Bovie Movie

In this World War II action thriller, American reconnaissance agents learn that a German submarine is sinking. The doomed ship carries an Enigma Machine, a special coding device that allows high-level Axis forces to send messages that can’t be read without a similar encryption mechanism. Obtaining a working Enigma device would be invaluable for the Allied war effort, so a U.S. sub is sent out to rescue the machine. However, German forces have already picked up the sub’s distress signal and are en route to rescue their comrades. U-571 features a distinguished cast, including Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton, Harvey Keitel, and Jon Bon Jovi.

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.

Family differences and personal grudges add drama to an already tense situation as the lives of a team of mountain climbers hang in the balance in this action drama. Peter Garrett (Chris O’Donnell) and his sister Annie (Robin Tunney) are the children of Royce Garrett (Stuart Wilson), an avid outdoorsman and climbing enthusiast who died when an accident left all three hanging from a single rope; Royce ordered Peter to cut him loose to save the lives of his kids, even though he knew it would mean his death. Years later, Peter has given up climbing and become a respected nature photographer, while Annie, who holds Peter responsible for her father’s death, is a famous world-class mountain climber who is hired by Elliot Vaughn (Bill Paxton), a self-made billionaire, to help him scale K2, a mountain in the Himalayas that’s the second-highest peak in the world. In the midst of the climb, dangerous weather strikes, and Elliot, Annie, and their crew find themselves trapped in a cavern that’s been sealed tight by an avalanche. Peter, who is near K2 working on an assignment, quickly organizes a crew of expert climbers to save Annie and the other mountaineers, who must work under a tight deadline before the trapped climbers run out of air. Peter’s partners in the rescue include beautiful medic Monique (Izabella Scorupco), radical climbers Cyril (Steve Le Marquand) and Malcolm (Ben Mendelsohn), disciplined Pakistani crewman Kareem (Alexander Siddig), and Montgomery (Scott Glenn), an eccentric outdoorsman who has a score to settle with Elliot. While backgrounds were shot on location in Pakistan, most of the climbing sequences in Vertical Limit were actually filmed on mountain ranges in New Zealand.

Borrowing liberally from the French film La Totale, this is an action picture, domestic comedy, and political thriller rolled into a crowd-pleasing ball of entertainment. Producer James Cameron wrote and directed the film. Henry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a workaholic computer salesman neglecting his mousy wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), a legal secretary. Simon (Bill Paxton) seduces Helen with the lie that he is a secret agent; he’s really a used car salesman. Harry suspects that Helen is cheating on him, and he sends a few colleagues to kidnap them. Helen then discovers that Harry is a secret agent by night, working for a shadowy group called the Omega Sector. Harry and his partner Gib (Tom Arnold) are trying to find four nuclear warheads that have disappeared from a former Soviet republic.

Hoping to make the magic of King Kong happen again, the production team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack came up with the 1949 special-effects smorgasbord Mighty Joe Young. Robert Armstrong reprises his Kong portrayal of Carl Denham as hot-shot showbiz entrepreneur Max O’Hara. While in Africa looking for authentic decorations for his new night club, O’Hara makes the acquaintance of Mr. Joseph Young, a ten-foot-tall ape. Unlike King Kong, Joe Young has a heart of gold, thanks in great part to his owner, a lovely lass named Jill Young (Terry Moore). Against her better judgment, Jill allows O’Hara to bring Joe back to the States as a nightclub attraction. Joe proves to be a smash as he participates in Jill’s musical act (he lifts her grand piano while she plays “Beautiful Dreamer”) and performs a tug-of-war routine with an imposing lineup of professional wrestlers (including Tor Johnson, Man Mountain Dean and Primo Carnera). But when the patrons go home each night, Joe is unhappily relegated to his cage. When a group of obnoxious drunks begin teasing Joe, the disgruntled ape breaks loose and goes on a rampage. Slated to be put to death, Joe redeems himself by rescuing a group of screaming children from an orphanage fire. Featured in the cast are Ben Johnson as the nominal romantic lead, Frank McHugh as Robert Armstrong’s assistant, and an uncredited Irene Ryan as a cocktail-lounge patron.

If you met Adolph Hitler when he was just a struggling cartoonist, wouldn’t you have done the world a big favor by murdering him? That philosophical question provides the linchpin of this black comedy. Jude (Cameron Diaz), Pete (Ron Eldard), Paulie (Annabeth Gish), Marc (Jonathan Penner), and Luke (Courtney B. Vance) are five graduate students who are confirmed members of the political left, participate in small-scale activism, and share a house together. One night, Pete is stuck in the middle of nowhere, and Zack (Bill Paxton), a truck driver, gives him a lift home. The housemates are just about to sit down to dinner, so to show his gratitude, Pete asks Zack to join them. However, it soon becomes obvious that Zack doesn’t share the group’s political views, and when he states that he thinks Hitler had the right idea, the argument turns into a fight, with Zack brandishing a knife. The trucker is accidentally killed in the scuffle, and rather than report the death to the police, his body is buried in the backyard vegetable garden. However, the event prompts much discussion among the housemates — if Zack was a hateful bigot, isn’t the world better off without him? And wouldn’t killing other ignorant hatemongers improve society all the more? Before long, the group is having a weekly dinner party in which they invite a special guest — including an anti-environmental activist (Jason Alexander), a right-wing religious leader (Charles Durning), a sexist who doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as rape (Mark Harmon), and a teenager campaigning against sex education in schools (Erin Bryn) — and serve them some wine, which happens to be laced with arsenic. While the group’s attempt at community improvement does wonders for their tomato plants, the recent disappearances eventually attract the attention of the local sheriff (Nora Dunn). The Last Supper was the first feature for director Stacy Title, who won an Academy Award for her short subject Down on the Waterfront; screenwriter Dan Rosen appears in a supporting role as a police deputy.

