Bovie Movie

Forget terrorists or hijackers — there’s a handful of deadly assassins aboard a jet liner and they don’t even have arms or legs in this airborne thriller. Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) is an FBI agent handling what seems like a routine assignment — serving as bodyguard for Sean Jones (Nathan Phillips), a Hawaiian surfer dude who is flying to California to testify in a high-profile criminal trial after witnessing mobster Eddie Kim (Byron Lawson) murdering one of his underlings. However, Flynn’s job gets a lot more challenging when he discovers Kim’s associates don’t want Jones to talk, and have devised a unique way to ensure his silence. A cache of highly dangerous poisonous snakes has been hidden on board the jet, and is released using a timed mechanism once the flight is well underway. The snakes quickly attack several members of the flight crew and are eagerly eying the passengers when Flynn decides its time to get medieval on the reptiles. Also starring Rachel Blanchard, Benjamin McKenzie, and Mark Houghton, Snakes on a Plane was produced under the title of Pacific Air Flight 121, but in several interviews Samuel L. Jackson expressed his enthusiasm for the script’s original title, Snakes on a Plane, and the high-concept moniker quickly made the film’s title and theme a favorite with bloggers and on Internet fan sites all over the world.

A young man who has flirted with death is forced to come to terms with mortality in this tale of terror based on a story by Stephen King. Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson) is a college student studying art at the University of Maine in 1969. Cursed with an over-active imagination, Alan constantly obsesses over the worst outcome of any situation, and when he begins to suspect his girlfriend, Jessica (Erika Christensen), is thinking of leaving him, it drives him to the brink of suicide. Shortly after this brush with death, Alan receives word that his mother, Jean (Barbara Hershey), has suffered a severe stroke and may not pull through. Alan grabs his jacket and hits the road, hoping to hitchhike the one hundred miles to the hospital. As it happens, Alan is trying to catch a ride on Halloween night, and after he’s picked up by one George Staub (David Arquette), he realizes that he’s riding the highway with a creature not of this Earth. Riding the Bullet was directed by Mick Garris, marking the fourth time the filmmaker has brought one of King’s stories to the cinema or television screen.

Yet another classic television series from the 1960s gets a big-screen update in this action-comedy inspired by the Bill Cosby/Robert Culp vehicle I Spy. Alex Scott (Owen Wilson) is a federal intelligence agent who has been assigned to find a particularly expensive and valuable weapon which has gone missing: a special stealth fighter jet which can not only hide from radar, but also turn invisible to the human eye. Scott learns a rogue agent has sold the jet to Gundars (Malcolm McDowell), a powerful and unscrupulous underground arms dealer. After blowing his opportunity to catch Gundars in the act, Scott formulates a Plan B — it seems Gundars is a rabid boxing fan, so in order to get inside his organization, Scott recruits Kelly Robinson (Eddie Murphy), a longtime middleweight champion whose ego nearly exceeds his talent in the ring. Robinson is excited by the prospect of a life of espionage, but Scott and Robinson’s personalities are like oil and water, and matters are hardly helped by the efforts of less-than-helpful fellow agents Rachel (Famke Janssen) and Carlos (Gary Cole). This adaptation of I Spy was directed by a woman who starred in a memorable television series herself, former Hill Street Blues regular Betty Thomas, who has gone on to a successful career behind the camera.