Amazon.com video review:
Welcome to Delos, the high-tech Disneyland for adults that
Michael Crichton created for Westworld, a nifty science fiction
thriller from 1973 that also marked the popular novelist's
feature-film directorial debut. The movie is so named because the
vacationing buddies who travel to Delos (James Brolin, Richard
Benjamin) choose Westworld as their destination (the other choices
being Roman World and Medieval World), where they are free to indulge
their movie-inspired fantasies of the Wild West. From brothel
beauties to black-hatted gunslingers (like the villain played by Yul
Brynner), the place is populated by perfectly humanlike robots
programmed and monitored to cater to every guest's fancy. But fun
turns into abject horror when the robots--particularly Brynner's
badman--begin to malfunction and Delos turns into an amusement park
that's anything but amusing. Westworld has moments of camp and
the look of a low-budget backlot production, but two decades before
Crichton revamped his idea to create Jurassic Park,
this movie made the most of its interesting and exciting
premise. --Jeff Shannon
Amazon.com video review:
This boxed set features three films that share a singular
distinction: Not only were they written by bestseller-factory Michael
Crichton (with two of three based on his novels)--they were directed by
Crichton as well. Coma stars Michael Douglas and Genevieve Bujold in a
thriller about doctors who discover that patients are being killed at a
major hospital so that their organs can be harvested for transplants.
The Great Train Robbery stars Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland in an
exciting and stylish film (based on an actual incident) about an attempt
to steal a huge shipment of gold from a moving train in mid-19th-century
England. Westworld is a futuristic thriller about an adult vacation
center, where grownups can live out their fantasies by being cowboys
and battling gun-slinging robots (who are programmed to lose). But the
robots (led by Yul Brynner in his Magnificent Seven mufti) go haywire
and start killing the customers.
--Marshall Fine
Amazon.com video review:
Welcome to Delos, the high-tech Disneyland for adults that
Michael Crichton created for Westworld, a nifty science fiction
thriller from 1973 that also marked the popular novelist's
feature-film directorial debut. The movie is so named because the
vacationing buddies who travel to Delos (James Brolin, Richard
Benjamin) choose Westworld as their destination (the other choices
being Roman World and Medieval World), where they are free to indulge
their movie-inspired fantasies of the Wild West. From brothel
beauties to black-hatted gunslingers (like the villain played by Yul
Brynner), the place is populated by perfectly humanlike robots
programmed and monitored to cater to every guest's fancy. But fun
turns into abject horror when the robots--particularly Brynner's
badman--begin to malfunction and Delos turns into an amusement park
that's anything but amusing. Westworld has moments of camp and
the look of a low-budget backlot production, but two decades before
Crichton revamped his idea to create Jurassic Park,
this movie made the most of its interesting and exciting
premise. --Jeff Shannon
