Dennis Quaid Archives - Silver Screen Riot

Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is staring down the barrel of her 50th birthday, and her Hollywood star has more than a few cracks—both literal and metaphorical. To make matters worse, the once-popular aerobics queen just overheard her sleazy, keyed-up boss (played with pure snake oil charm by Dennis Quaid) plotting her replacement. The network wants someone younger, fresher, tighter in spandex. Enter a shadowy black-market pharma company with a miracle drug, the titular Substance, promising to rewind crucial time on Elizabeth’s biological clock. The promise is…misleading. As she drinks down the sketchy elixir of youth, she doesn’t just regain her youthful glow—she begins to lose herself, piece by horrifying piece, to the younger version she thought she so badly wanted. Read More

Self-taught director Deon Taylor, who directed the embarrassing Mike Epps spoof movie Meet the Blacks, has a familiar way of staging a scene. That is to say, at the Christmas potluck that is Hollywood, he’s brought nothing new to the table. Despite modern trappings, this is a movie that feels trapped in the 90s, both in story and storytelling technique. From the totally awkward over-use of R&B music on the soundtrack to the sleek but rarely suspenseful camerawork, Taylor’s creation feels like a product released after its expiration date, but one that lives and dies by its unintentionally ironic and campy sense of uncool. Fittingly, The Intruder is the dad bod of psychosexual thrillers, past its prime and flailing for relevance, maintaining its rangy charm by sheer force of will. It’s the Dennis Quaid of movies. Read More