Word: slashers
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They're in your local video store, but you may have to look hard to find them. Past the shelves of fast-renting movie releases like Dirty Dancing and The Untouchables. Beyond the racks filled with vintage Hollywood comedies, Hitchcock suspense classics and slasher epics. Ah, the Jane Fonda workout tapes; now you're getting warm. Welcome to the wonderful world of original programming for home video...
...tears. Alone in the dark, awed by images bigger and bolder than any dream, children shuddered through a skein of traumas that Walt had devised for them: the outrage of kidnaping (Pinocchio), the ridicule of deformity (Dumbo), the death of a mother (Bambi). Long before the '80s scourge of slasher movies, Disney's were the true horror films, offering primal nightmares and blessed release. And the young were their eager victims. When Snow White premiered at Radio City Music Hall, the management reportedly had to reupholster the seats because they were so often wet by frightened tots...
...what? Now, Fatal Attraction is a fun movie. But so was Friday the 13th. This is indubitably the first time a slasher film has been up for best pic. If the Academy wanted to select a truly good shocker, it should have picked River's Edge...
Lots, as it turns out. Take, for example, Fatal Attraction. It is your standard slasher scenario. Pheromones sing sly duets in a seemingly innocuous setting. The sex object is cute and easily seducible, but interested only in an encounter that is brief and zipless. Whereupon the rejected partner falls to obsessive brooding and proceeds down a darkening path from harassment to stalking with a deadly weapon. Uh-huh. At best it sounds like a cult classic in the making...
...Carlin and Klein, Leno has a sharp eye for the idiocies of everyday life. In an agitated, high-pitched voice that could pierce the din of the loudest bar, he takes off after everything from convenience stores (where "$20,000 worth of cameras protect $20 worth of Twinkies") to slasher movies ("Woman opens the refrigerator, gets hit in the face with an ax. There's a common household accident, huh?"). Leno's P.G.-rated material is witty, accessible and firmly anchored in bedrock middle America. "I'm hopelessly American," he confesses. "If something doesn't come in a Styrofoam...