Bill Dalzell III Movies
Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin was the producer of Sudden Death, and the action is set in his hockey arena, in which the Penguins are playing the Chicago Blackhawks. Pittsburgh fire inspector Darren McCord (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is attending the game with his two children. He's quit fighting fires because of a tragedy a few years earlier involving a child he couldn't save. Also at the game is the vice-president of the United States (Raymond Barry), who is the target of a terrorist plot. The terrorist leader, an insane ex-CIA agent named Joshua Foss (Powers Boothe), has masterminded a scheme to hold the vice-president hostage in his luxury suite while demanding that payments be transferred to his account electronically at the end of each period of the game. If he doesn't get his money, he will kill one member of the vice-president's party at the end of each period, and at game's end he will order ten bombs hidden in the arena to be detonated with all 17,000 fans present. McCord discovers the plot while his daughter Emily (Whittni Wright) is kidnapped by the terrorists too. McCord must dispatch the villains and find the bombs, while saving all the hostages. Luckily, he is adept at martial arts. He fights one henchman dressed in a Penguins mascot outfit in the arena's kitchen, and another terrorist on the arena's retracting dome. At one point, McCord switches identities with a player, is sent into the game, and scores a goal. Director Peter Hyams also directed Van Damme in the blockbuster Timecop. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jean-Claude Van Damme, Powers Boothe, (more)
Adapted from a true story, dockworker Joey Coyle (John Cusack) finds over $1 million, which fell from an armored car. Instead of returning the money, he embarks on a spending spree unchecked by the wishes of his friend (Michael Rapaport) and hires a crime ring to launder the money. The detective assigned to the case (Michael Madsen) follows his increasingly distinct tracks. ~ John Bush, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- John Cusack, Debi Mazar, (more)
- 1992
In a sequel to the superior movie entitled The Incident, a small-town lawyer goes against the State of Maryland, suing on behalf of an institutionalized mental patient for release. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Walter Matthau, Susan Blakely, (more)
The life of powerful union leader Jimmy Hoffa is the subject of this biographical drama. The focus is strongly on Hoffa's public and political life, from his early days as a labor organizer to his later conflicts with the Federal government -- and, eventually, his mysterious disappearance. ~ Judd Blaise, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, (more)
- 1992
When a district attorney starts an investigation into corruption that leads her back to her own family--rife with police officers--she finds some decisions hard to make. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Valerie Bertinelli, George Dzundza, (more)
- 1991
Seven mobsters make a nighttime heist on New York City's Kennedy Airport, in this retelling of the true story of the shocking Lufthansa robbery. This cash robbery--the largest in American history--unfolds in 1978, the scheme plotted by gangster Jimmy "The Gent" Burke. The film follows them as the characters move deeper and deeper into the violence of their crime, ~ All Movie Guide
- 1991
Guilty Until Proven Innocent is a TV-movie dramatization of a an actual miscarriage of justice. Young Bobby McLaughlin (Brendan Fraser) is accused of murder when a teenager is killed during a Brooklyn drug deal. The arresting cop knows that Bobby didn't do it, but is so eager for a conviction in this otherwise unsolvable crime that he strongarms an eyewitness into fingering Bobby. The boy's foster father Martin Sheen is assured by the defense attorney that the truth will out in court. When Bobby is convicted, Sheen continues through legal channels to secure the boy's release, confident that someone will be willing to open their eyes to the facts. But despite common knowledge that he is innocent, Bobby languishes for years in prison. Featured in the cast of Guilty Until Proven Innocent is Martin Sheen's daughter Renee Estevez. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Martin Sheen, Caroline Kava, (more)
In this multiple Oscar-winning thriller, Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, a top student at the FBI's training academy whose shrewd analyses of serial killers lands her a special assignment: the FBI is investigating a vicious murderer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who kills young women and then removes the skin from their bodies. Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) wants Clarice to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a violent psychopath, serving life behind bars for various acts of murder and cannibalism. Crawford believes that Lecter may have insight into this case and that Starling, as an attractive young woman, may be just the bait to draw him out. Lecter does indeed know something of Buffalo Bill, but his information comes with a price: in exchange for telling what he knows, he wants to be housed in a more comfortable facility. More important, he wants to speak with Clarice about her past. He skillfully digs into her psyche, forcing her to reveal her innermost traumas and putting her in a position of vulnerability when she can least afford to be weak. The film mingles the horrors of criminal acts with the psychological horrors of Lecter's slow-motion interrogation of Clarice and of her memories that emerge from it. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, (more)
