From Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ===== The book opens with a prologue addressed directly to "The Reader", informing the reader of the fictional basis of the novel. The novel presents as a case file of Dr. Philip Outerbridge and attempts to "falsely" emphasize the fictional basis of the novel. The novel takes place in the middle of an unnamed war. The novel focuses on George Smith, an American soldier, transferred to the military psychiatric clinic, where Outerbridge works. Smith was brought to the clinic due to a confrontation with a superior officer. Smith was labeled psychotic and told to recount his story in the third person. Smith's autobiography takes up about half of the book, describing his childhood as the son of the town drunk. Smith is imprisoned for shoplifting, and eventually joins the army as a means of escaping an uncomfortable situation with his lover, Anna. The rest of the book consists of documents relating to Outerbridge's treatment of Smith, therapy sessions and correspondence between Outerbridge and his superior, the increasingly impatient Colonel Williams. Outerbridge believes Smith to be the most dangerous man in the hospital and deduces Smith to be a non-supernatural vampire who drinks blood at times of emotional crisis. The novel ends with an explanation of various potential and unrealized outcomes. ===== The story opens on Mama waiting in the yard for her oldest daughter, Dee’s, visit. She reflects on the differences between Dee and Maggie, her youngest daughter, and knows that Maggie will be anxious and self-conscious around Dee. Maggie was burned in a house fire that happened more than a decade ago. Mama carried her out in her arms, as Dee watched the house burn. Dee was seemingly happy and excited about the fire, due to her extreme dislike for the house. The narrator continues to paint a picture of Maggie as helpless and rather awkward, whereas Dee is beautiful and seems to have had an easier time in life. Dee left home to pursue an education in Augusta, afforded to her by Mama and the community’s fund raising efforts. Mama never attended school past second grade, and Maggie has a very limited reading ability, so Dee’s education is a stark difference and Mama seems to feel that starkness, commenting, “like dimwits, we seemed about to understand”. Mama discusses the physical differences between the three: her own manly looks, Maggie’s timid disposition, and Dee’s own nice hair, full figure, and stylish way of dress. When Dee finally arrives, she is accompanied by a man, whom Mama refers to as Hakim-a-barber. Mama and Maggie are a little taken aback by Dee's wild-looking outfit and her African greeting to them. Dee takes photos of Mama and Maggie in front of the house, and the greetings are stiff and unfamiliar. Dee informs her mother that she has now changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo in order to protest the oppression and cultural white washing Black Americans faced. Mama rejects this, telling Dee she was named after her Aunt Dicie, who in turn was named after Grandma Dee, and that the name went on through the generations. Dee gives Mama the option of not using her new name, and Mama concludes that Hakim-a-barber must be related to a family of Muslims down the road. Hakim-a- barber says he accepts some of the doctrines of his beef-raising family, but is not interested in farming or herding as a profession. Mama does not know whether Hakim-a-barber and Dee are married, nor does she ask. Hakim-a-barber has a restricted diet to follow, but Dee digs into the food Mama made. She begins asking for things around the house, like the top of a butter churn, and eventually she asks for two quilts as well. This quilt in particular is one that Mama had promised to Maggie, and Dee’s persistence frustrates Mama which develops into an argument between Mama and Dee. Dee argues that by using the quilt as a normal item, in “everyday use”, the quilt will be ruined, and the cultural importance will be lost. Mama would rather the item be used practically by her family and be ruined than have it sit on a shelf or be hung on a wall as a piece of art, and as Dee readies to leave, she tells Mama that Mama doesn’t understand her own heritage. She adds that Mama should try and improve, and that there is a new path for Black Americans to follow. Maggie and Mama sit in the yard after watching them drive off, until bedtime. ===== The mysterious Don Del Oro ("Lord of Gold"), an idol of the Yaqui, emerges and attacks the gold trade of the Republic of Mexico, intent on becoming Emperor. A man named Francisco is put in charge of a fighting legion to combat the Yaqui tribe and protect the gold; he is attacked by men working for Don Del Oro. Francisco's partner recognizes Zorro as the hidalgo Don Diego Vega. Francisco asks Diego, as Zorro, to take over the fighting legion and defeat Don Del Oro. ===== In dealing with genetic memory, Pavlou has drawn on both the nature of lineage, and the nature of self. Several characters all stem from the same source, and so as their memories become unlocked during the course of the novel, they each identify with being the same person at a distant point in history. The question of identity then becomes fundamental to the plot. If each character shares the same memories are they a reincarnation of that original person, or merely an echo? The novel is further complicated in that it is told backwards, using a Police procedural as the structure of the novel, memories are unlocked in the form of flashbacks, each flashback delving further and further back in time over the course of 3000 years. Told in alternating first person and third person, the novel is divided into a prologue and seven "books", the seven trials of Cyclades. The opening page begins with the first 27 lines of the Human Genome. Thereafter the prologue lays out the death of Cyclades during the Trojan War, and makes it clear that his death is merely the beginning of the journey. Told in first person, Cyclades, a Greek warrior, is mortally wounded. A Sybil forces him to have sex to continue his line, whereupon he dies for the first time in the book. Book One, shifts to third person and jumps to the year 2004. In New York City Detective James North has been called to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to deal with a mentally unstable man who has run amok amid the exhibits. ===== Ostensibly set in the near future, the film tells the life story of an elderly man named Thomas Van Hasebroeck (who has dubbed himself Toto, after a childhood fantasy), looking back on his ordinary, apparently uneventful life in a complex mosaic of flashbacks, interspersed with fantasies about how events might have turned out differently. It is not always possible to tell the difference between embellished or manufactured memories and fantasies, as Thomas is a very unreliable narrator, but some scenes (such as the narrative thread that features Toto as a secret agent) are definitely fantasized. Thomas firmly believes his life to have been "stolen" from him by Alfred Kant, born at the same time as Thomas, who Thomas believes was inadvertently switched with himself as a baby (characteristically, the film remains ambiguous as to whether this substitution ever actually happened, with Thomas' only substantiation being his apparent vivid memory of the day he was born). Thomas' jealousy of Alfred has overshadowed all his life, often with tragic consequences for his loved ones, and he is plotting revenge. Throughout most of the film, his intended revenge takes the shape of a plot to kill Alfred, but in the end Thomas finds a more creative and surprising way to "take back" his life. ===== The film tells the story of the ghosts of two children who are cursed to remain forever on a Cape Cod beach and in a 19th-century era lighthouse. After 100 years, they meet two children visiting the beach and take them to the lighthouse, hoping to turn them into ghosts like them. ===== Sabarivasan (Vijayakanth) is a doctor by profession but could not tolerate injustice by any means. Nandhini (Jyothirmayi), a college student meets Sabari and falls in love with him, eventually, the two get married. Vajravelu (Pradeep Rawat) is a local goon working for a minister (Mahadevan). Vajravelu's brother-in-law Ezhumalai (Aryan) is arrested by the police for a brutal murder. While trying to escape on the way to court, he gets shot by a policeman. Vajravelu's henchmen take Ezhumalai to Sabari and threaten him to operate. Sabari operates and removes the bullet, but he beats all the henchmen up and produces Ezhumalai to the police. Ezhumalai is then sentenced to the death penalty by the court and is hanged. Vajravelu gets angry and vows to revenge. Vajravelu comes out in bail and kills Sabari's father (Delhi Ganesh). He also kidnaps Nandhini. Sabari fights against Vajravelu and saves Nandhini. On the way back to the hospital, Sabari is stabbed by Vajravelu's wife (Aishwarya). Vajravelu and his henchmen arrive and injure Sabari. They leave the place thinking Sabari is dead, but he is saved and admitted in a hospital. Knowing this, Vajravelu comes in search of Sabari. But Sabari fights them back and kills Vajravelu. ===== The book relates the outdoor adventures and play of two families of children. These involve sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy. The Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger) are staying at a farm near a lake in the Lake District of England, during the school holidays. They sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow and meet the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. The Walkers camp on an island in the lake, while the Blacketts live in their house nearby. When the children meet, they agree to join forces against a common enemy – the Blacketts' uncle Jim Turner whom they call "Captain Flint" (after the parrot in Treasure Island). Turner, normally an ally of his nieces, has withdrawn from their company to write his memoirs, and has become decidedly unfriendly. Furthermore, when the Blacketts let off a firework on his houseboat roof, it is the Walkers who get the blame. He refuses even to listen when they try to pass on a warning to him about burglars in the area. To determine who should be the overall leader in their campaign against Captain Flint, the Blacketts and the Walkers have a contest to see which can capture the others' boat. As part of their strategy, the Walkers make a dangerous crossing of the lake by night, and John is later cautioned by his mother for this reckless act. The Walkers nevertheless win the contest – thanks to Titty who seizes the Amazon when the Blacketts come to Wild Cat Island. During the same night Titty hears suspicious voices coming from a different island – Cormorant Island – and in the morning it transpires that Turner's houseboat has been burgled. Turner again blames the Walkers, but is finally convinced that he is mistaken and feels he was wrong to distance himself from his nieces' adventures all summer. The Swallows, Amazons and Turner investigate Cormorant Island, but they cannot find Turner's missing trunk. The following day, there is a mock battle between Turner and the children, after which Turner is tried for his crimes and forced to walk the plank on his own houseboat. They agree at the post-battle feast that on the final day of their holidays, Titty and Roger will go back to Cormorant Island while the others go fishing. Titty finds the trunk, which contains the memoirs on which Turner had been working, and is rewarded with Turner's green parrot. James Turner appears in some ways to be modelled on Ransome himself. The story, set in August 1929, includes a good deal of everyday Lakeland life from the farmers to charcoal burners working in the woods; corned beef, which the children fancifully refer to as pemmican, and ginger beer and lemonade, which they call grog, appear as regular food stuff for the campers; island life also allows for occasional references to the story of Robinson Crusoe. ===== Chandler, dressed up for his and Monica's ten-month anniversary, picks up some pizzas that delivery girl Caitlin has brought for the group, but Ross mistakes his friend's natural jokes for flirting, which Chandler denies. Phoebe points out that the real reason Ross is mad is because he finds Caitlin attractive, and Ross takes the opportunity to flirt with her when he finds a missing vegetarian pizza for Phoebe. Ross makes inappropriate comments to Caitlin and saddened by his effort, he orders another pizza and practices flirting with Phoebe. Caitlin arrives with the pizza, but Ross screws up the flirting again, ending up talking to her about gas and methane. He scares her so much that she pays for the pizza herself and flees the apartment. Out of pity for Ross, Rachel catches up with Caitlin and tries to talk her into going out with Ross. Rachel returns to the apartment and gives Ross Caitlin's phone number. Meanwhile, Joey introduces everyone to his Italian grandmother, who is deeply intent on seeing her grandson debut on Law & Order. As she does not speak a word of English, they find it difficult to communicate with her, except for Phoebe, who manages to offer her a glass of water in Italian. The TV show starts, but Joey finds out that he has been cut out of it. Desperate not to shock his grandmother, he records a crude clip of himself on tape at his apartment in a crime scene where he holds his duck hostage. But the clip is good enough for Nonni – until the tape continues rolling, showing Chandler sing "Space Oddity" in front of the camera. Monica, getting dressed for the big anniversary date, asks Phoebe to return the earrings that Chandler bought her, which Phoebe borrowed some time ago. It turns out, however, that Phoebe lent the same earrings to Rachel, who has lost one of them. Phoebe tells her how the earrings are Monica's, which makes Rachel flip out because she is not allowed to borrow Monica's stuff as she ends up losing it. Fearing that Monica will kill her if she finds out, Phoebe takes the blame instead of Rachel, but Monica is understanding with her. Rachel steps in and explains everything to Monica, who immediately loses it with Rachel. Monica ends up wearing another pair of earrings, which luckily for her, Chandler doesn't notice. Monica and Chandler leave for dinner, and Chandler thanks Ross for the earrings he picked up for Monica. ===== The protagonist is referred to in the story as Kochan, which is the diminutive of the author's real name: Kimitake. Being raised during Japan's era of right-wing militarism and Imperialism, he struggles from a very early age to fit into society. Like Mishima, Kochan was born with a less-than-ideal body in terms of physical fitness and robustness, and throughout the first half of the book (which generally details Kochan's childhood) struggles intensely to fit into Japanese society. A weak homosexual, Kochan is kept away from boys his own age as he is raised, and is thus not exposed to the norm. His isolation likely led to his future fascinations and fantasies of death, violence, and same-sex intercourse. In this way of thinking, some have posited that Mishima is similar. Kochan is homosexual, and in the context of Imperial Japan he struggles to keep it to himself. In the early portion of the novel, Kochan does not yet openly admit that he is attracted to men, but indeed professes that he admires masculinity and strength while having no interest in women. This includes an admiration for Roman sculptures and statues of men in dynamic physical positions. Some have argued that the admiration of masculinity is autobiographical of Mishima, himself having worked hard through a naturally weak body to become a superbly fit body builder and male model. In the first chapter of the book, Kochan recalls a memory of a picture book from when he was four years old. Even at that young age, Kochan approached a single picture of a heroic-looking European knight on horseback almost as pornography, gazing at it longingly and hiding it away, embarrassed, when others come to see what he is doing. When his nurse tells him that the knight is actually Joan of Arc, Kochan, wanting the knight to be a paragon of manliness, is immediately and forever put off by the picture, annoyed that a woman would dress in man's clothing. The word 'mask' comes from how Kochan develops his own false personality that he uses to present himself to the world. Early on, as he develops a fascination with his friend Omi's body during puberty, he believes that everybody around him is also hiding their true feelings from each other, everybody participating in a 'reluctant masquerade'. As he grows up, he tries to fall in love with a girl named Sonoko, but is continuously tormented by his latent homosexual urges, and is unable to ever truly love her. ===== When asked why the film is called Out 1, Rivette responded, "I chose 'Out' as the opposite of the vogue word 'in', which had caught on in France and which I thought was silly. The action of the film is rather like a serial which could continue through several episodes, so I gave it the number 'One'." From the starting image of a small group of actors lying down with their legs bent back toward themselves, Rivette again focuses his film on rehearsals for a play, a motif present in both L'amour fou and his debut feature Paris nous appartient (1960); in particular, he extends L'amour fou's relentless reportage-style examination of the continual development of a play under rehearsal (in that case Jean Racine's Andromaque) and its effects on the director and his wife. In the case of Out 1, the two main anchors of the film are two different theater groups each rehearsing a different Aeschylus play (Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound), and the film does not particularly privilege any character within these groups more than any other. External to these two groups, two outsiders peripheral to the theater are featured: Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a young man who believes that there may be a real-life Thirteen group in operation, and Frédérique (Juliet Berto), a young swindler who happens to steal letters which may prove to be communication between members of the Thirteen. Other featured characters include Emilie (Bulle Ogier), who runs a local hangout under the name Pauline and whose husband, Igor, has been missing for six months. Michael Lonsdale plays Thomas, the director of the Prometheus Bound group, and there are cameos by directors Barbet Schroeder and Éric Rohmer, who plays a Balzac professor in a scene of both plot exposition and comic relief. The first few hours of the film alternate between documentary-style scenes observing the two troupes' rehearsals, Colin soliciting money from cafe patrons as a deaf man by playing irritating harmonica tunes, and Frédérique stealing money through a variety of deceptions. The plot gradually develops when Colin receives three mysterious messages in quick succession containing cryptic references to "the Thirteen" and to Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. He quickly connects this to Balzac and begins a quixotic quest to uncover what the messages mean and who the Thirteen are. Sometime afterward, Frédérique casually interrupts a businessman, Etienne, playing chess against himself at home; when she has the room to herself briefly, she attempts to locate a stash of money but instead steals a collection of letters. Sensing that they refer to some sort of secret society, she attempts to sell them to several of the correspondents in exchange for either money or more information on the group, but fails to gain any information. Only Emilie buys the letters, but only because they refer to her husband. The Seven Against Thebes production takes on a newcomer, Renaud, to assist in the production, but he quickly begins to take over more and more of the creative direction of the piece from Lili, who recedes into the background in disgust. Their fortunes appear high when Quentin wins a million francs at the races, but during the ensemble's celebration, Renaud steals all the cash; the production is cancelled and the members undertake a futile search for Renaud, spreading out all across Paris with a photo of him to try to discover his whereabouts. Thomas brings in old friend Sarah to help work through a creative block on Prometheus Bound, but she instead causes a rift within the group and the play is abandoned after another player leaves for unrelated reasons. It turns out that Thomas's block was largely due to his break-up with Lili after being with her personally and professionally for seven years. Thomas also is revealed to be a key member of the Thirteen, although the group never really was fully functional and had agreed to go into a period of dormancy two years earlier. Ironically, a chance encounter between Colin and Thomas motivates the latter to suggest reviving the Thirteen to Etienne, who is reluctant because the group never really did anything to begin with. One of the main correspondents in Etienne's letters, Pierre, is frequently discussed but never seen, and is described alternately as sinister and childlike. After reading the contents of the letters sold to her by Frédérique, Emilie prepares packages to be sent to major Parisian newspapers containing photocopies of these letters and purporting to disclose the existence of a scandal involving Pierre setting up Igor. Since Pierre and Igor are both members of the Thirteen, members of the group are forced to reconstitute to prevent the disclosure, and Thomas, Etienne and the ruthless lawyer Lucie de Graffe (Françoise Fabian) meet to discuss what to do. Frédérique eventually meets up with the young man that her gay friend Honey Moon (Michel Berto) is infatuated with, who turns out to be Renaud; the two become married in a blood ritual, but she suspects that he may be a member of another secret society even more sinister than the Thirteen. After seeing him associate with a local gang, she draws a gun on him, but warns him – causing him to turn around and shoot instantly, killing her. Colin gives up on the idea of the Thirteen, while it is quietly suggested during a discussion between two other members of the Thirteen, Lucie de Graffe and the cynical professor named Warok (Jean Bouise), that perhaps Pierre was the author of the messages to Colin and has been the invisible hand behind much of the plot, because he misses the Thirteen and wants to either restore it or replace it with young blood like Colin. Several of the characters retreat in the end to Emilie's small seaside house in Normandy called "the Obade" (another Balzacian reference, see "Ferragus"), where she breaks down in front of Sarah, confessing her love for Colin (who had been courting her earlier) and Igor at the same time. Her dilemma is solved at the end, when she receives a call from Igor telling her to meet him in Paris. She and Lili set off for Paris. Thomas remains behind on the beach at the Obade with two of his actors and has a drunken hysterical episode there, when he pretends to collapse on the sand. His actors are worried and frantically try to revive him. When he reveals his jest, they walk away in disgust and get in the car to go back to Paris. Thomas is left alone on the beach, crying and laughing at the same time, stranded at the Obade and for the first time in the film, part of no group whatsoever. The film then quickly cuts to a completely unrelated shot of Marie, an actress from the Thebes group who still seems to be searching for the missing Renaud and the money he stole. A golden statute of a Greek goddess, perhaps Athena, towers above her. The shot is held for a second before fading out. ===== The plot of Murphy follows an eponymous "seedy solipsist" who lives in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment in West Brompton. The novel opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark. This seems to be a habit for Murphy, who in carrying out the ritual attempts to enter a near-if-not- totally-nonexistent state of being (possibly something akin to sensory deprivation), which he finds pleasurable. Later on, Murphy's "meditation" is juxtaposed with conversations he has with his friend and mentor Neary, an eccentric from Cork who has the ability to stop his heart—an ability or condition which Neary calls the "Apmonia" (a play on the Greek word for "harmony"), sometimes referred to as "Isonomy" or the "Attunement". The book states that this is a "mediation between... extremes" of heart attack and heart failure, allowing Neary to enter a state of survivable cardiac arrest at will. An early conversation between Neary and Murphy is spurred by some type of revelation Neary receives during one of these routine heart-stopping sessions, and the two are prompted to discuss their respective romantic lives. At this point the story diverges to Celia Kelly, Murphy's lover, a prostitute and concerned friend. Murphy is urged by Celia to find a job, and begins work as a nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in north London, finding the insanity of the patients an appealing alternative to conscious existence. Murphy, gone to ground in London lodgings and then in the hospital, is pursued by a ragtag troupe of eccentrics from his own country, each with their own often-conflicting motivations. Neary, a practitioner of eastern mysticism, seeks Murphy as a love rival and then as compatible friend in the absence of all others. Miss Counihan's attachment to Murphy is romantic. Among Wylie's motivations, Miss Counihan is perhaps the strongest. And Cooper, Neary's simpleton servant and fixer, joins the trail for money, alcohol, and to serve his master. ===== After the mission from Supercop, Inspector Yang participates in neutralizing a terrorist incident during which she narrowly survives, and is awarded the Highest Distinction for the mission. Her boyfriend Chang, a war veteran who works as a security guard and bravely helped Yang in her mission, is frustrated that Yang gets an mere medal for risking her life. Growing disillusioned with the prospects in Mainland China, the ambitious Chang leaves for Hong Kong, promising to one day come back a millionaire and marry Yang. Some time later, the Hong Kong police encounters a heavily armed gang of highly trained robbers. Suspecting them to be ex-militaries from the Mainland, the police asked for assistance from the Chinese Public Security. Yang is dispatched to Hong Kong to provide intelligence sharing, working with Inspector Lee, who has an awkward crush on Yang. Yang helps Lee track down the robbers' safehouse. Although the robbers have rigged explosives in the building to ambush the police, Chang, who leads the gang, hesitates after seeing Yang, resulting in one of their member being killed and another arrested. In order to free the arrested man, who is a demolition specialist crucial to an upcoming heist, Chang contacts Yang and rekindles their relationship, and manages to stage a successful breakout. Yang suspects Chang's part in the crime, but cannot bring herself to accuse Chang. She is then ordered to return to Mainland, although she convinces Lee to let her stay on the case. The robbers then perform a daring heist on the Central Bank, masterminded by Roger Davidson, the designer of the Bank's vault security. After successfully breaking into the vault, Davidson double-crosses Chang's gang. Chang survives the betrayal and chases down Davidson's crew in an underwater subway tunnel, killing Davidson's men and mortally wounding Davidson. Yang, who has infiltrated the bank during the heist, arrives and confronts Chang, trying to convince him to surrender. When Chang is distracted by Yang, the dying Davidson detonates a bomb, causing the tunnel to flood. Knowing his injury will only hinder their survival, Chang pushes Yang and Lee past the lock gate, sacrificing his own life for the person he loved. ===== Ryan Flynn (Ryan Kelley) is a young boy who, traumatized by the death of his father, has not spoken aloud or exercised his imagination since. While on a walk with a friend, Ryan falls from a bridge and apparently drowns. He finds himself in a parallel universe called the Dust Factory, which houses all humans who are on the verge of death, but have yet to die. The Dust Factory's topography is immense, encompassing lakes, forests, mountains, and a wide field covered by dry grass. In the center of the Dust Factory is a circus pavilion whose Ringmaster is a figure of some authority and dread. Each person dwelling in the Dust Factory must enter the circus pavilion and make a leap (a literal leap of faith) across the arena into the arms of a trapeze artist to proceed into death or return to life. The latter decision occurs when a participant falls into the arena during the leap, leaving behind a pile of dust which marks the passage, gives the realm its name, and when disturbed allows the one doing so to enter a hidden chamber where they play a game of the individual's choosing against the Ringmaster. In the Factory, Ryan regains his voice and is reunited with his grandfather (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose Alzheimer's disease has (in his real life) prevented him from communicating with his family. The grandfather, who is apparently knowledgeable about the inner workings of the Dust Factory, advises and tells him stories. The stories he tells, which outwardly appear to convey no obvious meaning, contain hidden parables that Ryan must solve. The theme of belief and hope versus cynicism or despair surfaces in relation to one of these. Throughout the main body of the plot, Ryan spends a single endless day exploring the Dust Factory under weather conditions that are always favorable to wandering through the environments and marveling at natural beauty. He is guided by his grandfather and accompanied by a girl of his own age called Melanie Lewis (Hayden Panettiere), who has been in the Dust Factory for years, lacks any memory of her previous life, and lives under the illusion that the climate is of perpetual winter, despite the appearance to Ryan and the viewer of interminable summer. Melanie and Ryan, under the eye of Ryan's grandfather, become intimate friends. Their time is passed in an emotional atmosphere of joy and discovery, mitigated only by the influence of the mysterious Ringmaster, who interferes several times with their activity, and by Melanie's conflict with Ryan's grandfather, who wishes Ryan to make the leap across the arena and thereby contradicts Melanie's desire that all things remain as they are forever. Matters gradually reach a climax, after which Ryan's grandfather makes the leap and dies. Subsequently, against Melanie's wishes (who does not want to be left alone in the Dust Factory), Ryan makes the leap himself, but falls into the pile of dust and is sent back to life. Melanie then defies her own delusion of continual winter and makes the decision to determine her own fate. Having returned to life, Ryan resurfaces from beneath the water and is rescued by his friend. Although he no longer has any conscious memory of the Dust Factory, it seems to be present in his subconscious, as implied by the facts that he has regained his voice, and a general feeling of joy in life. He subsequently encounters Melanie, who in real life has recovered from a cerebral aneurysm. Although neither Ryan or Melanie has any conscious memory of the other, they appear to subconsciously recognize each other. ===== The plot begins in medias res with a mute Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) locked inside a trailer preparing his best cock for an upcoming fight. He slices the chicken's beak slightly so that it looks cracked in order to obtain higher betting odds in the upcoming fight. He bets his trailer, his girlfriend, and the remainder of his money with fellow cocker Jack (Harry Dean Stanton). Mansfield loses the fight (ironically because of the cracked beak), almost all of his belongings, and is set on a rambling path to win the Cockfighter of the Year award. Frank visits his home town, his family farm, and his long-time fiancée Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy). Mary Elizabeth has long grown tired of Mansfield's cockfighter ways and asks him to settle down with her. Frank decides in favor of cockfighting, leaves Mary Elizabeth, sells the family farm for money to reinvest in chickens, and starts a partnership with Omar Baradinsky (Richard B. Shull). The partnership takes them all the way to the cockfighting championships. ===== It's a "typical day" in Dogpatch, U. S. A., a hillbilly town where Abner Yokum lives with his parents. Mammy Yokum insists on giving Abner his daily dose of "Yokumberry tonic," although he is fully-grown. He has a crush on Daisy Mae Scragg (although he resists marrying her) and she on him; Abner's rival for her affections is the World's Dirtiest Rassler, Earthquake McGoon. Sadie Hawkins Day is approaching. On this day the "girls chase the men and marries whomstever [sic] they catches," as Senator Jack S. Phogbound puts it. However, the citizens of Dogpatch find out that their town has been declared the most unnecessary place in the country—and will be the target of an atom bomb, since the nuclear testing site near Las Vegas is allegedly spoiling things for the wealthy gamblers there. Dogpatch people at first are pleased about leaving. They change their minds when Mammy Yokum points out some of the horrible, awful customs they'll have to adapt to, like regular bathing and (worst of all) going to work for a living. Now anxious to remain, the Dogpatchers try to muster something necessary about their town to save it. The government scientist in charge of the bomb testing, Dr. Rasmussen T. Finsdale, rejects all of their suggestions. However, Mammy brings forth her "Yokumberry Tonic," the substance that has made Abner the handsome, muscular, strapping specimen that he is. The only tree in the whole world that grows Yokumberries exists in the Yokums' front yard. Thus, the town of Dogpatch will become "indispensable" to the outside world. Meanwhile, a greedy business magnate named General Bullmoose covets the tonic as well, since he could market it (as "Yoka-Cola," he tells Abner) and uses his wiles to get the tonic dishonestly. This involves Appassionata von Climax, the general's mistress. He cooks up a scheme to get Ms. von Climax to marry Li'l Abner, after which Abner would be killed and von Climax would become owner of the tonic, "by community property" , and turn it over to Bullmoose. He orders von Climax to enter the race on Sadie Hawkins Day. She catches Li'l Abner (with help from Evil Eye Fleegle) and Daisy Mae ends up heartbroken. But then Daisy, Mammy, Pappy and Marryin' Sam discover (through Mammy's "Conjurin' Power") what General Bullmoose is up to; Daisy promises to marry McGoon if he helps them to save Abner's life. McGoon agrees, and rounds up practically everyone in Dogpatch to go to Washington on the rescue mission. McGoon and the other Dogpatchers disrupt the society party at which Abner is supposed to drink a toast as a prelude to suffering the whammy—and the whammy-giver, Evil Eye Fleagle, says it won't work unless the subject has drunk liquor. So Bullmoose calls for a champagne toast. Fleagle strikes with his 'Truth Whammy' but McGoon deflects the whammy with a silver platter—and the whammy hits Bullmoose, who confesses his scheme. Yokumberry Tonic is a failure: although it made the subjects healthy and muscular, they don't care about romance...to their wives' chagrin. (This also explains why Abner has resisted marrying Daisy for so long.) Back at Dogpatch — with the tonic rejected, the bombing is on again — the wedding of McGoon and Daisy Mae is on; Romeo Scragg and his kin are armed to keep Marryin' Sam from stalling. Daisy Mae has a plan of her own—she shows McGoon the rest of her Scragg relatives (including "Priceless and Liceless" Scragg, and the "Bar Harbor Scraggs," who've been "barred from every harbor in the country") and he backs out. Dr. Finsdale orders the wedding stopped in order to evacuate. Pappy Yokum and some of the other Dogpatchers start to pull down an equestrian statue of Jubilation T. Cornpone (the town's founder) from a tall pedestal, claiming they won't leave without it. A stone tablet falls, and it turns out to carry an inscription ordered by Abraham Lincoln, who has declared the city of Dogpatch a "National Shrine" because of Cornpone's incompetence as a Confederate General. Abner points out "You can't bomb a national shrine" and Finsdale relents, cancelling the bombing and leaving Abner and Daisy free to marry. ===== Before the events of Killers of the Dawn, Darren returns to the Cirque du Freak with Harkat, and after many months of numbness, finally breaks down and accepts Mr Crepsley's passing. Several months later, Debbie Hemlock and Police Chief Alice Burgess arrive at the Circus, wishing to create a human army to combat the Vampets. Darren and Harkat agree to act as buffers with the Vampire Princes to help, but before they can set off, Mr. Tiny appears. Harkat's nightmares have returned; it is time for the Little Person to discover his former identity, or fall into madness. When Mr. Tiny informs Darren that Harkat has little hope of success without him, he decides to join his friend, leaving the two women to make their own way to Vampire Mountain. Darren and Harkat walk through a mysterious portal to a strange, desolate world. Mr. Tiny informs them to head west until they come reach the territory of a black panther they must kill to find a clue. The pair narrowly succeed, and retrieve a map from the panther's skin. They also find the panther's teeth are inscribed with letters that spell Harkat's name, but learn nothing more. The map tells them they must head to a swamp of a giant toad to grab some "gelatinous globes". They retrieve them, but Darren is attacked by alligators as he tries to escape. He is unexpectedly saved by Lady Evanna, who offers to trek with them until they reach a giant lake and assist them with fashioning a boat to cross it. Evanna then leaves, telling them to collect holy liquid from the 'Temple of the Grotesque' on the other side. As the voyage comes to an end they are attacked by a dragon, and barely escape with their lives. Darren wakes up in the home of a pirate and drunkard named Spits Abrams, who has no idea how he came to this world from the 1930s, and has been informed by Mr. Tiny that Darren and Harkat, the first human-like creatures he has seen since he arrived, are a chance for him to fulfill his dreams. Although neither trusts the man, they decide to let him join them in their quest, partly to use his fishing net to retrieve Harkat's soul, but also to give Darren a supply of blood. The three soon come across a tribe they dub Kulashkas (they are chanting "kulashka" more than any other word), who look strangely similar to the Guardians of the Blood from Vampire Mountain, and indulge in human sacrifice to feed the monstrous Grotesque, milking the monster's fangs for its venom, the holy liquid, stored in vials. Darren and Harkat enter the temple to extract these vials, but are discovered by the Kulashkas and are then attacked by the Grotesque. The Kulashkas eventually call the beast off, offering Darren and Harkat safe passage if they leave without the vials. The pair attempt to comply, but Spits drunkenly intervenes, stealing and throwing Harkat's vial at the monster. The vial smashes, and the explosive venom blows the Grotesque apart, causing the temple to collapse. Darren, Harkat and Spits escape by smashing through the floor and falling into darkness. They end up in a tunnel, following it until they reach what appears to be a fallout shelter, with drinks and food in a fridge. A note signed by Mr. Tiny informs them that a short walk will take them to the Lake of Souls. Harkat discovers some postcards that seem to bother him, but he does not explain why. They soon arrive at a valley where the Lake lies, which is also the home of five dragons. Darren and Harkat figure out that they should make bombs, filling the 'gelatinous globes' with the Grotesque venom to frighten the dragons away. As they reach the lakeside, the dragons stop attacking. Spits explains when Mr. Tiny brought him here, he told him that a spell prevents the dragons to be closer than eight metres to the Lake unless a living person fell into it. He reveals that he is a cannibal, who fed his crew members meat butchered from those fished out of the sea. Spits vows to stay by the Lake of Souls, feeding off victims for the rest of his life. Darren and Harkat refuse to allow him to carry out his plan, and in the struggle that follows, Spits is accidentally knocked out the eight metre zone. A dragon sets the pirate on fire and he falls into the lake, breaking the spell. While being ruthlessly attacked, Harkat pulls up his former identity, revealed to be Kurda Smahlt. The world freezes and Mr. Tiny appears to congratulate them and spirits the trio away, explaining that Harkat was created to help protect Darren for Mr. Tiny's plans, Kurda being chosen because he was Darren's friend in life. Mr. Tiny then informs them that, since Kurda and Harkat are of the same soul, only one can normally survive. Although Mr. Tiny had a means of protecting Harkat's soul when he and Kurda lived in the present at the same time, no such mechanism is in place now, and Harkat will soon disappear, albeit with a guaranteed escape from the Lake of Souls. Kurda eventually decides to sacrifice himself to allow Harkat to carry on his life, with Harkat choosing to risk a possible return to the Lake so he can carry on helping Darren in his quest. As Kurda prepares for his second death, Darren and Harkat return to their world, arriving at the Cirque du Freak. Harkat discovers the panther teeth also spell the name KURDA SMAHLT; Harkat's name is an anagram and the answer was in front of them all along. Harkat also takes out the postcards, pointing the time and date it was sent, noting that it was all dated twelve, twenty, thirty, and fifty years later. Harkat then reveals his theory: that the barren land they had visited was the future. ===== The movie opens with a scene that fans know all too well: Ryoko and Ayeka begin to fight over chores, and Tenchi runs into the forest after they demand he makes a choice between the two of them. He stumbles upon a huge tree covered in strange flowers, and suddenly vanishes without a trace. Tenchi has a strange dream of floating through nothingness while surrounded by the flowers he saw before, and wakes up to find himself a completely different person. He's several years older, has long hair, and lives with a beautiful young woman named Haruna. Tenchi shrugs off his old life as a dream and enters a new one with Haruna. The film jumps ahead six months. Tenchi's family and friends have been searching in vain for him, and the stress is building. His father Nobuyuki has filed a missing-person report, Mihoshi and Kiyone have infiltrated the Science Academy to look for clues, Sasami has returned to Jurai, and Ryoko and Ayeka have moved to Tokyo to continue the search. Ayeka and Ryoko have become shadows of their former selves: depressed, brooding, and sometimes angry. To pay for their food and lodgings, they've become waitresses at a small diner during the day, and every spare moment is spent showing Tenchi's picture to passersby, looking for some glimmer of hope. After a chance encounter with Tenchi and Haruna, the girls report back to Washu, who realizes that Tenchi has been drawn into a parallel world very close to ours. A plan to find and bring him back is set into motion. Meanwhile, Tenchi is beginning to get severe headaches, which for some reason coincide with his fleeting memories of his real life. Haruna becomes very upset when he starts to subconsciously draw crude pictures of Ryoko. To comfort her, Tenchi takes her out to buy engagement rings for one another, and stops for dinner at Ryoko and Ayeka's restaurant. When Ryoko tries to address them, there is no response, and her attempts to touch Tenchi pass right through him, making his headache worse. Tenchi and Haruna fade away to nothingness, leaving Ayeka and Ryoko confused and upset. Washu and Katsuhito have an encounter in the wilderness, and the old shrine master admits he knows what's happening. Haruna was the name of the woman he left Jurai with, but she died on the way to Earth. The huge tree that Tenchi encountered before he vanished grew from the spot that Haruna's body was buried. Katsuhito explains that her soul must have been very lonely, and drew Tenchi into another world to recapture the love she had lost (due to Tenchi's resemblance to Katsuhito/Yosho at that age). With this new information, Washu finalizes her plan. With the power of the trees Katsuhito planted over the years, Washu creates a doorway into Haruna's world, and Ryoko and Ayeka enter. Confronting Haruna and Tenchi, they try to bring him back, but his altered memories confuse him, and Tenchi sternly rebukes the two. With her power over the parallel world, Haruna banishes them back to our Earth. Devastated by Tenchi's rejection, Ryoko begins to cry. Haruna has been draining Tenchi's Jurai Power to keep her world stable, and he begins to feel the effects. The world begins to fade away when Tenchi remembers more about his past, and Haruna cannot hide discrepancies of the "perfect world" from him (such as a maxed-out bank account despite her meager earnings and his lack of a job). Her method of restarting the day (and Tenchi's memories) after something goes wrong stops working just as Katsuhito confronts his past and slashes into Haruna's tree with his lightsword, channeling his essence into her soul. Haruna recognizes her true love Yosho, and remembers why she took Tenchi away in the first place: as a substitute for Yosho. Yosho and Haruna leave together, Katsuhito reappearing in front of the ruined tree, and Tenchi finally remembers who he is. Without Haruna's presence, her world begins to vanish, and Tenchi has no way of escaping. Washu can only send one person to rescue Tenchi, and Ayeka tells Ryoko to go. After a bit of relieved banter, Ryoko lifts Tenchi into the sky to teleport them back to the real world, and he looks back down on his false life, "ready to leave it behind". A shot of Haruna's table shows the rings they purchased together, left behind by both individuals as they leave the charade she kept up for so long. The movie closes as we examine the Masaki household returning to normal life. Tenchi has become young again, his hair short and spiky as it was. Though he does not remember his experiences in the parallel world, he has taken up drawing like his older alter ego, because he likes the way it makes him feel. Just before the credits roll, Tenchi and Ryoko enjoy a quiet moment together as the wind shakes the trees, mirroring a scene involving Tenchi's parents in Tenchi Muyo in Love. ===== A newlywed wakes up to find he can transform people and objects using the power of his mind. An American media conglomerate wishes to harness this power. ===== In 2050, British