"The Last House on the Left" is a marketed as a horror film.  I don't understand this as there is too much drama and family oriented plots to make it a horror film.  There is just too much story for it to be horror.  Yes, there are some gruesome scenes.  But there are a lot of non-horror films that have blood and violence and are simply action or suspense movies.  This film fails at being horror and fails about just about everything else.  It only succeeds to disgust in a non-entertaining way. Movie violence has permeated through films for several decades now.  And while violence and gruesome attacks can be forgiven in the movie, the one thing that is completely unacceptable is the rape of a 17 year-old girl.  That fact aside, they also show it from beginning to end.  I ...

  I know what you are all thinking, "how could he give this film even three stars?"  Well, the answer is simply nostalgia.  In the mid-90s, the horror genre was resurrected and modified for the generation of the day.  It all began with "Scream" in 1996.  Writing/Directing team, Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson brought teen horror back to life.  This film was the start of Friday night college horror night.  The duo followed up "Scream" with two sequels.  While none of the three films were truly awe-inspiring, they paved the way for other films in the genre to come along. Most notably, in 1997, one year after "Scream," Kevin Williamson departed from Craven and created, "I Know What You Did Last Summer."  The film was only moderately successful, but the studio provided it a sequel.  Just one year later, in 1998 "I ...

  “The Thing,” aka “John Carpenter’s The Thing,” was released two weeks after “E.T.”, probably one reason it didn’t do as well as expected.  The reputation of the movie, John Carpenter’s first for a big studio, has gradually increased over the years, and now is generally regarded as a science fiction/horror classic.  Some even prefer it to Howard Hawks’ 1951 movie, of which this is a remake.  It’s well produced, convincingly set in Antarctica (using location work in Alaska and British Columbia), with special effects designed and engineered by the amazingly creative Rob Bottin.  This was well before computer graphic effects; what you see is what was actually in person, on the sets.  The effects are still astonishing and gleefully gruesome. The story from which both films grew was the 1938 novella “Who Goes There,” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing as ...

  When college student Emily Rose (Jennifer Carpenter) dies after undergoing a church-ordained exorcism, the priest who performed the rite, Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson) is put on trial for negligent homicide.  The District Attorney assigns Ethan Thomas (Campbell Scott) to the case, an attorney of faith whose beliefs will not dissuade him from leading a bold, ferocious prosecution.  The Archdiocese hires the firm run by Karl Gunderson (Colm Feore), who assigns top defense attorney Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) to the case.  Bruner is an agnostic who has a reputation for getting unsavory characters off the hook. As the trial proceeds, the film flashes back to tell the story of Emily Rose, a bright high school student in a rural family.  Awarded a full scholarship to a local university, Emily is off to a good start, attending classes and finding a boyfriend, when ...

  Created by Alan Moore, John Totleben and Steve Bissette in an issue of the comic book “Swamp Thing” in 1985, John Constantine began life as a sarcastic and cynical Englishman who knew a lot about magic and the beings that wielded it. With his trademark trench coat and smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, Constantine wandered through several issues of “Swamp Thing”, made brief stopovers in other titles, and finally got his own comic series under the title, “Hellblazer”. There have been over two hundred comic magazines published so far, and the series remains one of the premiere titles of DC Comics’ Vertigo line. In the comic books, Constantine doesn’t try to be the hero. He’s totally out for himself, either to gain something for himself, help a friend he can’t live without (and the attrition rate among Constantine’s friends is incredible) or ...