Stanley O'Toole Movies

Adapted from true events, this Australian production concerns a nurse (Linda Blair) who works at a psychiatric hospital. She gradually discovers the grisly truth about a head doctor (Tony Bonner) who performs rather suspect operations on comatose patients. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide

This silly Australian slasher film concerns a psychopath strangling students at an elite Catholic girls' school run by a strange married couple. Myles and Virginia Sheffield have sexual problems, and the viewer is led to believe that Myles is relieving his impotence by garotting the nubile students with barbed wire. There's also a nun, who disapproves of her girls getting friendly with the boys of the nearby Winchester school, and some hostile townies who are feuding with the prepsters. When a townie boy and a schoolgirl fall in love, the reactions from all quarters are such that there are suspects aplenty. Since the murders are all pretty much the same, at least the viewer can take interest in the mystery, right? Wrong. In fact, Alec Mills' direction is so clumsy and Robert Brennan's script so obvious that one is hard-pressed to find any reason at all to watch this film. At least Mills' follow-up -- the equally weak Dead Sleep -- had Linda Blair. This film has nothing!, but actually played theatrically in its home country to widespread apathy. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

A novice knight and his unlikely allies lead a crusade against evil in this adventure set in 12th century France. Robert Nerra (Eric Stoltz) is a young knight who, after the death of his older brother, abandons the struggle to defend his father's property in a skirmish over land rights and instead sets out to offer his services to King Richard the Lionhearted. As Nerra makes his way through a France racked with poverty and sickness, he encounters a group of orphans who are trying to flee from the Black Prince (Gabriel Byrne), a dark-clad rogue knight who steals children and sells them to Arab slave merchants. At first thinking him to be King Richard himself, the children follow Nerra, and he tries to protect and organize them as best he can. As they march through France, the orphans' numbers grow, and soon Nerra finds himself leading a crusade of children as he at once leads them to safety and fights off the Black Prince's forces. Lionheart was one of the final films from veteran director Franklin J. Schaffner; the film received an unfortunately short-lived theatrical release and went largely unseen until it was released on home video in 1990, a year after Schaffner's death. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In this drama, a tough old schoolteacher is shocked when he is visited by the illegitimate son he had never acknowledged. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

After a string of hits that included Planet of the Apes (1968), Patton (1970), Papillon (1973), and The Boys from Brazil (1978), director Franklin J. Schaffner stumbled badly with this expensive wannabe cousin to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Based on a novel by author Robin Cook, this romance-adventure stars Lesley-Anne Down as Erica Baron, a female archaeologist who is searching for a lost Egyptian tomb, hoping that she will be responsible for the next discovery along the lines of King Tut's Tomb. Erica witnesses the murder of a native, Abdu Hamdi (John Gielgud doing his best Alec Guinness impersonation) and when she attempts to solve the crime, she becomes the target of a campaign to kill her using a variety of creative methods, including bats and entombment. In the course of her adventures, Erica also falls in love with a handsome Egyptologist, Ahmed Khazzan (Frank Langella). Sphinx (1981) was a box office disaster from which Schaffner never recovered, directing only three more pictures. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

This film of Ira Levin's novel The Boys from Brazil wastes no time in establishing the fact that several seemingly unrelated men have been mysteriously murdered. Elderly Jewish Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), brought into the case when the clues seem to point to a neo-fascist plot, traces the trail of evidence to Paraguay. Here he finds an unregenerate Auschwitz doctor, patterned on Joseph Mengele and played by -- of all people -- Gregory Peck. Lieberman discovers that the murdered men had all fathered sons who were identical -- the results of a cloning experiment, designed to create a race of incipient Hitlers. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Nicholas Meyer based his screenplay for the "retro" Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven Percent Solution on his own best-selling novel. As any Baker Street Irregular will tell you, the title refers to the dosage of cocaine taken by Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson). The Great Detective's friend and chronicler Doctor Watson (Robert Duvall), concerned that Holmes' drug dependency is getting out of hand, suggests a cure under the auspices of Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (top-billed Alan Arkin). While undergoing treatment, Holmes comes to the realization that his archival Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier) is not the Napoleon of Crime, but instead a somewhat pathetic philanderer. Not yet completely cured, Holmes recharges his deductive batteries by undertaking a tricky conspiracy case involving another ex-addict, beautiful actress Lola Devereaux (Vanessa Redgrave). The traditional Holmesian sleuthing and split-second rescues of the film's second half are not as innovative as the Holmes-Freud scenes at the beginning of The Seven Percent Solution, but they provide this largely cerebral effort with a rousing climax. A success with both critics and filmgoers, The Seven Percent Solution opened the floodgates for subsequent TV and movie "reprises" of Conan Doyle's immortal literary figure. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This suspense drama features an all-star cast, including Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, James Mason, Ian McShane, and Raquel Welch. An interesting production fact about the film: its screenplay was written by actor Anthony Perkins and lyricist/songwriter Stephen Sondheim. Their careers depend on keeping in the good graces of Clinton (James Coburn), a powerful movie producer. That is why a group of actors, director, agents and other movie professionals (who hate each other) accept an invitation to spend a week on the producer's yacht on the anniversary of his wife's untimely death in a hit-and-run car accident. Once on board, Clinton requires them to play a vicious game which involves each person's revealing a damaging secret about themselves or someone else in the party. When one of the secrets to be revealed involves the hit-and-run murder of his wife, the game turns fatal. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide