They get back to the cabin, and Cheryl gets possessed and stabs Linda in the ankle with a pencil. They lock Cheryl in the basement, mistakenly thinking that will keep things under control. Before the night is up, everyone but Ash gets possessed and dies at the hands of their friends, and in generally there is a lot of gory mayhem (especially involving Shelly!). There’s shovel decapitation, ax-dismemberment, eyeball popping, arm chewing…

It’s a pretty straighforward horror movie of demonic possession. Unlike its sequels, there’s no comic relief to be found in this film. The pacing is good, the camera work great, the gore and makeup effects just as gross as you’d want them. In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen this, run to the video store now.

Eraserhead was David Lynch’s first feature-length film, begun while he was at the Centre for Advanced Film Studies. His style is still very apparent, and it’s a shame that this fabulously surreal movie is so hard to find.

While a lot of people are going to think this film’s pace is on the slow side, it’s better that way because it adds a lot to the mood. Henry’s world is slowly becoming more and more nightmarish, and I think a quicker pace would have been a detriment to the film. There is very little dialogue, and quite a few smashed fetuses and umbilical cord looking things. The hallucination parts are pretty disturbing, and the baby… well, you need to see the baby for yourself. A truly weird movie.

But it’s not a killer doll movie, it’s a back from the dead killer ventriloquist movie, and that makes all the difference. Jamie recieves an unmarked package containing a ventriloquist dummy named Billy. His wife is amused; he is not. She sends him out to get Chinese take out. When he arrives, she’s dead and her tongue has been removed.

He’s the last person who saw her alive, and his statement that he heard her speak when her tongue was gone and she was dead doesn’t exactly give him credibility in the eyes of the police. He goes off to see his estranged father, and instead of talking about more pressing matters, he just mentions a children’s rhyme about Mary Shaw, a woman who had dolls instead of children.

This leads him to the funeral home, where he talks about burial arrangements for his wife and, bizarrely, goes to the cemetery, finds Billy the doll’s grave, and buries him again. But as Stephen King once said, sometimes they come back.

The special effects are pretty good, and it never ventures too far into killer doll territory, thankfully. There is a curse on a bunch of people who got revenge on an old woman ventriloquist after a young boy’s disappearance, all sorts of puppets, people getting their tongues ripped out, and a nursery rhyme suggesting that if you ever see Mary Shaw, you should never scream.

I imagine that by this time next year I will have completely forgotten the existence of this movie, but it’s a fun waste of an evening in the meantime.

This is just straight out exploitation with little regard to good acting or plot, and mildly amusing just for the novelty factor. The deaths in particular are hilarious, with the men being unconvincingly smothered under the bulk of the breasts. A ridiculous sleazefest.

The author (not be confused with the main character of the same name) may or may not be making some kind of statement about the way our continued dependence on technology is rewiring our heads. I’m not entirely sure, especially after reading his (amazing) short story, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” Cronenberg’s directing here is good as always, as is the acting. I have trouble calling it a great film, but it is a unique film, and worth watching.

He uses saws and sandpaper and welding equipment to build a large something, then puts his glasses in his pocket and lays his head down on a block of wood on his contraption. Just then we realize what he has built: a man-size mousetrap.

Interesting, minimal, and worth viewing.

DePalma’s directing was certainly effective though. The opening scene involves a naked Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) in the gym shower, discovering that she’s started menstruating. Of course, religious fanatic Margaret White (Piper Laurie) never told young Carrie about menstruation, trusting that God would never visit the “curse of blood” upon her daughter if she was free from sin. Making it all the more stressful for Carrie is that she’s hated by everyone in school, and the rest of her class pelts her with tampons and maxipads, screaming “Plug it up!”

The teacher intervenes, but not before Carrie has been sufficiently traumatized (and blows up a lightbulb using her newfound telekinetic powers). She gets out of class for a week, and the rest of the class gets detention. Meanwhile, one of the girls launches a scheme to get her boyfriend to ask Carrie to the prom for a final showdown.

Back home, Carrie is learning more about her psychic powers. Her mother doesn’t like this, but soon learns her power over her daughter is diminishing. Carrie finally agrees to go to the prom with Tommy, leading to some bizarre scenes of death and destruction.

