Cliff De Young

Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), a troubled teenage girl who has previously attempted suicide, has just moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles with her father (Cliff De Young) and stepmother. She enrolls in a local Catholic high school, but has trouble fitting in. During French class, her classmate Bonnie (Neve Campbell) witnesses Sarah telekinetically causing a pencil to rotate while standing on its tip. During lunch, Sarah is hit on by Chris (Skeet Ulrich), the school's football star. She asks about Bonnie and her two friends Nancy (Fairuza Balk) and Rochelle (Rachel True). Chris tells Sarah to stay away from the trio, because "they're witches". Bonnie tells Nancy and Rochelle that Sarah is the "fourth" who will complete their circle and make a full coven. The three girls each have issues: Nancy lives in a trailer with her mom, Grace Downs (Helen Shaver) and abusive stepfather Ray (John Kapelos) , Bonnie has massive burn scars all over her back, and the painful treatment recommended by the surgeon (Brenda Strong) is likely to fail. Insecure African American athlete Rochelle is subjected to racist taunts by the most popular girl in school, blonde Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor). After school, the three girls befriend Sarah and take her to an occult shop. The owner, Lirio (Assumpta Serna), comments that Sarah is not like the other girls and says to her: "Maybe you are a natural witch; your power comes from within." While leaving the shop, Sarah is harassed by a vagrant (Arthur Senzy), and all four girls simultaneously will for something to happen; the vagrant is then hit by a car. The girls escape, and Nancy is thrilled at their "connection". Nancy tells Sarah about "invoking the Spirit" Manon, which is their ultimate goal as a coven. Sarah leaves the girls to meet Chris, but refuses to have sex with him. However, at school the next day, Sarah discovers that Chris boasted to the whole school that they slept together, and that she was the worst he's ever had. Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle comfort Sarah, and invite her on a field trip. They take the bus out to the country. The bust drivers tells them to be careful about wicked boys, but they say that they four are the dangerous ones. While on the countryside, they call the corners and cast some spells: Rochelle asks for the strength not to hate those who hate her, Sarah performs a love spell on Chris, Bonnie asks for beauty inside and out, and Nancy asks for "all the power of Manon." Shortly after the spells are cast, they show signs of working: Chris becomes infatuated with Sarah and goes after her constantly in spite of his friends Mitt (Breckin Meyer) and Trey (Nathaniel Marston) taunting him about it, Bonnie's scars miraculously heal, and the next time Laura bullies Rochelle, Laura's hair begins falling out. At home, Nancy causes the microwave and all light bulbs to explode, and Ray suffers a massive heart attack and dies. Then Nancy and her mother are told by the insurance man (Brogan Roche) that they have inherited $175,000 from an insurance policy, and they feel overjoyed about it. Nancy and her mother move into a posh high-rise where the girls meet one night and learn disguise-changing magic. Nancy's mother looks confused and dazzled. She has bought a weird-coloured sofa and a jukebox with only songs by Connie Francis. The four friends lock themselves in Nancy's room ignoring Nancy's mother, who is left empty and ignored, just as she felt before cashing in on the insurance money. The girls go to Lirio's shop again, where Nancy finds a book about "Invoking the Spirit". Later that night, the girls go to the beach and form a circle, calling on Manon. At the culmination of the spell Nancy is struck by lightning. The next day the rest of the girls witness Nancy walking on the water, and from this point on, Nancy's powers have increased. Later on, Rochelle sees a balding Laura in the locker room, hysterically sobbing after swim practice. Laura's two closest friends (Elizabeth Guber and Jennifer Greenhut) try to offer some consolation, to no avail. Rochelle feels remorse for the spell she