Frederic Forrest

A teen faces her impending adulthood in the carefree sex and drug revolution years of the early 80's prior to fears of AIDS. She lives with her bitter, divorced mother and her sadistic kid brother. Looking forward to a life based on her passion for art, she nevertheless gets in with the partying crowd which causes her to miss deadlines and poor grades which jeapordizes her future. Ultimately she ends up losing her virginity to an older artist wanna-be who she has had a long standing crush on. —John Sacksteder <jsackste@bellsouth.net>

A disturbed man (Michael Douglas) whose true identity is unknown. Stuck in L.A. traffic in summer, he abandons his vehicle. D-Fens, as he is credited in the film (based on his vanity license plate), begins walking west, trying to reach his estranged wife Beth (Barbara Hershey) and daughter Adele (Joey Hope Singer). It's the girl's birthday, and he wants to be with her. Detective Prendergast (Robert Duvall) of the LAPD is on his last day before taking an early retirement. He comes upon D-Fens's abandoned car on his way to work and helps push it out of traffic. A few years back, his pushy wife made him take a safe desk job. D-Fens wants to call his wife, but short on coins, he enters a Korean convenience store. He respects the "no change without purchase" policy and tries to buy a can of Coke. He gets angry at the 85 cents asked for the soda. He fights with the Korean owner and, after grabbing a sawed-off baseball bat from the owner, and begins wrecking the store. Heading for Venice, California, D-Fens climbs a hill in "gangland,". Two young Mexican gang-members accost him. When D-Fens fails to hand over any money, they threaten him with a knife, and he counters with the bat. He injures one assailant's arm and drives the other off. he drops the bat & takes the knife. The Latino gang members vow revenge, and a carload hunting for D-Fens. D-Fens calls his ex-wife from a pay phone, threatening to show up at his daughter's birthday party. The gangsters attempt a drive-by shooting but miss D-Fens and crash their car. They open fire, hitting several surrounding bystanders, but not D-Fens. The driver crashes. D-Fens picks up a gun, shoots the one surviving gang member in the leg, and then leaves with their bag of weapons. D-Fens encounters a panhandler who harasses him for change. D-Fens finally gives him the briefcase, which only contains his lunch. D-Fens stops by Whammy Burger, only to be told that breakfast stopped being served five minutes earlier. Not a wise thing to tell the psychotic D-Fens, as he soon pulls out a sub-machine gun, threatening everyone and deciding to have lunch instead. After berating the staff for serving him a hamburger that looks nothing like the advertising posters, he leaves. He leaves and tries to place a call from a phone booth, then shoots the booth to pieces after being hassled by someone who was waiting to use the phone. Prendergast is starting to notice a pattern and believes that all incidents are tied to the same person. The Korean store owner came in to complain, and the detective heard about the bold daylight shooting attempt. He looks on an L.A. map and sees that the mysterious man in a white shirt and a tie is walking towards the ocean. Prendergast is not taken seriously. D-Fens's ex calls the police to gain protection from him, but they don't believe he's much of a threat and leave. D-Fens passes a bank where an African American man is protesting after being rejected for a loan. The man exchanges a glance with D-Fens and says, "Don't forget me," as he is escorted away by police. The increasingly disturbed D-Fens goes into an Army-Navy surplus store run by a homophobic neo-Nazi to buy more durable footwear for his trek, as his shoe sole is half rotten. While he's being fitted, police detective Torres (Rachel Ticotin) comes in asking about him. The Nazi owner stalls her and, after she leaves, tells D-Fens he knows all about his activities. The Nazi assumes D-Fens is a racist who is attacking non-whites. After being corrected about this, and as D-Fens expresses disgust at the Nazi's bigotry, the irate skinhead attempts to handcuff D-Fens to turn him over to the police. He is instead knifed and ultimately killed. D-Fens clothes himself in military-style garb and sets out with a rocket launcher. He cuts through a nearby golf course and is accosted by two elderly golfers. After berating them for wasting such lovely green space on a silly game, he shoots up their golf cart, causing one to have a heart attack and die. D-Fens encounters a road repair crew who are not working and accuses them of doing unnecessary repairs to justify their budget. He pulls out the rocket launcher but struggles to use it, until a boy explains how it works. D-Fens accidentally fires the launcher, blowing up the construction site. D-Fens eventually reaches his former home, but his ex-wife leaves just in time. Prendergast, who has put the whole puzzle together by finally figuring out that the guy causing the mayhem is the one with the license plate D-FENS, he finds the address & reaches his mother. They find that D-Fens real name is William Foster & he was recently fired from the defense plant & is divorced from his wife who won't let him see his daughter as he has a bit of temper. Pendergast rushes to the wife's address with his friend, Detective Torres. Having turned in his weapon (it's his last day before retirement), Prendergast is unarmed. D-Fens shoots Torres, wounding her slightly, and the older detective grabs her weapon and chases D-Fens onto a fishing pier. Prendergast has a final confrontation with D-Fens where he correctly concludes that William planned to shoot his ex-wife & daughter & then turn the gun on himself and kill himself. Adele is happy to see him, but Beth wants him to leave. Prendergast arrives and distracts Foster long enough for Beth to throw his gun into the ocean. Prendergast holds Foster at gunpoint and urges him to surrender, acknowledging his complaints about social inequalities but not accepting them as an excuse for his rampage. With nothing left for him, Foster tricks Prendergast into shooting him dead. Having asserted himself, Prendergast decides to hold off retirement.