housewife Gertrude Noah wins a cookery competition, and the prize is a tour of Britannia Seven, the UK's new Space Exploration Vehicle. In the pilot episode, the craft is accidentally sent blasting off into space with Mrs Noah and a small crew on it. The series then centres on efforts to bring Mrs Noah back to Earth. The news bulletins on Earth, read by Gorden Kaye, revealed countries like the United States and Germany had to turn to Britain, the most successful nation on Earth, for help. After a failed effort to nudge the craft into the Earth's atmosphere, the series concluded with Mrs. Noah, and crew, careering off uncontrollably to the depths of space. ===== On an off-world asteroid, a red line wipes the sky as headquarters explodes. Hostile alien forces have invaded the vital subterranean mining colony. Workers are trapped in crevices and chasms, helpless against the clouds of radioactive dust swirling toward them. An experimental attack fighter is the only weapon powerful enough to repel the alien attack. A lone pilot has been charged with the task of defeating the aliens and rescuing the trapped miners.Sub-Terrania Instruction Manual. Zyrinx. Sega 1994 ===== Travel agent Paul Barnell (Robin Williams) finds a body in a dumpster that, unbeknownst to him, was left there by Mafia hitmen. Heavily in debt and attempting to find a cure for his wife Margaret's (Holly Hunter) apparent Tourette syndrome, he stages a disfiguring animal attack with the body in order to cash in his missing brother's life-insurance policy, for which a corpse is required. Local police are convinced, but promotion-hungry insurance agent Ted Waters (Giovanni Ribisi) is not. The hitmen who dumped the body are also in search of the corpse for proof to collect their payment. They take Margaret hostage to ensure that they will get the body. Meanwhile, Ted is having problems with his girlfriend, Tiffany (Alison Lohman), who he neglects as he works his way up in his firm. Paul's missing brother Raymond (Woody Harrelson) returns home, beats him up, and demands a portion of the insurance money. By suggesting that Ted assaulted him, Paul speeds up the delivery of the million dollar insurance payment. He has the body exhumed and agrees to exchange it and a portion of the money for Margaret. Fearing that Raymond will attempt to kill Margaret to keep her quiet, Paul considers killing his brother in his sleep, but cannot bring himself to do so. The next morning Paul leaves his brother asleep and meets the hit-men for the exchange. Raymond is angered at his brother's deception and arrives as well, and is told by the insurance agent, who has finally pieced together what has happened, about his million dollar policy. Raymond then pulls out a pistol and shoots Margaret in the back as she flees. He is in turn shot in the stomach by one of the hit-men (Tim Nelson). Paul finds Margaret alive; he had hidden the insurance money in her jacket, and it stopped the bullet. The brothers say goodbye as Raymond dies. Paul tells Ted that he only committed fraud out of love for his wife, which appeals to Ted's renewed feelings for Tiffany; touched, he lets them go. Using the money, Paul takes Margaret on a tropical vacation. ===== The film opens in India. It is the early 20th century when India remains part of the British empire. The opening sequence shows a group of British soldiers plundering an Indian fort and taking its riches by air to England. They are stopped by the valiant Raja Azad Singh (Dara Singh), who is immensely strong and manages to lasso the light aircraft, subdue several English soldiers and recover the stolen jewels. Around this time, Raja Azad Singh's wife Rani Durga (Nirupa Roy) gives birth to a baby boy, who is named Raju. Raja carves the word mard (man, intending to convey strength and bravery) into the newborn's chest, noting proudly that the baby is smiling throughout, and can apparently feel no pain. (His words, mard ko dard nahin hota, meaning "a true man feels no pain", are a recurring dialogue throughout the movie.) The British commission conducts an investigation, led by a sympathetic and liberal Englishwoman, Lady Helena; the investigation uncovers the atrocities of the English troops and results in several officers being officially reprimanded. Lady Helena is a close confidante of Raja Azad Singh and is generally supportive of Raja and the idea of India gaining independence from British rule. The English officers General Dyer (Kamal Kapoor) and Inspector Simon (Bob Christo) conspire with a snivelling, weak-willed local doctor Harry (Prem Chopra) to capture Raja. Harry sedates Raja; weakened thus, Raja is captured and imprisoned in a dungeon. Rani Durga escapes on Raja's faithful steed Bahadur. But she is shot, and the horse brings baby Raju to a local orphanage for safekeeping until Rani Durga can recuperate and reclaim him. The wife of a poor blacksmith spots baby Raju in the orphanage, asks after him and eventually adopts him. When Rani Durga returns, she is shocked to find her baby gone and she loses the ability to speak. The penniless Rani Durga eventually becomes a washerwoman. The traitor Harry is appointed mayor of the town for his part in the capture of Raja. Raju grows up to become a strong youth under the care of the loving blacksmith and his wife. His day job is to run a tanga. One day, he happens across an arrogant and oppressive young woman who blithely runs her car over an old lady. Raju gives chase, intercepts the young woman, and compels her to apologise to the old lady. The young woman is of high birth, and her bodyguard Zybisko (Manik Irani) engages Raju, but Raju fends him off quite easily. The young woman turns out to be Ruby, the daughter of mayor Harry. Ruby apologises. But she is charmed by Raju's rugged looks and candour. He initially refuses her advances to maintain his independence. But she eventually falls in love, changes his heart, and invites him to her birthday party. Harry and General Dyer continue their relentless quest for power. Their first move is to demolish the basti (slum colony) in front of Harry's mansion. Raju rallies the basti dwellers to oppose the demolition crew and picket Harry's mansion. Harry arrests Raju and is about to execute him when Lady Helena arrives on the scene. Lady Helena stops the demolition (citing lack of documentation), reprimands Harry, and releases Raju. Harry tries to buy off Raju, but Raju douses the cases with liquor, sets it afire, and uses the soot to blacken Harry's face. (No, it is certainly black money, for it burns black, he observes!) A frustrated Harry tries to have him a shot, but Ruby intervenes, professes her love for the tanga wallah (tanga driver), and threatens to completely disavow her father if any harm should befall him. Unable to subdue or subvert Raju, a frustrated set of cronies (Harry, Dyer, Simon, and others) fret and fume. The film introduces Danny (Dan Dhanoa) the son of General Dyer. Danny is every bit as corrupt, cunning, and avaricious as his father and his cronies. Danny runs the nefarious operations beneath the outwardly clean, lordly and manorial life of General Dyer and mayor Harry. There are three such operations. First, there is a secret blood camp; basti dwellers that are infirm, aged or otherwise unfit are secretly abducted and their blood (all of it) is involuntarily extracted to supply British war campaigns elsewhere. Second, there is a slave labour camp where, again, basti dwellers are put to work (with no pay) on various civil and construction projects for the British empire. And finally there is Raja Azad Singh, still imprisoned, and a champion for the basti and for the workers in the labour camps. His primary duty is to turn, by hand, a massive flour mill; this mill is the only source of food for the camps. (Rani Durga, it turns out, is a washerwoman in one of these camps.) The camps grow in size, and Raja Azad Singh secretly plans to have them revolt; this becomes a growing concern for Harry. Harry and General Dyer decide the best way to remove Raju from the picture is to announce the engagement of Ruby and Danny. Ruby strongly opposes this and runs off with Raju. Danny gives chase with his men, and even tries to kill Ruby, but eventually brings her back to Harry. Harry is truly enraged. He threatens to kill Ruby if she ever disobeys him again. Danny devises a nefarious plot to get rid of Raju. As the first step in the plot, Danny captures the blacksmith, burns his hovel, murders his wife, and puts the blacksmith in a slave camp. (As she lays dying, she reveals to Raju the story of his birth. Raju cremates his foster mother and writes out a letter for his real mother, which he immerses into the river along with the ashes of his foster mother. The river carries his note to the camp where the blacksmith finds it and reads it out to Rani Durga, who immediately recalls her story. The blacksmith stages a stick-up to facilitate her escape, and she is ultimately reunited with Raju. The blacksmith, however, is killed.) Danny learns of Raju's lineage. Realizing Raju will attack the camp to free the blacksmith and Raja Azad Singh, Danny plays the second step of his plot and lays a trap. Raju enters the dungeon to rescue his father. But it turns out that Raja Azad Singh has been replaced by a masked impostor (Simon), and Raju is captured. At this point, Danny devises a fatal final step. He announces a gladiatorial sword fight between Raju and Raja Azad Singh where the winner will go free. Prior to this fight, he takes steps to ensure father and son are truly bloodthirsty for the other. Raja Azad Singh is brought to a blood camp where he sees Raju (actually a masked imposter) extracting blood from innocent citizens and swearing loyalty to the British; the Raja is incensed and swears to finish him off in the contest. Concurrently, Danny sends word (through Ruby) that the fighter opposing Raju will be a masked impostor and not the real Raja. Raju, in turn, announces he will not let his opponent leave the ring alive. And Danny forthwith arranges to have the real Raja fight Raju. The contest begins on the next day, and father and son are soon in a crazed sword fight. The duel takes a turn when the Raja spots the word mard on Raju's chest, and Raju notices one of his blows drew blood from the Raja's cheek. They quickly discover the truth and keep up the appearance of a death duel until the Raja hoists Raju off the arena and into the viewing gallery. Raju plunges his sword into General Dyer, killing him instantly. Danny is infuriated. He orders his tanks to finish off Raju and the Raja. (Lady Helena and Rani Durga are strapped to the tanks, with British soldiers holding them at gunpoint.) Raju and the Raja seize horses and escape, with the tanks in hot pursuit. After a long chase and fight, Raju and the Raja overpower the tanks, rescue the ladies and engage the villains in combat. After a hard sword-and- gun fight, Harry, Danny, and Goga are drowned in quicksand, and Raju and his father return victorious. The film ends with Raju and Ruby coming together and being reunited with Raju's real parents, on the dawn of India's independence movement. ===== The book centers on two different kinds of shapeshifters: the avians and the serpiente. The avians have birds for second forms and their royal line consists of golden hawks. Their leader is the Tuuli Thea, or queen. The queen's pair bond is called her Alistair. Avian culture is uptight and strict, and it centers on, "avian reserve," the ability to keep complete control of one's emotions at all times. Avians do not lose their temper and they do not cry, no matter what the situation. The serpiente have the second form of a snake. Their royal line is the Cobriana, cobra shapeshifters descended from Kiesha, and their king is called the Diente. Their queen is the Naga. Serpiente wear sensual outfits and are free with their emotions, even in situations where some control might be appropriate. They are passionate and sometimes violent, the complete opposite of the avians. The two groups have been at war beyond living memory, so that nobody even remembers how the fighting started. The reason behind the war starting is given in Falcondance. All they know is that they hate each other and they will keep fighting until one of them is destroyed. Danica Shardae and her second form as pictured on the cover of Hawksong. The book takes place in roughly 705 BCE and is the romantic story of Danica Shardae, the heir to the Tuuli Thea. The novel opens with Danica walking the latest bloody battlefield and her discovery of the fallen Gregory Cobriana, who is the younger brother of the current Arami (Prince, soon to be Diente/King), Zane Cobriana. Despite her guards' warnings, Danica stays by Gregory's side, holding him, and singing the Hawksong, a lullaby, until the young prince passes. After Zane learns what Danica did for his brother, he sends his sister to the avians: the serpiente want peace. After a trip to the wise tiger shapeshifters, the Mistari, Zane and Danica secretly agree to marry despite their families' objections over the Mistari idea as well as their own hesitations. Danica has feelings for Andreios (Rei), her best friend, a crow and the leader of the Royal Flight and the highest commander in the avian army. Zane also has a relationship with the head of his palace guard, a white viper named Adelina. But over the course of the novel Zane and Danica grow fond of each other and eventually fall in love, but not before Adelina joins up with Karl, a member of the Royal Flight, to end the union between Zane and Danica. Adelina accidentally kills Zane's mother and while attempting to assassinate Danica, who is critically wounded. However, she survives while Zane stays at her side. Their love continues from Zane's view, in Snakecharm. ===== In Reborn! a boy, Tsunayoshi "Tsuna" Sawada, is chosen to become the tenth boss of the Vongola Family, as he is the great-great-great- great grandson of the first Vongola boss—who moved to Japan from Italy. Timoteo, the Vongola IX—the current head of the family—, sends Reborn, an infant hitman from Italy, to train the reluctant Tsuna. Reborn's chief teaching method is the , which causes a person to be "reborn" with a stronger self to execute his dying wish. The clumsy, underachieving Tsuna becomes stronger, more confident and willing, making him a suitable Vongola family boss despite his continued reluctance. He makes several friends, including his love interest Kyoko Sasagawa. Tsuna gets out of many scrapes on his way to becoming the Vongola boss, fighting escaped Mafia convicts posing as Kokuyo Junior High School students. The Varia, the Vongola assassin squad, want their boss, Xanxus, to be the Vongola boss and initiate a competition with Tsuna. To defeat the Varia, Reborn recruits Tsuna's schoolmates as Vongola guardians: Hayato Gokudera, an explosives expert who wants to be Tsuna's right-hand man; Takeshi Yamamoto, an athlete who likes baseball and cluelessly thinks of the Mafia as a game; Ryohei Sasagawa, captain of the school boxing club and Kyoko's older brother, and head prefect Kyoya Hibari. Lambo, a weak infant hitman who wants to kill Reborn; and Chrome Dokuro, a girl with links to the criminal Mukuro Rokudo, also join them. After defeating the Varia, Tsuna and his friends are transported to the future to face the Millefiore family, who are killing the Vongolas. They discover that the Arcobaleno, the seven strongest infants, are dead except for Lal Mirch. When Tsuna and the Vongola guardians fight the Millefiore, they learn that Shoichi Irie, a comrade of Tsuna's future self, sent them to the future because the future Tsuna said they were the only ones able to defeat Millefiore leader Byakuran. Byakuran, who has obtained knowledge from parallel worlds, wants to obtain all the Mafia rings to become omniscient. Tsuna and his group defeat Byakuran and return to the present, where they learn that he is to be installed as Vongola X. The ceremony is disrupted by the Shimon Family, who have sworn revenge on the Vongola founding father for allegedly betraying the first Shimon boss. Tsuna confronts the Shimon Family on a secluded island; the Vindice, a group of former Arcobaleno who protect the laws of the mafia, are involved in the fight and imprison the losers. After several battles it is learned that Daemon Spade, an illusionist, and first Vongola generation guardian, was manipulating Shimon, using the conflict to control Mukuro Rokudo and remake the Vongolas in his image. The combined strength of Tsuna and Shimon's leader, Enma Kozato, defeats him. After Tsuna reconciles with Shimon, Reborn and the other Arcobaleno compete among themselves to remove their curse. Each Arcobaleno chooses a representative to fight for them and the winner will be able to undo the curse. The Vindice enter the competition, informing Reborn and Tsuna that the tournament is a front for the selection of a new Arcobaleno; the previous Arcobaleno die or become Vindice. Tsuna joins the remaining teams to defeat Bermuda, a former Arcobaleno, and the Vindice. On the final day of the Representative Battle of the Rainbow, Tsuna defeats Bermuda and his team. Checker Face, who inflicted the Arcobaleno Curse of the Rainbow, reveals his true identity as Kawahira, administrator of the humankind's ultimate power, Tri-ni-set. Finding another way to keep the Tri-ni-set safe, Kawahira agrees to entrust it to future generations and remove the curse. After the Arcobaleno battle, Tsuna refuses to become the tenth head of the Vongola Family and Reborn leaves. A week after his departure, Tsuna realizes that he is still his no-good self; nothing has changed. Reborn returns to train Tsuna as Neo- Vongola Primo, similar to Vongola Decimo; Tsuna remembers that he now has friends he can rely on and has been changed by his experiences, thanks to his tutor and partner Reborn. ===== Aerlith is a planet of rocks and wilderness orbiting a distant bright star known as Skene which appears as "an actinic point" in the daytime. The sky is described as being black rather than blue. The planet's rotation is slow, taking several days. It is so slow that dawn and dusk are accompanied by storms that follow the boundary between day and night around the planet. The night has an effect on the "Dragons" of the title, making them more vicious and unmanageable. This means that all movement of the armies must take place during daylight. Humans live in valleys where the soil is good. Occasionally they make war on each other across the hills, passes and fells between their valley homes. Their technology is limited to steel and gunpowder. They also use semi-precious stones for decoration. From time to time, often after many years, a spaceship appears and abducts as many humans as can be caught. The settlements are also bombarded, ensuring that humanity will not rise above its present technological level. During one such raid, a charismatic leader named Kergan Banbeck captures a group of the alien raiders, who are accompanied by their human servants. Without their masters, the humans go mad and destroy the ship. The aliens, many-limbed lizard-like creatures known as "grephs", become prisoners of the humans they came to kidnap. Many years later, Kergan's descendant, Joaz Banbeck, is troubled by two things. He believes the grephs will return soon, and his neighbor, Ervis Carcolo of the ironically named Happy Valley, is forever plotting against him. The captive grephs have been bred over the years into fighting creatures known as dragons, ranging from the man-sized "Termagant" to the gigantic "Jugger". As each new variety has been bred over the years, the fortunes of war have shifted between the Banbecks and the Carcolos. Now there is an uneasy peace. There is a third group of humans, the "Sacerdotes", mysterious ascetics who walk naked in all weathers. They are characterized by very long hair, pale complexions, and the golden torc each wears around the neck. Only males are seen. They trade for what they need and seem to possess advanced technologies. They believe that they are beyond human, calling the rest of humankind "Utter Men", who will eventually disappear and leave the universe to them. Joaz Banbeck tries without success to convince Ervis Carcolo and the Sacerdotes of the need to prepare for the next visit by the grephs. Ervis Carcolo, far from cooperating, attacks Banbeck Vale, only to have his army routed by Joaz's ingenious tactics. Joaz is able to confine a Sacerdote and ask him questions, only to have the man apparently die. Taking his torc and making a wig from the man's hair, Joaz attempts to examine the Sacerdotes' cave home. They are definitely working on something big. Returning home, he is confronted by the Sacerdote he had thought dead, who demands the return of his torc and walks silently away. Subsequently, Joaz has a dream in which he talks to the sacerdote leader and tries to persuade him to help. The leader, known as the Demie, refuses, claiming that to involve himself in the affairs of Utter Men is to destroy the detachment necessary to their lifestyle. Joaz suspects they are building a spaceship. Ervis Carcolo attacks again. Once again, Joaz defeats him, but at that moment, the grephs reappear. Happy Valley is destroyed and Banbeck Vale is obviously next. Besides the power of the ship itself, the grephs have humans whom they have bred, just as the men of Aerlith have bred their dragons. The "Heavy Trooper" is physically equal to the Termagant, and a "Giant" matches the monstrous Jugger. Some of the humans have been bred to track people by smell, and still others are used like horses, like their dragon counterparts, the Spiders. The grephs attack, tentatively at first. Their troops are astonished by the dragons who so resemble their masters. The fighting is bloody and Joaz moves his people into caves and tunnels for safety. The grephs decide simply to bombard the Vale since they cannot take the people. Joaz has anticipated this, and lures them to a spot where he believes the sacerdotes' workshops are located. Carcolo, almost with his last remaining energy and backed by his now demoralized troops, assaults the ship from an unguarded quarter. Joaz coincidentally decides on a similar tactic, and is amazed to find Carcolo already inside. Together they free many people, but cannot gain control of the ship. The destruction of the Vale seems inevitable, until Joaz's scheme pays off. The Sacerdote cavern is blown open, and the Sacerdotes are forced to use the engine of their spaceship to project a beam of energy at the alien ship, disabling it. Joaz and his troops complete the rout and capture the ship. However, the Sacerdote ship is destroyed. The Demie is driven out of his detachment by what Joaz has forced him to do. He upbraids Joaz for causing the destruction of the work of centuries just to save himself. Joaz refuses to apologize, and when Carcolo, now a prisoner, absurdly continues to assert his claim to the ship, Joaz has him executed. At the end, Joaz surveys the ruins of his home. He picks up a small round object, a semi-precious stone carved to be a globe of Eden or Tempe or even Earth, the mythical home of humans. He plans to find the other worlds where humans live, if he can repair the alien ship. For now, he must rebuild the homes of his people. He tosses the globe back on the rockpile and walks away. ===== Martin Harvey is a middle-aged office worker who lives in Chicago with his wife, Katherine, 16-year-old daughter, Caroline, and 11-year-old son, Ben. When he learns his recently deceased uncle has bequeathed him a 60' yacht once owned by Clark Gable, he decides to take his family to the island of St. Pomme de Terre ("Saint Potato") to retrieve it so he can sell it. Katherine resists the idea, but agrees after Caroline announces she has just become engaged. When the Harveys arrive at the island, they discover that the yacht, the Wanderer, is in terrible condition. Upon hearing this, the yacht broker cancels his plan to send an experienced captain to help them sail it to Miami, and instead hires a local sailor, Captain Ron Rico, a one-eyed man with a very laid back attitude, and Navy veteran who claims to have piloted the USS Saratoga. He launches immediately when he sees the car he arrived in roll off the dock and sink. Its owner arrives at the dock and shoots at him. Captain Ron takes Ben's money in a game of Monopoly, giving him beer to drink and charging him for it later, but shows loyalty to Martin, who he refers to as "Boss". Martin, who doesn't like him, calls him "Moron" in his diary, and believes that he doesn't know what he's doing. The Harveys decide to stop off in the Caribbean, but learn that Captain Ron doesn't know how to navigate. While on a random island, Martin decides to go on a nature hike, but runs into guerrillas led by General Armando. Captain Ron bargains for Martin's freedom by giving them a lift to the next island, and receiving some firearms in return to fight off pirates. This angers Martin, as he declares there will be no firearms on his yacht and tosses them overboard, before realizing that without them, he is going to have to give the guerrillas a lift. In the yacht's cabin, Katherine shows Martin the initials of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard marked on the bedpost. They are so excited that they share their feelings and have passionate sex. When they arrive at their next destination, at a non-USA "San Juan", Martin and Katherine are arrested for smuggling the guerrillas. Caroline and Ben party with the locals and Captain Ron, which ends with Caroline getting a tattoo, Ben breaking his glasses, and Captain Ron losing his glass eye. Martin and Katherine are released from jail, but forced to leave that night. Martin decides to leave Captain Ron behind and they encounter pirates who steal the yacht, and are stuck floating in a raft. They land in Cuba and discover the yacht there. The pirates find them, but with the help of Captain Ron, they are able to escape with the yacht. Captain Ron learns that they underrate Martin, and he decides to play hurt, forcing Martin to take control of the escape. Using the skills that Captain Ron taught them, they are able to get the sails up after the engine breaks from lack of oil to distance themselves from the pirates. The United States Coast Guard fires once at the pirates, scaring them away and creates a safe passage to Miami. They arrive in Miami and part ways with Captain Ron. As they sail to their destination, they decide to turn the yacht around and keep it. In the final scene, Captain Ron appears to have cleaned up his appearance and has quickly taken on a new role as a captain for a wealthy couple and their small motorboat. Notably he is no longer wearing an eye patch. ===== The story is told by Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during a historic Vermont flood, Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy regarding the reality and significance of the sightings. He sides with the skeptics, blaming old legends about monsters living in uninhabited hills that abduct people venturing too close to their territory. He receives a letter from Henry Wentworth Akeley, a man living in an isolated farmhouse near Townshend, Vermont, who claims to have proof that will convince Wilmarth he must stop questioning the creatures' existence. The two exchange letters that include an account of the extraterrestrial race chanting with human agents in worship of several beings, including Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, the latter of whom "shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides". The agents intercept Akeley's messages and harass his farmhouse nightly. They exchange gunfire and many of Akeley's guard dogs are killed, as are several of the agents. Later, Akeley reports having killed members of the extraterrestrial race, describing them as bleeding a sickly greenish fluid. Although Akeley expresses more in his letters, he abruptly has a change of heart. He writes that he has met with the extraterrestrial beings and has learned that they are peaceful. Furthermore, they have taught him of marvels beyond all imagination. He urges Wilmarth to pay him a visit and to bring along the letters and photographic evidence that he had sent him. Wilmarth reluctantly consents. Wilmarth arrives to find Akeley in a pitiful physical condition, immobilized in a chair in darkness. Akeley tells Wilmarth about the extraterrestrial race and the wonders they have revealed to him. He also says that the beings can surgically extract a human brain and place it into a canister wherein it can live indefinitely and withstand the rigors of outer space travel and shows proof to Wilmarth. Akeley says he has agreed to undertake such a journey and points to a cylinder bearing his name. Wilmarth also listens to a brain in a cylinder as it speaks of the positive aspects of the journey and why Wilmarth should join it in the trip to Yuggoth, the beings' outpost in our solar system (later revealed to be Pluto). During these conversations, Wilmarth feels a vague sense of unease, especially from Akeley's odd manner of buzzing whispering. During the night, a sleepless Wilmarth overhears a disturbing conversation with several voices, some of which are distinctly bizarre. Once all is silent, he creeps downstairs to investigate. He finds that Akeley is no longer present, but the robe he was wearing is discarded in the chair. Upon a closer look, he makes a horrifying discovery amid the folds of the robe which sends him fleeing the farmhouse by stealing Akeley's car. When the authorities investigate the next day, they find nothing but a bullet-riddled house. Akeley has disappeared along with all the physical evidence of the extraterrestrial presence. As the story concludes, Wilmarth discloses the discovery from which he fled in terror: Akeley's discarded face and hands. These were utilized by something inhuman to disguise itself as a man. He now believes with a dreadful certainty that the cylinder in that dark room with that whispering creature already contained the brain of Henry Wentworth Akeley. ===== Xavier Quinn is the chief of police on a small Caribbean island. When Donald Pater, the millionaire owner of a luxury resort hotel, is found murdered, everyone assumes that the culprit is Maubee, a petty crook who also is Quinn's best friend. Quinn doesn't believe it and clashes with the island's inept Governor Chalk and his arrogant political fixer Thomas Elgin. Quinn's worries over the murder exacerbate his troubles at home; he is estranged from his wife, Lola, and rarely has time to see his son. Maubee eludes the police at every turn. Quinn questions a witness, who says that Maubee had a (rare) US$10,000 bill. Trying to track down Maubee, Quinn questions Ubu Pearl, the local witch and aunt of Maubee's girlfriend, Isola. Chalk introduces Quinn to Fred Miller, an affable American said to represent Pater's company. Pater had been found floating in a hot tub, decapitated. Against Chalk's instructions, Quinn has the body autopsied and finds that Pater died of a venomous snake bite and was already dead when his head was cut off. Quinn arrests Jose Patina, who claims to be on vacation, but has also been questioning people about Maubee's whereabouts. After Patina is bailed out of jail, he confers with Miller in a seedy hotel. Miller tells him the "operation" is over, then kills Patina. Miller goes to Ubu Pearl and demands to know where Maubee is. When she refuses, he burns down her house, with her inside. Quinn discovers that Pater, a close associate of the President of the United States, brought stacks of $10,000 bills to the island to be picked up by Patina. The President wants to fund an anti- Communist revolution in Latin America, but Congress would not support this. The President acts illegally, using the C.I.A. to deliver discontinued currency that is still good but will not be missed from its storage at the US Department of the Treasury. The murder messed up the plan, so the C.I.A. has sent Miller to retrieve the money and "plug up the holes." Quinn tracks Maubee down at their childhood playground in an ancient ruin. Maubee explains that Pater impregnated Isola when she was a maid at his hotel. When Ubu Pearl demanded that Pater support the child, Pater fired Isola. Ubu Pearl instructed Isola to go to the hotel and leave a snake in Pater's room. Maubee sped to the hotel and arrived just as Pater was dying from the snakebite. He cut Pater's head off, put his body into the tub to attempt to conceal the cause of death, and grabbed the sack of money. Miller appears and holds the pair at gunpoint. Maubee hands over the money and Miller departs in a helicopter. Enraged, Maubee grabs onto the helicopter as it lifts off over the ocean. Miller shoots at Maubee and Quinn watches helplessly as his friend's body falls into the ocean. A snake hidden in the sack of money slithers out and fatally bites the helicopter pilot. Miller struggles to regain control, but the chopper crashes into the old ruins and explodes. Grieved at the loss of his friend, Quinn returns home and reconciles with his wife. As he walks on the beach with his son, the camera pans down to show a line of barefoot prints emerging from the water, leading to a rock with a $10,000 bill sitting on it. ===== Reuben James (Washington), although having grown up in London, was born in St. Lucia, West Indies, and joined the British Army to escape the poverty of inner city life. He serves with the Parachute Regiment, doing a tour in Northern Ireland for three years at the height of The Troubles in the late 1970s, and later fighting in the 1982 Falklands War in the South Atlantic for the remainder of his military career, eventually becoming a war hero himself. Six years later, after leaving the army, Reuben returns to civilian life in London. Much to his chagrin, he receives far from a hero's welcome, mostly no-one caring about his time in the army. Many of Reuben's childhood friends have turned to crime and drug-dealing to support themselves. He is shocked to find that his old community, the East End, is still beset by the crime, poverty and racism that made him leave rather than being a better neighbourhood. In particular, he suffers abuse and brutality at the hands of racist police officers, and he is soon pressured by some old friends to go against the law. He struggles to adjust to everyday life, but with increasing difficulty, losing his girlfriend Stacey (Amanda Redman). With changes in the British nationality law that occurred in 1981, Reuben also can't claim British citizenship and any residency of the United Kingdom at all. Reuben finds himself unemployed in the middle of the emerging recession in the country and is frustrated by being unable to find work despite his outstanding military service as a dutiful soldier. He begins to feel betrayed by the country he fought for. He drives a taxi for a short time, but is soon brought into business with Colin (Bruce Payne), a drug kingpin and former friend of Reuben who was always nice to him. He becomes a vigilante bent on change instead of becoming a criminal himself. Reuben acquires a St. Lucia passport and gets two tickets to return to St. Lucia since he won't be able to go to Paris as he had planned to with Stacey, who sees him only as a bloody product of an old era and left him because she couldn't stand men with guns and his best friend's wife left him to move to Ireland. Reuben's old army friend, Tony, also known as Fish (Dorian Healy) - who saved Reuben's life in the Falklands and lost his leg there - gets Lynford down after the latter threatened to kill Reuben for telling the police that he killed Harry. Nevertheless, Tony/Fish is shot by a corrupt and racist policeman, Challoner (Craig Fairbrass) who started the harassment of Reuben in the first place. Reuben sets about avenging his friends' deaths and is able to during a riot between the police and drug addicts, shooting the policeman who killed his best friend. Reuben is targeted by a police sniper, who is also another friend from the army. Just as he fires the shot, the film ends. ===== Hoskins plays police sergeant Jack Moony, a racist bigoted cop; and Washington plays Napoleon Stone, an irresistible persuader and ambulance-chasing lawyer who Moony hates. The feelings are mutual. Stone goes on to date Moony's ex- girlfriend which stirs up the pot between the two. Moony's years of bad habits, such as overeating, smoking, and drinking, finally catch up with him, risking his health and life. At the same time, Stone is gunned down in a drive-by shooting. After suffering a heart attack, Moony wakes up to find out that his new heart was once Stone's, and the dead lawyer's ghost has become his constant companion. Stone takes on the role of a manifested ghost that needs answers to why he was shot and who committed it. He seeks to haunt Moony to help him in this quest because of the relationship they once had that will now continue. Now, Moony will have to solve Stone's murder. ===== A meteor strikes a houseboat in the swamps near a southern town, which causes the people on the houseboat to become zombies. When the zombies run out of alligators to eat, they begin killing people in the town. A local scientist tries to figure out how to stop the zombies. ===== John Brown lives in Riverton, Ohio, with his niece Penny and her pet beagle Brain. Dreaming of becoming a police officer, John works as a security guard for the Bradford robotics laboratory. Artemus Bradford and his daughter Brenda are designing a lifelike robotic foot as part of the Gadget Program, designed to add android officers to the Riverton Police Department. Sanford Scolex, a tycoon, steals the foot to build an army of androids from its technology, assassinating Artemus. John chases after Scolex’s limousine in his hatchback, but both vehicles crash. John is blown up in his car by Scolex, but a bowling ball launched from the wreck crushes Scolex’s left hand. Scolex receives a mechanical claw from his associate Kramer, taking on the alias “Dr. Claw”. Brenda decides to make the barely alive John the first test subject of the Gadget Program, transforming him into a crimefighting cyborg with the alias of “Inspector Gadget”, powered by a control chip. He is helped by the Gadgetmobile, a robotic car with a chatty AI. At a charity ball, Scolex approaches Brenda, having known her at Harvard, inviting her to work for him in her own laboratory. Brenda accepts, much to Gadget’s dismay. Police chief Quimby is unimpressed with Gadget, assigning him to menial assignments rather than investigate Artemus’ murder. Gadget investigates on his own, finding a piece of scrap metal which he later connects to Scolex, with help from Penny. Claw uses Brenda’s research to build his own android, “Robo-Gadget”, sending him out on a rampage across Riverton to frame the real Gadget. Gadget himself infiltrates Claw’s lab to recover the foot, but is caught and deactivated, Claw breaking his chip. Claw’s minion Sykes dumps Gadget in a junkyard, then is tasked to dispose of the foot. Brenda encounters her own robotic doppelganger, Robo-Brenda, who confirms Claw stole the foot and murdered her father. Brenda, Penny, Brain, and the Gadgetmobile track Gadget to a junkyard. A kiss from Brenda awakens Gadget, proving his will can control his new body. After dropping Penny and Brain off at home, Gadget and Brenda chase Claw and Robo-Gadget’s limo. Gadget and Robo-Gadget fall off the roof and duel on a bridge, until Gadget removes the latter’s head, tossing it into the river, though Robo-Gadget’s body runs off. Brenda crashes the Gadgetmobile into Claw’s limo, but is taken prisoner. Claw tries to escape in a helicopter, but Gadget appears using his helicopter hat to intercept. Claw destroys it, forcing Gadget to use an improvised weapon to damage Claw’s claw and the helicopter. Brenda leaps out of the helicopter onto Gadget’s back, but they fall down the side of Scolex’s skyscraper, using a parasol to land safely. Claw parachutes down, but lands in the Gadgetmobile. The police arrive to arrest Gadget, but Penny appears with a repentant Sykes, who confesses to his crimes. Saluted by Quimby, Gadget departs with Brenda and Penny, as Claw vows revenge. ===== Shy and withdrawn Dawn Cottrell (Kimberlee Peterson) feels as if she is unable to assert any control over her life. She is a teenager who attempts to please the world but feels like she is unable to please anyone. Her mother, Joyce (Sean Young), is vindictive and seems to take out her anger on the rest of the family. As a result, Dawn feels like a failure and unable to please her parents. Unlike most people, who are able to express extreme emotions outwardly through words or through tears, the only way Dawn knows about for channeling her pain is through self-injury. This physical pain secures relief for Dawn from the emotional pain that she otherwise would be unable to release. Her life consists of a continuous series of disappointments, as Dawn does not seem to have any real friends at school. Furthermore, her family is dysfunctional in the sense that her father, Russell (Robert Wisden) is unable to exhibit his emotions and Dawn's brother often hurls emotional abuse at his sister. Dawn finds solace in being able to control at least one thing in her life - her secret cutting. When Dawn is asked by the "popular" crowd to design their float for the upcoming school carnival, she is initially pleased. However, the popular girls still victimize Dawn by calling her names and acting maliciously towards her. Her hopes for acceptance are shattered when she overhears the girls snickering and making fun of her in the girls' bathroom. Unable to deal with the pain, Dawn runs to a private corner and begins to cut herself, the only way she knows about to cope with what transpired. Dawn feels that she is unable to articulate the troubles she experience at school to her parents. In fact, she is quite successful in hiding both the truth as well as her pain from her family. When Dawn tries to connect with them individually, Russell seems unable to handle any type of intimacy with his daughter and puts up an air of passivity. Joyce, on the other hand, is incapable of discussing anything without relating it back to herself, thus constantly taking the focus away from Dawn, where it should be. Tragically, Dawn attempts to find salvation from these two shaky worlds in the arms of a 19-year-old musician who, in reality, has little interest in finding out about her as a person, and only cares about how she can satisfy him physically. Back at school, another series of humiliating experiences leaves Dawn running to find solitude so she can again numb her emotional pain by cutting. This time, her activities are discovered by Lorraine, another social outsider in the high school with whom she can relate. A well-meaning teacher, who observes blood on Dawn's blouse, calls Dawn's parents to the school to address the matter. Humiliated that their façade as a perfect all-American family has been shattered, Dawn's mother again brings the focus of the situation back to her by insisting that she does not want to be blamed for Dawn's actions. Joyce fails to recognize that her daughter requires someone to understand her by listening to what she has to say. Meanwhile, Dawn's father remains distant and emotionless as usual. Russell thinks only of himself and is afraid that he will be blamed for Dawn's self-harm. Ironically, the new strains that her condition has put on her family leave Dawn further unable to cope, and she winds up in the emergency room after seriously burning herself with a cigarette lighter in a desperate attempt to alleviate the stress. Lorraine introduces Dawn to her psychiatrist, Dr. Parella (Rhea Perlman) who seems to be the only understanding voice in the torment of Dawn's volatile and painful world. Realizing there is no alternative for Dawn, her parents agree to allow her to begin counselling with Dr. Parella. Through counselling, Dawn slowly begins to understand that the nature of her disorder stems not simply from her constant feelings of abandonment by the people she loves, but also from her inability to express this pain through verbal channels. Instead, Dawn uses cutting to communicate what she feels inside. Her inability to communicate individually with her parents (as well as their inability to communicate with one another) leaves any hope of emotional support for Dawn unattainable. Triggered by the news that her friend Lorraine has been brutally beaten by her mother's boyfriend (and by her own mother's refusal to take her to the hospital to visit Lorraine), Dawn loses control and again winds up in the emergency room after having brutally slashed her body. Joyce, feeling she can no longer bear the blame for her daughter's condition, decides it would be better for her to simply leave her family, and she does. Her departure finally triggers a change in Dawn. When Dr. Parella comes to visit her in the hospital afterwards, Dawn breaks down into tears - something she had been unable to do before then. Dr. Parella points out that if tears can take the place of blood, then Dawn has at last begun the long road to recovery. After being released, Dawn goes to visit Lorraine, who is still in the hospital recovering. Lorraine informs Dawn that her mother is considering leaving her boyfriend, and Dawn tells Lorraine about her mother leaving and what Dr. Parella had said. Lorraine then tells Dawn that the popular kids at their school needed to enjoy being popular while they could, but her and Dawn's time is just beginning. ===== Julie (Marianna Hill) is an advice columnist for the city newspaper who begins to receive anonymous notes threatening murder and worse. At about the same time, female members of the group therapy session she attends are being stabbed, one by one, by an unknown assailant. Is there a connection? If so, why do the notes talk about murder with a gun, while the murder victims are being stabbed? At first, the police, her ex-husband, her therapist and her friends all assure her that the notes are probably unrelated, and a hoax; but with time, it becomes apparent that someone close to her is responsible. ===== Anbuselvan is an honest, daring IPS officer with the Chennai police as the ACP in the Crime Branch. As he has no relations in life, he lives with no fear. Anbuselvan and his IPS friends Srikanth, Arul, and Ilamaran are recruited for part of a special unit of police officers who are battling organised crime in Chennai. Violent and laconic, Anbuselvan finds little patience for personal life. The unit is ruthless in its confrontation with criminals, going as far as assassinating gang members; the unit is finally disbanded after 5 encounters in 3 months, by Human rights authorities; Anbuselvan is posted to Control Room Duties. One day a school teacher named Maya rebuffs Anbuselvan's routine questions regarding safety, not knowing that he is a police officer. He meets her again when she and her friend are questioned for driving without a license. However, Anbuselvan lets them off with a warning. When one of Maya's students has a problem with local kids, she asks Anbuselvan for help. Anbuselvan resolves this problem, a mutual respect grows between them, and they begin seeing one another. When Maya gets into a road accident, Anbuselvan helps her recover, and they fall in love. Srikanth and his wife Swathi become good friends with Maya. Meanwhile, gangster Sethu, who escaped the encounter operations, meets his estranged brother Pandiya, who returns to Chennai after 14 years of crime life in Maharashtra. Pandiya has a peculiar tactic: he kills a family member of his opponent, but leaves the opponent alive to rot in failure and depression on the loss of his family member. Sethu's gang, aided by Pandiya's planning, commit major kidnappings in the city and become very powerful in 6 months. When the 10 year old son of an influential movie producer is kidnapped and killed, and later his daughter is also kidnapped for ransom, the special unit is reassembled by commissioner with all four back in the crime branch. The unit tracks down and kills Sethu in a railyard, as others escape. Pandiya takes over the gang, promising grave revenge over his brother's death. Pandiya and his gang members target the families of the men in the special unit, but the police close in, and a badly injured Pandiya barely escapes Anbuselvan. Pandiya and his men brutally kill Ilamaran the same night, and escape. The entire department is mobilised, and all family members of the remaining three are sent to hiding. Maya and Anbuselvan get married in a hurry and leave for Pondicherry, but the next day, Pandiya and his thugs enter the cottage that the honeymoon couple are staying in and attack Anbuselvan, leaving him for dead, and kidnapping Maya. Anbuselvan is battling for life but thinking only about rescuing Maya. Srikanth and Arul arrive at the cottage, discover Anbuselvan, and take him to the Pondicherry Government Hospital. Srikanth reveals that Swathi was kidnapped earlier at the airport and confesses that it was he who gave away Anbuselvan's location to Pandiya, for Swathi's safe return. Srikanth feels extreme remorse over what has happened. Whilst in the hospital, they receive a message from Pandiya to meet him at a particular location in Andhra pradesh. When they go there, they find a package containing Swathi's severed head and Maya's triceps. Srikanth and Anbuselvan are distraught, with the former being hysterical upon seeing his wife's head, and in an agony of grief and guilt at being responsible, he shoots himself dead. Anbuselvan tracks down Pandiya before he can escape from Tamil Nadu and fights with the gang. Pandiya stabs Maya to distract Anbuselvan, and she dies in Anbu's arms. An enraged Anbuselvan tracks down Pandiya and brutally finishes him off, avenging Maya and his friends' deaths. An epilogue shows that Anbuselvan, after the death of Maya, continues his job as an IPS officer some months later. ===== Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright is a pretty and popular high school senior at Crawford Academy, a member of the school's "Top Ten," an elite clique of the most privileged and popular students. Each night, the group meets at the Silent Woman Tavern, a local pub. One night en route to the tavern, Bernadette O'Hara is attacked in her car by an unseen assailant. She struggles and plays dead to catch the killer off-guard before running to get help. She then runs into an unseen individual who she is familiar with and begs for help, but he slashes her neck with a straight razor. The Top Ten becomes concerned when Bernadette fails to arrive at the pub. Upon leaving, the group sees the nearby drawbridge raising and decide to play a game of chicken. Ginny is pushed into a car by Ann Thomason, and each of the group attempt to cross the bridge as it raises; the car Ginny is in barely clears the bridge, crashing as it meets the other side. Distraught, Ginny runs home, stopping at her mother's grave in an adjacent cemetery. At her home, Etienne Vercoures - a French foreign exchange student and a Top Ten member - has broken into Ginny's room and stolen her underwear. Bernadette fails to show up at school the following day. Ginny, who is plagued by repressed memories, visits her on-call psychiatrist, Dr. Faraday, with whom she previously underwent an experimental brain tissue restoration procedure after surviving a harrowing accident at the drawbridge. As Ginny attempts to resume her normal life, her fellow Top Ten members are murdered in vicious and violent ways: Etienne is strangled when his scarf gets caught in the spokes of his motorcycle, and Greg is crushed in his room while lifting weights. One night, Alfred, a Top Ten member who is infatuated with Ginny, follows her to her mother's grave. In retaliation, she stabs him with a pair of garden shears. On the weekend of Ginny's 18th birthday, her father leaves for a business trip. After a school dance, Ginny invites Steve to her house and prepares shish kebabs. While the two are drinking wine and smoking marijuana, Ginny attacks Steve with the kebab, violently shoving the skewer down his throat. Ann arrives at Ginny's house the following morning and finds Ginny taking a shower. In the shower, Ginny has a flashback of her mother's death: Her mother, a newly-inducted socialite, invited the Top Ten to Ginny's birthday celebration four years earlier. Instead, the group opted to attend Ann's party. Drunk, her mother drove to the Thomasons' house with Ginny, where she was humiliated by Ann's parents. Enraged, she attempted to drive across the raising drawbridge, resulting in a violent crash which ended in her drowning. Ginny, however, managed to swim to safety. Paranoid that she may be murdering her friends during blackout episodes, Ginny visits Dr. Faraday. When she confronts him over the procedure she underwent, he is evasive, and she murders him with a fireplace poker. Mr. Wainright returns home for Ginny's birthday and finds a pool of blood in the foyer. He flees, and finds one of Ginny's friends, Amelia, standing in the rain, clutching a wrapped gift. In the cemetery, he discovers his late wife's grave to have been robbed, with Dr. Faraday's corpse lying in it. Mr. Wainright notices a light on inside the family's guest cottage. Inside, he finds the bodies of each member of the Top Ten seated at a table alongside his dead wife's corpse. Ginny enters the room with a birthday cake, singing "Happy Birthday" to herself. Ginny casually admits to the murders before slashing her father's throat. He dies, failing to notice that his actual daughter is seated at the table. His killer, Ann, has disguised herself as Ginny with an elaborate latex mask. Ann removes the mask, ranting and raving over her father's affair with Ginny's mother and how it destroyed her family. Ann reveals that she and Ginny are half-sisters. Ginny manages to wrestle the knife from Ann and stabs her to death. As she stands over Ann's corpse holding the bloodied knife, a police officer enters the cottage and pleads: "What have you done?" ===== One night at a party, Brandon Sinclair uses his Ouija board with his ex-girlfriend Linda Brewster to contact the spirit of David, whom he communicated with before. Her boyfriend, Jim Morar, insults David, which provokes him to slash the tires of Brandon’s car. The next day, Linda uses Brandon’s board that was left behind to contact David, who informs her where her lost engagement ring is. At the construction site where Jim works, his friend Lloyd is killed by fallen drywall. When Jim is questioned by Lieutenant Dewhurst at Lloyd’s funeral, Linda contacts David about the accident, but he says that he did not cause it. Linda begins to fall under progressive entrapment, where the spirit terrorizes the user enough to weaken them in order to possess them. Brandon brings over psychic medium Zarabeth Crawford to contact David through a séance, and to exorcise him if necessary. After the spirit leaves, a suspicious Zarabeth returns home to research the occurrence, but her throat is slashed before thrown through a window, landing on a sundial. The next morning, Brandon hears about her death and suspects that David killed her. As Brandon leaves to seek information, Jim witnesses Linda violently thrown against the wall, rendering her unconscious. After she is brought to a hospital, Jim teams with Brandon to Big Bear to conduct research on David. At the lake where he died, they use another board to learn that a different spirit, Carlos Malfeitor, was terrorizing Linda all along. Jim is suddenly knocked out by barrels, and Brandon is killed by Malfeitor with a hatchet. Upon regaining consciousness, Jim grieves over Brandon’s body. That night, he reads that Malfeitor was an axe murderer shot by police in his home in 1930—the same residence he and Linda live in. After Linda releases herself from the hospital, she is attacked by Malfeitor. The next day, Jim finds their home in disarray, before a possessed Linda attacks him. Dewhurst enters to accuse Jim of the murders, but Linda strikes him with a fire poker. Jim takes his revolver, where Linda tells him that he is the “portal”, taunting him into committing suicide. He shoots the board before he is pushed through a window and lands on a car. After the events, Jim and Linda resume their lives and marry each other. Their landlady, Mrs. Moses, finds the board and wonders if it still works. The board is thrown into a box, where its planchette moves to the word “yes” by itself. ===== Karel Horák (Jan Hartl) and Božena Horáková (Veronika Žilková) are a childless couple and for medical reasons are doomed to remain so. While on vacation with their neighbors at a house in the country, Karel decides to buy the house at the suggestion of his neighbor. When he is fixing up the house, he digs up a tree stump that looks vaguely like a baby. He spends the rest of the evening cleaning it up and then presents it to his wife. She names the stump Otík and starts to treat it like a real baby. She then works out a plan to fake her pregnancy and becoming more and more impatient she speeds up the process and 'gives birth' one month early. Otík comes alive and has an insatiable appetite. Alžbětka (Kristina Adamcová), the neighbor's daughter, has been suspicious all along, and when she reads the fairy tale about Otesánek, the truth becomes clear to her. Meanwhile, little Otík has been just eating and growing. At one point he eats some of Božena's hair, and another day she returns home to find that Otík has eaten their cat. Karel and his wife are at odds with Karel pushing for killing the thing and Božena defending it as their child. The baby later consumes a postal worker (Gustav Vondráček) and then a social worker (Jitka Smutná). The resulting deaths lead Karel to tie up and lock Otík away in the basement of their apartment building, leaving Otík to starve. Alžbětka secretly takes over as prime caretaker. She tries to keep Otík fed with normal human food, but, when her mother stops her, she is forced to drawing straws (matches in this case) to choose a person to feed to Otík. The chosen victim is an old man and pedophile, Mr. Žlábek (Zdeněk Kozák) who has been stalking her recently. Deciding she cannot take the stalking anymore, Alžbětka lures Mr. Žlábek to the basement where he gets entangled by Otik's vines and devoured. Karel himself later becomes a victim when he comes into the basement with a chainsaw but on seeing Otík he hesitates and calls him "son" before dropping the chainsaw. Afterwards, Božena goes into the basement and is heard screaming; having become a victim herself. In the end, Otík disobeys Alžbětka despite repeated warnings and eats all of Mrs. Správcová's (Dagmar Stříbrná) cabbage patch, prompting the old woman to take charge. ===== The film is about the two teenage boys, Pelle and Proffen, that try to help Pelle's girlfriend, Lena, who has a drug problem. She is only 15 years old, and they initially meet at a snackbar in downtown Oslo. She has been abused by a social worker at a home for troubled teens. While they try to help Lena she runs away, they get beat up and watch people overdose at the central train station in Oslo. The film deals with issues like drugs, troubled teens and their parents, child pornography. It's also about Pelle and Proffen's families and their different backgrounds. Pelle's parents are former hippies and very liberal, but Proffen's parents are old and conservative. ===== Space is explored not by short-sighted governments, but by the Earth Company, a private corporation which becomes enormously wealthy and powerful as a result. Nine star systems are found to lack planets suitable for colonization, so space stations are built in orbit instead, stepping stones for further exploration. Then, Pell's World is found to be not only habitable, but already populated by the gentle, sentient (if technologically backward) Hisa. Pell Station is built. The planet is nicknamed "Downbelow" by the stationers, who also start to call their home "Downbelow Station". When Earth's out-of-touch policies cause it to begin losing control of its more distant stations and worlds, it builds a fleet of fifty military carriers, the Earth Company Fleet, to enforce its will. This leads to the prolonged Company War with the breakaway Union, based at Cyteen, another habitable world. Caught in between are the stationers and the merchantersIn the Alliance–Union universe, the traders who run starships are called "merchanters", not "merchants". who crew the freighters that maintain interstellar trade. Set in the final days of the war, Downbelow Station opens with Earth Company Captain Signy Mallory and her warship, Norway, escorting a ragtag fleet fleeing from Russell's and Mariner Stations to Pell. Similar convoys arrive from other stations destroyed or lost to Union, leading to an enormous crisis. The flood of unexpected refugees strains station resources. Angelo Konstantin, Stationmaster of Pell, and his two sons, Damon and Emilio, struggle to cope with the situation. Fearing Union infiltrators and saboteurs, Pell dumps all the refugees in a Quarantine Zone, causing massive dislocations of Pell's own citizens. While conferring with Pell's administrators, Mallory encounters a delegation from the Earth Company, led by Segust Ayres, Second Secretary of Earth's Security Council. Offended by her brusque, arrogant manner, Ayres declines her offer of transportation to the front and charters a freighter instead. Unbeknownst to Mallory, Ayres' mission is to open peace negotiations with Union. Mallory also drops off a Union prisoner of war, Josh Talley, whom she had rescued from a brutal interrogation by panicked security forces at Russell's. However, on the voyage to Pell, her sexual exploitation of him had been only marginally less abusive. Faced with indefinite confinement on Pell, Talley requests Adjustment, the wiping of much of his memory, in return for his freedom. When questioned by Damon Konstantin, he requests Adjustment to escape the indefinite imprisonment, so Konstantin reluctantly gives his permission. Upon later review of his file, Damon learns that Talley had already undergone the treatment once before at Russell's. Still feeling guilty for agreeing, he and his wife Elene Quen befriend the post-Adjustment Talley, an act of kindness that will have monumental, unforeseen consequences. Jon Lukas, Angelo Konstantin's brother-in-law and only rival for power, is worried about the course of the war. The Fleet has received little or no support from an indifferent Earth and is gradually losing a war of attrition. He secretly contacts Union, offering to hand Pell over. Union responds by smuggling in a secret agent named Jessad. Meanwhile, the last ten surviving Company Fleet ships under the command of Conrad Mazian gather for the most critical operation of the war. All of Mazian's recent strategic maneuvers and raids have been leading up to this point. If they can take out Viking Station in one coordinated strike before their enemy's growing numerical superiority can overwhelm them, there would be a wide, barren region between Earth and Union space, one which would make further conflict vastly more costly for Union. Downbelow Station (20th Anniversary Edition) Seb Azov, the Union military commander, has no choice but to gather his forces at Viking to await Mazian's anticipated attack. However, he has an ace up his sleeve. He has pressured Ayres into recording a message ordering Mazian to break off while peace is being negotiated. When Mazian strikes, Ayres' broadcast order does indeed force him to abort and the Fleet retreats to Pell in confusion. Mazian meets with his captains and gives them the choice of accepting a peace treaty that essentially concedes victory to Union as per Ayres' broadcast or rebelling against Earth and continuing to fight that is his preference. They all remain loyal to their leader. One of Mazian's first acts is to place Pell under martial law. The Fleet is now forced to defend Downbelow Station, its only reliable base and supply source. Union forces attack and destroy two ships out on patrol. While Union suffers casualties as well, it can replace its losses, unlike Mazian. Counting one carrier lost earlier in the debacle at Viking, he has just seven ships left. Under cover of the panic on the station caused by the battle in space, Lukas makes his move, killing and supplanting his hated rival, Angelo Konstantin. To escape rioting refugees, Elene Quen is forced to board Finity's End, one of the most respected merchanter ships. The freighters flee the battle zone, but Quen convinces most of them to band together, for safety and to maximize their leverage whatever happens. Damon survives his uncle's assassination attempt and links up with Talley. Together, they manage to hide from Lukas; in fact, Talley discovers he is surprisingly good at it. Eventually, they are contacted by Jessad, and Talley finds out why. He and Jessad are the same kind: azi, artificially bred and, in Jessad and Talley's case, trained especially for espionage and sabotage. They are discovered by Fleet marines; Jessad is killed, while Konstantin and Talley are captured and taken to Mallory. She receives orders from Mazian to quietly dispose of Konstantin. Lukas does the Fleet's bidding with far fewer scruples, so Konstantin is superfluous, even dangerous. Mazian is preparing to disable and abandon Downbelow Station. He has another goal in mind: to take over Earth itself in a surprise coup d'etat. The wrecking of Pell would create a firebreak with Union, playing the role he had originally intended for Viking. Mallory has different ideas. Mazian has gone too far for her to stomach. She abruptly undocks from Pell and deserts. Mallory finds the Union forces and persuades Azov to unleash them against her former comrades. Talley is instrumental in convincing Azov of Mallory's truthfulness. Mazian cannot afford a costly fight, so the Fleet sets off for Earth prematurely. Azov needs to pursue him, but is unwilling to leave Norway intact behind him. The tense standoff is broken by a timely arrival; Quen returns with the united merchanter fleet and claims Pell for the newborn Merchanter's Alliance, with Norway as its militia. Without the authority to deal with this new development and unwilling to fight the merchanters, Azov leaves to deal with Mazian. The end of the Company War is at last in sight, much to the relief of the Konstantins, the merchanters, and the residents of Downbelow Station. ===== Axel (played by Til Schweiger) has just been dumped by his girlfriend Doro (Katja Riemann), and needs to find a new place to live. He meets Walter a.k.a. Waltraud (Rufus Beck), a transvestite who participated in a heterosexual men's group to provide a gay man's perspective. Walter talks Axel into joining him and some friends at a gay party afterwards, and tries to convince Axel to move in with him. At the party, Axel decides instead to move in with Walter's best friend, Norbert (Joachim Król), whose boyfriend has just left him. Later, at Axel and Doro's apartment, Norbert tries to seduce Axel while they browse old photos. Just when Norbert has shed all his clothes, Doro shows up at the door, and Axel hastily hides Norbert. Doro explains to Axel that she's expecting his child and wants to give their relationship a second chance. She is not amused to discover a naked man in the wardrobe, but Axel manages to convince her that nothing has happened. Excited about fatherhood and eager to return to Doro, Axel forgets about his new friendship with Norbert. But soon Axel discovers a downside to the pregnancy: he finds that he is extremely adverse to having sex with a pregnant woman, due to an irrational fear of hurting the child. Despite his engagement to her, he decides to stray when he encounters Elke, a former girlfriend. They are trying to find a place to have sex when Axel bumps into Norbert again. At first Norbert is angry with him for having left without a word, but Axel claims it's only because Doro was upset. Axel convinces Norbert to lend his apartment for the tryst with Elke. A few days later at Norbert's apartment, Elke gives Axel a mind-altering drug, and leaves him sitting naked on a table. Meanwhile, Doro has learned that Axel went to Norbert's apartment, and she thinks that Axel is going to have sex with Norbert. She confronts Norbert at his apartment and upon entering, she sees Axel naked and unable to speak and starts to go into labor. In the bathroom Norbert finds Elke and Norbert's not-so-gay boyfriend playing in the tub. As Norbert drives her to the hospital, he attempts to explain everything on the way. Doro forgives Norbert and they become friends, but her relationship with Axel is in question. ===== ===== Ebenezer was born in the late nineteenth century, and dies in the early 1960s. He lived his whole life in the Vale. He never married, despite a few flings with local girls, and a tempestuous relationship with Liza Queripel of Pleinmont. He only left the island once, to travel to Jersey to watch the Muratti. For most of his life he was a grower and fisherman, although he also served in the North regiment of the Royal Guernsey Militia (though not outside the island) and did some jobbing work for the States of Guernsey in the latter part of his life. Guernsey is a microcosm of the world as Dublin is to James Joyce and Wessex is to Hardy. After a life fraught with difficulties and full of moving episodes, Ebenezer is ready to die happy, bequeathing his pot of gold and autobiography ("The Book of Ebenezer Le Page") to the young artist he befriends, after an incident in which the latter smashed his greenhouse. ===== Set in the new town of Moonlea, a fictionalised version of Merthyr Tydfil, it is told from the viewpoint of a travelling harpist, Alan Hugh Leigh, who is looking for his friend, the singer John Simon Adams. But his friend has become a populist leader among the ironworkers, who are involved in a bitter industrial conflict. Rachel Trezise describes it as "an emblematic account of the 1831 Merthyr Rising".Planet, no 206 ===== The Leviathan is the largest ship ever built - A mile long, half a mile tall and taking ten years to build. Designed by architect Ashbless - who is aboard and part of the governing cabal, and launched in 1928 with some 28,000 on board her maiden voyage was to New York. At some unspecified point of the journey it disappeared and has spent the last twenty years lost in an endless and lifeless ocean. Detective Lament is summoned to the officers club, where the cabal ask him to look into several murders - hushed up as suicides - that have occurred in the First Class section. Initially Lament is loath to become involved, as he believes the First Class hold everybody in contempt, however Captain McLean persuades him to investigate. Lament has barely begun his investigation before it is curtailed and ship's security arrest a member of staff who was caught stealing supplies - food being in short order - believing him to be the murderer. The steward insists that "Stokers" - ship-board mythical bogymen are in fact real and responsible for the deaths, but before Lament can question him further security execute him. Disgusted, Lament returns to his deck and regrets his involvement. Later McLean approaches Lament and again asks for his help, suspecting that the steward was correct and unnatural forces are at work - the engine room has been off limits for 5 years and despite having lights, heat and power - "the Leviathan should have run out of fuel decades ago". Lament again takes up his investigation and ventures into the Steerage decks, where after a violent encounter he is rescued by Sky Baker, a "Mace" - one of the self appointed security for the Steerage decks. Sky confirms Laments theory about the Stokers, and the two venture down to the engine room. Ambushed by a horde of Stokers they are taken to the "engine" itself - an oubliette containing the Demon Hastur. Hastur explains that Ashbless is in fact eight hundred years old, initially one of the Knights Hospitalier in the Crusades, but entered a devils bargain: Ashbless owns Hastur's soul, and is immortal so long as he has it. Should Ashbless give up or lose Hastur's soul (represented by a talisman stylised as an eye - a symbol seen throughout the ship,) Hastur would be free to exact revenge upon Ashbless' soul. Hastur claims that despite being a demon he only wishes to be released from Ashbless' control - should Lament help him, in return he will restore Leviathan and all onboard to New York. Sky distrusts Hastur, but Lament disagrees, and confronts Ashbless who confirms everything Hastur has said. During a struggle Ashbless is shot several times, but shows that he is indeed immortal with no reaction other than annoyance to his wounds. Ashbless disarms and shoots Lament, but during the struggle Lament has broken Ashbless' chain containing Hastur's talisman, and Hastur is released from the engine room taking Ashbless' soul in revenge for hundreds of years of torture. Hastur keeps his word, and after healing Lament removes Leviathan from the alien world and drops it almost on top of New York, where it crashes into the docks, dwarfing the city outline. ===== In silhouette against the wall of a living room, one figure stabs another to death. A bloody knife falls to the floor at a child's feet. 20 years later, Professor Giordani chairs a parapsychology conference featuring psychic medium Helga Ulmann. Helga is suddenly overwhelmed by the "twisted, perverted, murderous" thoughts of someone in the audience. After the lecture, Helga tells Giordani she also heard a child's song during the psychic link. She believes she can identify the person she sensed; in the shadows, someone watches them. That night, a black-gloved figure invades Helga's apartment and kills her with a meat cleaver. Musician Marcus Daly sees the attack from below and rushes to her apartment, finding her mutilated corpse. After the police arrive, Marcus thinks one of the apartment's paintings has disappeared, but he cannot pinpoint what is missing. Reporter Gianna Brezzi arrives and photographs Marcus. Outside, Marcus encounters his friend Carlo, who is very drunk. The next morning he visits Carlo's home to check on him but only finds Carlo's mother Martha, who seems interested in Marcus. The media identifies Marcus as the eyewitness and shows Gianna's photo of him. That night, someone plays a recording of a child's song outside his door; Marcus manages to lock the door before the person can enter, but he hears the gruff whisper "I'll kill you sooner or later." Marcus tells Giordani, whom he met at Helga's funeral, about the encounter. Giordani, noting that Helga also heard a child's song, recalls a book of modern folklore describing a local haunted house where a child's song is sometimes heard. Gianna begins helping Marcus because she feels guilty for taking his photo. Marcus reads the folklore book and finds a photo of the house in it. He rips out the picture, planning to learn more from the book's author. However, the killer has been watching Marcus and brutally murders the author before Marcus can speak to her. Using the photo, Marcus finds and investigates the huge abandoned house. Under sheetrock he uncovers a disturbing mural: a child holding a bloody knife over a dead body. Giordani, who has been assisting Marcus's investigation, is murdered that night after the black-gloved killer distracts him with a disturbing mechanized doll. Meanwhile, Marcus finds a walled-off room in the abandoned house. In the middle of the dusty floor sits a desiccated corpse. Someone knocks Marcus unconscious as he backs away in horror. Marcus awakens outside the house, which is burning. Gianna appears, explaining that she got his message about investigating the house and arrived in time to save him. As Marcus and Gianna wait at the caretaker's house for the police, Marcus notices that the caretaker's daughter has drawn a picture identical to the hidden mural he found in the house. She tells him she saw the picture in the archives of the local school. Marcus and Gianna immediately go to the school. Marcus finds the drawing in a student's record. When Gianna leaves to call the police, someone stabs her. Marcus corners the attacker-- it is Carlo, who as a student drew the disturbing pictures. The police arrive and Carlo flees into the dark street where a truck hits and kills him. At the hospital, Marcus learns that Gianna has survived. Believing that Carlo did not kill Helga, Marcus reinvestigates the apartment crime scene. There, he has an epiphany: the night of Helga's murder it was not a missing painting he sensed, but a missing reflection-- specifically, Marcus saw the killer's reflection when he first entered the apartment. As Marcus realizes he saw Martha, Carlo's mother, she appears behind him with a meat cleaver. Martha explains that she murdered her husband in front of the young Carlo as a child's song played (the events depicted in the first scene), then walled off the room containing his body. Carlo, scarred psychologically, did not kill anyone: he attacked Marcus and Gianna to protect his murderous mother from their investigation. Martha attacks. As they struggle, her necklace tangles in the bars of the building's elevator. Marcus sends the elevator down, slowly decapitating Martha. He stares into the deep red pool of her blood as the credits roll. ===== At Asashi High, a run-down high school for boys, Kujo, Aoki, Yukio, Yoshimura, and Ota are a gang of school friends lost in apathy and dissatisfaction. They are aware their future offers limited options. Even most teachers have already written them off as a lost cause. Kujo's gang is part of the school's illegal society, which is controlled through a rooftop game as a test of courage: the Clapping Game. Whoever wins the game gets to be the society's leader, and rules all gangs throughout Asashi High. No teacher can stand up to this society. After a round of the Clapping Game, Kujo wins the leadership role, which excites his best friend Aoki, who wants Kujo to dominate the school through the use of casual violence. However, Kujo passively resists doing this. Aoki eventually realizes his best friend only took part in the Clapping Game to pass the time, and that Kujo never wanted to be the school's leader. Devastated, he challenges Kujo for his leadership, and loses. As Aoki becomes disillusioned, alienated and hostile toward Kujo, friends around them slowly fall apart, bringing their school to a series of mini violent climaxes. ===== Pilots Philo and George are about to land a plane, only for Philo to accidentally knock out his contact lenses, causing the plane to malfunction and crash into a skyscraper. The destruction is then revealed to be a simulator and the duo was taking an exam in pilot school, causing the two to be attrited for unsatisfactory performance. Unemployed and out of options, they enroll in Weidermeyer Academy, one of the top stewardess schools in the country. George and Philo get put in a group full of misfits, including a lady wrestler whose fiancé got cold feet, a frumpy overweight girl, an ex- prostitute whose probation officer arranged for her to enroll in Weidermeyer as part of a work-release program, a gay man, and an extremely clumsy woman. The group has standard classes about emergencies, etiquette, and antiterrorism, which they work through. Also as part of a test is a full-sized replica of an airplane with people to wait on, and some difficult people are selected such as a bratty little kid, a group of middle aged drunks, and surly ex-NFL player who refuses George's orders not to smoke. The group starts to gel together, with George learning to start applying himself to a career and Philo finding common ground with the "jinx girl" due to his similar eye problems. However, by happenstance, the group gains the ire of the school dean, a matronly martinet who believes all stewardesses to be attractive "flying waitresses", not tough, nerdy, chubby, promiscuous, and certainly not stewards like George and Philo. As she fails to wash them out, she resorts to her secondary plan as she is responsible for jobs. When everyone graduates, stewardesses are given jobs with reputable airlines such as Delta, Pan Am, or TWA, while this entire group has been detailed to Stromboli Air. The group is introduced to their owner, Mr. Stromboli, a kindly immigrant whose airline is on the verge of chapter 11 bankruptcy unless his final flight can prove reputable. The group agrees to work together to make it a profitable flight. Still not content, the school dean has gotten herself assigned to be purser, saying she will oversee them and if Stromboli goes bankrupt, they are doomed to unemployment. The flight is a mixture of ordinary businessmen and a blind people's convention, which starts to run into trouble when an unexpected rain squall hits and a "mad bomber" (in an ironic sense) calmly and quietly sets his plan into motion, drugging the drink of the man sitting next to him with a powerful hallucinogenic, then taking advantage of the turmoil to plant the bomb under a passenger's seat, sneak a gas pellet into the captain's cabin to knock out the pilot, then to the cargo hold to jump out into the sky. It is assumed he dies, either from the height of the jump or from the parachute failing. Things go from bad to worse as one of the blind men, in an attempt to find the restroom, accidentally lets himself into the captain's cabin and hits the instrument panel with his white cane. The plane is brought under control by Filo with the help of autopilot, but as his glasses were stepped on and broken earlier, he cannot see well at all. He directs staff to look for missing passengers and they discover the mad bomber is no longer on the plane. Filo correctly suspects he planted a bomb and jumped out of the cargo door, so directs the team to look for it. Kelly discovers the bomb and presents it to the team. The back of the plane is evacuated, then Bunkle and Julie try to disable it before running away when realising it will detonate. It explodes, blowing a hole in fuselage, causing Julie to be sucked back. The width of her backside was sufficient to plug the whole perfectly and the plane remains in flight. Back in the cockpit, Filo is given binoculars which he turns around the other way and can see the instruments perfectly, allowing him to land the plane. The film ends with a court case where the fate of the stewardesses and airline are on trial. The undercover evaluator onboard turned out to be the passenger beside the mad bomber who was drugged and received a blow job from Sugar Dubois to calm him down. He states that it was the best flight of his life and the case is dismissed resulting in celebrations all round. ===== The story takes place in an alternate steampunk version of the British Empire (Neo-Britannia). The Empire has collapsed and every supernatural being has somehow been physically manifested. The various deities and sprites pass their time eating their subjects, squabbling and fighting amongst themselves in hopes of achieving monotheism. They are fought by a single relic of the NeoBritannia Empire, Harry Kipling. A parody of a traditional Imperial man, he wears a solar topee, uses an elephant gun and drinks earl-grey tea. He lives as a zombie, dedicating his undead existence to the complete eradication of gods - "Proactive Atheism". In this he's aided by Neesha, a bewildered refugee from a war-torn planet, and Klux, a powerful but unintelligent engine of destruction. Kipling discovered he is the pawn of an unnamed god who is presumably more powerful than those he's seen before and probably the one who brought him back. ===== The story appears to take place in an alternate version of North America in the present or near- future. Following the collapse of social order in cities, the newly orphaned teenager Michael is put aboard a refugee train and sent to work on a small- town farm. Conditions are difficult because the countryside is covered with "darklines", a type of wire that absorbs light, making the environment dull and gloomy and seemingly draining all the townsfolk of vitality and joy. The darklines have been erected in an attempt to prevent the encroachment of a strange "brightness" which the townsfolk claim will cause anyone who enters it to go blind and mad and eventually die. Wearing protective gear and dark goggles, the townspeople show Michael the brightness; he risks taking off his goggles for a brief peek and is surprised to see what looks like a naked boy of about his own age, dancing in the light. He guesses that the boy must be his predecessor Doey, who ran off into the brightness and was believed dead. Michael learns that Doey was not the only one, and begins to suspect that the brightness may not be as deadly as the locals believe. His suspicions are strengthened when Doey, still naked and glowing with brilliant colors, briefly dances into the darkness to taunt and invite Michael when no one else is watching. Doey's joyful attitude and his androgynous beauty stir feelings in Michael that he does not fully understand, and he is torn between remaining in the gloom of his familiar world or taking his chances in the light. Seeing his change of attitude the townsfolk guess that Michael has been touched by the brightness, and decide to use him as bait in a trap. Their plan is to leave Michael in an old house on the border of the brightness and activate a new darkline to trap anyone who comes for him. Instead the brightness overtakes the house. Under its influence Michael feels all of the joy and vitality he has never been able to experience in the dark. Putting aside his inhibitions and clothing he joins Doey and the others who have left the darkness behind forever. Doey has sabotaged the local darklines, and invites Michael to join him in bringing them all down. According to Doey all of the dark-dwellers will eventually have to choose, either to join the brightness-dwellers or to die. ===== An agent of the United States CIA is arrested in Morocco on drug-smuggling charges. The person behind the smuggling operation is CIA deputy director Burton Cooper, who hopes the resulting scandal will lead to the resignation of CIA Director Ross, and Cooper's promotion to Director. Ross is aware of Cooper's complicity, but when questioned by a special Senate committee about the arrest, Ross tells the committee that he has not reviewed all of the facts of the case. The committee orders a full inquiry and gives Ross 48 hours to present with the proper answers. Ross devises a plan for Cooper's downfall. Ross knows his house has been bugged for sound by Cooper, so he purposely leaks a rumor that a man will be arriving at the airport who will clear him of the scandal, and orders his assistant to pick him up. Cooper, desperate to find out who the mystery man is, sends his own agents to follow Ross's lackey, Brown. Brown goes to the airport with instructions to pick someone at random from the crowd, leading Cooper and his team on a wild goose chase. Brown spots a man wearing mismatched shoes descending an escalator and picks him as their random target. The man is concert violinist Richard Drew, whose percussionist friend Morris played a trick on him by hiding one of each pair of his shoes. This has forced Richard to wear one business shoe and one red sneaker on his flight home. Cooper takes the bait and starts tracking Richard, who proves to be carrying on his own intrigues. Richard is completely oblivious to the intelligence operations centered on him, consumed by his own personal problems. He has been having an affair with Morris' flutist wife Paula, who plays in the same symphony orchestra with Richard and Morris. The affair was brought on by Morris' immaturity and his obsession with playing practical jokes on people, Richard being one of them. After eluding them at the airport, Richard is bumped into by Maddy, one of Cooper's operatives, who steals his wallet. After damaging his tooth with a bag of gag peanuts given to him by Morris, Richard heads home to prepare for a visit to the dentist. While talking on the phone with Morris, Cooper, who has tapped his phone, learns that they are to meet with the Senators. Cooper thinks it is an inquiry with the Senate, but it turns out to be the name of the orchestral softball team for which Richard and Morris play. While Richard heads to the dentist, Cooper sends his agents out to continue their surveillance, first by having Maddy lead a team to search his apartment for any information and bug it for sound, and then by having other agents intercept him at his dentist's office, believing his tooth has microfilm inside. They learn Richard has traveled the world, including several Communist countries. Cooper thinks this is the perfect cover for a spy and starts digging deeper. Soon, they suspect his sheet music is actually a code, and steal time on Defense Department computers to decipher it. Hoping to learn more, he sends in Maddy to seduce Richard and find out what he knows. While Richard is playing a violin composition he wrote for her, Maddy actually falls for him. Meanwhile, Morris catches glimpses of the operations of Cooper's agents, leading him to believe he may be going mad. Ross, meanwhile, simply sits back and watches the antics unfold. Brown is concerned that Richard, the innocent man that he selected at random, may end up being killed as a result of Ross's plan to draw out Cooper, but Ross is only concerned about his career and dismisses Brown's guilty conscience. When one attempt after another fails to yield any usable information, Cooper orders Richard killed and eventually attempts to kill Richard himself. Richard remains completely oblivious to the plot until Maddy decides to thwart Cooper, and testifies in front of the Senate about the plot. Cooper is arrested, while Ross is demoted and replaced by Brown as Director of the CIA. Morris is committed to a mental institution, and Paula severs her romantic interest in Richard, believing that Morris needs her. Maddy agrees to testify against Cooper in exchange for her freedom, after which she is reunited with Richard. ===== Lawrence Bourne III (Tom Hanks), is a spoiled rich kid who just graduated from Yale Class of 1962 with a $28,000 gambling debt. After his father, Lawrence Bourne Jr. (George Plimpton), refuses to pay his son's debt, Lawrence escapes his angry creditors by trading places with his college roommate Kent (Xander Berkeley) and jumping on a Peace Corps flight to Thailand. On the plane, he meets Washington State University graduate Tom Tuttle from Tacoma (John Candy) and the beautiful, down-to-earth Beth Wexler (Rita Wilson), the latter of whom rejects his advances upon realizing why he's really there. In Thailand, Lawrence is assigned by John Reynolds (Tim Thomerson) to build a bridge for the local villagers. On day one, Tuttle gets into an argument with the villagers over what wood to use; the only one to speak English is At Toon (Gedde Watanabe). Tuttle then gets captured by communist forces who brainwash him into doing their bidding, while Reynolds makes passes at Beth. Lawrence befriends At Toon, teaching him and several other villagers various gambling card games, but they are met by the powerful drug lord Chung Mee (Ernest Harada), who forces them to have the bridge ready soon. Lawrence eventually wins Beth over but she is captured by Reynolds, who is working with Chung Mee. They rescue Beth, who urges them to destroy the bridge; Lawrence reluctantly agrees after professing his love for her. They get the villagers on board with the plan and get Tuttle back to reality, plotting to leave dynamite in the center of the bridge so that the entire structure will capsize. Their plan works fine until Lawrence is confronted by Reynolds, who threatens to kill him. Lawrence sweet- talks Reynolds long enough to enact the plan, jumping into the river as the bridge explodes. Beth saves Lawrence by performing CPR, and they kiss once Lawrence wakes. Some time later, Lawrence and Beth are married in the Thai village. Lawrence writes to his parents saying he finally did something right for the right reasons. ===== Darryl Witherspoon (Marlon Wayans) is a college economics student, who does not have the advantages of his wealthy nemesis, Scott Thorpe (David Spade), or his best friend Tim LaFlour (Matthew Lillard), straight edge punk rocker who has a hockey scholarship. Darryl is so broke he donates four pints of blood in one day (playing a different character each time) and four vials of sperm in one day. Darryl's big break comes when he enters a competition, where the winner gets a high-paying Wall Street job. But when Scott enters the competition, it seems Darryl's break has gone down the drain. He takes on a high-paying experiment to test a drug that enhances the five senses. Darryl uses it to his advantage and he impresses the competition's supervisor, Mr. Tyson (Rip Torn) and he even joins the hockey team as a goalie. But after taking an extra dose one night, he experiences side effects. The experiment's supervisor, Dr. Thomas Wheedon (Brad Dourif), tells Darryl only four of his senses will work at a time until the drug leaves his body. As Darryl struggles, Tim thinks that his friend is on heroin and gets worried about him. Darryl's luck then starts going down the drain as he loses the hockey game because his sense of sight is lost. He also mistakenly confesses love to his girlfriend's father who he thinks is his girlfriend as his sense of sight is lost. Her father turns out to be Mr. Tyson. He also acts very clumsily (because of the loss of the ability to feel) during the basketball game he is invited to see with a client who needs to be impressed in order for Darryl to score some points with the Smythe-Bates guys. Luckily, the client thinks Darryl is just funny and signs a contract with the company. As the story progresses, Darryl asks his friend Tim to help him study for the next day's interview. At that exact moment, Scott studies for the test with the aid of his rich father's employees. Scott is shown to answer a question correctly but he does not know the reason behind it, he ignores the question. The next day, the drug leaves Darryl's system