Bovie Movie

Porter (Mel Gibson) is pulled into a heist by his old friend, Val (Brian De Palma regular, Gregg Henry). As they’re stealing $130,000 in laundered drug money from Chinese Triads, no one is going to call the police. Everything goes smoothly until Porter’s wife, Lynn (Deborah Kara Unger), shoots Porter in the back. After Val had shown Lynn a photo of Porter in the arms of another girl (Maria Bello), the two planned the double-cross together to pay off Val’s mob debts so he could return to “The Syndicate.” They didn’t plan well enough, though, because five months later Porter’s back, a complete sociopath who wants his $70,000. Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter for L.A. Confidential and Conspiracy Theory, makes his directing debut with this adaptation of the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake writing under the pseudonym, Richard Stark. The same novel served as the basis for John Boorman’s Point Blank starring Lee Marvin.

This big budget “re-imagining” of the 1968 original departs somewhat from both that classic science fiction film and the source novel by author Pierre Boulle. Mark Wahlberg stars as Leo Davidson, an astronaut of the early 21st century whose unauthorized mission to rescue a chimp companion from a mysterious space storm goes awry when he and his ship are lost through a rip in the fabric of time. Leo crash-lands on a planet where intelligent, talking apes are the dominant species and humans a conquered slave class. Befriending both a chimpanzee activist named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who’s sympathetic to humans, and a beautiful human rebel, Daena (Estella Warren), Leo quickly becomes a prominent figure of resistance to his fellow humans. This makes him an instant source of irritation for the militant and ambitious General Thade (Tim Roth) and his trusted adjutant, Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), who intend to hunt Leo down and crush the burgeoning human uprising. War looms between ape and human as Leo and his band head for a sacred site deep in an off-limits desert, where secrets about the planet’s ape and human ancestry wait to be revealed. Planet of the Apes is directed by Tim Burton and features the original film’s star, Charlton Heston, in a cameo role as the dying father of Thade.

Jack Lemmon and Robert Mitchum star as Tony and Felix, co-owners of a tramp-steamer service in the West Indies. Threatening their friendship is itinerant trollop Irena (Rita Hayworth). Tony seethes with jealousy as Irena gravitates towards Felix, leading to a heated confrontation. Felix retaliates by blowing the whistle on Tony’s under-the-counter smuggling activities. Tony in turns plots to kill his former partner, but changes his mind when Felix saves his life during a shipwreck. The supporting cast includes Herbert Lom, Bernard Lee, and Anthony Newley.

British director Stephen Norrington helmed this David S. Goyer adaptation of the Marvel Comics character created in 1973 by scripter Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan. In the Tomb of Dracula comic book origin, just before Blade’s mother gave birth to Blade, she was bitten by a vampire, which made Blade immune to vampires. Now a vampire hunter, Blade, joined by vampire detective Hannibal King and Dracula-descendent Frank Drake, stalks vampires. In the 1990s (in Marvel’s Nightstalkers), Blade teamed with Drake and King in an agency created to fight a variety of supernatural beings. The Marvel origin is retold in this 1998 Norrington film, with Blade’s mother dying as he is born. Thirty-some years later, Blade now exists somewhere between the two worlds, not human but not fully vampire. He has become a relentless and superhuman vampire hunter, out to avenge the death of his mother and protect the rest of humankind from the evil vampire race. In this pursuit, Blade storms a notorious vampire nightclub and in a virtual bloodbath manages to wipe out most of the blood-lusting denizens. But the burnt corpse of vampire Quinn (Donal Logue) is reanimated at the hospital morgue and bites hematologist Karen Jenson (N’Bushe Wright). Blade magically appears at the hospital just in time to whisk Karen to his hideaway, a machine-shop run by his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), who once rescued Blade and who now produces a antidote to keep Blade from turning into a full-fledged vampire and who builds custom weapons for Blade to use against his evil foes. Meanwhile, Blade’s vampire arch-nemesis Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) uses computers to translate the Book of Erebus, with the ultimate aim of bringing down the old-guard vampire council, headed by Dragonetti (Udo Kier), and triggering the Blood Tide — an event in which everyone in the world becomes a vampire.