The sequel to Chinatown (1974) finds J.J. "Jake" Gittes investigating adultery and murder, and the money that comes from oil. Private detective Jake Gittes has a new client. Jake Berman believes his wife is cheating on him and wants Gittes and his associates to catch her in the act. Everything appears to be going according to plan until Berman shoots the man dead. It should be an open-and-shut case but now Gittes is drawn into a complex web that involves far more than infidelity. —grantss After the war, L.A. private eye Jake Gittes is hired by realtor Jake Berman. He proves the infidelity of Berman's wife Kitty and sets up a way for her to be caught in the act. At the rendezvous, Berman shoots the co-respondent who turns out to be his business partner. Gittes finds himself in the middle of a complicated web, under pressure from all sides for a wire recording of the fatal encounter. He then realises that the land the partners were developing was once an orange grove connected with a case that he has never quite gotten over. —Jeremy Perkins {J-26}

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Frank Davis is still reeling from the death of his child and the part he played in it, seeing his chance to atone by assisting other would-be parents of mutant children. He tries to warn soon-to-be parents Jody and Eugene Scott of the vast and dangerous conspiracy to murder their baby and the other unborn mutant children who are being born around the country. They are convinced when they are met by Mallory and a strong force of police officers at the hospital as Jody is about to go into labor. She is rescued by Frank from the maternity ward before she goes into labor. The baby is delivered in a truck specially constructed for this specific purpose. They manage to elude the people going after them. The baby is placed with two others in a secluded confine for observation by the doctors Frank has been working with. Frank informs a skeptic Eugene about the special bond the babies have with their parents. Despite seemingly to adjust slightly to society, they take advantage of an opportunity to escape and begin wreaking havoc. While one of the other babies attacks Eugene in the pool, the Scott baby corners Jody with intentions unclear until Frank arrives to defuse the situation. Frank discovers a homing device placed in Jody's purse by her mother before taking the baby to safety. On his way in the woods, Frank is stopped by a night watchman, whose flashlight spooks the previously calm baby, and it attacks and kills Frank in an attempt to escape. Mallory (who's real name was Preston) is revealed to be the father of the monster baby born in Seattle at the end of the original, and convinces a recovering Eugene and Jody his people manage to track Jody to the place in Los Angeles where her baby is taken. The baby also finds them and Jody calms a frightened Eugene as the baby only came to be a part of the family, just as Frank Davis had previously said. However, Mallory enters with the intent to kill the baby, but it attacks him first, forcing Eugene to shoot it to save Mallory's life. In the last scene, Eugene is seen going up to expectant couples in the street to warn them and offer his help, just as Frank Davis did to him.