has cast and when she looks in the mirror at herself, her reflection looks away. Sarah's love spell also backfires on her. She finally accepts to have a dinner date with Chris, but he takes her to the top of a hill and attempts to rape her. Sarah runs away and knocks on Nancy's door. Nancy leaves her home for a party Chris is attending in order to punish him. However, when she arrives to the party, she tries to seduce Chris by disguising herself as Sarah, but when the real Sarah arrives as they engage in foreplay, Nancy causes Chris to fall out a third-story window, killing him. On consequence of this, Sarah starts having nightmares concerning her old friends, and feels like they're following her everywhere to torment her. She tries to stop Nancy - who has become the leader of the three remaining coven witches - by binding her powers so that she won't be able to hurt other or herself, but this does not work and the three other coven girls now hate Sarah. Nancy appears and tells Sarah that in the old days, if a witch betrayed her coven, they would kill her. Needing help, Sarah goes to Lirio, who tells her to invoke the spirit herself. Lirio also reveals that Sarah's mother was a powerful witch, and that her talent has passed on to Sarah. Sarah starts to invoke Manon, but she has a vision of fire and the shop exploding, so she leaves the shop absolutely terrified.. Sarah returns home, where she is tormented by Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle, who taunt her using magic and intimidate her with threats on her life. Sarah arrives home and nobody is there. She is instructed to turn on the TV set and listens that her family went back to San Francisco thinking that she had run away there, and that their plane had had an accident without any survivors. Without a second of rest, all kinds of snakes and worm appear everywhere. The three other coven girls then appear. After a few seconds of intimidation Nancy says that Sarah will commit suicide. Nancy later slashes Sarah's wrists and a letter on Sarah's handwriting stating the reasons of her suicide magically appear - blaming herself for Chris' death. Sarah runs to her room, while Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle wait for her to die. Rochelle then tells Nancy that this has gone out of hand. Nancy tells her to go upstairs to check on Sarah and threatens to slit her throat if she doesn't. Bonnie pulls up Rochelle to Sarah's room. Sarah is almost too weak to invoke Manon, but then she hears her mother (Janet Eilber) moving in an old photograph and her sweet voice whispering, "Don't be afraid. Reach inside yourself". Sarah successfully invokes Manon and is able to cast spells to fight back, as well as heal the injuries to her wrists. Forced by a counter spell of Sarah's to see themselves and what they've become by catching their reflections in a mirror, Bonnie's face horribly scarred and Rochelle's hair falling out, Bonnie and Rochelle flee, leaving only Nancy and Sarah at home. Nancy and Sarah have a showdown, in which Nancy is ultimately defeated by Sarah as she binds Nancy's power to prevent her from doing any more harm. In the end, Nancy has been sent to a psychiatric hospital, and Bonnie and Rochelle lose any powers they had. They go to see Sarah and half-mockingly tell her not to be angry with them because when Sarah was made to believe that her family had died it was just an illusion. Sarah's father is packing everything in his car to move out of LA. The two girls ask Sarah if she still has any powers, and when she shows no interest in continuing a friendship with the two girls who tried to kill her, they make fun of her as they leave, saying, "She probably doesn't have powers, anyway". On hearing this Sarah makes a bolt of lightning strike causing a tree branch to fall, nearly crushing the two girls, revealing that she still has powers. As they stare back at her in shock, Sarah warns them, "Be careful. You don't wanna end up like Nancy", and smiles. The scene cuts to a bird's eye view of Nancy's room in the psychiatric hospital. She is screaming like a maniac, telling the nurse (Esther Scott), "He gave me powers! I can fly, I'm flying, I'm flying, I'm flying!"

