In Stephen Hopkins's The Ghost and the Darkness, Val Kilmer plays an Irish engineer who is sent to an African village to build a bridge for an English colony. For the first half-hour, Kilmer establishes himself as a determined, honorable, dull young man. The movie crawls along at a snail's pace, and only loud, cymbal-heavy music every few minutes warn us that something terrible is going to happen. That something is two ferocious lions possessed by the Devil. While Kilmer views the bridge as a metaphor for bringing different peoples of the world together, these more intelligent lions see it as representative of white people's exploitation of the continent. They articulate these feelings by eating as many of the African builders as they can.

For a while, it's just Kilmer vs. the lions, and it's clear that Val and the movie aren't getting anywhere. Enter cowboy Michael Douglas as a renowned renegade lion killer and leader of his own African tribe to turn a boring film into a ridiculous one. He eventually helps the "good guys" defeat the devilish lions, and the white folks can go back to colonizing Africa. Don't you just love happy endings? At the Copley Place, the Fresh Pond, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.