and now all his five senses operate normally. During the interview, it comes down to Darryl and Scott, Scott is asked the same question he was asked last night, he answers it correctly, but when asked the reason, he does not know, Darryl steps in, gives the correct reason and scores the position of junior analyst at Smythe-Bates. But in his speech, he confesses that he cheated by taking an experimental drug. A meeting is called to decide his fate and Mr. Tyson tells him that he himself started out in the mail room and Darryl should too, if he serves one year duty in the mail room, he will score the position of junior analyst. The story skips a year and Darryl is shown to ask his mom to move into a deluxe apartment. The movie ends with Darryl entering the Smythe-Bates building on his first day, with a familiar-looking doorman (Sherman Hemsley). ===== In New York City, a series of murders begin. In Washington, a plot conceived at the highest levels of American government is at work to bring the nation of Japan to its knees. In Tokyo, a power struggle is nearing its final stages for control of the Black Blade Society, an ostensibly political cabal whose motives may encompass far more than politics. ===== After vanquishing the Wicked Queen, Queen Snow White and her husband King Charming are now the rulers of the land. They have a young daughter, also named Snow White for her snow-white hair. The royal family decides to host a Christmas winter sports festival. One of the participants is Grunyon, a bumbling dwarf and a friend of the young Snow White. Snow White says her Christmas wish is to build a playhouse for all the children and suggests remodeling the deserted castle on a mountaintop nearby that belonged to Snow White's evil stepmother. However, a large ice block melts, freeing the Wicked Queen, who has been encased within it ever since her defeat. Returning to her castle, she finds her Magic Mirror still in place and conjures a magical ice storm that freezes the entire kingdom, just barely missing princess Snow White who is told by her mother to find the Seven Dwarfs, immediately before her parents are transformed into ice statues. Grunyon, who was also spared being frozen, leads Snow White into the forest to escape the storm. After finding their way into the Warm Valley, they accidentally wander upon a giant garden and two giants appear (Finicky and Corny) who mistake them for bugs and try to squash them. Snow White starts crying, and Grunyon scolds the giants who apologize and introduce themselves through song, along with five other giants (Thinker, Hicker, Tiny, Weeper, and Brawny). Turns out they are cousins of the Seven Dwarfs. After hearing their story, they take pity on Snow White and Grunyon, and allow them to stay in their cottage. After the Wicked Queen discovers the young Snow White is still alive and also more beautiful than her, she first turns herself into a giant rat to attack her, but is foiled when one of the giants shoos her away upon his return home. She then melts all the ice on the mountains to form a flood, which Brawny saves Snow White from. The giants decide to leave Snow White at home and post Hicker as a guard. The Queen turns two vultures into wyvern-like creatures to distract Hicker, then disguises herself as a giant old woman and tricks Snow White into smelling the scent of a poisoned flower that puts her to sleep, just as she had tricked Snow White's mother with the poisoned apple. However, Hicker's hiccups are loud and the other giants hear them and get back to the cottage. Seeing Snow White apparently dead, they run off to attack the Queen's castle, seeking revenge. There, she tries to stop them by casting lightning bolts, but Brawny is too tough for it. She then summons seven demons to fight the giants, but Hicker begins hiccuping which causes an earthquake and the castle collapses. The Magic Mirror, revealed as the source of the Queen's power, is shattered and the demons vanish as she herself evaporates into nothingness. With the Wicked Queen's final demise, the curse she has placed over the kingdom is broken, causing the land to thaw and the ice statues to revert to people. Grunyon and the Giants bring Snow White home to her parents in a rose-filled coffin. They kiss Snow White's cheeks and she awakens, and everyone rejoices. Brawny also tells that he and the other giants built a castle for the children while Snow White was asleep. ===== This, though necessary, is not sufficient to account for the multifariousness of the work. The scheme of the allegorical satire not only overlaps with the narrative scheme of the romance or history, but with the epistolary novel as well, the parody of which is but the first external frame inside which many other genres are parodied. The story of the squabble is just half the work. The other half is a "subjoined" key to the allegory and two other letters. And "subjoining" a key, which is in the end no key at all, represents, literary speaking, a "scandal" as shameful as the topical misdeeds that are told. Inexorably, the focus of the scandal shifts from the allegorical history of facts to the allegorical romance of their reading. ===== The fearless American journalist and fashion photographer Emanuelle travels throughout the world in search of a good story for her editor. She is a globe-trotting reporter who is not afraid to disrobe in the name of investigative journalism. In this third installment, Emanuelle goes to Europe to investigate the private harem of wealthy tycoon Eric Van Darren, where she watches a naked woman masturbating a horse named Pedro before having a sapphic encounter in a steam room. She also meets the Italian Duke Alfredo Elvize and travels to his house in Venice where she ends up in a threesome with him and his wife. She also likes to see for herself what really goes on at diplomatic parties, observing and finally taking part in an orgy at a party the couple throws. Then, Emanuelle is sent to a private holiday resort island where women pay for men to fulfill their ultimate carnal desires. There she discovers a couple watching a disturbing snuff film for sexual titillation and becomes determined to find out who made it, thereby stumbling upon a group that uses kidnapped girls for the production of snuff films. Emanuelle takes several pictures with a small spy camera installed in her necklace and eventually gets caught. She has a brush with death, which leaves her wondering if it is perhaps time to hang up her camera for good. Loaded with plenty of photos for her story, Emanuelle returns to New York City to meet her editor, who, however, refuses to print the story and images. Emanuelle is disgusted and quits her job to go on a long vacation with her boyfriend. ===== The Rider arrives on his advanced motorcycle with its artificial intelligence computer Einstein. He crashes but manages to pass through the "wall of illusion" and is found and brought back to health by the Enlightened Elders. They have chosen him to lead their fight against the evil Omega, an Orwellian state run by the evil Prossor. The Elders are allied with the resistance movement, the Outsiders. The Rider first helps Nastasia and the other Outsiders by rescuing McWayne, Nastasia's father and leader of the Outsiders. While the Rider and McWayne successfully escape, Nastasia is captured and subjected to brainwashing by Prossor. The Rider gains acceptance from various Marginals (amazons, martial artists, truckers, punks, soldiers, Omega defectors) by winning in the ritual brawl which determines who is the strongest. The Rider and the Outsiders launch their final attack on Prossor's regime, but are intercepted by the Omegas and a giant armored truck, called Megaweapon. As the rebels destroy the Omega patrols with their cars (Ford Taunus TCs), helicopters and tankers, the Rider manages to destroy the Megaweapon by short circuiting it, but not before his speedcycle is crushed under the truck's wheels. The Rider and McWayne storm Prossor's headquarters where they face the dictator and a brainwashed Nastasia. She wounds the Rider, but when ordered to kill her father, she rebels, turning on Prossor and shooting him instead. The Omega has been overthrown, and the Outsiders and Marginals celebrate, as the Rider prepares to move on with his repaired speedcycle. In a twist, it is revealed that the man Nastasia shot was actually a cyborg clone and the real Prossor is still alive. He flies away with an unnamed traitor of the New Way (Fred Williamson), plotting revenge against the "animals" that defeated him. ===== The game can be played with two starting-points. The Campaign game starts in the beginning of year 348 AC, with the Highlord controlling Neraka only, and the Whitestone Alliance has not even formed yet. The Whitestone player will need to build it up from scratch. The Scenario game starts in year 349 AC, with each side having possession of a few countries, and the Whitestone player will start the game in medias res, during the height of the war. In particular, one of the Whitestone countries, elven Silvanesti, will be besieged by a swarm of dragon and enemy troops. ===== The book narrates the adventures of Huma Dragonbane, a Knight of the Crown, his meeting with Kaz the Minotaur, the discovering of the dragonlances, and the defeat of Takhisis during the Third Dragon Wars. Huma and the rest of his unit patrol through a desolate village. Huma's commander, Rennard, orders the investigation of the nearby woods due to a rumor of goblin activity. During the ensuing confrontation Huma is separated from his unit. While searching for his comrades he comes across goblins tormenting a captive, the minotaur Kaz. After saving Kaz, Huma strikes up an unlikely friendship with the minotaur and later with a silver dragon before being reunited with the Knights. Once back at headquarters, they encounter a battle between the forces of Paladine and the forces of Takhisis. Huma is struck in the battle and loses consciousness. He awakens in an infirmary being tended by a woman who introduces herself as Gwyneth. Huma is appointed captain of the watch, and encounters his old friend, Magius, a powerful magic user. Magius tells Huma to trust him, but has to leave while Huma returns to the knights' encampment. The knights are engulfed in a battle with the forces of Takhisis and Huma and Kaz are thrown into a magical darkness. Magius leads Huma and Kaz through the battle to his Citadel, but later prevents them from leaving. Magius tells Huma that he is a renegade mage that took the test in the Tower of High Sorcery. The Citadel is discovered by Galan Dracos and comes under attack by the forces of Takhisis. Magius tells Huma that a mountain represented by a tapestry in the Citadel is important and that Huma should journey into Ergoth toward this mountain. Huma and Kaz flee the Citadel. Huma and Kaz are separated. Huma fights off dreadwolves and warriors and becomes lost in the forests of Ergoth. He is helped by an Ergothian commander who brings him to the Ergothian camp. The Ergothians tell Huma that the lands around Ergoth have been ravaged by the plague. While the camp is traveling Huma comes upon a ruins of a town and is captured by servants of Morgion. The Ergothians rescue Huma who then encounters Magius, and the two escape into the night. Magius and Huma come across the knight Bouron who is attached to an outpost of the Knights of Solamnia. Bouron and his commander Taggin welcome Huma. Taggin captures Kaz and puts him on trial. Taggin releases Kaz to Huma and allows Huma to continue on his journey to the mountains accompanied by a retinue of knights. Magius, Kaz and Huma traverse the paths in the mountains and Huma is separated from the others. Huma is led to a temple built into the side of the mountain and encounters Gwyneth. Gwyneth tells Huma that he will face challenges before he can claim the prize that he has come for. Huma enters the mountain and faces Wyrmfather, an ancient, serpentine dragon. Huma hides in Wyrmfather's treasure room, discovering an evil magical sword called the Sword of Tears. Huma kills Wyrmfather with the Sword of Tears and is teleported through a magical mirror in the treasure room to Solamnia. Huma returns to Vingaard Keep to find that the head of the Knights, Grand Master Trake, has died. Huma is to attend a meeting that will determine whether Bennett, Trake's nephew, or Lord Oswald, the High Warrior and Huma's mentor, will become the next Grand Master. During the meeting Rennard tells everyone that Oswald has become mysteriously ill. At night Huma discovers the guards near Lord Oswald have been put into a magical sleep, then encounters Rennard dressed as a servant of Morgion, trying to poison Lord Oswald. Huma and Rennard fight, but Rennard escapes. Lord Oswald thanks Huma for his help and sends him back to the mountains of Ergoth. Huma encounters Rennard inciting villagers to violence. The two fight until Rennard is mortally wounded. Huma is then teleported back to Wyrmfather's treasure room. Huma finds the Sword of Tears, lying among the treasure. He takes it with him and looks for an exit from the mountain. Huma encounters Gilean, a grey-clad mystic, who tells him to leave the sword behind. Huma struggles for control as the sword tries to dominate his mind; he eventually prevails, discarding the sword. Huma is granted access to the workshop of Duncan Ironweaver. Duncan tells Huma that he is the creator of the Dragonlance and allows him to pass into a room where Huma has a vision of the knightly, benevolent god Paladine, on a platinum dragon. Paladine hands Huma the Dragonlance. Huma exits the chamber and finds Gwyneth, who tells him that Kaz and Magius are nearby. Huma finds Kaz and Magius and with the help of a silver dragon that Gwyneth sent for, they are able to prepare the lances for transport to Vingaard Keep. En route to Vingaard the group is attacked by Crynus and Char. Huma and the silver dragon kill Char, and Crynus is defeated with the help of Kaz and the silver dragon. Warriors of Takhisis attempt to steal the lances, but are prevented from doing so by Kaz. Magius is captured and taken back to Galan Dracos. Huma rejoins the knights to find that there are many Dragonlances already there. He finds Duncan Ironweaver, who tells him he had many. Many good dragons show up and are fitted with the new lances, and go into battle against the evil dragons of Takhisis. ===== A Boston couple, Gail (Meryl Streep) and Tom Hartman (David Strathairn) are having marital problems, mostly due to Tom, an architect, spending so much time working. Gail, a history teacher and former river guide, is taking their son, Roarke (Joseph Mazzello), on a rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho, along with their dog, Maggie. Daughter, Willa (Stephanie Sawyer), is staying behind with Gail's parents in Idaho. Tom, who had remained in Boston, unexpectedly joins them at the last minute. As they are setting off, they meet three other rafters, Wade (Kevin Bacon), Terry (John C. Reilly), and Frank (William Lucking), who appear to be friendly. The Hartmans catch up with the trio during a day break, and notice that Frank is no longer with Wade and Terry. They explain that Frank hiked out after an argument. Unfortunately, Frank was their guide, and Wade and Terry lack any rafting experience. Gail offers to guide them down the rest of the river. Before getting back on the water, Maggie wanders off and becomes curious about something in the brush farther up the canyon. Tom fetches her before she uncovers it, and they return to the boat. After a day's rafting, they make camp for the night, but Tom continues working on his architectural project, agitating Roarke, who feels neglected. They are joined by Wade and Terry, who help celebrate Roarke's birthday that night. After Wade begins acting suspiciously, Gail agrees with Tom that they should part ways with the men. Their plans are upended when the men shove off first with Roarke aboard their raft. Wade, showing off to Roarke, reveals they have a gun. During a rest stop, Gail and Tom attempt to take off with Roarke before Wade and Terry notice. The attempt fails, and Wade pulls the gun on Tom. As they struggle, Maggie runs off into the bushes. Gail then realizes that Wade and Terry committed a recently reported robbery and have killed Frank. The Hartmans are forced down the river at gunpoint before setting up camp for the night. During the night, Tom tries and fails to wrestle the gun away from Terry. Tom runs into the river with Wade chasing, but he escapes; Wade lies, telling Gail and Roarke that Tom is dead. The next day they run into Johnny, a park ranger (Benjamin Bratt) who knows Gail. Wade holds the gun to Gail's back as they pretend everything is okay. Wade and Terry's escape plan includes rafting down the Gauntlet, a dangerous and now restricted rapids section that Gail once successfully navigated. Johnny returns later, suspecting Gail intends to run the Gauntlet, and warns her not to try. Wade shoots Johnny and throws his body into the rapids. Unbeknownst to anyone, Tom, who finds Maggie, is racing on foot along the canyon rim to get ahead of the raft. After a harrowing ride, the group makes it through the Gauntlet. Tom reappears, and flips the raft. As Tom struggles with Terry, Gail is able to get the gun. She shoots and kills Wade while Tom subdues Terry. The film ends with the Hartmans and Terry, who has been arrested, being helicoptered out. ===== A school massacre leaves seven students and the shooters parents dead and one student named Deanna Cartwright (Christensen) seriously injured. The shooter himself is dead, shot by police during the confrontation after the actual shooting, and the only witness (and possible suspect) is Alicia Browning (Philipps), a gothic student who is now under the attention of the detective in charge of the case, Det. Martin Van Zandt (Garber). The school principal asks Alicia to visit Deanna in the hospital. Right away, their differences are evident. Alicia is an outsider from a single-parent family who shuns the society that similarly shuns her, while Deanna is from a wealthy family, gets good grades and is popular with her classmates. At first, Deanna seems upbeat and cheerful, but soon it becomes apparent that beneath this exterior are psychological scars left behind by the incident. Alicia starts to empathize with her, as she herself is battling her own demons as well, including a previous suicide attempt. Through these similar emotional bonds, the two form an unlikely friendship as they both try to cope with their separate psychological problems. ===== The film opens on Hector "Heck" (Matthew Goode) and Rachel's (Piper Perabo) wedding day in North London, England which Rachel's overbearing mother, Tess, (Celia Imrie), is in charge of planning. Rachel's father Ned (Anthony Head) and her younger sister Henrietta (Boo Jackson) "H" are supportive. Flower shop owner Luce (Lena Headey) and Henrietta are chatting with Hector and Cooper "Coop" (Darren Boyd). Henrietta take an immediate liking to her, and she asks if Luce can sit by her during the wedding. Rachel arrives with her father and the ceremony begins. At the reception afterwards, Luce introduces herself to Rachel, who is blocking her attempts to get a drink, admitting that her wedding ring fell in the punch, and the two fish it out before going their own ways. Some time later, Rachel goes to Luce's shop and invites her and Hector to dinner, with Rachel planning to set Luce up with Coop. Luce confides to Heck that she's a lesbian and is bemused as Coop attempts to seduce her. During the meal, Luce espouses she believes in love at first sight, while Rachel says it takes time to find the right person. Later on that night, Rachel and Luce share a moment together on the balcony as it rains. The next day while grocery shopping, Hector and Rachel run into Luce and a female friend, Edie (Eva Birthistle). Hector then tells Rachel that Luce is gay. Hector inquires as to the relationship of Luce and Edie, but they assure Rachel and him that nothing is going on. Edie says Luce "loves another". Hector sets Luce and Rachel up to spend some time together as friends despite Rachel attempting to avoid Luce. The two spend an evening together, visiting a football match and an arcade. At the end of the night, Luce walks Rachel back to her flat. Rachel leans forward to kiss Luce but withdraws at the last moment and goes inside her home. Rachel continues to resist her growing attraction to Luce. Unable to deny what she is feeling, Rachel eventually confronts Luce directly at her flower shop. She tells Luce that a romance between them cannot happen, turns to leave, and returns seconds later to kiss Luce. Their foreplay gets interrupted by Hector, who has stopped by to pick up flowers for Rachel, feeling guilty about the distance growing between them. Later, Rachel and Luce agree that they cannot betray Hector. Hector quits his job and when he returns home drunk, she confesses all to him as he sleeps, but does not say who her love is. Hector, who was feigning sleep, calls Coop for support. Coop confronts Luce after figuring out she is the one Rachel loves. Luce decides that being near Rachel without being with her is too hard. She makes plans to go on an extended trip out of the country, leaving care of her shop to her mother. While Rachel and Hector are celebrating her birthday, Rachel finds out about Luce's trip and Hector realizes who Rachel is in love with. Wanting Rachel to be happy, he leaves. Rachel confesses to her parents that she is in love with a woman, and she tracks down Luce. Rachel gets stuck in traffic and tries to call Luce, who ignores her. However, Rachel realizes Luce is in the same traffic jam when she hears the same man on a bicycle singing "Happy Together" and comments, "I've heard that song before", and proceeds to climb on the roof of her car. She then uses the lessons Luce taught her at the football match about how to yell loudly to call to her. The two women reunite and kiss each other in the middle of a crowded London street. During the end credits, we see the characters some time later. Heck is on a plane, all set to write his travel book, when he discovers a young woman (Angel Coulby) will be sitting next to him for the long flight. The scenes continue with H and her young boyfriend playing at a playground, Coop holding a baby, and Luce and Rachel enjoying each other's company. ===== Irene Morrison (Vera Farmiga), a working class mother of two boys, lives in Upstate New York and works as a supermarket cashier. She also harbors a cocaine addiction. Her eldest son, Ben (Jasper Daniels), whose birthday is approaching, asks Irene to buy a snake for him; she suggests Lego instead. On the night of Halloween, Irene takes her kids trick-or-treating and, at one of the houses they visit, she meets Bob (Hugh Dillon), a nurse. Later that night, her husband Steve (Clint Jordan) arrives home with a toilet, announcing he's going to build them a second bathroom. In bed, Steve tries to initiate sex, but Irene says she doesn't feel very sexy. She changes the subject back to decorating their bathroom. The next day, Irene takes the kids to a reptile store to buy a snake, but finds that they don't have enough money for one. While her boys wait in the car, Irene visits her dealer, asking him for another fix, but he refuses since she hasn't been paying for the last couple of weeks. At work, Irene contemplates taking money from the cash register. She then goes back to her dealer with Ben's birthday check from her mother-in-law, but the dealer refuses to take it. Afterwards, Irene checks herself into a drug rehabilitation center. At a meeting about cravings, she meets fellow addict Lucy (Caridad de la Luz), and befriends her. While at the facility, Irene again encounters Bob. Before she leaves, Bob visits with a book that helped him during his quitting phase, and offers her his support. At Irene's first Narcotics Anonymous meeting, a man celebrates one year of abstinence. In the following weeks, Irene finds it difficult to stay clean when her friends use drugs around her recreationally. One day at work, she is called into the manager's office. She admits her past drug use and is subsequently fired. Lucy suggests they start a cleaning business in order to gain money, to which Irene agrees. On the way to her next NA meeting, Irene offers to give Bob a ride. However, in the car, she instigates an affair with him. Bob then takes her to a snake breeder so she can purchase one for Ben. Later on, the two become intimate, but Bob excuses himself to the bathroom. Irene then walks in to find him shooting up. Furious at his hypocrisy, she argues with him but ends up using his drugs. Irene and Steve attempt to play a sexual game with one another while using coke, but Irene soon stops it. After taking drugs in Bob's car one night, the two are pulled over by the police. They are both arrested and detained when an officer finds a drug burner on the dashboard and a half- ounce of heroin. A lawyer briefs Irene on her best sentencing option: if she pleads guilty, she must commit to 50 individual counselling sessions, 100 group counselling sessions, and 250 NA meetings a year; he informs her that if she screws up, she'll be sentenced to several years incarceration in a state prison. When she arrives home, she admits her affair to Steve, who tells her to move out. Lucy gives her a place to crash, although she's angry with Irene for flaking out on a job. Irene eventually finds herself a house and gets some custody of her kids. After another of Irene's Narcotics meetings, Bob shows up to apologize for getting her caught up in his mess and subsequently avoiding her calls. Irene forgives him and he begins to stay at her house. Meanwhile, Bob is using, but intends to start going to support meetings again. His dealer tries to persuade him to sell some pills, but he refuses. Irene realizes he's been getting high by combining his prescribed methadone and other drugs, and as a result could endanger her kids; she confronts him and silently asks him to leave. ===== Drayton "Dray" Jackson (Bill Bellamy), who works as an A&R; representative for Def Jam Recordings, is a playboy with only one goal in life: to have sex with as many women as possible. He dreams that he gets caught cheating on his girlfriend, Lisa, (Lark Voorhies) only to wake up for the dream to remind him not to get caught. The women he sleeps with are all a secret from Lisa, who comes over to his house for a bit to see him, before heading off for work. Dray's sister, Jenny, (Natalie Desselle) also comes by his house to remind him about the cookout. Dray becomes fascinated with Jenny's friend Katrina (Mari Morrow), and invites her to a party his friend is hosting; she tells him that she is busy. Jenny cannot stand Dray's way of treating women. As soon as Dray leaves, she and Katrina snoop around and find Dray's mobile black book of his women. Jenny plans to set Dray up at the party in a hostile environment, hoping that Dray, if he gets caught, will reform his ways. After Jenny and Katrina call the women and receive their numbers, they both leave. Dray makes his daily rounds of sex with his women, including his three main ones: Robin (Beverly Johnson), a married woman, Amber (Amber Smith), a sexy thespian, and Sherri (Stacii Jae Johnson), a freaky dominatrix. Afterwards, Dray goes to the cookout briefly before continuing on to the party. When he sees all of his women there, including Jenny and Katrina, he understands that he has been set up by them. He figures out a way get all of his women out of the party, without them noticing about each other and confrontation about Dray. He then heads to Jenny and Katrina to explain that when a player is put in a hostile environment, a player doesn't reform: he adapts to the situation. Dray leaves to go home and wait for Lisa to come see him after a long day at work. While Dray is waiting for Lisa, Katrina shows up at the last minute to apologize. However, she has become fascinated with Dray and has been fantasizing about him. Before leaving, she makes a move on Dray and they have sex, apparently fulfilling her fantasy. Lisa returns, but Katrina is able to leave without her noticing. However as Lisa changes into her nightwear, she sees a dress, bra, and heels with smears of lipstick spelling out: "Busted, Adapt." Realizing that Katrina has set him up, Dray knows that he finally got caught. ===== Laurie Robinson (Didi Conn) is a young woman who earns a living by performing in commercials and hosting a children's show on public television, but she would rather concentrate on songwriting and singing than doing comedy with her small-time comedian father Si (Joe Silver). One night, Laurie goes to a restaurant where she meets a young film director, Chris Nolan (Michael Zaslow); she drives him back to his apartment and they spend the night together. The next morning, Laurie confesses to Chris that she is engaged and has to be at her wedding rehearsal. He asks if the previous night was just a final fling before marriage, and she says she cannot see him anymore. Laurie later meets with her fiancé, Ken Rothenberg (Stephen Nathan), and attends a recording session where she records her song, then sings background vocals and directs the musicians during overdubs. From there, she goes to the wedding rehearsal where Si has arranged an elaborate setup with an old friend who owns the Wedding Palace. The next day, Laurie auditions for a film that needs a singing voice for the leading lady. The director, she discovers, is Chris, who is as surprised as she is. Chris asks to see the songs in her portfolio. Laurie's voice and the orchestra's performance of her song "You Light Up My Life" impresses everyone, and Chris asks her if she would be interested in auditioning for the lead in his movie. Later, Chris sings "You Light Up My Life" for Laurie at his piano, giving it a more subdued treatment, then takes her for a walk along the beach. Laurie visits her best friend Annie (Melanie Mayron) to confess that she loves Chris, and adds that she may have the lead in his film. Meanwhile, when Laurie meets with Ken to call off the wedding, Chris auditions another girl for his movie and tells her she has the part, then gives his assistant the job of calling Laurie with the bad news. When Laurie asks why Chris did not call himself, the assistant explains that Chris has been in meetings all afternoon, and when she calls Chris's office, the receptionist tells her he is probably at home because he does not have any meetings. Laurie arrives at Chris's apartment as he and his new leading lady are leaving for dinner with friends. He apologizes and tells her she is special enough to get other roles. Later that night, when Laurie and Si perform at the Family Komedy Hour, her routine falls flat, tears flood her eyes and she walks off. In the dressing room, Laurie tells Si she hates the act because she is not funny, all she wants to do is sing and that Columbia Records is interested in her. She gives Si a cassette tape of her songs and tells him he has to let go of her, because she needs to depend on herself; she is going to New York City alone. They hug and kiss goodbye, and Laurie drives away. Sometime later, Laurie's song "You Light Up My Life" climbs the music charts and reaches number one. ===== Some years after his dangerous ride down the steep mountain to capture the Brumby herd and regain the colt, Jim Craig, now with a large herd of mountain-bred horses of his own, returns to take up with his girl, Jessica Harrison. She is still smitten with him, but opposition from her father remains as resolute as ever. Further, she also has a rich would-be suitor, Alistair Patton (son of the banker from whom Harrison is seeking a large loan), endeavouring to court her. Before he returns from Harrison's property to his home, Jim meets an army officer seeking quality horses for the remount service on a regular basis. As he realizes Jessica's affections remain for Jim, and that she doesn't "give a damn" about him, Patton jealously and maliciously recruits a gang to steal Jim's horses. Jim gives chase and in so doing again rides his horse down the steep mountainside. Patton shoots at him; the horse is killed and Jim is injured but manages to recover and resume the pursuit. Jim had earlier let the wild stallion which led the Brumbies loose into the wild again; in a twist of fate, the stallion shows itself from the wild at this crucial moment, and Jim finally trains the horse that has been the enigma of the entire district for decades. As Jim breaks him in and learns to ride him, they become friends, and together they catch up to Patton and his gang. Jessica's father has also relented during this time, and he eventually joins with Jim and his friends to hunt down Patton and his gang. Jim Craig gets and wins his man-on-man duel with Patton, and Harrison gives his final approval for Jessica and Jim to marry. ===== Moist von Lipwig is bored with his job as the Postmaster General of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, which is running smoothly without any challenges, so the Patrician tries to persuade him to take over the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork and the Royal Mint. Moist, content with his new lifestyle, refuses. However, when the current chairwoman, Topsy Lavish, dies, she leaves 50% of the shares in the bank to her dog, Mr Fusspot (who already owns one share of the bank, giving him a majority and making him chairman), and she leaves the dog to Moist. She also made sure that the Assassins' Guild would fulfill a contract on Moist if anything unnatural happens to the dog or he does not do as her last will commands. With no alternatives, Moist takes over the bank and finds out that people do not trust banks much, that the production of money runs slowly and at a loss, and that people now use stamps as currency rather than coins. His various ambitious changes include making money that is not backed by gold but by the city itself. Unfortunately, neither the chief cashier (Mr. Bent, who is rumoured to be a vampire but is actually something much worse) nor the Lavish family are too happy with him and try to dispose of him. Cosmo Lavish tries to go one step further — he attempts to replace Vetinari by taking on his identity — with little success. However all the while, the reappearance of a character from von Lipwig's past adds more pressure to his unfortunate scenario. Moist's fiancée, Adora Belle Dearheart, is working with the Golem Trust in the meantime to uncover golems from the ancient civilization of Um. She succeeds in bringing them to the city, and to everyone's surprise the "four golden golems" turn out to be "four thousand golems" (due to a translation error) and so the city is at risk of being at war with other cities who might find an army of 4000 golems threatening. Moist discovers the secret to controlling the golems, and manages to order them to bury themselves outside the city (except for a few to power clacks towers and golem horses for the mail coaches) and then decides that these extremely valuable golems are a much better foundation for the new currency than gold and thus introduces the golem-based currency. Eventually, an anonymous clacks message goes out to the leaders of other cities that contains the secret to controlling the golems (the wearing of a golden suit), thus making them unsuitable for use in warfare (as anyone could wear a shiny robe). At the end of the novel, Lord Vetinari considers the advancing age of the current Chief Tax Collector, and suggests that upon his retirement a new name to take on the vacancy might present itself. ===== The series takes place principally in the castle and province of Southmarch. Prominent sub- plots cover connected events to the south and north of Southmarch, respectively in the land of Xis and the Qar (faerie) lands beyond the impassable Shadowline. The action centers on the troubled Eddon family, the rulers of Southmarch, which is the nearest human province to the Shadowline and was formerly held by the Qar prior to their expulsion by the advancing humans. The novel begins with the king, Olin Eddon, imprisoned in a foreign land. His eldest son Kendrick is struggling to rule in his place, while his younger twins, Barrick and Briony, struggle with their adolescent emotions. The male twin, Barrick, is particularly troubled by depression and nightmares, incited by his private knowledge of a mysterious family curse. When Kendrick is assassinated, Briony shoulders the burden of ruling in her father's absence, while Barrick slips further into maudlin self-obsession. An army of Qar cross the Shadowline to invade Southmarch, and in the climactic battle of the first book Barrick is lost in the land of the Qar. Briony narrowly escapes death when the throne is usurped by her cousin. While Barrick travels in the Shadowlands, Briony travels around her own lands incognito, seeking allies. Incidents in the second book elucidate that the three main religions - those of the Qar, the northern humans, and the Xixian humans - are based on a violent feud within a pantheon of gods. The three contemporary religions, though seemingly unrelated, each stems from a different perspective on the Godswar, which ended in the victory of three brothers. The Godswar began when one of the gods married a goddess of the competing faction, prompting her father and brothers to go to war to reclaim her. It is suggested in the course of the second novel that in fact she eloped, and her father, disapproving of her choice, fought to abduct her from her beloved. Long after the end of the Godswar, a child of the losing faction staged an attack on those who won, sending them to sleep; this allowed the rise of mortal civilizations. As Barrick travels in the lands of Qar he uncovers more of their beliefs, including that they hold both knowledge and power descended directly from their patron god, via a supernatural gift called the Fireflower. Qar culture is revealed to center around a ruling family who are descended from one of the gods and who pass the Fireflower down through their generations. This family practices incestuous marriage, with each generation producing exactly one male and one female child. In order to preserve the Fireflower, which sustains the Qar, each generation of this family must present itself on reaching adulthood to the last remnant of a god still in the world who is trapped and barely alive in a cave deep below Southmarch Castle. Barrick learns that unbeknownst to the contemporary Eddons, this arrangement was discreetly tolerated by the dwarf-like Funderlings until one of the Eddon ancestors met and desired the Qar princess on her pilgrimage. They married under disputed circumstances. She is remembered by the humans as a queen of Southmarch, but her Qar ancestry is forgotten. She was, therefore, unable to marry and procreate with her brother. This broke the chain connecting the Qar to the slumbering god and began their long period of decline. Their siege of Southmarch is intended to regain control of the castle and the slumbering god beneath, in the hope of restoring their race. On the southern continent, the powerful but insane Autarch of Xis also desires the power of the gods beneath Southmarch castle, whose existence he has deduced from ancient texts. In order to access that power he requires someone descended from a god and therefore has procured the imprisonment of King Olin Eddon. He is revealed to be behind much of the turmoil in Southmarch. At the climax of the series, in the third and fourth novels, several factions compete for possession of Southmarch castle, and the deep caves beneath. The Autarch, who has launched a rapid marine invasion of the province; the Qar, who have tired of their siege and attempted to storm the castle; the usurper, holding the castle with his own designs on the slumbering god; and two forces loyal to the Eddons, one a large army recruited by Briony advancing on the castle to lift the siege, another consisting mainly of Funderlings holding their caves beneath the castle, initially unaware of what sleeps further below. An eventual alliance between the Qar and the Eddon loyalists drives out the usurper but fails to prevent the Autarch from gaining access to the cave of the slumbering gods. One of the gods is woken, but easily transcends the Autarch's control. The alliance of loyalists and Qar eventually succeeds in defeating the god. Briony Eddon is restored to her throne. Her brother Barrick, who like all Eddons is descended from the Qar royal line and had accepted the Fireflower into himself during his time with the Qar, hopes that he can restore the line his ancestor broke and allow the Qar to survive. ===== In 1926, while practising a new trick, Houdini has a near-death experience, awakening the mysterious Sleepers. Meanwhile, Lovecraft is visited by a talking raven, and a séance that Sir Arthur is attending is attacked by a strange force that possesses the medium. Sir Arthur travels to New York City to speak to Houdini, where they are attacked by Tcho-Tchos, summoned by The Sleepers' human minions (The Hidden Masters of the World: The Illuminated Ones). While Houdini and Lovecraft travel back into the spiritual plane, Fort and Sir Arthur must protect their bodies from the assembling dark forces. However, there is also a traitor in their midst, and one of their number will die. ===== Wayne Rogers plays a determined but not wholly ethical private detective, Jake Axminster, who looks out for himself--and somewhat less aggressively for his clients--amid the corruption of Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1930s. He is aided in his investigative efforts by two friends: his ditzy blonde secretary, Marsha Finch (Elaine Joyce), who also runs a call-girl business on the side, and attorney Michael Brimm (Philip Sterling). Brimm is called upon frequently to defend Axminster from charges (mostly trumped-up) leveled against him by Lieutenant Murray Quint (Clifton James), a fat, cigar-chomping, and thoroughly crooked member of the Los Angeles Police Department. Axminster drives a 1934 ragtop Studebaker and keeps his office in downtown L.A.’s historic Bradbury Building, phone number OXford-8704. (Brimm’s office is located just across the hall.) For his services, Axminster charges $25 a day plus expenses. Although Brimm describes him as “Mr. Play-It-Safe,”"The Castle of Dreams" - Episode 10 Axminster regularly places himself in danger by helping friends and annoying the police with his questions. His efforts frequently result in his being beaten up. So often does Quint order his thrashing, that Axminster has taken to having nude photographs shot of himself in order to prove later on how aggressive the cops were in their interrogations."A Lonely Way to Die" - Episode 5 The detective drinks coffee addictively. When one client asks him whether his habit keeps him up, Axminster responds, “No, but it helps.” He appears to be constantly in debt, and he’s not above borrowing money from friends and even from his bootblack, Lester (Timmie Rogers)."The November Plan, Part II" - Episode 2 Axminster “gripes in general about the cost of staying alive. ‘All the angels left this burg about 20 years ago,’ is his succinct summation of the 1930s ...”Wilkins, Barbara. "TV's 'Manure,' Says Wayne Rogers, Who Plays the Angles as Skillfully as 'City of Angels'." People, March 8, 1976. ===== ===== The film, set in the 1940s and moving to the 1960s, revolves around the emotional story of Thulasi (Nandita Das) returning to her village to become a dance teacher. She cannot bring herself to forget Vishwa (Mammootty), a man she has been in love with for two decades. Memories of Vishwa haunt her constantly, and upon a chance meeting with him, she discovers he too is struggling with his love for her. Both are haunted by the memory of Thulasi's cousin, a figure who is unable to control his obsession for his cousin and hide his resentment at Thulasi's feelings for Vishwa. Thulasi comes to Sundarapuri after her guardians — her grandma and uncle — pass away, to work as teacher in a dance school. It is in Sundarapuri that Vishwa, the Zamindar whom she had met 20 years ago, lives. They meet again and the feelings that had blossomed in their hearts as teenagers, are revived. Vishwa is unmarried and Thulasi has gone through an unceremonious ritual in the name of matrimony, but fear of societal stigma and innate inhibition keep them asunder. Sensing their intense love for each other, Pattabhi (Delhi Ganesh), the manager at Vishwa's house, helps them overcome their fears. It is then that fate enters in the form of Shiva (Manoj K. Jayan). ===== In 1944, Major Baldwin (James Stewart) is ordered to blow up an airfield. Headquarters in Kunming orders him to then use his pre-war engineering expertise to delay the advancing Japanese forces as much as possible while retreating, but General Loomis (Alan Baxter) gives him the option to just return to base. Baldwin makes the riskier choice to have his first command. Loomis is reluctant to let him, because of his inexperience as a commander, but relents. War brings Major Baldwin and Madame Su-Mei Hung together in an unlikely pairing. Baldwin has at his command Sergeant Michaelson (Harry Morgan), Prince (Mike Kellin), Lewis (Eddie Firestone), Miller (Rudy Bond), Collins (Glenn Corbett), the demolition team's translator, and two other soldiers, a Jeep and four trucks. On the road, Baldwin finds out from Chinese commander Colonel Li (Leo Chen) that the Japanese wish to capture a munitions dump away. Li wants Baldwin to blow up the munitions, but Baldwin does not want to go that far out of his way. Li assigns Colonel Kwan (Frank Silvera) to the team, but before they can embark, Madame Sue-Mei Hung (Lisa Lu), the American-educated widow of a general, joins them, with Baldwin gradually becoming attracted to her. Baldwin blows up a bridge and pushes a truck over a cliff to keep on pace, trying to reach the munitions dump before the Japanese. Sue-Mei and Baldwin are at odds over his cavalier treatment of the Chinese when he resorts to blowing up a mountain road, leaving thousands of local Chinese refugees trapped. After stopping at a village because Miller is ill, Collins tries to give out the surplus food the team has brought, but is trampled to death by starving villagers. Baldwin is furious and resolute in trying to complete his mission, finally successful in blowing up the munitions storage, but when one of his trucks is stolen by Chinese bandits, Miller and Lewis are also killed. Baldwin exacts revenge by rolling a gas barrel into the bandits' outpost and setting the village on fire. Baldwin asks Sue-Mei to understand why he had to act that way, but there is no reconciliation between them as the gulf of two divergent cultures is too great and she leaves him. Although recognizing that his retribution was fundamentally excessive and brutal, Baldwin radios his report to headquarters, and is praised for fulfilling his mission. ===== In 1963 Pittsburgh, Rocky Holzcek is a cantankerous 77-year-old Polish-American baker who insists, despite