Bovie Movie

An unpopular high-school girl dies at the hands of her classmates when a cruel prank spins out of control, only to return from the land of the dead to seek revenge as a sexy seductress in this frightful feature from Final Destination screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick. Tamara was a quiet girl, and the cruelty of her classmates was relentless. As their disdain for their mousy classmate reaches a fever pitch, Tamara’s sadistic classmates carry out a vicious practical joke that inadvertently results in the young outcast meeting her doom. Tamara isn’t the kind to stay down forever though, and when the once-homely girl returns from beyond the grave with a killer new look and a body to die for, that’s exactly what her tormentors are about to do.

Miramax Films darlings Robert Rodriguez and screenwriter Kevin Williamson teamed up for a high-school alien-horror film that they described as The Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dilapidated Herrington High is the location for a story about a school faculty taken over by outer-space creatures, forcing the students to take charge and kick some alien butt. School faculty members (Robert Patrick, Bebe Neuwirth, Salma Hayek, and Jon Stewart) are infested with rapidly reproducing space worms that take over their minds and bodies. But never fear, because at this school, between hazing the student body and having sex in the locker room, a Scooby-Doo-ish group of high school students is ready to fight back. The up-and-coming acting talent includes R&B singer Usher Raymond, Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Laura Harris, and Jordanna Brewster. The story is nearly irrelevant, as the real stars are the action and lots of special effects.

Three teenagers two-timed by a local lothario decide to turn the tables on him in this romantic comedy. John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe) is the big man on campus at his high school — he’s the captain and star player of the basketball team, he’s got money, he’s good-looking and charming, and he can have any girl he wants. However, the latter attribute is about to get him in serious trouble when three different girls at his school — Heather (Ashanti), Beth (Sophia Bush) and Carrie (Arielle Kebbel) — discover they’ve all been dating John at the same time. Determined to bring down the campus ladykiller, the girls devise a plan — they pick a cute but socially clumsy girl who is new at school, Kate (Brittany Snow), and give her a crash course in stealing John’s heart. Once Kate has John wrapped around her little finger, she’s supposed to drop him like a bad habit and give him a taste of what heartbreak is really like. However, it seems that the early stages of the plan work a little too well, and John and Kate end up falling for each other for real. John Tucker Must Die also stars Jenny McCarthy, Penn Badgley, and Dan Payne.

John Waters does a quirky spin on ’50s nostalgia in Cry-Baby, his musical homage to Rebel Without a Cause and Romeo and Juliet. Set in Baltimore in 1954 at the birth of rock & roll, the film features Johnny Depp as Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker. Depp is pure charisma as a juvenile delinquent with a permanent tear slithering down his cheek, a reminder of his state-executed parents. In the depths of his despair appears goody-goody girl Allison (Amy Locane), who has a sexual crush on Cry-Baby. But Allison’s Pat Boone-like boyfriend, Baldwin (Stephen E. Miller), the leader of the squares, is dead set against Cry-Baby and the rest of the juvenile delinquents and leads a revolt against them. In the resultant riot, the juvenile delinquents are blamed for the chaos, and Cry-Baby finds himself dispatched to reform school.

In this hit ’80s hybrid of the horror movie and the teen flick, a single mom and her two sons become involved with a pack of vampires when they move into an offbeat Northern California town. Lucy (Dianne Wiest) and her sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim), move to Santa Carla to live with Lucy’s lovable but curmudgeonly father (Barnard Hughes). Lucy gets a job from video store-owner Max (Edward Herrmann), then begins dating him, while Sam hangs out with Edward and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), a pair of vampire-obsessed comic-shop clerks. Soon Michael falls in with some actual vampires after becoming enamored of one of their victims: Star (Jami Gertz), a gypsy-like vixen who is trying to hold onto her humanity even though vampire leader David (Kiefer Sutherland) wants to play Peter Pan to her Wendy. When Michael visits the cavernous hangout of David and his cronies and unwittingly drinks from a wine bottle full of vampiric blood, he becomes an unwilling member of the bloodsucker biker gang. Soon, it’s up to Sam and the Frog brothers to destroy David and his ilk without killing Michael and Star. Shot on location in the coastal California town of Santa Cruz and directed by Hollywood pro Joel Schumacher, The Lost Boys became a pop-culture phenomenon thanks to its attractive young stars, offbeat soundtrack, and hip, clever marketing campaign; the film’s tagline — “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” — perfectly captured its knowing mixture of attitude and gore. The effects team who transformed Sutherland and company into snarling blood-suckers would go on to provide equally gruesome effects for Blade, another revisionist vampire flick, more than a decade later.

