This holiday season Clark Griswold vows his clan will enjoy "the most fun-filled family Christmas ever." Before you can sing "fa-la-la-la-lah," he decks the halls with howls of folly in the perennial favorite National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Seeing is believing. There are 25,000 lights on the roof. An exploding turkey on the dining room table. And a SWAT team taking siege outside. Yule love it!
The miracle about Miracle is that it gets so many details right in telling its 24-year-old story about the historic victory of the U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Olympic Games.
Tom Hanks and Shelley Long star in this offbeat, slapstick comedy about a young couple duped into buying a large mansion only to find that the problems and rennovations needed may be more than they can handle... in both their pocketbooks and relationship. The unfinished domicile becomes a metaphor for their troubled relationship, as evidenced by Long's character's attraction to a madman violinist (Alexander Godunov).
Emmy Award winner Tom Selleck stars as a major league ballplayer who is reluctantly traded to the Chunichi Dragons in Nagoya, Japan, in this fish-out-of-water sports comedy. Replaced by a rookie, the resentful Jack Eliot (Selleck) feels superior to the other Dragons, but he has a lot to learn about Japanese baseball, which is more about teamwork than about being an arrogant hotshot. Japanese superstar Ken Takahura is their hard-headed manager, Uchimaya, whom Jack treats with disrespect, while the beautiful Hiroko (Takanashi) helps him learn to live in - and love - his new home.
Jules Verne's classic adventure is perfectly matched with Ray Harryhausen's timeless movie magic in Mysterious Island. Based on Verne's sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this rousing Civil War-era fantasy begins when a band of Union war prisoners (and one Confederate straggler) escape in a hot-air balloon, which crash-lands on the titular island of mystery.
Overworked and overscheduled, contractor Doug Kinney never has enough time for his wife and family. So when a helpful geneticist offers to "Xerox" Doug, it seems like the perfect solution - until the clones begin to take over his home, his job, and his bed. Keaton takes on four hilariously distinct roles as the comic possibilities quickly multiply in this genuinely funny, touching romantic comedy.
The Net, the first of Hollywood's big cyberthrillers of the mid-1990s, was also the most successful, thanks in large part to the natural appeal of star Sandra Bullock. Still riding high from Speed and While You Were Sleeping, Bullock plays a computer expert victimized by sinister cyberforces who steal her identity for reasons unknown. It's a clever combination of high-tech paranoia and Hitchcockian references (including Jeremy Northam as a romantic stranger named Devlin, after Cary Grant in Notorious).
Neil Simon wrote this 1976 spoof in which virtually every famous fictional detective of the 1930s and 1940s congregate at the home of a mysterious fellow (Truman Capote) to try and solve the mystery of who's trying to kill them all. Simon's jokes are mostly obvious, and the film's real appeal is the clever concept matched with fine--sometimes legendary--actors. Peter Falk plays a very Bogart-like Sam Spade equivalent, James Coco is a Hercule Poirot wannabe, Peter Sellers does a Charlie Chan bit, David Niven and Maggie Smith are reflections of Nick and Nora.... You get the picture.
Hammer Studios' greatest nemeses, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, once again square off in this reworking of Universal's The Mummy (with elements of The Mummy's Tomb and The Mummy's Ghost thrown in for good measure). Cushing stars as archeologist John Banning, whose dig for a lost tomb results in untold treasures but leaves his father a mumbling madman and marks the rest of the company for death.
The Griswolds have planned all year for a great summer vacation. From their suburban Chicago home, across America, to the wonders of the Walley World fun park in California, every step of the way has been carefully plotted. So what if they lose all their money when their new car gets wrecked. And it's not too bad when Cousin Eddie deposits sour Aunt Edna in their back seat for a lift to Phoenix. But what really keeps Clark's eyes on the road is a flirtation with a mysterious blonde in a red Ferrari.
