Film Reviews

Heckle & Jeckle are looking for a place to build a bird house, and they decide to do so on McDougal's Rest Farm, which is reserved for peace and quiet. Dimwit, apparently the guard dog here, tries to stop all the racket.

An alien slave crashes lands in New York city while being pursued by two Men in Black bounty hunters. His attempt to find a place for himself on earth parallels that of the immigrant experience.

After transferring to a new school, a teenage girl finds her troubled past exposed when she innocently signs up for a singing club.

A strange animal attack turns a botanist into a bloodthirsty monster.

Grace Rhodes, who is studying to be a doctor, returns to her hometown as a strange illness is afflicting the local children. The symptoms include a high fever and spasms, but even weirder is what happens the next day: All those with the illness claim they are somebody else -- then they begin murdering the grown-ups. After her sister undergoes the same sinister metamorphosis, Grace comes to believe there is some connection to an evil cult figure who may be returning from the grave.

THE ACID HOUSE is a surreal triptych adapted by "Trainspotting" author Irvine Welsh from his acclaimed collection of short stories. Combining a vicious sense of humor with hard-talking drama, the film reaches into the hearts and minds of the chemical generation, casting a dark and unholy light into the hidden corners of the human psyche. Directed by Paul McGuigan, the film dramatises three stories from the book: 1- The Granton Star Cause, 2- A Soft Touch & 3- The Acid House.

Kay Kerrigan commits a murder and then changes her hair color, assumes a new identity and flees the country by ship. She's unaware that she's being followed by Sam Wye, a skirt chasing detective. The two soon develop a shipboard romance. Will Sam be able to bring Kay back to the States and likely imprisonment?

Inventor Thomas Edison's boyhood is chronicled and shows him as a lad whose early inventions and scientific experiments usually end up causing disastrous results. As a result, the towns folk all think Tom is crazy, and creating a strained relationship between Tom and his father. Toms only solace is his understanding mother who believes he's headed to do great things.

The Sheffield family reveal and go through some home truths as their middle child inherits the Foxworth mansion. The family's ghosts looming over, and more tragedies are in store as the curse lives on.

Dr. Allen Seward (Robert Francis) is assigned to a western cavalry post where his predecessors had been drunks and slackers. The post doesn't take kindly to him either, especially after he disregards regulations and tends to sick Indians on the malaria-infested reservation. The Indians break away from the reservation to move to a healthier higher ground, and when they join with the Comanches to besiege the fort, Seward is branded as a "woodhawk", the bird that turns against its own. Donna Reed is present as the niece of the post commander; Phil Carey is a cavalry captain that believes the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and May Wynn (who shared a screen debut with Francis in "The Caine Mutiny)is the white girl raised by the Indians and married to the chief's son. Francis would make only two more films before being killed in a 1955 plane crash.

José Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portayal of the swordsman-poet using his silver tongue to woo the woman he loves for another man. Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play is a fictionalization of his life that follows the broad outlines of it. The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, very close to the Alexandrine format, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene. The play has been translated and performed many times, and is responsible for introducing the word "panache" into the English language.

Ten years after a band of mercenaries first battled a vicious alien, the invisible creature from another world has returned to Earth -- and this time, it's drawn to the gang-ruled and ravaged city of Los Angeles. When it starts murdering drug dealers, detective-lieutenant Mike Harrigan and his police force set out to capture the creature, ignoring warnings from a mysterious government agent to stay away.

In the back country of South Africa, black minister Stephen Kumalo (Canada Lee) journeys to the city to search for his missing son, only to find his people living in squalor and his son a criminal. Reverend Misimangu (Sidney Poitier) is a young South African clergyman who helps find his missing son-turned-thief and sister-turned-prostitute in the slums of Johannesburg.

Old sailor Chris Christofferson eagerly awaits the arrival of his grown daughter Anna, whom he sent at five years old to live with relatives in Minnesota. He has not seen her since, but believes her to be a decent and respectably employed young woman. When Anna arrives, however, it is clear that she has lived a hard life in the dregs of society, and that much of spirit has been extinguished. She falls in love with a young sailor rescued at sea by her father, but dreads to reveal to him the truth of her past. Both father and young man are deluded about her background, yet Anna cannot quite bring herself to allow them to remain deluded.

A roughly beautiful Hilton! gives the viewer a glimpse of life in a modern society, a life that young persons lead.