transient-2

This film runs like an adaptation of a one man stage show and with tight claustrophobic shots of one man's face dominating the entire film, it's difficult to understand why anyone thought it would flourish in the medium of cinema. Initially I was not clear on any historical context to the film, so I chose to understand it as allegory - some attempt if you will at British existentialism. Very little effort was spent to make the lead character a convincing astronaut (f*cking hell! oh sh*t! oh god! etc) and his colleagues on the radio were equally unprofessional, useless and unhinged. It was clear however that the British, alone and unprepared, defied the expectations of rival nations who might not want to see them succeed in their mysterious mission. The film had some international intrigue, and was not conceptually uninteresting in that regard.

Unfortunately,if you've ever endured the frustration of trying to speak to someone on the phone as their signal disappears, you should prepare to relive this annoyance for the entire film's duration. I will just share some scenes and let the writing speak for itself.

Can you understand? Can you say again? You're breaking up. What do you mean? Did you hear that? Hello? (silence) Are you there? (silence) Your signal is disappearing. Did you hear me? (silence) What's wrong? (silence) Hello? I no understand Russian. Your signal is breaking up. What frequency is this? Say again? (silence) Answer me please. (silence) Where am I? I have a problem. Will you help me? Can you put me back in touch? Hello?

The film fast becomes an endurance test for the viewer, who like the protagonist, is flying through space with headphones wondering if he couldn't just die a little sooner to spare the agony of boredom and tedious repetition. Frankly, I would recommend turning it off. If you grapple with meaning, Kierkegaard is still tried and true.

I doubt 'After the Fall' was conceived as a sequel to 'Falling Down' but the movies do have a similar subject. Wes Bentley plays the protagonist, who begins to have money issues after losing his job. His character is completely unsympathetic, a sociopath who lies easily to his family and goes on an increasingly reckless crime spree because he's too prideful to ask for money from his father-in-law. Instead, he robs complete strangers at gunpoint with an astonishing lack of anxiety or hesitation; he moves like a career criminal with no fear of getting caught. His occasional indulgence in rants and his spontaneous petty interventions suggest a desire for social justice, but his actions are transparently hypocritical and the film has established that nothing he says can be believed. It's hard to see any arc of development at all in this character because Bentley doesn't emote. He never varies his facial expressions beyond a look of frustrated detachment - his eyes never change, his face doesn't move; he walks quietly through dry scenes set to meditative music posing with the same look in every shot, and he never experiences remorse. His wife (Vinessa Shaw) is a trophy, a prop to suggest his motivation, but she's so completely oblivious and implausibly stupid, she doesn't interact enough to actually humanize him. There are plenty of scenes of his children happily playing or asking questions. The implication is that Bentley never swallows his pride because he cares for his family - that alone should justify lying to them and sadistically hurting whoever he wants. This movie will be of special interest to you if you think your wife is useless and your children are such a burden, it could justify murder and suicide.

This film establishes characters and follows their emotional vacillations in such a conscientious, thorough manner that its compassion becomes powerful. It's neither formulaic nor lazy, and offers a refreshing lack of cynicism, even granting some noble courage to characters who might not in reality be so graceful.

Neither angry nor pretentious, the film also never struggles to be more than what it is: a pleasantly optimistic, hopeful depiction of how people might heal under the weight of distraction following a tragedy.

The performances are excellent, and help to make the film very engrossing.

My initial response to this film was unfairly snide, searching the lead actor's face in vain for simple change of expression. But although it took some time, I was finally able to find redeeming value in this tepid disaster film; this apparent new sub-genre of divorced dads winning back their families by saving them from natural disasters might have some worth if you take a drink every time you see someone on the phone. Of course having a character talk on the phone does not contribute any sense of urgency or suspense. In fact watching people talk on the phone in films is as annoying as watching them talk on the phone in real life - but this film is annoying enough to leave you falling down drunk. Three sips for speaker-phone, two sips for a headset, this film promises a good time.

