Marty Adelstein Movies

A harmless experiment in prison behavior takes an sudden turn for the worse when the subjects assuming the role of the guards began to display an unexpected sadistic streak in director Paul Scheuring's remake of Oliver Hirschbiegel's Das Experiment -- itself inspired by the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment which took place in 1971. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

A few innocent women experience a nightmare before Christmas in this bloody thriller. Billy Lenz, a severely maladjusted child, finally snaps under years of brutal treatment by his family, killing and eating them in an explosion of violence on Christmas Eve. For years, the Lenz house stands vacant, but in time it's purchased and renovated as the new home for a college sorority. A few days before Christmas, a handful of sorority sisters -- Dana (Lacey Chabert), Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg), Kelli (Katie Cassidy), and Heather (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) -- are enjoying a quiet evening with their house mother, Barbara MacHenry (Andrea Martin), exchanging gifts and swapping stories before heading home for holiday break. While Barbara remembers the story of Billy's crimes, the atmosphere is peaceful until the young women receive the first in a series of disturbing telephone calls. Before long, they learn that Billy has escaped after years in a mental institution, and has come back to the house where he grew up to once again spill blood for the Christmas season. Black Christmas is a remake of the 1974 horror film of the same name by director Bob Clark, who later made a less-threatening film about the Yuletide season, A Christmas Story; Andrea Martin, who plays the house mother, also appeared in the 1974 film as one of the sorority girls. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Undoubtedly pitched to network executives as "24 Behind Bars," the weekly, hour-long continuing drama Prison Break starred Wentworth Miller as structural engineer Michael Scofield, who when first seen by the audience was somewhat inexplicably in the process of committing a bank robbery -- and then allowing himself to be arrested and convicted. Scofield was sentenced to five years at Fox River Penitentiary, where, by a stunning coincidence, his brother Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) was spending his last month on Death Row, awaiting execution for the murder of the brother of the U.S. vice president. Convinced that Lincoln was innocent and the victim of a government conspiracy, Scofield had purposely gotten himself incarcerated at Fox River for the express purpose of helping his brother escape -- a task made slightly less formidable by the fact that Scofield had helped design the prison! Our hero's meticulously worked out scheme depended upon the cooperation of several co-conspirators, among them Scofield's likable cellmate Sucre (Amaury Nolasco); well-connected mobster (and fellow prisoner) Abruzzi (Peter Stormare); Charles Westmoreland (Muse Watson), who may or may have not really been the legendary hijacker D.B. Cooper; and sympathetic prison doctor Sara Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies), whose dad was the governor of Illinois. Meanwhile, Lincoln's former girlfriend, lawyer Veronica Donovan (Robin Tunney), burned the midnight oil to figure out who would want to frame Lincoln and why; and Lincoln's 15-year-old son LJ (Marshall Allman) desperately tried to make sense of the fact that both his dad and his favorite uncle were now beyond his reach (temporarily, anyway). Others in the cast included Stacey Keach as Warden Pope, Robert Knepper as fearsome white-supremacist convict T-Bag, and Wade Williams as highly suspicious senior correctional officer Bellick. Merrily playing fast and loose with such intangibles as logic and common sense, Prison Break was given a major publicity blitz before its Fox network debut on August 29, 2005. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The weekly, 60-minute Fox series Tru Calling was the strange saga of medical graduate student Tru Davies (Eliza Dushku). When her grant money was abruptly terminated, Tru was forced to make ends meet with a night-shift job at a Boston morgue. It was there that our heroine discovered her ability to communicate with certain of her deceased "clients"; she was then able to relive the events of the previous day, and in so doing prevent the death of the person with whom she had communicated -- or, at the very least, to resolve that person's other problems, thereby averting disaster of a more wide-ranging variety. Alas, Tru had plenty of problems of her own, what with her brother Harrison (Shawn Reaves), a chronic gambler, and her sister, Meredith (Jessica Collins), a drug-addicted lawyer. Also, Tru had to deal with her doubting boss, Davis (Zach Galifianakis), as well as a sinister chap named Jack Harper (Jason Priestley), who was introduced halfway through the series' initial season. Jack possessed the same psychic "gift" as Tru -- but instead of saving people from death, he merely wanted to make certain that they stayed dead. Created by Jon Harmon Feldman, Tru Calling deftly balanced its supernatural and sometimes horrific aspects with wry humor and touching humanity. The series debuted October 30, 2003. ~ All Movie Guide