Joel Silver Movies

The plot of this action film begins in 1996, with Los Angeles in a violence-crazed conflagration. One of the LAPD's most notorious cops, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), known as "the demolition man," is in hot pursuit of blonde-haired psychopath Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), who is so nasty he even kills sometimes just because he feels cranky. John captures Simon, but not before Simon kills innocent hostages. John is blamed for the deaths of the hostages, and both he and Simon are cryogenically frozen to remove their brand of ultra-violence from a society that is simply just too violent. The film shifts to the future world of 2032, where Los Angeles has become a megalopolis called San Angeles. There is no poverty, Arnold Schwarzenegger was (at one time) president of the United States, and Taco Bell is the sole survivor of the Franchise Wars. Into this peaceful and bland society, Simon is summarily defrosted by reigning benevolent dictator Dr. Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne) to have Simon murder Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary), the leader of a group of underground rebels. But Cocteau bites off more than he can chew when the melted-down Simon proceeds to go on a murder-and-looting spree. Reluctantly, Cocteau defrosts John to hunt down his old adversary. As John adjusts to self-driving cars and having sex wearing helmets, he pairs up with Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), a bored cop with a nostalgic fascination for 20th-century culture. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Michael Lehmann directed this post-modernist hash of To Catch a Thief and The Naked Gun starring Bruce Willis as Hudson Hawk, a cat burglar who wants to go straight, but the circumstances won't allow it. The story begins in a pre-credit sequence that takes place in the renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci (Stefano Molinari) is rushing through his Mona Lisa painting to work on his latest invention -- a machine to turn lead into bronze. But Da Vinci makes a mistake and, instead of bronze, the machine turns the lead into gold. Realizing the danger of his invention if the contraption gets into the wrong hands, he hides three parts of the apparatus inside three of his other works. Four hundred years later, Hudson Hawk, the world's greatest cat burglar, is being released from jail after pulling a ten-year stretch. He wants to retire from the profession of cat burglary and drink some cappuccino, but two screwball billionaires -- Darwin and Minerva Mayflower (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard) -- won't let him. Their nefarious plot is to steal the three Da Vinci works, restore Da Vinci's gold-making machine, and destroy the world's monetary system. They blackmail Hawks into working with them to steal the Da Vincis by threatening the life of Hawks's pal Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello). Along with the power-mad billionaires, Hawks has to deal with the CIA, in the person of George Kaplan (James Coburn), breathing down his neck. He also has Vatican art restorer Anna Baragli (Andie MacDowell) falling for his smirk. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Ricochet, a suspenseful, exciting police thriller that loses its way at the end, is the story of a good cop whose life is destroyed by an obsessed psychotic criminal whom he sent to prison years before. Nick (Denzel Washington) is a successful happily married police officer with a distinguished record. He is drugged, kidnapped and framed by Blake (John Lithgow) who has never forgiven him for arresting him years before. Nick must redeem himself both to the police force, his family and the public who had come to love and respect him. Denzel Washington is excellent in his role of the good man in an impossible situation. John Lithgow, while always interesting, is completely over-the-top as the psychotic criminal, and the film looses plausibility during an extended and highly improbable and unbelievable final chase sequence around the Watts Towers. Despite these flaws, Ricochet is an exiting suspense film with a fine performance by Washington and worth watching despite its disappointing conclusion. ~ Linda Rasmussen, Rovi

This special effects-heavy science fiction sequel moves the action from the first film's Amazon forest to the urban jungle of L.A. Danny Glover stars as Lt. Mike Harrigan, an LAPD detective baffled by his latest case, the ritualistic slaughter of several drug dealers by a devastating killer who leaves no traces. As Harrigan and his partners, Danny Archuletta (Ruben Blades), Leona Cantrell (Maria Conchita Alonso), and Jerry Lambert (Bill Paxton), try to figure out who or what killed the criminals, FBI investigator Stephen Keyes (Gary Busey) attempts to warn the team away from investigating further. When two of his team are killed in a particularly grisly way, Harrigan uncovers the truth -- their quarry is an alien creature that hunts humans for sport. Attracted to violence, its latest choice of prey is gun-toting Jamaican drug dealers. Keyes and his team know all about the nasty extraterrestrial and its bloody pastime because they've been studying it for ten years, and they've come up with a possible means of dispatching the beast. When that plan backfires, however, it comes down to Harrigan and an extremely irritated otherworldly foe, slugging it out in a rooftop confrontation. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

