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Summary: For the curious...
Review: Well, now that you've heard everyone rave about the movie, one might ponder about the deleted scenes on this Artisan Special Edition DVD. "Jezzie's Transformation" and "The Train Station" are good, and all have good reason to be deleted. But the one sequence that was taken out called, "The Antidote", was probably THE most horrific experience I have ever had in my life.I must say that the british sure have a good sense of visual abilities! [Applauds]
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Summary: Climb the Ladder
Review: For the sake of brevity I will not outline the plot. To the point; it is an excellent movie on a variety of levels; but foremost it excells in the ability to convey primal and surreal emotions embedded in a disturbing and complex plot. A great performance by the cast in a film that provides a glimpse into both the dark and soft-side of man.
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Summary: Too confusing for most people...
Review: You may wanna rent this one first, because this film is complex and commplicated. There are so many layers, and so many twists in this movie that the viewer who just watches casual films, will hate this. Yes this is a horror film, but plays out like a drama and mystery movie. It is long, and the there are scenes taken out, but they actually halped the film, those scenes had good jolts in it, and kept the viewer involved. For 35 minutes, there is a long and boring, but it is important. It does take away from the atmosphere.This isn't a very fun film to watch, because it wares the viewer out, so this is one you won't watch alot, but if you have to have it, get it for a cheap price. Watch it alone in the dark.
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Summary: Great movie, great concept.
Review: This is the kind of movie you either love or hate. I love it. The concept of this film is very captivating and complexed in the way it is portrayed. A hard to follow movie that needs multiple viewing to fully understand it. This is a trip within a person's own emotions. Very deep, very interesting. Overall: EXCELLENT.
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Summary: I'm not sure which is more annoying...
Review: ...the bleating of the illiterati (professional critics included!) who totally missed the point, or the spoiler-laden dissertations of the cognoscenti who want to ruin the ending for you. Suffice it to say, this is neither a popcorn horror flick nor a heartwarming drama. Set in 1970s New York, Jacob's Ladder deals with the aftermath of one man's experiences in Vietnam. It's a cerebral "mess with your head" kind of film that will likely scare and disturb you. As in the more recent "Memento", plot twists invite continual re-evaluation of what has gone before. What really happened to Jake and his buddies on that fateful day in Vietnam? Has he left his wife for Jez (Elizabeth Pena) or hasn't he? Where is his son Gabe? Are his waking supernatural visions drug-induced hallucinations, PTSD, or something else? The best way to answer these questions is to stop reading (now!) and watch it for yourself a few times. There are many well-considered interpretations below, but most of them will ruin the experience.
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Summary: One of the Best I've Ever Seen
Review: It's easy to become skeptical about rave reviews, but sometimes they are actually justified. To begin with, the editorial review of this movie is simply wrong-headed. Tim Robbins is not "lethargic" at all in this movie; that'd be like saying William Hurt was "emotionless" in "Accidental Tourist". What the reviewer is calling lethargy is most likely the depiction of Jacob Singer's shock as he moves through the film. The basic plot is that Jacob Singer, a Postal worker and Vietnam veteran, begins experiencing disturbing hallucinations, possibly related to his experience in Vietnam, possibly out of grief over his dead son, possibly because of his two failed major relationships, possibly all three. Gradually, he gets closer and closer to the truth of what is going on, and then comes the twist at the end. This largely straightforward story is told in an exquisitely unstraightforward way. From the beginning, the narrative quickly makes it impossible to distinguish what is real and what is hallucination and the various ways the screenplay and director conspire to make this happen is, at least from a writerly and technical standpoint, one of the great achievements of the film. Shots will begin in "normal" reality, but as they progress, insane faces, or blood, or bits of flesh begin to appear in the shot and suddenly you realize you have slipped into a hallucination. People are human one moment, and demonic the next. The party scene where Jacob's girlfriend (played marvelously by Elizabeth Pena) transforms into a demon, for example, is flawlessly executed, and genuinely unnerving. On the larger level of the narrative, similar transformations of what is really going on