The action takes place in Montana in the 1880s among the tributary streams that eventually flow together into the Missouri River, an area known as the Missouri Breaks. Tom Logan, (Jack Nicholson) is the likable leader of an amiable gang of horse thieves. They make their living stealing horses or rustling cattle from ranchers, laughing all the way, spending their money on whiskey and whores. Logan and his gang are particularly upset by the hanging of a friend by rancher David Braxton (John McLiam), an egomaniacal gay local land baron who took the law into his own hands. Braxton has horses, and a daughter, worth stealing. Logan's men pull off a daring train robbery, only to lose much of the money. The gang retaliates against Braxton by hanging his foreman Pete Marker (Richard Bradford) on the same noose. Posing as an aspiring cattle rancher, Logan buys an abandoned ranch next to Braxton's to serve as a relay station for moving stolen horses across the plains. While his men ride off across the Missouri River and north of the border to steal Canadian Mounted Police horses, Logan plants crops at their new farm and enters into a relationship with Braxton's virginal daughter, Jane (Kathleen Lloyd). He knows how to court a woman by brewing Chinese tea in the Wild West. Jane is on bad terms with her father and has taken a shine to Logan in any event, seems to be fascinated by the bad guys and demands sex, saying: "Do you want to have sexual intercourse?" while flirting with Logan. Braxton, obsessed with his rustling problem, his daughter, and avenging his friend's murder, sends for Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), a notorious regulator from Medicine Hat, Wyoming, who, for a price, will take care of rustlers personally, one at a time. Regulators were mercenary frontier agents famous for their ruthlessness and their ability to kill without warning from long distances with their trademark Creekmore rifles. Clayton arrives with a fancy wardrobe, a perfumed scent, an Irish brogue and a rifle with which he is deadly accurate from afar. Clayton bursts in on the funeral of the murdered foreman dressed like a western dandy in fringed leather coat and scarf, bellowing and yanking the corpse up out of the open casket to borrow a few of the ice cubes used to keep the body from decomposing as a compress for a tooth-ache. Clayton is portrayed comically, but he is a sadistic, perverse, and psychotic killer who comes across as much more lawless than the criminals he's hunting. Quickly suspicious of Logan, who doesn't strike him as much of a farmer, Clayton dons a variety of disguises to pick off Logan's gang, one by one. Impersonating a preacher "Jim Ferguson," Clayton tries to cajole Little Todd into confessing that he is part of the gang. He kills Todd by dragging him with a rope through the raging Missouri, seemingly aware of the fact that Todd cannot swim. Clayton spies on Logan with binoculars and taunts Braxton about his daughter's affair with a horse thief. Braxton attempts to discharge him but Clayton is determined to finish what he starts. He amuses himself by shooting two more of Logan's partners from a distance and then by wearing a granny dress while brutally killing Logan's closest friend, Cal (Harry Dean Stanton) with a handmade weapon. Logan knows it's kill or be killed by Clayton. He also wants vengeance against Braxton for having hired the regulator in the first place, despite his feelings for Jane. Now it's up to Logan to hunt down Clayton. One night after a campfire goes dark with Clayton serenading his horse, Logan gets his revenge catching up with him while he's asleep and then slitting his throat: "You know what woke you up? You just had your throat cut!" Logan then comes after Braxton. There's a shootout where Braxton, who everyone now believes is infirm with a stroke, pulls out a gun while he's sitting in a wheelchair and shoots the unawares Logan. Logan then shoots back killing Braxton. Logan abandons his farm and packs up to leave the area and Jane, although he acknowledges that he and Jane might renew their relationship another time, another place.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a prominent private surveillance expert in San Francisco, has been hired by the CEO (Robert Duvall, known throughout simply as the director) of a large, unnamed company to follow and record a conversation between the director's wife, Ann (Cindy Williams) and her suspected lover, Mark (Frederic Forrest), who's a major executive at the company. Using three separate microphones and two cameras, Harry and associates follow the couple on a seemingly casual walk in Union Square, where the director suspects they go to talk without, they think, the possibility of being surveilled. Later, in his lab, Harry laboriously reconstructs their conversation, which clearly indicates the two are in a relationship, which seems about to be consummated again the following Sunday at 3 pm at a room in the Jack Tar Hotel. He obsessively homes in on a particularly hard-to-hear sentence Mark whispers in Ann's ear, and eventually, with the aid of a complex state-of-the-art electronic board of his own invention, pieces together what Mark whispered: "He'd kill us if he had the chance." Harry is secretive and paranoid (not totally without reason). He alienates his assistant, Stan (John Cazale), because Harry won't teach him more about audio surveillance nor share the details of his cases, and his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr), because he won't open up to her. A deeply religious man, his guilt over a