Cliff Emmich Movies

Made by and for the TNT cable network, this sharp, satirical courtroom drama skewers the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the judicial system and popular media. The story centers on the trial of a famous model (Gina Gershon) who has been accused of murder. The media touts it "the trial of the century," a notion notorious celebrity lawyer Norman Keane (James Garner) does nothing to dispel. He also doesn't seem to be concerned about the myriad of rumors flying through the airwaves. Reporter Brenda Whitlas (Kathleen Turner) is not as easily fooled as the public and tries to ferret out the truth. Meanwhile a rookie lawyer involved in the case tries desperately to stay afloat amidst the confusion. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Cyberpunk schlockmeister Phillip Roth directs this sci-fi action flick about cool explosions and bad cyborgs. When the army's latest brand of killer robots start killing the wrong people, a band of nubile coed soldiers get sent in to kick a little android keister. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

In Best of the Best 2, Alex Grady and his partner, Tommy Lee, turn their karate talents toward crime fighting. An illegal fighting club, headed by Wayne Newton, is a center for crime and criminals. Alex and Tommy decide to take it down but first they have to fight their way through Brakus, the big evil, and his growth protein-engorged posse. ~ Brian Whitener, Rovi

In the conclusion of a two-part story, vacationers Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Ron (Darryl M. Bell) don female drag in a desperate effort to escape a pair of homicidal drug dealers. Elsewhere, and despite all signs to the contrary, Whitley (Jasmine Guy) and Julian (Dominic Hoffman) find themselves drawing ever closer--so much so that one of them may be willing to go "all the way." And Ernest (Reuben Grundy) remains in a drunken stupor, oblivious to the chaos all around him. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In 1982, Crippen High School was the scene of a gruesome series of dismemberment murders, but the killer was never identified. Five years later, Cosmic Pictures arrives at the long-abandoned campus to make a low-budget horror movie based on the tragedy, and suddenly the terror begins anew. The police department arrives at the school to find the building and grounds covered in gore and human body parts, the remains of the unfortunate film crew. The only survivor of this new massacre is the screenwriter, Arthur (Richard Brestoff), who tries to explain the horrifying events to the authorities. The troubled production's leading lady is angered over the demeaning nature of her role, the producer and director argue over the film's lack of artistic merits, and when cast members start disappearing, everyone else assumes that they're just quitting out of disgust. Who is the culprit? Is it the school's principal, appearing as himself in the film for the sake of realism? The janitor, who hopes to parlay his cameo into a pornography career? Or maybe Steven (Brendan Hughes), who was a student at Crippen during the original murder spree and finds himself reluctantly cast as the hero? This self-referential slasher parody features George Clooney in a small part as the film's first victim, and The Brady Bunch's Maureen McCormick as a policewoman with a lust for blood and hot dogs. ~ Fred Beldin, Rovi

It's hard to be critical of an exploitation film that revels so gleefully in its awfulness. To begin with, we're presented with dazed, glassy-eyed heroine Judy Landers, whose condition is readily explained by a bout with amnesia brought on by the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of a sleazy villain, Ray Sharkey. She is sent to the prison-like Ashland Mental Hospital for therapy, at first blissfully unaware of the diabolical mind experiments being performed on the all-female patients in the title dungeon by leering mad doctor Mary Woronov (who's done more than her share of leering in films of this type). Sharkey's not out of the picture -- he's lurking about the grounds, hoping to wring some secrets from our heroine about the documents he tried to obtain from her poor mom. The usual women-in-prison accouterments abound, from glue-sniffing lesbians to lecherous guards. The exploitation elements seem somewhat restrained (Landers doesn't even get her hair mussed) and they make the film look more like a sleazy made-for-TV movie with a few nude scenes thrown in for spice. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

