Mark Peterson Movies

Eric Christian Olsen and Jeremy Sumpter star as brothers Randy and Skeet Dobson in this coming-of-age surfer movie from director Ron Moler. With their widowed mother working to provide for the family, Randy is left to look after 12-year-old Skeet. Despite the fact that a kid brother is a bit of a style-cramper, Randy lets Skeet tag along with him to the beach where he and his friends surf the summer days away. But trouble begins to brew when a pretty girl named Samantha (Shelby Fenner) chooses Randy over the leader of a rough-and-tumble surfer gang. Meanwhile, all is not well at home either when Skeet befriends Jim Wesley (Mark Harmon), a legendary surfer who begins a romantic relationship with the boys' mother, Jessica (Stacy Edwards), much to Randy's chagrin. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

A man convinces his wife to participate in one of his sexual fantasies and lives to regret it in the farcical comedy The Sex Monster. Marty (Mike Binder) is a building contractor who is married to a beautiful woman named Laura (Mariel Hemingway). While reasonably happy in his marriage, Marty has always had a fantasy about having a menage a trois, and when he starts to feel his sex life with Laura is getting stale, he suggests they bring in another woman and give it a try. Laura is reluctant at first, but Marty refuses to drop the subject and eventually she relents, and a second woman is introduced to the bedroom. However, Marty is soon too tired to continue with the fun, and Laura and her new friend go on without him. While she's coy about it at first, it quickly becomes obvious Laura enjoys adding another woman to the mix a lot more than Marty does, and she starts aggressively pursuing new female companions. While Laura doesn't mind if Marty joins in, she and her partners seems to be enjoying themselves enough that's he feels like a fifth wheel, since Laura seems to have much clearer ideas about female eroticism than he does. Mike Binder wrote and directed The Sex Monster, as well as playing the male lead; Stephen Baldwin also appears in a supporting role. Despite its subject matter, this film features little nudity, with the sexual escapades discussed or inferred rather than shown. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

On the eve of her sister's wedding, suburban teenager Samantha (Molly Ringwald) suffers silently as her family forgets her birthday. Even worse, some total dork (Anthony Michael Hall) keeps propositioning her with sophomoric innuendo when she really craves romantic attention from high-school hunk Jake (Michael Schoeffling). Moving from Samantha's family home as it's invaded by outre relatives to a high-school dance where nothing seems to go her way, this bittersweet teen comedy traces the hopes and disappointments of not only Samantha, but also a host of incidental but memorable characters, from a hapless Japanese exchange student to a prom queen and a posse of barely pubescent nerds. A climactic party scene at which these various strata of young America overcome their rigid hierarchies sets the stage for resolutions both tender and torrid. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi

Dr. Who was/is the longest-running entertainment series ever to run on the BBC, and for a variety of reasons, including its sassy humor, delightfully idiotic sets and special effects, and some first-class star-turns by a series of usually underrated actors in the title role, it generated a fanatic and devoted following in the U.K. One of the earliest "Doctors" in the movies was the great horror favorite Peter Cushing, and in this movie he saves the universe and, not incidentally, our dear old earth, from domination by the mostly robot and decidedly anti-biological Daleks (predecessors of the Borg, no doubt), a group of endearingly awfully designed (and made) A-frame shaped robots which, when massed together, appear to be engaged in a bumper-car race. No matter, the story races along at a furious and improbable pace, punctuated by wisecracks and gags, most of them from the almost-wise Doctor himself as he races about in his infinitely large (on the inside) antique London telephone booth known as "the Tardis" (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), protecting the innocent. Fans of the series will be delighted with the film, but as is so often the case, newcomers to the series will wonder what all the fuss is about. The cumulative cheesiness of the whole Dr. Who concept does take quite a bit of getting used to, and any attempt to take the series or this movie seriously is doomed to failure. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi