1. Gone With the Downwind. Rhett Butler has a problem when he accidentally eats too many black beans.
2. Iron Man's Mineral Deficiency. Iron Man becomes incredibly weak after suffering from vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
3. King Kong Plays Ping-Pong. Who will defeat King Kong in a game of ping-pong? Who dares?
4. Sounds of Rap Music. “The Hills are Alive with Bad Boys, Cheap Booze, and Crazy Women.”.
5. Arm Pits. The logical sequel to Hairspray. This movie is rated S for smelly.
6. Ducks on a Plane. Savage mutated ducks threaten the passengers on Flight 222. This movie is unintentionally hilarious.
7. The Foreclosed House on the Haunted Hill. Ten guests go to a haunted house only to be turned away because the house is foreclosed.
8. Fatal Constipation. Advanced trailer showed the behind scene development of this comical thriller.
9. ET Phone Home. ET spends half the movie trying to convince a telephone operator to let him phone home. The operator insists that this is a very long distance call and demands that ET pay one billion dollars.
10. Cycle. Crazed motorcycle driver attacks a woman who is taking a shower. Will justice prevail?

Anna Lynne McCord

Okay, so last night was Halloween night. Okay, so I thought it would be a shame to let the season pass without seeing a good horror flick. Okay, so how could I know that what I and a friend were about to see would make me want to renounce my views about over-the-top gore and make me wish I had seen Saw V instead?

In fact, you need not even go as far as that. I believe I would even have rather seen the High School Musical movie that is now out rather than have had to sit through what is surely the most phenomenal upheaval of every tired cliché from every suspense horror film involving teenagers, their high schools and what happens if you can get Satan to make a name-only cameo in the hellish mix.

The film starts out with a flashback to 1997. We see the standard set-up scene of an attractive teenage girl alone in a wilderness area. We find her following notes that are spaced-apart on a line of twine beckoning her to go further. (Which - smart girl that she is - she does). She is led to an abandoned house where her boyfriend, fun-loving prankster that he is, scares the living daylights out of her and after the anti-climax, both proceed with the obligatory make-out scene. They are (of course) interrupted by the girl's psychotic-looking father (again, standard fare) who makes her get into his truck and speeds of down the dirt road where we are introduced to the film's sub-plot of bad decisions made by parents long-ago and nefarious dark forces at work and about to culminate on the girl's eighteenth birthday. After a botched attempt to kill both himself and his daughter by swerving into on-coming traffic (all the while literally thumping on the Bible and asking for forgiveness), they skid to a halt, look at each other, and end-up getting creamed by a semi any way. With his dying strength, the father takes a piece of broken glass and kills the daughter. (By this time, the dread I was already beginning to feel had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever “scary” thing might be coming next).

Open to the present day and we find our heroine, Molly Hartley, (Haley Bennet) in the midst of a nightmare and waking up violently. (And at this point, the film has already met about three-quarters of the recommended horror-movie clichés to get itself categorized as unimaginative garbage). One thing you need to know about this girl is that she has a nosebleed every other scene. In fact, without her nosebleeds, this would be one horror film that would be almost entirely bloodless. We find (much to our non-surprise) that she is someone who (after nearly being killed by her own mother - and is now locked-up in an asylum) is embarking on a new life, new school and a new relationship with her guilt-driven, doting father. (And these are the only areas where the adjective “new” can legitimately be applied). On her first day of school, she is at once button-holed by the same quartet of likely suspects; the nerdish, Bible-thumping girl (more about this later), the hot guy, the hot guy's rabid ex-girlfriend, and the class rebel wild-girl who wants to free our heroine from all of her frumpish inhibitions.

As if this miasma of everything-you've-seen-before-to-the-nth-degree weren't enough, the writer of this celluloid drive-heave even includes a school psychologist who turns out in the end to be (you guessed it) one of the baddies. She is about as subtle a factor in this whole thing as Damien's nanny in The Omen was. From this point, Molly is set on a course to find out her true destiny which she does by way of hearing voices, hallucinations of her whacko, institutionalized mother, dizzy spells and of course, by continuing to bleed all over the place from her nose. (All necessary pieces of the puzzle, you understand).

We finally get to the bottom what is going on with this girl when her mother, freshly escaped from the asylum, finds her daughter alone in her house and once again, attempts to kill her. Only this time, we get the entire explanation from her as to why she is embarked on a course to off her own daughter. It seems that eighteen years ago when her daughter was born (and after several miscarriages), there were some complications, and her brand new baby daughter was about to die. As quickly as you can say “Beelzebub,” a mysterious woman (who turns out, of course, to be the school psychologist) appears on the scene and offers them the classic deal; they get eighteen years with your daughter, and the devil gets her after that. They agree. From here all of the blanks are filled in and one finds that one can pretty much predict the outcome of the film as if one were directing it him or herself. (In the end, she agrees to join the devil's side - as if we are surprised).

