Goldcrest Films is a British film production company founded by Jake Eberts in January 1977. It enjoyed great success in the 1980s with films such as Local Hero (1983), The Killing Fields (1984) and Hope and Glory (1987) mostly produced by David Puttnam on modest budgets. The company also benefited from the new investment of Channel 4 in film production. The company won two Academy Awards for Best Picture, for Chariots of Fire in 1981 and Gandhi in 1982. After these initial successes the company backed more expensive productions with established Hollywood stars that often ran over schedule and budget culminating in Revolution, The Mission (1986) and Absolute Beginners that all turned out to be box office flops.
George (Freddie Highmore) is a loner high school student with a penchant for drawing and skipping class. He has a nihilistic view of the world which is why he never does homework and skips school frequently. His academic delinquency puts him on academic probation. One day while on the school roof he encounters another classmate, Sally (Emma Roberts), smoking. When a teacher appears, George pulls out a cigarette and takes the fall for Sally. The two become friends. On career day, George meets a young artist, Dustin, and finds him inspiring. He brings Sally with him to visit Dustin at his studio in Brooklyn and it becomes apparent that Dustin finds Sally attractive. Sally invites George to a New Year's Eve party. At the party, she dances with an ex-boyfriend and George gets drunk, goes outside, throws up, and falls asleep in an alley. Sally finds him there and takes him to her place, putting him to bed on a pull-out next to her bed. They grow close and George gets more involved in school.
Scorchers takes place in cajun Louisiana on the wedding night of a young woman named Splendid (played by Emily Lloyd). Splendid is scared to death of what will happen in the bedroom with her new husband, Dolan (James Wilder) and her father, Jumper (Leland Crooke), finds himself having to coax his daughter to submit to the groom.
In 1939 New Orleans, a roguish German Shepherd named Charlie B. Barkin escapes from a dog pound with the help of his friend, a dachshund named Itchy Itchiford. They return to a casino riverboat on the bayou, which is formerly run by Charlie with his partner, a bulldog named Carface Caruthers. Not wanting to share the profits with Charlie, Carface persuades him to leave town with 50% of the casino's earnings. Charlie agrees, but is later intoxicated and murdered by Carface. He is sent to Heaven where a whippet angel named Annabelle (who was named in the sequel) tells him that a gold watch representing his life has stopped. He steals and winds it, sending Charlie back to Earth, but is told that if he dies again, he will go to Hell. After reuniting with Itchy, they discover that Carface is holding an orphan girl named Anne-Marie (presumably kidnapped from the orphanage by Carface), who has the ability to talk to animals and gain knowledge of a race's results beforehand, allowing Carface to rig the odds on the rat races and become rich. They rescue her, intending to use her abilities to get revenge on Carface, though Charlie tells her that they plan to give their winnings to the poor and help her find parents.
Connie Wyatt is a restless 15-year-old who is anxious to explore the pleasures of her sexual awakening. Before she enters her sophomore year in high school, she spends the summer moping around her family farm house. She suffers from her mother's put-downs, while hearing nothing but praise for her older sister, June. Her father somehow manages to float around the family tensions. She also helps paint the cottage, just as her mother constantly demands her to.