Bovie Movie

A pair of first-rate performances from Balthazar Getty and Peter Weller fuel Isaac H Heaton’s snappy urban noir. Getty, reminiscent of a young Charlie Sheen, is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic driven to distraction by his night time service station job. Rich, unconventional writer Weller takes him under his wing, but an initially invigorating tour of hedonistic night-spots begins to takes its toll. Sharp direction and energetic music add further atmosphere to ever more unsettling visits to illegal underground fights, fetish sex clubs and even a Russian Roulette parlour. There is a major flaw, with a significant murder subplot that’s never resolved satisfactorily, yet the compelling acting and disquieting scenery still pack a considerable punch. 

Imagine National Lampoon’s Animal House without the jokes or a decent director. That’s this dud, which sounds like a horror film but isn’t, although it does use the stalk-and-slash plot staple of a college fraternity initiation prank that goes wrong, killing a student. Director Douglas Curtis, in his debut outing, accents the campus students hushing up the death and how they crack under the pressure for his main narrative thrust. Despite the presence of Charlie Martin Smith (The Untouchables), there’s little to recommend in this hazily executed melodrama. 

Screenwriter Don Mancini, who created killer doll Chucky, makes his directorial feature debut with this, the fifth entry in the franchise. Here, Chucky (voiced, as always, by Brad Dourif) and his bride, Tiffany (breathlessly vocalised by Jennifer Tilly), are brought back to life by their gender-bending offspring Glen/Glenda (Lord of the Rings’s Billy Boyd) on the set of the Hollywood film chronicling their murderous exploits. The terrible toys then attempt to transfer their souls into the movie’s director (real-life rapper Redman) and Tiffany’s favourite star, Jennifer Tilly (playing herself), who generates the film’s biggest laughs with a go-for-broke send-up of her own ditzy persona. Genuinely sick and fitfully funny, this technically terrific horror spoof plays exclusively to the gore gallery with some insane parodies and in-jokes, and also revs up the bad taste quotient with a cameo appearance from Pink Flamingos director John Waters, who pops up as a sleazy paparazzo. 

This poor man’s imitation of a Jim Carrey movie is weak on all fronts. Marlon Wayans stars as a student so desperate to get a junior analyst’s job that he agrees to take a sense-enhancing potion. Inevitably, his super senses soon spiral out of control. Both Wayans and love interest Tamara Taylor are bearable, and Rip Torn is more than adequate in yet another corporate role, but Matthew Lillard is sorely misused in a subplot of zero consequence. This one isn’t worth the eyestrain. 

This enticing helter-skelter ride through space-opera clichés cleverly conceals the fact that there really isn’t anything new of note here, just neat tangents off the basic Alien concept as nasty extraterrestrials relentlessly stalk their human prey through a deserted spaceship. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is cloned 200 years after the action of Alien³ because she’s carrying an alien queen foetus. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s shock thrill ride showcases such scintillating set pieces as an underwater battle and a gallery of grotesque clones-gone-wrong. It’s tense, mordantly funny, very graphic and bloody, and Weaver is on great form as the clone with some interesting alien influences on her personality. 

Frank Herbert’s mammoth cult novel, about the competition between two warring families for control of a barren planet renowned for its mind-expanding spice, is converted by director David Lynch into a dense, swirling mass of religious symbolism and mysticism. Unwieldy and confusing, it’s not as bad as it seemed on release. Lynch was, reportedly, unhappy with the final cut, but his film is visually stunning — the industrial design is truly unique — and many of the scenes are among the most memorable, and original, of the genre. Kyle MacLachlan (in his film debut) stars as the “messiah” alongside an amazing cast that includes Sean Young, Francesca Annis, Sting, Patrick Stewart and Kenneth McMillan (as the decaying, bloated Baron Harkonnen, perhaps the most repellent villain ever created). 

This is the most complete of David Lynch’s films, made before his disturbing black vision of small-town American life veered into self-parody. The dark tone is set from the opening sequence, which starts with white picket fences and cheery firemen but ends with a man suffering a stroke in his garden while insect life seethes beneath the lawn. Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan plays the young innocent who gets sucked into the bizarre sadomasochistic relationship between nightclub singer Isabella Rossellini and monstrous local crime boss Dennis Hopper. The latter resurrected his career with a crazed portrait of evil — legend has it that Hopper said “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank”. Once experienced here, listening to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams will never be the same again.