The story unfolds as a mentally ill professor (Val Kilmer) confesses to a newspaperman and later a detective, that he's holding a group of men and women hostage in a steam room; they were lured there with the offer of a dating service, and now the hot steam will slowly kill them by dissolving their lungs if the professor's theories about global warming are not printed in the paper. We're not entirely sure if these victims are being held, if they're already dead, or if Val Kilmer's character is merely delusional; unfortunately, in confusing our understanding of reality and the passage of time, the film altogether removes us from the feeling of suspense.

Presumably the intent is to show how social constraints and civilized behavior will collapse into chaos under pressure, since the victims all become infantile and turn on each other in flashbacks. In this case however the pressure seems pretty damn mild - the victims are sweating in a steam room from the very beginning, so all they can really do is sweat more. We add a little more steam, and they pant. Now they look tired. They make tortured faces at each other, quietly lamenting a lack of iced tea. But since the scenes are intercut with police interviews outside, we lose the feeling of claustrophobia, and the conflict between the victims seems inexplicable; it's implied they've already been compromised by their own neuroses but we haven't seen enough of these characters to mark their descent - all we see are silly histrionics. Just as annoying, the film relies on the stereotype of Italian-Americans as insensitive mobster-types; roughly sketched in the cretinoid detective, this crystallizes completely when an imprisoned restaurateur instantly transforms to a misogynistic brute, calling each woman a 'b*tch" and just attacking someone. He tries to escape by smashing the locked door and you'd think this action would be welcome, but for unknown reasons it causes violence among them. One scene jumps out as especially bizarre. We hear the operatic strains of 'comrades being slain on the battlefield' music as the victims simply look at each other in desperation for more than five full minutes, in slow-motion. At the end of this montage, one woman just stands up and cuts her own throat with a shard of glass. She could no longer endure the agony of waiting in the sauna.

The conclusion attempts to outline some relationship that Kilmer has with another mad, diabolical doctor as an accomplice. I'm not sure why, and I'll abstain from offering any interpretation of this conclusion, since it struck me as utterly nonsensical.

I'll say first that I empathize with this narrator and I found this film to be well worth the time. However, having seen far more personal and daring attempts at catharsis I was put off by the film's consistent, crass disingenuity. Within the first ten minutes, it becomes clear that the narrator's quest to pursue the "history of his failed relationships" is merely a narcissistic attempt to further reinforce the high opinion he holds for himself. This is a fantasy rock-star gratifying himself with a wink to the camera, evidenced more by the passive-aggressive and flippant attitude he displays toward the people who've touched him than by the headphones he costumes around his neck. At the beginning of the film we are introduced to a list of his ex-girlfriends, which we should note is average or above average in length for a man his age, a man who is not physically unattractive. He crassly reintroduces himself to each of the lovely women who've left him with obvious disregard for the people they've become, and we retain the impression that he's carried his camera crew with either bitterness or adolescent bravado to their door for a boast. We see him coaxing smiles from attractive young women on the roadside who giggle and coo for his attentions; we see his mother chide him for having ignored the amorous letters of the many women who've adored him, even as he suppresses a smile; we see him make a fool of "geeky" skateboarders, as if his own ostentatious display of guitars didn't evidence some puerile naivete. All this within the first ten minutes - and is all this to establish some wobbly foundation from which he'll fall, and in the throes of personal agony lay himself raw to some revelation? Perhaps, in the last ten minutes. The majority of the film speaks more to pathos than tragedy. The story unfolds as we loathe to expect: he returns to each of his ex-girlfriends to remind them of how he humiliated them the first time, and it will be a pleasure if he can do so again. He even goes through the motions of finding a new girlfriend (since by now we've established firmly that finding a new girlfriend has NEVER been the problem) just so he can vent even more hostility in systematically rejecting and dismissing them all. He just can't seem to find the committed, genuine anger or the beating he wants as a response - not from a counselor, whose words lack the pain and not from a dominatrix, whose pain is misspoken. By the time our hero takes his Viagra and we're equally convinced his problems have nothing to do with sex, just as our 'documentary' seems to devolve into a time-wasting farce, he narrows to his last, most meaningful interview. Hostility is funny but it can't replace an apology. Now the perennial question 'why did you dump me?' is marked by a more tender, anxious delivery. Even as our imagination pads the brevity of this conversation with some depth, one can't help but wonder to what extent, wiping her tears, this woman also felt used. Who couldn't love the way it ends.