previous case he conducted for the U.S. Justice Department that resulted in the death of a mafia accountant and his wife and child makes him fear that his work will again lead to the death of innocents, and he refuses to deliver the tape or its contents to the director's assistant, Martin Stett (a very young Harrison Ford). Amy breaks up with Harry, and he goes off to attend a surveillance convention at which he's a featured guest. There he spots Martin, whom he accuses of following him. Martin says he's just delivering a message: give up the tape. Harry discovers that Stan has overnight gone to work for Bernie Moran (Alan Garfield), a Detroit-based surveillance-device inventor looking to acquire the rights to Harry's celebrated electronic surveillance inventions. Bernie demonstrates a device he sells that turns any telephone into a live remote microphone. Harry pooh-poohs the device to Stan, and persuades him to come back and work for him. He invites Moran, Stan, and four other friends from the convention back to his lab for a party. Moran's sexy (but aging) product demonstrator Meredith (Elizabeth McRae) flirts brazenly with Harry, and in a tëte-a-tëte outside the lab he opens up to her about his troubles with Amy. Back in the lab, Stan gets Harry to explain his sophisticated surveillance method for the Union Square conversation. Harry is drunk and exuberant, but his mood is broken when Bernie reveals that he successfully planted a pen mike on Harry and plays back the very private conversation with Meredith. Harry is outraged and kicks everybody out. Meredith stays and sleeps with him on the small bed in the lab. Harry dreams that he's pursuing Ann through fog, telling her about how he nearly died from a childhood disease and warning her that her husband plans to kill her. "I'm not afraid of death," he tells her as she disappears in the mist, "but I am afraid of murder." When Harry awakens in the morning, he discovers that Meredith is gone, along with the composite tape, and the original individual tapes. He tries unsuccessfully to reach the director from a pay phone, then hurries home. Harry has told everyone that he doesn't have a telephone and is shocked when Martin calls him right back. Martin tells him that it was he who hired Meredith to take the tapes, and that he's delivered them to the director. Martin instructs him to come to the corporate office to pick up his $15,000 cash fee. When Harry complies, he finds the director listening to the tape in disbelief, which is turning, as he feared, quickly to anger. The upset director curtly dismisses Harry, telling. him to "please go count your money somewhere else." At the appointed time, Harry goes to the Jack Tar Hotel assignation Ann and Mark mentioned, takes an adjoining room, and inserts a microphone through a hole he drills in the bathroom wall to listen in. He hears the director yelling at Ann, followed by confusing shouting, and rushes to the balcony, where he sees bloody hands slap up against the glass partition. Terrified, he collapses in his room, and falls asleep, curled up like a fetus. (Some commentators wondering about his unusual last name note that the gray, semi-transparent raincoat Harry Caul sports throughout the movie eerily resembles the caul, a membrane that protects a baby in the womb.) Upon reviving, he breaks into the room Mark and Ann had rented. The room has been completely cleaned and restored to rentable status. In the bathroom, he inspects the covered-with-a-"sanitized"-label toilet, and hesitantly lifts the lid. It's immaculate inside, to his visceral relief. But when he flushes it, bloody water wells up and gushes surreally and relentlessly onto the floor. Harry goes to see the director but is forcibly ejected by guards before he can even get past the first floor. On the street, he spies a waiting limo which he expects to be occupied by the director. But it's Ann inside. He passes a newspaper box and sees that the headline story reveals the death of the director in a car accident. Suddenly he revisualizes the central line from the conversation, "He'd kill us if he had the chance," and realizes that because of his sympathy for Ann and Mark, he'd misapplied his modulator to emphasize the word "kill", and suppress the real emphasis that was on the word "us". The whisper wasn't about Mark's fears, but was instead a justification for the director's planned murder that they had been finalizing in the conversation. Ann now controls the company. Later, as Ann, Mark and Martin try to escape reporters pestering them about the director's death and the company's future, they spot Harry in the crowd. He runs. Back in his apartment, Harry sits and stews, and goes into his habitual form of meditation, playing a saxophone in accompaniment to a jazz record. His phone rings, but no one seems to be on the other end. He hangs up and resumes playing. It rings again; this time Martin is on the other end and warns him that he, Ann and Mark know that he has figured out what happened, and that they will be watching him. Martin then plays back a recording of Harry's record and sax playing from seconds before. Harry methodically tears apart his apartment looking for the bug, which he can't unearth (even in the phone, à la Bernie's device). He may be a widely celebrated surveillance expert, but he's got nothing on these guys. Exhausted, he resignedly goes back to playing his sax amidst the ruins of his apartment.

After his mistress is savagely beaten up a Mafia leader goes after the killer with a bloody vengeance. Soon after the hunt begins, a gang war ensues.