Bovie Movie

B-movie favorites Lance Henriksen and Lorenzo Lamas star in this high-flying heist film from writer/director Tripp Reed. Ripping off 250 million bucks is almost never an easy task, but stealing it from an airborne jetliner is seemingly impossible. Evidently no one ever told that to the band of crooks in Rapid Exchange. With the tension high and the odds stacked against them, the just might pull it off. Aviva Gale and Matt O’Toole also star.

Big-budget special effects, swiftly paced action, and a distinct feminist subtext from writer/director James Cameron turned what should have been a by-the-numbers sci-fi sequel into both a blockbuster and a seven-time Oscar nominee. Sigourney Weaver returns as Ellen Ripley, the last surviving crew member of a corporate spaceship destroyed after an attack by a vicious, virtually unbeatable alien life form. Adrift in space for half a century, Ripley grapples with depression until she’s informed by her company’s representative, Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) that the planet where her crew discovered the alien has since been settled by colonists. Contact with the colony has suddenly been lost, and a detachment of colonial marines is being sent to investigate. Invited along as an advisor, Ripley predicts disaster, and sure enough, the aliens have infested the colony, leaving a sole survivor, the young girl Newt (Carrie Henn). With the soldiers picked off one by one, a final all-female showdown brews between the alien queen and Ripley, who’s become a surrogate mother to Newt. Several future stars made early career appearances in Aliens (1986), including Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Reiser.

A dark, bitter commentary on modern American life cloaked in the form of a surrealist western, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man stars Johnny Depp as William Blake, a newly-orphaned accountant who leaves his home in Cleveland to accept a job in the frontier town of Machine. Upon his arrival, Blake is told by the factory owner Dickinson (Robert Mitchum) that the job has already been filled. Dejectedly, he enters a nearby tavern, ultimately spending the night with a former prostitute. A violent altercation with the woman’s lover (Gabriel Byrne), also Dickinson’s son, leaves Blake a murderer as well as mortally wounded, a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. He flees into the wilderness, where a Native American named Nobody (Gary Farmer) mistakes Blake for the English poet William Blake and determines that he will be Blake’s guide in his protracted passage into the spirit world.

Steven Spielberg followed Jaws (1975), his first major box-office success, with this epic science fiction adventure about a disparate group of people who attempt to contact alien intelligence. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is an electrical lineman who, while sent out on emergency repairs, witnesses an unidentified flying object, and even has a “sunburn” from its bright lights to prove it. Neary’s wife and children are at first skeptical, then concerned, and eventually fearful, as Roy refuses to accept a “logical” explanation for what he saw and is prepared to give up his job, his home, and his family to pursue the “truth” about UFOs. Neary’s obsession eventually puts him in contact with others who’ve had close encounters with alien spacecraft, including Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mother whose son disappeared during her UFO experience, and Claude Lacombe (celebrated French filmmaker Fran?ois Truffaut), a French researcher who believes that we can use a musical language to communicate with alien visitors. Lacombe’s theory is put to the test when a band of government researchers and underground UFO enthusiasts (including Neary) join for an exchange with alien visitors near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. In 1980, a “Special Edition” was released. While its primary selling point was the addition of scenes inside the alien spaceship, Spielberg claimed that he also cleaned up some choppy editing in the second act.

Acclaimed director David Fincher’s promising career was lucky to survive this astonishingly wrong-headed, almost universally despised second sequel to Alien (1979). The film careens into oblivion virtually from the beginning, as Lt. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor of a crash-landing on a hellish, God-forsaken prison planet. Not only does the crash kill little Newt, completely obviating the entire point of the superior Aliens (1986), but Fincher then compounds his betrayal of that film’s fans by having Ripley attend the girl’s gruesome autopsy and barely bat an eye as the child’s chest is bloodily ripped open with a steel bonesaw. Things just go downhill from there, as the rather unthreatening rapists and murderers harass Ripley and curse a great deal before being torn apart by large fans, having their heads crushed by the unconvincing CGI alien, and finally volunteering to be murdered by the beast rather than letting the evil Company get hold of it. Fincher does the best he can with a terrible script, and there are some nice supporting turns by Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, and Brian Glover, but nothing could redeem the film’s first 15 minutes. By the time Ripley takes a suicidal swan-dive into a vat of molten lead, cradling a baby alien as it explodes from her chest, many viewers will not know whether to reach for the remote control or a warm bath and a razorblade. A loathsome experience by any standard, Alien 3 still made enough money for Weaver to return as a Ripley clone in Alien Resurrection (1997).

