David Hyde Pierce

A troubled actor begins to unravel while shooting a horror film. His estranged daughter wonders if he's slipping back into his past addictions or if there's something more sinister at play.

Frank Detorre is a widowed slovenly zookeeper at the Sucat Memorial Zoo in Rhode Island. Much to the frustration of his young daughter, Shane , he eats compulsively unhealthy and has minimal concern for germs or disease. While trying to eat a hard-boiled egg with mayonnaise and salt, it is stolen from him by a chimpanzee. He gets it back, but not before it falls into the filth of the chimp's habitat. When Shane is disgusted by him about to eat it he uses the "ten second rule" as a justification for the unsanitary act. Inside Frank's body, Osmosis "Ozzy" Jones, an agent of the Frank PD, is an adventure-seeking white blood cell with a good sense of humor. He is a rebel cop, frequently disobeying authority to do what he thinks is right. He is often mocked by his fellow cops due to his rebellious nature. He has been relocated to the mouth to fight against germs entering the body via ingestion after he induced Frank to vomit all over Shane's science and P. E. teacher, Mrs. Boyd at the school's science fair. This was considered a false alarm because he had been the only one to suspect an incoming pathological threat from the raw oyster Frank had eaten from one of the displays. After several newcomer germs, believed to be gingivitis, hijack a "squad car" in the mouth, Osmosis and another officer in an FPD helicopter, are pulled into the lungs by a massive yawn while in pursuit. After the germs evade capture and pass into "Immunity's" jurisdiction, Osmosis disobeys direct orders as he pursues the germ on foot and accidentally triggers a major cramp in Frank's leg. Meanwhile, Mayor Phlegmming is preparing for re-election, campaigning with the promise of more junk food. His reckless policies are largely responsible for Frank's deteriorating health, but his re-election hopes are complicated by the arrival of Thrax, a deadly virus that came with the hard-boiled egg. In an attempt to cover up the severity of the situation, Phlegmming "tells" Frank to take a cold-suppressant pill. The pill, Drixenol "Drix" Koldreliff, arrives in the body and covers Frank's infected throat with a disinfectant to soothe the irritation. Osmosis is assigned as Drix's partner, much to their mutual chagrin. Later on, an influenza virus tells Osmosis and Drix about Thrax's plot to masquerade as a common cold while at the same time plotting to kill Frank with a high fever. Osmosis and Drix confront Thrax in a club in one of Frank's zits, where Drix launches a grenade of medication at Thrax and his goons, popping the skin blemish, killing nearly all of Thrax's men, and seemingly ending the virus's siege. The pop of the zit further aggravates Mrs. Boyd, when Frank comes to apologize for his earlier action of vomiting on her at the science fair. Thrax survives the explosion and after killing off his remaining henchmen, launches a lone assault on Frank's hypothalamus gland (the portion of the brain that controls the temperature) by disabling its self-regulative capabilities. There, he uses his virus-infecting claw to destroy the protoplasmic barrier around the gland and takes a DNA bead. Soon after, the mayor's secretary, Leah Estrogen, discovers his sabotage and alerts security. Thrax manages to evade them, taking Leah hostage and escapes from the brain to the mouth. Meanwhile, the temperature continues to rise, causing chaos to break out all over the City of Frank. Frank is taken to the hospital under the influence of Thrax's attack. Ozzy and Drix rescue Leah and confront Thrax, who leaves Frank's mouth after causing confusion using pollen. Osmosis and Thrax fight on one of Shane's eyeballs and end up on Shane's false eyelashes after she blinks, which she was wearing atop her natural ones on her way to a hiking trip. During the fight, Thrax threatens to kill Shane, but Ozzy causes him to knock Shane's false eyelash into a vessel of alcohol below, where he dissolves. During this time, the situation becomes even more dangerous when the temperature hits 108 degrees Fahrenheit, causing Frank to go into cardiac arrest. Just as doctors give up, Frank is revived when Ozzy returns to his body with one of Shane's tears with the missing hypothalamus chromosome. Ozzy is reinstated into "Immunity" with full privileges, he and Drix are declared heroes with the Chief of Police giving Ozzy his job back. Having survived Thrax's attack, Frank has begun to improve his diet and personal hygiene. Meanwhile, Phlegmming has lost his position as mayor and is now a janitor in the bowels. He accidentally ejects himself from the body via the rectum by touching a button that is important and marked "DO NOT TOUCH!" which triggers Frank's farting.

Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), an editor-in-chief of a large, New York City publishing house, is driving home to Manhattan from Vermont on a cold March night. The road is quite dark and icy and he hits a large wolf with his car. While he inspects the wolf's body and tries to drag it off the road, the uninjured wolf, playing dead, suddenly bites him and trots off. Will walks slowly back to his car, noticing that several other wolves are watching him in the woods nearby, their yellow eyes glowing in the dark. Will makes it back home to his penthouse and his wife, Charlotte. He ends up sleeping for some 20 hours, waking up only when Charlotte comes home in the evening. They have dinner together and Will becomes very passionate with her, to her sly delight. When he returns to his office, he notices that his sense of smell is greatly enhanced; he can smell tequila on a coworker's breath as he passes him and hear every conversation going on among the office's other employees. Will is also able to edit a manuscript quickly and without his glasses. Will's new boss, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), a rich tycoon who has bought the publishing house, throws a lavish dinner party at his Long Island estate. He tells Will that he's demoted as chief editor and his replacement will be Will's protégé, Stewart Swinton (James Spader). Raymond offers Will a job as editor in Easter Europe. While stalking away from the meeting with Raymond, Will gets too close to a few prized horses Raymond is showing and they become spooked. Will also feels pain in his chest like a heart attack and is forced to sit down near a guest house. While he recovers, he meets Alden's headstrong daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is polite but sullen and withdrawn. She comforts him with a glass of liquor and firmly rebuffs Will's advances. Will rejoins Charlotte and Stewart and genially congratulates the latter on his promotion. Stewart, feigning incredulity, claims he had no knowledge of Raymond's decision until right before the party. Will and Charlotte drive home, both seething over the turn of events. At home later, with Charlotte out of town for work, Will takes several deep sniffs of a robe. He becomes very agitated and goes to Stewart's apartment. Steward lets Will in the building, tries to grab him to talk to reason with him and Will bites him viciously on the arm. Will jumps up the grand staircase to Stewart's apartment with seemingly superhuman agility and finds Charlotte there. Will stalks off without another word, leaving his wife unharmed. Will checks into Manhattan's Mayflower Hotel. The next day he consults his secretary Mary (Eileen Atkins) and his assistant Roy (David Hyde Pierce) and plots to draw his and Roy's clients into a new firm with new investors, a move that Will hasn't backed up with a shred of truth, much to the admiration of Mary and Roy. Will drives out to Raymond's estate again to tell him he's turning down the position in Eastern Europe. While leaving, Will sees Laura again, riding a horse nearby. The horse is spooked when it sees Will and throws Laura off. Raymond suddenly appears and, upon finding out that Laura is unharmed, takes another opportunity to slag Will, saying that he doesn't approve of Laura getting involved with Will. She turns down her father's offer of lunch and takes Will back to the guest house she's staying in. The two talk over peanut butter and jelly and wander around the estate. Will tells her about his encounter with the wolf and how he believes he might be becoming one. He feels sick again and lays down in her house while she tends to him. During the night he wakes up, clearly showing characteristics of a wolf and bounds out, hunting down a deer and killing it. In the morning Will finds himself on the bank of a stream, with blood all over his face and hands. He leaves immediately and sees his doctor, who tells him he's fine. Laura, believing Will had left her cold, refuses to take Will's calls. Will visits Dr. Vijav Alezais (Om Puri), a professor specializing in the supernatural. Alezais tells him that the wolf that bit Will was not a true werewolf but a demon wolf that simply passes the spirit of an animal on to it's victims. He also suggests that this spirit can be transmitted to another person simply through passion and that not all wolf spirits are evil, they are manipulated by the nature of the individual. The professor gives Will an amulet to protect him from turning completely into a wolf. Alezais also asks Will to bite him, as Alezais does not have long to live, and would prefer "demonization to death." After refusing, Randall keeps the amulet so that he won't transform at the next full moon. Calling Laura to explain, Randall, now a wolf, breaks into the Central Park Zoo and steals handcuffs from a policeman (David Schwimmer) who tries to arrest him. In another area of the park, muggers want his wallet, but he attacks and leaves one of them alive. He wakes up in his hotel, with no memory of what happened. Will outmanoeuvres Raymond and Stewart with his threat of stealing the publishing house's biggest authors. He finagles a new contract that will let him stay editor-in-chief and grant him a larger salary and greater authority. Raymond also grants him the opportunity to fire Stewart. The two meet in the men's room and although Stewart begs Will for a second chance, Will still fires him, urinating on his shoes. While washing his hands, he finds fingers in his handkerchief and realizes he killed someone, at least one of the muggers in Central Park. Will's biting of Steward when he discovered his affair with Charlotte has consequences. Stewart attacks and kills Charlotte and sets about framing Will for the murder. Will, who believes he's become too dangerous, handcuffs himself to the radiator in his hotel room and waits for Laura to arrive. She frees him against his objections and Will finally puts on the amulet Alezais had given him. The two spend the night together, having sex. The next day they both hear about Charlotte's murder and Will insists Laura take him to her father's estate and lock him in the horse stables. Laura gets a call from a Detective (Richard Jenkins), the chief investigator of Charlotte's death. He tells her that canine DNA was found on Charlotte's body. Alarmed, Laura goes to the police station. There she runs into Stewart, who makes an animal-like pass at her. Laura hurries away, making arrangements for her and Will to leave the country. Stewart follows her, viciously kills the two security guards on the property and attacks Laura, trying to rape her in front of Will in the stables. Will tears off the amulet, succumbs to the full power of the wolf and escapes confinement, attacking Stewart. The two fight ferociously until Stewart is shot to death by Laura when he tries to stab Will with a pair of garden shears. Will and Laura stare at each other, Will is frightened to touch her due his monstrous state. She looks at him with a loving glance and takes his hand but he still runs off, hiding in the woods where he makes a final transformation. Later, Jenkins arrives. Laura shows heightened senses while talking to the detective and the police that accompanied him, telling the detective that she can smell vodka on his breath. The final scene is a close-up of her face fading into dark, lupine eyes, and a close up of Will completing his transformation into a full werewolf.