occur as well. As Jacob discovers explanation after explanation for his hallucinations, the viewer thinks, "Ah, so that's it," only to have that explanation turn out to be another false lead. One incredibly effective moment in the film involves Singer, running a high fever and being put in a tub of ice. Suddenly we cut to a bed--he's with his first wife, his son is not dead, and an icy open window needs to be closed. And just as he lies back down, BOOM, we're back in the tub--Robbins' face is utterly stricken and there is a tear on his face, and we realize that he just dreamed or hallucinated a reality that will now never be. Given all of the narrative doubt already built into the film, we should never for a moment have believed that everything we'd seen so far was "really" just a dream Singer was having in bed with his first wife, but the film has already successfully caught us up in the intensity of Jacob's own desire for it to be real, so that we wish it to be real just as much as he does. And so, like him, we are crushed when it turns out to be just a feverish dream-hallucination. Having all the elements of affecting acting, brilliant cinematography, cunning directing and an enviably brilliant script, what most elevates it for me is that it is also a perfect realization of a profound philosophical idea. Jacob's chiropractor asks at one point if he is familiar with Meister Eckhardt, who said (quoting from memory), "If you have not made your peace with life, then those that beset you will seem as demons. But if you have made your peace, you will see that they are angels." And this is precisely Jacob's problem. Because, as we discover at the end, he never made it back from Vietnam, but died on the operating table. It was his reluctance to die that made him feel beset by demons throughout the film, and when he is finally at peace with it, the angelic figure of his son, backlit at the base of a flight of stairs, appears to encourage Jacob to come with him. The implications of this fact on the rest of the film are considerable, but anyone who thinks it negates the events of the film hasn't been paying attention. The film shows Jacob's struggle to come to grips with his own death--it ultimately has nothing to do with post-traumatic stress disorder, with the mysterious psychotropic drug Jacob's Ladder, with the conspiracy to cover up its experimental use on soldiers in Vietnam, with failed relationships that didn't "really" happen, or a dead son who might never even have lived.-literally the son he never had. The brilliance of the screenplay is that Ruben gets to have his cake and eat it too. He presents a thorough picture of post-Vietnam reactions and dilemmas and still manages to perfectly justify his ending. As one reviewer points out, it's not just that your whole life flashes before your eyes when you die, but also your possible futures. And this is precisely, and humanly true, because much of what torments us about dying is losing what we might have had in the future. And yet, as Jacob demonstrates, it is precisely holding onto an impossible future that makes it a wasteland of failed relationships, a dead son, a dead end job, madness, hallucinations and terror, and possible conspiracies by government agencies. A blurb at the end of the movie about such experimental drug use will tempt a viewer (and perhaps the director as well) into believing that the drug conspiracy is what "really happened" to Jacob. Don't buy it. Either the topicality of that theme seduced the director, or he wanted to inject a kind of reassuring final explanation into the ultimate question mark of death itself. The fact that the film is named for the drug adds to the impression that the drug conspiracy is the real plot, but Meister Eckhardt's words apply here. It is up to the individual's perception whether or not they see governmental demons of conspiracy in the title, or instead an allusion to the ladder to Heaven that the Biblical Jacob saw after wrestling with an angel.
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Summary: Intense.....
Review: This movie was very *multi level*. The basic premis of the movie was that the US government used a chemical on US soldiers to make them super aggresive. The only problem was they didn't konw what was going on. Years later when they began to have problems and seeing strange things, questions were raised. The ones that raised the questions were killed. Now, the twist comes in when the main character moves through his life, after Vietnam, jumping back and forth between two different wives. Each time he is with a differant wife, he remembers the other as a dream, or part of his past.
The chemical is what is presumed to make him hallucinate all of the strange events he sees while with one or the other wife.
This is definatly not a background noise movie...you have to pay attention to this one or you will get lost quickly.
I would love to say more but if i do i'll give the whole thing away...
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Summary: #3 on Scariest & most underrated horror movies of all time!