relatives' protests, upon adopting his young grandson Michael when the boy's parents pass away. The other family members are unwilling to take in Michael and say that Rocky is too old, but he insists that "Family takes care of family!" The two live in Rocky's apartment and often play cards. Rocky has a habit of taking a long time to arrange his hand, and this drives Michael crazy. Twenty years later, Michael is a medical intern in Columbus who's forced to take in his still-spry grandfather when the old man is evicted from his apartment building. At a college history class, Rocky explains that the "S" in Harry S Truman's name actually did stand for something, despite what the professor says, because it was a Russian name. Although the crusty, outspoken Rocky gets along with his Chinese college roommates, they play cards together, still with Rocky taking his dear sweet time to arrange his hand, he is less enthused about his grandson's girlfriend, Beth. Eventually, Michael and Beth marry and head to Pittsburgh where Michael begins his medical residency, while Rocky continues working as a baker. An illness forces Rocky to move back to Pittsburgh with his grandson and his wife, and Rocky warms up to Beth. They play cards, and it seems Beth takes even longer to arrange her hand than Rocky! Seven years pass, and Rocky lives with Michael and Beth and their two children, as Michael has built himself a prominent medical career. However, when Beth is killed in an automobile accident, the old man once again comes to support his grandson in his time of need. Beth's mother wants to take the children, and Michael - initially - agrees. Rocky again lectures Michael on his motto: "Family takes care of family." Michael decides he can't give up the children, and echoes Rocky when he tells Beth's mother "End of discussion!" She backs off and Michael and Rocky take the kids home. At the end of the film, Rocky is in a hospital room, and Michael and the kids come to him to celebrate his 107th birthday. Seeing his EKG growing weak, Michael sends the kids out of the room, and tries to be upbeat for Rocky's sake. He picks up a newspaper and talks about Rocky looking for a new job. Running through the want ads, he pauses after reading one for a Chinese bakery! Turning to Rocky, he asks, "You know anything about this?" A reference to his old college roommates. Rocky smiles, but grows weaker, and Michael finally tells him it's okay, he can go now. Rocky quietly passes away knowing that his grandson is well, and that he has provided all the care that he could for him. ===== Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt, an elderly dowager in Holly Springs, Mississippi, commits suicide with one of her late husband Buck's pistols. Her pretentious niece, Camille, who directs local church theater productions, stops by later that day to borrow a glass fruit bowl, accompanied by her witless and submissive younger sister, Cora. Camille finds Cookie's body in the bedroom and drops the bowl, shattering it and inadvertently cutting herself. Believing that "suicide is a disgrace", Camille eats Cookie's suicide note and attempts to make her death look like a murder. She steals a prized diamond and ruby necklace from Cookie's neck and throws the pistol in the garden (observed doing so by Ronnie, a young boy who lives next door). Camille coaches Cora to say that Cookie was murdered, and summons Sheriff Lester Boyle to the scene. Meanwhile Cora's wayward daughter (and Cookie's grandniece), Emma, returns to town after having moved away following several criminal offenses. Jason, an inept sheriff's deputy investigating Cookie's death, has long been romantically pursuing Emma. Willis Richland, Cookie's African American handyman and closest friend, is the primary suspect in her death because his fingerprints appear on the gun she used to kill herself, but this is only because he had cleaned her guns the night before. He is detained on suspicion of murder. The same night, Jason encounters Camille and Cora moving into Cookie's house, despite it being an active crime scene, and escorts them off the property. Cora is shocked to find that Willis is the suspect, Emma openly protests it, and Camille feigns surprise. Emma visits Willis at the police station, where Boyle and a local attorney, Jack Palmer—both fishing buddies of Willis's—casually play Scrabble with him in his unlocked cell. Willis tells an anecdote about Cookie's prized diamond and ruby necklace, explaining that Buck once had the necklace appraised only to discover its jewels were fake, a fact he never disclosed to Cookie. Otis Tucker, a detective from a larger jurisdiction, arrives that night and begins questioning locals. Protesting Willis's detainment, Emma refuses to leave the police station until he is freed. She and Jason also frequently have sex in empty offices at the station. The next day, Easter Sunday, Emma prepares a holiday meal for Willis and herself in his cell. Meanwhile, Cora and Camille return to Cookie's home and begin cleaning her bloodied bedding and removing the crime scene tape, assuming they are to inherit the house. They are interrupted by Jack, who arrives to look for Cookie's will, which Cora tells him is in the cookie jar. At the station, Ronnie's father brings him in to recount seeing Camille throw the pistol in the garden; moreover, Camille's rare AB negative blood is recovered from the crime scene, excluding Willis as a suspect. That night, Camille and Cora prepare to debut their production of Salome at the local church, in which Cora, Jason and Jack star. After police match the blood type to Camille, they descend upon the church as Cora is performing the play's Dance of the Seven Veils sequence. Camille is arrested and taken to the station, where Willis is prepared to be freed. Jack arrives to disclose Cookie's will, which bequeaths her entire estate to Willis, who is Buck's nephew; this was never disclosed to Camille or Emma, who never suspected it because of Willis's race. Emma is delighted to learn that she and Willis are cousins, but shocked when medical records show that Camille, not Cora, is her biological mother, conceived from an affair she had with Cora's late husband. Tucker interrogates Camille the following morning. She recounts how she staged Cookie's suicide to look like a murder for the sake of "family pride." Cora arrives at the station, and Camille is hopeful she will corroborate her story, but Cora insists that Cookie did not commit suicide. Camille is charged with Cookie's murder. Half- delirious, she reenacts the Dance of the Seven Veils in her cell before throwing herself down on her bunk and sobbing in despair. Meanwhile, Willis and Emma go fishing with Boyle and Jack, before Emma excuses herself for another tryst with Jason. ===== Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba, from the Cuban Revolution to the missile crisis, the effect of living in what he calls an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna. Memories of Underdevelopment is a complex character study of alienation during the turmoil of social changes. The film is told in a highly subjective point of view through a fragmented narrative that resembles the way memories function. Throughout the film, Sergio narrates the action, and at times is used as a tool to present bits of political information about the climate in Cuba at the time. In several instances, real-life documentary footage of protests and political events are incorporated into the film and played over Sergio’s narration to expose the audience to the reality of the Revolution. The timeframe of the film is somewhat ambiguous, but it appears to take place over a few months. ===== When the Simpsons' plans for a nice family outing at the Frying Dutchman turn into a dining disaster due to an uncooperative octopus armed with knives, the family tries to salvage the night by telling three nautically themed stories. ===== Lisa decides to bring the family to the museum to see a weaving exhibit for her summer vacation, but they soon discover that it has been replaced by a "History of Weapons" exhibit. Faced with an incredibly long line, Homer notices Ned Flanders and his sons at the front of the line and cuts in front of them. Everyone else starts taking advantage of Ned’s kindness as well until the Flanders family is stuck at the end. At the end of the day, they are still waiting, and are denied entry, as it is closing time for the weapons exhibit. They decide to check out the human evolution exhibit next door. Ned is outraged to hear that humans actually evolved from apes and that the creation account in the Genesis is therefore a myth. Covering his sons' eyes, he forcefully drags them out of the exhibit. Ned meets up with the church council to suggest promotion of creationism. The next day, he and Reverend Lovejoy blackmail Principal Skinner into introducing creationism in the school. Lisa is perturbed by this, and at a town meeting asks everyone to make a choice between creationism and Darwinism, as there is only one truth. The townspeople vote for creationism, much to her chagrin, and the act of teaching or learning Darwinism and evolution is made illegal. Lisa therefore decides to start holding secret classes for people interested in evolution. However, just as the first lesson is about to begin, she is arrested by Chief Wiggum. She asks why she is being arrested when there are far worse crimes out there, and embarrassed he tells her they only have enough manpower to enforce the last three laws passed, even stating that this is the worst law system there is. Lisa is brought to trial, which is dubbed Lisa Simpson v. God. Representing her is Clarice Drummond, an ACLU lawyer, while on Ned's side is Wallace Brady, an overweight, southern lawyer. The trial does not go smoothly for Lisa, as Professor Frink gives ambiguous answers regarding God's existence, while a creationist says that evolution cannot be real, as there is no proof of a "missing link" (depicted in a picture as a savage hominid, holding a rock over his head). With Lisa now facing a long jail sentence, her mother decides to help her out. Marge begins reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which is incorrectly called The Origin of Species, and becomes addicted to it. When the trial resumes, Marge tells Lisa that she now knows a way that she can help her. While Ned is being cross-examined by Drummond, she gives Homer a beer. Homer, ecstatic at getting the beer, tries to open it unsuccessfully. The more he tries, the more primitive he gets, hooting and banging the beer on the bench, disrupting the trial. Ned loses his temper and tells Homer to stop behaving like a monkey. Drummond then asks Ned to compare the picture of the "missing link" and Homer shaking the beer over his head, and asks if he truly believes Homer cannot be related to apes. Ned cannot and concedes victory to Lisa. After the trial, Lisa goes up to Ned and tells him that while she fully respects his religious beliefs, she just does not think it is proper for the church to dominate the school in the same way that he and Reverend Lovejoy do not want scientists taking over the church. Ned finally agrees with this, so he offers to take Lisa and his sons out for ice cream. ===== The series is similar to the book, and focuses on the adventures of a newspaper proofreader who through years of secret practice has gained James Bond-like skills in many forms of physical combat, shooting, and in activities as diverse as rock climbing and scuba diving. The proofreader, Hiram Holliday (Cox), was revealed to be muscular when stripped. The starting gimmick of the series was that Holliday had inserted a comma in a news story which saved the publisher a small fortune in a trial. The grateful publisher rewarded Holliday with a trip around the world, which set the scene for him to solve crimes and thwart foreign spies in every port of call he visited. The series was hampered by a low budget which did not permit convincing recreations of the different exotic foreign locations featured in each episode. Other cast members included actor Ainslie Pryor as Holliday's reporter sidekick, Joel Smith, and Sebastian Cabot as a criminal mastermind he repeatedly encountered. There were a number of directors, including George Cahan and William Hole, and a number of writers, including Philip Rapp and Richard Powell. Rapp also served as producer. ===== On a mountain in medieval Italy, an old woman meets a mysterious red-cloaked figure, shuffling Tarot cards. The figure gives the woman a white rose, which then turns red and dappled with blood. Prince Prospero, a Satanist, visits the village over which he holds dominion, and is angrily confronted by two poor and starving villagers, Gino and Lodovico. Prospero sentences the pair to death, but Lodovico's daughter Francesca begs for their lives. Prospero discovers that the old woman who encountered the red figure is infected with a deadly plague, the Red Death. He orders the village burned down to prevent the spread of the disease, abducts Francesca and then sends out invitations to his castle to several dozen of the local nobility. At the castle, Francesca is finely dressed and tutored in etiquette by Prospero's jealous consort, Juliana, and the gathered nobility are entertained by a pair of dwarf dancers, Esmeralda and Hop-Toad. When Esmeralda accidentally knocks over a goblet of wine, one of Prospero's guests, Alfredo, strikes her. Juliana expresses her wish to Prospero to be initiated into his Satanic cult, and that night Francesca is terrified to discover Juliana and Prospero lying in a strange, hypnotic state in Prospero's Black Room. Gino and Ludovico, meanwhile, are being held prisoner in Prospero's castle, with the castle guards teaching them armed combat so that they can fight to the death against one another as entertainment for the nobility, which they refuse to do. While Prospero further attempts to seduce Francesca, Juliana performs a ritual in the Black Room, pledging her soul to Satan. Francesca is horrified to learn of her actions, but Juliana gives Francesca the key to Ludovico and Gino's cell, and tells her to leave. During their escape, Gino and Ludovico fight and kill three guards but are then recaptured by Prospero, who points out to Francesca how her father and Gino have sinned. At a grand feast, Prospero summons Gino and Ludovico. As they refuse to fight each other, he instead has them each choose daggers to cut themselves with. One of the daggers is coated with poison, and, upon choosing the last dagger (which by process of elimination is revealed to be the poisoned one) Ludovico attempts to stab Prospero with it, but Prospero runs him through the heart with his sword. He then casts Gino out of the castle to be killed by the Red Death. Gino runs away through the woods and encounters the red-cloaked figure, who presents him with a Tarot card which he says represents Mankind. Juliana is then put through her final initiation ceremony, where she drinks from a chalice and suffers a terrifying hallucination (one of Corman's distinctive psychedelic dream sequences) involving wild, dancing figures from different historical periods that stab at her as she lies prostrate on an altar. Awakening from her dream, Juliana then declares herself the wife of Satan, proud that she has 'survived [her] own sacrifice', but hears Prospero's voice telling her "There is more". She wanders out through the coloured rooms and is viciously attacked and killed by a falcon. As the nobles gather about her body, Prospero comments that Juliana is now truly married to Satan. The remaining villagers come to Prospero's castle, intending to beg him for sanctuary. Gino tries to dissuade them but is instead thrust aside. At the castle, Prospero hears the villagers' plea and orders them to go away. When they tell him that unless he helps them they will die, he orders his soldiers to shoot down the villagers with crossbow bolts, deliberately sparing only one small girl. Meanwhile, Hop-Toad, enraged by Alfredo's previous ill-treatment of Esmeralda, plans his revenge by persuading Alfredo to wear an ape costume to Prospero's grand masked ball, where Prospero has instructed that no one is to wear red. In the guise of the ape's trainer, Hop-Toad cruelly humiliates Alfredo in front of the assembled guests by tying him to a lowered chandelier and hauling the chandelier and Alfredo up above the crowd before soaking him with brandy and lethally setting him on fire. Prospero plans to reward Hop-Toad for his amusing 'entertainment', but the dwarf has fled. Outside the castle walls, Gino returns to rescue Francesca and once again encounters the red-cloaked figure. The figure tells him not to enter the castle and promises that he will send Francesca out to him soon. Amid the general atmosphere of debauchery and depravity at the ball, Prospero notices the entry of the mysterious, red-cloaked figure. He and Francesca follow the figure through the different-colored rooms into the Black Room, where Prospero believes the figure to be an ambassador of Satan. He asks to see the figure's face, but the figure tells Prospero that "There is no face of Death until the moment of your own death." The ball is transformed into a danse macabre, changing from a maddening revelry to a grim ballet as the figure causes all of the nobles to die of the Red Death – while the corpses dance. Still believing the figure is Satan, Prospero asks for Francesca to be spared and given the same high status in Hell as he believes he himself will receive. The figure appears to consent to his request and sends Francesca outside, where he knows Gino is waiting. Before leaving, Francesca sadly kisses Prospero. The red-cloaked figure then reveals that he is not a servant of Satan ("Death has no master") and tells Prospero that his beliefs will not save him, declaring that "Each man creates his own God for himself – his own Heaven, his own Hell." Prospero rips off the figure's red mask to reveal Prospero's own blood-spattered face. The figure is the Red Death himself – Prospero's 'own Hell', and the 'moment of [his] death'. Prospero attempts to flee through the now-infected crowd, but his red-cloaked self is always in front of him. The Red Death finally corners Prospero in the Black Room, asking, "Why should you be afraid to die? Your soul has been dead for a long time" and strikes him down. In an epilogue, the Red Death is seen playing with his Tarot cards with the girl who had escaped the massacre of the remaining villagers. Other similarly cloaked figures then gather around him, each wearing a different colour: white, yellow, orange, blue, violet, and black, echoing the coloured rooms in Poe's original story. They discuss among themselves the numbers of people each of them had 'claimed' that night, each accepting of their endless terrible task. When asked of his work, the Red Death says to them, "I called many...peasant and prince...the worthy and the dishonoured. Six only are left." Among the surviving six are Francesca, Gino, Hop-Toad, Esmeralda, the little girl that the Red Death plays cards with and an old man from a nearby village. The Red Death declares "Sic transit gloria mundi" (Latin for "Thus passes the glory of the world") and the cloaked figures line up in order of colour and file offscreen in a grim procession. Over the procession are Poe's words: "And darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all". In the closing credits a hand arranges Tarot cards in rows and columns until it reaches the Death card - and its owner dies. ===== Frank Abernathy is the curator of the natural history museum in Blackwater, Louisiana. He is a widower who doesn't seem to have time for his daughter, Jack. Frank's father, Simon, is a B-movie enthusiast who believes in extraterrestrials and shows his favorite movies at the local theater. The city loses its electrical power just as Simon, Jack and her boyfriend Squirrelly exit the theater. They watch an object streaking through the sky and crashing into the museum. Thought to be a meteorite, they later find out it is a craft containing an alien lifeform. Trying to adapt to the Earth's atmosphere, it latches on to the first organism it finds - the museum's most notable exhibit, a frozen Wooly mammoth. A security guard witnesses the revival of the prehistoric elephant, which kills the guard. With the creature on the loose, two government agents, Powers and Whitaker, track Frank down. While the agents and Frank try to figure out what happened and what to do, the mammoth heads into the forest, where it kills anyone it comes across. The beast's path soon brings it to a huge party attended by Jack and Squirrelly. They survive the attack and meet up with Frank and the agents. The mammoth suddenly appears and kills Agent Whitaker while Agent Powers, Frank, Jack and Squirrelly escape. While the mammoth continues its rampage around the town, the government is preparing to detonate a nuclear bomb on the alien-possessed elephant. The group must find a way to take the creature down without destroying their town. After devising a plan to stop the mammoth, Frank, Powers, Jack and Squirrelly are joined by Simon and town sheriff Marion Morrison at the local factory to encase the creature in ice, just like it was before. While en route, Squirrelly is killed by the mammoth, but the plan moves forward at full speed. The mammoth arrives at the factory, and is doused in molten steel. It then slaughters Sheriff Morrison, off screen. They figure out that liquid nitrogen is the only way to stop the mammoth once and for all. The mammoth is lured into the liquid nitrogen trap. Frank, Jack, and Powers, among other survivors, escape as Simon sacrifices himself to pull the release valve and smash the controls, forcing the liquid nitrogen to spray out and freeze both Simon and the mammoth. The movie ends as Simon's frozen body is put in government hands, and the refrozen mammoth is put back out as an exhibit. ===== As far back as Sandra Larson (Parker) can remember, she has been fascinated by death. As a child, she dances with the corpses of animals at night, rubbing them on her body, before giving them a funeral. She performs this dance in front of her only friend, a girl named Carol (Jessie Winter Mudie), who ends their friendship soon afterward. In college, Sandra studies biology, carefully dissecting the bodies of small animals, trying to avoid disfiguring them. She gets a job at a funeral home to be closer to dead bodies. The funeral home's janitor Jan (James Timmons) believes, like Sandra, that dead bodies still have a soul in them. While driving the hearse with a body in a coffin in the back through a car wash, Sandra looks at the body and finds a shining light, believing that body's soul is alive somewhere. Mr. Wallis apprentices Sandra in embalming. She starts studying mortuary science, where she meets a medical student named Matt (Peter Outerbridge) who also must study corpses for his major. Matt and Sandra begin to date, and Matt is intrigued by Sandra’s death fascination. Occasionally they spend nights together in Matt's basement apartment, but Sandra always leaves for late night visits to the mortuary to celebrate the dead bodies of young men with dance ceremonies which escalate into necrophilia. Matt becomes distraught when he discovers that he is competing with dead bodies. He tries unsuccessfully to get Sandra to talk about her necrophilia, so he starts visiting her at the funeral home, which upsets her. Matt has to go to an extreme to win Sandra’s heart, as she struggles with choosing between the living or the dead, with tragic results. ===== Seattle PD Detective Quentin Conners and his partner Jason York are implicated in the death of a hostage taken by a carjacker named John Curtis. After a fellow police officer, Callo, testifies against them, Conners is suspended, and York is fired. In reality, York tried to shoot John, but accidentally killed the hostage. John in turn fired back, but Conners killed John in self-defense. Some time later, Lorenz and four other criminals take hostages in a bank. Lorenz has only one demand, to negotiate with Conners. Conners is reinstated but put under the surveillance of a new partner, the recently-graduated Shane Dekker. Conners is given control of the negotiations, and after a bank teller is shot, he orders a SWAT unit to cut the building's power and go in. During an explosion, the criminals flee during the ensuing panic and chaos. Dekker and Conners learn more about each other at a local diner, slowly building a friendship, but Dekker disapproves of Conners' "cowboy cop" methods. Dekker explains that during negotiations, Lorenz was making many cryptic references to chaos theory. As they leave to examine new evidence, Conners puts a ten dollar bill on the table for his share of the bill. Dekker swaps the ten for a twenty of his own. A TV camera caught a shot of one of the criminals, who is arrested together with his girlfriend at her home, where banknotes are found with a scent used to mark evidence collected by the police. The banknote serial numbers did not come from that day's robbery, but had been placed in police storage and signed out two weeks earlier by Callo. He is found shot dead in his home, together with incriminating evidence linking him to the heist. When reviewing video footage from the bank, Dekker notices one corner of the bank is deliberately shielded from view. In that corner, they find the bank regional manager's computer. Fingerprints on the keyboard reveal the identity of a hacker that Conners himself had arrested, but whose conviction was overturned after the shooting on the bridge. Conners and Dekker want to question the hacker, but he is shot dead by Lorenz, and a gunfight ensues, during which Lorenz manages to escape. Dekker questions the hospitalized bank robber identified in the news footage and finally breaks him when he casually explains the impact of a massive overdose of morphine while slowly injecting something into the suspect's drip. An amazed Conners watches and later calls him a hypocrite. Dekker responds by explaining he only injected more saline solution. The suspect reveals Lorenz is Scott Curtis, the brother of John shot earlier, and Conners leads a stakeout at an address where all the gang are to meet that night; Scott's house. Forced to go before Scott arrives, a shootout results in both suspects' deaths, and a bomb blows up the building while Conners is inside. Dekker is devastated but realizes that Callo's signature requesting material from the evidence storage was forged by the evidence custody officer, who reveals that Scott is actually York. In a flashback, York stands on the bridge and fires the first shot, killing the hostage in the opening sequence. Tracking Lorenz/York's mobile phone, Dekker surprises York at a diner, and York takes a woman hostage in a reversal of the standoff on the bridge. Dekker chases and eventually kills York. When Dekker pays for his coffee at the diner, he discovers the banknote Conners used to pay for lunch with is also scented, which means Conners was also involved in taking the money from police evidence. Dekker finds a copy of James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science in Conners' house, showing he had faked an earlier ignorance of the mathematics. On a hunch, Dekker looks for airplane tickets booked in Gleick's name and runs to the airport. During a mobile call between the now disguised Conners and the searching Dekker at the busy airport, flashbacks reveal how the seemingly unconnected events in the film form a pattern, just as predicted in chaos theory. Conners reveals that he placed his badge on the corpse of one of York's henchmen before the explosion. Conners and York recruited a group of ex-convicts from their past. Callo was framed for being a dirty cop. Conners ends the call, walks casually to a private jet, and takes off while sipping champagne. ===== Set in the fictional Wasaychigan Hill reserve in Northern Ontario, Dry Lips is a companion piece to Highway's earlier play The Rez Sisters. The Rez Sisters focused on seven women from the community; Dry Lips, whose original working title was The Rez Brothers, is about seven men. It is written in a mix of English, Cree, and Ojibway. It tells the story of life on the Wasaychigan Hill Indian Reserve and the men on the reserve as well. The men talk about their plans; Big Joey wants to get a radio show, Zachary wants to open a bakery while Pierre St. Pierre got a new job as a referee for the women's hockey games. Nanabush is a trickster; she can change shape and gender, enact the men's phobias and fantasies about women and also shows the misogynistic attitudes of the men in the play. Each character has their own story within the bigger picture. The play's original cast included Gary Farmer, Billy Merasty and Graham Greene. Highway's brother René and musician Carlos del Junco were also involved in the production. In 2010, Highway also staged Paasteewitoon Kaapooskaysing Tageespichit, a Cree language version of the play. ===== Nicholas Quinn, a former Treasury official, is the new chairman of an investment bank called Kendrick Maple, a company that is in need of modernising. The managing director is long-standing employee Bruce Morton and he is outraged by Quinn's attempt to modernise. Between them is young, high- flyer Greg Hayden, who often acts as a mediator. ===== Detective Cathy Palmer (Ellen Barkin) is on the trail of an elusive serial killer. During her investigation she meets Vickie Kittrie (Peta Wilson), who belongs to an exclusive club of women who engage in secret sessions of bondage and S&M.; Matters become even more complicated when Palmer finds herself attracted to Kittrie, leading to a brief lesbian encounter. Palmer soon learns that each victim belonged to this club of prominent, sexually experimental women. In order to catch the killer, Catherine must trust Vickie to guide her through the dangerous and illicit underground. ===== The film depicts several months in the life of the Nolans, an Irish American family living in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in 1912. The film covers a much shorter timespan than the book, which ranges from before Francie is born until after she turns 16. The film focuses on the time when Francie is around 13 years old. James Dunn and Peggy Ann Garner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Katie Nolan is a hard-working housewife who scrubs the floors of her tenement building and collects rags for sale to a scrap fabric dealer in order to provide for her family. She's married to Johnny Nolan, a happy-go-lucky, charming man who means well, but dreams his way through life, rather than find steady employment. He is also an alcoholic. On the rare occasions he finds work as a singing waiter, everything he earns usually ends up in his drinking, much to Katie's despair. The couple have two children: 13-year-old Francie, who idolizes her father; and 12-year-old Neeley. Tense and frustrated, Katie is often sharper with the children than she means to be, while Johnny is gentle, generous, and indulgent, especially with Francie. Katie's sister, Sissy, is a sassy, free-spirited woman who has recently married for the third time. Katie learns this from gossipy insurance agent Mr. Barker when he comes by to collect the Nolans' weekly premium. Scandalized and embarrassed, Katie cuts off her relationship with Sissy, which makes the children, who love their unconventional aunt, unhappy. Francie is also worried that the building's landlord has cut too many branches off the tree in the tenement's courtyard, which Francie and her father call the Tree of Heaven, and that it may die. But when she points this out to Johnny, he explains the cutting back is necessary and the tree will grow again. Peggy Ann Garner and Ted Donaldson in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Advertisement (February 1945) In the meantime, a police officer new to the neighborhood, Officer McShane, encounters Sissy and the children one afternoon. When he meets Katie, he is enchanted. A few days later, however, he learns Johnny (drunk after an argument with his wife) is Katie's husband, and is devastated to realize Katie is married. The children's grandmother Rommely often tells them about her immigration to the United States, and how important education is in life. While Neeley isn't interested in books and school, Francie is a bright child who is always reading, thinking about what she reads and observes, and eager to learn. One Sunday, Francie persuades her father to go for a walk and shows him a nicer school in a nearby neighborhood which she’d like to attend. She helps her father write a letter to the principal requesting a transfer, and is accepted. Meanwhile, Katie moves the family into a smaller, cheaper apartment on the top floor, angering her husband who thinks she is being stingy. In fact, Katie is pregnant and worried how they will support another child. Sissy also becomes pregnant, and she and Katie reconcile shortly before Christmas. The families celebrate a happy, poignant Christmas together, with the children bringing home a discarded tree, and later that night, Katie tells Johnny she is pregnant. She suggests that Francie drop out of school to work. Since Johnny understands how much being in school means to his daughter, he feels desperate to find a job. Despite the fact that it's snowing hard, Johnny goes out determined to find work but fails to return. A week later, Officer McShane comes to the apartment to deliver the bad news that Johnny died of pneumonia while looking for work. Francie blames her mother for her father's death, but the births of Sissy's and Katie's babies help ease tensions in the household. To provide financial help, a sympathetic tavern owner, Mr. McGarrity, gives Francie and Neeley after-school jobs. During Katie's labor, at home because they cannot afford the hospital birth Sissy had, Francie is her mother's greatest help and comfort. Katie asks Francie to read some of her creative writing essays, and confides how much she misses Johnny. The shared experience brings mother and daughter closer. When the baby is born, a little girl, Katie names her Annie Laurie, after the song Johnny once sang to them. The following June, both children graduate from their respective schools on the same day. Katie attends Neeley's graduation, while Sissy goes to Francie's. Using money Johnny gave her for safekeeping back in December, Sissy gives Francie a bouquet of flowers from her father, along with a congratulatory card that Johnny wrote himself. Francie, who has bottled up her grief for many months, finally breaks down. After the graduation ceremonies, the family reunites at the ice cream shop to celebrate. While there, some boys who know Neeley come by their table. One teenager in particular is very interested in Francie, and asks her to a movie the next day, her first date. When the Nolans return home, they find Officer McShane babysitting Annie Laurie together with Sissy's husband and his baby. McShane has been waiting to propose to Katie, who accepts. McShane also asks to adopt Annie Laurie and give her his last name. Francie and Neeley think Annie Laurie's life with McShane as a father will be much easier, but not nearly as much fun. The film ends as Francie sees the courtyard tree begin to grow again, just as her father said it would. ===== Ashok hails from a wealthy family and has a job as a postmaster, but it is clear that his job requires little hard labor, aside from sending an occasional telegram, leaving him time to enjoy his comforts – cigarettes, painting and song writing. A girl named Bela, the poor and simple daughter of the former postmaster strives for his affections and is supported by her poor father who wants her married. Bela prepares Ashok's meals, teases and amuses him, and imagines a happy marriage with Ashok, who likes her but is not in love with her. Bela has competition from the wealthy landowner Jamnadas's daughter Usha, who lives a lavish lifestyle in a hilltop mansion. Usha, drives a foreign car and seems more suitable for Ashok, the young postmaster. Bela, heartbroken, in a fit of jealousy lies to Usha that Ashok has confessed his love for her and is playing a double game. Bela witnesses Usha's wedding while sitting in a tree, believing that shortly afterwards she would be married off to Ashok. But the tree branch that she is sitting on breaks and she falls to the ground, severely injured. As she is brought back to her father's home in this condition, Ashok arrives and promises her father he would marry Bela. As Ashok sits on Bela's bedside to comfort her, Bela dreams again that the black-veiled rider has come to get her and dies. ===== In the year 3000 Earth has become a toxic dump ravaged by careless humans, leaving an uninhabitable, polluted wasteland. The powerful alien space pirates Gulfer, led by the evil Queen ZZ Badnusty, plan to harvest the pollution to create weapons of mass destruction. The United Star Cluster of Leezaluth sent a warning to Earth about their plans, stating that if they could not stop them, Leezaluth would be forced to supernova Earth's sun to avoid war with Gulfer; but if humans succeeded, Leezaluth would use their technology to restore Earth to its former beauty. Legendary space hero Dan Dare (Diaz in the Japanese original), a young but brave and very skilled ace pilot from Earth was chosen to be the pilot of a new starfighter to combat Gulfer. The ship is armed with a powerful experimental weapon from Leezaluth called the TOZ System, which would be operated by Alexis, an alien princess from Leezaluth and Dan's lover. ===== The Heian period was a time when human beings and various supernatural beings still coexisted with each other, the latter occasionally causing trouble to humans. Practitioners of the art of onmyōdō, the onmyōji, were held to be able to control and subdue these malevolent entities and other paranormal phenomena, and were thus held in high regard, being employed by the imperial court. In Heian-kyō, nobleman Minamoto no Hiromasa meets court onmyōji Abe no Seimei, a mysterious man about whom many rumors have been told. On a dare by some courtiers, Seimei demonstrates his exceptional skills in onmyōdō by killing a butterfly without touching it (i.e. casting a spell on a leaf which then flies and cuts through it). Hiromasa later visits Seimei at the latter's home, where he sees Seimei's shikigami in human form, one of whom was Mitsumushi, the butterfly he had killed (and subsequently revived) earlier. Seimei joins Hiromasa in inspecting a mysterious gourd growing from a pine tree in Lord Kaneie's house; Seimei reveals the gourd to have been caused by a curse cast by a former lover of Kaneie who committed suicide. One night, Hiromasa impresses an unseen lady on an oxcart with his flute playing. Unbeknownst to him, this woman is Sukehime, Minister of the Right Fujiwara no Motokata's daughter and one of the current emperor's wives, who is worried that she is losing the emperor's favor as another wife, Lady Tōko, the daughter of Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Morosuke, had just given birth to a baby boy, who is to be the heir to the throne. Meanwhile, the head onmyōji of the imperial Bureau of Onmyō, Dōson, is secretly plotting to overthrow the emperor by trying to awaken the vengeful spirit of Prince Sawara, who had died 150 years ago. Wrongfully accused of treason by his brother, the Emperor Kanmu, Sawara committed suicide, but not before swearing eternal vengeance on the Son of Heaven (i.e. the emperor). When Dōson curses the emperor's newborn son, Prince Atsuhira, to be possessed by an evil spirit, Seimei combats his spells and drives the demon away with the help of Hiromasa and the immortal Lady Aone, who was ordered by Kanmu to guard the burial mound where Prince Sawara's spirit is sealed away. Hiromasa once again meets Sukehime (again unseen by Hiromasa) on the oxcart. He confesses his feelings for Sukehime, who he calls 'Lady of the Full Moon' (望月の君 Mochizuki no kimi), but Sukehime, who still loves the emperor, rejects his advances. Both Seimei and Aone are put under arrest by Motokata and accused of cursing the infant prince. They are saved in the nick of time by Morosuke, who points out it is unlawful to kill a court onmyōji without imperial permission. Dōson, who is implied to be behind the allegation, enchants one of the imperial police to attack the two; Aone is severely wounded, but proves to be unharmed due to her immortality. Taking advantage of Sukehime's jealousy against Tōko, Dōson uses his powers to turn her into a namanari (a woman halfway to becoming an oni) that harasses both Tōko and the newborn Atsuhira. Seimei uses onmyōdō to transform straw effigies into the likenesses of the Emperor and the infant prince. Sukehime arrives and assaults the effigies, thinking them to be the real emperor and Atsuhira. The emperor, moved by a waka poem she recites (the same poem Hiromasa hears the lady on the oxcart recite earlier), speaks out loudly, breaking Seimei's spell. Hiromasa, recognizing Sukehime to be his 'Lady of the Full Moon', steps in to accost her. Sukehime briefly comes back to her senses when Seimei removes a paper talisman attached to her back, but Dōson doubles his efforts, and she completely transforms into an oni. When Hiromasa sacrifices himself by allowing her to bite on his arm, Sukehime comes back to her senses once more and kills herself with Hiromasa's tachi. In her final moments, Sukehime - now a human once more - begs to hear Hiromasa's flute one last time. Seimei shoots an arrow with the paper talisman towards the sky, ordering the curse to go back to its sender. The arrow, now on fire, lands in Dōson's secret lair, burning it to the ground. Dōson, swearing vengeance on Seimei, finally releases the spirit of Prince Sawara from its confinement in the burial mound. Sawara's ghost enters Dōson's body and summons a horde of vengeful spirits to attack Heian-kyō. Aone reveals to Seimei that he and Hiromasa are foretold by the stars to become the two protectors of the city: one cannot survive without the other. She, Seimei and Mitsumushi then go off in search of Hiromasa. Dōson makes his way to the imperial palace. Hiromasa tries to stop him in his tracks, but he is no match for his superhuman abilities; he is mortally wounded when Dōson throws back an arrow Hiromasa shot towards him. Seimei and Aone find him, but it is too late. Aone suggests that Seimei resurrect Hiromasa by performing the rite of Taizan-fukun, the Chinese god of the dead (泰山府君祭 Taizan-fukun no matsuri), offering to sacrifice her immortality and life to do so. Hiromasa, brought back to life by the ritual, and Seimei go to face Dōson. Aone's spirit, speaking through Hiromasa's body, convinces Sawara to give up his hatred. While Sawara at first refuses to do so, he is finally moved by the prospect of being with Aone - who was the prince's lover during his lifetime - forever; he then passes peacefully with Aone into the afterlife. Although now without Sawara's spirit to empower him, Dōson resumes the fight. Seimei, using his wits, traps Dōson within a magical barrier. Finally admitting defeat, Dōson slashes his throat with the sword from Sawara's burial mound. At the end of the movie, Seimei and Hiromasa drink sake together in Seimei's house. Hiromasa teases Seimei for crying when he died and reflects on what Seimei said to him earlier: that the human heart can turn one into a demon or a buddha. Seimei tells Hiromasa that he is a 'very good man'; Hiromasa answers, "So are you." The two share a laugh together. ===== Jackie York is a famous novelist with a secret: she is suffering from writer's block and is unable to write her much-anticipated novel. After being used and then dumped by a wannabe movie director, Jackie can't get back to work. So, Jackie concocts a mess of lies to cover up her loneliness and to protect her secret. Jackie then meets a man named Patrick McKeating, a writer who opens her up to new possibilities. However, Patrick is nearly 20 years younger than Jackie. Jackie gets a lesson in true love and must decide what really matters in life. ===== Eight years after the events of the previous film, ten-year-old Adam just wants to be a normal boy and go to baseball camp. However, his interest in sports seems almost alien to Wayne, as Amy and Nick, both now adults, are a thespian and genius respectively, although Diane is more understanding. Wayne has started his own lab, Szalinski Labs, with his brother, Gordon. One day, they receive tickets to witness a shuttle landing, but Diane reminds him that he needs to watch Adam and his cousins, Jenny and Mitch, while she and Patti go on vacation. She also reminds him to get rid of his Tiki Man sculpture that she sees as an eyesore, though he considers it a good luck charm. After Diane and Patti leave, Wayne and Gordon have activities planned that bore the kids. Wayne sends them to the store, but reveals to Gordon that it is a ruse to get rid of them long enough so that he can use his shrinking machine in order to shrink the Tiki Man without Diane's knowledge, as she and the FDA banned him from ever using it again to avoid a repeat of the incident with Adam in Las Vegas (as well as preventing it from falling into the wrong hands), and without the risk of unintentionally shrinking or enlarging the kids (although the machine now fires at the push of a button instead of at random like before, as well as the button being locked with a key to prevent the machine from accidentally firing). However, after carelessly not turning it off immediately after they succeed, Wayne and Gordon are shrunk when a billiard ball left on it falls onto the activating button, just as they are in front of it searching for the Tiki Man. Meanwhile, Patti realizes she forgot to leave Mitch's medicine for his potassium deficiency, and they head back. Hoping to catch Wayne and Gordon by surprise, they sneak up to the attic only to be shrunk when another billiard ball falls onto the activating button. Shortly after, the kids return home, and after hearing Wayne's message about the launch, assume they are alone for the evening, and Jenny makes plans to have her friends come over. Upstairs, the adults make use of a fishing rod to lower themselves down into Adam's room. To attempt to get to the floor, they use his Hot Wheels race track, but they overshoot their target and fall down the laundry chute ending up in a clean load that is delivered back upstairs by Adam and Mitch. They tumble out of the laundry basket when it is overturned, and discover Adam and Mitch reading a Sports Illustrated Kids magazine, revealing to Wayne that Adam's interest is not in science as he hoped. The four suddenly encounter a cockroach, but manage to defeat it by luring it into a bug trap. Seeing Mitch struggling, Patti realizes that they need to get him his medicine soon, or he could pass out. He ignores his weaknesses, though, and goes downstairs. The adults witness the arrival of Jenny's friends and decide to use a bubble machine in order to get downstairs. Diane and Patti land safely, but Wayne and Gordon fall into a bowl of onion dip and are nearly devoured by the girls. In the kitchen, when Patti and Diane resolve to find a way up the counter in order to find Mitch's medicine and push it into view, they encounter a daddy long-legs with its leg caught in a spider web, and Diane quietly talks to it as Patti tries to cut the web with a nail file. Diane realizes her own insecurities about being small as she relates to it, which she had earlier tried to kill, and realizes how hard it is to be that size. After it's freed, Patti and Diane realize they can cling to its silk as it climbs up onto the counter. Meanwhile, Wayne and Gordon decide to rewire the stereo to work as a microphone, and a group of boys crashes the party, including Jenny's crush, Ricky King. He takes her into the kitchen, where he steals a kiss from her, but she spurns him for not asking permission first, thus earning Patti's respect. Angered, he returns to his friends and they begin to wreak havoc in the living room. Mitch, severely weakened, enters the kitchen and discovers Patti and Diane on the counter before fainting, partially from his failure to take his medicine, and partially from the shock of seeing his miniature mother and aunt. Adam and Jenny discover him, and thinking quickly, Adam gets potassium-rich bananas to give to him, and he begins to recover, weakly saying he had seen his mother. In the living room, Wayne rewires the stereo so that Gordon can talk and amplify his voice. With this, he pretends to be the voice of God and orders Ricky and his friends to leave, leading Adam, Mitch, and Jenny to realize what has happened to them. In the attic, the kids discuss the benefits of leaving their parents shrunk briefly before deciding they love them more than that, so they unshrink them to give them a chance to re-evaluate their parenting methods. Patti confides her trust in Jenny for how she stood up to Ricky and took care of Mitch, while Wayne tells Adam that he can have an interest in sports, and agrees to sign him up for baseball camp. Diane tells Wayne he can keep the Tiki Man, and won't sweat the "small" stuff anymore, while he decides to relinquish his presidency of Szalinski Labs to Gordon and return to inventing. In the end, life is back to normal again, while Wayne has developed a new respect for baseball, and the Tiki Man has been moved into the backyard and enlarged to twice the height of the house. ===== An unnamed detective arrives to investigate a mysterious death at Carmody University. Louella-Marie Busch and Susan Morey were known as the "library twins" due to their similar appearance and work at the science reference library. Busch is dead after drinking tea laced with potassium cyanide. The detective proves, with a professor's help, that it was the survivor, Morey, who prepared the tea by showing that she did not know the name of the one person who inquired at the reference desk while the tea was being prepared, a furrier named Ernest Beilstein. Professor Rodney alleges that Morey could not possibly have forgotten this due to the coincidence of his sharing a name with Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry, a sixty volume encyclopedia of chemical compounds and reactions. ===== February, 1964: Ed Sullivan prepares the ushers for the Beatles' debut performance on his television show, which broadcasts from CBS Studio 50 in New York. In Maplewood, New Jersey, Rosie and Pam visit the local record shop. Janis, a folk music devotee whose dad owns the shop, detests the Beatles. Grace wants to rent a limousine so they can pull up to the Beatles' hotel and get exclusive photos of the band. The girls recruit Larry DuBois, a shy teen whose father has access to limos as he is the local undertaker. They leave for New York City and are joined en route by the brash and streetwise Tony who, like Janis, also hates the Beatles, preferring American pop music instead (particularly The Four Seasons). At daybreak on the morning of February 9, the six teenagers arrive in New York. When they pull up at the hotel, which is already surrounded by screaming teenagers, Grace, Rosie and Pam sneak inside, and Tony and Janis remain in the limo while Larry pulls around to the side of the hotel. Once inside the hotel, Grace and Rosie sneak into a service elevator, while Pam, who initially is not interested in seeing the Beatles as she is about to be married, hides in a basement storage closet during which time she sees the group leaving the hotel for the theater to rehearse for the show. Grace gets off on the 11th floor, but Rosie goes up to the Beatles' rooms on the 12th floor; she is briefly caught but escapes and runs into Richard Klaus, a fellow Beatles fan who is hiding out in another room, but soon they are both caught and tossed from the hotel, after which the two quarrel and go their separate ways for a time. To avoid being caught, Pam hides in a food cart which is taken to the Beatles’ room. When she finds their clothes and instruments she revels in a moment of quiet euphoria. When the Beatles return to the room, Pam hides under John’s bed. Grace is caught and thrown out of the hotel, so she goes to the theater, where a guard tells her that for fifty dollars he will let her in backstage while the show is on. Larry asks Grace to the Valentine’s Day dance at school, but Grace, her mind fixated on getting the pictures, ignores him and attempts a quick but dangerous scheme to get the money: she decides to take the place of a prostitute who has a john waiting at the hotel. Once in the john’s room, Grace gets nervous and hides, but takes photos of the john with the hooker and then blackmails him into giving her the fifty dollars. He attacks her, but Larry, who has been getting progressively tipsy in the hotel bar, appears just in time to knock out the john and rescue Grace. In front of the hotel, Janis befriends Peter, a boy with a Beatles hairstyle who is determined to get in to see the show. He tells Janis that his dad has three tickets to get in, but refuses to give them to Peter unless he gets his hair cut. Realizing that the Beatles themselves are providing the type of social cause that she believes in, Janis recruits Tony to steal Peter's dad’s wallet when they meet him at the barber shop. Tony carries out the plan and gets the tickets, one each for Peter, Janis and Tony. While Janis wants simply to help Peter see the show and be himself, Tony secretly decides he's going to find a way to stop the TV broadcast. Throughout the film, Rosie attempts to win tickets to the show from a radio disc jockey giving them out as prizes if listeners can correctly answer trivia questions about the Beatles. After several failed attempts Rosie hears the DJ ask another question ("Which Beatle is both the oldest and youngest Beatle?"); she makes it to a phone and calls in with the right answer (Ringo - oldest in terms of age, "youngest" in that he was the last to join the group), and finally wins two tickets. Pam gets caught, but she is treated kindly by the Beatles' staff and even interviewed by the press. Eddie, her fiancé, arrives to pick her up, but now realizing that she's not ready to get married, she leaves him behind and runs to the theater, using the ticket that the Beatles' road manager Neil Aspinall gave her to see the show. Richard and Rosie get to the show, running into Pam in front of the theater. Right before the Beatles go onstage, Tony grabs a fire axe from a doorway and goes to the roof of the theater and climbs the TV transmitter to sabotage the broadcast. Janis follows and tries to stop him, but Tony is dead set in his plan until lightning from a gathering storm strikes and knocks Tony from the transmitter. Larry parks the limo in the alley behind the theater and Grace makes her way to the back door, but when a policeman catches him and prepares to arrest him for improper parking and driving without a license. Grace runs back and uses the $50 to bribe the cop into letting Larry go. Now without the money to get backstage, Grace is temporarily disconsolate, but soon accepts Larry's offer to go to the dance. After their appearance, the Beatles quickly leave the theater, but take a wrong turn and end up in Larry’s limo. As a mob of fans descends on the car, Larry drives off with the Beatles still in the back seat, and Grace gets to snap her photos. ===== Eric Seaver is a young man that was abused as a child. He has since grown up to become a serial killer with a steady job as a medical transcriptionist, transcribing autopsy reports, and a fiancé. As Eric's killings become more frequent, his stable life is threatened and his rage begins to take over any sanity he had left. ===== Alan and Wendy Barnet are stuck in a marital rut and decide to answer an ad they find in a Swinging magazine. The couple meets with Jack and Louise Bauer at the Zebra Lounge. The Bauers are a pair of experienced swingers who help the Barnets fulfill their sexual fantasies. However, Alan and Wendy soon realize that the Bauers are not who they seem to be. ===== Although each game in the collections feature different characters and stories, they take place in the Algol planetary system, specifically on the planets Palma, Motavia, and Dezolis. In the four games, there exists a Dark Force, a common antagonist that threatens the solar system. The games also make small references to each other, such as the idolation of Alis in Phantasy Star IV. ===== A hit woman is contracted to perform one final job before she leaves her life of cold- blooded killing behind forever. She is now faced with the challenge of dealing with carrying out the contract she accepted and her own moral values. ===== ===== The story of Power Pete revolves around the title character, Power Pete. Power Pete is an action figure residing in a toy store. After the store closes, all of the toys come alive and chaos ensues. A group of plush rabbits escape from their bin and scatter throughout the store, helpless against the hordes of the more dangerous toys. The only one able to save them is the most popular toy in the store, the action figure Power Pete. Power Pete begins a crusade to try to find and save the rabbits. The other toys in the store, whose sales have been eclipsed by those of Power Pete, are less than happy to see the action figure and spend the game trying to hinder his efforts. Power Pete is aided however by the variety of weapon accessories designed for the Power Pete model that are found throughout the store. ===== The concept of the film is explained in a voiceover intro by G. W. Bailey, who wonders what it would be like if one of the 1930s/1940s Rex O'Herlihan films were to be made today. At that point, in a scene reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, the cinematography shifts from black and white to color and the soundtrack changes from mono to surround sound. As a consequence of this paradigm shift, Rex O'Herlihan (Berenger), a "singing cowboy", is the only character aware of the plot outline. He explains that he "knows the future" inasmuch as "these Western towns are all the same" and that it's his "karma" to "ride into a town, help the good guys, who are usually poor for some reason, against the bad guys, who are usually rich for some reason, and ride out again." Rex's knowledge is also connected to the unspecified "root" vegetables he digs up and eats. On his high-stepping horse Wildfire, Rex rides into the town of Oakwood Estates, walks into a saloon and meets Peter, the Town Drunk (Bailey). In exchange for a free drink, Peter explains the background: the town, and especially the sheep herders ("nice enough, but they smell God-awful"), are being terrorized by the cattle ranchers, headed by Colonel Ticonderoga (Andy Griffith).According to an academic analysis published in 2017, Westerns conventionally juxtapose cattle ranching with sheep herding as a signifier of masculinity: Also there is Miss Tracy (Marilu Henner), the traditional Prostitute with a Heart of Gold. A local sheriff (John Orchard) is "a corrupt old coward who takes his orders from the Colonel." Blackie (Jim Carter), the foreman at Rancho Ticonderoga, swaggers into the bar with two of his henchmen and shoots the town real-estate agent. Miss Tracy objects, and when she is verbally abused by one of Blackie's henchmen, Rex intervenes. Blackie draws on Rex after they exchange words – including Rex's threat to "shoot in the hand" anyone of them drawing on him – and duly delivers on that threat. The disabled Blackie orders his two henchmen to kill Rex, but having been rattled by Rex's skill, they draw and fire their six-shooters hurriedly, and shoot Blackie in the back instead. Rex then proceeds to shoot both in the hand. He then orders them to remove Blackie's corpse. Peter exchanges his drunk suit for a sidekick outfit, catches up with Rex, and is reluctantly accepted. (Rex has sworn off sidekicks as they keep dying.) At the singing cowboy's campsite, Peter finds not one but two women there eager to get to know Rex a little better, Miss Tracy and the Colonel's daughter (Sela Ward). In the PG-rated original version, Sela Ward and Rex sneak off behind a rock to have sex. This is removed and the film is rated G. The Colonel goes for help to the boss of the railroad men (Fernando Rey) – who wear dusters and have theme music like characters in spaghetti westerns. "We should stick together. Look what we have in common: we're both rich, we're both power-mad, and we're both Colonels — that's got to count for something!" Rex outwits the Bad Guys because he knows their every move before they do. But then the Colonels import "Wrangler" Bob Barber (Patrick Wayne), apparently another Good Guy. Bob psychs out Rex in their first meeting by attacking Rex's claim to be the "most good Good Guy" and pointing out that a Good Guy has to be "a confident heterosexual". "I thought it was just a heterosexual", Rex objects. "No, it's a confident heterosexual", responds Bob. Rex backs down from the shootout. On his way out of town, while preparing to change roles to that of a sidekick, Rex explains to Peter that he rides into town, kisses the girls and rides out again. "That's all: I just kiss 'em. I mean, this is the 1880s. You gotta date and date and date and date and sometimes marry 'em before they, you know." Bob reports that Rex is finished as a Good Guy. Nevertheless, the Colonels, over Bob's objection, arrange for Peter to be bushwhacked. This rouses Rex to round up the sheep herders and face down Bob and the rancher/railroad combine. Bob is revealed as not a Good Guy at all because, after all, he is a lawyer. Rex shoots him. Colonel Ticonderoga makes the peace. He apologizes to Rex and throws a party at Rancho Ticonderoga, after which Rex and Peter (who survived because Rex had him wear a bulletproof vest) ride off together into the sunset. ===== Dr. Sharon Golban finds an ancient skeleton in Jerusalem in a rich man's tomb. Coloration of the wrist and ankle bones indicates the cause of death was crucifixion. Several artifacts, including a gold coin bearing the marks of Pontius Pilate and a jar dating to 32 AD, date the tomb to the year Christ died. Faint markings on the skull consistent with thorns, the absence of broken leg bones, occupational markers suggesting the deceased was a carpenter, and a nick on the ribs from a pointed object lead authorities to suspect that these could be the bones of Christ. The different reactions of politicians, clerics, religious extremists—some prepared to use terror to gain their ends—to the religious, cultural and political implications of the find, make life difficult and dangerous for the investigators as they seek to unearth the truth. Father Matt Gutierrez is assigned by the Vatican to investigate the case and to protect the Christian faith. He sets out to prove that the bones are not those of Jesus, but as there is more and more evidence to support the claim, his faith begins to waver. Troubled by the case, he turns to Father Lavelle who commits suicide because he cannot reconcile the scientific evidence with his faith. This event causes Father Gutierrez to turn from his faith, but he comes back to it in the end. He also comes to understand that it is the power of the Catholic Church that he is protecting and not the faith, and decides to resign from his priesthood. In the end it is revealed that the body is in fact not Christ's body but one of his followers who died in a similar way. The film's fazit is that faith in Jesus will eventually become truth. ===== Will FreemanThe name, Will is an example of charactonym. lives a serene and luxurious lifestyle devoid of responsibility in London thanks to substantial royalties left to him from a successful Christmas song composed by his father. In an attempt to meet single women with children (who Will believes have low expectations in the men they date), Will begins attending a single parent support group, "SPAT", where he falsely states that he has a two-year-old son named Ned. He meets an attractive woman named Suzie in the group, and during a planned play-date with her, he meets Marcus, the teenage son of Suzie's friend Fiona, who was unexpectedly brought along by Suzie. Will gains Marcus's interest and trust after he lies to a park ranger to cover up for Marcus accidentally killing a duck by throwing his mother's home-made cottage loaf at it. Afterward, when Will and Suzie take Marcus home, they find Fiona in the living room, overdosed on pills from a suicide attempt. Marcus attempts to fix Will up with his mother in order to cheer her up, but the plan fails after a single date. Instead, Marcus becomes close to Will after blackmailing him with the knowledge that "Ned" doesn't exist, and begins to treat him as a surrogate big brother. Marcus's influence leads Will to mature and he seeks out a relationship with Rachel, a self-assured career woman, bonding over their experiences raising teenage sons, though Will neglects to explain his relationship to Marcus. He introduces Marcus to Rachel's insecure son, Ali, who threatens to kill him. Marcus, in turn, develops a crush on a girl named Ellie, a punk rocker at his school. However, his feelings change and he gives up his romantic interest in favour of a close platonic friendship. Will, realizing that he desires true intimacy with Rachel, decides to be honest with her about his relationship with Marcus, but this backfires and their relationship ends. One day, Marcus comes home from school to find his mother crying in the living room. He attempts to tell this to Will, but Will is withdrawn following his break-up. Marcus decides to sing at a school talent show in order to make his mother happy. Will attempts to return to his previous lifestyle, but finds it unfulfilling. He realizes that the one thing that means something to him is Marcus, and decides to help him. He crashes a meeting of SPAT to find Fiona and beg her not to commit suicide. She assures him that she has no plans to do so and reveals that Marcus has decided to sing at the school show that day. Will realizes this will be a huge embarrassment for Marcus and rushes with Fiona to the school to stop him, but Marcus is steadfast in his decision to perform, believing it will be the only thing that will make his mother happy. When he steps on stage and sings his mother's favourite song—"Killing Me Softly with His Song"—the student body starts to taunt him. Suddenly, Will appears onstage with a guitar to accompany Marcus for the rest of the song, earning themselves a modest applause. Will performs an unnecessary solo immediately afterward, turning himself into the butt of the joke and rescuing Marcus from humiliation and even social suicide. The following Christmas, Will is back with Rachel and hosts a celebration at his home, with his new extended family. The idea of Will marrying Rachel is brought up and Marcus seems unenthusiastic. But Marcus reveals in voiceover that he is not against Will and Rachel marrying, merely that he believes that couples do not work on their own and that everyone needs an extended support system like he now has, concluding "No man is an island." ===== The novel is about two friends Deborah Cochrane and Joanna Meissner, both of whom are shown equally as protagonists. Joanna dumps her boyfriend Carlton Williams and finds herself in need of money to complete her studies. Her friend Deborah shows her a newspaper article about Wingate Clinic that is offering $45,000 for people willing to donate their eggs for infertile patients. The two friends decide to take the offer and donate the eggs. Everything goes on peacefully till they complete their doctorate studies and come back to USA. Here their curiosity gets the better of them and they decide to find out what happened to their eggs. With the Wingate Clinic maintaining a strict silence about their working, the two of them decide to use some unfair means to get this information. ===== Map of Mars in the fiction of Leigh Brackett. For the first seven chapters, Queen of the Martian Catacombs and The Secret of Sinharat are almost word-for-word identical; the differences are inconsequential to the plot. In Chapter 1, a brief paragraph is inserted to situate the reader in the Solar System and to excuse the presence of non-Terran humans on planets like Mars through the concept of a prehistoric "seeding"—not mentioned elsewhere in Brackett's novels. In Chapter 5, an explicit reference to the events of Brackett's story "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (Planet Stories, Winter 1948) has been cut, perhaps on the assumption that readers of the novel would not know or be interested in the earlier story. The Arabic word "khamsin" is consistently replaced by "storm wind", perhaps on the grounds that readers might not be familiar with the word (or mistake it for a Martian technical term). * Chapter 1: Eric John Stark, fleeing from Venus where he has been running guns to native opponents of a Terro-Venusian mining concern (mining and mineral extraction companies recur as villains in Brackett's stories), has come to Mars to fight as a mercenary in a private war in the Martian Drylands on behalf of Delgaun, lord of the Martian city of Valkis. He is finally pinned down by agents of Earth Police Control. Their leader, Simon Ashton, offers him a deal: lifting of his sentence, if he agrees to act as a spy on Delgaun, whom Ashton claims is plotting a major war together with a barbarian leader called Kynon, of the Dryland tribe of Shun; a war that Ashton says will be disastrous for the drylanders. Stark agrees to go to Valkis as Ashton's agent, and return to report to him in the Martian city of Tarak. * Chapter 2: Stark enters Valkis late at night and sees the drylanders gathering there. He meets Delgaun and several other mercenaries that Delgaun has hired. One of them is Luhar, an old enemy of Stark from Venus. They challenge each other, but Delgaun separates them. At dawn, Kynon of Shun enters Valkis. * Chapter 3: Delgaun, Stark and the mercenaries go to see Kynon. In the public square of Valkis, Kynon demonstrates a technology which he claims to have recovered from the lost secrets of the Ramas, an ancient race of Martians who had acquired a form of immortality. Kynon, using two crystal circlets and a glowing rod, appears to transfer the consciousness of an old Martian man into a young Terran boy. The old man collapses and dies. Kynon returns with Delgaun and the others to the council room in the palace. * Chapter 4: Stark accuses Kynon of an elaborate charade in which the boy was coached in his part and the old man was killed by poison. Kynon admits it, but justifies it as a necessity for uniting the drylanders against the City-States of the Dryland Borders, who are depriving them of water resources. Together with the men of Valkis and the other Low- canal cities, they will conquer the City-States and become fully independent of Terra. Stark goes to his quarters and sleeps through the day. At dusk he goes to the council-room, and finds Delgaun there with Kynon's female companion, Berild. Delgaun asks Stark to bring back one of Kynon's trusted captains, Freka, who is indulging in "a certain vice"; he needs to be back before Kynon sets out at midnight for his desert headquarters. On his way, Stark is stopped by Fianna, Berild's serving girl, who warns him that he is going into a trap set by Delgaun. Stark accepts the warning, but continues anyway. * Chapter 5: Stark comes to Kala's, a broken-down dive in a mostly uninhabited part of Valkis. He finds Freka there, indulging in shanga, a radiation-induced temporary atavistic regression to a bestial state. Stark realizes that an empty room near Freka probably contains the trap set for him. When he is refused entrance to the room, he leaves Kala's and waits outside. He is followed by Luhar, who had been waiting in the empty room for a chance to attack Stark. Stark jumps Luhar; the fighting goes back into Kala's, where the shanga addicts and Kala herself become involved. Stark knocks Freka out, is stabbed by Luhar, knocks Luhar out, and returns with Freka to Delgaun's palace. Delgaun is surprised and angry; Berild is pleased. * Chapter 6: At midnight, Kynon leaves Valkis with the drylanders and mercenaries. Kynon orders Stark and Luhar to remain apart from each other. Delgaun remains behind. Luhar and Freka confer. The caravan proceeds across the desert for three days, and on the fourth day they are hit by a sandstorm. * Chapter 7: Luhar and Freka take advantage of the storm to jump Stark and leave him for dead. He finds himself together with Berild. When the storm blows out, they are lost in the desert. They proceed on foot. After four days, running out of water, they come to a wilderness of rocks. From chapter 8 on the two versions diverge. ===== Belle (Lynsey McLeod) lives in France and owns her own music and bookshop. Helping her at the bookstore are Lewis and Carroll, two magical bookworms, Harmony the Cat and Big Book, a large talking book on a book stand. The bookstore is visited by local children to whom Belle will sing songs and tell stories, usually with a moral relating to something that's happened that day. Clips from vintage Disney cartoons would often be used to illustrate the stories, including: * Mickey's Rival * The Cookie Carnival * Goliath II * Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree * Music Land ===== Tommy Gibbs (Fred Williamson) is an African-American who grew up in Harlem, New York City. As a kid, he was brutally assaulted by a cop named McKinney. The incident led him to a life of crime. As an adult, he joins the New York mafia and becomes the head of a black crime syndicate in Harlem. He wages a gang war with the Italian mobsters of New York City and begins to establish a criminal empire, keeping a ledger book of all his dealings as leverage over his business associates, including McKinney. He meets and falls in love with a singer named Helen (Gloria Hendry) and marries her. She is unhappy as he is violent and rapes her. Eventually his enemies conspire with her, leading to an attempt on his life that leaves him shot and wounded. Killing his would-be assassins, he returns to his office to retrieve the ledger book. McKinney meets him there, and attempts to humiliate him before killing him. Tommy overpowers McKinney and beats him to death. Retrieving the ledger, a badly wounded Tommy returns to the house where he grew up, but a street gang attacks, robs and, presumably, kills him. ===== Armed with a quarterstaff and a pet lion, noble nightclub owner Samson does his best to keep his neighborhood clean of crime and drugs. When vicious mobster Johnny Nappa tries to muscle in on Samson's territory, Samson takes a stand against Nappa and his flunkies. ===== L.A. bounty hunter, Zachary Kane, is on the hunt for a masked serial killer on the loose. ===== After a year of marriage, Edward "Teddy" Bare (Dirk Bogarde) kills his wealthy older wife, Monica (Mona Washbourne), after she asks her lawyer, Phillip Mortimer (Robert Flemyng), to change her will. He stages it to look as if she was accidentally asphyxiated while drunkenly trying to light a gas heater. To his chagrin, he discovers that she actually intended to leave him all her money; instead, he only inherits the mansion from a prior will, while her millions are left in trust to her only relative, her sister Dora. Edward will receive the money if Dora dies. An inquest rules it an accident, but Phillip makes it clear he suspects Edward. When Edward asks where Dora lives, Phillip tells him she is too far away, in Jamaica. Edward manages to marry lower-class but well-off widow Freda Jeffries (Margaret Lockwood), who is closer to her husband's age, and much less trusting than her predecessor, keeping tight control over her fortune. As the death of a second spouse so soon after the first would be highly suspicious, he is powerless to do anything. Edward becomes acquainted with Charlotte Young (Kay Walsh), who is looking for a house to purchase for an equestrian school. As Edward was an estate agent before he married Monica, he shows her around, making Freda jealous. Edward lures Charlotte to his mansion late one night while Freda and the servant are out. He reveals he knows that Charlotte is actually Dora. Then he brazenly admits killing her sister before trying to make her leave. Suspicious, she remains where she is. Eventually, however, Freda returns home and escorts Charlotte to the door. After she drives away, Edward tells Freda that he killed Monica, secure in the knowledge that a wife cannot be compelled to testify against her husband, and that he expects to inherit Charlotte's money shortly, as he has tampered with the brakes on her car. He is shocked when Phillip enters the room, having heard his confession, followed by his intended victim. She had returned to the house after meeting the lawyer at the estate's gate. Edward flees in his car, but the entrance is blocked by Charlotte's and Phillip's automobiles. With Phillip in pursuit, Edward switches to another vehicle, only to realise too late that he has taken Charlotte's. He loses control and drives off a cliff. ===== Minkey, a super- spy primate, rescues his partner Mike Muggins from Middle Eastern terrorists. Their secretary, Edith, congratulates them as the two best spies in the business, but Mike informs her that he is going to retire to be with his wife and daughter. The movie flashes forward 10 years. Mike's wife had died, and his daughter, Amelia, is a child prodigy, having invented a revolutionary oxygen iodide laser drill. Amelia is about to receive the National Scientific Achievement Award from the world's leading scientists, Dr. Robert Farley and Dr. Claudette Amour. Mike tells her how proud he is, and reminds her that Minkey is in town, now the star of a circus show. Mike offers to take Amelia to Minkey's show, but Amelia laughs it off, remembering those "silly stories" he used to tell her about life as a spy. As Amelia leaves for school, Hugo, a henchman, follows her and takes pictures of her. Amelia receives the National Scientific Achievement Award, although Dr. Amour is unable to be there. As she and Mike leave, Dr. Farley videotapes Mike with a pen-camcorder. The next day, Dr. Farley shows up in a black limousine and kidnaps Amelia, telling her that her father has a surprise for her. He has a manipulated video of Mike confirming this, and Amelia happily goes with Dr. Farley. Dr Farley takes her to Japan, explaining that it is a "top-secret government program." He has built a full-scale model of Amelia's drill, but it is not working properly; Amelia begins working on it. Meanwhile, Hugo delivers a package to Mike—it's a video of Dr. Farley, who promises not to hurt Amelia as long as Mike does not contact the authorities. Mike springs into action, contacting Edith and Minkey, persuading them to come out of retirement to help him save Amelia. Minkey's new friends from the circus are enlisted as spies; while Mike and Minkey fly to Jamaica to find Dr. Amour, Edith brings the performers up to speed on the project. Apparently, Minkey was genetically enhanced and specially trained as a part of operation SPYMATE, but when the Russians moved in on the project, Mike was ordered to terminate Minkey. After Minkey exhibited formidable martial arts skills against KGB agents, Mike requested him as a partner. Meanwhile, Mike and Minkey find Dr. Amour, who tells them that Dr. Farley plans to use Amelia's drill to cut through the Earth's crust in a Japanese volcano and harness the heat energy of the Earth's core. However, according to Dr. Amour's calculation, the energy will cause a massive earthquake that could wipe Japan off the map. Dr. Amour agrees to take Mike and Minkey to Dr. Farley's drill site. Meanwhile, Amelia is becoming suspicious of Dr. Farley. She tries to escape, but is captured and held prisoner. Meanwhile, Mike, Minkey, and Dr. Amour parachute into the drill site. Dr. Amour and Mike are captured, but Minkey escapes with the help of a Japanese ninja sensei, who "has been awaiting him." The sensei and his students tell Minkey how to breach Dr. Farley's lab and promise their help. Dr. Farley threatens to kill Mike and Dr. Amour if Amelia does not fix the drill. Amelia reluctantly tells him to put an elastic band around the drill to dampen the sympathetic resonance. Dr. Farley begins drilling into the earth and tells Hugo to kill Mike and Dr. Amour. As Mike and Dr. Amour are escorted out, Minkey ambushes Hugo. Mike fights off the other guards while Dr. Amour and Minkey run to the drill chamber. Dr. Amour distracts Dr. Farley while Mike and Minkey take out the guards in the drill chamber and rescue Amelia. More guards pour in, but Minkey's ninja friends drop out of the ceiling. Dr. Amour and Amelia stop the drill, but this causes it to explode. Mike, Minkey, Dr. Amour, and Amelia barely escape the exploding lab. Outside, Amelia exclaims to Mike that he really is a spy. Minkey receives a call from the president requesting his services in a "delicate matter" and snowboards away to more adventures. ===== The film explores adolescent issues through the minds of three friends and their reactions after a boy named Rudy Carges (Conor Donovan) is killed in a tree house set on fire by local bullies Jeff and Kenny, who carelessly didn't find out he was inside until too late. The boy's twin brother Jacob, a boy with a huge birthmark (also played by Donovan), decides to seek revenge against the bullies. Leonard (Jesse Camacho) who's overweight, survives the tree house fire but loses his sense of taste and smell. Leonard is prompted by his gym teacher to go on a diet, which isn't welcomed by his obese family. The boys' female friend Malee (Zoe Weizenbaum) tries to befriend an adult named Gus (Jeremy Renner), a grief-stricken patient of her therapist mother, Carla (Annabella Sciorra). Jacob's family falls apart after the death of his brother, but soon after they adopt a boy named Keith Gardner. Meanwhile, Malee begins to have a crush on Gus and changes the song for her recital to one Gus liked. As time goes by, she sees Gus as her "soul mate". She sneaks into his house one night to find him grieving. Afraid to confront him, Malee steals his gun and leaves. She gives the gun to Jacob the following day. Jacob's mother gets furious when she finds out Jeff and Kenny are being put in juvenile hall for only one year, while Jacob's father views Rudy's death as an accident. Jacob spends the next few months visiting Jeff and Kenny, and threatens them, until eventually Jeff commits suicide. Jacob befriends Kenny, soon learning he has an early release and is illegally moving to New Mexico. Meanwhile, Leonard's father decides to take his sisters to Florida instead of Leonard (who would usually go). Leonard decides to force his mother to lose weight by trapping her in the cellar. They both end up in the hospital after a gas leak in their home. Next, Jacob and Kenny agree that Jacob can go with him to New Mexico. Malee visits Gus and removes her clothes in an attempt to seduce him. Instead, Gus calls Malee's mother to come and pick her up. The next day, Gus explains to therapist Carla about the last fire he ever fought (which involved killing an injured little girl, upon the girl's request), claiming that Malee wanted him to take her pain away, as he was aware of her growing crush on him. Meanwhile, Jacob's mother tells him that Keith Gardner wasn't adopted to replace Rudy, and that she wants Kenny dead, which reminds Jacob of his planned revenge. The night of escape for Jacob finally comes and he meets up with Kenny. Jacob insists on going through a construction site which he says is a secret route. Once there, Jacob points Gus's gun at Kenny, and tells him "you killed him" before shooting him dead. Jacob buries the body and leaves. He returns in the daytime, and sees Gus spreading cement above Kenny's grave, knowing the evidence is gone. Malee begins visiting her estranged father and Leonard's family finally starts eating healthily. Jacob returns home without telling anyone what he did. ===== Nancy Drew, an amateur sleuth, and her widowed father, Carson Drew, move from their quaint hometown River Heights to California, where Carson has a temporary job. Carson encourages Nancy to focus on living like a normal teenager, instead of getting herself into trouble with crime- and mystery-solving. However, unbeknownst to Carson, Nancy chose their California house because of its famously unsolved mystery of the death of the movie star Dehlia Draycott. Nancy struggles to fit in at her new school, only befriending a younger boy, Corky. She wears 50's outfits and penny loafers, becoming subject to teasing from Corky's older sister and her best friend. After discovering many clues about the Draycott mystery, she begins secretly sleuthing behind her father's back. Nancy eventually finds Draycott's lost child, Jane Brighton, who turns out to be the sole beneficiary of Draycott's will, which has disappeared. Nancy contacts her father's business associate, Dashiel Biedermeyer, the lawyer of the Draycott estate, to assist her with the case. Meanwhile, as an early birthday present, Ned Nickerson, Nancy's good friend with implied romantic interest, visits from River Heights. Corky becomes jealous of Nancy and Ned's close relationship and tries his best to get Nancy's attention. Nancy begins experiencing worsening attacks against her as she learns that someone does not want her to solve the case. One afternoon, a tearful Jane arrives on Nancy's doorstep and announces that her daughter has been taken away from her. While watching a Dehlia Draycott film, Nancy realizes that Draycott has hidden her will in a prop from one of her last movies. After retrieving the will, Nancy is kidnapped by the villain's henchmen. Nancy escapes with the will but gets into a car crash. Her father arrives and demands to know what is going on. After explaining her sleuthing, Biedermeyer offers them a ride home so he can finalize the legacy to Jane. Nancy concludes that Biedermeyer was Dehlia Draycott's supposed love who stands to lose money if the will goes to Jane. However, when he questions Nancy about the will, she manages to jump out of the car. She is caught by Biedermeyer who threatens her; when Nancy asks him why he killed Dehlia, he replies that Dehlia went crazy after she put Jane up for adoption, and wanted to leave to be with her caretaker Leshing. Nancy escapes but is once again cornered. Leshing arrives and knocks the henchmen unconscious as Nancy reveals that she secretly recorded Biedermeyer's confession. While the police arrive to arrest Biedermeyer, Nancy reveals to Leshing that Jane is his daughter. The will is restored to Jane, who is able to get her daughter back and convert the Draycott mansion into a home for single mothers. Back at River Heights, Nancy visits Ned as he repairs her car and they share a kiss. She receives a long- distance phone call regarding a new mystery in Scotland. ===== Shuichiro Harashima (Hiroyuki Sanada), an upper-class and work-driven businessman, falls in love with Kaori Fujimura (Nanako Matsushima), a lower-class downtown sweetheart, and fights to save the doomed building in which she lives. Rumored to be cold-hearted and cruel, his love for Kaori and his growing friendship with her brother-in-law, Konosuke Shimodaira (Koji Tamaki), change him into a kind and caring person. ===== Corrupt Division Commander Earl Buglar orders his subordinate Dr. J. Barrett C. Coldyron, a leading scientist in the field of police robotics, to rush development of an experimental police robot. Buglar wants the prototype – dubbed R.O.T.O.R. (Robotic Officer of the Tactical Operations Research/Reserve Unit) — ready in sixty days so that Senator Donald D. Douglas can take public credit for the project and use it to catapult himself into the White House. Coldyron warns Buglar that the prototype is several years away from completion but is forced to resign and is replaced by his incompetent assistants, Dr. Houghtaling and his robot Willard. In Coldyron's absence, R.O.T.O.R. is inadvertently activated and put on duty. The robot executes a motorist for speeding and terrorizes his young fiancée, Sonya, who the robot views as an accomplice in her boyfriend's infraction. Upon learning his creation has escaped, Coldyron enlists the help of his colleague Dr. Corrine Steele, who designed the unit's combat chassis. Together, Steele and Coldyron track down the rampaging robot and attempt to stop it from killing again. ===== As school starts at Highland High, Mr. Van Driessen announces roll call. For the third week in a row, Beavis and Butt-Head are absent from school, and Van Driessen goes to Principal McVicker's office to let him know of his concerns. McVicker does not care, telling Van Driessen to deal with it himself, but is eventually convinced to have his secretary, Ms. Tress, call their home to speak with their parents. At home, we find out the reason why Beavis and Butt-Head have not been going to school: they cannot find anything good to watch on TV. As they keep flipping through the channels and eating junk food, Beavis hears the phone ringing and Butt-Head tells him to make it stop. Beavis answers, and when Ms. Tress asks where the boys have been, Beavis says to her "yeah, they're dead." and hangs up, then goes back into the living room. Meanwhile, Ms. Tress relays what Beavis told her to McVicker and Van Driessen. The two men have completely opposite reactions. Van Driessen, in disbelief that two of his students could have died, grieves - while McVicker is overjoyed at the fact that, at least as far as he knows, he will never have to deal with Beavis or Butt-Head again. Van Driessen, in tears, decides to go back to class and break the news to them in private, but McVicker goes on the school loudspeaker and yells triumphantly to the student body and the faculty that Beavis and Butt-Head have met their demise. The students, meanwhile, could not care less and Van Driessen tries to get them to share their feelings or memories as he does, although all of them ended badly for him. The only student willing to speak up is Daria Morgendorffer, only after being asked to, and even though she is sad to hear that Beavis and Butt-Head are gone, she reinforces the point that the duo were not destined for bright futures. Van Driessen thanks Daria for sharing her thoughts and being honest about them, and only hopes that the two found what they were looking for in their failed lives. Back at home, Beavis and Butt-Head have not found what they are looking for still. More and more channels have been flipped through and they still cannot find something to watch. Butt-Head finally says that if he does not see some boobs or butts soon, he is going to become "pretty pissed off". Meanwhile, the mood among the teachers is still joyous as everyone (with one exception) is drinking champagne and toasting to the downfall of Beavis and Butt-Head. When Van Driessen suggests that they stop celebrating and instead show some respect to the dead, a furious Coach Buzzcut talks down to him, saying that it took everything he had not to kill both of them and that he hoped their deaths were slow and painful. Undeterred, Van Driessen suggests that the school start a fund in Beavis and Butt-Head's memory for scholarships. McVicker agrees to the fund, but instead wants to use it to raise money for other things around the school such as a new teachers' lounge, claiming that the boys owe the school money for all the damage they caused over the years. Shortly thereafter, Beavis and Butt-Head finally find something worth watching as the local TV station has a report on dead bodies at the school. Since the two do not realize that they are the dead people everyone is talking about, they simply watch as a girl Butt-Head tried to score with (which he lies and says he did, although she tells a different story) and Stewart reminisce. Beavis wants to know where the dead bodies are, and finally he and Butt-Head decide to go down to the school to check them out. Meanwhile, Van Driessen has taken up a collection for the fund and, to McVicker's annoyance, has collected mostly pennies in a glass jar. However, McVicker is happy about all the attention that the deaths of Beavis and Butt-Head has brought to the school and says that things have not been this good since President Clinton visited. As he continues to bask in his glorious moment, a reporter asks McVicker about the fund. He immediately changes his tone and begins speaking and acting like Van Driessen regarding the fund as well as faking grief over the loss of Beavis and Butt-Head. He ends the interview by saying he would give all the money away so he could see Beavis and Butt-Head alive again. Almost on cue, Butt- Head emerges from the crowd and demands McVicker give him the jar. A clueless Beavis looks around for the dead bodies, still completely unaware that he was one of the assumed dead, while Butt-Head tries to pry the jar away from McVicker as the cameras catch everything. As he tries to keep Butt-Head from taking the change, McVicker has a series of flashbacks that become faster and more intense the longer he fights Butt-Head. The stress from the flashbacks eventually breaks McVicker and he collapses to the ground, suffering a heart attack. Beavis is finally excited to see a dead body, while a furious Buzzcut knocks out the camera as he tries to save McVicker's life with CPR. As the chaos at the school continues, Beavis and Butt-Head start walking back home, making fun of McVicker's heart attack and Buzzcut for "making out with him". When Beavis suggests they go back to school in case someone else dies, Butt- Head tells him that with the money in the jar he stole from McVicker, they are now rich and do not have to go to school ever again. As they walk off into the midday sun, Beavis responds to Butt-Head's remark by saying "that's pretty damn cool". ===== In Kuon's Yin Phase (Chapter of Shadow), Utsuki and Kureha arrive at the Fujiwara mansion to find their father. At the same time, during the game's Yang Phase (Chapter of Light), Doman's disciples, including Sakuya and her older brother, enter the manor to