Tag Archives: blade runner

Review of Original Quantum Leap S5E5 “Killin’ Time”

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Scene from the original Quantum Leap episode “Killin’ Time” featuring Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett.

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Based on what I said in my review of the original Quantum Leap show Blind Faith, I decided to continue to sample other episodes.

I just finished watching S5E5 Killin’ Time. The title is appropriate because Sam (Scott Bakula) leaps into an escaped murderer named Leon Stiles (Cameron Dye) in 1958 Oklahoma. Stiles has taken Carol Pruitt (Connie Ray) and her young daughter Becky (Beverley Mitchell) hostage in their home. The house is surrounded by law enforcement officers.

They are led by Sheriff John Hoyt (Jim Haynie) who is determined to kill Stiles in revenge for Stiles murdering the Sheriff’s daughter.

This is far from a “normal” leap.

In the project’s waiting room Stiles has leapt into, he has attacked a Marine guard, knocked him unconscious and taken his sidearm (this was in a deleted scene which originally made the audience wonder where the gun came from). He threatens to kill Al (Dean Stockwell) unless Al lets him out. Besides letting an armed killer from forty years in the past out of a confined area, the other problem is if Stiles leaves the waiting room, Sam can’t leap.

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Review of “Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut” (1982)

 

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Promotional image for the film “Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut

Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut (1982) is the only version of this film I’ve seen, so I have no real idea what the original theatrical movie was like. On Amazon, I found this explanation:

When Ridley Scott’s cut of Blade Runner was finally released in 1993, one had to wonder why the studio hadn’t done it right the first time–11 years earlier. This version is so much better, mostly because of what’s been eliminated (the ludicrous and redundant voice-over narration and the phony happy ending) rather than what’s been added (a bit more character development and a brief unicorn dream). Star Harrison Ford originally recorded the narration under duress at the insistence of Warner Bros. executives who thought the story needed further “explanation”; he later confessed that he thought if he did it badly they wouldn’t use it. (Moral: Never overestimate the taste of movie executives.) The movie’s spectacular futuristic vision of Los Angeles–a perpetually dark and rainy metropolis that’s the nightmare antithesis of “Sunny Southern California”–is still its most seductive feature, an otherworldly atmosphere in which you can immerse yourself. The movie’s shadowy visual style, along with its classic private-detective/murder-mystery plot line (with Ford on the trail of a murderous android, or “replicant”), makes Blade Runner one of the few science fiction pictures to legitimately claim a place in the film noir tradition. And, as in the best noir, the sleuth discovers a whole lot more (about himself and the people he encounters) than he anticipates…. With Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, Rutger Hauer, and M. Emmet Walsh. –Jim Emerson

I first watched this DVD (the director’s cut, as explained above, was released eleven years after the original) years ago, and found certain sequences so violent, that I haven’t had the nerve to view it since. However with the recent death of actor Rutger Hauer (who was so good in so many different roles) who played replicant Roy Batty, I felt compelled to borrow the disc back from my son.

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