- 1990
- R
Most of this provocative made-for-cable television drama, takes place in the courtroom where a young white, female attorney tries to prosecute an African American ex-con for the assault of a prostitute. He is not only the prime suspect, he is also the only witness. Unfortunately, he may not get a fair trial, for the prosecutor may be using the case to settle a personal score. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Forest Whitaker, Jennifer Grey, (more)
Two well-known directors each adapt stories by Edgar Allen Poe in this horror drama. George Romero's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" tells how the wife of an elderly, wealthy man and her lover--who also happens to be the husband's private physician--scheme to control his assets. Dying before they can carry out their plans, his soul is caught between life and death while they freeze the body to finish their work. In the Dario Argento-directed "The Black Cat" a crime photographer, known for his photos' gruesome content, kills his girlfriend's titular pet and then his girlfriend. Soon he gets a good look at what he's done. ~ Kristie Hassen, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Adrienne Barbeau, E.G. Marshall, (more)
- 1989
Written with heartbreaking attention to detail by Ara Watson and Sam Blackwell, No Place Like Home was one of the first TV movies to direct itself to the plight of the homeless. Jeff Daniels plays a Pittsburgh apartment superintendent and aspiring electrician who loses his job--and his home--when the apartment building burns to the ground. Daniels, his wife Christine Lahti, and his two children (Lantz Landry and Kyndra Joy Casper) move in with Daniels' brother Scott Marlowe, but the resultant family hostilities render the situation impossible. As the family takes the downward journey from welfare hotel to homeless shelter, Daniels searches in vain for an electrician's job, Lahti takes a few stints as a waitress, and son Lantz Landry gets involved with a drug dealer. The film offers little hope or comfort, nor any pat solutions to the ever-growing homeless dilemma. The final shot in No Place Like Home is a stunner, grimly evocative of King Vidor's more upbeat finale in 1928's The Crowd. Lee Grant, director of this numbingly realistic TV movie, had earlier directed a documentary on the same subject, Down and Out in America. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Christine Lahti, Jeff Daniels, (more)
Directed by onetime Rookies co-star Georg Stanford Brown, Alone in the Neon Jungle has all the earmarks of a TV pilot film-albeit a better-than-usual example of the genre. Suzanne Pleshette plays a no-nonsense police captain, assigned to the town's most corrupt police district. In attempting to clean things up, She is handicapped by the fact that she can't tell her friends from her enemies. Director Brown costars as a police sergeant who turns out to be a valuable ally to the new captain. Filmed in Pittsburgh, Alone in the Neon Jungle was first telecast January 17, 1988. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Kenny is a Canadian kid who has a couple of pals and, like a lot of the other lads, idolizes the jock his pretty older sister has chosen as her boyfriend. However, Kenny was born without legs or even the lower part of his body. He gets around (quite well, in fact) on his arms. He has been given a prosthesis that makes him look "normal," but he protests, rightly, that it was made so as to keep other people from getting upset at the sight of him -- it only slows him down. When his sister runs away during the filming of a documentary about how his family has coped with his handicap, he embarks on a solo journey to Philadelphia to find her. There, she pours out her heart, complaining that everything she values in her life has been turned inside out so as to serve and support her legless brother. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Caitlin Clarke, Liane Alexandra Curtis, (more)
Michael Keaton stars as a wheeler-dealer who hopes to save a failing Pennsylvania automobile-assembly factory from having to close its doors. Keaton persuades a Japanese auto firm to reopen the factory, retrain its staff, and streamline the operation. It isn't long before the American-born workers grow to resent the disciplinary demands of their new Japanese bosses, setting the stage for a comic clash of cultures. The day is saved when it turns out that the poker-faced owner of the auto company possesses a really strange sense of humor. Gung Ho was later spun off into a short-lived TV sitcom, starring Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michael Keaton, Gedde Watanabe, (more)