A pretty powerful movie, considering it’s about a high school girl with psychic powers. The characterizations are great, especially Carrie and her mother. DePalma did a superb job in pacing the film, and keeping an atmosphere of extreme discomfort going for a full hour and forty minutes. The funky crucifx was pretty cool, too.

The game starts off with a silly intro text about how the game profiles you. A “psychology warning.” I groaned, but imagined this could be fun, also. The questions seem a bit generic. “Do you makes friends easily?” Predictably, owing to my responses, everyone in the game was a misanthropic asshole. Your responses affect some of the areas you can get to, but not enormously so; what people are wearing (i.e., if Cybil’s tits are hanging out of her shirt or not); the wording of the phone calls and memos, and how people treat you.It does add to the replay value considerably.

The survival horror genre has more misses than hits, and I’m not sure where this falls. Clock Tower for Playstation made great use of your main character hiding instead of fighting enemies; though you were physically pretty helpless, there were tricks you could use to outsmart baddies. Resident Evil for Playstation had places where it was best to run from approaching hordes of zombies, but in other places, I felt like Rambo with my acid rounds, obliterating zombie scum. The Silent Hill series has been a mixed bag when it comes to combat, especially now that a few different teams have worked on games, and the protagonists all have different strengths and weaknesses. The first few games used different tactics to put the “horror” in “survival horror.” Sometimes they would make ammo scarce, making you choose whether you should run away or risk your health by using melee weapons. Other times, they would throw several baddies at you at once, so you had to run. Occasionally, they had enemies you could not harm.

SH:SM eschews the whole “what weapon should I use?/Should I run?” questions and just eliminates weapons altogether. That’s right, you don’t even have a kitchen knife. Unlike Travis in Silent Hill Origins, you cannot use your fists, either. All you can do is run. This is not to say you don’t have any contact with monsters. When they grab you, you have to shake them off. But there is no real combat and no boss battles. The first nightmare sequence did have me on the edge of my seat, but after that it gets a bit repetitive and feels rather pointless. It lacks a scare factor after a while because it’s too predictable: (1)Explore for a while, knowing that no enemies are around. (2) Wait for everything to freeze, run around and shake off baddies until you reach the end of the sequence. (3) Lather, rinse, repeat. The rest of the nightmare sequences are just tiresome and don’t add much to the game. Chase sequences can be used well. Silent Hill 2 had the Pyramid Head/elevator chase sequence, which was nicely done. Adding tiresome, long chases pursued by enemies you can’t kill just sucks. I had to say it. The chase parts suck. It’s also easy to get lost in the forest, where everything sort of looks the same, even with the map. I would just run and run and repeatedly get killed by the stupid monsters. I haven’t let out such long, colorful strings of curse words since I last played the end level of Marble Madness for NES. Eventually I got the hang of these parts, but they are still somewhat annoying.

The story is the strong part, though, and it changes a lot depending on how you play the game. The cellphone actually helps a lot too. There is a GPS feature, which you use like the maps in the other games, and you receive phone calls and text messages. You’d think that would kill the whole Silent Hill atmosphere, but somehow, it doesn’t. It’s still pretty bleak (though in no way scary), even when you’re receiving weird phone calls. You also get to do some spirit photography. More intriguing than the past few Silent Hill games, and a worthy sequel in any case.

A woman is late on her washing machine bill, and as stated in the agreement, the penalty is “to go directly to Hell.” The devil comes and claims her soul, but 6 months later she rises again because she forgot her handbag. Her niece, a bit surprised to see her, exclaims, “My aunt is a zombie from Hell!” Worthwhile for anybody into zombies or animation. Hilarious.

She finds a room across from a flirty neighbor, and begins seeing a strange man following her around. Stranger still, there are times when she seems cut off from the rest of the world, even in the midst of people. The landlady starts to think she’s a bit strange, even the neighbor starts to keep his distance.

Her position as an organist is just another job to her, her heart really isn’t in it. The priest notices this and soon she’s without any friends. She goes to visit an old abandoned carnival that she somehow feels drawn to, and it leads up to a satisfying conclusion. It deals with the supernatural, but don’t expect any real special effects or action here; this is more psychological. Some may find it a bit slow, but I thought it was a great piece of film and a testament to the power of good storytelling.