Word: slasher
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Boys are constantly being subjected to so-called adventure films, which are really nonstop violence films with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator and Jean-Claude Van Damme doing blood sport, and slasher films in which people are dismembered, burned alive, skinned. By the time American kids are 18 years old they have watched 26,000 murders on television alone. Heavy-metal and rap lyrics often encourage rape and bigotry. It is contrary to common sense and research to think you can create such a culture and not have any effects...
Americans seem to be particularly fascinated by death. How else can you explain the popularity of Faces of Death--a movie consisting entirely of real deaths? Faces of Death II? Faces of Death III? Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and their slasher sequels...
Darkman wants to be Batman. Its hero, a scientist (Liam Neeson) scarred in body and soul after being left for dead by venal thugs, is a cloaked crusader bent more on vengeance than on justice. Director Sam Raimi, whose cheapo slasher film The Evil Dead achieved cult status, mines familiar comic-book terrain with a plucky heroine (Frances McDormand), a couple of corporate villains -- one slick (Colin Friels), the other slimy (Larry Drake) -- and plenty of explosive violence that virtually reads KA-BOOM! in block letters across the screen...
...their speed, technical wizardry, surface brilliance and cheerful cynicism, dyna-movies are the ideal art form for the MTV generation. Zapped for a decade by the lightning impulses of rock videos, inured to slaughter by campy slasher films, kids have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures vaporized in Nintendo games...
Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales (two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse...