David Gale Movies

On New Year's Eve, no one wants to be alone. On this night in 1981, several different groups of young desperate people begin a journey from around New York City to a big party hosted by Monica (Martha Plimpton) and new friend Hillary (Catherine Kellner). As the hours pass and no one shows, Monica begins to unravel. She must bribe Hilary to stay with the promise of a clear shot at Monica's old boyfriend, Eric (Brian McCardie). Eric, at that moment is drinking in a nightclub with his new girlfriend, Bridget (Nicole Parker) and her friend Caitlyn (Angela Featherstone). When Bridget learns the host of the party is Eric's ex-girlfriend, she moves in on the bartender (Ben Affleck). Another group consists of two teenagers from Long Island, Monica's cousin Val (Christina Ricci) and Stephie (Gaby Hoffmann). The two get lost on the way when they run into a pair of punk rockers, Tom (Casey Affleck) and Dave (Guillermo Diaz). In a nearby diner, Lucy (Courtney Love) commiserates with her best friend Kevin (Paul Rudd) who has just been dumped by performance artist Ellie (Janeane Garofalo) so she could move in with her therapist. As they bar hop it slowly dawns upon the two that they could be more than friends. Elsewhere, new acquaintances Jack (Jay Mohr) and Cindy (Kate Hudson) are celebrating more than the new year. Cindy lost her virginity to Jack the night before, though is afraid Jack is with her out of sense of obligation. Now if only everyone can get to the party by midnight. Linking the different stories is the disco cabbie (Dave Chappelle) in whose cab the party never stops. ~ Ron Wells, All Movie Guide

This is a full-length cartoon movie featuring the dim-witted obnoxious loser teens, Beavis and Butt-head. They are obsessed with sex, TV, heavy-metal rock 'n roll, sex, coolness and sex, in that order. The trouble begins when the couch-potato duo's beloved television disappears (they assume it was stolen). In the course of trying to get another TV, they get involved in a major arms-smuggling scheme and are chased all over the U.S. by mobsters and lawmen alike. In one of the movie's highlights, Butt-head tries to get Chelsea Clinton to go to bed with him. Apparently he believes that since they both wear braces, she will naturally want to have sex with him. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The true-life story of a coach who tries to teach his players that there's more to life than basketball is brought to the screen in this sports drama. Ken Carter (Samuel L. Jackson) was once a star player on the Richmond High School basketball team in Richmond, CA, and years later, after establishing himself in publishing and marketing, he returns to the school and to the team as the new basketball coach. Carter quickly sees that his work is cut out for him -- the team is having an awful season, and their fights off the court are more decisive than their play on the court. While Carter wants to make the Richmond cagers into a winning team, he also wants a lot more -- to teach the boys to respect themselves and one another, and that they must excel in the classroom as well as in the gymnasium. Under Carter's guidance, the team turns their losing season around, with the state title a genuine possibility. However, when Carter learns that a number of his players have let their grade point averages slip below 2.3, as mandated in a contract he entered into with the students, he decides to lock the team out of the gym and send them into study hall until their marks improve. Carter's plan quickly becomes a subject of controversy among parents and team boosters, and their objections are soon picked up by the local news media, many of whom are not sympathetic to Carter's belief that his players must have goals beyond college ball or the NBA. Coach Carter also features Rob Brown and Rick Gonzalez as members of the team, and R&B diva Ashanti in her film debut as the girlfriend of one of Carter's players. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Before the box office success of Varsity Blues (1999) and the critical acclaim of Election (1999), the MTV cable channel created this raunchy campus comedy, the debut feature from MTV Films, the network's motion picture production banner. Josh Miller (Tom Everett Scott) is a studious and responsible pre-med student entering college as a freshman. His wild, hard-partying roommate Cooper Frederickson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), on the other hand, is a spoiled rich kid who never studies and spends his time getting drunk and ogling co-eds. Before long, Cooper's fun-filled lifestyle has corrupted Josh, and both are on the verge of flunking out of school. That's when they discover a little-used codicil in the college's charter stating that any student whose roommate commits suicide will automatically receive straight A's. Since their third roommate has moved in with his girlfriend, Josh and Cooper set about recruiting the most depressed, suicidal classmate they can find. The prime candidate: Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), a mentally unbalanced wild man. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

In this satirical comedy, a hotly contested high school election becomes a metaphor for the current state of American politics. Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is a popular and well-respected instructor at George Washington Carver High School in Omaha, Nebraska, but lately he's been unhappy in both his personal and professional life, and his anxieties finally come to a head with the school's student elections. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is running for student body president, and she certainly seems like the sort of girl who would win a high school election -- she's pretty, popular and takes part in all the right extra-curricular activities. In fact, she seems so perfect she's running unopposed, which offends McAllister's sense of democracy (not to mention the fact he doesn't like her very much). So Jim intervenes and persuades Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against Tracy. Paul is not terribly bright and is entirely unqualified to be student president, but as a star of the school's football team (before a leg injury sidelined him), he's popular enough to at least give Tracy a run for her money. Just as the race begins to heat up, a spanner is truly thrown into the works when Paul's sister, Tammy (Jessica Campbell) announces she's also running for office. Publicly, Tammy's platform is that the student elections are ultimately pointless and if she's elected, she'll eliminate them altogether. Privately, Tammy is out for revenge against her brother; it seems Tammy is experimenting with her sexuality, and a recent fling with a bisexual classmate named Lisa (Frankie Ingrassia) ended when Lisa dumped her to start going out with Paul. Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, Election was directed by Alexander Payne, who won enthusiastic reviews for his debut feature, Citizen Ruth; Payne also co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Johnny Knoxville and his crew of fun-loving masochists bring their routines to the big screen in this feature adaptation of the popular but controversial MTV series Jackass. A crew of young men perform a variety of strange, painful, and often humiliating stunts for the amusement of themselves and those around them, including crawling across dozens of mousetraps while wearing rodent make-up, being rolled down bowling lanes on skateboards, racing in golf carts across an ancient driving range, giving themselves self-inflicted paper cuts, making snow cones out of urine, tightrope walking over live alligators, using uninstalled sanitary plumbing in a hardware store, terrifying Japanese pedestrians while wearing panda costumes, and much, much more. Johnny Knoxville, the show's creator and star, returns to head up this movie version of Jackass, along with series regulars Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Chris Pontius, Steve-O, Dave England, Jason "Wee Man" Acuna, Preston Lacy, Ehren McGhehey, and Brandon DiCamillo; Henry Rollins, Tony Hawk, and Spike Jonze are among the movie's guest stars. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Corbin Bernsen, fresh out of LA Law, plays a real-life attorney in Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story. As Dees, Bernsen goes head to head with the Ku Klux Klan in the Alabama of the 1980s. Despite having his name included on the "hit list" of every wacko white supremacist in the Nation, Dees manages to break the back of the KKK is his own particular corner of the world. Line of Fire is elaborately produced and hits all the right emotional buttons, but falls short of perfection thanks to stereotypical villains and excessive melodrama. The film was first telecast on Martin Luther King Day in 1991. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Some cast and crew from NBC's highly acclaimed, little-seen series Freaks and Geeks reunite for this teen comedy that also marks the first starring role for Tom Hanks' son, Colin. The younger Hanks plays Shaun Brumder, a high schooler eager to propel himself out of the land of surf bums and ranch homes to which the film's title refers. He's had his sights set on Stanford ever since he read the works of professor Marcus Skinner (Kevin Kline), and his transcript is stellar enough to gain him admission. Shaun is understandably furious, then, when he receives a rejection letter in the mail; after some detective work on his part, he realizes that his flaky counselor (Lily Tomlin) mistakenly sent the university the wrong papers. It's up to him to get to Stanford within 24 hours to set the record straight -- literally -- and he enlists the help of his slacker brother Lance (Jack Black) to do so. Orange County co-stars Catharine O'Hara and John Lithgow as Shaun and Lance's slightly unhinged parents; the film was directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Mike White, both of whom contributed to several episodes of Freaks and Geeks. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) is a brilliant medical student who has perfected a green-glowing serum for regenerating life into dead things -- or even parts of dead things. But a corrupt superior, Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), assumes control of West's experiments and winds up, by ghastly necessity, using the stuff on his own severed head and body. West and in-over-his-head co-worker Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) struggle to control the now out-of-control effects of the serum, but the bone-saws and zombies complicate their plans. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide

This is a relatively early entry in the slice-n-dicer genre that while made in 1976, was not actually released until the early '80s. Like most of the subsequent slasher flicks, the terror begins when a few horny couples head out to a remote location for fun and frolic. Unfortunately, their sexploits are interrupted by a homicidal maniac wearing a mask. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

A multinational corporation specializing in military defense technology creates an indestructible killing machine for use on the battlefield, only to find out just how effective their monstrous invention truly is after the prototype malfunctions and embarks on a bloody killing spree. Syngenor is a Synthesized Genetic Organism, a scientifically created "Super Soldier" designed by Norton Cyberdyne and possessing powers far beyond that of mortal man. When Syngenor breaks loose from the lab and unleashes hell on the employees of Norton Cyberdyne, scheming executive Paula Gorski (Riva Spier) purposefully allows the killing to continue in order to humiliate Carter Brown (David Gale), the company's powerful CEO. But Paula's plan is about to backfire, because somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, a horde of newly spawned Syngenors are growing more powerful by the minute. If the creatures escape, the city streets will surely run red with blood. Now, the only hope for humanity is for the people trapped in the building to ensure that not one Syngenor manages to escape from the building. Unfortunately, outsmarting the perfect killing machine is no simple task, and it's beginning to feel as if the nightmare has only just begun. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

This low-budget Canadian weirdness involves the diabolical schemes of pop psychologist Dr. Blake (David Gale, who played a far more convincing horror villain in Re-Animator), the host of an incredibly popular TV self-help show called "Independent Thinking." Blake takes a particular interest in the case of a juvenile delinquent (Tom Breznahan), whose brain is fitted with a special transmitter linking him to a giant, bug-eyed, fanged brain monster, which begins to remotely control his will. Sort of a blend of Videodrome and The Brain from Planet Arous by way of EC Comics, this would have come off as a fairly clever sci-fi/horror sleeper if not for the ridiculous special effects: the monster is essentially a big brain-shaped rubber balloon with a cartoonish face on it. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Director Jonathan Lynn followed up the surprise hit The Whole Nine Yards with this musical comedy starring Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr. Gooding plays Darrin, a shallow New York advertising executive, who travels to a small town in the deep south upon receiving word that his aunt has passed away and left him a sizable inheritance. But once Darrin gets into town, he is informed that he will only receive the money if he successfully leads a local gospel group to victory at an upcoming competition. Reluctant but strapped for cash, Darrin takes on the task of finding the best singers in town and shaping the group up. Along the way, he becomes acclimated to the town with the help of his cousin Lucius (Mike Epps) and meets Lilly (Beyoncé Knowles), a single mother who not only possesses an incredible voice but also the ability to warm Darrin's cold heart. Along with Knowles, the supporting cast features a number of other real musicians, including Faith Evans, Melba Moore, Angie Stone, Montell Jordan, and The O'Jays. ~ Matthew Tobey, All Movie Guide