Beverley Murray Movies
- 1995
This Canadian black comedy features lots and lots of gore as it chronicles the activities of a group of strange killers living in a warehouse apartment. The film opens with Jane, a tall woman dressed in black leather as she rapes and photographs her victim, a man in a business suit. Enter Donny and Clem, two dim-witted brothers, carrying a human head in a plastic bag. They tie up the poor business man and then argue about whether they should slice him up or burn him with a blow torch. The boys' mother firmly believes that Clem is the Messiah. Jane is Donny's girlfriend. The brothers are in trouble with another psycho killer in a red rubber suit who demands they give him $50 thousand bucks or suffer the consequences. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
In the expatriate-littered Paris of the 1920s, painter Nick Hart (Keith Carradine) mingles with Ernest Hemingway (Kevin O'Connor) and other leading lights of the Lost Generation while palling around with gossip columnist Oiseau (Wallace Shawn), whose reportage has helped establish the international reputation of the writers and artists who fled America for France after WWI. Older and less successful than many of his fellow painters, Hart relies on gallery owner Libby Valentin (Genevieve Bujold) to sell what she can of his work while he supports himself drawing cartoons for Oiseau's weekly column. In a café one day, Hart spies Rachel Stone (Linda Fiorentino) on the arm of her husband, Bertram (John Lone), a condom magnate and art patron who's trying to buy his way into society. It seems Hart and Rachel share a romantic past of which Stone is completely unaware. At the salon of writers Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven) and Alice B. Tolkas (Ali Giron), Hart suffers a nasty run-in with the Stones and meets Nathalie de Ville (Geraldine Chaplin), a rich socialite who wants to steal three paintings from her estranged husband. Nathalie plies Hart with sexual favors and the promise of cash in exchange for his help in forging copies of the paintings. Although he's loath to follow in the footsteps of his father, a gifted forger, Hart acquiesces, and soon his rivalry with Stone and his involvement with the forgeries leads to death, destruction, and scandal in the art world. Bujold, Shawn, Chaplin, and Carradine are all regular collaborators of iconoclastic director Alan Rudolph, who filmed The Moderns in Montréal and would go on to lens the similarly intellectual Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi
- Starring:
- Keith Carradine, Linda Fiorentino, (more)
- 1987
- R
This hilarious Canadian comedy frankly and with surprising taste, chronicles the travails of Alex, the 'Most Potent Man in the World." Alex earns this title while visiting a sperm bank. There it is discovered that he has a sperm motility rate of 99.5. What that means is that women he comes in contact with, directly or through artificial insemination, stand a terrific chance of becoming pregnant. Alex is naturally proud of his gift, but unfortunately, because he is only average looking, few of the sperm bank patrons are enticed to have his babies. In order to let them known what they are missing, he hires himself a manager and appears on a radio talk show. The ploy works and he suddenly finds himself surround by women desperate to get pregnant one way or another. At the same time, Alex's buddy Blue and his mail-order Korean bride Pak are crushed to discover that they cannot have children because Blue doesn't have enough sperm. They try every crazy method around before going to the clinic in desperation. Unfortunately, the day they come in, the clinic is besieged by Australian commandos who kidnap Alex and take him down under to help repopulate their population-challenged land. Last Straw is the third of screenwriter David C. Wilson and director Giles Walker's trilogy on the lives and trials of two modern males. The first two were Masculine Mystique and 90 Days. The characters Alex and Blue appear in all three films. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
- Starring:
- Salverio Grana, Fernanda Tavares, (more)
One man's past comes back to haunt his family in this low-budget Canadian horror story. George Gimble was just five years old in 1947 when his mother abandoned her husband and young daughter, taking George with her. George's father and sister drove off into the night to look for them, but died in a freak auto accident. Thirty years later, George (Alan Scarfe) is married to Vivian (Beverly Murray), an unhappy woman who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, Cathy (Randi Allen), who keeps to herself. George has moved his family into the house his parents used to own, and before long Cathy finds a ragged old doll that she carries with her at all times. The doll carries the ghost of George's late sister, and as the angry spirit takes control of Cathy, the child develops demonic powers and uses them to punish her parents and playmates. Shot in Montreal, Cathy's Curse (aka Cauchemares) was the first English-language project from French director Eddy Matalon. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
