But Roth is indefensible. His persona, actions, and body of work stand for the victory of a wretched set of luck and circumstances that solidify the current septic tank state of the American Dream. There’s also the small matter of his blatant lady-issues—you can just picture him ranting about how women are all psychotic whores, as evidenced by the string of crazy wenches he’s banged since high school (I’m surmising here—thankfully I have no insider knowledge of Roth’s love life). He's the horror movie version of a Portnoy-era Philip Roth—all the Jewish angst and thrashing lady-rage, with no self-awareness or insight. But putting aside all female indignation, he has committed a terrible act: single-handedly taking what some apparently think is an Oscar-worthy film and turning it into a fucking joke.

If you love horror, you can overlook his treatment of women as vaginas-that-bleed and his puerile humor and God-killing dialogue and the fact that he admits to taking his father's life savings to fund a film filled with jokes about gay squirrels and the N-word, because his movies are semi-decent. Cabin Fever isn't great, but it's willing to go some interesting places. Hostel is bad, but the torture scenes are undeniably entertaining. Hostel 2 is lethargic and lame—but it has a great moment, that pre-torture-scene montage that belongs in a highlight reel. Taken solely as pseudo-crappy horror movies, these are enjoyable, and Roth gets props (though claims of his "reviving the genre" are BS—take one look at anything Ti West has done, it all makes Hostel look like a Chocolate Rain retread). Of course, most important to the Hollywood Overlords, Roth’s movies made money—Cabin Fever was Lionsgate’s highest grossing film of 2003, and Hostel pulled in a hefty $47 million domestic. (For the record, the sequel made $17 million.)

But any respect or admiration halts there, for the simple reason that the rest of Roth’s career—and even the success of Hostel—has rested on the unbelievably lucky move of becoming Quentin Tarantino's shoulder monkey. His Holy Tarantino-ness sprinkled "Quentin Tarantino Presents" dust on Hostel, which subsequently lured scores of twenty-something Americans into sweating over the idea that they'd get sold to torture dungeons by slutty Eastern Europeans if they ever set foot in Slovakia. Which, for some of the frat boys I knew in college, doesn't sound like such a bad scenario. Yet somewhere in the afterglow of Quentin’s pixie dust, Roth had a hallucination and got the idea that he was an ACTOR. Like Tarantino, Roth’s one of those directors that puts himself in every one of his movies. Which is perfectly fine if it’s a campy horror flick and you’re the stoner-douche whose entrails get gobbled by a flesh-eating virus. Even in Cabin Fever, his acting was bad—but that was the point. It was all in good fun.

Only after the syrupy joy of fame descended, a disconnect occurred in Roth’s brain. A delusion of grandeur so great that it topples acting empires. Specifically, the delusion that he had any Goddamn business being in a Nazi movie that expects to be taken seriously.

Which brings us to Inglourious Basterds. As a whole, it wasn't good. Many people whose opinions I respect spilled adoration on it like the fucking Magi. I don't get it. It was dull, and smug, and plodding. The title characters of the film were also irrelevant—the entire plot could have happened without the presence of the Basterds. They were a silly sideshow. Let’s be honest: The only thing that saved this movie from Death Proof levels of obscurity is the subject matter. We humans fucking love us some revenge fantasies, and killing Hitler is just about the Everest crest of those. Without the orgasmic joy of seeing the Führer blown to little Nazi pieces, this film would be a boring flop propped up by the institutional weight of a famous director and the presence of the biggest movie star on earth. It would make $15 mill on opening weekend, Harvey Weinstein would grumble through fistfuls of M&Ms about how he’ll turn a profit in DVD sales, Nikki Finke would cackle at his failure and sacrifice another goat, and life would go on as normal.

But no, we’ve got bloody spattery Hitler-death on our hands, so instead Basterds is a massive blockbuster and everyone loves it and if you don't love it you must be some Eichmann-worshiping fascist I mean it was sooooo awesome, everyone says, so and no I don't really get that whole scene in the bar and why does the blond chick have to prattle on for 20 minutes about nothing but ITS THE BEST MOVIE EVER and if you don’t think so that means you love Hitler.

Does the film have redeeming value? Yes: The acting. The performances of every non-American cast member are astounding. It’s like the human condition is chewed to its raw elements and regurgitated directly into our souls by these actors—the airily dazzling Diane Kruger, the simmering Melanie Laurent, and of course Christoph Waltz, oozing a lizard-smooth quadlingual evilness that no villain has ever captured onscreen.

But transcendent acting or no, the Achilles tendon is sliced from this movie by the presence of Roth. He is laughable. Beyond laughable. He appears to be LAUGHING AT US DURING HIS SCENES! OH LOOK, I’M IN A NAZI MOVIE! FUCK ALL YOU AT NYU WHO SAID I WAS A TALENTLESS HACK! Meanwhile, we’re left thrashing in our seats, wondering, “What the fuck?? Did we miss something? Since when is this man an actor?? Like a REAL actor?? The kind of actor who can appear next to people who have spent careers making this shit into an art form?? And in a fucking NAZI movie no less?! Would you cast Pauly Shore in Sophie’s Choice? No, you fucking wouldn’t!”

As such, Roth destroys the film. He sucks you out of the Spell of Magical Movieland into the seeping craphole that is Hollywood reality. His acting—calling it "acting" is like calling two third-graders dry-humping on camera "porn,“ as it’s so inept as to render it irrelevant—downgrades the movie from a plodding but well-acted fantasy into a giant inside joke. Haha oh look it's the dude who directed the Thanksgiving trailer where the cheerleader on the trampoline gets a knife up the cooch! And he's totally Jew-hot! Haha isn’t that just so funny!