investigate the strange incidents occurring there. Utsuki and Sakuya become separated from their respective groups, and occasionally cross paths with one another. As the story progresses, the protagonists learn of Doman's true evil nature. The strange occurrences are a result of Doman's attempts with performing the forbidden Kuon ritual, which involves fusing a person with other corpses inside of a massive silkworm cocoon. Once this is done nine times, the person is "reborn". Doman sees his disciples, the manor residents, and even his daughters as expendable in his pursuit to form the Kuon cocoon. One by one, Sakuya's fellow exorcists died and resurrect into undead monsters. Meanwhile, Kureha, revealed to have died before the game's events, merges with Sakuya's older brother, becoming a hideous abomination. Later, Utsuki and Sakuya separately enter the underground area beneath the manor, where Doman is working to perform the Kuon spell. Utsuki becomes fused with other corpses eight times; slowly driven mad, she attacks Sakuya. In the Kuon Phase, Utsuki comes to her senses and releases Sakuya. Utsuki begs Sakuya to get away from her, but the latter vows to find a way to save her. At this time, Abe no Seimei arrives. After meeting with Sakuya, and later with a deformed Utsuki, Seimei finds and battles Doman, who seeks to use Seimei's body for the final cocoon. After Seimei kills Doman, Utsuki, unable to stop herself, drags Doman's body away and locks herself with it inside a wicker basket, thus beginning the final phase of the Kuon ritual. Sakuya convinces Seimei not to kill Utsuki, and the master exorcist reluctantly decides not to. During the ending credits, Sakuya coaxes Utsuki—now reborn as a young girl—out of the Fujiwara mansion grounds. Amazed by the outside world, and thrilled with her newfound freedom, Utsuki leaves the mansion behind with Sakuya. ===== The young ninja battles together with his faithful pet dog. In the center of the city, a group of terrorists are committing every imaginable atrocity known to man, including the planting of time bombs throughout the metropolis. Our youthful hero and his canine companion courageously set out to gather all the explosives placed by the evil gang and annihilate the syndicate that manipulates them. The protagonist is never actually named in the original arcade version, although the various home versions gives him differing identities. The manual and packaging description for the Master System version identifies him as Takashi, although the attract sequence in this same version contradicts this by naming him Fuma. The manual for the home computer versions produced by U.S. Gold, claims that he is Joe Musashi himself, with one print ad for the game referencing Kato and Sauros (who were characters from the Genesis version). ===== Set against a soundtrack of Clash, Sex Pistols, Ruts and Ramones records, sixteen-year-old Joe sets about enjoying his new-found freedom, which in the summer of ’77 means hard-drinking pubs and working-men’s clubs, local Teds, soulboys. disco girls and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. A joyride to Camden Town in North London takes him to see his first band, but it is a late-night incident back on the streets of Slough that changes his life forever. The second part of the book takes place in 1988 and finds Joe in China, receiving bad news in a letter from home. He buys a black- market ticket and takes the Trans-Siberian Express back to England. During this journey he reflects on the events that have filled the intervening years, eventually returning to that night in 1977. Siberia passes in a series of recollections and romance with a Russian woman, Joe arriving in Moscow during the days of Mikhail Gorbachev, continuing to Berlin where he crosses the Wall in the early hours. More trains take him on to Slough. The third section of Human Punk captures the main characters as they reach middle-age. They are older, but little wiser. Slough has changed, but not too much, the spirit that drove Joe and his friends as boys stronger than ever. He makes his living in a range of ways, one of which involves the buying and selling of second-hand records. His punk beliefs remain solid. Life bounces along until a face from the past emerges from the haze of a misty morning and forces him to stop and confront his memories once more. ===== Tim Purdom is born in 1937 in a small village on the Kentish coast as the illegitimate son of a young woman who dies in her early forties. After her death in 1959, Purdom decides to move to London as he does not have any sense of belonging to his home town any more. He finds cheap accommodation in Bayswater and work in a snack bar in Soho. Purdom is not only a jazz fanatic (his favourite musician is Thelonious Monk) but also an intellectual who reads books and who is interested in what is going on in the world, both politically and culturally. His intellectual pursuits do not go together with his lifestyle or his job. However, without any formal education or money, he is reduced to the kind of life he is leading; but, unambitious by nature, he is quite content with it for the time being. Very early during his stay in London Purdom is confronted with petty crime through his contact with guests and workmates. When he is offered some extra money by one of the older regulars he tags along with him and suddenly finds himself in a place where "dirty pictures"--which were illegal at the time--are taken. He is then approached by the owner of some adult bookshops and encouraged to become a pornographic photographer himself. The customers like his pictures, which are sold under the counter, and Purdom makes some good money. He is initiated into the world of private parties where old blue movies of foreign origin are shown to middle-aged upper middle class men in the company of young, attractively made up women. At one of those parties, where he works as the projectionist, he meets a man who later turns out to be Stephen Ward, one of the key figures in what will later be referred to as the Profumo affair. Ward supplies Purdom with a good many "models" for his photographic sessions. Eventually Purdom buys an 8 mm amateur movie camera and starts shooting pornographic movie shorts himself. His short-lived career is already over in early 1963 when he is told by his employer that the industry has moved on and that cheap Scandinavian imports are now in demand, which are also in colour rather than black and white. Purdom keeps on working at the snack bar and in addition is commissioned to do some serious photography about London for foreign magazines. He has become a respectable citizen with a new girlfriend who does not know anything about the shady business he has left behind. It is then that he feels he is being haunted by his past. ===== Having survived the assassination attempt at the end of Black Caesar, Tommy Gibbs takes on corrupt New York District Attorney DiAngelo, who had sought to jail Gibbs and his father, Papa Gibbs, in order to monopolize the illicit drug trade. Gibbs decides to eliminate drug pushing from the streets of Harlem, while continuing to carry out his other illicit enterprises. Gibbs falls in love with Sister Jennifer (Margaret Avery), a woman who works with Reverend Rufus, a former pimp who has found a religious calling. Gibbs and his father have a falling out after Gibbs is told by his enforcer, Zach, that his father ordered the death of Gibbs' ex-wife, Helen. Gibbs and Jennifer move to Los Angeles, leaving Papa Gibbs in charge of the Harlem territory. It is later revealed that Zach himself killed Helen as part of a move to take over the territory, with the assistance of DiAngelo. Gibbs defeats hit men sent to take him out in Los Angeles, while Papa dies from a heart attack while fighting Zach. Knowing that DiAngelo will be having the New York airports and roads watched, Gibbs flies in to Philadelphia, and then enters New York City on foot in order to carry out a personal war against Zach and DiAngelo. ===== In Kansas, Dorothy and Imogene the cow are chased by Hank the mule, and the farmhands draw their muskets at the beast. Dorothy runs off to their field and discovers that the family scarecrow is alive. The Scarecrow begins to notice a storm building up and hurries the Mule, the Cow, Toto and Dorothy behind a haystack. A tornado appears overhead and carries the haystack away, thus letting it fall into the Land of Oz. In Oz, The Wizard in the Emerald City declares that he is retiring from being the ruler and he will be crowning a new leader. The wicked witch Momba appears and attacks the wizard and the paper disappears. Meanwhile, Dorothy is playing with Toto, while being stalked by the Cowardly Lion. The good witch Glinda decides to turn Toto into a real protector that can fight off large predators. While Toto befriends the lion, the Scarecrow finds the wizard's paper on a tree. The travelers continue onward and find the Tin Woodsman. They oil him and find Eureka the cat. When they enter a forest, Momba the Witch flies out the window as her soldiers come out of the cottage, they are all captured and led into the witch's jail-house. Dorothy splashes water on Momba and kills her. After defeating the witch, the travelers arrive at the Emerald City for the retirement party of the Wizard, who names the Scarecrow king and leaves in a balloon. ===== The movie is about a murderer who has been mysteriously killing the members of the school's majorette squad. The local sheriff and a federal agent investigate the killings. The Majorettes is relatively noteworthy for its midway plot shift from a mystery/horror/slasher film to that of a vigilante/action film during which the protagonist, Jeff Halloway (Kevin Kindlin) arms himself with an assault rifle and besieges a biker gang (metaphorically "going Rambo" on them) to avenge crimes that they, not the slasher, committed. Such a twist is atypical of slasher films, which tend to follow a strict plot pattern. ===== Surratt served as a Confederate Secret Service courier and spy. After he had been carrying dispatches about Union troop movements across the Potomac River. Dr. Samuel Mudd introduced Surratt to Booth on December 23, 1864, and Surratt agreed to help Booth kidnap Lincoln. The meeting took place at the National Hotel, in Washington, D.C., where Booth lived. Booth's plan was to seize Lincoln and take him to Richmond, Virginia, to exchange him for thousands of Confederate prisoners of war. On March 17, 1865, Surratt and Booth, along with their comrades, waited in ambush for Lincoln's carriage to leave the Campbell General Hospital to return to Washington. However, Lincoln had changed his mind and remained in Washington. ===== The year is 1865. Will Denton (Kirk Douglas) is a jaded American miner escaping a troubled past. Seeking isolation for two reasons – to mend his broken heart after a failed romance during the California Gold Rush, and also to escape punishment after he murdered a man in a gunfight – Denton tends a lonely and isolated lighthouse with a minimal crew of three men, himself included. The lighthouse sits on a fictional rocky island adorned with many caves carved by the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean; it is however set in the geographic location of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the southern tip of South America. Before the building of the Panama Canal, the waters off Cape Horn were perhaps the busiest and richest shipping lanes in the world (all shipping between Europe and the western coast of The United States had to go around the Cape) and therefore very lucrative. Denton is contented to retreat from the world and be away from the problems of civilization, and quickly adjusts to his new supervisor, old Argentine sea dog Captain Moriz (Fernando Rey) and his youthful and innocent assistant Felipe. A shipload of utterly malicious and sadistic pirates show up, murder everyone they can find, and extinguish the light. They are wreckers, brigands who mislead ships into the rocks to loot the cargo and prey upon the victims. Their leader Captain Jonathan Kongre (Yul Brynner) is a diabolical fiend with a seductive and charismatic facade. Denton hides out in the caves and amongst the rocks, hiding from the pirates. He saves Italian wreck survivor Montefiore from the pirates' massacre, and together they wage a war of guerrilla tactics against Kongre and his cutthroats. Kongre breaks his own rule by keeping one captive alive – a beautiful Englishwoman named Arabella (Samantha Eggar). Montefiore is captured while creating a diversion for an attempt by Denton to rescue Arabella, who however opts for remaining with Kongre. On the next day, Kongre has Montefiori flayed alive on his ship, trying to draw Denton out of hiding, but Denton shoots Montefiori from afar. Angered, Kongre gives Arabella to his men and withdraws to the lighthouse. Denton uses the pirates' cannon to sink their ship, along with all the pirates except for Kongre. The finale of the film is a showdown between the only two survivors left on the island, Denton and Kongre. ===== Skip Beat! follows the story of Kyoko Mogami, a sixteen-year-old girl who loves her childhood friend, Shotaro Fuwa, but is betrayed by him. Having spent a large part of her childhood at Shotaro's parents' inn, she learned a great deal about hostelry and other such jobs. Shotaro, not wishing to take over his parents' business, asks Kyoko to run away with him to Tokyo, leaving high school and her life in Kyoto Prefecture behind to help him pursue a career in music. Upon arrival in Tokyo, Kyoko lives an unreasonably frugal life and works multiple jobs to support Sho, as he is called by his fans, spending nothing on herself and doing whatever she can for Sho, who eventually becomes ranked seventh of the top twenty most popular male celebrities of Japan. One day, she overhears Shotaro complaining about her to his manager, saying that she is a boring and plain girl who he thinks of as a doormat. He proceeds to sweet-talk and flirt with his manager, in stark contrast to the cold and demanding attitude he usually exhibits towards Kyoko. As she storms away, Kyoko doesn't shed many tears when she learns that Sho wanted her along only to handle housekeeping duties. Instead, her "Pandora's box" opens and she vows vengeance on Sho. As she is carried away by security, Sho mockingly tells her that if she wants revenge, she had better become a bigger star than he is. And so, Kyoko changes her appearance and enters the entertainment industry, facing many challenges along the way. After this introduction, Skip Beat! follows Kyoko's journey climbing up the showbiz ladder at first to gain her revenge but later out of love of acting. Along the way Kyoko meets many interesting people, troublemakers, foes, and friends alike, as she develops both as a person and as an actress. Additionally, she begins to regain the sense of compassion and other tender emotions that she lost when her heart was broken by Sho (Shotaro). Once she enters show biz Kyoko meets Ren Tsuruga, who at first disapproves of Kyoko for such a silly reason to begin acting, a profession he holds semi-sacred. As Kyoko cultivates her acting and friendships, she soon discovers a sense of self separate from her initial plans for revenge. ===== Mikey Chapman (Michael J. Fox), a former child star and now a talent agent for child stars, discovers Angie Vega (Christina Vidal, in her first movie), a girl who pick-pockets for money and lives with her teenage sister and her boyfriend. Together, they try to hit it big and earn her a role on a series of television commercials. ===== Kyo Sogoru, a high school boy living in a city called Maihama, leads a normal life of school, romance, and the swim club. Kyo's life changes when he sees a beautiful girl, Shizuno Misaki, at the pool one day and discovers he is initially the only person who can see her. In order to keep his high school's swimming club open by recruiting more members, Kyo hopes to enlist Shizuno to appear in a promo video shot by Kyo's close friend, Ryoko. Shizuno agrees, but on the condition that he does something for her in exchange – pilot a mecha for an organization known as Cerebrum. Agreeing to her request, Kyo is drawn into a world of fighting giant robots in a game-like world that he must save from Deutera Areas formed by aliens known as Gards-orm that threaten to destroy the earth. However, Kyo soon comes to realize that the world that he is living in might not even be real at all and begins to find that everything he is doing is strangely familiar. As he questions the nature of the reality he lives in, Kyo must continue to fight in order to protect the lives of those important to him. ===== Set in the 2020s where society has largely collapsed due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Parable of the Sower centers on a young woman named Lauren Oya Olamina who possesses what Butler dubbed hyperempathy or "sharing" – the ability to feel pain and other sensations she witnesses. As a teenager growing up in the remnants of a gated community near Los Angeles, she begins to develop a new belief system, which she comes to call Earthseed. When the community's security is compromised, her home is destroyed and her family is murdered, and she travels north with other survivors. Society outside the community walls has reverted to chaos due to resource scarcity and poverty, and mixed-race relationships are stigmatized amid attacks against religious and ethnic minorities. Lauren believes that humankind's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets, forcing humankind into its adulthood and that Earthseed is preparation for this destiny. She gathers followers along her journey north and founds the first Earthseed community, Acorn, in Northern California. ===== Parable of the Talents is told from the points of view of Lauren Oya Olamina and her daughter Larkin Olamina/Asha Vere. The novel consists of journal entries by Lauren and passages by Asha Vere. Four years after the events of the previous novel Parable of the Sower, Lauren has founded a new religious community called Acorn, which is centered around her religion Earthseed, which is predicated around the belief that humanity's destiny is to travel beyond Earth and live on other planets in order for humanity to reach adulthood. The novel is set against the backdrop of a dystopian United States that has come under the grip of a Christian fundamentalist denomination called "Christian America" led by President Andrew Steele Jarret. Seeking to restore American power and prestige, and using the slogan "Make America Great Again", Jarret embarks on a crusade to cleanse America of non-Christian faiths. Slavery has resurfaced with "shock collars" being used to control slaves. Virtual reality headsets known as "Dreamasks" are also popular since they enable wearers to escape their harsh reality. During the course of the novel, Acorn is attacked and taken over by Christian American "Crusaders" and turned into a re-education camp. For the next year and a half, Lauren and the other adults are enslaved and forced to wear "shock collars". Their Christian American captors exploit them as forced labor under the pretext of "reforming" them. Lauren and several of the women are also regularly raped by their captors, who regard them as "heathen". In 2035, Lauren and her followers eventually rebel and kill their captors. To avoid retribution, they are forced to disperse into hiding. By 2036, President Jarret is defeated after a single term due to public dissatisfaction with the "Alaska-Canada War" and revelations of his role in witch burnings. Meanwhile, Larkin is adopted by an African American Christian America family and renamed "Asha Vere Alexander" after a popular Dreamask hero. Unloved and abused by her adoptive parents, Asha grows up never knowing who her biological parents are. As an adult, Asha reunites with her uncle Marcus "Marc" Duran, who was believed to have perished in the events of the previous novel and has since become a Christian America minister. With Uncle Marc's help, Larkin becomes an academic historian but leaves the Christian faith. Unknown to Asha, Uncle Marc had previously re-established contact with his long-lost half-sister Lauren. Marc claimed that the "Crusaders" were rogue elements who do not represent Christian America. He tells Asha that her mother is dead, and never told Lauren he had found her daughter. With Jarret's legacy in disgrace, Lauren's Earthseed religion grows in popularity in a post-war United States, funding scholarships for needy university students and encouraging humanity to leave Earth and settle Alpha Centauri. After Asha learns that Lauren is her biological mother, she manages to meet with her mother. Though Asha is unable to forgive her mother for choosing Earthseed over her, Lauren tells her daughter that her door is always open to her. After learning that her half-brother Uncle Marc hid the fact that Asha was related to Lauren, Lauren severs all ties with her estranged brother. Lauren dies at the age of 81 while watching the first shuttles leaving Earth for the starship Christopher Columbus, which carries settlers in suspended animation to Alpha Centauri. ===== ===== The antagonist is a tall, "no-nonsense" television journalist named Shannon Michaels, described as the product of two Celtic parents, who is pushed out by Global News Network, and systematically murders the people who ruined his career. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a "straight- talking" Irish-American New York City homicide detective named Tommy O’Malley, is charged with solving the murders that Michaels has committed, while competing with Michaels for the heart of Ashley Van Buren, a blond, sexy aristocrat turned crime columnist. Some reviewers have said that Michaels and O'Malley are "thinly veiled versions" of O'Reilly. Michaels' first victim is a news correspondent who stole his story in Argentina, and got him into trouble with the network. He then stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. After that he murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him by burying him in beach sand up to his neck and letting him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. After this, he is pursued by O'Malley and Van Buren, where he attempts to lose them by crossing a runway in front of a speeding jet. Although he makes it, his car's right back tire is cut by the jet's wing, causing the car to spin, flip over, and be subsequently melted by the exhaust from the jet, which explodes. Michaels dies in extreme agony, as his contacts (used to hide his identity) burn into his eyes and a chunk of the car crushes his head in. ===== Having escaped the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Countess Sofia Belinskaya is working as a taxi dancer, if not worse, in a seedy Shanghai bar in 1936 to support her family of aristocratic White émigrés, including her daughter Katya, her mother-in-law Olga, her sister-in-law Grushenka, and an aunt and uncle by marriage, Princess Vera and Prince Peter. Although employment is scarce and her meagre income is almost the family's only income, Sofia's relatives scorn her for her work and insist she keep it a secret from her child. Sofia meets Todd Jackson, a former official of the US State Department who several years ago lost his wife and daughter in separate terrorist bombings. The bombing that killed his child also blinded him. With his job at risk and dreaming of running a nightclub, he gambles his savings on a bet at the racetrack. Winning, he opens an elegant nightclub catering to the cosmopolitan upper class and invites Sofia to be his principal hostess, an offer she accepts, and in honour of her he calls the club The White Countess. Over time, they begin to fall in love, but neither acts until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War causes the political climate to disintegrate, followed by a mass exodus from the besieged city. ===== Joe (Hal Holbrook) is a cynical American journalist assigned to work in the Soviet Union, where he meets Oktyabrina (Goldie Hawn), a spirited and erratic Russian ballet dancer who lives illegally without proper documents. Their ensuing romance opens new possibilities for both; but also draws the attention of the Soviet authorities. ===== In 1882 San Francisco, popular dance hall girl Amanda Quaid learns that Mormon millionaire Josiah Widdicombe is seeking a well-bred governess for his children. Looking for an easier life, Amanda needs $65 to buy clothes for the interview. She accepts an invitation from gambler Charlie "Dirtwater Fox" Malloy to join him in his hotel room, where she discovers he is carrying a satchel full of stolen money that he acquired by double-crossing the Bloodworth gang in a bank robbery. Drugging Charlie and stealing the satchel, she buys a new outfit and successfully interviews with Widdicombe as the "Duchess of Swansbury." When Charlie finds the money gone, he heads east on his horse Blackjack and catches up to the stagecoach carrying Amanda to Salt Lake City, Utah. Charlie recognizes Amanda and makes her agree to give him a portion of her salary in exchange for keeping her real identity a secret. On their trip, they encounter snakes, rapids, horseback pursuits through towns, a Jewish wedding, and the Bloodworth gang who capture them and take back the money. The pair are tied down with stakes and left to die, but manage to escape when Amanda uses a lorgnette (spectacles (glasses)) to burn through the ropes. The couple almost make it to Salt Lake City, but Charlie is not willing to give up the money and hatches a plan to get it back from the Bloodworth gang. He sets booby traps at the gang's ranch and starts a fire in the barn, retrieving the loot in the process. In the ensuing chase and gunfight, the gang members are killed but Charlie is wounded. Charlie believes he is dying, but Amanda calls him lazy, grabs the satchel and walks toward Salt Lake City; Charlie and Blackjack get to their feet and follow. ===== Anita (Hawn) is an American actress who decides to vacation in Rome. There, she becomes involved in a romance with her friend's married lover Guido (Giannini). ===== Molly McGrath is the daughter of a famed football coach who is dying to head her own team. When her wish is finally granted, Molly leaves her job coaching girls' track at an affluent high school (Prescott High School) to take over a football team at an inner- city Chicago high school (Central High School)--the kind of place where guard dogs are needed to patrol the campus. At first the new coach's idealism and optimism are suffocated with racial and gender prejudice, but eventually her overriding spirit begins to whip her unruly team into shape. At the same time, she must also struggle to win a battle for the custody of her two young daughters. The real test for Molly comes when her Central High team faces Prescott in the city championship. ===== Marianne Graves (Goldie Hawn) is a successful lawyer completing a business deal in Detroit, Michigan. At a gas station, she crosses paths with a man that looks suspiciously like her ex-fiancé, Rick Jarmin (Mel Gibson), who disappeared 15 years previously and was presumed dead. The man feigns ignorance and Marianne leaves; he later makes a call saying that he has been recognized and needs to be moved. Rick helped convict a drug-dealing DEA agent named Eugene Sorenson (David Carradine) and was placed in the witness protection program. Unfortunately, his old handler has retired and his new handler, Joe Weyburn (Stephen Tobolowsky), is a corrupt FBI agent working with Sorenson. Sorenson is released from prison after serving his sentence; his partner, Albert "Diggs" Diggins (Bill Duke), picks him up and they set out to kill Rick for revenge and to smooth the passage of their latest deal with drug dealers. Marianne returns to confront Rick just as Sorenson and Diggs show up at the gas station with guns blazing. During the gunfight, Rick gets buckshot in his buttocks and his kindly old boss is killed. Marianne escapes with Rick, but Sorenson and Diggs pin the boss's murder on Rick. They are forced to go on the run as Weyburn wipes out Rick's file and sends police to catch them. To clear their names, Rick needs to reach his old handler. They use contacts from Rick's former life-in-hiding, including at a beauty salon where he was a star employee, and an old flame, a veterinarian who removes the buckshot. During a night spent in a hotel room, Rick tells Marianne everything that happened 15 years ago. They share their feelings and have passionate sex. They reach the home of his old handler and find out he has Alzheimer's disease and thus doesn't remember Rick. Sorenson, Diggs and Weyburn show up, so Rick and Marianne retreat to a nearby zoo where Rick once worked. He releases animals from their cages to assist in their defense, and all three men are killed in various ways by the animals. Wounded, Rick winds up suspended over a tiger in a pit, requiring Marianne to save him. When she is not quite able to reach him, he offers her the extra incentive of marriage and children, which does the trick. They are then seen boating into the sunset in the Caribbean. ===== Adrienne Saunders is happily married to her art dealer husband, Jack. They have a daughter named Mary. After the local museum curator is mysteriously murdered, Jack falls under suspicion of selling forged treasures to the museum. Jack has to suddenly go to Boston on a work related trip, but Adrienne hears from a friend that she thought she saw Jack in town. Adrienne confronts him, but he denies being in town. As pressure mounts on Jack over a forged relic, Adrienne receives word from the police that Jack died in a car accident. In trying to wrap up Jack's affairs, Adrienne begins to suspect that her husband was not who he claimed to be. When she sees a high school yearbook picture of her husband attributed to a man named Frank Sullivan, she realizes that she has been deceived. She tracks down Frank's cousin, Evelyn, who confirms that Frank and Jack were inseparable in high school. After Jack died, she never saw Frank again. Evelyn explains that Frank's father was an alcoholic and that his mother worked as a toll booth operator. She directs Adrienne to Frank's mother, who lives in a rundown Brooklyn apartment. Frank's mother, Rosalie, bitterly receives the news of her granddaughter, telling Adrienne that Frank was always selfish and never looked in on her. A stalker lurks at Adrienne's loft. He comes in to Adrienne's bed while she is asleep and caresses her. He watches Mary, who is spooked by the man in her room at night. One day, as the housekeeper finishes her chores, she surprises the stalker. He leaves her almost dead in the bathroom and ransacks the apartment. At work, Adrienne gets an urgent message from Mrs. Sullivan and rushes to her apartment. When she arrives, the door is open, and Mrs. Sullivan is nowhere to be found. "Jack" appears, and Adrienne slaps him for his cruelty. Jack explains that when his friend died, he was distraught and fell into Jack's identity during the mourning process. He reveals that a man named Dan Sherman is blackmailing him. Jack faked his death to escape, knowing that he would have to give up his life with Adrienne and Mary. He tells her that Sherman is insistent on having an Egyptian necklace in their apartment, and he asks Adrienne to look for it. As she leaves the apartment, Jack watches her from the window beside the body of his murdered mother. During her search for the necklace, Adrienne discovers a Parks Department photo ID. It bears her husband's picture and the name Dan Sherman. She tracks down an address and pays a surprise visit to the house. A pregnant Mrs. Sherman is on the phone and lets her in, thinking she is with a moving company. Adrienne looks around the house and sees wedding pictures of her husband with Mrs. Sherman. In a photo album, she sees a picture of Mary, who Mrs. Sherman says is her husband's dead sister. The person on the phone is Jack, who asks her to give the phone to Adrienne. He congratulates Adrienne on tracking down his new life and reveals that he has kidnapped Mary. Mary traded the necklace to another girl, and Jack instructs Adrienne to retrieve it and meet him at their loft to exchange Mary for the necklace. At the loft, Adrienne asks to see Mary, and Jack explains that she is downstairs playing in the car. When Adrienne tries to go see her, Jack pins her against a wall and demands the necklace first. Adrienne stabs him and flees. After a long chase throughout a construction area, Jack corners her in the freight elevator. He reveals his true nature as always doing "what comes next" to preserve himself. Adrienne lures Jack into the elevator shaft, where he falls to his death; Adrienne had been holding on to an unseen elevator cable to give the illusion of being in the elevator car. Later, Adrienne and Mary pack up to move out of the loft and start a new life somewhere else. ===== Three men are walking through the woods, they hear strange noises and catch glimpses of something moving in the undergrowth. Suddenly they are attacked by unseen creatures. Two men are killed, but one escapes and flees the woods. Hercules strolls into a village after returning from one of his adventures, and is greeted by Iolaus. It is established that Iolaus is getting married and that Hercules is the best man. The two men set off for Alcmene's house. While walking through the woods, they reminisce that it has been a long time since they last saw each other. Iolaus tells Hercules about his bride-to-be, Ania. They stumble upon a little girl crying alone near an altar. She tells them that a monster killed her father while they were placing an offering to the goddess. Hercules tries to comfort the girl and asks if he can help, but the girl transforms into a monster. Hercules chops off its head, and thinking it is now dead, he and Iolaus begin walking away. They hear a noise and turn around to see that the monster is not dead, and has now grown two new heads in the place where the previous one was. The monster is a Hydra. Hercules tells Iolaus to grab the torch from the altar, Hercules cuts off the heads and burns the Hydra, preventing it from growing new heads, thus killing it. After the Hydra is destroyed a peacock feather remains in its place, and Hercules tells Iolaus that Hera is responsible for the Hydra. Hercules and Iolaus finally reach his mother's house. Iolaus invites them both for dinner, then leaves. While the four are enjoying dinner, Ania glimpses a man outside the window and Hercules goes to investigate. It is the Gargarean Pithus, the man who escaped the creatures at the beginning of the film. He explains to Hercules about his village being attacked by creatures and Hercules agrees to help. Iolaus persuades Hercules to let him go along for one last adventure before he is married, Hercules reluctantly relents and says that he can come along. The three men set off for the village. When they arrive Hercules asks where all the women are, Pithus tells him that they were stolen by the creatures in the forest. Hercules and Iolaus head off to find the beasts and rescue the village's women. In the forest they are ambushed by the beasts, managing to stave off the attack for a time until Iolaus discovers that the beasts are really women. He chases after one but is fatally injured in the fight, and dies in Hercules' arms. Hercules is then surrounded by several of the 'beasts'. Two of them approach him with spears. One of the 'creatures' cries out and says "No Stop!", and then raises her mask. It happens to be a woman, who then says "The queen will want to kill him". Hercules is in utter shock to discover the true nature of the 'beasts'. Hercules is then seen being taken captive by the women, bound in chains and gagged with a black leather strap. He is surrounded by the "Amazon Women Warriors" and led through the village full of women. An older woman offers to buy Hercules and several taunt him along the way to see the queen. When he arrives Hippolyta tells him that she knows he is here to defeat them. Hercules tells her she is wrong. Using a magic candle, Hippolyta turns Hercules into a baby telling him she will show him what he is really like. As Hercules reverts to infant form we are shown flashbacks to Hercules's youth and times when he has been told by people how to behave toward women. Later he returns to adult state, realizing that Hippolyta is right and that his attitude toward women is wrong, he tells her that he can change. She says that he cannot change and that all men are the same. Hippolyta goes to consult with Hera, she tells Hippolyta to lead an attack on the village. Hercules escapes from the Amazons and warns the men of the village of the forthcoming attack. He prepares them for when the women arrive. The women ride into the village and order the men to remove their clothes, telling them they are here for only one thing. The men tell the women to sit and talk with them for a while. Pithus's wife enters her home, and her son Franco asks if she really is his mother. He tells her he often dreams about her but she has no face, she removes her mask and shows her face to Franco. Hercules stands up to Hippolyta, who says she's not afraid of Hercules. He kisses her, she tells him she's not afraid and kisses him back. The two make love. The following day the women are still with the men. The Amazons return to their city and both men and women reminisce about the night before. Hera tells Hippolyta that Hercules has tricked her and orders her to attack the village again, this time killing all the men and boys. Hippolyta refuses but Hera possesses her. Hera, now in control of Hippolyta's actions, orders the women to attack the village. Hercules stops Hippolyta and realizes that she is possessed by Hera. She rides off and Hercules goes after her. As they fight Hercules tries to get through to Hippolyta, telling her that she is stronger than Hera. Hercules bests her and is about to deal the fatal blow, but cannot because it is Hippolyta's body and not really Hera. Hercules leaves and Hera follows him, goading him. He tells Hera that if he or Hippolyta have to die then he will give up his life for her, saying he couldn't live his life without her. Upon hearing this Hera runs Hippolyta's body over the edge of a waterfall, killing her. Hercules returns to the City of Amazons and retrieves the candle Hippolyta used to send him back to his childhood. Zeus appears and tells him the candle doesn't work in the way Hercules wants it to. Hercules replies that Zeus could make it work that way. Zeus tells Hercules that if he did that he would be in big trouble with Hera, but Hercules persuades him anyway. Zeus blows out the candle and Hercules is taken back to the night of the dinner. Ania sees Pithus outside the window and Hercules goes to tell him that the village doesn't need the help of Hercules. He explains that all the men need to do is treat the women with respect and things will sort themselves out. Pithus returns to the village and when the women come the men sort out the problems that have been occurring. Alcmene asks Hercules if there is a woman out there who will make him happy like Ania did for Iolaus, Hercules replies that he is sure there is. ===== Three foot messengers are running along the riverside, one of them stops to take a drink from the river. As he stoops down to quench his thirst, a female figure composed of water rises out of the river and pulls him under, drowning him. While the other two men run on, one man is hit by a boulder and killed, and the remaining man escapes. Elsewhere, a young woman is collecting water when the ground begins to shake. She flees back to the village to warn them that a giant is coming. The giant follows the woman to the village and rips the roof of the tavern. Hercules presents himself to the giant and the giant challenges Hercules to a fight. Hercules goes outside and he beats the giant. As the village celebrates the giant's defeat, the exhausted messenger from earlier in the film arrives in the village, and asks for Hercules' help. He explains to Hercules that his people have been driven from their city, the lost city of Troy. Zeus appears and Hercules asks him if he will help him. He asks his father how to find Troy and is told that Hera vanished it, and to find it Hercules must find the one true compass which will point the way to Troy. Hercules heads off to find the compass, he finds a tribe of men preparing to sacrifice a young virgin woman to their water god. Hercules saves the girl from being sacrificed, while unknowingly being watched by a mysterious robed figure. The woman tells Hercules that her name is Deianeira. Later in the evening as they camp for the night, Deianeira tells him a story that she is the daughter of a King. She sees the dark figure and asks who he is and why she is being followed, but the figure does not answer. Later Hercules and Deianeira arrive at the slave market looking for Queen Omphale of Lydia, the last person to have possessed the compass. In order to get to see the Queen, Hercules sells himself as a slave, and the Queen buys him. After spending the night with the Queen Hercules gets the compass, and he and Deianeira continue searching for Troy. Deianeira gets attacked by some men, but the figure in the dark robe saves her and tells her to follow her destiny. Hercules and Deianeira head on to Troy, they arrive at the ocean and the figure standing on the cliffs summons a sea serpent to do Hera's bidding. It swallows Hercules and Deianeira, but Hercules kills the monster from inside and they are washed up on the shore. Deianeira sees Troy in the distance and tells Hercules that she now remembers this is where she is from. Deianeira and Hercules get caught in a trap and taken to the king. The king is ill and he and his daughter are reunited. He tells Deianeira that the Cult of the Blue Priests have taken over the city and the people have taken refuge in the woods. He tells her to rule them well, and then dies. Hercules tutors the people of Troy and prepares them to battle to take back Troy. Deianeira realizes that the people cannot beat the Cult of the Blue Priests and goes looking for the Blue Priest. The people notice that Deianeira is missing and Hercules and the people use a tunnel to get into the city. As the people fight the cult members Hercules goes looking for Deianeira, he finds her about to be sacrificed to Hera and saves her. The Blue Priest and Hercules fight and Hercules cuts off the Priest's head. A huge storm approaches, and Zeus tells Hercules that Hera is coming for Deianeira, Hercules saves her and Hera takes Hercules instead. As Deianeira is crowned Queen of Troy, Hercules is thrown down from the sky elsewhere. A man approaches him asking him for help, Hercules agrees and the two men walk off to the next adventure. ===== Private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy widow Elizabeth Bright Murdock to recover a missing Brasher Doubloon, a rare and valuable coin. Mrs. Murdock suspects it was stolen by her son's estranged wife, Linda Conquest, a former singer. Returning to his office, Marlowe is followed by a blond man in a coupe. Mrs. Murdock's son Leslie Murdock visits Marlowe and tries to learn why his mother hired him. Murdock reveals that he owes nightclub owner Alex Morny a large sum of money. Marlowe learns that Linda Conquest had two friends: Lois Magic and a Mr. Vannier; Magic is now married to Morny. Marlowe visits Mrs. Morny at home and finds her with Vannier, who acts suspiciously. Marlowe is again tailed by the blond in the coupe and confronts him. He is George Anson Phillips, an amateurish private detective, who wants to enlist Marlowe's help on a case he cannot handle. Marlowe agrees to meet him at his apartment later. Marlowe visits a rare coin dealer, Mr. Morningstar, who confirms that someone tried to sell him a Brasher Doubloon. Marlowe agrees to buy it back the next day, and after leaving overhears the dealer trying to call Phillips. Marlowe keeps his appointment with Phillips but finds him dead. Police arrest the drunk next door for the murder and give Marlowe an ultimatum to reveal all he knows. Marlowe receives an unaddressed package containing the coin. He calls Mrs. Murdock but she claims the coin has already been returned to her. Marlowe returns to the coin dealer and finds him dead. Alex Morny's henchman invites Marlowe to visit Morny at his nightclub, where Linda Conquest is singing. Morny demands to know why Marlowe visited his wife, but eventually realizes he is not Marlowe's quarry. Morny offers to hire Marlowe to investigate Vannier, giving him a suspicious receipt for dentistry chemicals that Vannier lost. Marlowe also talks to Linda and decides she is probably not involved in the theft. Returning to the Murdocks, Marlowe is told a story he doesn’t believe: Leslie Murdock gave the coin to Morny to secure his debts, then changed his mind and retrieved it. Marlowe leaves, beginning to suspect a dark secret involving Merle, the timid family secretary, and Mrs. Murdock's first husband, Horace Bright, who died falling out of a window. The police say the drunk has confessed to the murder of Phillips, but Marlowe discovers he is covering for his landlord and is unlikely to be the real murderer. A 1787 Brasher Doubloon, the same type featured in The High WindowMerle arrives at Marlowe's apartment having a nervous breakdown. She claims to have shot Vannier, although her story doesn’t make sense. Marlowe visits Vannier's home, finds him dead, and discovers a photo of a man falling from a window with a woman behind him. Morny and Magic arrive, and Marlowe hides while Morny tricks his wife into leaving her fingerprints on the gun near the body to incriminate her. After they leave Marlowe puts the dead man's prints on the gun instead. Marlowe visits Mrs. Murdock and reveals what he has figured out: Horace Bright once tried to force himself on Merle, and she either pushed him or allowed him to fall out of a window to his death. Vannier knew and was blackmailing the family. Mrs. Murdock admits it is true and says she regrets ever hiring Marlowe. Marlowe confronts Leslie Murdock, revealing that he knew Murdock and Vannier had a plot to duplicate the coin using dental technology. They had Lois Magic hire Phillips to sell the fakes, but Phillips was frightened by the assignment and mailed the coin to Marlowe. Vannier killed Phillips and the coin dealer to cover his tracks. Leslie killed Vannier because he threatened to ruin Leslie if their scheme ever got out. Leslie confirms the plot, but Marlowe declines to turn him in. The police discover Vannier's role in the counterfeiting and the murders of Phillips and the coin dealer, but they rule his death a suicide. Marlowe tells Merle it was Mrs. Murdock who pushed her husband out of the window and then blamed Merle for it. Marlowe drives her cross country, to the home of her parents, safely away from Mrs. Murdock. He watches her and her family as he drives away and says, "I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again". ===== Created