However, what I am writing here is every bit as much as a commentary on the condition of this genre of film as it is a review of the film itself. (And if I have dissuaded even one person from going to see this hound or even renting the DVD - which should be out the day after tomorrow! - then I feel I have done my duty!). Earlier, I made a reference to one of the characters in this film who was the “nerdish, Bible-thumping girl.”

And also to the father in the opening scenes who is “literally thumping a bible and asking for forgiveness” before he kills his daughter.

Hollywood has (has had for quite a while, in fact) a large degree of schizophrenia going on in the area of how to depict both Christians and the Bible in its films. Nowhere is this schizophrenia more evident than in the area of the supernatural/horror thriller. The reason for the schizophrenia basically boils down to this: In order to make a film of this type, you usually have to borrow heavily from the Bible in general, and Christianity in particular as source materials if you want an effective background for your archetypal battle between good and evil. You really cannot have Satan show-up in a film (or even being present, yet unseen) and somehow divorce him from all of the theological underpinnings which go to make him, and his attributes, believable.

This has always been the basic rule of thumb since the inception of the horror movie genre. Even if Satan is not actually present in a film like “Frankenstein,” the whole concept of “playing God” (and it's attending ramifications) is. And in any horror film where Satan is not present, he usually leaves his hoof-print. In every Dracula film from the original with Bela Lugosi, to sixties and the seventies with Christopher Lee, to all of the later efforts, the Satanic element is either heavily present, or else tacitly implied.

Yes, Hollywood (particularly the segment which makes the horror films) has a big, schizophrenic problem alright. You see, it doesn't take one who can put together legos, let alone a rocket scientist, to tell that Hollywood doesn't like Christians very much. In fact, it would be a pretty safe bet to say that Hollywood thoroughly despises Christians. One can therefore see the problem with making this type of film from the point of view of a screenwriter who is a bit of a Christianophobe; he has to give both the Bible and Christianity just enough credibility to make his story work, or else he doesn't have a story. He can no more put God and Satan in a story framework without both these as a context than he can put pirates on a prairie and make the whole thing believable.

Therefore, Hollywood has been pillaging the Bible for years with greater gusto than those whom they claim are pillaging rainforests. They don't like Christians or the Bible, yet they simply cannot dispense with either one of them. The only way to make vampires immune to the Cross is to make them some kind of hideous genetic mutations such as in Blade or Underground. In so doing, they have gone and divorced the entire of idea of “vampires” from its long-held (and cherished, by horror fans) legacy of being undead, supernatural (and plenty scary) beings.

Sooo, screenwriters have to make some kind of a compromise and strike a balance between their own dubious sense of aesthetics and a practical approach that won't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (Even if in their esteem, it is a rather homely goose). Therefore they decide that while they will go on raping the Bible (and the Book of the Revelation in particular) for ideas, they will also continue, at every opportunity, to depict the Christians in their films as vile, psychotic, cringing, buffoonish and downright villainous. (At one point in the film, the girl who is the Bible-thumping nerd attempts to kill the heroine by drowning her in a baptismal font - in order to “save her soul”). They therefore get what they want; they cull from the Bible (and any attendant literature - Paradise Lost gets a mortifying mention in this film) all they need in the form of apocalyptic symbology or supernatural personae and yet still have good ole' Wally and Wanda Christian on the side to poke fun at.

However, I do not write this simply because I am a Christian (and I am). I write this also as a former horror movie buff. (Add to that present fantasy and sci-fi movie buff). I say “former” because the genre that once produced some to the most genuinely (and legitimately) scary movies when I was growing up, has long since lost it's way in a quirky quagmire of the cheaply visceral (blood and body parts everywhere) and the boringly predictable (hordes of teenagers getting slaughtered every year or else darkly-woven conspiracies affecting those who come of age with Satan as persona-non-gratis in some for or another). Gone are the true chills that only the likes of Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney (Sr. and Jr.), Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing could produce in me. There is a ten-year old in this forty-six year old frame who feels much betrayed. Those days are never coming back and it would be foolhardy of me to sit around pretending that they someday might. I will simply cut my losses by a third and say goodbye (with perhaps a hesitant visit every now and again) to the horror genre. In the realm of the fantastic, there is only science fiction and fantasy really left. (And they have been showing signs of decay for some time now as well).

