Bovie Movie

Midnight Express is a harrowing tale of a na?ve American caught in a nightmare of his own making thousands of miles from his home. Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) is an American tourist visiting Turkey with his girlfriend Susan (Irene Miracle) when he’s caught by customs officials trying to smuggle a large amount of hashish out of the country. The crime would normally carry a sentence of four years, but officials decide to make an example of Billy, and he draws a 30-year sentence despite the promises of his Turkish legal counsel. While Susan and Billy’s father (Mike Kellin) pledge to do everything they can to speed Billy’s release, in fact there’s little than can be done. Billy quickly finds himself in a hellish prison that’s a nightmare of filth, violence, rape, inedible food, and unspeakable health conditions. However, Billy gains a few confidantes behind bars: Jimmy (Randy Quaid), an American in a constant state of emotional overdrive; Max (John Hurt), an intelligent, drug-addicted Englishman; and Erich (Norbert Weisser), a gay Scandinavian who is attracted to Billy but accepts his gentle refusals of sex. Before long, Billy is convinced that he can take no more, and he makes plans to take the “midnight express” — jailhouse slang for escape. While his friends are willing to help, they also make clear that almost no one who has tried to escape has lived to tell the tale. Based on a true story, Midnight Express was a box-office hit which won wide acclaim for the performances of Brad Davis and John Hurt; and the screenplay, by Oliver Stone, won an Academy Award.

Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson star as a quartet of Manhattan-based “paranormal investigators”. When their government grants run out, the former three go into business as The Ghostbusters, later hiring Hudson on. Armed with electronic paraphernalia, the team is spectacularly successful, ridding The Big Apple of dozens of ghoulies, ghosties and long-legged beasties. Tight-lipped bureaucrat William Atherton regards the Ghostbusters as a bunch of charlatans, but is forced to eat his words when New York is besieged by an army of unfriendly spirits, conjured up by a long-dead Babylonian demon and “channelled” through beautiful cellist Sigourney Weaver and nerdish Rick Moranis. The climax is a glorious sendup of every Godzilla movie ever made-and we daresay it cost more than a year’s worth of Japanese monster flicks combined. Who’d ever dream that the chubby, cheery Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would turn out to be the most malevolent threat ever faced by New York City? When the script for Ghostbusters was forged by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, John Belushi was slated to play the Bill Murray role; Belushi’s death in 1982 not only necessitated the hiring of Murray, but also an extensive rewrite. The most expensive comedy made up to 1984, Ghostbusters made money hand over fist, spawning not only a 1989 sequel but also two animated TV series (one of them partially based on an earlier live-action TV weekly, titled The Ghost Busters.

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.