And thus the spell is broken, and you're back to being confronted by the fact that Hollywood is one big reach-around where your buddies stick your non-actor ass in Nazi movies next to shoo-in Oscar winners and then sit back and laugh at all the stupid slobs who buy it. Think of the potential alternatives for that role. Think of what they could have done with it. You couldn't get Adrien Brody? What, his post-Darjeeling Limited paycheck is too high? This is the only time modern audiences have ever seen a big powerful Jewish man bash a Nazi's skull, and it's FUCKING ELI ROTH?!! MY RELATIVES ARE SCREECHING FROM THEIR BIRKENAU GRAVES! Okay, maybe they aren’t—but they would be if they’d seen Cabin Fever.

As such, Inglourious Basterds must be stricken from the record and removed from the Best Picture list. If you disagree, you clearly love Hitler.

Melissa Lafsky has really had it with Eli Roth.

As such, the reincarnation of the classic Wolfman (in theaters today) had a good shot at full image reinvention. First of all, it’s set in London, thereby solving the Euro problem. Plus now we have all sorts of things they didn’t have when the original (which was made in 1941) came out. Like Benicio Del Toro. And CGI! LOTS of motherfucking CGI!

Of course, the production team had to go all purist on us: The creature effects were done by an actual makeup artist, meaning they WERE NOT CGI. Which, on the one hand, assures the preservation of all that’s pure and sacred in horror special effects—but on the other hand means that the post-transformation Benicio could pretty much be a stand-in for Teen Wolf at the prom. There is only so much one can do when one is dealing with a real corporeal human body, as opposed to the wondrous artificiality of a digital creation (hey, why not make the Wolfman bright blue and diamond-freckled? Sure, why the hell not?!).

And so The Wolfman falls into the same trap as its predecessors: it’s not that scary. Yes, the gore is decent—but if James Cameron’s giving us nine-feet-tall blue chicks hair-fucking giant trees, then those entrails BETTER look good as they exit the belly of yet another pasty landowner. Gore is a necessary with the Wolfman; it’s the visual depiction of just how beastly he becomes. The gore is what draws us in, connects us to the darker place that good horror films take us—one day we too could succumb to our animal urges, and all the messy carnage they demand. That openly-sneezing dude on the subway or the lady who sex-grunts on the treadmill next to you—neither would stand a chance if The Beast Within had its way. In this sense, the film needed MORE wolf slaughter; the one truly satisfying scene involves Benicio being “examined” as a mental patient by a class full of priggish med students and their monocle-wedged-in-his-anus professor. Who wouldn’t want to see a monster unleashed on these supercilious pricks?

But alas, the gore is sparse and the acting hack-jobbed. On the up side, the movie looks beautiful, in the same way Helena Bonham Carter looks beautiful—pale and chiseled and about to collapse from rickets. The moody malevolence of Victorian London is a stunning backdrop, and the sets make Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes look like King Ralph. But you can’t cast Benicio as a pedigreed British gentleman, let alone a professional Shakespearean actor—in fact it’s not clear what you CAN cast him as these days, other than a Fenster Redux. Plus at this point Anthony Hopkins has phoned in his “Stroke-Addled Patriarch” role from Legends of the Fall so many times, you’re half expecting him to wave a paycheck in front of the camera.

And there’s another inconvenient thing about remaking a 1940s movie: us womynfolk are so fucking demanding these days. We want a female role that doesn’t mash every stereotype and bromide cliché into Cute-Girl-Character pudding. Emily Blunt is unequivocally awesome—she can pull any movie from the pit of suckery, even if it contains Anne Hathaway and 600 pairs of shoes.

But sloppy writing traps her in the tired cavity of “I’m irresistibly drawn to this dangerous man for no apparent reason and I ignore every sign that something is amiss and oh look I’ll ride out on the full moon and maybe get fed my own pancreas, all because I must SAVE my doomed hero!” Aren’t we past the assumption that women want to die for love? Hasn’t that whole meme been securely stowed in the bowels of antiquation? I mean, if there’s a third-party aggressor in the picture, maybe I’d push my man out of the way and take a bullet—but if Mr. Fantastic turns into a bloodthirsty Hellbeast bent on carpeting the woods with my intestines, fuck if I’m not hauling out the shotgun. Because Lord knows, The Beast can live in ovaries, too.

Melissa Lafsky will probably not date you if you turn into a monster once a month.

So yeah, Daybreakers. It spackles on the gore, because without it, the awfulness of this movie can barely be restrained from seeping into your retinas and slurping out your myelin and gutting your soul and OH GOD MY EYES IT BURNS!!! Which is a shame, since the concept was interesting. What if everyone in modern society turned into a vampire? We'd all put blood in our Starbucks! And have sexy LED-lit eyes! And drive “day-proof” Cadillacs! Ohhand look we’d even have Ethan Hawke at his Reality Bites-palest (albeit a bit doughier around the edges) except he’d be even paler ‘cause HE’S a vampire too! And Sam Neill as the evil vampire corporate overlord! Isn’t this cool! Aaaand then it all tumbles off the precipice into a teeming pit of rampant idiocy.

Just how bad? Jesus, people. It’s like the Spierig brothers (who directed this putrescence-fest) challenged the Wachowski siblings to a Thunderdome cage match on 12 bottles of rat poison. Sam Neill is terrifying even in The Piano, and somehow you put him in a horror movie and manage to turn him into Pauly Shore? You DANGLE HIS SEVERED HEAD in front of the camera? Did his agent not object to this shit? And while we’ve gotten used to seeing the great Elias reduced to a dickless (literally) B-movie special, for God’s sake show some mercy—if you’re gonna make him say lines like “Being human in a world full of vampires is about as safe as barebacking a $5 whore,” then at least spare him the random-quoted Elvis lyrics. And the stovepipe jeans. Christ, this man did Shadow of the Vampire—show some fucking respect.

