Sam Pillsbury Movies

Based on the 1961 children's novel by Wilson Rawls, Where the Red Fern Grows is a family-oriented drama four years in the making. This project is co-directed by Lyman Dayton, who also adapted the screenplay and produced the 1974 filmed version. The story involves 12-year-old Billy Coleman (Joseph Ashton), who lives in the Ozark mountains with his mother, Jenny (Renee Faia), and father, Will (Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band). Billy's grandfather (Dabney Coleman) encourages him to save money to buy a hunting dog. For two years, Billy does odd jobs in order to save the money. When he finally gets enough, he buys two puppies and names them Old Dan and Little Ann. Billy eventually trains them to become hunting dogs and enters the Fall Hunting Competition. Also starring Kris Kristofferson and Ned Beatty. Even though principal photography started in 1999, Where the Red Fern Grows didn't premiere until the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival due to numerous production difficulties and law suits. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

Filmed on location in Lake Havasu, AZ, this made-for-cable domestic drama stars Tim Matheson as Al Dodge, a burned-out intellectual working as a handyman and living in a rundown trailer in the middle of the Arizona desert. Some 15 years earlier, Al had abandoned his family and is now living the life of a truculent recluse. All this may change -- or may not -- when Al is visited by Alison (Kristen Bell), his long-estranged teenaged daughter. Doing their best to mend the fences between father and daughter are Al's current girlfriend Sandy (Sean Young) and the requisite "crusty but lovable" widower Auggie Sinclair (Ed Asner). Adapted by Michael De Guzman from his own novel, The King and Queen of Moonlight Bay debuted on the Hallmark Channel on Father's Day, June 15, 2003. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sam Pillsbury directs the CBS movie The Wedding Dress, a romantic drama about a magical wedding dress that involves six different couples. The television feature stars Neil Patrick Harris, Margaret Colin, and Tyne Daly as Joan Delano, the mother of romantic lead Zoey (played by Daly's real-life daughter Kathryne Dora Brown). ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide

This is a documentary about Bruno Lawrence, one of New Zealand's wildest and most intriguing entertainers. Lawrence, who died of cancer in 1995 at the age of 50, came to prominence as one of a group of anarchic actors and musicians who brought their message to the public via television in the mid-1970s. An actor and musician, Lawrence was a major figure on both the film and counter culture scenes, and he left a legacy that influenced countless Kiwis and Australians. Through 30 years-worth of personal and public footage, this documentary tries to capture this legacy, and the man behind it. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide

A woman whom life has passed by finds love in a very unexpected way in this drama. Sam (Billy Zane), Darcy (Johnny Galecki), and Monroe (Henry Rollins) are three convicts who have escaped from a prison camp in the deep South, and are on the run from the police. Desperate to find money and a way out of the state, they happen upon the cabin of Vonee (Kelly McGillis), a hard-bitten spinster who lives alone in the woods. The three convicts invade Vonee's home and take her hostage, but they soon discover she isn't at all intimidated by them, and wouldn't be willing to give them money even if she had any. While Monroe is an ill-mannered musclehead and Darcy has a weak will and a short fuse, Sam is far more charming and generous than his circumstances in life would suggest, and Vonee soon finds herself falling in love with him; before long, Darcy and Monroe decide it's time to move on, but Vonee doesn't want Sam to leave, and she hides him from the police on her property. Morgan's Ferry also stars Roscoe Lee Browne and Muse Watson. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

In the third installment in the Free Willy series, Jesse (Jason James Richter), the once-troubled youth whose life was changed by his friendship with the killer whale Willy, is spending the summer on board a ship assisting a group a whale researchers, including his old friend Randolph (August Schellenberg), and Drew (Annie Corley), an oceanographer. Jesse once used a harmonica to communicate with Willy, and when he plays his mouth harp through the ship's underwater sound system, he is able to find his old friend, who is now raising a family of his own. As Jesse, Randolph, and Drew are out to study and assist the whales, a ten-year-old boy named Max (Vincent Berry) is accompanying his father John Wesley (Patrick Kilpatrick) on the fishing boat that John helps to run. Max soon discovers that John and the crew are not fishing for salmon, as he believed, but killer whales, which is illegal, but very profitable, as whale meat fetches $200 a pound on the black market. Jesse meets Max on shore, and when Jesse learns what John and his crew are up to, he tries to teach Max that while his father may not be a bad man, he's doing a very bad thing in killing the whales, who are intelligent, compassionate, and deserve the right to live; Jesse also acts to save Willy and his family from John and his fellow poachers. As in Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, Free Willy 3: The Rescue used mechanical and animated whales rather than flesh-and-blood aquatic mammals. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A widow's joy at finding new love evaporates when she learns that her new husband's checkered past includes an abandoned wife. After he disappears with his two sons, the two wives team up to find him. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

In this chilling thriller, a woman living in Seattle finds herself plagued with visions of a murder that occurred in the 1920s and realizes that the victim was her in an earlier lifetime. She becomes desperate to learns all the details of that death when it becomes apparent that history seems determined to repeat itself. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Psychotherapist Jesse Newman is a psychic. When she learns that the criminal who brutally murdered a cop has been captured, she feels distress for according to her visions, the police have the wrong man. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The bizarre career of New Zealand filmmaker Sam Pillsbury had veered from the sci-fi weirdness of The Quiet Earth to the Cajun spice of Zandalee to the mawkish Free Willy 3 without ever really demonstrating a consistent vision. This made-for-cable horror-western anthology is the most confused work Pillsbury has ever done, starring Bruce Dern as a bounty hunter who gets frostbitten, cuts off his own toe, and talks to an outlaw's corpse. His attempt to track down the outlaw is the rough link behind this senseless mess adapted from some fairly good short stories. It still might have some allure for a surprising cast including Andrew Robinson (the killer from Dirty Harry), Helen Hunt, and Dylan McDermott. The most annoying segment has Mariel Hemingway as an eccentric woman who may or may not be under siege by wolves in her isolated home on the prairie. It's sometimes reminiscent of Mad at the Moon, an even more annoying prairie-set wolf tale. For genre completists, Lisa Pelikan from Ghoulies shows up, and co-writer Dick Beebe went on to pen the superior remake of House on Haunted Hill and the uneven Book of Shadows: The Blair Witch Project 2. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

In this thriller, poet Thierry Martin (Judge Reinhold) takes over the family business, abandoning both his art and his sex life, much to the dismay of his wife, Zandalee (Erika Anderson). However, when Thierry's painter friend Johnny Collins (Nicolas Cage) comes to town, his fling with Zandalee could prove more complicated than he imagined. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

In a tour-de-force sci-fi story with only three main characters, Kiwi director Geoffrey Murphy creates an interesting dynamic nuanced with shades of mysticism. When scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) experiments with a radical new power source -- a band of energy that would circle the planet -- the project goes awry and apparently wipes out all living creatures (they vanish without a trace). At first Zac adjusts by indulging himself in some of his materialistic desires, but he soon starts a serious search for other signs of human life. He discovers it in New Zealand in the form of Joanne (Alison Routledge), with whom he falls in love, and Api (Peter Smith), a Maori. The challenges the three face in order to survive, as well as their personal interactions, keep this human drama engrossing. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide