HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING

Twenty-five years of film reviews and essays by the famed sf/fantasy writer--drawn from AFI Report, Cinema, L.A. Free Press, Cosmos, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and others--that total a quarter of a million words by a two-fisted master of gab. Ellison's fans will know what they're in for. Readers new to his style and hoping for the same old film criticism they find elsewhere will soon find themselves dodging his bantam jabs and punches. For Ellison is most gleeful when felling giant reputations. Much as he admires Stanley Kubrick, he nonetheless trashes Kubrick's 2001 ("". . .no story. . .no plot. . .seriously flawed. . ."" although ""visually exciting""), while lifting John G. Avildson's Joe to Olympus because of Peter Boyle's Brandoesque turn. His eye is cocked for sf and fantasy films and six out of nine adapted from his buddy (""a writer of limitless gifts"") Stephen King's works are shot down and give Ellison some of his more deeply thought pages. The three King films he likes are Kubrick's The Shining (aside from Nicholson's scenery chewing), David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, featuring Christopher Walken at his richest, and Brian de Palma's Carrie, largely for Sissy Spacek but also because de Palma ""had not yet run totally amuck. . ."" As for the film of his own story A Boy and His Dog (a postholocaust fantasy featuring a telepathic dog), he generously elevates it to a select list of ""Good"" sf films (""very few and far between""), an opinion that ignores the gruesome claptrap underpinning this faithfully adapted tale. Rattle-tongued, flannel-mouthed space-filling which, at this length, is like grogging out on HBO for a week.