Sometimes a movie is so comprehensively awful it has a destructive effect on your morale. You begin to really ask yourself, what does it mean for our society that the standard is so terribly low? Can they honestly expect that we'll endure this many clichés and still be entertained?

Of course, it is still a Hollywood mainstay to make the GUN the major character, plot device, and the source of all conflict and resolution in films. Character needs a gun. Gets a gun. Can't do that because he has a gun. Puts his gun down first. OH MY GOD What are we going to do!? He has a gun! He waves it around, acting more malicious than real human beings ever do. He pushes it in someone's face for 90 minutes, shouting questions. The hallmark of any conclusion will be the comforting sound of police sirens.

It's a real challenge to make such a tired, hackneyed formula work again; a film has to be very clever and well executed. This one is neither. It has no life and no personality, and it will suck these components from YOU. it will make you feel WORSE about living in the time and space that you do. Really, who needs that!? So yes, I'll say it: I think this may well be the worst film I have ever seen. Anyone who was involved in the making of this sub- mediocre soul killing trash should be publicly embarrassed for the disservice they've done to us all.

Don't people wrestle these things, even? Is ONE crocodile going to be so lethal that you can't even let your feet touch the water even for a moment? I just can't see that one crocodile could be so menacing. The characters in this film are whimpering, nervous wrecks for the duration, hysterical and cowardly. Why? Just get back in the boat! You see a human ear and you run screaming? Who would do that? In Open Water, which other commenters have referenced, the circumstances were realistic. This film is much closer to Piranha or any number of cheesy sci-fi/horror films that feature an overgrown insect, rodent or reptile terrorizing an island, city, or sewer. 'Attack of the 30-foot Killer Alligator People from the Black Lagoon' is what Open Water was fresh to avoid. This film on the other hand quickly becomes camp; the characters have seeming mental breakdowns and you're more inclined to laugh at them for their dearth of intellectual resources.

I don't know anything about the howard stern show, or john belushi, or the innumerable seemingly tangential associations commenters have been bringing to this film but I will say that this film must belong to as an yet undefined genre of Italian-American exploitation films. It should share the wall with Blacula, Born in East LA, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Personally I find that kind of sentimentality to be as boring as baseball... but I did laugh a few times. Jokes are delivered with enough pregnant pause to make a light comedy Brechtian. Here's my own tangential association: Scrubs. (Inner dialogue): "what was that film... somebody and kumar go to white castle? Yeah, I thought that film was more creative."

the protagonist of this movie is very much like his near-sexual obsession - the shark - as it is described: a "misunderstood predator". Added to this, as a vengeful crusader for shark equality he's not only a murderous psychopath, he's also an unfriendly, arrogant man with a big ugly medallion and no sense of humor. In this film humans and sharks both live in competitive worlds where hunting is both the business and the pleasure. Don't expect anything edifying. The dialogue is histrionic and combative with a few genuine gems like: "You are a SICKIE! Get out of here you SHARK-LOVER!"

Indeed, it's implied that sharks replace women for our curiously masculine anti-hero - ("I wouldn't be surprised if them baby sharks come out lookin' just like him.") In the beginning, he sits at a bar and watches a sexy woman on stage, as the audience hoots and howls. Later, the girl is replaced by a shark...yes, It's a feeding frenzy of abysmal performances!

I would recommend this film for one reason alone - the soundtrack. There are some nice ambient grooves in here, and more than one scene has music similar to Pink Floyd circa 1969, with keyboards from 'More' or 'Ummagumma'...only this is easy listening music for creatures with walnut-sized brains.