After parodying the blaxploitation films of the 1970s in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Keenen Ivory Wayans takes aim at slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s in this raunchy satire, which was produced under the clumsy but inarguably appropriate title Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween. As you might expect, a group of teenagers — not-terribly-bright Buffy (Shannon Elizabeth), her best friend Brenda (Regina Hall), stoner Shorty (Marlon Wayans), fey football player Ray (Shawn Wayans), loudmouthed Greg (Lochlyn Munro), sexually overexcited Bobby (Jon Abrahams), and his prim girlfriend Cindy (Anna Faris) — are on the run from a maniacal killer who is looking for revenge after the kids accidentally kill a man following an auto accident. They also find themselves having to contend with intrusive reporter Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) and eccentric high school principal Squiggly (David L. Lander). Incidentally, the title Scary Movie is something of an inside joke: it was the working title for Scream, the movie that kick-started the mid-’90s slasher film revival.

Adam Shankman’s adaptation of the stage musical Hairspray, itself an adaptation of the non-musical John Waters film of the same name, stars Nikki Blonsky as Tracy Turnblad, an overweight high-school student whose only dream is to be on a local Baltimore teen dance program. While her father (Christopher Walken) tells her to follow her dreams, her mother Edna (John Travolta in drag) reminds her that she doesn’t look like the girls on that show. After impressing the show’s host (James Marsden), Tracy earns a coveted spot on the program, but when she becomes a popular addition to the cast, she earns the wrath of the prettiest girl in school — a girl whose mother (Michelle Pfeiffer) just happens to operate the local television station. Tracy’s visit to detention hall opens her eyes to the racial tension on the show, as does the budding relationship between her best friend (Amanda Bynes) and an African-American boy named Seaweed (Elijah Kelley). Thus empowered, Tracy attempts to integrate the races on her favorite program.

Prolific television director Gary Nelson made the Walt Disney live-action comedy Freaky Friday, based on the novel by Mary Rodgers. Barbara Harris stars as suburban housewife Ellen Andrews, the wife of Bill (John Astin) and the mother of Annabel (Jodie Foster) and Ben (Sparky Marcus). Ellen just can’t understand what’s going on with teenaged Annabel, who hangs around the house making snappy remarks, eating ice cream for breakfast, and calling her brother Apeface. They each make a separate wish to be in the other’s place, and they get their wish on Friday 13th. Ellen has to go through the day as a kid, playing on the field hockey team and dealing with typing class. Annabel has to deal with grown-up problems like getting appliances fixed and preparing a banquet. The whole silly story ends with a wacky car-chase/water skiing/hang-gliding conclusion in keeping with other Disney movies of the day. Freaky Friday was remade twice with the same title, and spawned a whole subgenre of body-switching movies in the 1980s.

Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman, and Lindsay Lohan star in director Garry Marshall’s tale of a rebellious young woman who is sent to spend the summer with her grandmother when her frustrated mother fails to find a means of curbing her unruly behavior. Rachel (Lohan) is an out-of-control teen whose reckless drinking, foul mouth, and hysterical fits have become a constant source of embarrassment for her long-suffering mother, Lily (Huffman). When Rachel crashes her car, Lily determines that the only way to tame her savage daughter is to take her as far away from San Francisco as possible. Though Lily had once sworn never to return to the Idaho farm presided over by her demanding mother, Georgia (Jane Fonda), desperation has a funny way of dulling the pains of the past, and it’s not long before Lily is packing Rachel in the car and setting out for potato country. Contrary to the common image of the sweet and doting grandmother, Georgia is a stern matriarch whose beliefs in the power of God and a hard day’s work stand in stark contrast to the carefree lifestyle of the tempestuous Rachel. An interesting thing happens as the summer wears on, though; despite her initial efforts to disrupt the quiet Mormon community, Rachel’s rage is gradually tempered as she learns the value of structure and responsibility. Later, as Rachel’s protective walls begin to crumble and she begins to embrace compassion and kindness, the doors are opened for three generations of family to confront the long-buried secrets of their past and finally move forward in the healing process.

Former Prada model and Road Trip co-star D.J. Qualls makes a bid for leading man status in this nerd-makeover comedy. Qualls stars as Dizzy, a dorky but delinquent high school student who’s determined to get expelled from his hellish high school — but ends up landing in jail instead. There he meets the intimidating, street-smart Luther (Eddie Griffin), himself a former geek, who takes Dizzy under his wing to teach him the art of being cool. Soon Luther and his pals have broken Dizzy of his meek, maladroit ways, and Dizzy is ready to start a new life at a new high school under a new name: Gil Harris. When Gil arrives at East Highland High — his former inmate reputation known to all — he quickly ingratiates himself with the cool kids and lays to waste any jocks who stand in his way. He even manages to date the school’s most coveted girl, Danielle (Eliza Dushku). But when a face from his past shows up, it seems that his facade as the big man on campus may be about to crumble. The New Guy also stars Zooey Deschanel and Lyle Lovett, and features cameos from rockers Henry Rollins, Gene Simmons, and Tommy Lee.