This was a strange one, but in a good way. The film starts at a frequent event in slasher films: the college fraternity party. Beautiful, barely clothed young people are acting stupid, getting wasted, and hooking up. I instantly hate all of them and can’t wait for them to die. (I will add that I…

I have a difficult relationship with the work of Sigmund Freud. On the one hand, I think he offered a lot of insight into the working of the human mind, particularly popularizing the somewhat ethereal notion of the unconscious. While this hidden layer of the psyche is hard to define, I do believe it exists.…

I watched 2001’s “The Pledge“ starring Jack Nicholson and directed by Sean Penn a few years after it came out. At the time, I proclaimed the neo-noir the greatest film ever made. (The world, committed as it is to ignoring my sage proclamations, took little notice.) I was, in particular, in awe of Penn’s directing,…

Evil kid movies have a long history going back to “The Bad Seed,” first shown on screens in 1956. That lineage runs straight through 1976’s “The Omen,” where the trope goes biblical. I fondly recall Macaulay Culkin’s turn as the archetype in 1993’s “The Good Son.” And there’s what is possibly my favorite film, “Orphan.”…

You might be familiar with director Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 film “Straw Dogs“ in which a nebbish character played by Dustin Hoffman faces off with thugs in rural England who want to invade his house and violate his wife. 1986’s “Bullies“ is like “Straw Dogs“ idiot younger brother. It’s the same setup, though the family arrangement…