in a time when the Cold War was becoming hotter, Nextworld is Osamu Tezuka's parody of the tense relationship between the USA (represented as the 'Nation of Stars') and USSR (known in the work as the 'Uran Federation'). The main storyline focuses on atomic tests that create a race of mutant animals known as Fumoon, with psychic powers and intelligence beyond humans, who formulate a plan to evacuate hundreds of animals and a small group of people off the planet Earth. The reason for this is due to a large toxic cloud approaching the Earth, threatening to wipe out all life. Meanwhile, the two warring superpowers draw closer and closer to a confrontation. ===== The anime film (based on the manga) is similar, but omits characters from the manga. Another difference is that Kenichi (a character who also appears in the Metropolis manga and its anime adaptation) is a teenager in the film, whereas he is a child in the manga. ===== In the Western Desert of World War Two, a party of British "Desert Rats" soldiers and a party of Australian soldiers are holed up in a remote building, when an ambulance of Italian "nurses" arrive. The pilot was badly received and was never developed into a series. The pilot was directed by Roy Gould who had worked for David Croft at the BBC. ===== Hailing from an upper-middle-class family, Seemi Shah falls in love with her handsome classmate Aftab in the MA Sociology class at Government College Lahore. Seemi is a modern and attractive urban girl and attracts most of her male class fellows, including the narrator Qayyum and the young liberal professor Suhail. Aftab belongs to a Kashmiri business family. Although he also loves her, he cannot rise above his family values and succumbs to his parent's pressure to marry someone against his wishes and leave for London to look after his family business. The novel then takes on touching several moral and ethical issues, beyond the love triangle plot, depicted through the rich culture and everyday life of Lahore. ===== Jimmy Grimble (Lewis McKenzie) is a 15-year-old misfit living in Manchester, where nothing seems to go his way. Jimmy is constantly threatened by the school bully, "Gorgeous" Gordon (Bobby Power); he is also not sure what to make of Johnny (Ben Miller), a lost-in-the-ozone biker who is dating Donna (Gina McKee), Jimmy's mum; and he has a crush on one of his classmates, Sara (Samia Ghadie), who seems to like him, but his powers of speech fail him when he tries to talk to her. Like most Mancunians, Jimmy loves football. He is a fervent supporter of Manchester City and attends home games with Donna's ex-boyfriend, Harry (Ray Winstone). Jimmy also loves to play football, but while Eric (Robert Carlyle), the coach of his school's team, thinks he has potential, "Gorgeous" is already a skilled player, and when Gordon's father informs the school he will make a large and much-needed donation if their team makes it to the Manchester Schools Cup final, it looks like Jimmy will be on the bench for a while. But when an old woman gives Jimmy a pair of boots that once belonged to one of City's greatest players, his skills on the field begin to change. ===== The film opens in 1975 at a place called Headstone Manor, which is being used as a "businessman's weekend retreat and girls' summer camp". A few minutes into the film, a group of satanic monks enter the house and kill 18 of its occupants. In 1983, Doctor Lucas Mandeville (Kenny Everett) and Doctor Barbara Coyle (Pamela Stephenson) are sent to investigate radioactive readings in the area that have been traced to Headstone Manor, now known by locals as the House of Death. Along with several other scientists, Mandeville and Coyle set up their equipment in the house, while the Sinister Man (Vincent Price), a 700-year-old Satanic priest, prepares a rite in the nearby woods to purge the house of its unwanted guests. During this time, Mandeville reveals that he was once a successful German surgeon named Ludwig Manheim, who was reduced to "smart-arse paranormal research crap" after a humiliation in the past. Coyle also encounters a poltergeist, and the two engage in sexual intercourse. Several satanic clones of Mandeville, Coyle and the other scientists enter the house, and begin killing off the originals and taking their place. When Coyle is about to be killed, she is rescued by the poltergeist and saved. The satanic monks then take off in a spaceship, revealing that these monks are aliens using the house for their activities on Earth. The film ends with the spaceship soaring into the skies, with an E.T. voice groaning: "Oh, shit! Not again!". ===== Set in a Medieval world made of Floating Land Masses, two men, Gwizdo and Lian- Chu, are professional dragon hunters who have known each other since they were children. Perpetually flat broke, they are forced to continually stay at the Snoring Dragon Inn until they can get another dragon-hunting contract to pay their rent. The proprietress of the inn is Jeanneline, a three-time divorcee with two daughters, one of whom is also a professional dragon hunter who doesn't see her mother much. ===== Eighteen years after the events of Gregory's Girl, Greg Underwood (Sinclair) – now a 35-year-old English teacher in his former secondary school – has fantasies about 16-year-old student Frances (McKinnon). His politically motivated lessons inspire Frances and Douglas, another student, to plot to overthrow a businessman they suspect of trading in torture equipment. ===== David (Derrel Maury), a new student at Central High, meets Mark (Andrew Stevens), an old friend whom he once helped out of a jam at their previous school. Mark tells David that the school can be like a country club for him if he befriends Bruce (Ray Underwood), Craig (Steve Bond), and Paul (Damon Douglas), the bullies who rule the school student body; Mark has become their somewhat reluctant accomplice. Over the next few days, David witnesses Bruce, Craig, and Paul torment the other students, including the scrawny Spoony; the overweight Oscar; Arthur, the school's hearing-impaired librarian; and Rodney, who drives a rundown car that is vandalized by the bullies. After David forcibly thwarts the trio's attempt to rape two female students, Mary and Jane, in an empty classroom, the bullies approach Mark and tell him he only has one more chance to talk David into minding his own business. When this fails, the three bullies decide to take matters into their own hands. Meanwhile, David has taken a liking to Mark's girlfriend, Theresa. One evening, David is repairing Rodney's car in his garage when the bullies appear and kick the jack out from under the vehicle. One of the wheels crushes David's left leg, crippling him. After being discharged from hospital, David takes revenge on the trio by arranging fatal "accidents": he electrocutes Bruce by sabotaging his hang-glider to fly into a power line, tricks Craig into high-diving into an empty swimming pool, and pushes Paul's van off a cliff with Paul in it. The school changes after the bullies' deaths. At first the students support each other, but soon the formerly tormented students become bullies themselves, and try to form alliances with David to control the school. In due course more deaths occur: Arthur is killed when his hearing-aid malfunctions, Oscar's locker explodes when he opens it, and Rodney's car blows up when he starts the engine. While camping under a cliff, Spoony, Mary, and Jane find a box of dynamite but ignore it; when they return to their tent for a threesome, an explosion causes a rockslide, killing them also. The police blame Spoony, Mary, and Jane for the carnage, but Mark is aware that David is responsible. He tells Theresa they must prevent David from killing more people at the school dance with a bomb he has planted in the school basement. Realizing the only way to stop David is by playing on the last sympathies he has towards them, Mark and Theresa enter the gym where the dance is being held and tell David that if he really wants to kill everyone then he will have to kill them too. David rushes to the basement and retrieves the bomb, and as he tries to defuse it, he takes it outside where it explodes, killing him. To save David's reputation, Mark and Theresa agree to tell the police that Spoony, Mary, and Jane had planted the bomb, and that David had given his life to save everyone. ===== A junior high school basketball game between the cities of East Appleton and West Appleton ends in a tie. The two cities, both vying for a trophy known as The Mighty Apple, must determine the winner through a bowling competition. Alex Thompson and his friends, Delia, Elisa and Ken, are in West Appleton Junior High School's bowling club; they discover that Todd McLemore, a popular basketball player, is also a member of the club, as his friends Leo and Flip had signed him up as a prank. At a bowling alley operated by Alex's father, Kevin Thompson, Todd reluctantly trains for the upcoming bowling competition with Alex and his friends. He criticizes Alex and his friends for not demonstrating a strong willingness to win, which they deem as overconfidence. Alex later attends a party with Todd, rather than train at the bowling alley with his friends, upsetting them. Todd's bowling improves, while Alex's bowling becomes worse as he continues to spend time with Todd. The children later redecorate Kevin's bowling alley to bring in customers. Todd uses his popularity to convince various businesses to donate supplies such as paint and flashing lights for the bowling alley, where a party known as the "Bowling Ball" is held and attended by dozens of people. Delia, Elisa, and Ken leave the party early, as they feel betrayed by Alex now frequently hanging out with Todd and his friends. After the party, Alex overhears Todd's friends talking among each other and discovers that they are only pretending to be friends with Alex to increase the chances of their school winning back The Mighty Apple. Jeff McLemore, Todd's father and the mayor of West Appleton, makes a wager with mayor Hanburger of East Appleton: the winning team, in addition to receiving The Mighty Apple, will also get to choose the name for a new school that is under construction. Hanburger hires Whipsaw McGraw, a bowling champion, to train his bowling team. From the city, the West Appleton bowling team receives low-quality team shirts for the bowling competition. The team is also told about the wager between the mayors, after which Alex quits the team out of anger. Todd attempts to convince Alex to rejoin the bowling team, and reveals new shirts with the team's name, Alley Cats, on it. Kevin later tells Alex that he used to be friends with Jeff when they were younger, but ended their friendship after accusing the other of losing a baseball game, which they both believe resulted in the city losing The Mighty Apple. Kevin tells Alex to not let a dispute end a friendship. Alex rejoins the bowling team for the competition the next day. At the end of the competition, Todd's bowling results in a 7-10 split, which he could never master during his training. Delia substitutes for Todd. Using her knowledge of physics, Delia rolls a spinner slowly down the lane and spares, winning the competition, to everyone's surprise. Todd tells his father that it does not seem fair for a school to be named over a game of bowling. Alex and his friends decide to compromise and name the new school Appleton Central. ===== In a distant future, water is so scarce and rationed that it is considered an immensely valuable substance, both as a commodity and as a currency in ice cubes. The Templars of Mithra control the water and they destroy worlds that have natural water, leaving the galaxy virtually dry. Pirates dedicate their lives to raiding ships and looting the ice from the cargo holds to make a living. Jason is the leader of a band of pirates that raid a Templar cruiser for its ice, and discover the beautiful princess Karina in a stasis pod. He decides to kidnap her, waking her up, and alarming the Templars. Jason and his pirates flee, but are pursued by Templar ships. Jason lets some of his crew, Maida and Zeno, escape while Roscoe stays to help Jason. Both Jason and Roscoe are captured. During their capture, they meet Killjoy, who has been pretending to be a monk to avoid slavery. Jason and Roscoe are sentenced to become slaves, a process which includes castration. Roscoe and Jason are spared this fate by the spoiled princess, who has taken an interest in them. Princess Karina purchases them as her slaves, to work as servants during her party. That evening, they are reunited with Killjoy (disguised as a robot). Jason, Karina, Roscoe, Killjoy and Nanny manage to leave the planet before the Supreme Commander arrives to arrest her. Princess Karina hires Jason so she can find her father, who has gone missing while searching for the so-called "Seventh World": a lost, mythic planet rumored to contain vast reserves of water. The existence of such a world would threaten the Templars' water monopoly, and therefore their hold on power. The Supreme Commander of the Templars orders Zorn to pursue Princess Karina in order to locate the Seventh World for the Templars. At some point, Jason keeps a secret that a nasty creature is hiding in their spaceship. Later, they are about to eat a turkey when something bursts out of it and runs away. Someone asks, "What was that?" Jason replies, "Space herpes." On their next planet, Jason and Roscoe are reunited with their fellow pirates, Maida and Zeno. They proceed to locate the "lost" planet, which contains massive amounts of water and protected by a time distortion field. The planet must be approached on a specific course or the ship will be lost in time forever. As the heroes' ship enters the distortion field, Zorn pursues and attacks them with a host of Templars and robots. This results in a climatic battle as time randomly speeds up and everyone quickly ages into extreme old age. In the aftermath, the day is saved by the now-adult son of Karina and Jason, the result of a romantic tryst just before entering the time distortion field. As the heroes exit the field, everyone's ages regress to what they originally were, leaving Jason and Karina with the knowledge that they will have a child together. The Templar ship has disappeared as it veered off the designated course during the attack and has now become lost in time for eternity. The crew looks on as they approach the Seventh World, which is revealed to be the earth. ===== When Katharine (Lynn Redgrave) throws a party on Halloween, a psychic called Arnita (Tyne Daly) predicts that one of the three couples present at the party will break up by the end of the year. The guests don't take her seriously. Arnita doesn't tell them that she can see a fourth couple at the party, the long dead Mae (Samantha Mathis) and Edward (William Hurt). As days go by, Katharine grows increasingly jealous of her lover Rick (Harry Connick, Jr.), and his flirting with her neighbor Sandra (Cindy Crawford). Sandra is married to Paul (Jamey Sheridan). Marta (Monica Keena) and Billy (Dylan Bruno) are rock musicians who live in the same building as Katharine. ===== In college studying archaeology, Dai Sawamura deciphers the symbols of the Nazca Lines in Peru. Impressed by this feat, the recruit and train him to be Earth's third Space Sheriff. He's given the code name Shaider in memory of an ancient warrior who defeated Emperor Kubilai and brought down his Fuuma Empire 12,000 years ago. When Fuuma returns, Dai is deputized as he returns to Earth to battle Fuuma. ===== Circa 10,000 BC, a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Yagahl live in the Ural Mountains and survive by hunting woolly mammoths. The tribe is led by a hunter who has killed a mammoth single- handedly and earned the White Spear, and venerate Old Mother, an elderly woman with shamanistic powers. The mammoths begin to dwindle, and the village chief finds a young girl named Evolet who survived a massacre of her village, perpetrated by what Old Mother calls "four-legged demons" who will come when "the Yagahl go on their last hunt". She prophesies that whoever kills the leader of the "demons" will win both Evolet and the White Spear, becoming the next village chief. The tribe believe that the "demons" are mammoths, whose return will save them from starvation. The chief does not believe the prophecy and leaves to find the mammoths. He entrusts the White Spear, his son D'Leh, and the true purpose of his quest to his friend Tic'Tic. The rest of the tribe, including D'Leh's rival Ka'Ren, believe that D'Leh's father was a coward and fled. Over time, D'Leh and Evolet fall in love. When the mammoths finally return, D'Leh hunts them with the men of the tribe under Tic'Tic's leadership, and manages to kill one by accident, inadvertently winning both the White Spear and marriage to Evolet. The village believes Old Mother's prophecy is coming true, but D'Leh is consumed by guilt for not earning the White Spear fairly. After speaking with Tic'Tic, he gives up the White Spear, forfeiting his marriage to Evolet. The next day, horse-raiders attack the camp, enslaving Evolet and several others and killing many of the tribe. D'Leh, Tic'Tic, Ka'Ren and young boy Baku set out to rescue their fellow Yagahl, but Evolet is recaptured with Ka'Ren and Baku during an attack on the slavers by terror birds, and Tic'Tic is wounded. While hunting, D'Leh falls into a pit, where he rescues a Smilodon before escaping himself. After Tic'Tic recovers, they make their way to a village and learn of a prophecy from the Naku, another tribe; whoever talks to a Smilodon they call the "Spear-Tooth" will help free their people. D'Leh realizes the prophecy is about him when the Smilodon he rescued arrives and refuses to kill him. They also learn that D'Leh's father was a guest of the Naku until he was captured by the slavers and Tic'Tic finally reveals to D'Leh why his father left. Several tribes form a coalition to pursue the raiders with D'Leh as their leader. They find the ships holding Evolet and their families but with no means to follow, they journey through a desert and discover an advanced civilisation, ruled by an enigmatic god-king known as the "Almighty", the last of a group of people whom had survived the collapse of an advanced civilisation from across the sea. Here it is discovered that the kidnapped Yagahl work as slaves. The warlord who kidnapped Evolet tries to coerce her into loving him, only to be arrested by the Almighty's priests when they find he has taken her without permission. During a night scouting raid, D'Leh learns of the Almighty and the fate of his father, who perished as a slave. The party is spotted by the guards, who are killed by Tic'Tic before he succumbs to his wounds. The Almighty's priests believe that Evolet is destined to kill The Almighty, based on the whip scars on her hands matching the stars they call the "Mark of the Hunter" and an ancient prophecy foreseeing their civilization's downfall. The Almighty realizes that Evolet is merely the herald of the true hunter. D'Leh starts a rebellion among the slaves, killing many of the Almighty's forces, though Ka'Ren is killed. The Almighty offers Evolet and the other hunters to D'Leh in exchange for abandoning his rebellion. D'Leh feigns acceptance but kills the Almighty with a spear. During the ensuing battle, Evolet is killed by the warlord who is then killed by D'Leh, but is restored to life when Old Mother sacrifices herself. With the Almighty dead and his civilization destroyed, the Yagahl bid farewell to the other tribes and return home with seeds given to them by the Naku to start a new life. ===== Neelix is aghast when a Haakonian named Ma'Bor Jetrel contacts Voyager and asks to meet him. The Haakonians fought a long, destructive war against his people, the Talaxians, fifteen years ago. Jetrel was responsible for developing the Metreon Cascade, a superweapon that killed over 300,000 people on Talax's moon Rinax, including Neelix's family. Jetrel says he has come forward to examine Talaxians like Neelix who helped evacuate survivors from Rinax, in the process exposing themselves to high concentrations of metreon isotopes that can cause a fatal blood disease, metremia. Although he considers Jetrel a monster, Neelix agrees to be examined and Jetrel informs him that he has incipient metremia. Jetrel convinces Captain Janeway to make a detour to the Talaxian system. Using the ship's transporter systems, Jetrel feels he will be able to develop a cure by retrieving samples of the Metreon cloud still surrounding Rinax. Janeway agrees but Neelix is still bitter. He angrily condemns Jetrel for the devastation he caused, only to learn that the scientist is also paying the price — his wife left him in the wake of the attack on Rinax, his children refuse to acknowledge him, and he is in the final stages of metremia with only a few days to live. The ship's arrival at Rinax opens old wounds for Neelix. He confesses to Kes that he lied for years about being part of the Talaxian defense forces. He never reported for duty; instead, he spent the war hiding on Talax. Later, Neelix seeks out Jetrel in sickbay, only to find the Doctor deactivated and Jetrel covertly conducting experiments. Suspecting the worst of Jetrel, Neelix tries to notify Janeway but the scientist renders him unconscious. Jetrel heads for the transporter room, where he is confronted by the Captain. Jetrel pleads with Janeway to let him conclude his work and bring back the deceased Talaxian victims of Rinax. He believes that he can use the transporter to regenerate their dissociated remains and confesses he came to Voyager as a pretext to use the ship's transporter; Neelix does not have metremia. Janeway allows Jetrel to proceed but the improbable experiment fails. The scientist collapses, knowing that he will never be able to redeem himself. Neelix pays a last visit to Jetrel and tells him that he is forgiven, allowing the Haakonian to die with some semblance of peace. ===== In 1851 in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, Elvira and her maidservant Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith), on their way to a can-can revue in Paris, get kicked out of an inn for a slight monetary discrepancy. After making their way out of the village, they are rescued by Dr. Bradley Bradley (Scott Atkinson), who takes them to stay at Castle Hellsubus, in the hills high above the village. While there, Elvira meets the residents—and discovers that she happens to resemble the deceased former wife of his Lordship the Count Vladimere Hellsubus. ===== Kevin Parson, a 28-year-old seminary student, has his life turned upside-down when a killer named Richard Slater decides to stalk him. If he can "confess his sin" Slater will stop killing. But he doesn't know what the sin could be. Kevin is shown as being a purely innocent character with no idea why anyone would want to hurt him, and the story that follows involves an FBI agent and an old friend named Samantha Sheer. Category:2003 American novels Category:Thriller novels Category:American Christian novels Category:Novels by Ted Dekker Category:American novels adapted into films de:Thr3e – Gleich bist du tot ===== It is a story of a family feud healed by young love. The story is based on a factual event involving the notorious Hashknife gang of Northern Arizona. ===== John (Reece Dinsdale), an ambitious young police officer, is sent undercover to join a violent football firm associated with the fictitious club Shadwell Town to track down the 'generals' - the shadowy figures who orchestrate the violence. His team of four gradually ingratiate themselves into the lives of The Dogs, the nickname that Shadwell's fans give themselves. The main site for this is The Rock, a public house around which The Dogs' lives revolve. Gradually, the hard drinking and hard fighting macho culture - where Saturday's match and Saturday's fight are all that matters - prove strangely irresistible to John and he slowly finds himself becoming one of the thugs he has been sent to entrap. His relationships with his wife, his superiors and even his team become strained. Eventually his wife returns to her parents' house and rebuffs his attempted reconciliation. The police operation is abruptly wound up for budgeting reasons, just as it seems John is making progress in identifying those who pull the strings. The closing sequence shows a shaven-headed John taking part in a march. Trevor approaches him to try to help him, but is rebuffed. John says that he is, again, working undercover. There is a degree of ambiguity. His chanting at the very end makes it clear that whatever the truth, John is unable to prevent himself from sinking into his character. The film features the fictitious teams of Shadwell Town and Wapping FC. The locations the teams are based on are real – they are neighbouring areas on the northern bank of the River Thames in London's traditional East End. It is believed that Millwall F.C was the inspiration for one team, as the clubs' fans had a long-standing reputation for violence during the period which the film represents. Another possible parallel is that Shadwell are promoted to the First Division for the first time in their history towards the end of the film - Millwall were promoted to the top flight of English for the first time at the end of the 1987-88 season. A sequel, with the title of ID2: Shadwell Army was released in August 2016. It was directed by Joel Novoa, and was written by Vincent O'Connell."ID2: Shadwell Army": at the BFI. Retrieved March 19 2019"Vincent O'Connell ": at the BFI. Retrieved March 19 2019 ===== The Callum children spend their Easter holidays on The Broads with a family friend, Mrs Barrable, who is staying on a small yacht called the Teasel, moored near the village of Horning. There they encounter the Coot Club, a gang of local children comprising Tom Dudgeon, twin girls 'Port' and 'Starboard' (Nell and Bess Farland), and three younger boys — Joe, Bill and Pete (the "Death and Glories"). The Coot Club was formed to protect local birds and their nests from egg collectors and other disturbances. Protecting wild birds was a relatively new concept at the time. A noisy and inconsiderate party of city-dwellers (dubbed the 'Hullabaloos' by the children) hire the motor cruiser Margoletta and threaten an important nesting site of a coot with a white feather (one of many monitored by the Coots) by mooring in front of it, and refuse to move when politely requested to do so. Despite warnings "not to mix with foreigners", Tom stealthily casts off the Margoletta's moorings to save the nest and then hides behind the Teasel. He hides for fear of disgracing his father, who is the local doctor. Casting off boats is considered unthinkable on The Broads, where the local economy is so dependent on boating. Mrs Barrable does not give Tom away to the Hullabaloos and instead asks him to teach the Callums to sail. Tom, Port, and Starboard join the crew of the Teasel, and together with Mrs Barrable and her pug William, the children teach Dick and Dorothea the basics of sailing up and down the Broads. The women of the party sleep in Teasel and Tom and Dick share Tom's small sailing boat Titmouse. Dick shares the Coot Club's keen interest in local bird life, and Dorothea uses the voyage as fodder for her new story, "Outlaw Of The Broads", based on the Hullabaloos' vow to catch Tom. They chase the crew of the Teasel all over the Broads. Through a piece of imprudence on the part of Mrs Barrable, Teasel and Titmouse are caught on a falling tide on Breydon Water and go aground, just too far apart to be able to pass things between them. William the pug is encouraged to make a heroic journey across the mud towing a thread, by which a rope is hauled across to share food, without which some of the party would have had to go unfed for 12 hours. They are still stranded on the mud when the Margoletta arrives. There is no escape, but the Hullabaloos, in their joy at running their quarry to earth, manage to crash the Margoletta into a wooden marker post, holing her hull and putting the crew in danger of drowning. At that moment the Death and Glories appear, having rowed all the way from Horning to warn Tom of the Hullabaloos' approach. They conduct a dramatic rescue, and are rewarded by the owners of the Margoletta with a salvage award which enables them to refurbish their vessel. The Hullabaloos depart without thanking their rescuers, and Tom can return home in the knowledge that the reputation of the doctor's family is intact. It turns out that the Hullabaloos were alerted to Tom's whereabouts by George Owdon, a Horning youth who makes money by selling birds' eggs to collectors, and who therefore has no love for the Coot Club. This rivalry is the subject of the sequel, The Big Six. ===== The story begins a few weeks after the events of The Moomins and the Great Flood, as the Moomin family are settling into their new life in Moominvalley. Sniff, who is now living with the Moomins, discovers a mysterious path in a nearby forest. As he and Moomintroll explore it, they meet the mischievous Silk Monkey and arrive at a beach, where Moomintroll goes pearl-fishing. Meanwhile, Sniff and the Silk Monkey find a cave, and the three decide to hide Moomintroll's pearls there. The next day, as they go back to the cave, they find the pearls arranged in the shape of a star with a tail. Back at Moominhouse, the Muskrat, a philosopher whose home was ruined by Moominpappa's bridge-building and who is now staying with them, explains that the pearls depict a comet. He directs Moomintroll to the Observatory on the Lonely Mountains, where the Professors would be able to tell him whether the comet will hit the Earth. Moomintroll and Sniff set sail towards the Lonely Mountains, and on the way they meet Snufkin, who joins them. The river takes them into a cave under the mountains where they almost fall into a hole, but at the last moment a Hemulen inadvertently rescues them when he mistakes Snufkin's harmonica-playing for a rare caterpillar and reaches his butterfly net into the cave to catch it. They find themselves in the Lonely Mountains and set off towards the Observatory. On the way they are attacked by an eagle and Moomintroll finds a gold ring, which Snufkin tells him belongs to the Snork Maiden he had met a few months earlier. At the Observatory, one of the professors tells them that the comet is going to hit the Earth, and gives them the exact date and time that it's going to happen. Realising they only have a few days left, they hurry back towards Moominvalley, noticing that the heat from the comet's approach is starting to dry up smaller streams. In a forest they come across the Snork Maiden being attacked by a poisonous bush. Moomintroll saves her, and she and her brother join them. Further on, they arrive at the sea to find it all dried up. They use stilts to cross it, and the Snork Maiden saves Moomintroll from a giant octopus. On the other side of the sea they meet another Hemulen, and manage to survive a tornado by using his dress as a glider. Finally they arrive in Moominvalley and the whole family, together with the Hemulen, the Muskrat and the Snorks, go to the cave, making it there just in time to seek shelter from the comet. Believing the impact to have destroyed everything, they fall asleep, only to discover the next morning, to their great delight, that the comet had missed the Earth altogether and everything is back the way it used to be. ===== The Headsman tells a story of loyalty tested by two friends during Europe's 16th-century Inquisition. Orphans Martin (Nikolaj Coster- Waldau) and Georg (Peter McDonald) bond as children, but walk very different paths as adults. Georg follows his calling to join the church, while Martin becomes an army captain. When fate places Martin in the role of executioner, he must choose between friendship and fundamentalist doctrine. ===== Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin discover the Hobgoblin's top hat on a mountain- top, unaware of its strange powers. An egg shell discarded into the hat becomes five clouds the children ride and play with. Next day the clouds have disappeared and nobody knows where they came from. Moomintroll hides inside the hat during a game of hide-and-seek and is temporarily transformed beyond recognition. Once they discover the magic powers of the hat and use it for a few transformations, the family resolves to get rid of it and throw it into the river. But Moomintroll and Snufkin recover it at night and hide it in the cave by the sea, where the Muskrat is spooked when his dentures transform into something mysterious and terrifying. The Moomin Family travel to the Island of the Hattifatteners on a boat they have found, and the Moominhouse is transformed into a jungle when Moominmamma absent-mindedly drops a ball of poisonous pink perennials into the hat. At night the jungle withers, and it is used as firewood to cook the huge Mameluke that the children previously caught while fishing. Thingumy and Bob arrive clutching a large suitcase containing the King's Ruby, which they stole from the Groke. After a court case (presided over by the Snork) the Groke agrees to exchange the ruby for the Hobgoblin's Hat. Thingumy and Bob steal Moominmamma's handbag to use as a bed, but return it when they realise how upset she is. The Moomins hold a party to celebrate the finding of Moominmamma's handbag, during which the Hobgoblin arrives (with a new hat) demanding the King's Ruby, but is refused by Thingumy and Bob. To cheer himself up, the Hobgoblin grants everyone at the party a wish. Although not everyone gets exactly what they wished for, the Hobgoblin is delighted when Thingumy and Bob wish for a duplicate ruby to give him – the Queen's Ruby. (As it turns out, the Hobgoblin can grant the wishes of others, but not his own.) ===== After the end of the Civil War, Confederate army captain Justice Cain (Scott Brady) retires from the military. He becomes a farmer and lives a peaceful life with his son, Jody (by his deceased first wife) and his new wife, Angie (Tereza Thaw), the biracial ex-slave of Cain's former father- in-law. Unbeknownst to Cain, a group of six soldiers previously under Cain's command (and known as "Cain's Cutthroats"), Ameson (Robert Dix), Billy-Joe (Darwin Joston), Tucker (Bruce Kimbale), Farrette (Don Epperson), Mason, and Crawford, has recently been released from a Union prison. The former Confederate soldiers have become a roving band of homicidal highway robbers, and their ultimate goal is to re-form a squadron led by Cain and renew attacks upon Union targets. The men find Cain and tell him of their plans, but when Cain refuses to join them, tells them that the "Old South" is dead, and derides their unrealistic plan to attack the north, they become enraged, attack him, and tie him up. Ameson, the leader of the group, rapes Angie while Cain watches helplessly. Billy-Joe, the most deranged and volatile of the men, attempts to rape her afterwards, but she fights him off. Fuming about what he perceives as Angie's sexual "rejection" of him, Billy-Joe kills her. Cain then screams insults at Billy-Joe, who shoots both Cain and Jody, killing the little boy instantly. Realizing that Billy-Joe's uncontrollable rage has set them on the path of no return, the men attempt to cover their tracks by burning down Cain's farm, but they leave unaware that Cain is still alive. With the help of Preacher Simms (John Carradine), a bible-quoting bounty hunter, and Rita (Adair Jameson), a former prostitute (and Tucker's ex- girlfriend), Cain systematically tracks down and kills the men. However, Cain becomes increasingly sadistic with each killing, and Simms begins to question whether Cain is more interested in achieving justice or indulging his own bloodlust. After killing most of the men, Cain finds Billy-Joe and shoots him in the crotch several times, so that he dies a slow, excruciatingly painful death. This disgusts Simms and Rita, and they abandon Cain. Cain then sets out alone to kill Ameson, the last surviving member of the gang. However, Ameson is captured by Union soldiers and executed by firing squad before Cain can reach him. Cain, now alone in the world and robbed of the satisfaction of killing the man who raped his wife, sinks to the ground and weeps in despair. ===== Several aspects of how Rover worked were never revealed in the series beyond the primary actions in subduing prisoners, in which task it was apparently extremely effective. Open questions surrounding Rover suggest that its use in the series was a variation of the deus ex machina type of plot device, used as a means to give a reason as to why the Village is so successful in coercing the inhabitants and preventing escape, without having to waste unnecessary screen time explaining this method. The other methods of control of the Village, such as surveillance, mind-control and double agents, are explored in much more detail in the TV series than is Rover. ===== A nearby volcano causes a massive wave to flood Moominvalley. While escaping the flood the Moomin family and their friends find a building floating past, and take up residence there. They believe it is a deserted house until they realise someone else lives there, Emma, who explains that it is not a house but a theatre. The moomins start to understand about the scenery, props, and costumes they have found. The theatre drifts aground and Moomintroll and the Snorkmaiden decide to go and sleep in a tree. When they wake next morning the theatre has floated away again and they are alone. Meanwhile, Little My accidentally falls overboard, and by some strange coincidence is rescued by Moomintroll's adventurous friend Snufkin who is setting off to seek revenge on a grumpy Park Keeper. He tears down all the "Do not walk on the grass" notices, fills the lawns with electric Hattifatteners and sets free twenty-four small woodies who immediately adopt him as their father. The coincidences continue as Moonmintroll and the Snorkmaiden meet Emma's deceased husband's niece, the Fillyjonk, and all three get arrested burning the signs that Snufkin tore up. Meanwhile, in the theatre, Emma helps Moominpappa write a play and the family decide to stage it. The woodies find a playbill for the play and cajole Snufkin into taking them to the theatre. The Hemulen who has arrested Fillyjonk, Moomintroll, and the Snork Maiden also finds a playbill and leaves his cousin to guard the prisoners while he heads off to see the play. The cousin is persuaded of their innocence and lets them out to go to the play too, where everyone is reunited and ends up on stage, the play itself collapsing into a big reunion party. When the floods recede everyone gets to go home. ===== The film begins with the alien abduction on Scalleum, a remote island off the coast of Wales, of Cat Williams and her boyfriend. Cat's boyfriend is gorily killed through brutal anal probing, and Cat is (also gorily) implanted with an alien fetus. Cat's story attracts the attention of Michelle "Foxy" Fox (Emily Booth), the bosomy host of the cable TV show Weird Worlde, who brings a film crew to the island -- her cameraman boyfriend Ricky (Sam Butler); Jack the sound man; nerdy UFO expert Gavin Gorman; and actors Bruce Barton and Candy Vixen (the latter, Foxy's producer assures her, "because she's good, not because she's my girlfriend"). The island is accessible via a narrow causeway only at low tide. The Weird Worlde crew sets out in their van, but it is dark by the time they reach the Williams family's creepy farmhouse, where they meet Cat and her three hulking and sadistic brothers (who speak only Welsh with English subtitles). The crew (with the exception of Gavin Gorman) initially assume that Cat's story is a hoax, and even go so far as to make a crop circle in a nearby field so they can film it for the show, to Gorman's great disgust. However, it soon turns out that the aliens are all too real and rather malevolent. The film crew teams up with the Welsh Williams brothers to fight off the aliens, with a great deal of blood and gore. One highlight features Ricky running down some aliens in a combine harvester, to the tune of "Combine Harvester (Brand New Key)" by The Wurzels. Eventually, the alien child inside Cat claws its way out; on board the alien ship, Foxy is impregnated with another alien fetus while Gavin loses his virginity to a shapely female alien; Bruce, Candy, and the Welsh brothers meet various horrible demises; Ricky blows up himself and four alien pursuers in a tank of liquid manure; back at the house, the female alien rips Foxy in half; and finally Gavin manages to use his laptop (in a sequence reminiscent of Independence Day) to overload the ley lines of the nearby stone circle. As Cat's alien child rips his arms off, Gavin manages to press the space bar with his nose, sending the stones shooting into the underside of the alien craft, which crashes into a convenient mountain. Jack the sound man, meanwhile, having been blinded by alien ichor early in the film, swims across the channel to the mainland, only to discover that he's lost the videotape that was the only proof of their extraterrestrial encounter. The film ends with a clip from an alien talk show reminiscent of Jerry Springer (and subtitled in English), on which Gavin's female alien is trying to explain how her entire crew was killed by humans and she herself carries the love child of one of those humans. The audience roars with laughter, and the host cuts her mike. ===== The world is controlled by the US/UN, a sort of semi-benign meta- dictatorship which does not rule directly but enforces a series of basic laws on a vast number of microstates, many of which are in a near-constant state of low-intensity warfare. Among the laws enforced on them is a prohibition on certain directions of research, such as intelligence augmentation or artificial intelligence. Precisely what is prohibited is of course secret, and as violation of the prohibitions will result in the swift and efficient death of everyone directly involved, scientific research is a dangerous proposition at best. The main characters (a Trotskyist mercenary, a libertarian teenager from a fundamentalist microstate, and an idealistic scientist) find themselves caught up at the centre of a global revolution against the US/UN. The revolution was planned and partially automated by financial software, and it was set to break out after a certain set of conditions. The stakes are raised at the end of the book, when it is revealed that the autonomous financial software has evolved into an intelligent form, which might cause the paranoid US/UN to make a "clean break" with Earth, knocking the planet back to the Stone Age with the orbital defence lasers. ===== Steve Morgan (Tierney) is a charming sociopath who has just robbed and killed a cinema cashier. Seeking to escape, he hitches a ride to Los Angeles with unsuspecting Jimmy 'Fergie' Ferguson (North). Part way the pair stops at a gas station and picks up two women. Encountering a roadblock, Morgan persuades the party to spend the night at an unoccupied beach house. The police close in as one by one Morgan begins killing the threesome. ===== Talent agent and huckster Sammy Kamin travels to Romania on business after splitting up with his wife. After his young client fires him, Sammy crashes his car and is rescued, while unconscious, by an enormous Romanian man named Max who is close to 8 feet tall. Sammy thinks the rescuer is God, as he can only see Max's giant hands. When Sammy wakes up, he thinks he is in Heaven. But he is confused to find a statue of Jesus next to his bed, as he was raised Jewish. He then realizes Max has brought him to a monastery, where he was raised after being given up for adoption by his parents because of his height. Once he wakes up and interacts with Max, he sees potential stardom in him. Sammy attempts to broker his introduction into the movies. In doing so, he exploits Max' desire to visit a long-lost paramour, Lilliana, in Gallup, New Mexico. First, Max obtains the role of a villain in a movie, but he is so drunk that he vomits on the protagonist (Sammy's former client). However, the scene is included in the movie. One day, Sammy talks to Steven Seagal about including Max as a villain in one of his movies, convincing him that he needs a different kind of villain. At first Seagal rejects him because there was another actor who would take that role, but he changes his opinion after listening to an extract of a Shakespearean play done by Max. Suddenly, after some medical exams, Max is diagnosed with heart disease which cannot be treated with a transplant because his heart is so big. Sammy decides to find Lilliana, and tries to convince her to meet Max again, but she rejects the invitation. Sammy then convinces his wife to take the role of Lilliana and after some words, Max asks her for a kiss. Afterwards, Sammy and his wife decide to get back together again, after realizing that they were truly in love and that their son needed them. Sammy eventually decides to return Max home to Romania. Max refuses to go back, but finally he enters his old house, and meets his parents again. Sammy ends up watching Max's first filmed scene in a cinema with his family. Max dies shortly after, because of his heart, but he changed many people's lives forever. ===== Yū Aoi dancing in Hana and Alice When Alice develops a crush on a stranger at the train station, she offers her best friend, Hana, the stranger's "half brother," Masashi. Hana declines, but after watching Masashi from a distance, she develops feelings for him. She stalks him by traveling on his regular train throughout the winter. During the spring, Hana and Alice enroll at Masashi's high school. Hana learns that Masashi is a member of the story-telling club, which prompts her to join as a member. As she continues to track him secretly, she witnesses him crash into a garage door, which leaves him unconscious. As he awakes, he finds Hana leaning over him. She reveals that a blow to Masashi's head has given him a case of amnesia and that she is his girlfriend. Hana and Masashi soon hang out as a couple while she continues deceiving him about their relationship. Alice becomes involved with Hana's lies by pretending she is Masashi's ex-girlfriend. Through a series of events, a love triangle unexpectedly develops between Hana, Alice and Masashi when Masashi falls in love with Alice who he still believes is his ex. Masashi eventually learns Hana's lie about his amnesia and reacts accordingly, which tests Hana and Alice's friendship and their relationships with people around them. ===== The story takes place just after the fictional disappearance of Richard Dutcher, famous for beginning the current Mormon cinema phase with his work God's Army. After Dutcher's disappearance the film follows the journeys of three amateur filmmakers who are eager to take his place as the first "Mormon Steven Spielberg". One of these filmmakers doesn't want to see Dutcher found. :Tagline: "Large Egos. Big Dreams. Small Budgets." =====