Oh lord and don’t get me started on the Soylent Green-esque “evil corporate overlords exploiting the last dredges of humanity” theme. Hey guys, get it?! Corporations are out to squeeze out every last drop of our blood! Haha check out our clever metaphor! We’re so much cleverer than the fucking Wachowskis! Oh, so you think it’s hackneyed and cliché? Okay then, here’s a human-vampire bloodbath in the lobby of a highrise! Top that bitches! What’s this, you say? The scene looks like an interpretive dance by Monty Python? Well fuck you, you Luddite.

But worst of all was the pseudo-spiritual faux-Confucian bullshit about the dangers of immortality. Which was insulting, not to mention nonsensical. How can an entire population be immortal? It eliminates birth and death, and thus the presence of life itself—it's an existential paradox (though just think how much we'd save on healthcare costs—and forget about the whole obesity epidemic). As a post-cancer Steve Jobs said, "Death is the single best invention of life—without it, we think we have something to lose.” Somehow I doubt he meant to solicit thoughts on the topic from Troy Dyer.

Still, there wasn’t a single ounce of pulsating vampire lust. So at least there’s that.

Melissa Lafksy usually really likes horror movies.

5. The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Guess what? Everything you ever feared about the innate shallowness of human beings is true. No matter how beguiling, brilliant and charismatic you may be, the world will nevertheless judge you on a set of genetic factors over which you have absolutely no control. All that crap about "inner beauty" and "gorgeous personality" is, quite simply, an elephantine crock. You may have spent decades cultivating chemical magnetism and tender compassion and a rapier wit and a laugh that shoots beams of charm from your soul—but if you do not look like the chromosomal mix of Rita Hayworth and a pound of IF-grade diamonds, all that character and spirit will not matter for shit. Men/women will not approach you, they will not notice you and they will likely not respect you. And if you do manage to land the hot English photographer on the basis of said personality alone, you'll spend the rest of your life wondering if he/she is plotting to trade up. Bow before the power of the Pretty, and be horrified. (For a joy-destroying double feature, watch this one back-to-back with No. 2)

4 . Julie & Julia

Every creative thought you may have, every scrap of inspiration you may glean, every goal you set about to achieve—it's already been done, and better. Think you can write about cooking? Bitch, some pasty Amazonian chick did that four decades ago, and trumped any bourguignon your sorry ass could ever imagine. You are not original, and you have nothing new to offer. And so you will be reduced to a creative tapeworm, parasitically sucking off the achievements of others to wrangle readers and book deals, staging cheap simulacra of great accomplishments from your cheesy Queens apartment with your whiny husband who's upstaged by the swishy fashion editor from Devil Wears Prada. And then you will ruin the aspic, because you are no fucking Julia Child (though at least the part of You wasn't played by Meg Ryan).

3. A River Runs Through It

Death comes at random. It doesn't give a shit if you're smart or successful or benevolent or handsome, or how much time you've spent working out your filial differences through pregnant bouts of fly-fishing. It could take you young, it could take you rich, it could take you even if you have a face that looks like it was farted out by Aphrodite and crafted into anthropoid perfection by Michelangelo on a bender. Death could take any of us, at any time. It could take the better brother—and that brother may not be you.

2. Pretty Woman

You better be pretty. You better be really fucking pretty. You better be so fucking pretty that the concrete melts and the heavens rumble and the woodland creatures frolic and sing before your all-encompassing epochal beauty. And you'd better STAY that pretty, and pray you get the chance to display it before the Richard Gere equivalent of Charles Keating. Because if you aren't, and you don't, you'll end up like Kit De Luca, beaten by pimps and butt-slammed by winos and scraping for next month's rent as you strive to avoid getting knifed by the unwashed troglodyte with track marks under his toenails who just paid you $15 for backseat head.

If you are male, simply substitute "rich" for "pretty" in the above paragraph.

1. Kramer vs. Kramer

Think evil clowns under the bed or Tim Curry in the sewers is scary? Try this, my children: One day you will wake up, and your entire existence will have been sucked down the existential toilet and ground into shit clafoutis. Your parents will have transformed into narcissistic monsters, bent on destroying whatever remains of your mangled childhood. They will cry and shriek in public and divide their belongings with masking tape and parade you in front of lawyers and tell your teachers your bad math grade is "all his bastard father's fault" and head to California to find themselves and fuck their therapists and drink excessively and make you tiptoe around the scary naked people who invade your house on Sunday mornings. You will be transformed into a pawn, a human cigarette butt tossed and stomped at the will of raging sociopaths who have complete power over you until the day you turn 18. And you will spend the rest of your life wondering, "What did I do to bring this evil upon us?"

Give us your chainsaws, your torture porn, your artery-crushing eyeball-slicing genital-mashing carnage. Anything but this.

Melissa Lafsky prefers horror movies for some really good reasons.

Here are numbers 10 through 6 of the most invidious Unintentional Horror movies. Look for Part Two in the near future.

10. Knocked Up

We can fetishize reproduction all we want. We can coo and slobber over babies and genuflect before the Cult of Mommyhood and spend our savings on Swarovski-rimmed diaper bags and Baby Einstein brain implants and exalt the continuation of our species (and the fact that we've created a person who is genetically programmed to like us, at least for the next 10 years or so).

But in reality, the miracle of procreation could be an awkward, antiseptic encounter that's the sexual version of gum surgery. And the purveyor of your child's other chromosome might be a porcine smartass with aggressive back hair and THC leaking from his pores. And likewise, the Gaia who bears your sperminated miracle could be a stuffy killjoy who managed to get through an '80s childhood without ever displaying a single hint of personality, or seeing Back to the Future. And then you are stuck with the genetic offspring of this person for the rest of your life.

