I was mumbling about successful genre screenwriters a while back after watching a few Richard Matheson films and despite Stephen King I can only think of one other, Michael Crichton. Yeah I know he's churned out a tonne of big budget crap: Congo, Sphere, Twister etc but he did pen some decent scifi films at the start of his career like The Andromeda Strain, Westworld, Coma and The Terminal Man so I thought I'd check out a couple of his early films. First up is The First Great Train Robbery a fairly entertaining Victorian heist flick starring Donald Sutherland and Sean Connery. It's nothing particularly special and takes a while getting going but it's a funny bawdy romp with a couple of engaging performances and some decent stunts.
Next up is The Looker from 1981 a scifi thriller starring Albert Finney as a plastic surgeon whose customers unfortunately keep turning up dead. Though it's dated badly it still has merits with some startlingly prescient ideas about technology and our celebrity culture. James Coburn and Finney put in perfunctory performances and it's riven with continuity errors but somehow I still enjoyed it.
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