While John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic Halloween irrevocably changed the style of horror cinema with its simple but relentlessly tense story, it triggered more than a decade's worth of uninspired, exploitative knock-offs, and one could easily list Halloween II among these failures. As with its predecessor, this film was written and produced by Carpenter and Debra Hill, but the terse style and unbearable suspense of the first film are missing, replaced by a more simplistic stalk-and-slash scenario. Directorial duties were handed over to Rick Rosenthal, whose lack of expertise is quite evident (though he managed to hit his stride two years later with the prison actioner Bad Boys). The plot picks up exactly where the original left off: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), shaken and injured from her battle with unkillable psycho Michael Myers, is taken to the Haddonfield Hospital for observation, while Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) continues his desperate search for his monstrous patient. An interesting plot twist has Loomis' investigations revealing Michael's true identity (some of these sequences incorporate footage of young Michael originally shot for the television version of Halloween, which contained scenes hinting at the link between Michael and Laurie).

After slashing his way through the town, Myers manages to track Laurie to the hospital, where the remainder of the action takes place. Numerous night-shift employees are slaughtered in a variety of gruesome ways before Loomis catches up with his quarry, leading to an explosive -- and seemingly conclusive -- confrontation. Pleasence is compelling as usual, but Curtis, who made an auspicious debut in the original, is sadly wasted here, her character reduced to shuffling half-drugged through darkened hospital corridors and screaming helplessly. Carpenter's active involvement in the Halloween franchise continued to dwindle steadily from one sequel to the next, getting scarcely a mention by the time producers Hill, Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans revived the series in 1988 for three more sequels. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

Cliff Emmich guest stars as John Bevins, a warm-hearted but grotesquely heavy man who is treated as an object of ridicule by most of his neighbors. John accepts a job at the one place in town where no one can see him: the school for the blind where Mary Ingalls (Melissa Sue Anderson) works. Totally accepted by the sightless students, who can "see" John's unconditional love for them, John is happy and content at last -- until a humiliating incident causes his daughter, Amelia (Julie Anne Haddock), to forsake him out of shame. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Here's a very low-budget attempted knee-knocker where chemicals released in public waters infect the fish, causing them to turn voracious as they become people eaters. ~ Rovi

Don Siegel took over the directing chores from Peter Hyams on this taut cold war action film, based on the novel by Walter Wager. With the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union thawing, old KGB hard-liner Nicolai Dalchimsky (Donald Pleasence) activates a group of Americans who were brainwashed twenty years earlier to blow up United States defenses when a passage from a Robert Frost poem is recited to them. When bombs go off at an abandoned United States defense installation, the Kremlin realizes that they have a rogue KGB agent on their hands who is trying to re-ignite the cold war. To stop him, the Russians send out KGB agent Grigori Borzov (Charles Bronson). Accompanying him is KGB double agent Barbara (Lee Remick). As the two agents try to stop Nicolai from starting World War III, they find time to fall in love with each other. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Aloha, Bobby & Rose was conceived and promoted as a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde. Paul LeMat plays Bobby, an auto mechanic, while Diane Hull is Rose, a car-wash jockey; the two fall in love and dream of heading off to Hawaii, hence the title. Responsible for an accidental homicide, Bobby and Rose are then forced to take it on the lam. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

As much an eccentric character study as a road movie, Michael Cimino's directorial debut follows the adventures of a quartet of misfits in their life of crime. Retired thief Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood) and sweet drifter Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) meet cute when Thunderbolt jumps into Lightfoot's stolen car to escape a gunman. The pair embarks on an oddball journey to get Thunderbolt's loot from an old robbery before his former associates, the sadistic Red (George Kennedy) and cretinous Goody (Geoffrey Lewis), get to it first, but all four are too late; the one-room schoolhouse hiding place has apparently vanished. So instead, the four play house and work legit jobs while they plot to rob the same place Thunderbolt and Red hit before. Although the plan goes awry, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot discover that they may still have succeeded-or so they think. As the easy-going mediator between the two, Eastwood's Thunderbolt was a move away from his tough cop-westerner image; his audience accepted this then-atypical performance enough to turn Thunderbolt and Lightfoot into a moderate hit. Bridges received his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, but Cimino turned down a subsequent deal with Eastwood, moving instead to his artistic peak with The Deer Hunter (1978) and career nadir with Heaven's Gate (1980). ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi