Word: cleverness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Clever fellow, our fricasseed Freddy. Now he stalks the dreams of his posse's teenage children. A vision of loathsomeness with his moldy black felt hat, scalded face, red-and-green-striped sweater and right-hand glove with steel "finger-knives," he lures each sleeping adolescent to a convenient boiler room (every building in town has one) or into their grungiest fears. And if they don't wake up in time, he executes them. Kind of harrowing, the number of Elm Street kids who die in their sleep. As one boy says, "It's not exactly a safe place...
Never mind a candidate's stand on the issues, Sheehy warns us. After all, she argues, the issues have become increasingly diffuse, "too complicated to submit to clever political slogans." The parties have become virtually interchangeable. The candidates themselves are often big on rhetoric but thin on specifics, preferring instead to stake out popular, non-controversial positions (opposing new taxes and "big government" while supporting patriotism, "good jobs at good wages", and a "war on drugs...
Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is a clever, hunky, athletic law student. Make that was. For Allan is hit by a truck and wakes up a quadriplegic. He is told to look on the bright side: "You'll get all the best parking spaces." But for Allan, this is a life near death. His mother (Joyce Van Patten) cloys and crushes. His girlfriend runs off with the surgeon who may have botched his operation. His nurse, a sulky sadist named Maryanne (Christine Forrest), cares more for her parakeet than for her patient. And Allan's best friend (John Pankow...
True to the genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg...
...confident as his manner of address. "What I like is to take your 'campus-novels' . . . and compare them with the works of your better competitors -- as, Thom. Hardy, Max Beerbohm, J.I.M. Stewart . . . and David Lodge." Bradbury cannot resist compounding the young man's confusion ("It was clever of you . . . to work out that in fact I am several if not all of the authors you mention") while offering him a few biographical scoops ("It has been a difficult business, especially the episode of being married to Mrs. Thomas Hardy...