Jack Canon Movies
Jonathan Kaplan directs this drama which grafts a nostalgic mood piece with a race-to-the-finish road movie. Lurene Hallett (Michelle Pfeiffer) is an insulated middle-class wife living in Texas in the early 1960s who adores the Kennedys, particularly Jackie, whom she feels is a kindred soul. When she finds out the President and First Lady will be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, she races to the airport to greet the couple. Just missing them, she drives through the Dallas streets and notices a quiet chaos developing. When she finds out John Kennedy has been assassinated, Lureen is determined to get to Washington to be with Jackie for the funeral. When her redneck husband Ray (Brian Kerwin) refuses to give her the car, she gets on a bus, where she meets a black man named Johnson (Dennis Haysbert), with his five-year-old daughter Jonell (Stephanie McFadden). Lureen speaks continually about Kennedy and the rest of the black occupants of the bus roll their eyes. But after an accident with the bus, Lureen uncovers the fact that Mr. Johnson's real name is Cater, and he has kidnapped his daughter from an orphanage and is heading to Philadelphia. With the cops on their tail, the trio steals a car and race northward with the police in pursuit, Lureen hoping to make to Washington in time for Kennedy's funeral. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Michelle Pfeiffer, Dennis Haysbert, (more)
When two bumbling businessmen, Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard Parker (Jonathan Silverman), alert their boss, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser), to an expensive discrepancy in the company books, he invites them to his home on the beach with the intent to have them murdered. However when they discover that their boss has been murdered prior to their arrival, they attempt to convince people that he is still alive to avoid suspicion for his death, leading to all kinds of wacky mishaps. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Silverman, (more)
- 1989
This made-for-cable biopic originally went out under the simpler title Margaret Bourke-White. Farrah Fawcett stars as the famed photojournalist, whose work for Life magazine from 1936 onward gained her worldwide celebrity. The best scenes, showing the dauntless Bourke-White (Fawcett) at work in the most grueling and perilous of situations, are all too fleeting. The filmmakers evidently believed that the audience would be more intrigued by Bourke-White's stormy relationship with her husband, novelist Erskine Caldwell (played with a fluctuating Southern accent by Frederic Forrest). The film's chief assets are the well-focused performance of Farrah Fawcett, and the lensed-on-location sequences in Louisiana and Moscow. Margaret Bourke-White premiered over the TNT cable channel on April 24, 1989. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Writer-director Stephen King falls short in his debut at the helm with Maximum Overdrive, an absurd tale about a radiation storm that somehow animates machines across the world, causing them to turn on their makers. The film focuses on a group of survivors held captive at the Dixie Boy Diner by a group of bad-tempered semis. Led by Emilio Estevez, the diner-goers do their impression of Ten Little Indians, waiting their turn until each gets bumped off one by one. There are holes in the plot big enough for the semis to drive through; for example, why don't the trucks run over the diner at the start of the film rather than wait for ninety minutes? Maximum Overdrive's only distinction is that it is, without question, one of the worst films released in the '80s. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, (more)
Released originally under the title Lisa, Lisa, this seedy murder-fest was later re-titled during drive-in circulation then again for its video release in 1985 as The California Axe Massacre to capitalize on the hype of another new arrival to video, Tobe Hooper's cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film itself (actually filmed in North Carolina, not California) has little in common with Hooper's hit; the bloody revenge scenario is more reminiscent of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. It involves a gang of grimy fugitives who hole up in the rural abode of a pretty but unstable young woman (Leslie Lee) and proceed to abuse her and her grandfather. Of course, things get out of hand from there, and the hoods kill the old fogey, which brings gory retribution as the sweet young thing brandishes the title implement. Painfully cheap-looking, this tawdry exploiter is too slow-moving to sustain the interest of chop-em-up fans who might be lured by the title. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Leslie Lee, Jack Canon, (more)
