Mindy Suzanne Bell Movies

In this darkly comic film noir from writer/director David Atkins, Steve Martin revisits dentistry -- an occupation he'd explored 15 years prior, in the camp musical Little Shop of Horrors. Novocaine casts Martin as a much more mild-mannered D.D.S., Dr. Frank Sangster. Engaged to a prim and delicate hygienist, Jean (Laura Dern), Sangster leads a placid, upper-middle class existence, save for the occasional visit from his deadbeat artist brother Harlan (Elias Koteas). But Sangster finds his life turned inside out from the moment the alluring Susan (Helena Bonham Carter) plops down in his reclining vinyl chair: Complaining about her molars, she's really more interested in the refrigerator of narcotics the good dentist keeps on hand for his patients in pain. Once they manage to get Sangster's guard down, Susan and her brother (Scott Caan) rob him blind -- and worse yet, frame him for the theft. When a dead body turns up in Sangster's sleek suburban home, he finds that clearing his name will be a difficult proposition indeed. Novocaine marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Atkins, who first made his mark with the script for Emir Kusturica's oddball cult favorite Arizona Dream (1993). ~ Michael Hastings, Rovi

The Applegates is the video title for the darkly satirical comedy Meet the Applegates. The titular family, for all intents and purposes human beings, are actually a clan of giant Brazilian Cocorada bugs. Paterfamilias Dick Applegate (Ed Begley Jr.) takes a job with an Ohio nuclear power plant, with the intention of triggering an explosion, thereby exterminating all humankind and allowing the bugs to live in safety. Alas, every one of the Applegates falls victim to assimilation: Dick becomes a typical suburban philanderer, his wife Jane (Stockard Channing) succumbs to the seductions of the credit card, and the Applegate kids transform into obnoxious mall-cruising teens. By the time the Applegates' Aunt Bea (Dabney Coleman) links up with them to supervise the nuclear explosion, the family considers Auntie a nuisance and plots a fitting demise for her. Director Michael Lehmann had previously skewered upper-middle class values in Heathers; completed in 1989, Meet the Applegates buzzed into local cineplexes in 1991. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Evil spirits follow a young girl from the suburbs to the city in the second follow-up to the blockbuster horror film Poltergeist. Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O'Rourke) is now 12 years old and living with Patricia and Bruce Gardner (Nancy Allen and Tom Skerritt), her aunt and uncle, in a high-rise apartment building in downtown Chicago. Carol Anne attends a school for gifted children, where the staff psychologist Dr. Seaton (Richard Fine) attributes her past troubles with noisy ghosts to mass delusions and hypnotic suggestions. However, Carol Anne isn't so sure that the explanation is that simple, especially since she still sees threatening apparitions in the mirrors of her apartment. Particularly troubling is the ghost of the wicked Reverend Kane (Nathan Davis), who is eager for Carol Anne to join him and his followers in the unknown world on the other side of the light. Sadly, Heather O'Rourke died due to surgical complications resulting from an intestinal blockage several months before Poltergeist III was released. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi