Madonna's Romp With Austin Powers, Whitney Houston's 'Bodyguard' Ballad And More Classic Movie-Related Music Videos

For pop-culture aficionados, few things bring as much pleasure as a music video promoting a movie. It's the collision of two worlds, as musicians and movie stars join forces to combine story lines, lyrics and personalities in ways that any sane person would never expect to see together.

Batman and Prince? Arnold Schwarzenegger and AC/DC? Celine Dion and Leonardo DiCaprio? Sometimes such unlikely combinations yield a result as delicious as the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Other times we get something as repulsive as the Portuguese water dog.

In celebration of the recent launch of MTV Music, a massive site housing many of those beloved videos you grew up watching on our lovely channel, here's our list of the most notable movie-related music videos of all time:

Cyndi Lauper's "Goonies 'R' Good Enough"

You get one of the most beloved movies of the '80s ("The Goonies"), Cyndi Lauper acting, a Steven Spielberg cameo and iconic wrestling superstars, such as the Iron Sheik, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper and "Classy" Freddie Blassie, making fart jokes. The song is pretty damn catchy, and the cheese factor is through the roof! What more could you ask for? Well, a link to part two would be nice — hopefully, it will be among the videos coming soon.

Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger"

In 1999, the Material Girl joined forces with King of Schwing Mike Myers to give us a hit song, a video that had Madonna shoving her butt in Austin Powers' face and a combination that made Mini-Me want to raise the roof. Yeah, baby, yeah!

Dokken's "Dream Warriors"

We've all wasted afternoons pondering the age-old question of whether Freddie Krueger's razor-sharp claws could penetrate the hairspray-heavy locks of a 1980s metal band. Luckily for us, Dokken teamed up with Robert Englund and a pre-"Medium" Patricia Arquette to give us this clip promoting "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors." But what's more terrifying: that skeleton baby or Don Dokken's eardrum-shattering high notes?

Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You"

After all these years of reality shows, Bobby Brown arrests and declarations that "crack is wack," it's hard to imagine that Whitney Houston was once the biggest star in the whole world. But way back in 1992, she made her acting debut in a hit movie ("The Bodyguard"), turned this song into one of the best-selling singles of all time and launched a music video as inescapable as death and taxes. Things only got better when Adam Sandler stepped in to give us his rendition.

Prince's "Batdance"

Tim Burton's "Batman" was revolutionary in many ways, including the hype it built up over a comic book-themed dance song from the Purple One himself. In 1989, the song seemed weird, self-indulgent and kinda creepy. But watch the video all these years later, and maybe "Batdance" was just ahead of its time. The best part? This clip contains an extended, nearly seven-minute-long cut, giving us a more detailed version of Prince's rock opera.

Cobra Starship's "Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)"

Dating all the way back to when we visited the set, we always knew this video would be something special. Combining several music up-and-comers with Sam "the Man" Jackson and a song you can't get out of your head, it didn't let us down. Too bad we can't say the same thing about the movie.

Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"

Are Steven Tyler's lips weightless in outer space? Would the cold of leaving Earth's atmosphere make Joe Perry finally button up his shirt? If Ben Affleck playfully walked an animal cracker across Liv Tyler's navel, would we all vomit? These questions and more are answered in this epic clip promoting Michael Bay's "Armageddon." I don't know about you, but I blame the failure of "Deep Impact" solely on the fact that they didn't get a rehabbed '70s band to pen them a sappy theme song.

Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill"

Just like the rest of us, James Bond has a few bad memories from the '80s that he wishes we'd all forget. For those who don't count themselves as fans of Simon Le Bon, this clip promoting 1985's Roger Moore adventure "A View to a Kill" is it. For everyone else, it's the Timothy Dalton films. Between the floating cameras, mullets, berets and bomb-detonating Walkmans, it's hard to imagine that "Quantum of Solace" will be half as entertaining.

Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On"

Like "Titanic" itself, Celine Dion's hit is as dated now as it was massively successful then. But near, far, wherever you are, you've got to give props to the most successful movie/song pairing in the history of pop culture. Like Celine's heart, our memories of this once-ubiquitous music video will go on and on.

AC/DC's "Big Gun"

"The Last Action Hero" was a bomb and, come to think of it, "Big Gun" wasn't much of a hit either. Still, it's hard to beat this dream pairing of the Governator and Australia's most famous heavy-metal pioneers. Arnold has a history of popping up in his movies' music videos, as we all remember from Guns N' Roses' "You Could Be Mine" clip starring the Terminator, but the silliness of this video gives it the edge. Admit it: When Ah-nuld recently took the stage at a John McCain rally to introduce the senator, you were hoping just a little bit that his suit and tie would once again morph into Angus Young's schoolboy uniform.

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'Splinter': Pinned Down, By Kurt Loder

"Splinter" is a horror flick so trashy, so totally drive-in, that you'd expect a few cans of beer and a couple of joints to be included in the price of admission. Two vacationing lovebirds, Seth and Polly (Paulo Costanzo and Jill Wagner), get hijacked in their van by a gun-wielding escaped convict named Farell (Shea Whigham) and his junkie sweetheart, Lacey (Rachel Kerbs). When they all pull into a lonely gas station, they quickly learn that the attendant has been attacked by a bloodthirsty, spine-covered ... I dunno, thing of some sort, which has in turn converted him into a bloodthirsty, spine-covered zombie. "What next?" is not a question that will occur to you at this point.

Lacey soon gets gobbled by a spine monster, and her severed hand — all spiny now itself — takes on an evil life of its own and starts chasing the three spine-free survivors around the convenience store inside the station. Farell has been firing off shots through all this, prompting Polly — still intent on escaping his clutches — to whisper, "He's out of bullets." To which Seth replies, "What if he has more bullets?"

Seth, who amazingly possesses a Ph.D. in biology, fulfills the age-old monster-movie function of being professionally fascinated by something he should be flattening with a rock. "This is new," he says. "I've never seen anything like this." We wish we could say the same.

A cop arrives on the scene intent on arresting the famously wanted Farell, but she gets chewed in two before she can even get her cuffs out. Farell has mixed feelings about this. As the felled cop starts sprouting spines, he says, "Help can't even help us." At this point, Seth has a bright idea. He tries to explain it to Polly — unsuccessfully. "What're you saying?" she asks. Seth thinks for a second and says, "I don't know."

Some deeply unusual moments follow. Stalked by spiny, severed hands scuttling across the floor, Seth starts throwing rolls of paper towels at them. Bags of ice cubes are brought into play, and then firecrackers (please don't ask). And when it's discovered that Farell's arm has been infected by a rogue spine, Seth steps in to amputate it with a box cutter. ("Ooh!" says Polly.)

Considering this movie in retrospect, in all of its cheesy, no-budget splendor, I recalled Farell at one point looking down at an immobilized spine-thingy and mumbling, "It ain't thinkin'." Staggering away from the picture, you might wonder, "Who was?"

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'Friday The 13th' Producers Lead Us Through Exclusive Photos From Upcoming Reboot

All week, MTV News has been bringing you exclusive looks at upcoming horror films, including sneaks of "The Unborn" and "Drag Me to Hell."

And next, we're bringing you a familiar face.

Jason Voorhees, an icon of horror cinema, doesn't return to theaters until early next year, but MTV News has an exclusive first look at two new pictures from the eagerly anticipated "Friday the 13th" reinvention to sate your appetite.

Producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form walked us through the pictures, letting us know what characters we can safely get attached to, how their heroes are smarter than the average victim, what plans they have next for Jason and more.

MTV: The first picture showcases a lot of the young cast. It looks like they're having way too much fun. Poor, unsuspecting, innocent kids.

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'Let The Right One In': Blood In The Snow, By Kurt Loder

"Let the Right One In," a luminous, transfixing new vampire movie from Sweden, does a rare thing: It creates a completely new sensibility for a time-worn genre. Here all the old darkness has been banished, and in its place all is light: shining snowscapes, clean, bright interiors. Daubs of red and flashes of artful violence are very carefully placed. The tone is muted, and beautiful.

Twelve-year-old Oskar (Kеre Hedebrant), with his mop of blond hair and his sad pale eyes, is an emotional invert, bullied at school, falling through the cracks of his parents' divorce at home in a Stockholm suburb. One day — well, one night — a strange girl (Lina Leandersson) moves into the apartment next door, accompanied by a tormented-looking man who could be her father. The girl is a disheveled madonna, peering out from under a curtain of dark hair through eyes with huge irises. In a yard the following night, she appears out of nowhere. "I can't be your friend," she tells Oskar. "I want to be left alone." Says Oskar: "So do I."

Of course neither of them really does. They're two melancholy loners who've finally found a friend. The girl, Eli, is 12 years old, too, "more or less." She's a little scruffy, and she smells weird, and she goes coatless and sometimes shoeless in the bitter cold. But Oskar is awkwardly drawn to her, and she — suppressing a powerful urge for the first time — to him. One day he wanders through the open door of her apartment; no one is there, only a note. "I'm in the bathroom," it says. "Please don't go in. Want to hang out tonight?"

The picture is built on a procession of extreme, radiant close-ups, and it has scenes of startling originality: a character suddenly bursting into flames, an attack of terrified house cats, a very long shot (so long you might miss her in the distance) of Eli scrambling up the side of a building. There's blood seeping into the snow, too, of course, and one hideous mutilation; but there are no shock cuts, no cheap thrills, and there's very little sucker-punch music, either — only an occasional wash of somber strings or a lone piano.

Everything is background to Oskar and Eli's strange story. He falls more and more in love with her even as it dawns on him what she really is; and she toughens him against his classmate antagonists, and teaches him how to grow up — something she can never do. At the quiet, glorious conclusion, the movie's cryptic title finally settles onto it like a cool breath of poetry.

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The Sounds Of Scary, By Kurt Loder

Those familiar with the music released over the last decade by ADULT. (the period is part of the name) will be happy — or possibly not — to know that the intently mysterious Detroit duo has now produced a movie, an exceedingly creepy 40-minute horror film called "Decampment."

It's not playing in a theatre near you. It's not playing anywhere, in the usual sense. Since the group's two members — Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus — have decided to provide a live soundtrack at all screenings of the picture, it's only been shown twice so far: once at the Detroit Institute of Arts last spring and once, earlier this month, at Anthology Film Archives in New York. (They'll be presenting it next at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles on November 18.)

Anthology's East Village theatre was filled largely with students, it appeared. After a staffer's earnest warning to those in the front rows that what was about to transpire would be quite loud, the lights went down and Miller and Kuperus slipped out onstage and took their places behind two modest banks of synthesizers, one on each side of the screen. (They would play in darkness throughout the film, recalling such shadow-dwellers of the past as Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream.) Then the picture began, and the duo set to work.

(Browse photos from the "Decampment" screening here! )

Their music is a species of thundery electro-squall that's highly reminiscent of such past noise masters as Fad Gadget, Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle (whose onetime leader, Genesis P-Orridge, now resident in New York, turned up for the Anthology show). Miller cites all of these groups as influences, along with Howard Shore, Suicide and the Italian gore-movie titans Fabio Frizzi and Goblin. If it need be said, you either love this sort of thing or you hate it very deeply. (I tend to like it.) Either way, it's hard to deny that when merged with the chilly visuals of "Decampment," ADULT.'s music becomes part of a larger and much eerier experience.

The film's imagery grew out of Kuperus' uncanny art photography — meticulously staged tableaux featuring dead women in unlikely environments, often in the vicinity of vintage cars. (You have to see it, really.) The story is murky and unsettling, the proceedings wordless. The focus is on five spooky, crimson-lipped women in black high heels and business suits; heightening the air of obscure menace, their faces are generally cropped out of the frame. They are much concerned with a strange yellow book with a witchy-looking symbol on its cover. They have a van stocked with axes and black butcher aprons. A couple of other women are also on hand, but not for long. There's quite a bit of arterial leakage.

The film's manner is one of deadpan naturalism, which sharply sets off its most striking images: a body surrounded by a spreading lake of hot-pink liquid, a book oozing blood from its pages, a knife to the head. There are all kinds of fright-flick echoes, from Argento and Bava to "The Blair Witch Project," but the picture's atmosphere of home-brewed dread is very much its own.

The "Decampment" soundtrack, packaged with several of Kuperus' photographs, is available on three seven-inch records from the ADULT. Web site. The movie itself, however, will not be turning up in the great Amazon DVD bin anytime soon. "My current distribution plans," Miller said in a recent e-mail, "are to 'Crispin-Glover' it" — a reference to "the genius of how Crispin Glover started this idea of taking his own films around, and that is the only way one can see them." In the age of instant Internet access, he said, "I think that is a great thing."

So "Decampment" may be coming to a theatre near you, who knows? Just not soon, probably. It's worth a wait, though.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Splinter,""Zack and Miri Make a Porno" and "Let the Right One In."

‘Zack And Miri Make A Porno’: Boffo, By Kurt Loder
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'Zack And Miri Make A Porno': Boffo, By Kurt Loder

"Zack and Miri Make a Porno," the new Kevin Smith movie, is about a guy and a girl — lifelong friends, now platonic roommates — who are flat broke and swamped with unpaid bills. Although they've never had sex together ("It would be like f---ing my brother," says Miri), they decide to make a porn film to get out of debt.

The picture has a knockabout charm, thanks to the actors; but its premise seems flawed. Zack and Miri have been spy-cammed walking around the coffee shop where Zack works in their underwear (and less) by two snotty kids, who post the results on YouTube; a homemade porn film, Zack decides, could profitably exploit this sudden Internet stardom. Well, maybe. But since they have to tap out their friends for funds just to shoot the movie, where will they subsequently get the money to produce and promote the necessary DVDs?

Another plot defect is a function of the picture's casting. Since Zack is played by the famously funny and lovable Seth Rogen, and Miri by the adorable Elizabeth Banks, and since both of their characters complain at length (and of course hyper-graphically) about how incredibly horny they are, it's hard to accept that they haven't already given in to the obvious solution — however quasi-incestuous it might seem — and had sex together off-camera before taking the even more daunting step of having it on-camera.