No one likes it when you give a bad review. If you're looking for the legacy of George Romero, look elsewhere. In sum, this film features characterizations and dialogue so lazy, uninteresting and shallow you really won't care if anyone dies or not, and there's not a sliver of irony to keep you interested otherwise. Ask yourself, "Would I sit through "Friday the 13th part 11?"

That narrative is exactly what you'd expect from the title, but the constraints of being on an airplane apparently don't prohibit setting off bombs and having prolonged firefights with automatic weapons. Why put them on a plane in the first place if there's no danger of a hull breach or decompression, or even a crash? If you're going to stave off farce you have to work creatively around the limitations of your setting. Astronauts wear helmets, submariners don't open the hatch while submerged. "Dawn of the Dead" took place in a mall - did you see anyone in the mall flying helicopters or yachting? No, because you can't do that in a mall. When a film is too absurd it violates its own rules and ceases to be interesting. On an airplane, setting off a bomb and shooting 100 rounds through the ceiling is just dumb, lazy writing.

For all the reviewers here who were born after 1990: Dude! being a "zombie film" doesn't give it license to be stupid and in fact for fans of the genre, it's very much the opposite. The zombies are of course dumber than the protagonists but sad reflections on these characters as well. Not rabid dogs, barking bad computer enhancements that protagonists treat as such. If you're going to make zombies irrelevant, why not just make them snakes?

Oh wait- I know, it's a coincidence. Of course the producer of such a great film could never be cynical, quick money had nothing to do with it. We all have deep faith in your capacity to discriminate between two astonishingly fresh cinematic novelties: snakes on a plane. and plane dead. And we'll prove it, by changing the title to remind you of an entirely different film!

Go ahead, tell me this comment is useless. Then check back in 20 years.

If the purpose of this documentary was to evoke an emotional response and foster dialogue, it succeeded on both counts. I left a comment to articulate my visceral response to this film, and a few people found it offensive. But what should I say? As a human being, much less a documentarian who has to been to Thailand, I was offended by this film. I don't think "Bangkok Girl" ever really got to tell her story. All I heard was the filmmaker. So I'm going to repost my comment, and preface it with a disclaimer: for any who came surfing here with the intent of posting their tearful heartfelt applause, you might find the following comment to be unpleasantly sardonic.

"I'm a good citizen! That's why I'm going to a bowling alley in Virginia, US. I'll interview the first girl willing to talk to me. Maybe she's been beaten by her husband but remains in her marriage. I'll ask her lots of personal questions: why did she get an abortion when she was 15? Why doesn't she leave her job as an underpaid waitress, quit drinking and go back to school? Then I'll lay in a voice over, wondering if there's really any hope for her, or any remedy for the tragedy of her situation. I'll call it: Richmond Girl. Because everyone has a story. As for the men in the bowling alley, they don't really have a story so I won't ask them personal questions - but together, we can feel better than them. I'll wave goodbye to the first girl in Richmond who talked to me, and feel good - knowing that I could have slept with her if that's what I wanted. Because that's what caring is.

If you're amazed or ashamed that hypocrisy like this still has an audience, try to understand that it's basically a rite-of-passage for lazy film students everywhere. College students love to "investigate" prostitution, but they don't do it at home because they'd have to see and hear from their subjects again and that's too much commitment. So students: ask around the quad and you'll hear about some places you can shoot (coincidentally, your own country's GNP will be higher - go team!). "I hear Paraguay is like, really bad. Like you can buy any girl you want and stuff." You'll come back from vacation feeling better about yourself, as if you've tackled some kind of social problem. And better still, you'll get an "A"!

I challenge you to learn *ONE SINGLE THING* about Thailand from this indulgent film. This comes from a long embarrassing tradition of backward, self-serving, patronizing colonialist-explorer films. Kidlat Tahimik please... let me hold you and cry."

