Suspension of Disbelief

I like horror movies. As I've mentioned, we often go on Sundays to the pirated disc market, even when it's 20 below zero, as it was today. It's a good way to walk off the hangover, if nothing else, and me collapsed in a stupor on the living room floor in front of the TV drinking beer and watching the discs I've bought is, to me, an exemplary way to spend a Sunday evening.

I'm not, generally, the kind of person who bitches about physical or logical improbabilities in movies.

Until today. There's one horror movie convention that always irritates me, and I just saw it in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING. I've seen it recently in two other well-received horror movies, WOLF CREEK and THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake.

Basically, what I'm talking about it this: the hero (or one of the victims) gets into a car while running from whatever maniacal cannibal murderer. The hero struggles to start the car, there is a tense moment while he/she does so, then we are of course led to believe the hero is safe -- when suddenly, in the rear view mirror, the hero sees that the maniac is in the back seat. At which point, usually, something sharp goes through the seat and through the hero, too.

Okay, maybe if there was like. . . a midget, or a ventriloquist dummy, or Chucky, hiding in your back seat, okay, you might miss them. That, I can buy.

But in all three of the films mentioned abouve, the maniacs are gigantic men. In TCM: TB, of course it's Leatherface, who's also covered with blood and severed flesh, AND CARRYING A GIGANTIC CHAINSAW. Are you telling me you wouldn't at least SMELL a 6'6, 250 pound cannibalistic hillbilly in the backseat of your car? Maybe hear him breathing? Maybe wonder why the car is listing terribly to port?

Still, any cannibalistic hillbilly movie is a good cannibalistic hillbilly movie, as far as I'm concerned.

A new Case Study and some nightclub titty-pics coming sometime this week.