Bovie Movie

This Hitchcock classic somehow strayed from favour for a while, yet in the realm of popular mythology it is now rivalled only by Psycho. Set in the remote California coastal town of Bodega Bay, the story concerns a small group of unsatisfied creatures. Two women and a young girl are all fixed on one man (Rod Taylor), and when a fourth (Tippi Hedren) arrives from San Francisco with a certain determination in her heart, a menacing populace of birds descends on the town, wreaking terror and havoc, right up until the film’s inscrutable ending. But, as ever, Hitchcock is also having a laugh. 

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” A close encounter of the third kind becomes a Jaws-style nightmare when an alien invades a spacecraft in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic. On the way home from a mission for the Company, the Nostromo’s crew is woken up from hibernation by the ship’s Mother computer to answer a distress signal from a nearby planet. Capt. Dallas’ (Tom Skerritt) rescue team discovers a bizarre pod field, but things get even stranger when a face-hugging creature bursts out of a pod and attaches itself to Kane (John Hurt). Over the objections of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), science officer Ash (Ian Holm) lets Kane back on the ship. The acid-blooded incubus detaches itself from an apparently recovered Kane, but an alien erupts from Kane’s stomach and escapes. The alien starts stalking the humans, pitting Dallas and his crew (and cat) against a malevolent killing machine that also has a protector in the nefarious Company.

It wasn’t a classic or particularly well made, but at least Scary Movie was good for a few honest Scream-inspired laughs. That original outing looks like a masterpiece in comparison to this uninspired profit-driven sequel. Barely competent on any technical or artistic level, what comic ingenuity and genre appreciation was shown the first time around has been replaced by boorish vulgarity and a desperation to get the audience to snigger at anything, no matter how lame, crude or obvious. Once past the opening where The Exorcist is amusingly sent up by James Woods in a cameo appearance as a priest (a role originally earmarked for Marlon Brando), it descends rapidly into lampooning the 1999 remake of The Haunting — so close to an awful self parody itself that any gags at its expense are depressingly redundant. Everything from Charlie’s Angels and What Lies Beneath to Hannibal and even The Weakest Link is raked over for minimal laughs in a shoddy satire that took seven screenwriters to produce. It brings new depths to the term “too many cooks spoil the broth”. 

This raunchy metaphor for the battle between the sexes from Mad Max director George Miller soars with inspired lunacy as three romance-starved suburban women dabble in off-white magic for some offbeat chandelier swinging. While Jack Nicholson dominates this spellbinding adaptation of John Updike’s ironic bestseller as the horny little devil, the luminous female talent (Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer) almost matches him in a charming sensual fantasy that’s slightly overloaded with needless special effects.