Jack Gramm is a psychiatrist, and a professor, and a professional 'expert witness' instrumental to the FBI's prosecution of a serial murderer. As the film opens the murderer is in prison, but a similar crime has just been committed - was he falsely accused?

Well, it's a movie, so let's pretend a string of crime scenes with no physical evidence does stump the FBI and they DO need to meekly prosecute someone with just a psychiatric profile, a profile given by one man whose conscience can overturn the conviction. For our suspense, the biggest mystery is how Jack found work as a psychiatrist OR a professor, as we never see him perform either of these functions with competence. Jack Gramm may well be the exact opposite of Dr. Richard Kimble (The Fugitive). From the start, we see an aloof man indulge himself over and over again; first drunk, then dismissing compelling arguments from colleagues in his absolutely huge and oddly corporate office, then arriving late to class to linger on the phone before an auditorium of obviously frustrated grad students. His legitimacy is only given credence by the patients and secretaries he dryly kisses, peripheral waves of adoring females who can bring him cookies as quickly as they can trace calls on disposable cell phones.

Now Jack receives an alarming phone call wherein a garbled voice tells him he has 88 minutes to live. At this point he begins to suspect whoever happens to cross his line of sight - a bored student playing with his cell phone, a girl walking to her car - no less than five different people who happen to be in the parking garage, as well as a guy in campus security - campus security! where Seattle students go to plead for their confiscated pets and pot plants, here we find a buzzing hub to rival any city precinct and Jack thinks he's found a solid lead. As he fumbles about flashing his credentials, sooner or later, inevitably you contemplate the deeply grotesque nature of this character: in spite of his enormous pool of resources, Jack is reluctant to tell anyone at the FBI about his troubles because he wants to ensure that the man he has accused is executed as quickly as possible. The idea of staying the execution even for 12 hours, even as a different man or a very INFORMED copycat kills his students - has him steeped in disgust and incredulity! It's not blood-lust, but arrogance we should find so charming. And here's an example of the incisive and persuasive reasoning for which Dr. Gramm is apparently renowned:

"I don't like him! Get a warrant, search his place!" "You know I can't get a warrant without sufficient grounds." "Awwwww...just get a warrant. Come on."

Come on! Even his closest friend at the FBI will turn a gun on him and wonder. By the time we've established zero confidence in our paranoid autocratic hero, a caricature whom we can only redeem retroactively - we're about halfway through the movie.

At this point the professor puts away his handy portable bomb detection unit, and the director bombs us with a baffling and implausible network of student intrigue that culminates in the kind of timing and logistical genius of which SWAT teams can only dream. Wrap all those circuitous threads into a standard confessional monologue, clap your hands clean and there you have it, a truly mediocre, pitiful contrivance.

Reading the comments here, it seems a lot of people are still very eager to see ANY film with Al Pacino. There are lot of really, really talented actors out there. Good films too.

Imagine yourself on a riverbank prodding mud with a stick; the dirt is unsettled, stirs in the water, settles down again. In this film we're introduced to a number of characters who cross paths, and whose conflicts overlap on occasion before settling to a passive resolution.

The confrontation between the architect of a dilapidated housing project and a dissatisfied resident forms the central vein in a network of sadly uninteresting stories.

There is no surprise, and no insight brought to the representation of a young girl who in alienation craves affection; nor to the truck driver who doesn't want to ruin her first time; nor to the teenage boy accepting he's gay, nor to the grieving mother in the projects and finally, there is no insight into the proud man who doesn't want to admit his ego blinds him. Here we find a few people we've all seen before. They barely talk to each other and - unlike real people - when they do talk they say exactly what you'd expect them to say. Don't be tricked into thinking this film is asking any kind of question about family or race. If that's true, what's the question? The pretentious and two-dimensional nature of this writing is most transparent in the final scene wherein the architect and his son meet on a rooftop in the projects. Finally they have something to talk about: through my actions I have been the architect of someone's suffering, but there was no indication that I should have done anything differently - like father like son? Well, here the film ends abruptly, safe, risk-free. Not taking risks in your writing is not especially clever, let's not make a point of it.

