Bovie Movie

A few innocent women experience a nightmare before Christmas in this bloody thriller. Billy Lenz, a severely maladjusted child, finally snaps under years of brutal treatment by his family, killing and eating them in an explosion of violence on Christmas Eve. For years, the Lenz house stands vacant, but in time it’s purchased and renovated as the new home for a college sorority. A few days before Christmas, a handful of sorority sisters — Dana (Lacey Chabert), Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg), Kelli (Katie Cassidy), and Heather (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) — are enjoying a quiet evening with their house mother, Barbara MacHenry (Andrea Martin), exchanging gifts and swapping stories before heading home for holiday break. While Barbara remembers the story of Billy’s crimes, the atmosphere is peaceful until the young women receive the first in a series of disturbing telephone calls. Before long, they learn that Billy has escaped after years in a mental institution, and has come back to the house where he grew up to once again spill blood for the Christmas season. Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 horror film of the same name by director Bob Clark, who later made a less-threatening film about the Yuletide season, A Christmas Story; Andrea Martin, who plays the house mother, also appeared in the 1974 film as one of the sorority girls.

Cat Storm (Dominique Swain) is a bored high school girl in New York City who follows her petulant, rich friends from one coming-of-age adventure to another. They experiment with cruelty, rudeness, brazenness, and idiocy before moving onto sex and drugs. Cat’s best friend, Delilah (Bijou Phillips), is kicked out of school for using cocaine (her father’s), forcing Cat to become best friends with Grace (Mischa Barton), who guides her into the arms of William (Brad Renfro), the boy Cat’s had a crush on for some time. Eventually they all wind up at a luxurious country estate for a weekend of drugs, passion, and, inevitably, gruesome murder.

Two fathers get a crash course in caring for kids other than their own in this family-friendly comedy. Charlie Hinton (Eddie Murphy) is an advertising executive whose job monopolizes his time, making it difficult for him to stay in touch with his young son, Ben (Khamani Griffin). However, after Charlie and his partner, Phil (Jeff Garlin), are given their pink slips in the wake of a disastrous campaign for a new breakfast cereal, Charlie’s wife, Kim (Regina King), goes back to work, and with the family budget tighter than before, Charlie becomes a stay-at-home dad. After pulling Ben out of an expensive and exclusive daycare center run by the humorless Gwyneth Harridan (Anjelica Huston), Charlie comes up with a brainstorm — since he and Phil watch their own children every day, how much harder could it be to watch a few more kids and open their own day care center? Charlie and Phil discover there’s much more to running a daycare center than they ever imagined, but after a very rough start, with the help of likable slacker Marvin (Steve Zahn) their new business becomes a success — so much so that Harridan finds herself losing customers to the upstart fathers, and she starts searching for a way to shut them down.

This $90 million science fiction adventure is adapted from the television series, created by Irwin Allen, which originally ran on CBS from 1965 to 1968. The original series employed a Swiss Family Robinson in outer space premise; sent to colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, the Robinson family was thrown off course by a stowaway and was left wandering from planet to planet (and changing along the way from a black-and-white series to a color series). The 1998 remake is set in the year 2058, when the United Global Space Force sends Professor John Robinson (William Hurt) and family — wife Maureen (Mimi Rogers), daughter Judy (Heather Graham), teen Penny (Lacey Chabert), and 10-year-old Will (Jack Johnson) — on a promotional space jaunt to herald the “offshore” future for the human race (now saddled with eco problems on Earth). Major Don West (Matt LeBlanc), more accustomed to fighting menacing Global Sedition forces, is reluctant to sign on as the Jupiter II pilot but quickly changes his mind after he gets a good look at Judy in her fetish-fashioned space togs. Space spy Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman), hired to sabotage the mission, programs in problems but winds up aboard the craft unconscious. Once awake, he summons the Robinsons from suspended animation, and they save the ship just in time, passing through hyperspace to arrive near an Earth ship where they encounter space-pet Blawp and hordes of teethy spiders. A spider bite makes the villainous Smith mutate, one of some 750 special effects, from animatronics (Jim Henson Creature Shop) to CGI, and other adventures await throughout the galaxy. Cameos include actors from the original series, including June Lockhart and Robot Voice Dick Tufeld. In a curious coincidence, the TV series took place in the future of 1997, the year this movie was produced.