Wyoming sheep rancher Dan Logan (George C. Scott) and his teenage son, Chris (Nicolas Beauvy), spend a night camping out on their land. While Dan stays in the tent, Chris decides to sleep outside, underneath the stars. The next morning, Dan leaves the tent to discover that all of his sheep are dead and that Chris is having violent convulsions. Dan rushes his son to the local hospital, where he hopes that the family’s longtime physician, Dr. Caldwell (Richard Basehart), can save his son’s life.
However, at the hospital, Dan is separated from his son. Two doctors that he’s never met before — Dr. Spencer (Barnard Hughes) and Major Holliford (Martin Sheen) — take over his case. They tell him that Chris was probably just exposed to an insecticide and that both Dan and his son are going to have to stay at the hospital for a few days. Dan is confined to his room and not allowed to see his son.
What Dan doesn’t know is that both he and his son have been unwittingly exposed to a secret army nerve gas. Though the experiment was only meant to be performed on the animals that were grazing on Dan’s land, Dan and Chris were accidentally sprayed. When Dan discovers the truth about what’s been done to him and his son, he sets out to try to get revenge with what little time he has left.
Fresh from refusing an Oscar for Patton, George C. Scott made his feature film directorial debut with Rage. (He had previously directed The Andersonville Trial for television.) As a director, Scott sometimes struggles. Rage is so relentlessly grim and serious that even the most experienced director would have had a difficult time making it compelling. The scenes in the hospital are effective claustrophobic but they’re also often dramatically inert. The only humor in the film comes from Scott’s overuse of slow motion. When even simple scenes, like throwing coffee on a campfire, are shown in slow motion, it goes from being ominous to unintentionally humorous.
As a director, Scott did make a very wise decision by casting himself in the lead role. No one was better at portraying pure, incandescent anger than George C. Scott and the film picks up once Dan discovers what’s been done to himself and his son. Once Dan sets off to get revenge, Rage becomes an entirely different film, one that is about both a father’s anger and the cold calculation of a government that views him as just as a subject to be tested upon. The final scene is especially effective and suggests that Scott could have become an interesting director if he had stuck with it.
Scott would direct one more film, The Savage Is Loose, before devoting the rest of his distinguished career to performing.
The year is 1972 and it is Thanksgiving week in small town America. The Colliers are getting ready for the holidays. Maurine (Kathy Bates) is intent on preparing the perfect Thanksgiving meal. Bob (Martin Sheen) is keeping an eye on his car dealership and wondering why kids today are not as respectful as they once were. The two Collier children are coming home from school. The youngest, Karen (Kimberly Williams), is hoping she can keep the peace because she knows that her older brother, Jeremy (Emilio Estevez), has returned from Vietnam a changed man. Suffering from severe PTSD, Jeremy is haunted by flashbacks and angry at everything, especially his father. The only reason he even attended college was so he could be near his girlfriend (Carla Gugino) and even she has told him that she no longer feels comfortable around him. When Jeremy returns home, his family first tries to ignore the problems that he’s having adjusting to civilian life but Jeremy is determined not to be ignored.
Four former high school basketball players and their coach gather for a reunion in Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years ago, they were state champions. Now, they are all still struggling with the legacy of that championship season. George (Bruce Dern) is the mayor of Scranton and is in a fierce race for reelection. Phil (Paul Sorvino) is a wealthy and corrupt businessman who is having an affair with George’s wife. James (Stacy Keach) is a high school principal who is still struggling to come to terms with his abusive father. James’s younger brother, Tom (Martin Sheen), is an alcoholic who can not hold down a steady job. The Coach (Robert Mitchum) remains the Coach. All four of the men still want his approval, even though they know that he is actually an old bigot who pushed them to cut too many corners on their way to the championship.
Songwriter Michael Raine (Bret Micheals) moved to Nashville from Philadelphia, searching for a new life. Instead, he ended up convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Michael says that he is innocent but the police have a video tape of him smothering his girlfriend with a pillow. Michael says it was just a sex game. He was in the bathroom, testing out his karate moves, when someone else broke into the house and smothered the victim for real.
From the strange period of time in which Charlie Sheen wanted people to call him Charles, comes this generic action movie.
Through the Shattered Lens 