It isn't often that a popular TV series is inspired by a literary property that all but destroyed a particular industry, but such was the case with the weekly, half-hour horror anthology Tales From the Crypt. Most of the episodes depicted herein were based on stories originally published in the EC comic book series Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Shock Superstories in the 1950s. In these grim little morality plays, a number of nasty characters deservedly met grisly fates appropriate to their misdeeds. Examples included the compulsive neat freak who is cut up into little pieces and then tidily repackaged into carefully labeled mason jars, or the homicidal baseball player whose bloody body parts are used as bats, balls, and bases in a grim nocturnal ball game played by the vengeful teammates of his last victim. It was this sort of merry mayhem that brought down the wrath of professional do-gooders (such as the infamous Dr. Frederick Wertham) and their political co-conspirators, who demanded that the comic book industry immediately purge itself of all horror magazines -- and never mind these were among the best written and illustrated comics in the business.
At any rate, the old EC comics had become classics by the time Tales From the Crypt made its HBO debut on June 10, 1989. The series, like the comic books that inspired it, was hosted by the ghoulish "Cryptkeeper," seen here as a skeletal animatronic puppet whose voice was provided by actor John Kassir. Cracking delightfully gruesome jokes all the while, The Cryptkeeper introduced each episode, and showed up at the denouement to make a few additional creepy comments. In keeping with the standards set by the comics, the individual episodes dealt primarily with unpleasant people who were given their just desserts in an even more unpleasant fashion, usually with supernatural assistance. Several top filmmakers contributed their directorial talents to Tales from the Crypt, among them Robert Zemeckis, Walter Hill, Steven E. de Souza, John Frankenheimer, Elliot Silverstein, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks. The casts were equally impressive, boasting the likes of Joe Pantoliano, Amanda Plummer, Kirk Douglas, Miguel Ferrer, Teri Hatcher, Harry Anderson, Teri Garr, Beau Bridges, Christopher Reeve, Mimi Rogers, Martin Sheen, Shelley Hack, Natasha Richardson, and Ewan McGregor. The seven seasons of Tales from the Crypt, totalling 93 episodes, aired first in uncut, uncensored form on HBO, then were rebroadcast with a few judicious trims and expurgations here and there by the Fox Network. The last first-run episode was telecast July 19, 1996. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Love, treachery, and broken furniture are the hallmarks of this rollicking action drama. Dalton (Patrick Swayze) has a Ph.D., but rather than make a living teaching Socrates at some university, he's opted to become a top-drawer "cooler" -- an expert barroom bouncer who can break up fights without getting himself killed in the process. Dalton is hired to keep the peace at the Double Duce, a rough-and-tumble honky tonk in Jasper, Missouri, where beer-soaked free-for-alls are a nightly event. Dalton is hurt on his first night on the job, and he is patched up by "Doc" Clay (Kelly Lynch), a beautiful woman working as the town's physician. Dalton and Doc immediately hit it off, but Dalton learns that another man, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), already has his eye on her. Wesley is a man used to getting his way; he's an extortionist and crime boss who has nearly everyone in Jasper under his thumb, and he sets out to teach Dalton a lesson, while Dalton is determined to clean up the town like he breaks up brawls at the Double Duce. Sam Elliott plays Dalton's mentor Wade, and Red West, a one-time member of Elvis Presley's "Memphis Mafia," appears as Webster; Canadian blues-rock guitarist Jeff Healey leads the Double Duce house band. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Ex-football player Carl Weathers stars in this violent action film as Detroit policeman Jericho Jackson. The dedicated but brutal cop is plunged into nefarious doings concerning a crooked industrialist (Craig T. Nelson) and his drug-addicted girlfriend (pop-singer Vanity), breaking many people's bones before solving the case. Sharon Stone stands out in a cast of genre veterans including Nicholas Worth, Sonny Landham, and Robert Davi. Heavy on the sex and violence, this film harkens back to the glory days of 1970s blaxploitation, but is a bit too mean-spirited to be as much fun. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