At last the Feds have caught him! Infamous 60's radical Huey Walker is heading for jail. So how come it's Huey's yuptight FBI escort who ends up behind bars? In 1989, clean-cut FBI man John Buckner is detailed to escort heavily-bearded Huey Walker back to jail for offenses dating back to his days as a celebrated hippie radical. After Walker dupes Buckner on the train he falls into the hands of a couple of well-meaning refugees from the 60's, the two men with apparently nothing in common find themselves on the run together. But appearances can be deceptive. —Jeremy Perkins {J-26} The young FBI agent John Buckner is instructed to bring Huey Walker, a hippie from the sixties, to prison. They travel by train, and of course, Huey tries to escape. John loses his freedom and his identity through one of Huey's tricks: He plies him with drink and takes his gun, his handcuffs and his passport. Now John ends up in jail instead of Huey... When the mistake is discovered, John sets off in pursuit of Huey. —Tony Kessen <rhkessen@cs.vu.nl>

A visiting son tries to warn his father and stepmother that they are being menaced by a living and intelligent pulse of electricity that moves from house to house and terrorizes the residents therein. In a suburb in Los Angeles, California, the divorced Bill welcomes his beloved son David with his new wife Ellen to spend a few days with him. David lives with his mother in Colorado, and befriends his neighbor Stevie. When Bill and Ellen have to go to a party, David prefers to stay home alone watching a baseball game on TV. Out of the blue, weird things happen at home with the TV and other electric appliances. Then Stevie tells him that their neighbor went crazy and destroyed his house. David snoops around in the house and meets an old man, who tells him that there is a deadly and intelligent pulse of electricity running through the electrical grid. David is afraid and discloses the information to Bill and Ellen, but they do not believe in him. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil An intelligent pulse of electricity is moving from house to house. It terrorizes the occupants by taking control of the appliances, either killing them or causing them to wreck the house in an effort to destroy it. Then it travels along the power lines to the next house, and the terror restarts. Having thus wrecked one household in a quiet neighbourhood, the pulse finds itself in the home of a boy's divorced father whom he is visiting. It gradually takes control of everything, badly injures the stepmother, and traps father and son, who must fight their way out. —Cynan Rees <cynanrees@hotmail.com>

The story opens at a fancy Manhattan restaurant where an elegantly dressed woman is enjoying a night out. As she and her companion enjoy a fine dinner, another man walks up to her with a submachine gun and begins blasting, killing several people. He confronts the woman last and shoots her dead over her pleas. Suddenly a voice yells "CUT!!" The restaurant is actually a movie set and the murdered woman, Ellen Keith (Diane Venora), pops up. The shooting was a illusion created by her boyfriend, Rollie Tyler (Bryan Brown) a visual effects wizard. Tyler, working with his assistant, Andy (Martha Gehman), is approached by a man claiming to be a producer who wants to hire Tyler for his next film. At Rollie's shop in SoHo, the producer, after being scared out of his wits by a giant rubber monster that Rollie has wired to his front door, reveals that he isn't actually in the movie business but is an agent working for the Justice Department named Lipton (Cliff De Young). He wants Rollie to work his expertise in creating the illusion that a mob boss, Nick DeFranco (Jerry Orbach), has been killed publicly. DeFranco is set to testify to a grand jury about the Mafia's inner dealings and Justice wants him to appear murdered until the jury hearing. Rollie is emphatically reluctant at first but when he meets with Lipton's boss, Mason (Mason Adams), he's baited into the job when they mention Rollie's biggest competitor in the business. Rollie decides to take the job. Lipton meets Rollie at his shop and is surprised when he finds Rollie pointing a gun at him. Rollie questions him in a rapid-fire manner and fires a shot with a blank cartridge. Lipton is angered by the exchange but backs off a bit when Rollie shows him how the illusion he'll use works on the monster rigged to his door. It involves a radio transmitter and explosive squibs to simulate bullet hits. Lipton is impressed. Lipton brings DeFranco by to have him rigged for the illusion: Rollie takes a plaster cast of DeFranco's upper chest and head and builds the plates necessary to place the squibs on the mob boss. Mason