Jon Van Ness Movies

This made-for-TV cop drama is deliberately reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh's previous video success Police Story. LA Law star John Spencer plays a big-city cop with deep and serious emotional problems. His inner turmoil is exacerbated when he plunges into a troublesome murder case. Among the many personal demons with which the cop is wrestling is the memory of how a brief act of impulsiveness in his past led to tragedy. From the Files of Joseph Wambaugh: Jury of One debuted November 29, 1992. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Tune in Tomorrow is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. In New Orleans, circa 1951, a news writer for a local radio station, Martin Loader (Keanu Reeves), meets and falls in love with his aunt Julia (Barbara Hershey), a divorced woman who is looking for a new husband. Meanwhile, new-in-town eccentric radio-soap-opera writer, Pedro Carmichael (Peter Falk) has been hired to help boost the station's bad ratings. Pedro begins manipulating Martin and Julia's affair and using it as the basis for his radio show. Director Jon Amiel uses the same story-within-a-story construction from The Singing Detective, the miniseries that he directed for British television. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

Stuart Rosenberg, under the guise of Alan Smithee, directed this action film concerning a soldier of fortune sent into a South American country to rescue a kidnapped American during a revolutionary upheaval. Harry Burk Jr. (Mark Harmon) and United States Ambassador Douglas (Bruce Gray) are held hostage by Colombian drug dealers who demand the release of associates who are imprisoned in the United States. But the U.S. government refuses to negotiate with the drug dealers. In disgust, Harry's brother Corey (Michael Schoeffling) and three of his friends (Tom Wilson, Glen Frey, and Rick Rossovich), along with an adventurous auto dealer named Jack (Gary Busey), hire mercenary soldier Shrike (Robert Duvall) to sneak into Columbia and rescue Harry. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

The film version of The Natural pulls off the neat trick of conveying the spirit of the Bernard Malamud novel upon which it is based, even while changing both the outcome and the meaning of Malamud's closing chapters. In his first film appearance in four years, Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a farm boy with a hankering to be a great baseball player. With his faithful homemade bat "Wonderboy" in hand, Roy heads to the big city. En route, he arouses the fascination of the mysterious Harriet Bird (Barbara Hershey). Luring the boy to a hotel room, Harriet asks Roy what he wants out of life. Roy brashly responds he wants to be "the best there is," whereupon Harriet whips out a gun and shoots Roy down. Sixteen years later, a humbler Roy Hobbs emerges from the bush leagues to become a 35-year-old "rookie" on the 1939 lineup of the New York Knights. He soon becomes the team's star player, and in so doing once more attracts enigmatic woman Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), the glamorous niece of the Knights' manager Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) and the mistress of Rothstein-like gambler Gus Sands (a curiously unbilled Darren McGavin). Roy's fascination with Memo compromises his ability to play, but this time he finds salvation in the form the angelic Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), his childhood sweetheart. From this point forward, the script for The Natural bears very little resemblance to the Malamud original. Without giving anything away, it can be said that Roy Hobbs is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compensate for the mistakes of his youth, despite the demonic intrusion of inexplicably spiteful sports writer Max Mercy (Robert Duvall). The Natural elevates the art of slow-motion photography to new heights; while this technique would become precious and boring in later baseball films, it works beautifully here, as does the decision by director Barry Levinson and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to convey the symbolism inherent in the story in purely visual rather than blatantly verbal terms. (If the characters told you that the story was a retelling of the Camelot legend in baseball terms, would you have watched?) Another plus is the pastoral theme music by Randy Newman, which has been well utilized on sports broadcasts and "human interest" TV documentaries ever since. The baseball scenes in The Natural were staged at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this taut, futuristic drama, the maiden voyage of a hypersonic passenger jet becomes a disaster when something goes terribly wrong and it gets stuck in orbit. The film is also known as Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Richard Pryor gives a compelling performance in Some Kind of Hero, playing a Vietnam veteran who tries to readjust to civilian life. Pryor plays Eddie Keller, who has just spent five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. Most of the time there, Eddie was able to hold his own against his captors, but he eventually was forced to sign a statement denouncing United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Eddie decided to sign the document in order to insure that his friend Vinnie (Ray Sharkey) would be given proper medical treatment. Because of this denunciation, when Eddie returns home from the war he is denied his back pay. He also discovers that his wife has left him for another man, his business has fallen apart, and his mother has been sent to an asylum. Eddie falls into a deep depression and hits rock bottom. But he meets a friendly prostitute, Toni (Margot Kidder), who helps him straighten out his life. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Bob Rafelson's remake of 1946's The Postman Always Rings Twice, with a screenplay by the award-winning playwright David Mamet, stars Jack Nicholson as Frank Chambers, a depression-era drifter who ends up at a diner run by Nick Papadakis (John Colicos), who offers Frank a job. Frank takes him up on the offer, but quickly begins a torrid affair with Nick's wife Cora (Jessica Lange). The adulterous lovers soon hatch a plan to kill Nick and share in the insurance payout. The second big-screen adaptation of the James M. Cain novel, the film garnered a certain degree of notoriety for the explicit sex scenes between Lange and Nicholson. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

This lurid, misogynist slasher opus employs the usual "20 years later" motif in its presentation of a heavy-breathing maniac (Chip Lucia) who has been relentlessly stalking the now-grown object of a jilted childhood crush (former Playboy playmate and '80s television staple Barbi Benton). He finally tracks her to the hospital where she has arrived for a routine physical and switches her x-rays with those of a terminally ill patient in order to buy more time in which to plan the ultimate realization of his revenge. His actions are timed to coincide with Valentine's Day, exactly 20 years after he murdered her brother (depicted in one of the most hilariously contrived death scenes in horror film history) in retaliation for laughing at his timid attempts to woo her. While Benton is dutifully stripping down for gratuitous head-to-toe examinations, the killer is busily roaming the halls in surgical garb, slaughtering doctors, nurses, and patients alike with a wide assortment of medical equipment. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

In this horror outing, a seemingly abandoned desert gas station turns out to be a grotesque museum filled with murderous mannequins who come to life when visitors come to call. The ill-fated "guests" are lured in by a strange siren's song. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide