awbergh

Just read the book so I can't be all mistaken; there are no bees, no vicars, no bomber jacket clad sleuths on motorcycles chasing any long legged blonds, no election campaign going on – and certainly no left leaning young country doctor, in Agatha Christie's original with this title. Not even miss Marple is present in this odd little village with all its funerals, simply because it is not written as such! It is in fact no Agatha Christie story at all, except names and characters are used most hap hazardous. The only mystery is why this baffling yarn bears her (brand) name. If modern screenwriters are so ingenious, why not use their own names?

In fact they are all spoilers, these ITV "miss Marple" Americanized recasts - spoiling most work of Agatha Christie. Also this one looks like something dragged in by the cat. Complete with a false blond, French-styled womanizer sporting a thin mustache, cozy police inspector John Hannah who appallingly enough gets the (false) blond, in stark competition with, yes folks, a Hollywood movie star version of an American WWII fighter pilot (from Brooklyn), still in his leather jacket! Albeit, even set in 1951 a bit late, one might think (rather than the original early thirties). All these people gathered incidentally as if there was nothing else around to be put in the stew. Griff Rhys Jones as the family doctor for instance, as if straight from Not the Nine O'clock News en route Three men in a Boat, David Warner, as aged landlord of an odd variety of penniless heirs, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, and – amazingly – daughter Emma/Niamh Cusack from Wallace & Gromit! Add a couple of kids from Harry Potter's School of Witchcraft to make it complete.

So it's the wrong set and time – and the wrong war from which Christie so skilfully found people to die and disappear in and cook entertaining mysteries of. Here are no mysteries at all, just cannibalizing on a famous brand name, still selling heaps of untampered paperbacks to be found in most bookstalls. Please read them, instead of wasting time on this crap!

Adding more Leonard Maltin movie grading: It has already been done before! As close by as in 1986 to be exact – and then much better due to those who remember.

It should of course be a legal non-profit entity protecting these classics from overexploitation – as the one representing Swedish now diseased Astrid Lindgren (of Pippi Longstocking fame) rejecting all adaptations she wouldn't have liked. Else I can only agree with earlier downbeats by adding a few of my own. Except the MGM musical-style village in full summer bloom (Christie's novel was set in dark winter and in 1930 rather than 1950) not only is the sugar-coated McEwan a miss Marple miscast (and why is everyone treating this snooping old hag as a royalty?), but even worse is the misuse of the stately Janet McTeer as the sinister murderess. It must be people who simply hate tall blonds (she is 6"1') that got her into this! (At least she would sue someone for the terrible lipstick makeup smeared in her face.) And why is her lover-accomplish, "artist painter" Flemyng, sporting a Hollywood nineteen-century van Gogh-look?

Tell someone to imitate an absurdly criminal Latino, and he might turn up like Al Pacino in this terrible parody of a splatter movie. But this goes on for hours in drug trafficking Florida, a business since shown to us with so much more elegance and light-handedness in TV's Miami Vice. Probably the worst caper since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could be a promotional video paid by the local drug lords to get poor immigrant foot soldiers into the trade. Leave the barrio son, come to Miami and have just as much fun as the hookers on Hollywood Avenue in "Pretty woman". Pick a bikini girl of your dreams. All of them Nordic blondes. The beachfront is full of them, just looking for the worst looking creeps the Cuban prison system might produce. To share the life with in his lush home, a one just slightly smaller than the Versailles. All you have to do is killing as many as you can. No small wonder the video version of this film was an absolute hit among the third world young in Sweden's thriving immigrant ghettos! Who said hate can't get you to the top!?