1408

Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales
$7.99
Very good book. Interesting tales, and I love the little blurbs by King before or after the stories that give a little background on the story itself. There are 2 maybe 3 'Great' stories in this collection, 4 or 5 'Pretty Good' stories and ther rest are just 'Enjoyable'. And if the WORST parts of something you read are "just enjoyable", then you're doing PRETTY darn GOOD. Read this. People have started to drift too far from being able to enjoy an anthology. This is a good one.

1408 (Full Screen Edition)
$14.95
Got this through an old Pepsi Promotion for free and I'm glad I didn't pay for it. The basic idea was okay, but in the end, if you want a good class horror movie that takes place in a hotel, go for The Shining original, not the tv remake).

Vacancy
$14.94
An upper class devorving couple gets stuck on the backroads and has to spend the night at a fleabag motel. In their room they find video tapes, made in the hotel by the front desk man. Smart, they figure out they are next.

Vacancy is basically a cat and mouse film around the motel, which is filled with trap doors and secret hatches. There is not a lot new in this film, but this is good.

The script is stripped lean to the elements of the chase, and the suprises come in how the couple gets away. There are no cheap tricks, and everything seems plausable.

This is classic good vs. evil horror, and for good horror, simplicity and formala, with a few twists, is all it takes.


Reccommended.

Mr. Brooks
$14.98
This could have been a good movie with a fresh look at serial killers and what drives them.

In the end the Director and Producers, like the main character in the movie Mr. Brooks, simply couldn't control themselves and had to butcher humans on screen for shock value.

Hitchcock's lesson remains forgotten; what the mind can imagine is worse than what the Director and special effects can graphically display for you; or at least it use to be.

The second concern that I have with this kind of movie is whether it will inspire a budding killer or train existing killers on better ways to get away with it.

I picked this movie up for a dollar, after watching it in hopes of more clinical tale, I was in the end disappointed. I still hunger for a good movie.

In my climatic ending, the movie was moved from the DVD player and deposited into the garbage bin. It was the waste of my time and mind space acted out as a ritualistic elimination of the DVD, I folded it in half; perhaps acting out aggression learned from the movie. It is unlikely that the remains of the DVD will ever be found at the garbage dump.

This isn't the first DVD I have eliminated; and sadly won't be the last. Before I was the DVD folder, I used a number of ways to get rid of them, sometimes the shredder. I'll have to think of something new for the next bad movie.

Costner should have had enough clout to get all the graphic human butchering out of the movie; or has he too fallen on economic hard times.