the last word in film

Each year, Hollywood’s editors hold the Splice World Film Festival. Of course, editors don’t finance their own films; instead, they take pieces left on editing-room floors and mix them to make new movies from previous releases. To simplify things, they only fuse movies that share the last words of their titles. You might see two men trade murders on a locomotive that is hijacked by Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in Strangers on a Money Train, or Clark Gable falling in love with Claudette Colbert over a sumptuous Italian meal in It Happened One Big Night. Can you identify the Splice World films described below? (Note: the first film referred to in the description comes first in the spliced title)

(by the way, the Splice World Film Festival program can also be read in tree-death [printable] version)

1. Michael Caine and Sean Connery travel to an animated Indian jungle to help Simba, a young cub, fight his murderous uncle for control of the throne.

2. A boy buys a mysterious fantasy book about a young upper-class woman (Katherine Hepburn) romanced by her ex-husband and a writer for a society magazine.

3. Newlyweds Jane Fonda and Robert Redford take a New York City apartment and find their wacky domestic life complicated by genetically-engineered dinosaurs.

4. Phileas Fogg sets off to circumnavigate the globe, all of which looks strangely like Rockaway and Manhattan, in a film narrated by Woody Allen.

5. Clint Eastwood, an aging Secret Service man brought in to guard the President, trains for his assignment with the 1924 British Olympic running team.

6. Billy Crystal plays an NBA referee who romances Debra Winger by moving to France and taking up painting, all the while singing and dancing to Gershwin music.

7. On her wedding day, Meg Ryan’s soul enters an old man’s body; the groom, Alec Baldwin, flees, leaving the bride-to-be to get him back, with the help of an infuriating European con man, played by Kevin Kline.

8. In this cult horror film, marauding vegetables try to conquer the world, starting with the women visiting the Whistle Stop Café in Alabama.

9. Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same period of time over and over again, trapped until he helps save humanity from invading aliens.

10. Steve Martin must deal with his daughter’s imminent marriage to a two-faced, fairy-tale tyrant and enlists the aid of a pirate, a giant, and a Spanish swordsman.

11. After an affair with Sean Young, mistress of the Secretary of Defense, Kevin Costner worries about his future at the Pentagon when an actor at the Academy Awards reveals that one of his high-school teachers is gay.

12. Military lawyer Tom Cruise is sent to investigate the mysterious murder of a Marine and implicates loveable curmudgeons Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.

13. Jim Carrey thinks he’s had a normal life until he discovers he’s been on camera since birth, as a contestant on a rigged 1950s trivia program.

14. James Bond must stop a maniac who wants to flood the Silicon Valley, while at the same time preventing a druglord from making billions of dollars on cocaine sales.

15. Janeane Garofalo and Uma Thurman star in an unusual remake of Cyrano de Bergerac, which involves not only gender reversal, but also a botched diamond heist carried out by men named after colors.

Answers will premiere tomorrow. Get your tuxes and gowns out of storage.