Bovie Movie

Geena Davis stars in this adventure saga as the most swashbuckling female pirate to ever lay waste to the seven seas. Morgan Adams (Davis) is the daughter of a pirate who has followed in her father’s footsteps. When he dies, he passes along his ship, a crew of bandits, and one third of a treasure map (which happens to be tattooed on his skull). Morgan is eager to search out the rest of the map and retrieve the riches, but the fragment she holds is in Latin. Morgan then buys a well-educated slave, William Shaw (Matthew Modine), who can read the ancient language and already has a taste for the criminal life. However, Morgan and William are not long into their search when they discover that someone else is following the same trail for the rest of the treasure map: Dawg Brown (Frank Langella), Morgan’s uncle and as black-hearted a scurvy dog as ever boarded a ship. As Morgan and Dawg battle each other over the fragments of the map, a British journalist (Maury Chaykin) covers their feud for the penny press. William Shaw was originally to have been played by Michael Douglas, who dropped out in the early stages of this troubled production.

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).