A former radio DJ, suicidally despondent because of a terrible mistake he once made, finds redemption in helping a mentally unstable homeless man who was an innocent victim of that mistake. Jack Lucas was once a famous, arrogant and egotistical New York City call-in radio talk show host. Largely self-inflicted due to remorse and grief, Jack goes on a quick downward spiral, both personally and professionally, after a glib comment he makes to one of his regular callers results in that caller going on a murder spree. Three years later, the only emotional and financial support a despondent Jack receives is from his current video store owning girlfriend, Anne. When Jack hits rock bottom, he meets a seemingly crazy and homeless man calling himself Parry. Parry does have mental health issues, namely hallucinations centered around the story of the Fisher King, which is why he has an obsession with obtaining the Holy Grail. When Jack learns of Parry's own background and the reason he got to where he is, Jack feels he needs to be part of Parry's salvation. He figures the way to do so is to connect Parry with Lydia Sinclair, a shy and uncoordinated woman who Parry loves from afar. In doing so, Jack may himself be able to recapture his old life back. But if he does, he may not realize that he was no saint in that former life. —Huggo A former radio shock-jock (Bridges) sinks into a boozy depression when his flip comment on the air is blamed for a shooting spree in an upscale cafe. Living off the kindness of long-suffering girlfriend Anne (Ruehl, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress), Jack has an epiphany when he is rescued from street punks by Parry (Williams), a homeless former professor who has created a world of his own invention to insulate himself from the pain of witnessing his wife's death in the cafe shooting spree.

A single mother raises a child prodigy on her own, struggling to give him every opportunity he needs to express his gift. Dede is a sole parent trying to bring up her son Fred. When it is discovered that Fred is a genius, she is determined to ensure that Fred has all the opportunities that he needs, and that he is not taken advantage of by people who forget that his extremely powerful intellect is harboured in the body and emotions of a child. —Murray Chapman <muzzle@cs.uq.oz.au> Uneducated working class Dede Tate is the loving single mom to now seven year old Fred Tate, the two who live in a small inner city apartment. Dede has known since Fred was an infant that he is gifted, even more so than the most exceptional of children. His gifts, which are in the sciences and creative arts, are largely intuitive. Because so, he is a sensitive human, who internalizes many of his feelings, and who has ulcers in part because he worries about the world's problems. But more than anything, Fred wants to have friends, which he doesn't have at his inner city public school because he is considered different. Dede understands this, and although she does indulge some of his intellectual pursuits, she wants him to be like a "normal" kid. Their lives change when Fred comes to the attention of Jane Grierson of the Grierson Institute, a school for exceptional children. Jane was considered an exceptional child herself. Jane wants Fred to enroll in the Institute and after she gets to know him better wants to take him under her personal wing. But taking Fred to the other extreme may not be what Fred needs to flourish either. In addition, people who do truly become Fred's first ever close friends as he sees them may not truly understand what literal Fred needs in his friend virginity. A battle of sorts ensues between the two women as they do what they believe is best for Fred, who brings out maternal instincts for the first time ever in Jane. —Huggo The story of the intellectually-gifted eight-year-old Fred Tate, his mother Dede and the director of a program for gifted children, Dr Jane Grierson. It explores the tension between Fred's emotional and intellectual needs and between his mother and Dr Grierson. —Mike McBain <mike@calcite.apana.org.au>