Review: And I don't say that lightly; Jacob's Ladder clocks in #3 in the Top 10 horror films of all time, behind Suspiria and The Haunting of Julia. While Dario Argento (Suspiria) has amassed a huge following and his films are well known, neither Haunting nor Jacob's Ladder have merited the kind of recognition and following they deserve. H.P. Lovecraft observed that "of Man's fears, the greatest is the fear of the Unknown." Adrian Lyne, hot from his successes as a chronicler of the sanguine effects of dangerous indiscretions (9 & 1/2 Weeks) and marital infidelity (Fatal Attraction), moved boldly and effectively into Lovecraft territory with this nasty mix of pure grue and sheer terror. Jacob's Ladder is set in 1970's New York, and stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran now returned home from the war and working as a postal worker---and seeing strange, nightmarish things. A homeless man in the subway has a tentacle for a hand, which withdraws, wormlike, into his tattered sleeve; a car tries to run Singer down, a featureless, quivering face looking out from the dirty glass; a dance party at a friend's turns into a blood-drenched orgy with a tentacled horror. Even stranger, Singer keeps "waking up" into another life---one with a secure career, a house, a family, and adorable little Macaulay Culkin as his son. Lyne keeps up the pace, as Singer tries to make sense of his descent into nightmare. Is he slipping into madness? Is this the result of being doused with a nerve agent in Vietnam? Is there a government conspiracy to silence him? And which of the two lives is 'real'? True horror films capture that sense of active but unseen malice, and build on a palpable atmosphere that is brooding, destructive, and malignant---and that is why there are so few of them. Jacob's Ladder is that rarest of film, a visual descent into a nightmare in which the horror boils directly out of the atmosphere, and is even more effective and masterful in that there is---at least, not initially---an identifiable villain or source of evil. Robbins is well cast as a sort of latter-day Jimmy Stewart, a man in the process of disintegrating who is staving off the increasingly aggressive horrors while trying to make sense of them. Elizabeth Pena is also excellent as the postal employee he shares a squalid apartment with, delivering a performance that is sensual, supportive, but somehow malignant. Danny Aiello is solid, as always, in an interesting role as Robbins's masseur; even Seinfeld star Jason Alexander has a small part as an intimidated attorney trying to help Robbins and his fellow veterans make sense of their plight. But good acting aside, the real star of Jacob's Ladder is the cinematography and the malignant atmosphere. The onslaught of horrific, initially subtle, and truly terrifying images that Lyne cooks up rank as some of the more unsettling in horror film history, and the sleazy, decrepit New York of the 1970's accentuates the film's nastiness and adds to the film's edginess. If you like a nice dose of true terror with your horror, try Jacob's Ladder---and watch it with the lights off.
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Summary: Jacob's Ladder - Wicked, brilliant and thrilling!
Review: Jacob's Ladder is one film that stays with you for a long time after it has finished. It is intriguing, exciting with a wonderful twist at the end, the message within the film is something that you ponder on for ages afterwards. Watch Jacob's girlfriend's face when she is stroking his back and he is complaining "they" are not human and then she asks "who are they then?" - personally, I found something quite disturbing about that. I like feel-good films, comedy, supernatural, horror, thrillers, true stories, but this film - Jacob's Ladder - is my number one. It blew my mind and really did make me think, there are hidden messages throughout the film that you really need to search hard and deep for and once found they stir something in your psyche that just will not let go. I cannot begin to say just how good I found this film, all I can say is, had I never seen it, it would have been my loss - but then again, I would never have known, so ignorance is not always bliss is it. Absolutely superb and one I will watch again and again.
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Summary: a surreal and disturbing horror movie...
Review: I've seen this movie many times, and I see something new every time I see it. It' so unusual and so odd - we're never exactly certain what is happening, much less what the movie is about in general. You come away from the movie feeling disoriented and momentarily estranged from your own reality. I came out and immediately wanted to watch my favorite TV show. So what about the movie is so scary? EVERYTHING and on EVERY LEVEL. Demons, blood & guts, mobsters, civil servants, mad scientists, mutants, homeless people, torture, etc... Fans of the TV show Law & Order will enjoy seeing S. Epatha Merkerson playing a flirtatious fotune teller (also potentially scary).
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