Dorian

Basically, transporting it to a modern day setting should be enough to do the trick. Christ on a stick, this was a lamentable film. It will never be the worst film ever, nor is it so badly made it sucks hairy balls. But given the fact this was based on Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray", they sure turned it into an atrocity.

The easiest thing to do, was to set the story in the world of models & fashion photography (eternal youth & beauty, right?). Yawn, how original. Furthermore, this film suffers that hard from looking "so nineties", that it hurts. A lot. Ridiculous and worn-out fashion concepts, the photo-shoots are so clichéd (and you should see the result - no artistic value whatsoever), a lot of uninspired pop/rock songs for no reason on the soundtrack, lots of cheap but oh-so-hip at the time editing effects, glossy & shallow sensuality, polished soft sex scenes, art-farty 'beau monde' parties, an artificial fragrance of decadence,... Should I go on?

I've seen decadence in the world of fashion portrayed with more flair in a grotesque B-flick like "Night Angel" (1990). I've seen art, photography, evil & mirrors handled better in horror sequel romp like "Amityville: A New Generation" (1993). You think those are great movies? That should say enough about how good a job this "Dorian" did on a classic story. I've also seen great Edgar Allan Poe stories all mangled up and poured into some 'sorority girls' slasher-format in "Buried Alive" (1990), not exactly the most faithful of adaptations. But I'm sure if they'd turned this "Dorian" into a slasher, it would have been a better stupid movie.

You can tell Malcolm McDowell had some fun playing his part, as Dorian's (evil) mentor, but it's far less fun seeing him play it. The whole film pretty much bores you along, and so does McDowell after a while.

Have the Hughes Brothers make a new "Dorian Gray" movie with a Victorian London setting and give us decent adaptation. It would be for more pleasing looking forward to such a project than suffering through the umpteenth unimaginative Hollywood re-make of any given horror film these days. Or maybe I could check out that 2009 version with Colin Firth. It surely should have more appeal than this trite.

A mediocre re-telling of Oscar Wilde's classic Dorian Gray tale, the only thing about it worth watching is Malcolm McDowell.

In his typical baddie role, McDowell is gleefully diabolical and makes even the most ridiculous plot turns almost believable.

The rest of the action, while pretty enough to look at, is flawed and boring at best. I rented this on the dollar shelf, and I rented it for McDowell. I got what I paid for.

Interestingly, IMDb doesn't allow me to post less than 10 lines of text, so I'm not going to have enough to say about its cheesy acting, rehashed-into-pulp mush of a very thin plot, bad dialogue, wooden character interactions, and all-around TV-movie feel. It's the kind of movie you watch when there's absolutely nothing else to do.

My advice? Vacuum instead.

The title of the movie, as shown by Showtime, the other night, was "A Pact with the Devil". It didn't ring a bell as anything seen locally in recent years. The idea of seeing a film with Malcolm McDowell in it, and nothing else worth watching in the other channels, played a trick on us. We witnessed in horror, a remake of the Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" that has nothing to do with the classic, and much better film, of 1945.

Under the direction of Allan A. Goldstein, we are taken, where else, to the world of the super models, where beauty is only skin deep. Henry, who stands as the Devil, tempts Louis into giving his soul in exchange of keeping his good looks forever, duh! Incredibly, we watch as the picture of Louis, now renamed Dorian, ages in ways that are not realistic, at all. I mean, a few wrinkles, we could understand, but making the image in the photograph, taken by Henry, a monster, is pushing reality a bit too far.

Malcom McDowell, who is an otherwise excellent actor, lends himself to this misguided attempt to retell something that was better done before and should have been left alone by the people behind this travesty.

Watch it at your own risk.

This is a modern updating of the classic, 'Picture of Dorian Grey.' As if the Oscar Wilde story was rewritten by sex & shopping book hack, Jackie Collins. There's nothing new here except for the setting, in a photo model environment instead of Victorian London.

It starts off interesting enough but McDowell as a poor man's Devil, begins to chew the scenery before too long. And sadly, Ethan Erickson doesn't have the range of acting to successfully portray the slowly morally declining Dorian.

For a study in debauchery, there's precious little shown, you would get the idea the height of decadence was dancing in a few discos on the continent. Surprising since the video I watched had an 18 certificate.

The original film version was made under far more stringent censorship rules but still was able to imply the depths that Dorian sunk to in his pursuit of hedonistic pleasures.

This is just fodder for the MTV generation, full of flash style and hip music but lacking in any real substance at all.

Watch the original or for a study in moral corruption, check out the excellent 'Alias Nick Beal' starring Ray Milland as well.

Apparently, this "Dorian," a.k.a. "Pact with the Devil," was a direct-to-video movie, and it shows. To call it an MTV-styled updating of Oscar Wilde's novel "The Picture of the Dorian Gray" doesn't fully describe how awfully irritating it is. For some reason, once-acclaimed actor Malcolm McDowell ("A Clockwork Orange" (1971)) and future two-time-Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz ("Inglorious Basterds" (2009), "Django Unchained" (2012)) are in it. They easily outshine the wretched demonstrations of so-called "acting" by the rest of the cast of amateurs--even though McDowell mostly butchers the epigrams of Wilde's Lord Henry, and Waltz plays a billionaire cuckold invented for this movie and who is rather superfluous to the main plot. There's a lot of yelling and shoving that's supposed to be drama. Wilde's words are replaced by illiterate drivel. At the least, the movie should've been edited down to a more tolerable short rather than a feature-length picture cluttered with time-lapse photography of traffic and cityscapes as transitions between just about every scene and with a distracting and obnoxious soundtrack also transitioning between and within just about every scene. In the one where Henry discovers two girls in Dorian's apartment, his voiceover is almost inaudible because of the blaring music. Instead of trimming, however, the jarring editing features temporal replays and sequences that look like trailers (the montage of Dorian and Bae's affair and the one of the billionaire's cuckolding).

I've seen every Dorian Gray movie I could find since reading Wilde's book, and although there's not many of them available (I've seen 10, including the loose reworkings such as this one), this is easily the most ineptly assembled of the lot. It seemingly has a few novel ideas, too, but blunders them all. There's potential for some clever structuring of the narrative, especially with McDowell and Waltz' characters. Both employ a form of surveillance: Waltz with the cameras capturing his cuckolding, and McDowell sneaking photographs like a peeping Tom. McDowell's Lord Henry is also the narrator, who in the movie's framing device is relating the main story to the detective. He also relates the outline of Wilde's novel to the Dorian in this movie. Plus, he has the omniscience of the Devil. But, nothing interesting comes of any of this.

Reworking Wilde's Faustian tale of eternal youth and doppelgänger images for the modeling business seems promising, too, as it did when the 1983 TV movie "The Sins of Dorian Gray" did the same thing. That version also had a female version of Basil, the artist who painted Dorian's portrait in the book. Here, she's Bae, the photographer. In both movies, Henry manages Dorian, and both are updated to contemporary times. Worst of all, both, through their partial gender reversals, are heteronormative debasings of the gay subtext of the book. Although, at least, this one contains some debauchery; it's flabbergasting how little is even hinted at in some of the other adaptations. A photographic portrait of Dorian instead of a painted one also has an antecedent in a 1915 silent film version, which still exists.

Ordinarily, I think I'd like the use of mirrors here, too, including hiding the portrait behind one, but the movie is so poorly executed in every way, it's difficult to appreciate that there might've been some appealing concepts to begin with.