And if you complain, you're a shitty parent.

9. Serendipity

You have no control. Control is a joke. Your life, fate, happiness are all based on luck, the freak possibility of a chance encounter. If you do ANYTHING to throw off the timing—forget your dry cleaning or spend too long on YouTube or go back upstairs to change out of those toe-crunching heels—you could miss that encounter. And then your life will be a fetid pot of rotting misery, all because you had to watch that Lady Gaga video ONE LAST TIME. In fact, if you need any more evidence that your life is random and out of control, here it is: You actually let someone convince you to watch Serendipity.

(P.S.: If you happen to be an obstacle in someone else's happiness-encounter, aka "The Boyfriend Or Fiancée That Stands Between The Lovestruck Protagonists," then prepare to be collateral damage.)

8. Remains of the Day

What is your life for? What purpose does it have? What are your options? You could get super rich—pull a fuck-everyone scheme à la Madoff, or just do it on the legal like John Thain—and spend your life yawning through $2,000 French dinners and scrubbing your Prada loafers with caviar and picking your teeth with the bone shards of the unwashed masses. Or you could earn an honest wage, join the working man's ranks, dedicate your earthly existence to the service of others and embrace the idea that your life could be part of something larger than yourself. Except then that Something Larger winds up being an ungrateful product of a stuffy colonialist empire who unwittingly aids Nazis, and then the NEXT Something Worthy is a nouveau riche dishrag who dismisses you as nothing but a doddering old coot. And then you die.

Plus it is simply horrifying that it might ever be so damn hard to get laid.

7. Mr. & Mrs. Smith

You and your significant other could be the hottest human beings on the planet. You could shoot unalloyed sex appeal from your eyeballs, liquefying every carbon life form in your path and shifting tectonic plates with your endothermic orgasmic energy. But after a while, your relationship will slide into banality. That fiery attraction that once led to coitus in elevators and bar restrooms will be lost in a black ocean of SUVs and monogrammed stemware and window treatments and Williams-Sonoma. The detritus of modern suburbia will clog up your genitals and clot your sperm and makes you want to rip out your own heart—or just shoot your partner in the head. And actual attempts to do so may be the only way to break out of this rut.

Oh, and your spouse? That person who sleeps beside you every night, whose social security number and mother's emergency contact at the nursing home you have memorized? You have no fucking clue who this person is. He/she could be a trained killer, massacring arms dealers and de-boning druglords and strangling mobsters in his/her spare time, all before you get home from yoga (though for men, this horror is mitigated by the fact that you're sleeping with Angelina Jolie).

6. Bruce Almighty

For all those centuries of piety and faith and existential quests and exquisite suffering and Deuterocanonical interpretation and ecumenical theism and dragging your ass to church and teleological scripture-reading and generations upon generations of breast-beating sin-preaching Holy Land-coveting heretic-disemboweling condom-shunning Rapture-awaiting woman-subjugating evolution-denying madness in the name of beatitude, we still don't have a God damn clue who God is. He could be Jim Carrey. Fuck if we know.

Melissa Lafsky really does like horror movies.

Given this tide of mainstream scorn, it's hard to get anyone to take a horror movie about alien abduction seriously. Even before you start shooting, there's general agreement that your premise is crap. And let's face it: this general agreement is right. Sure, people claim to have been snatched and probed in all sorts of unpleasant ways by aliens. People claim to have seen all sorts of things—ghosts in the shower, demons in the bedroom, Mary Magdalene's face in a week-old Denny's Grand Slam. These visions are a result of neurochemical cocktails sloshing around in our brains, killing our ability to distinguish between the mind's creation and what exists in the physical universe. (Yeah, okay, you could claim my definition of "existence" here is narrow, and assert that the mind has the ability to create reality, but I'm far too hungover to get all quantum physics right now. Go debate this with someone smarter.)

So once you've made your silly alien film, how do you get moviegoers to buy it? Answer: you release it in a time/place where alien abduction has already garnered mass acceptance, or at least some societal relevance. People need to be eased into strange and unfamiliar concepts—black presidents, gay Marines, soy milk. Alien sightings aren't considered legit until significant social reinforcement or a cultural movement says they are (AKA, Mulder and Scully). Remember that whole Tipping Point chapter on contagious teen suicide in Micronesia or wherever? (Yes, you read it. So did I. Though I stole a friend's copy, I swear.) It said that suicide was anathema until one popular kid did it, then gradually it became a social norm. When Gladwell isn't garroting contextual logic or jerking off on a pile of royalty checks or sprinkling pixie dust on his cauldron of marketable anecdotes, he stumbles on the occasional good point—humans implant ideas in each other's heads, creating viral permission-chains. So when one burly trucker (or Southern governor, perhaps?) starts proclaiming on TV that little green men gave him an anal probe, others will pick up the notion and run with it, and on and on, until pretty soon your crappy horror film is evidence of a full-blown "sticky" trend.

And here we have the crux of The Fourth Kind's problem: it knows that no one gives a shit, because no one cares about aliens right now—we're all too busy with things like wars and foreclosures and healthcare for people who don't have platinum cards. It knows that it should have been made eight years ago, when The X Files was still programmed into everyone's VCR. It knows all this, and so it begs, no PLEADS with you to take it seriously. This stuff is real!! We swear!! Look at all the SUPER REAL footage that we have to prove it!! Though you don't have to look at it too much, since we wouldn't want to assault your retinas with anything that isn't Milla Jovovich!