There's a larger problem, too. While Smith's 1994 "Clerks" was a milestone in the sweet-and-salacious comedy genre that's since been polished to blockbuster perfection by Judd Apatow, at this point "Zack and Miri" — which features several actors from Apatow's movies (Rogen and Banks were both in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin") — seems like an attempted Apatow picture that doesn't quite make the grade. This may be a little unfair: The movie does have some funny, very Smithian moments. But his generally crotch-centric humor, without the wild situations and verbal pizzazz of the Apatow films, can seem like little more than a string of "dirty" jokes — which in turn seems a little dated.

Still, Rogen and Banks have a warm, supple chemistry; and their big sex scene (which is completely nongraphic) has a wonderful romantic glow. (Score one for the director.) They also get strong support from Craig Robinson (the club doorman in Apatow's "Knocked Up") as a friend who's been wheedled out of money to become a "producer" of the film and who deludedly anticipates a cash avalanche. ("I'm gonna be Oprah-rich!" he crows.) Smith's longtime foil Jason Mewes is on hand as a studly recruit, and so are two actual porn stars — the long-retired Traci Lords, as Bubbles, the continuity girl (who shows no skin); and the still-active and irresistibly perky Katie Morgan (who shows lots, including a pair of hugely fake breasts). There's also a surprise appearance by two fairly well-known actors playing a gay couple at a high-school reunion, and they're so unexpected, and so into their roles, that they walk away with the scene.

But apart from a freewheeling interlude in which Zack and friends lounge around trying to think up a good, punny title for their porno ("Edward Penis Hands"? "Lawrence of the Labia"?), the jokes with which the picture is stuffed are too predictably crass and dudish, and after a while they drag the movie down. Can Smith ever outgrow this sort of rote, tired raunch? Or does that just cue another punchline?

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Kevin Smith Eschews Comedy In Favor Of Horror For 'Red State' -- But Will It Ever Get Made?

Kevin Smith's new horror film, "Red State," is so bleak and despairing, he's beginning to jokingly tell reporters that it makes "The Dark Knight" look like "Strawberry Shortcake." Very much unlike his previous movies, this one has a body count and an unrelenting and terrifying villain.

But the story about four unsuspecting teenagers and the Fred Phelps-esque religious fundamentalist who stalks them, which Smith first detailed to MTV News in an interview last July, is terrifying the 38-year-old director for an entirely different reason these days: He may never get to make it.

"I don't know, dude," Smith casually replied when asked if he's still optimistic that the film will find financing. "Honestly, it's been tough finding financing, and that was before the economic collapse in the last two or three weeks. It's just not a very commercial flick, and I understand why people are like, 'Do you have another comedy? Because I'll do that.' So I don't know.

"[But] for some reason," he continued, his resolve growing, "that just makes me want to do it more. It makes me feel like I'm on the right track, if people are like, 'I don't know if I want to be involved in this.' It makes you feel like it's worth making."

Make no mistake about it, either: Smith is intent on finding financing for the flick and finding it soon, despite recent front-page news about a new space comedy he's written that's in the pipeline — news that wasn't all that, well, new, actually. (Indeed, Smith told us about the movie almost a full year ago, back when it was still going to be about "Ranger Danger.") But that made us wonder if he was shelving "Red State" in favor of the outer-space flick.

"Oh, I'm doing 'Red State' next," Smith insisted. "The space movie isn't quite ready yet and won't be ready for a little while, and then we haven't even thought about casting. If I put in it, I have to wait until Seth's free, and Seth, as we all know, is a very busy actor right now."

Speaking of Rogen, "Red State" is even more imperative these days because of near-universal early acclaim for "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," his newest comedy starring Rogen and Elizabeth Banks. "Zack and Miri" is Smith's seventh film since breaking out with "Clerks" in 1994. Like "Clerks," each film has been both sentimental and scatological — but each, at heart, has been a comedy.

But they've also all been, simply, "movies," Smith said, insisting that he's eager to move outside his comfort zone with an entirely different genre.

"This, to me, is very much a film, 'Red State.' 'Zack and Miri' is a total movie, totally a fun movie, totally enjoyable, but 'Red State' has a lot on its mind," Smith explained. "And I want to get back to my filmmaker roots and make something that's got a lot on its mind.

" 'Red State' has something on its mind. It's like a polemic of sorts," he added. "I didn't get into the business to make comedies, even though I do make comedies and that's what I like. I got in the business to make film, like I'm a filmmaker, and films are full of ideas, and full of outlooks, and full of opinions, and done with artistry or whatnot. I've never been accused of being an artist, but that's chiefly what films are."

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