However, at any rate, this review of mine will probably be somewhat of a maverick anyway. I believe that if Hollywood keeps pumping out bilge like this last installment, it will find not Christians who are the ones lobbing fire-bombs of criticism at it. It will instead wake-up to discover that it has been besieged on all sides by the very ones it was seeking to entertain; horror fans themselves who have now become tired of grafted-on devils and human innards pasted everywhere. Such is the fate of those who pander the same recycled formulae year after bloody year.

After his brother's death, Jerry is caught up in the most terrifying ordeal of his life. It all begins with someone ransacking his apartment and a mysterious warning phone call. The caller tells Jerry that the  FBI is coming for him and to flee his apartment.

On the other side of the city, A woman by the name of Rachel Holloman has just sent her son on a school trip. She too becomes involved with this thriller after the mysterious caller that called Jerry also has her in their sights. The caller warns Rachel that harm will come to her son if the caller's directions are not followed exactly.

She and Jerry must team up to find out what mysterious circumstance surround his brother's death. They also must discover who the mysterious caller is and how they are tracking their every move. It is a rather intriguing tale of suspense and the terrifying reaches that technology unchecked can go.

Will Jerry and Rachel succeed and get their lives back? or will their high ranking government pursuers throw a wrench into their success and put national security at risk in the process? This film is a must see for anyone who likes action,intrigue,suspense, conspiracy theories, and a little sci-fi thrown in the mix.

Go check it out, you won't be disappointed

Using everyday technology, this mysterious woman controls everything that happens to them and can track them down. She sends them into several dangerous situations that they must fight to get through.

Full of plot twists and much suspense, it will keep you on the edge of your seat until the credits roll.

If your children can handle violent scenes then this movie is okay for 8 year olds and up. This movie is mostly targeted towards young adults and adults - but is enjoyable for most ages.

I found myself wanting more at the very end, and I'll be sure to pick up a copy of it when it comes out on DVD so I can see it over and over! It is a great movie and it's definitely worth it to see it in theaters!

Then there are those other movies, the ones that squeak by without much publicity, fanfare, or box office revenues. These are little gems that are worth seeking out. They're the kind of films which seem like an experience that you've shared in. They stay in your mind, and you're somehow richer for the experience.

These are my top five choices:

1. Heavenly Creatures

   This movie was directed by Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings fame. It's about a real life story. In the 1950's, two teenage girls were charged in the murder of one of the girl's mother. Heavenly Creatures takes a look at the two girls, Pauline Parker(Melanie Lynskey), and Juliet Hulme(Kate Winslet). They form an intense and passionate friendship, bonded by their love of writing and their vivid imaginations. They both feel isolated from their families; Juliet, because of her illnesses, and Pauline, because of her longing for the arts. It's a sympathetic portrait of the two girls. You become part of the strange world that they create, and you like them. But when they make a terrible decision, you're not sure what to think anymore. You're jarred out of the narrative. The film is especially compelling when you realize that the events in the film really did happen.
   
   

2. Johnny Stecchino

   An earlier film with Roberto Benigni, the star of Life Is Beautiful .I prefer this film. This is an hilarious movie about a bumbling bus driver, Dante (played by Benigni). He looks exactly like Johnny (also played by Benigni) , who just testified against his former colleagues. Dante visits Palermo, where Johnny is hiding out, and chaos and physical comedy ensue.

3. Oldboy

   This is a fascinating Korean movie. It is violent, but by American standards, it's almost tame. (You don't see a lot of what happens directly). The plot is as follows: a man is locked in a room for 15 years. He has no idea why he's locked up, or who's behind it. He is released just as randomly, and he only has a few days to find out who locked him up and why, or he and everyone that he loves will be killed. I love foreign films. I love seeing a window into another culture and a different way of story telling. This is a strange and brilliant movie, and worth the time. Don't be put off by the subtitles.

4. Morvern Callar

   A movie based on a novel, about a young girl who works in a supermarket. She wakes up on Christmas Day to see that her boyfriend has committed suicide. He has left a suicide note on the computer, along with his unpublished novel, and a list of publishers to send it to. On a strange impulse, she changes the name on the novel to hers. Samantha Morton plays the title character. She's a fascinating actress who can disappear into her roles. She's luminous, and she conveys so much without having to say a word.

5. A Tale of Two Sisters

   Another Korean movie (well, they are really good). A strange little movie about two sisters who leave the mental hospital. They return home to their father and their bizarre stepmother. It's hard to describe this movie, and it's got a lot of nuances and strange twists. But it's still a vivid cinematic experience. It's so unusual, compared to the usual commercial movies, that you want to sit for a while and try to experience it again.