It's Christmas time in L.A., and there's an employee party in progress on the 30th floor of the Nakatomi Corporation building. The revelry comes to a violent end when the partygoers are taken hostage by a group of terrorists headed by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), who plan to steal the 600 million dollars locked in Nakatomi's high-tech safe. In truth, Gruber and his henchmen are only pretending to be politically motivated to throw the authorities off track; also in truth, Gruber has no intention of allowing anyone to get out of the building alive. Meanwhile, New York cop John McClane (Bruce Willis) has come to L.A. to visit his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who happens to be one of the hostages. Disregarding the orders of the authorities surrounding the building, McClane, who fears nothing (except heights), takes on the villains, armed with one handgun and plenty of chutzpah. Until Die Hard came along, Bruce Willis was merely that wisecracking guy on Moonlighting. After the film's profits started rolling in, Willis found himself one of the highest-paid and most sought-after leading men in Hollywood. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has a code of honor which he will not violate, even when his life depends on it. Paradoxically, his code of honor gives him the backbone to survive as a military special forces operative when he is sent on a covert mission to rescue another group which was sent in to assist some nefarious U.S. government plan in a Latin American country. Once there, he encounters an old army buddy (Carl Weathers) who has gotten too deep in the CIA's good graces for Dutch's comfort. When he and his team go into the jungle to rescue the others, they get involved in a pitched battle with local guerillas, but they are more than capable of besting these vicious fighters. However, not long after that, they encounter signs that the equally capable men they were sent to rescue were all killed unawares and in an unusually gruesome fashion. Given their training, it should have been impossible for anyone to best all of these commando warriors. Soon, the men from Dutch's own team get picked off one by one, as they grow aware that they are up against something uncanny, not of this world, something that is hunting them for sport. Why? Because their skills make them worthy opponents for the perfectly camouflaged Predator. This carefully paced action movie was given poor reviews by many movie critics, but was sufficiently satisfying for its (largely male) audiences that a successful sequel (Predator 2) was released in 1990. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

The seventh cinema adaptation of the venerable stage farce Brewster's Millions stars Richard Pryor as Montgomery Brewster, a third-rate baseball player. Much to his amazement, Brewster discovers that he is related to deceased millionaire Rupert Horn (Hume Cronyn, who appears only in a videotaped "living will"). Even more amazing is the fact that Horn has left Brewster his entire $300 million fortune. The catch? Brewster must spend $30 million within 30 days, or he'll be left with nothing (in the earlier incarnations of Brewster's Millions, the hero was required to spend only a million, but this was, after all, the inflationary '80s). Aiding and abetting Brewster in his efforts to divest himself of his money are his catcher pal (John Candy) and an erstwhile lady friend (Lonette McKee), while his principal antagonist is a snotty attorney (Stephen Collins). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

John Hughes's third directorial effort, Weird Science, follows in the tradition of his previous teen-centered films, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith play the wannabe hipster Gary and his nebbish weak-willed best friend, Wyatt, a pair of high-school geeks who are hapless with members of the opposite sex. Using Wyatt's computer, they create what they believe is the ideal woman. A lightning storm brings that woman to life, and she takes the form of Kelly Le Brock. Lisa sets about building their self-confidence, but trouble begins brewing when Wyatt's cruel, military-minded older brother, Chet (Bill Paxton), begins to realize that something is not as it should be. Hughes would finish his cycle of high-school themed films with his next movie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

A variation on the "buddy-cop" hybridized genre, 48 HRS. greatly bolstered the career of Nick Nolte and made comedian Eddie Murphy a bonafide box-office sensation. When a pair of reckless cop-killers break out of prison, grizzled detective Jack Cates (Nolte) is left no alternative but to spring fast-talking hustler Reggie Hammond (Murphy) from the penitentiary in order to find the criminals. The catch: the pair only have 48 hours to complete their assignment before Hammond must return to prison. Naturally, the two despise each other and even engage in fisticuffs, but eventually the danger facing them proves a strong enough common bond for them to play on the same team, and even achieve a little mutual admiration. ~ Jeremy Beday, Rovi