A high-energy action adventure based on legend rather than historical fact finds Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) desiring to retire from law enforcement. With brothers Virgil (Sam Elliot) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), he arrives in Tombstone, Arizona intending to build his fortune. He discovers that long-time friend Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) is there and that the town is run by a group of brutal outlaws called the Cowboys. Earp, frustrated with his laudanum-addicted wife, begins a romance with traveling stage actress Josephine Marcus (Dana Delany). Meanwhile, the Cowboys terrorize the citizens of Tombstone unchecked.

When the town marshal is killed by a Cowboy, Earp steps in to prevent a lynching by an angry mob. He also refuses to hand the killer over to his fellows, beginning the enmity between the Cowboys and the Earp brothers. Virgil, overcome with guilt at doing nothing to help the Tombstone citizens, accepts the position of town marshal. With Wyatt and Morgan as his deputies, and the help of Doc, Virgil attempts to arrest several Cowboys, resulting in the famous OK Corral shoot-out. The Cowboys take revenge by ambushing two of the brothers and injuring Virgil and killing Morgan. The Earps leave town, apparently cowed. Wyatt returns, wearing the badge of a U.S. marshal, vowing to destroy every last Cowboy. He hunts them mercilessly, until the leader, Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) challenges Wyatt to a duel. While not regarded as an artistic masterpiece, “Tombstone” is considered the best of director George P. Cosmatos’ prolific films. The all-star cast (including Thomas Haden Church and Billy Bob Thornton in small roles) delivers solid performances. Both William A. Fraker’s cinematography and Bruce Broughton’s stirring musical score are expertly designed for dramatic effect. Blood is shown liberally in several key scenes, but seems intended to show that there is nothing glorious in Wyatt Earp’s actions, only necessity. He and his deputies take on the symbolism of the horsemen of the apocalypse — dispensing judgement, and the Biblical references form a symmetry at the beginning and end of the film.

Based on Scott Smith’s bone-chilling blockbuster 1993 novel, A Simple Plan is a bit of a departure for horror-film director Sam Raimi. Instead of flying eyeballs and dancing corpses, A Simple Plan is a taught crime thriller in the vein of Joel Coen’s Academy Award-winning Fargo. Set during the white winters of Minnesota, this story tells the eerie tale of Hank and Jacob Mitchell (played by Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) who, along with a buddy, find a downed single-engine plane buried in the snowy woods. Inside it is a decaying pilot and a bag carrying four million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills. The men decide to hide the money until spring when the snow is melted and the plane is found. If no one notices the missing money at that time, they will split it and live a wealthy new life. A simple plan, right? Wrong. Much like Humphrey Bogart’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, things can only get worse, as distrust and greed creep into the minds of the principles. They find it difficult to decide which one gets to hold the money — and even more impossible to keep from dipping into the stash until spring. And so on. It also becomes increasingly tough to keep a secret of this magnitude. And if all this doesn’t get movie-goers’ right-brains working, it seems there are suspicious characters in town who just may be able to link them to the plane, forcing the more dangerous and bloody question of what to do with those people and how to cover their tracks.

Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt and Carey Elwes may be billed as the stars of Twister, but the film’s real attractions are the cyclones themselves. Best experienced in a theater, the nail-biting, blow-the-audience-out-of-their-seats computer generated graphics, cutting edge sound and other special effects are designed to take viewers straight into the roaring funnel of a gigantic tornado. In order to focus on special effects and action, the story is simple and the characters are drawn in broad strokes with little depth. Jo Harding (Hunt) became a storm chaser (a meteorologist who photographs and scientifically studies tornadoes in the field) after a large twister sucked her hapless daddy into oblivion when she was a girl. Bill (Paxton) was a storm chaser too, but left to become a successful weatherman. His change of profession ruined his marriage to Jo. Before separating, the Hardings invented DOROTHY, a gizmo designed to release thousands of tiny sensors when a tornado passes over it. The Hardings hope the information transmitted by the sensors will provide insight into the nature of the whirling windstorms. Backed by a large corporation, the villainous Dr. Jonas Miller (Elwes) has created a similar machine. Neither gadget has been field tested and both groups of storm chasers are anxious to find tornadoes. At the peak of the worst twister season in decades, Bill shows up at Jo’s truck with his prissy fiancee Melissa (Jami Gertz) so Jo can sign divorce papers. Suddenly a twister is spotted. With little hesitation, Bill rejoins the mad rush to reach it in time to activate DOROTHY. Jonas and his team are right behind them. Throughout the day the storms become worse and the rivalrous race becomes more intense. As they continue facing incredible dangers together Jo and Bill find renewed love while poor Melissa finds only an intense desire to get away from these storm-obsessed lunatics.

Endlessly imitated, The Terminator made the reputation of cowriter/director James Cameron — who would go on to make 1997’s titanic Titanic — and solidified the stardom of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie begins in a post-apocalyptic 2029, when Los Angeles has been largely reduced to rubble and is under the thumb of all-powerful ruling machines. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a member of the human resistance movement, is teleported back to 1984. His purpose: to rescue Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother of the man who will lead the 21st-century rebels against the tyrannical machines, from being assassinated before she can give birth. Likewise thrust back to 1984 is The Terminator (Schwarzenegger), a grim, well-armed, virtually indestructable cyborg who has been programmed to eliminate Sarah Connor. After killing two “Sarah Connors” who turn out to be the wrong women, he finally aims his gunsights at the genuine article. This is the film in which Schwarzenegger declared “I’ll be baaaack” — and back he was, in “kinder and gentler” form, in the even more successful Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).