Elliot Freed's Movie of the Week:

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)

Elliot Says: "What--you thought it would be a Christmas movie? This Steve Martin/Carl Reiner collaboration (the second of four) was a milestone in special effects at the time. It stars Martin in a spoof of 1940s detective noir, and in selected scenes, he actually plays against some vintage footage of Bogart, Cagney, Fred MacMurray and Vincent Price. It takes some doing, but it works--for a while. After the gimmick wears off, though, it's Martin's askew sensibility (again, before he decided he was a serious artist) that drives the movie. With a surprisingly funny Rachel Ward and Reiner himself in an Erich von Stroheim-type role that's just--much like everything else in this movie--silly."

It Happened One Knife: A Double Feature Mystery Elliot Freed couldn't be happier: His all-comedy movie theatre, Comedy Tonight, is newly refurbished; things with his ex-wife are looking up; he's even willing to screen his projectionist's film debut. But what really has Elliot walking on air is hosting the legendary duo, Lillis & Townes, at a special showing of their classic comedy Cracked Ice. Nothing can bring Elliot down—not a missing film, a bomb scare, or even a surly teenage girl. But when insinuations arise that one of his boyhood heroes may have been involved in a Hollywood murder decades earlier, Elliot crashes to earth. He sets out to discover the truth—but finds that he may be on the killer's hit list... Read the first chapter of It Happened One Knife

Some Like It Hot-Buttered: A Double Feature Mystery All Elliot Freed wanted to do was to make people die laughing. But he didn't mean it literally. The dead guy in Row S, Seat 18, is no joke. Elliot Freed, recovering writer, socked all his savings-and the alimony from his ex-wife-into the Comedy Tonight movie theater, never suspecting it would become a murder scene. And murder can't be good for ticket sales... Death by popcorn was the cause. Poisoned popcorn. To the chagrin of the police, Elliot takes to his bike to start his own investigation. A growing attraction to a beautiful detective, the discovery of a DVD pirating operation, and one missing employee later, Elliot's still waiting for the punch line. But this one might knock his theater—and Elliot—out for good... Read the first chapter of Some Like It Hot-Buttered Read reviews of Some Like It Hot-Buttered

© 2002-08 by Jeffrey Cohen.