And unlike any number of films where stronger character sketches guide the narrative, time is linear in this picture; you won't see events intertwining or taking place simultaneously, nothing is revealed as cause or effect. "Crash", to which this film has been compared, and "American Beauty" had engaging narrative formats that compelled you to unravel a mystery. A director is an architect of sorts, and the director of this film is just like the architect he depicts - he's merely housing people in a flat, familiar, boring rectangle. There's no drama or vision, so we have to ask: what's the function?

I wouldn't normally do this but some of the comments being made about this film are just too curious to elude quotation.

My favorite so far is: "The cinematography was horrible, and gives one the feeling of actually being in the sea, instead of watching a film. "

Can you imagine if people were as opinionated about medicine as they are about films? 'These doctors should stop delivering so many babies because it makes the population grow, and because women look better when they keep them inside!'

And I can't count how many people have dismissed this film entirely because it has nudity in it. If you want to be prudish that's your prerogative, it really depends on where you're from. But how does this qualify a work of cinema either way?

"This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. There is unnecessary nudity and the entire film is two people floating around in the ocean. "

Yeah, the two people could've gotten out of the ocean and driven trucks. If the film had one less boob and a different setting I'd give it an 8. "Waiting for Godot" would've been a great play too, if only the bus had come. I mean is it possible to miss the point more completely? It seems some people don't appreciate a compelling subject as much as a good shiny explosion, and they're simply unwilling to look beyond the film's budget. It was a good idea here to exploit the immediacy of video and its association with vacations, and to choose some gritty, sun-burnt realism over grandiosity. Personally, I'd rather watch people bob in the ocean for two hours than another film where leather-clad Hollywood twits beat each other through banal interrogation procedures. 'Where is so-and-so?' (slap) 'Where is so-and-so? I'm too stupid to pick up the phone book or find him myself!' (slap).

This comment says a lot; have you ever heard someone complain that a movie is not formulaic enough?:

"then they decide to give in and die at the end after all of that!!!...Disappointed. Especially because it is made by LionsGate."

Oh no Mr. LionsGate! You were such an engaging artist, before you gave up on happy endings! I'm gonna return my T-Shirt and switch to Paramount!

Erroneously advertised as a horror movie, this is in fact a DETECTIVE DRAMA; it might solicit praise from "Monk" or "Columbo" fans not simply because its paced as a TV movie or an extended teleplay, but because a lot of time is spent on the development of humane characters with real fallibility. The mystery takes time to unravel, and it does so in a reasonably realistic and tasteful manner. In an ocean of conflated stereotypes, stilted scripts and nerve-wracking formulas, watching a subdued, 70s-style drama like this one can be quite pleasant. Moreover, however slow or lacking in suspense, no one will say that this story bores with its predictability.

Just to debunk two popular misconceptions:

(1). For the reputation it sustains, this movie does indeed pale to the works of H. G. Lewis in the domain of nauseating graphic violence. Jaded fans of splatter will note at once that a lot of violence is merely implied, taking place off screen with suggestive sound effects and banking on your own perverse imagination.

(2). The film is not really sexist. It was arbitrarily singled out by Women Against Pornography, a useless if well-meaning organization notorious for pushing women to feel victimized and expressing, without irony, matchless hatred for any woman appearing in the nude. In fact, much of the violence in this film is perpetrated by women upon men, and you wouldn't know they were women at all if they weren't nude, because no other reference is made to their gender. There is ONE SEX SCENE in this film, between a man and another man's corpse. As for the implications of the midget and the severed head, well, is this film "anti-midget" or is it "midget-empowering"? Does it depend on whether or not the midget is nude, or just the gender of the severed head? If you can care about questions like these for more than five minutes, you're probably as bored as you are boring.