Of course it fails. Miserably. The whole "faux-reality horror" thing works if it's demons in a tract house or a witch in the woods, but don't try our patience. There is no alien Happy Hour going on in Alaska, there are no owl-eyed spacemen sneaking through our bedroom doors and beaming us up to their human experimentation labs. Viral marketing or no, we are simply not going to buy this crap. Not without balloon-boy levels of cable news coverage on UFOs, or a decade of David Duchovny telling us it's real. Maybe the execs at Universal should read The Tipping Point before they greenlight any more of these movies. Just tell them to buy it used.

Previously: 'Antichrist' Might Give You a Penis-Ache but that Doesn't Make it Misognyistic

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Here's a rundown (since I don't expect anyone to actually subject themselves to this movie): We open with snooty black-and-white shots of a toddler leaping from a window to his death while his parents get it on porno-style. (Get it? Having sex after procreation will KILL your CHILDREN! As will reading and/or contributing to mommy blogs.) Mother is despondent, father emotionally void. From then on, their itinerary looks like this: sit in bed and have conversations where she pulls out stereotypical fuck-with-your-head comments like "You never loved me" while he sits there like a rock. Have graphic sex. Have more retarded conversations. More sex. Head to their summer cabin, which is apparently located at Camp Crystal Lake. More sex. Then the wife has a few communing-with-nature moments, starts channeling Jack Torrance, and predictably goes postal. Cue more sex, and the much-ballyhooed genital mutilation scene—which, at the very least, means no more sex.

Yes, it's as awful and pointless and self-indulgent as everyone says. But it KNOWS this. It is a movie aware of its own awfulness—Von Trier practically admitted as much. This film was his therapy, and was made on a depression-addled whim. So when you take it on those terms, it actually does a few interesting things. Case in point: it's not often you see a woman smash a penis on film. Most directors won't go within a mile of penis-smashing (perhaps because 95% of them have penises themselves), and the ones that do usually steer clear of the full smash. Sure, Hostel II had a graphic penis cut (more on Eli Roth's Portnoy-esque complaint at a later date) and Hard Candy got about 15 yards from the end zone (girls: for a good time, watch that one on a bad date). And of course, there's always Teeth.

But here, the Danish wonderdirector goes for that rarest of things: the full-contact smash. He sets it up so blatantly, you could almost call a play-by-play: And the wife is starting to really lose it now… she's going for the blunt instrument… she… could… go… all… the… WAY!!! (Ahem—not that I'm condoning penis smashing. I don't have one myself, but I certainly understand that those in possession of penises have a strong vested interest in not seeing them smashed. In fact, I thought the scene was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen on screen. As did the guy I was watching it with, who shrieked and ran out of the room.)

As for the whole feminist debate, come on people—let's reserve the "misogyny" battle cry for stuff that's meant to be taken seriously. This is a marginal movie about a marginal viewpoint—our society has come far enough that it's no longer a commonly-held view that women are hysterical nutbags bent on destroying men (no thanks to Joanne Lipman). These reviewers crying lady-hate manage to be as pretentious as the movie itself, by making this silly film into something that deserves our feminist attentions. Misogyny? How 'bout we talk about mainstream Hollywood, where practically EVERY movie marginalizes female roles? At least Von Trier has the balls (intact, one hopes) to be laughably blatant about it, and to vent his lady-anger in a forum that limits the physical and emotional violence to one short crappy film. After all, it's just a movie, people—no one's ever gonna force you to watch it.

Except me (sorry Steve).

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

The first Saw was entertaining for one reason only: "Is Wesley from Princess Bride SERIOUSLY gonna saw his own foot off?" And then he does, and you go "Well that was interesting." After that? The films attain a color and clarity of shit so high that it could be mined by Liberian warlords. Forehead-slappable acting, plots with less substance than an edible G-string, and grisly, awful torture scenes. I mean really viscerally unpleasant stuff. When you find yourself differentiating between the sequels by saying "It's the one where the chick gets tossed into the vat of dirty hypodermic needles" or "It's the one where the drunk driver has his arms and legs twisted off in that giant machine" you know something is wrong. There's no scare here. There's no psychological dread or built-up suspense. There's just the human body, and all of the sick disgusting things that can be done to it.

Oh and then there's Jigsaw, the most pompous serial killer in history. "Once you're in Hell, only the devil can help you out"—who SAYS shit like that?? Granted, he has his whole punishment-doling "What would you do to survive?" ideology. Murderers with ideologies are always more interesting—Idi Amin, Charles Manson, Carl Spackler. Plus Jigsaw's got that whole "dying of a terminal illness" thing, which is a nice twist. But why does he have to look like Rutger Hauer crossed with Sinead O' Connor's fetus? Plus who's funding all these large-scale torture operations? Booby-trapped houses and deadly nerve gas and rooms full of razor wire don't just purchase themselves. Is there some VC firm doling out cash for early-stage, potential-high-growth torture sprees?

But the REAL question is: Why the hell are these chunks of cinematic shite so popular? The answer is simple: American guilt. We're all thrashing around in a culture built on Me-ism—I want mine, I'll do whatever it takes to get it, and fuck everybody else. And deep down in places we don't talk about at parties, we KNOW we're steeped in a moral wasteland, and that we're little better than most criminals for spending our time worrying about how many panda-skin Jimmy Choos we can buy while a single mother of four works three jobs and still can't afford to have a fucking cavity filled.

The beauty of these movies is that they're blank slates to assuage our guilt—the scenarios are so ambiguous (random people plucked from ordinary assholery) and the characters so bland, they allow every one of us to imagine we're the guilty douche in the torture chamber/poisoned house/corpse-sprinkled public bathroom. And they let us feel better, by presenting someone worse than us (drug dealers, wife beaters), and creating some sort of internal justice system. "Sure, I wrote a few misogynistic blog comments and scowled at a homeless man, but THAT guy killed a kid with his car! He's worse than me! He deserves to have his extremities slowly twisted off by a giant Medieval crucifix!"

