranoid assassination/conspiracy thriller from the late 1970s- penned by Manchurian Candidate himself Richard Condon- Winter Kills. And then you'll realize until now you've never heard of the movie, unless you were around for the two weekends it was in release in 1979 or heard the minor blurbs how the picture went through ridiculous difficulty getting made. While one shouldn't group the making of the movie too closely with the final product itself, it's almost as crazy a story as in the film itself (one involving the mob, pornographers, marijuana money, and a re-shoot budgeted by *another* movie shot by the same director in-between in Germany).So, as a humble 'who-is-this-guy' movie-buff on this site, I humbly recommend this movie incredibly so. It's a mighty sleeper, a comedy with the intent so black that it's hard to see where the drama stops and the laughs begin. At times it's also weirdly over-the-top (an orgasm at one point is the loudest one has ever seen in a non-porn, and for no real reason except to have it in there, or as part of an "act" perhaps), and with a cast that is irreproachable. Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Toshiro Mifune, Elizabeth Taylor - and most of these actors are barely in one scene! Yet everybody leaves there mark so indelibly that one grins from ear to ear suddenly recognizing them (Hayden in particular is a hoot as he practically is like Jack D. Ripper as an old man with a huge beard and a private fleet of tanks)(Huston, too, chews up the scenes he's in without even trying).The plot... geez, I can't really say for certain. Let's just call a spade a spade and say it's a spoof on the Kennedy conspiracy (if there was one), and the power and influence of family and politics and the mob. It's a murder mystery, but it almost becomes moot who was the real killer as by the time its uncovered it's simply more fun seeing how one gets from point A to point B. Though Condon might have had a stronger plot for 'Candidate', and first time director Bill Reichert stumbles in a couple of spots in getting the comedy and suspense mixing just right, it's still amazing entertainment more often than not, and it's one of those nifty, strange treasures to be dug out from the video store or queued on a whim on netflix.

Jonathon Dabell Winter Kills is a terrible, incoherent and very disappointing conspiracy comedy-thriller from little-known director William Richert. While watching the film, I honestly felt as if I was the emperor in the classic fable The Emperor's New Clothes. The film made me feel like a fool because I couldn't make head nor tail of the serpentine plot and the nonsensical characters. But I felt kind of embarrassed to admit to myself that the film was tying my brain up in knots. So I stuck with it to the end, hoping that the whole tangled mess would untangle itself. Then I realised.... the film is SUPPOSED to be serpentine, nonsensical and illogical, because that's the whole point. This is a satirical look at conspiracy theories and theorists, with the knotting-up of the plot used as a metaphor for the knotting-up of truths, half-truths and lies that define any conspiracy. Even when I got that the joke was on me, I still felt Winter Kills to be a pretty awful movie.Young Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges) is the younger brother of a former United States President who was assassinated in Philadelphia. Nick is present when a dying man claims that he shot the President and gives detailed information about where he hid the gun. Nick follows the clues, but every step of the way the people helping him seem to die in mysterious circumstances. Also, his father Pa Kegan (John Huston), a vulgar and disgustingly wealthy businessman, keeps interfering with Nick's investigation. The deeper he delves into the assassination, the more Nick realises that he is descending into a web of complex lies and red herrings, where nothing is as it seems and no-one can be trusted.The film is an utter nightmare to follow, and in many ways is not worth trying to follow for the afore-mentioned reason that it deliberately tangles itself up. The cast is packed with extraordinary talent but most of them are wasted. Toshiro Mifune has one of the briefest and most pointless cameo roles in cinematic history; Elizabeth Taylor appears uncredited and has not a single line of dialogue; Richard Boone is given what seems to be an interesting role but his character goes nowhere. John Huston has the best role as the powerful patriarch and provides us with the film's few enjoyable moments with his acerbic delivery. Anthony Perkins also gets a creepy role and handles it well, though his screen time is far too short to do complete justice to the character. Some nudity and sex scenes are tossed in for no real reason and, while they're quite graphic and might appeal to voyeurs, they really belong in another film. The film's semi-comic climax is farcical and disappointing, yet paradoxically memorable in its weird little way. There's obviously a cult audience out there somewhere for Winter Kills.... but I won't be counting myself among its number.