Chris Short Movies
Television commercial director Christine Jeffs makes her feature debut with this intense family drama about the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of a mother-daughter relationship. Thirteen-year-old Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki) and her younger brother Jim (Aaron Murphy) are largely left alone in their seaside bungalow as their parents try to piece their marriage back together. While Janey's mom Kate (Sarah Peirse) gets blind drunk, flirts with other men, and nurses hangovers, her father Ed recoils in disgust at his wife's dissolute behavior. The family's simmering tensions explode with the appearance of Cady, a rakish freelance photographer. While Kate immediately starts to flirt with the younger man, Janey herself is attracted to him, believing that he is her only ticket out of her dysfunctional family. Soon Kate and Janey find themselves locked in a desperate and despairing battle for Cady. This film was screened at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
- Starring:
- Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, Sarah Peirse, (more)
Charlatan Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) has genuine psychic powers, but he doesn't use them to help people. Rather, he generates cases for his supernatural private-eye firm by harassing a group of hapless ghosts (including a dearly departed Wild West outlaw and an undead judge played by John Astin) into staging hauntings and poltergeists in the homes of likely marks. Bannister's world turns on its head when he starts noticing real hauntings around town -- ghostly assassinations that seem to be tied to the execution 20 years earlier of a brutal serial killer. Lucy Lunskey (Trini Alvarado), the wife of one unlucky victim, teams up with Bannister to get to the bottom of the killings and find out what shut-in Patricia Bradley (Dee Wallace Stone) and her witchy mother (Julia McCarthy) have to do with the sinister spree. ~ Brian J. Dillard, Rovi
- Starring:
- Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, (more)
- 1994
- R
Vietnamese director Pauline Chan, known for short films, made her feature debut with this story about a woman living in colonial Indochina. Chan co-wrote the screenplay based on a novel, Dreamhouse, by Kate Grenville. The sexual and emotional awakening of Louise Duffield (Saskia Reeves) takes place against the backdrop of the Vietnamese people awakening to the possibilities of liberation. Duffield is a British photographer who comes to southeast Asia with her husband Michael (Robert Reynolds), an Australian journalist, to fashion an article for a French rubber manufacturer. Louise is emotionally starved in her marriage and feels slighted by playing second fiddle to her husband professionally. Michael discovers that the rubber company is mistreating its workers, and he is trapped between his compulsion to tell the truth and his desire to please his corporate bosses, who may give him a job at their Paris headquarters if he turns in a favorable story. Michael and Louise are staying at the home of a tyrannical French plantation boss, Daniel Renouard (Sami Frey), whose little empire is crumbling as the natives become increasingly restless. His daughter Viola (Jacqueline McKenzie) is rebelling against her abusive father and looking for adventure. She finds some with her new housemates soon enough. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi
- Starring:
- Saskia Reeves, Robert Reynolds, (more)
Director Peter Jackson's second feature cheerfully trumps the gross-out quotient of his splatterfest debut, the appropriately named Bad Taste. The tone is cartoonishly comic, and the premise is simple: The village dweeb (Timothy Balme) is trying to maintain a budding romance with the sweet Paquita (Diana Penalver) while concealing the fact that his overbearing mum (Elizabeth Moody, in an amazing good-sport performance) is a flesh-eating zombie. (She owes her condition to a bite from a "Sumatran Rat Monkey" at the local zoo.) Complicating matters even further is Les, a greedy uncle (Ian Watkin), who suspects that his sister has died and is eager to occupy her elegantly furnished Victorian mansion. The climax is a housewarming party Les throws to celebrate his "inheritance;" what he really gets is his comeuppance, thanks to his sister and her similarly afflicted zombie pals, who burst out of their basement prison to turn the guests into appetizers. Our hero finally cuts a wide swath through the zombie party crashers with the help of a rotary blade lawn mower, leaving the house awash in blood and body parts in order to save his romance. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi
- Starring:
- Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, (more)
- 1981
- PG
Actor David Hemmings made one of his periodic forays into directing with the lightning-paced Race For the Yankee Zephyr. The film pits deer hunters against a group of unscrupulous businessmen. Their mutual goal is a reserve of gold, hidden somewhere in the Australian wilds. Ken Wahl and Leslie Ann Warren are the Hollywood-bred "box office insurance" in this Australian/New Zealand coproduction. Race for the Yankee Zephyr was first shown in America via pay-cable, where it carried no rating but was preceded with a warning vis-a-vis violence and strong language. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
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