Writer/directors Jeff Renfroe and Marteinn Thorsson make their feature debut with the paranoid thriller One Point O (1.0). Jeremy Sisto plays a computer programmer named Simon J. who gets used as a test subject. His corporate employers are secretly conducting a experiment on him in order to test out a new advertising scheme. Simon receives empty boxes at his apartment, grows suspicious of everyone else, and develops a strange desire for milk. Also starring Deborah Unger, Lance Henriksen, and Udo Kier. One Point O premiered at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the dramatic competition.

Author Edgar Rice Burroughs once suggested that animation would be the ideal medium to bring his Tarzan to the screen, and 81 years after the first film about the famous ape-man, Disney brings us the first full-length animated film starring the King of the Jungle. After a disaster at sea causes their ship to sink off the coast of Africa, a British couple finds their way to shore with their infant son in tow. However, the parents are killed by a leopard, leaving the baby to fend for himself. The child is discovered by a gorilla named Kala (voice of Glenn Close), mate of Kerchak (voice of Lance Henriksen), the leader of the tribe of apes. While Kerchak is taken aback by the foundling and would just as soon leave him in the jungle, Kala’s maternal nature is stirred. Kala and Kerchak take the baby with them, naming him Tarzan and raising him among their own. Although Tarzan (voice of Tony Goldwyn) grows up painfully aware that he’s different from the apes, he comes to love and respect the gorillas and learns their ways, while they accept him into their tribe as he grows to adulthood. However, Tarzan’s idyllic life in the jungle is changed forever by the arrival of Professor Porter (voice of Nigel Hawthorne), his daughter Jane (voice of Minnie Driver), and their guide, a hunter named Clayton (voice of Brian Blessed). The Professor and Jane have arrived in Africa to study the wildlife in its natural habitat, although Clayton would prefer to bag as many trophies as he can. When the explorers encounter Tarzan, they at first think they’ve discovered the missing link, although soon realize that he’s as human as they are. Tarzan finds himself torn between his desire to be with his own kind (and the new, unfamiliar emotions that he feels for Jane) and his loyalties to the gorilla family that raised him — especially since Clayton sees the apes not as friends but as prey. Dominated by fast-paced jungle action sequences, Tarzan also features voices by Rosie O’Donnell and Wayne Knight, as well as new songs by Phil Collins.

Small-time crook Mickey Rourke is mockingly named Johnny Handsome because of his grotesquely deformed face. While in stir on a robbery rap, Rourke is knifed by convicts in the employ of his former partner–and now bitter enemy–Lance Henriksen. While in the prison hospital, Rourke is cared for by a kindly doctor (Forrest Whitaker), who believes that the key to Rourke’s rehabilitation might be a literal change of face. Undergoing plastic surgery, Rourke emerges as virtually unrecognizable to everyone but the audience. Paroled, Rourke seems to be willing to follow a straight and narrow path. Seems to be. Only Morgan Freeman, playing a hard-bitten law officer, sees through Rourke’s “new leaf.”

John Larroquette starred with Kirstie Alley in this comedy involving a couple’s troubles with their starter home. An array of obstinate houseguests refuse to leave and provoke the anger of all involved.

Christian McIntire's Bermuda Triangle thriller Lost Voyage comes to DVD with a standard full-frame transfer. The English soundtrack is rendered in Dolby Digital Stereo. Spanish subtitles are accessible, and the soundtrack is closed-captioned. Supplemental materials include the trailer. This is a pedestrian release from First Look that will have interest primarily for genre enthusiasts.