Bottom line: We're headed for a cultural revolution in this country—one hopes!—and it'll come down to the Me-ists versus those who believe in humanity's inherent social responsibility. The Saw movies are a perfect tool to prepare for this—they're creating an organic sense of order. So when Rome burns and the Hieronymus Bosch shit starts in earnest, we'll have a system of punishment all worked out. If you're a "Why should I pay higher taxes so the poor can have healthcare—I work hard for my money!" then it's the Iron Maiden for you. "Why should I give a shit if overseas military contractor women are getting raped—they joined up! They asked for it!" You get thumbscrews. "Why should I pay for content on the Internet—I should have everything I want for little to no cost! I'm an American, dammit!" Twisting Crucifix, with a side of nerve gas.

Oh, and yeah, Saw VI opens today. Go see it and stuff.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Horror movies that play to this fear bother me. Even if they star Tom Hanks's son and stink worse than pig shit on a hot day. (For anyone who has no clue what I'm talking about—which is everyone, since no one saw this film but me and my friend Morty—I'm referring to Alone With Her, which reached levels of suckery previously reserved for Ishtar.) So when I started hearing buzz about this "next Blair Witch" that was supposedly the SCARIEST MOVIE EVER and was all "recovered footage" from a camera in a couple's bedroom, I said no thanks—too many childhood neuroses packed into an hour and 39 minutes. And then I saw it anyway, because I am a total fucking sucker to peer pressure, particularly when the pressure-er offers to buy me ice cream. Plus it's October, and October is the only month that condones mass consumption of life's two great joys: Candy and horror movies. (Add sex, and you've hit the joy jackpot.)

If you haven't heard anything about Paranormal Activity, you're not spending enough time on the Internet. But not to worry, since I spend enough time in the tubes for both of us. Blah blah blah it was made in 2007 on a budget that makes Blair Witch look like Spiderman 3, then sat on a shelf 'til it finally got limited distribution (which goes nationwide on Oct. 16). The one theater currently showing it in Manhattan is selling out every night to a slew of crazy people. One guy in line kept screaming "NONE OF YOU WILL SLEEP TONIGHT!" Some dude leaned over during the previews and offered me a Xanax. Seriously.

So what's the Big Fat Scary Deal? Premise: Young photogenic couple moves into obligatory 3-bedroom tract house ("Just sign this negative amortization no-income-no-asset loan, my pretties, and aaaallll your problems will be over") and the too-cute-to-bear girlfriend starts hearing things. Impossibly normal boyfriend buys camera to film what's going on. Freaky shit happens. Cue the entrance of random psychic, who diagnoses a demonic presence in the house (which makes sense—I mean really, who hasn't felt something demonic in all these suburban shrines to Bed Bath & Beyond?).

Pluses: There's not much "Ooh let's sprint from the scary demon lair but hey don't forget the camera!" so you avoid the seasick pukery of other "recovered footage" films like Blair Witch or Quarantine. And the characters are likable, so you avoid the thank-Christ-those-assholes-finally-died of Cloverfield. But come on—"SCARIEST MOVIE EVER" my ass. My cab ride home was scarier. Sure, it's impressive when a movie made for peanuts delivers more eek factor than most $30 million studio projects. But seriously people—shit ain't that scary, particularly when you're worried that the guy sitting across the aisle might try to feed you to his imaginary friend.

Really, what saves this film from borderline suck is the boyfriend. He's a genuinely good guy (they do exist—I still believe) trying to do the right thing for the demon-bait he unwittingly agreed to cohabit with. He's the kind of guy you can't not root for—does right by his woman, cooks dinner, likes gadgets and porn (I don't trust guys who don't like porn. I dated a guy who didn't like porn, and he was a douche. So Not-Like-Porn = Douche. Yes folks, I did well on the LSAT with that logic). Too bad he gets a big fat demon foot up the—oh wait! I won't spoil it! You'll have to hit the asylum to see it yourself! And for Christ's sake don't forget the Xanax.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Zombies aren't trying to bone you or rescue you or captivate your soul with their pulsating manly man-ness and spackled hair. They don't give a rat's ass about overblown social metaphors or moral relativism or charming your undies off at least once an episode. They just want to eat you. Preferably your guts, if it's Raimi or Romero. Or your brains, if it's Return of the Living Dead. They'll munch your bones and slurp your innards and then go about their zombie way. They're the perfect predictable date. Plus they're funny. Vampires: not funny. Maybe it's the lack of fiber.

This is why you should burn all the vampire shlockfests in your bookshelf and erase the vampire orgies from your DVR and go see Zombieland instead. From the opening credits, it tells you exactly what it is—hysterically funny. Sean of the Dead-meets-Deliverance funny. When you have a mentally-disabled child zombie eating a soccer mom in your opening sequence, you know shit's gonna be amazing. There will be irreverence. There will be post-apocalyptic hilarity. We will have campy trailer-park flair plus the neurotic mensch from Squid and the Whale—add Woody Harrelson with a Hummer full of guns, and you've got a joy trifecta.