later meets with Rollie personally and asks him to be the trigger man since he knows the job and can work the equipment better than anyone else. Rollie becomes very reluctant but agrees with the promise that he'll be fully protected. Outside the restaurant where the assassination is planned, Rollie and Lipton get DeFranco ready. Rollie notices Lipton playing with the prop pistol and orders him to put it down. At first DeFranco is hesitant to try the radio box used to trigger the squibs because of his pacemaker but Rollie proves the amperage won't have an effect. DeFranco is sent out to the restaurant and Lipton has Rollie destroy the plaster casting of DeFranco's head. The assassination goes off perfectly and Rollie runs out of the place and jumps in a car with Lipton and a driver. After questioning Rollie about how the stunt went, he pulls a gun on Rollie, saying he's a loose end. Rollie grapples with Lipton and the car careens into a construction site and crashes. Rollie escapes to a pay phone a few blocks away and calls Mason. Mason tells Rollie that Lipton might be a mole they've been looking for. He tells Rollie to stay by the phone and that an NYPD car will pick him up. Rollie gives the phone booth to another person and hides nearby. When the cops show up they riddle the booth with bullets, killing the other caller. Rollie escapes again, going to Ellen's apartment in SoHo. He tries to figure out the turn of events and determines that Mason and Lipton will continue to hunt him. When he and Ellen wake up the next morning, she suggests he call the media. When she steps to the window and opens the curtain, she's immediately shot through the chest. Rollie looks for her killer with a compact mirror and then has to hide when he hears someone approaching the loft door. He surprises the assassin and manages to tie him up briefly. After he checks on Ellen, who's dead, he beats the assassin, demanding to know if he works for Mason. The assassin puts up a good fight but Rollie eventually knocks him cold with a steam iron and beats him to death. Before he leaves her loft, he takes Ellen's body and places it on her bed. The NYPD sends a homicide team to the apartment. One of them, Mickey (Joe Grifasi) calls another detective, Leo McCarthy (Brian Dennehy) to the scene. After getting some of the details, he reports to police plaza downtown and runs into Lt. Murdoch, who'd just had a meeting with Lipton and Mason about DeFranco's murder. Mason and Lipton had played up the angle that DeFranco had somehow slipped them to get to the restaurant. Though Mason gives Lipton and chewing out, it's a ruse designed to throw Murdoch off the trail. When Leo finds Murdoch, he offers to take the DeFranco murder off his hands -- previously, Leo had been the lead investigator who'd brought DeFranco in. Murdoch refuses to give up the case. Leo checks with a records specialist, Velez (Jossie DeGuzman) and finds out that the dead man in Ellen's apartment, Adams, has virtually no information available as to his current position. Mickey arrives and tells Leo that Ellen and Rollie had been a hot item before her murder and that Rollie had disappeared a couple of days before. Leo charges Mickey with finding Rollie's address and Velez with finding out more about Adams. Rollie places a call to his assistant Andy and tells her to meet him at the boathouse at the Conservatory in Central Park. She arrives, towing a small makeup kit and one of Mason's men. Andy gives the man a boat under the pretext of it being a signal to meet Rollie, but when the man puts the boat in the water, Rollie charges him, pushing him into the pond. Rollie and Andy escape into the park, finding refuge in a hidden chamber under a pedestrian bridge. Rollie explains a little of the situation and disguises them as homeless people. Rollie later calls Mason, using a simple trick with payphones and telling Lipton to meet him at a specific location. When Lipton gets into his car, Rollie throws a garrote around his neck and forces him to drive to a remote location. He takes Andy out of the trunk and puts Lipton in, demanding to know Mason's address. When Lipton refuses, he smashes the rear end of the car into several obstacles until the beaten Lipton agrees to talk. Leo and Mickey enter Rollie's shop without a warrant, scared by the rubber monster. After looking around a bit, Leo finds a connection: the fake bullet hits to the monster match those that killed DeFranco. Before he can clear his name, Rollie needs to get his van out of the impound lot on the West Side. Leo had charged Mickey with watching the van. Rollie and Andy sneak into the lot. Rollie has Andy place several small and harmless explosives around the lot as a distraction. Rollie roars out of the lot and Mickey gives chase, following Rollie through the meatpacking district in Chelsea. Rollie and Andy are able to place a few traps that stop the cops but Mickey persists until Andy throws a mannequin into the street, stopping the chase. Rollie suddenly pulls over, thinking something's wrong with his truck. He fools Andy into stepping out and he takes off, not wanting her to get involved any further. Leo, having found out that DeFranco is staying at Mason's house, wants to go out there and arrest him but his superior officer puts him on suspension for interfering with the case. Leo appears to take it pretty hard but does so to steal the Captain's badge. He goes to Mason's mansion and gets the local police to help him secure the front gate. Meanwhile, Rollie has managed to subdue several of Mason's guards and sneak into the house. He uses sound effects devices and a mirror sheet to fool some of them into killing each other. Rollie also trips a few fuses to cut power to certain rooms. He tricks DeFranco into shooting out several windows in the living room and falls into the room, allegedly shot to death. When DeFranco tries to leave the house, he touches a door rigged by Rollie to shock him. The surge scrambles his pacemaker and he falls to the floor, near death. Mason gets DeFranco to give him the key to a safe deposit box in Geneva that contains all the money he kept or stole from his Mafia days in cash. Rollie finds Mason getting ready to leave the house and hold him at bay with DeFranco's Uzi. Mason tries to talk his way out, giving Rollie the key and promising him a large share of DeFranco's money. Rollie considers it for a moment and lays the Uzi down on a sideboard, hovering over it for a few moments. When Mason grabs the Uzi, Rollie tells him it's unloaded and that he'd smeared Krazy Glue on the grips. Rollie pushes Mason out the front door where he's shot to death by the police when he can't let go of the gun. Leo and the local cops clear the area, finding DeFranco's dead body, as well as that of Rollie. When Rollie's body arrives at the morgue, he slips himself out of the body bag and peels off Latex skin he'd covered his neck and wrists with to fool the paramedics into thinking he had no pulse. He climbs out a window and is stopped immediately by Leo. The story closes with Rollie wearing a mask of DeFranco's face and emptying the safe deposit box in Geneva. He meets Leo outside and the two drive off.

The film opens in a New York night club. The gothic rock band Bauhaus is onstage performing the song "Bela Lugosi's Dead." In the crowd are John and Miriam Blaylock (David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve). Stylishly dressed and predatory, they stalk the crowd and connect with a young couple (John Stephen Hill, Ann Magnuson). The couple takes them back to their home, where John and Miriam seduce them before viciously slashing their throats. John and Miriam are vampires, although not in any traditional sense; lacking fangs, they use ancient Egyptian pendants to cut open the jugulars of their victims. The center of their strange existence is Miriam. She is an immortal being, able to pass along her supernatural qualities to selected human beings that she chooses to be her lovers. However, her progeny are not truly immortal as she is, and sooner or later, usually after 300 years or so, they find themselves suddenly and rapidly getting old. However, the progeny are unable to die, but continue to live forever withered, in a fully conscious, vegetative state. Miriam packs their decaying, aging bodies in caskets that she keeps in the attic of her residence. In the 18th century, Miriam offered this gift of immortality to John, who eagerly accepted, as had all her previous lovers through the ages. Suddenly, John develops trouble sleeping, and starts aging at a rapid rate. Miriam is aware of the significance of this happening, and she goes looking for a famous gerontologist, Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), desperately seeking her help for a cure for John's fast deterioration. She makes contact with Dr. Roberts, and through her psychic powers, finds out that the doctor is just guessing, and that her research is inconclusive. Therefore, John, as all her lovers before him, is doomed to extinction. John also attempts to meet with Dr. Roberts at her clinic, but she dismisses his claims as delusional and leaves him to sit in the waiting room, hoping that he will grow bored and leave. John ages decades within a few short hours, and when Sarah sees him later, she begs John to stay so she can examine him. But John refuses to speak to her, his hunger for blood nearly overpowering him and forcing