All told, the attempt of this film is to keep the viewer amused with its audacious perversity. Many off-off Broadway productions do make that attempt, but I've never seen one succeed as this film does.

The central character in this film is a mental patient made witness to a series of unrelated, nightmarish episodes; he serves as a hub for a narrative format similar to 'Twilight Zone', 'Cat's Eye' and 'Creepshow' in particular. Each story chronicles the punishment of characters sketched as repulsive in so far as they are, respectively: crudely misogynistic, developing over an antique amusement park inhabited by an annoying ghost, colorizing black and white films, and committing robbery-homocide on an old couple protected by murderous teddy bears.

In light of its apparently low budget the film coheres surprisingly well (as much as a talented editor could compensate for the pacing of abysmal performances) and one might even be inclined to forgive its merely functional, mediocre cinematography -- were it not for the audio. The audio is so outstandingly, distractingly poor it single-handedly, exponentially reduces the film's entire production value and its tolerabilty for anyone who resents dialogue engineered in bathtubs with a walkman. The entire film should have been post-dubbed, if only to be made dignified for cremation.

As B-movies go, this movie is hilarious and absolutely entertaining. The renegade macho posturing, over-the-top costuming and sound effects, and the genuinely comic manners of death can easily coalesce to something transcendent for you; if you're worried that a camp film will leave you feeling that you've merely wasted your time, worry not. This film is much funnier than anything you've seen on MST3K, and would be delightful even without irony for anyone who likes to watch lost paint-ballers, Chuck Norris movies and/or right-wing survivalist nut-jobs. After this movie, I like to slap on some "Brut" cologne, do squats and hold my breath until laughter prompts release.

Halloween II sets the stage for a consistent continuation of the original but the stage is so ridiculous: can you believe a dark hospital? OK, how about an empty one? OK, how about a hospital with no doctors in it? A warehouse might have been a better stage for Halloween II; our suspension of disbelief is already constrained by Michael Meyers, and the film becomes pure silliness when he's transplanted to a world we have never seen before. Unlikely characters in unlikely places get killed in unlikely ways. Weeee! Is there room in the hospital hot tub for me too? No amount of marijuana could prevent this movie from boring (or annoying) a fan of horror films.

You can't convince someone to like this movie. I found the image of a high school class singing The Supremes over the ornate corpse of a Krishna to be comically endearing. I also liked the image of Scatman Caruthers bicycling through flying sausages in "Zapped!" with Scott Baio; neither of these films can be called excellent, but each has a tepid silliness which is pleasant. Gerrit Graham and Michael Lerner make memorable characters, and the rest are painless. 'Painless' is a high rating for any as jaded as I.

Never having read the original lampoon concept, and never having seen a 'John Hughes' film prior to this one (it is hard to recognize John Hughes in here - although the film takes place in a high school, the characters are all adults) I thought it was at least as funny as Animal House, which I never really found that funny.

the film revolves around 'snuff' (something disturbing, although we can download or see it on the news every night) but creates its 'dark and disturbing' atmosphere by trapsing us something neutral, the same tired Hollywood characterizations of fetishistic sex as 'underworld' and 'sleazy' that we've seen since the first days of film noir. S&M is dark?! Actresses are poor drug addicts? Been in a porno shop lately? You'll see lots of rich happy couples renting gross movies in there; the 'dark ambiance' is not, as previously posted 'beyond human imagination' but is actually rather banal. Hollywood - home of the hooker - continues to produce movies where criminals and horrible characters are the pillars of what's actually a relatively clean cut multi-billion-dollar- a-year industry.

That said (by way of a compliment) the conflict in nicholas cage's character - although its clear what it is supposed to be - is not credible. Why would he go out of his way (as a private investigator) to engage in armed conflict anybody? Watching that 8mm film over and over again would only do to him what it does to us - desensitize him completely. Maybe if there was a more pronounced problem within Welles's own family, or if he'd had an affair with the victims mother, Cage could offer us something more than his usual overcome-and- bewildered schtick.