There's little NOT to love about this film. Van Halen and Beethoven on the soundtrack, stripper zombies chasing dollar-waving johns, the standard Romero-esque digs at capitalism. And, as would be expected from a big-studio project, the creature effects are kickass (with apologies to Homer Simpson, I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my zombies oozing black goo). And yeah, there's the Double Secret Probation Cameo that you've no doubt already read about on 400 blogs (and if you haven't, there are 30,000 more Google results waiting to tell you, plus the whole damn movie is probably already download-able on 66Stage). But you won't find any spoilers here. I'm not gonna have cameo-spoiling on my conscience, along with pushing that 5-year-old out of the way for the last free sample at Fat Witch. I will say that for once the bloggers are right—said cameo is as brilliant as everyone says. It's on par with Bowie in Zoolander. Or Ethel Merman in Airplane. Only better. So much better.

My one criticism (there's gotta be one) was that the girl characters blew. Yes, preadolescent Little Miss Sunshine is adorability in a jar, and I realize I need to get over the fact that the Superbad chick manages to keep her eyeliner perfect in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. But in movies, when apparently self-reliant women go and do something stupendously retarded, just to set up a big fat Male Rescue, well, that shit's annoying. Girls do not go from smart to dumb in the space of an hour. Well, OK, maybe when there's dudes and sperm and tequila involved. Let me rephrase: When there are flesh-eating zombies poised to rip open our spleens, girls do not go from smart to dumb in the space of an hour.

Still, when Woody Harrelson tells a 300-pound zombie with entrail stains on his shirt, "You've got a purdy mouth," all is forgiven.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Everything about it is a metaphor—the vast emptiness that signifies lonely chasms in our consciousness, the jarring discord of the unfamiliar, the endless darkness that makes you wonder if life has any significance or if we're all racing up little Sisyphean hills toward total oblivion (though at least we're not as fucked as Sigourney Weaver trapped in that alien hatching ground). Yup, everything is scary in space—the food, the clothes, the lighting, it's all strange and harsh and threatening and OH SHIT WHAT'S THAT ACID-DROOLING THING THAT WANTS TO EAT ME?? Oh thank God, it's just CGI. But it could happen, right? It's space! Anything goes!

As such, horror and space have made great bedfellows—there's Alien and its sequel (the third and fourth were unadulterated crap, as will be the prequel), plus The Thing (not really IN space so much as FROM it, though Antarctica may as well be another planet), and Event Horizon (that shit was SCARY—watching it turned my college boyfriend's Westchester McMansion into a teeth-grinding insomnia den).

Of course, it's not easy to come up with sci-fi horror that's good, since doing so requires stuff like actual talent and creativity. Which means there's a whole genre of crappy space movies that follow a single system: chop all the good elements out of better films and mush them together, until they form one ultra-derivative feature-length shitfest that sucks away your will to live. It's sort of like the chick lit fantasy where you splice everything you liked about all your past boyfriends into one perfect man—and then he hacks off your limbs and staple-guns your forehead.

So yeah, Pandorum = prime example of this "chop and hack" school of filmmaking. Lessee, we've got shit yanked from Star Trek and Serenity and Alien and Scanners and even some Mad Max thrown in for extra flavor. It's all ripped off—costumes, dialogue, sets—even the bloodthirsty creatures are plucked straight from The Descent's prop desk. Which is a shame, since Ben Foster (the star) is objectively cool—he was cooler than Russell Crowe in 3:10 to Yuma, and he was cooler than Josh Hartnett in 30 Days of Night (not that this is hard—my fridge holds mold spores that are cooler than Josh Hartnett).

But not even the Bodhisattva of cool could withstand the crappiness of a chopjob this derivative, and so Cool Ben Foster is stuck doing a lot of pointless crap for two hours. Like being naked and covered in goo. And running away from things. What things, we're never quite sure—at one point he's apparently fleeing a skinny chick with an accent. (Note to the boardroom full of guys in charge of greenlighting these things—it's almost never believable when a large man runs away from a 120-pound actress. Though granted, my linebacker-sized ex spotted me in the park the other day and took off like a fucking bandit. So it does happen.) Then he has a couple fight scenes taken straight from a Steve Austin/Randy Savage rematch, but by then you've ceased to care, since you're gasping for breath as your will to live is sucked through your nostrils by demon corporate moviemaking.

Finally they hit you with this whole Pandorum thing, which is a retarded word to begin with—it sounds like what happens when you stub your toe so bad the nail falls off, or when your boyfriend texts your best friend at 2 a.m. asking if her boobs are real ("He did WHAT?! Oh I am gonna go Pandorum on his ass"). According to Dennis Quaid (always a reliable arbiter of psychiatric evaluations) it's what happens to your mind when you get stuck in space with no hope of return. Or when you watch too many shitty space-horror movies.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Why the box office flop? (And it was: don't let anyone lie to you about how they were rolling it out or whatever. No: it opened big, on 2,702 screens.) One reason is because the film was bad. Or at least, not good. Okay, one scene was seriously fucking good—Megan Fox eviscerating a sweet-natured Goth kid in silhouette could go in a "Best of Modern Horror" highlights video. But the "teenage girl awakens as bloodthirsty monster, while good-girl best friend watches in vain" theme has been done before, and better. Ginger Snaps did it far darker and scarier, taking the werewolfism-as-puberty metaphor to a satisfying extreme (plus the two girls were sisters, giving them that extra toxic twist). And if you want pure "teen loses control of the sexual beast within," there's just no better than Teeth (an abstinence activist with vagina dentata—now THAT's a concept).

Still, what makes this blood-soaked Juno followup almost work is said star. Megan Fox's body is, inherently, evil. She's the Demon Pretty. That much Pretty has power over all of us—young, old, black, white, female and panting male alike. We're helpless in the face of it. We pay it more money, give it better customer service, offer it more respect at dinner parties. Studies have proven it: that level of Pretty controls our minds. So of course it should show up as a murderous demon in a horror film. Makes perfect sense.

And Fox doesn't just provide the Pretty—she brandishes it, cooing and slithering across the screen before slurping up another hapless adolescent. She's the Pretty's perfect monster. She rocks.

