An intellectual billionaire and two lesser men struggle to band together and survive after getting stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with a blood-thirsty Kodiak Bear hunting them down.
Director:
Lee Tamahori
Stars:
Anthony Hopkins,
Alec Baldwin,
Elle Macpherson
Simon Templar (The Saint), is a thief for hire, whose latest job to steal the secret process for cold fusion puts him at odds with a traitor bent on toppling the Russian government, as well as the woman who holds its secret.
Director:
Phillip Noyce
Stars:
Val Kilmer,
Elisabeth Shue,
Rade Serbedzija
A man, having fallen in love with the wrong woman, is sent by the sultan himself on a diplomatic mission to a distant land as an ambassador. Stopping at a Viking village port to restock on supplies, he finds himself unwittingly embroiled in a quest to banish a mysterious threat in a distant Viking land.
Directors:
John McTiernan,
Michael Crichton
Stars:
Antonio Banderas,
Diane Venora,
Dennis Storhøi
A computer specialist is sued for sexual harassment by a former lover turned boss who initiated the act forcefully, which threatens both his career and his personal life.
Director:
Barry Levinson
Stars:
Michael Douglas,
Demi Moore,
Donald Sutherland
A mousy romance novelist sets off for Colombia to ransom her kidnapped sister, and soon finds herself in the middle of a dangerous adventure hunting for treasure with a mercenary rogue.
Director:
Robert Zemeckis
Stars:
Michael Douglas,
Kathleen Turner,
Danny DeVito
A wealthy Wall Street speculator discovers that his wife has a lover. He investigates him and uses the carrot and stick to make him murder his wife. Planned to detail, it seems like a perfect murder.
Director:
Andrew Davis
Stars:
Michael Douglas,
Gwyneth Paltrow,
Viggo Mortensen
Astronauts, and their robotic dog AMEE (Autonomous Mapping Evaluation and Evasion), search for solutions to save a dying Earth by searching on Mars, only to have the mission go terribly awry.
Bill and Jo Harding, advanced storm chasers on the brink of divorce, must join together to create an advanced weather alert system by putting themselves in the cross-hairs of extremely violent tornadoes.
Sir Robert Beaumont is behind schedule on a railroad in Africa. Enlisting noted engineer John Henry Patterson to right the ship, Beaumont expects results. Everything seems great until the crew discovers the mutilated corpse of the project's foreman, seemingly killed by a lion. After several more attacks, Patterson calls in famed hunter Charles Remington, who has finally met his match in the bloodthirsty lions.Written by
Jwelch5742
There is another reason that may have driven the lions to eating humans. With the prevalence of shallow graves in the area due to a cholera outbreak these graves were easy to dig up. Coupled with their now recognized dental disease, human flesh was an easy target. See more »
Goofs
Instantly recognizable polio vaccine scars are visible on the arms of several extras playing native Africans throughout the film. The vaccine wasn't announced until 12 April 1955. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Samuel:
[narrating]
This is the most famous and true African adventure. Famous because what took place at Tsavo never happened before. Colonel John Patterson was there when it began. A fine Irish gentleman, a brilliant engineer. He was my friend. My name is Samuel. I was there. Remember this: even the most impossible parts of this story really happened.
See more »
Crazy Credits
The beginning of the end credits is shown with a photograph of the real bridge as background. See more »
When I was in high school, my English teacher made us document all the differences we could spot between the Ronald Coleman movie version of "A Tale of Two Cities" and Dicken's novel. It's an exercise I find myself doing every time a movie comes out - especially when the movie is supposedly based on fact.
When I saw "The Ghost and the Darkness," I had already read "the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo" and already seen the lions in the Field Museum. There really were two lions that killed well over 40 workers during the construction of a railroad in Africa in Tsavo, Kenya in the late 1800s. National Geographic also did an article about the aggressive Tsavo lions in 2002. I found the real story fascinating, and was really looking forward to the movie.
I understand that the normally maneless lions found in Tsavo don't look quite right for us ignorant viewers (could have just explained it with a one liner from a native, but oh well), so they used lions with manes.
I also realize that we as an audience today are too politically correct to cope with the way the white man treated natives back then, so the movie has been historically sanitized, with a few remarks sprinkled throughout on religious reformation from the doctor. I suppose we must continue to pretend certain behaviors in history didn't happen.
Yet another key change: I'm not clear why we needed another mighty hunter in the story. Patterson had the help of a district manager from time to time, but not another great white hunter. In Africa in that period, getting messages and arranging encounters wasn't easy - strangers of European race were apt to consider each other friends just because they were the same color upon encounter in that era - something the movie fails to get across - it's unlikely that another hunter could be reached easily. And certainly great star/hunter Val could carry a movie on his own.
Fortunately the character Michael Douglas plays does not detract from the movie, and there is that extra emphasis on the Ghost/Darkness nomenclature from the (again, additional characters) Masai. Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer did play off each other well, although neither seemed able to fully adopt Southern/Irish (? did we need those?) accents respectively.
I do think the hunting scenes in the movie captured well the constant effort to see something, staring into the darkness at nothing, that hunting at night can be like. Not to mention the cold sweat, stark fear, blinding pain, and sudden calm and desperation that a near death experience is.
Which is why, in spite of the factual inconsistencies, I gave the movie the rating I did. Worth the watch, if only for that. If you really want to know about the Lions of Tsavo, read the story by Patterson - it's pamphlet #7, published in 1925 from the Field Museum in Chicago.
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When I was in high school, my English teacher made us document all the differences we could spot between the Ronald Coleman movie version of "A Tale of Two Cities" and Dicken's novel. It's an exercise I find myself doing every time a movie comes out - especially when the movie is supposedly based on fact.
When I saw "The Ghost and the Darkness," I had already read "the Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo" and already seen the lions in the Field Museum. There really were two lions that killed well over 40 workers during the construction of a railroad in Africa in Tsavo, Kenya in the late 1800s. National Geographic also did an article about the aggressive Tsavo lions in 2002. I found the real story fascinating, and was really looking forward to the movie.
I understand that the normally maneless lions found in Tsavo don't look quite right for us ignorant viewers (could have just explained it with a one liner from a native, but oh well), so they used lions with manes.
I also realize that we as an audience today are too politically correct to cope with the way the white man treated natives back then, so the movie has been historically sanitized, with a few remarks sprinkled throughout on religious reformation from the doctor. I suppose we must continue to pretend certain behaviors in history didn't happen.
Yet another key change: I'm not clear why we needed another mighty hunter in the story. Patterson had the help of a district manager from time to time, but not another great white hunter. In Africa in that period, getting messages and arranging encounters wasn't easy - strangers of European race were apt to consider each other friends just because they were the same color upon encounter in that era - something the movie fails to get across - it's unlikely that another hunter could be reached easily. And certainly great star/hunter Val could carry a movie on his own.
Fortunately the character Michael Douglas plays does not detract from the movie, and there is that extra emphasis on the Ghost/Darkness nomenclature from the (again, additional characters) Masai. Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer did play off each other well, although neither seemed able to fully adopt Southern/Irish (? did we need those?) accents respectively.
I do think the hunting scenes in the movie captured well the constant effort to see something, staring into the darkness at nothing, that hunting at night can be like. Not to mention the cold sweat, stark fear, blinding pain, and sudden calm and desperation that a near death experience is.
Which is why, in spite of the factual inconsistencies, I gave the movie the rating I did. Worth the watch, if only for that. If you really want to know about the Lions of Tsavo, read the story by Patterson - it's pamphlet #7, published in 1925 from the Field Museum in Chicago.