Amazing Stories (TV Series) Secret Cinema (1986) User Reviews

A bit Boring Oldies ! (web)

[leplatypus · 4/10 · 18 April 2020]

I wish i could have rated this highly awaited Tv show with 7 (good) but after watching the 1st season, i can only give 4 (poor) as the facts are terrible: only 11 episodes were great and so 13 were just boring!

Maybe it would change during 2nd season, but i don't really understand the editorial choice for this 1st one. I expected a show inspired by Twilight Zone set in the 80s and what i got is a tearful, nostalgic fantasy stories with the 30s-40s atmosphere! In a way, it's like the targeted audience was the 50+ years old!

So everything looks old, forgotten, out of time! Even the cast looks like a retirement home! So it's not a surprise that the show bombed! It's not a modern Twilight Zone and the future X-files would be more gripping and amazing.

And like XF, AS alternates fun and dramatic episodes. In the dramatic, Scorcèse (Mirror) and Hyams (Falworth) are outstanding thriller! In the funny ones, there are 2 particularly stupid episodes (Tuning, Toupee) but the content is indeed good: Mummy, Dante Boo, Santa, Control Man but i picked this Secret Cinema as my best episode: it has a really original story and very great acting from "young" people!

What's My Motivaton?

[Hitchcoc · 5/10 · 25 May 2014]

We start out with Jane talking to her psychiatrist. She is a mess. She can't walk by a lamp without breaking it or sit on a chair without ending in a pile of rubble. She tells the shrink (Shreck the shrink) that the engagement to her boyfriend is off. What follows are a series of weird events, including her realizing she is part of a movie. Or is she? One need only think for a couple minutes to realize that this is really out there. The psychiatrists tells her that her clothes and her look are at the center of her problems, so she ends up with kind of Cyndi Lauper 1970's look. She goes to a movie theater where her movie is showing but she isn't allowed in. Does this sound like someone's nightmare. It also has an element of Fellini to it but that is too much of a compliment. Don't bother.

"You mean I'm not crazy after all?"

[classicsoncall · 4/10 · 25 November 2021]

This is the kind of story that on a different day and in a different frame of mind I might have found cleverly entertaining. As it is, the entire thing just wore me out with it's failed attempt at absurdity. It started out reasonably well but I thought it tried to jump through too many hoops for the sake of making Jane (Penny Peyser) look like she was crazy when she really wasn't. The turkey waiter in particular was quite annoying, and I don't see the actor's name who played him in the credits, so maybe this episode doomed the poor guy. The best thing this one had to offer was that movie poster of "The Snake Pit' in Dr. Shreck's (Paul Bartel) office, a film I would recommend for it's harrowing look at the treatment of mental illness as it existed in the 1940's.

A clear example of what is wrong with this series....

[planktonrules · 1/10 · 23 June 2015]

"Secret Cinema" SHOULD have been great. After all, it was directed by odd-ball filmmaker Paul Bartel and Bartel and Mary Woronov are major characters in the show. Who are Bartel and Woronov? These are the folks who specialized in weirdo roles and starred in "Eating Raoul"! Yet, despite me being a big fan, I thoroughly hated this particular episode.

"Secret Cinema" is perhaps the perfect example of why "Amazing Stories" never really succeeded as an anthology series while shows like "The Twilight Zone" clearly did. It's the writing!! A very similar idea appeared in the older series and was quite good. Here, however, not only is the original idea copied but everything about the copy sucks!

In the old "Twilight Zone" episode, a guy at work suddenly hears 'cut' and it turns out his life is all on film! The show was spooking and a bit disturbing. Here in "Secret Cinema", however, it's all played for laughs...very, very, VERY bad laughs. Pie in the face laughs (this is done repeatedly)...painful, terribly unfunny laughs. Additionally, WHY this all occurs is vague and the message is a muddled mess.

The bottom line is that I think this one was written by a chimp...and a very dumb one at that. Given the lack of originality and dullness of it, this can be the only explanation for the bad writing.

'The Adventures of Jane'

[sonnyschlaegel · 7/10 · 25 March 2007]

Jane has been left by her fiancé Dick. She talks about it with her shrink, Dr. Shreck. He says she hasn't got any psychic problems - it is her looks that are problematic. He orders his nurse to do something about it. When Jane has lunch with her mother, she says she has seen Jane on a screen and asks her for some autographs to give to the members of her bridge circle, much to Jane's surprise. More and more strange things happen. The waiter throws a pie in her face as a dessert. The nurse gives her a very wild hair-cut. Jane finds Dick at the Movie Star Lounge; he's there with his new girl-friend Hildegard - who looks very much like the nurse and the waiter. It seems that all the people around Jane have conspired to film (and script) her life for a 'secret cinema'. When she tells the shrink about it, he says it's just a delusion, a manifestation of the trauma caused by her being rejected by her fiancé...

Probably a remake of 'The Secret Cinema' (1968), also written and directed by Paul Bartel. But I'm not completely sure since I haven't seen the 1968 version - which might have been the inspiration for 'The Truman Show' since there is a similar plot element: the main character doesn't know that his / her life is being filmed.

It's an interesting idea, but I think that this episode could have been done better. Why does it take so long for Jane to find out that her life is being filmed and to start to defend herself against it? There are so many clues. I guess it was meant to be that way; it's easy to see that this story wasn't meant to be a serious story but a farce; but it was exaggerated too much in my opinion. However, there were some points that I liked very much, so it's not a bad episode in my opinion. The basic idea of the plot is good (see above). I liked the acting, especially Paul Bartel as the psychoanalyst and Mary Woronov as the nurse. It also has some jokes that I liked, for example Jane's suggesting that an Oedipus complex could be the source of her problems, the label of the button, or when Jane wants to tell something to her mother and her mother asks her to stop because she doesn't want to hear any spoilers.

All in all, this episode deserves seven points in my opinion.