John Lind I had "In Cold Blood" set up to auto-record on my TiVo so I wouldn't have to keep searching for it. Lo and behold, it showed up as having been recorded. To my dismay I found this 1996 Hallmark TV movie remake instead of the 1967 theatrical film. The original movie was an Oscar magnet, earning four nominations, and rightfully so as it's a taught, compelling adaptation of Capote's novel in three acts. This one is mired in the same mediocrity that besets nearly all made for TV movies. It's all the film that's print to fit . . . the alloted TV time slot . . . with uneven, mired down pacing that geared for commercial breaks and splitting it into two parts. Add to that the mediocre small budget production values and compromises made to conserve budget, using 2nd and 3rd string actors, with a Roger Corman School "make 'em dirt cheap" director, and the result is a dull plodding movie that can serve as a perfect substitute for sleeping pills. This is a movie remake that should NEVER have been made! CBS should have gotten the rights to the original 1967 film and broadcast it instead, and saved us from this worthless drivel being rebroadcast on the Hallmark Channel.

Arlis I watched this on T.V. when it first came out. I would've bet money that it was in the late 80's but it says here its 1996. I watched it with my sister and we only got to see the first part of the miniseries. I really was locked in by the whole attitude Anthony Edwards carried and the hate he showed.The rest of the cast did nothing for me. Sam Neil is about as dry as an actor can get and Eric Roberts is an ugly no talent nobody who has never made a movie that he didn't cry in. I guess he knows that his sister is a big millionaire and he's nothing - that must suck, and for the record I hate her with passion as well.The production of this movie was so plain and not even worthy of a lifetime movie of the week in my opinion. the direction has to be a character within its self and that was the most boring aspect of this movie for me.I found this DVD at wal-mart for $3 last month and just had to see the rest of it. I wish I had left it setting there and saved my $3. Anthony Edwards was mean and I liked him in it though and thats the reason to watch it. The fear he puts into that family. I just found out today that this is a remake of a 1967 Robert Blake movie of the same name. I'll try to get it and see if it's better.

treasurebin2 In Cold Blood was one of several 60s films that created a new vision of violence in the Hollywood film industry. Capote coined the phrase "nonfiction novel" to describe the book on which this film is based, and the spirit of that form was carried over into the film script, which he co-wrote. Despite the fact that we were well into the era of color film, Richard Brooks elected to present this film in black and white to underscore both the starkness of the landscape and the bleakness of the story. This is the first problem with the TV remake --color changes the tone of the story. In addition, the confinement of shooting a film for TV makes reduces the options of how the shots are framed and focused. As a result, we lose the dramatic clash which makes the second part of the original film (police interviews, trial, imprisonment, and execution) so claustrophobic. On the small screen, it's just another version of Law and Order spin-offs. Hollywood's search for scripts continuously takes it back to movies that were successful in another age. Usually, that's a mistake, and this is no exception.All of the actors are competent. The script is OK. The directing doesn't get in the way. It's just that the movie doesn't work as well as the original precision instrument. It doesn't hook the viewer into the ambivalence toward Smith and Hickock that the original film provokes. At the end of the TV version, we are left with the feeling: "Ho hum, who cares?"See the original first, on as large a screen as you can, then watch the TV version simply to understand why the first one was such an important film in 1967.Wouldn't hurt to also go on line and read a bit about Capote and the original book. It will help you to understand the extraordinary effort he put into the material, and also some of the controversy surrounding both the book and the movie.I actually only gave this a 4 because I save the bottom 3 rankings for true bombs--the kind that enrage you about having been sucked into spending an

Robert J. Maxwell It boggles the mind. If they think another nickel can be squeezed out of a piece of material, they'll squeeze. The only reason I can think of that this story was retold was that the producers figured the audience was so stupid that they either never had seen the original or didn't know that there WAS an original. Well, maybe the assumption isn't that far off base. As a collective we seem to have dropped a good couple of IQ points somewhere along the way. Back in the 1960s Stanley Kaufman wrote an essay on "the film generation." In one of his classes he brought up Preminger's Joan of Arc, and his students did an impromptu comparison with Dreyer. His students don't do that anymore. They can't. They never heard of Dreyer. In the original "In Cold Blood," there is a lot of artsiness and pop psychology. It isn't a timeless classic, but it's a well-made movie. I don't know why anyone felt a remake was a good idea except, as I suggested, there might be another nickel left in it. The shot-by-shot remake of Psycho was a disgrace. It wasn't that long ago, by geological standards, that when a movie became a classic it was left alone. Can anyone imagine making "Gone With the Wind" now, without its being followed up by "Gone With the Wind, Part 2: Scarlett's Revenge"? What an insult this movie is. It's not badly done, but the motives behind its creation are scurrilous.