No, the problem isn't Fox—it's the rest of the film. It MAKES NO SENSE. Random fires start for no reason, random woodland creatures suddenly become minions of Satan, random lesbian-undertoned mind-melds lead to random highway encounters that lead to… makeout scenes. Shit don't make no sense. Horror has a CODE. There's a SYSTEM. We need to SEE our demon entering our girl, and leaving her body when she dies (and dude, seriously, since when are demons killed by ripping off BFF necklaces?). What we need far less is having our demoness call people "Monistat" and watch infomercials. And girl-power opening scene aside, any feminist street cred in this film is shredded by that utterly superfluous Fox-on-Seyfried makeout sequence. Seriously—it had no purpose, so much so that it drew laughter from the audience (and not just from dudes squirming to hide their boners).

Granted, the underlying point—that the "good girl," despite her lack of Pretty, is the stronger woman of the two—is well made. But by the time we get there, we're so overwhelmed by the randomness that it's hard to care. Plus if Seyfried is that effing strong, you'd think she could carry out a quadruple homicide without getting caught on security cameras. I mean really.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

Some spoilers ahead!

Girl killers are less of a joke in foreign films, like High Tension (where you're too busy chugging Klonopin and hiding under the seat to laugh):

Or Audition (you're checking yourself into a mental health clinic).

But in American horror, when it's a lady under the scary black hood, you know it's all meant in camp. Take Urban Legend—naked threesome videos notwithstanding, come on. We're supposed to believe Rebecca Gayheart butchered some dude and hung his body from a tree? Please.

The thing is, women do kill people. Sometimes in violent, messy ways. We gots anger. We get pissed. Got ovaries? Not feeling pissed? Look around—there's plenty to be pissed about. Like the fact that if you're a woman and you write for a living, you could top Tolstoy and it wouldn't matter, if you have a seriously crooked nose and big thighs. And the fact that if some dude in Dockers calls you a "sloppy cunt" and he's just being a "cool guy" (or a bestselling writer), you're a humorless bitch if you don't think it's funny. And the biggest clusterfuck of all: We're not "allowed" to get angry—it's not "feminine." (Apparently neither is cussing, according to some dude who asked me to drinks a few months ago—"You swear more than a woman should," he told me. Motherfucker, I said, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.)

But mainstream horror is and always has been afraid of female rage. Films like the first Friday the 13th, and the original House on Sorority Row (which Sorority Row is based on) touched on the wrath of She—by making the killer a crazy old lady (plus in the latter film, she wasn't even the real killer—yes, I just spoiled the ending. Deal with it).

So given all this, Sorority Row had such a fantastic, singular opportunity. Here we have a house full of aggressive, pissed-off, bitchy women who'd love nothing more than to slide an ice pick into each other's craniums (or their boyfriends'). The killer SHOULD be one of these women. They should be UNLEASHED, preferably with chainsaws and nail guns. It would be AWESOME.

But instead, they blow it. Same old formula, same tired shit: Homicidal (male) maniac on the loose, who fooled everyone into thinking he was a normal guy (don't they all). Kills a bunch of screaming women who are usually in some state of undress. And a few guys too. BORING.

Though I will say Rumer Willis did wield that shotgun quite well at the end. Par for the course when your father is John McClane, I suppose.

Previously : 'The Final Destination' Blows Only As Much As You'd Expect It To

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.

What the horror lover has to face, though, is that the film's not really horror. In fact, none of the Final Destination movies are scary. There's no Descent-style predators, no superhuman psychopath, no psychological mindfuck, not even a satisfying Roth-esque torture scene.

For those who haven't been subjected to any of the first three FDs, the setup is this: A group of camera-ready teens gathers in a banal spot, like an amusement park or a NASCAR race. Get it? Everyday life can kill you; it's not always buckets of pills or anal cancer. One of the principal characters has a vision of an impending disaster, and saves his crew.

Then Death spends the rest of the film sauntering through the survivors, in the form of twisted and drawn-out accidents that often lead to detached body parts or inverted entrails. That's it.

So what's the appeal? Little more than the guilty pleasure of seeing death glammed up and doled out free of traditional movie confines. The whole cadre of camera-ready cuties with perfect skin and zero body fat totally buy it in grisly ways—that's satisfying. But there's little suspense, and no final Friday-the 13th/Halloween-style girl to root for—nothing but a morbid interest in seeing how the next G-list actor will croak.

Unfortunately, this latest installment manages to suck beyond all understanding (a fact that never precludes a summer movie from becoming #1 in America). The deaths are beyond drab—nothing even close to the tanning bed broilings or barbed-wire executions in Nos. 2 and 3. The characters, always little more than vessels for blood and innards, lack even the teeniest hint of likeableness that would make us care when they get decapitated or scorched. (Apart from the obligatory douchey guy, who we're not supposed to like: it's maybe mildly satisfying when he gets his comeuppance. Also, at some point in recent horror movie history, the jerky guy biting it became the new version of the slutty girl biting it.)

These accidents are almost entirely reliant on random uncapped liquids and projectile objects. (Canisters are helpfully labeled "spontaneously combustible.") This makes "acute propofol intoxication" look fascinating. Granted, 3-D ups the squish and splatter quotient—a nail gun shooting into the audience is a nice trick—and the unsubtle dig at suburbia—car washes, tow trucks, and country club pools become instruments of Hades—is good for a urban-superiority chuckle. The only thing that makes TFD remotely interesting is the fact that a nonstop summer of celebrity deaths can transform a phoned-in crapshow into meta-horror: Death is coming for us all, famous or no. Let's just hope it isn't by anal cancer.

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.