E-Mail This Article to a Friend Spring to action This season is the age of rage BY PETER KEOUGH

The Democrats may have eschewed the anger of Howard Dean in their quest for the White House, but this spring, Hollywood is hoping to tap rage and a lot of other negative emotions. Just check out some of the titles for the cruelest month: Envy, Hellboy, and Mean Girls. What’s pissing people off? The usual: occult Nazi experiments during World War II, inventions that eliminate dog shit, Mexican domination of Texas, werewolves and vampires, those damn Trojans, and such minor nuisances as environmental breakdown and systemic racism.

No stranger to excretions, Ben Stiller and Jack Black team up for Barry Levinson’s Envy (April 30), in which Black invents a spray — the "Vapoorizer" — that makes crap disappear. Stiller, as his doubting friend, nurtures the deadly sin of the title while Black’s fortune mounts. As you might have guessed, Christopher Walken co-stars.

Just think, if there really were a Vapoorizer, there might not be any more films to write about. Meanwhile, there’s Hellboy (April 2), a demon summoned by Nazi conjurers in the waning days of the war who’s captured by the Allies and made a force for good. Based on Mike Mignola’s comic book, it stars Ron Perlman as the red-skinned revenant, and it’s the film Guillermo Del Toro chose to direct instead of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

A little overwhelmed by all the wrath and venom you’re witnessing on screen? Take a break with "Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration," a huge retrospective saluting one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived; it’s presented by the Harvard Film Archive April 2 through May 11. But don’t get too wrapped up in these sublime, serene, bittersweet masterpieces; before you know it, you’ll have to prime your flintlock to fight off Santa Ana’s horde in John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (April 9), in which that tiny band of heroes (Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett?) fight to the end in the defining battle of the Texas war of independence. And if you want some payback for what they did to our boys (Jason Patric as Jim Bowie?), then you’re ready for a reprise of ’70s-era vigilante movies, starting with the remake of the 1973 butt kicker Walking Tall (April 9). The Rock now plays the Special Forces soldier who returns to his home town to find it taken over by evildoers whom he proceeds to beat senseless with a two-by-four. Kevin Bray directs.

Had enough yet, evildoers? Well, meet The Punisher (April 16). Played by yet another wrestler (Thomas Jane), this Marvel Comics hero is a former G-Man whose family were murdered, and now he’s going to make all the bad guys pay. Jonathan Hensleigh directs.

Want someone else to hate? How about Quentin Tarantino for letting us down with his so-so Kill Bill: Vol. 1. Here’s hoping that Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (April 16) has a bit more edge as Uma Thurman proceeds to slice up a lot of sword-wielding assassins. Daryl Hannah and David Carradine will, we presume, donate blood.

Fans of SNL’s Tina Fey should get their fill of her tart humor in Mean Girls (April 30); she wrote the screenplay and stars in this tale of a teenager (Lindsay Lohan) who returns from life on safari and finds it nothing compared to the savagery of your average suburban high school. Fey’s SNL colleague Tim Meadows stars as the high-school principal; Mark Waters (Freaky Friday) directs.

Okay, we can deal with the evildoers and the sword-wielding assassins. What about the vampires, lycanthropes, and Frankenstein monsters? Enter souped-up Dracula slayer Van Helsing (May 7), who’s played by Hugh Jackman, and his lovely assistant (Kate Beckinsale) to crusade against wickedness in all its CGI-enhanced forms. Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) directs.

And if you think these evildoers are just a modern-day problem, just check out this Homer guy. That’s what director Wolfgang Petersen likely did in making Troy (May 14), though it probably doesn’t matter if you’ve got Brad Pitt as Achilles and Orlando Bloom as the wife-stealing Paris.

Sure, Achilles had good looks and invulnerability, but that’s not everything. Toss in some green skin and a little flatulence and you’ve got that endearing ogre voiced by the increasingly grating Mike Myers in Shrek 2 (May 21). Here he ties the knot with Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz).

As we get all worked up about these figments of dread and anger, it’s almost The Day After Tomorrow (May 28), when all that global-warming nonsense comes true and glaciers descend on New York. Roland Emmerich directs; Dennis Quaid stars. And who knew that racism was a problem in this country? Mario Van Peebles reminds us in his docudrama How To Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass (May 28), which pays tribute to his father Melvin’s groundbreaking 1971 black-comic vigilante movie, Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song.