Bovie Movie

If a comedy is to be made from the plight of the homeless, who have to scrape through their days returning deposit bottles and cleaning car windshields to get their daily bread as the rich get richer and more heartless, it may as well be Mel Brooks’ Life Stinks. The trademark Brooks humor dominates this fable about a ruthless billionaire, Goddard Bolt (Mel Brooks), who wants to obliterate a poor section of Los Angeles and build a high-tech commercial center in its place. His only problem is that he owns only half the land needed for the construction, the other half belonging to equally ruthless billionaire Vance Craswell (Jeffrey Tambor), who has his own ideas for the land. The two try to buy each other out until, finally, a deal is struck: Craswell bets that Bolt cannot survive a month on the streets as a homeless man. If Bolt makes it, he gets the property. If he doesn’t, Craswell gets it. Bolt agrees and, as a poor man, he begins to feel the pain of being uprooted and alone, even meeting a friendly homeless woman, Molly (Lesley Ann Warren) with whom he forms an attachment.

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).

Crime is the disease and Sylvester Stallone is the cure in Cobra, a high-octane rehash of the Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry films, burnished to a 1980s action sheen. Stallone is Marion Cobretti, a cop called in when regular police methods have failed. Cobra is sent to get a cult of Charles Manson-like serial killers and to protect Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen), a beautiful, statuesque witness who is set to testify against them. Cobra deposits Ingrid in an out-of-the-way town for safe-keeping, but a mole in the police department tips off the killers. The gang comes racing into town to get Ingrid, but Cobra is there waiting for them, ready to spring into action.