Bovie Movie

Built more on suspense and audience imagination than on cheap thrills, genre-cliches, and gore, this Canadian horror movie centers on the evil doings of a murderous demon and the determination of a courageous priest (Michael Rooker) to stop it. The smoke-like demon arises from the netherworld in response to a satanic ritual held in an empty warehouse. The priest showed up in time to destroy the worshipers but not soon enough to stop the devil’s minion from escaping into the city’s labyrinthine sewer system. Travelling underground, the demon eventually resurfaces in Grand River, a peaceful little town. Meanwhile, the priest investigates the bodies of the dead satanist and on one of them finds papers that lead him to a young boy in the aforementioned town. This fatherless child has been divinely marked for greatness, and the demon has been called forth to destroy him, but before he can, the creature must consume large quantities of human blood to build up its power. His presence and the rising body count drives the locals insane, something that only hinders the priest on his desperate quest to save the child and return the demon to his fiery domain.

Requiem for a Dream director Darren Aronofsky switches gears from drug-induced urban malaise to abstract science fiction with this time-tripping symbolic tale of a man’s thousand-year quest to save the woman he loves. Moving between representational stories and images, this meditation on life and death focuses on the concept of the mythical Tree of Life that is said to bestow immortality to all who drink of its sap. In one of the film’s allegorical timelines, a 16th century Spanish conquistador played by Hugh Jackman sets out to find the tree in order to save his queen (Rachel Weisz) from the Inquisition. Another conceptual story finds Jackman centuries later, struggling with mortality as a modern-day scientist desperately searching for the medical breakthrough that will save the life of his cancer-stricken wife, Izzi. The third and most abstract concept finds Jackman as a different incarnation of the same character-idea, this time questing for eternal life within the confines of a floating sphere transporting the aged Tree of Life through the depths of space. Still more avant-garde than his breakthrough film Pi, The Fountain finds Aronofsky almost completely abandoning conventional story structure in favor of something more cinematically abstract. Though the film was originally slapped with an R by the MPAA, Aronofsky & co. re-edited it to conform to a PG-13 rating.

Writer/director Ernie Barbarash helms this prequel to the sci-fi thriller Cube, with events that unfold some time prior to those in first picture. Here, another group of prisoners navigate the treacherous confines of their futuristic trappings. Each step is potentially the last as the deadly last traps hidden in the sparse rooms find the numbers of the unwilling prisoners quickly thinning. Only when they can figure out the mysteries of their constantly changing prison will the surviving inmates have any hope for escape, and even then there is no guarantee of freedom — much less survival. As the cube workers who monitor the prisoners progress bear witness to their increasingly grim bid for survival, a sudden sting of remorse finds one of the employees empathizing with the victims and plotting to assist them in their unlikely escape.