Tag Archives: Dino de Laurentiiis

Amityville 3-D (1983) | Richard Fleischer

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John Baxter is a recently divorced journalist working for an investigative magazine called Reveal. Baxter’s latest assignment exposes a seance scam operating within the abandoned Amityville home on Long Island, New York. Afterward, Baxter finds that the house is immensely affordable due to its sordid history of terrible things happening to those who’ve been inside. Baxter, apparently needing to find a new place following his divorce that has fourteen rooms covering three floors, moves into the house certain that all prior calamities were coincidences, delusions, and hoaxes. That bottomless pit in the basement others have claimed a portal to hell? Oh, that’s just an abandoned well. It has plenty of space for himself and his teenage daughter when she visits, as well as solitude for writing the “great American novel” he’s been talking about for years. Others around him experience strange events and implore him to leave. He won’t because he’s convinced the house’s reputation is causing mass hysteria. Unfortunately, with his daughter staying with him on occasion, he soon discovers that being wrong might be dead wrong.

Total Recall (1990) | Paul Verhoeven

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Set on Earth of the future, where we’ve already mastered the ability for space travel to through the solar system, and even set up colonies on Mars, Total Recall surrounds a lowly construction worker named Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has recently been plagued by a recurring dream of being on Mars.  His doting wife (Sharon Stone) tells Doug it’s just a dream, but there’s something in the events of the dreams that makes him curious to find out more about the red planet.  Seeing an advertisement for a company called Rekall, an establishment that will implant the memory of vacation into the mind in vivid and perfect detail, Doug decides to choose the “secret agent” package set on Mars. 

No sooner than the implanted thoughts enter his head, Doug finds himself in what he perceives to be a real-life espionage drama involving himself and his role in a Martian underground society of spies, all seeking to end the stranglehold of a megalomaniac corporate businessman named Cohaagen (Ronny Cox).  Fighting for his life, Doug makes his way to Mars to try to uncover the secret to who he really is, but not everything is what it seems to be, both on Mars and in his mind.

Paul Verhoeven directs.

King Kong Lives (1986) | John Guillermin

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In this sequel to the 1976 remake of Kong Kong, none of the original cast returns, except in archival footage shown in the intro depicting Kong after getting shot down from the top of the World Trade Center and falling to the streets below. We come to learn that Kong (Peter Elliott) improbably survived, existing in a coma for ten years on life support in a giant lab facility in Atlanta awaiting a giant artificial heart to replace the organic one that can no longer support him without medical assistance. Kong also needs lots of ape plasma for the surgery but there aren’t apes like him to give blood. The lead heart surgeon, Dr. Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton), laments that only a miracle can save Kong.

That miracle arrives when the soldier-of-fortune Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin) discovers another giant ape while scouting for diamonds in the jungles of Borneo. He finds a way to bring the female ape back to the United States for fortune and glory. The lab needs her plasma but the two apes sense the presence of each other, which makes it particularly dangerous for any humans trying to keep the apes from doing what apes want to do naturally.  The apes escape their confinement and run away as fugitives, but the scientists can’t have these two roaming the Great Smoky Mountains wreaking havoc, so the military, led by the tenacious Colonel Nevitt (John Ashton), is called in to take whatever measures and necessary. It’s up to Dr. Franklin and Hank Mitchell to lead them to safety somehow. John Guillermin directs.

King Kong (1976) | John Guillermin

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In this remake of the 1933 classic of the same name, Petrox, a gasoline corporation, sends an expedition to an uncharted island near Micronesia obscured by perpetual fog to find out if there’s oil there. Stowing away is Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), a paleontologist from Princeton University curious if the reports of a giant primate residing on there are true. they pick up another unexpected passenger in Dwan (Jessica Lange), an aspiring American actress adrift in a lifeboat.

What they find instead of useable oil is a gorilla six times the size of a normal ape, who is the god to which the native villagers sacrifice women, of which Dwan becomes the next in line. Kong takes a liking to Dwan but gets captured by the Petrox people who take him back to the United States to gain publicity. Problems arise when the ape escapes and begins destroying the city searching for Dwan. Charles Grodin Costars. John Guillerman directs this Dino De Laurentiis production fro a Lorenzo Semple Jr. Script.