him to leave in search of a victim. Driven by his bloodlust and desperation to reverse the aging process, John makes a kill out of young Alice (Beth Ehlers), a music student that he and Miriam are tutoring. Her blood does nothing to help John, and he eventually falls down a flight of stairs at the townhouse, his legs no longer able to support his own weight. Miriam carries John's withering body up to the attic and puts him in a casket, next to several other caskets containing her earlier lovers. Later on, when Dr. Roberts shows up at Miriam's door looking for John, Miriam sees in the doctor a replacement for John in her life; it is love at first sight for Miriam, and she immediately proceeds to seduce Sarah. Sarah is a willing participant in Miriam's seduction, but she doesn't know that Miriam has now transformed her into a vampire, just as she did to John and her other lovers. Lieutenant Allegrezza (Dan Hedaya) shows up at Miriam's house looking for Alice, and is immediately suspicious of Miriam, although he has no real proof of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Sarah begins to manifest symptoms of vampirism. She is ravenously hungry, but eating normal food makes her vomit. She also starts seeing Miriam everywhere she looks. Finally she confronts Miriam about what happened between them on that day, and Miriam vaguely states that she has given Sarah eternal life, and that they belong to one another now. Sarah rejects what Miriam has told her, but she does understand that something terrible has happened to her. Sarah and her partners at the clinic, including Sarah's boyfriend, Tom Haver (Cliff De Young), cannot find a cure for the change that is occurring in Sarah's blood, and in desperation Sarah returns to Miriam. Miriam arranges for Sarah to make her first kill, bringing back a male prostitute, but Sarah is unwilling to take a human life. Finally, Tom arrives at the townhouse looking for Sarah following her disappearance, and is surprised to find that Sarah is there. Miriam knows that Sarah's hunger is now beyond reason, and when she takes Tom to Sarah, Sarah kills him for his blood. Miriam is now convinced that she has found her new lover, and she tells Sarah that they will now share an eternity together. Sarah, however, is wracked with guilt over taking Tom's life, and she attempts suicide by cutting her own throat with Miriam's ankh as they kiss. Sarah's blood pours into Miriam's throat and then Sarah collapses. Miriam is horrified at what Sarah has done, but she dutifully carries Sarah's limp body into the attic to place her among her other desiccated lovers. This time, however, she finds her crumbling lovers now out of their coffins, waiting for her. The sudden intake of Sarah's blood has caused a change in Miriam. Suddenly released from Miriam's spell, the lovers crumble into dust as Miriam herself begins to wither. The film's conclusion shows Lieutenant Allegrezza returning to question Miriam, only to find that the townhouse is now mysteriously empty and up for sale, all of the luxurious furnishings in the home gone and the money funneled to the sleep clinic where Sarah, presumably missing, used to work. In the final shot, Sarah herself is seen living in a high-rise luxury apartment with a couple lovers, while Miriam, imprisoned in a coffin just as she did to her own lovers, screams for her release.

When three automotive factory workers who're struggling financially try to steal from their own labor union, they discover corruption, and reluctantly decide to use this information for blackmail. Three workers, Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto), are working at a car plant and drinking their beers together. One night, when they steal away from their wives to have some fun, they get the idea to rob the local union's bureau safe. First they think it is a flop, because they get only six hundred dollars out of it, but then Zeke realizes that they also have gotten some "hot" material. They decide to blackmail their union. The best reason for that is the union itself. All three are provoked by the fact that the union claims to have lost ten thousand dollars by their robbery. —Oliver Heidelbach Three auto workers at a car factory in Detroit rail against the injustice they see and their lot in life. They are barely getting by and factory management are always hounding them and generally making their life a misery. Their union should be looking out for them but does nothing. They then decide to rob the union's head office but find something much more valuable: evidence of shady dealings by the union. However, what should have been their ticket to a reasonable amount of money turns into a life-threatening situation. —grantss