Bovie Movie

Vatel director Roland Joff? teams with screenwriters Larry Cohen and Joselh Tura to adapt an original story by Cohen concerning a fashion model (Elisha Cuthbert) and her chauffer who are kidnapped and held captive by a sadistic serial killer. Jennifer Tree (Cuthbert) is America’s Sweetheart; a top fashion model and ubiquitous cover girl who is adored by millions, Jennifer possesses all of the wealth and power that comes with being a natural, world class beauty. Every girl wants to be Jennifer, and every man wants to have her - one more than all others combined. That man has been lying in wait for precisely the right moment to strike, and when Jennifer makes the fateful mistake of stepping out on her own at a Soho charity event he finally sees the opportunity to take possession of his most prized object. Drugged, taken, and placed in a cell where she is forced to endure unspeakable mental and physical torture, Jennifer struggles against her twisted tormentor with every ounce of courage and fight that she has - but will it be enough for her to endure should her captor continue to maintain the upper hand? A controversial film long before it ever went into wide release, Captivity caused quite a stir when graphic, unapproved ads for the film appeared on billboards and taxi cabs in New York and Los Angeles. Though representatives from Captivity’s releasing company After Dark Films claimed that the wrong materials were shipped to the printers and put up before they realized what had happened, public outcry was such that the MPAA saw fit to suspend the ratings process for the film. As a result, it quickly became apparent that Captivity would fail to procure an MPAA rating before its original target release date.

A mute American working on a low-budget movie runs afoul of the Russian mafia in this internationally produced thriller. Billy (Marina Zudina), a special-effects makeup artist who is unable to speak, is in Moscow working on a cheapie slasher flick directed by Andy (Evan Richards), her sister’s boyfriend. Late one night, Billy returns to the set to pick up some equipment and stumbles on what appears to be the filming of an actual snuff film. Watching, unseen, as an “actress” (Olga Tolstetskaya) is bludgeoned to death before her very eyes, Billy flees the set, pursued by the snuff film’s crew. Eventually, she escapes and tells her story to her sister, Karen (Fay Ripley), and Andy. The film crew convinces the police that it was simply some special effects that Billy witnessed, then they start a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the hapless Americans. The intrigue soon leads Billy and her friends to “The Reaper” (Alec Guinness), the shadowy financier of an entire snuff-film underground. Director Anthony Waller’s screenplay for Mute Witness began as a tale of gangsters in 1930s Chicago, but he rewrote it to take advantage of Russia’s analogous present-day climate — and the country’s cheap sets and labor. Unexpected problems, from a diptheria epidemic to unexpected fines at the customs gate, nearly sank the production. The director convinced Guinness to appear in the film several years before principal photography began; the veteran thespian was paid nothing for his scenes, which were shot in a single morning in Germany.