Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

This movie is a very good remake of a classic. Theme remains the same, young attractive woman having an in and out experience with reality. I like the troubling problem she has with water thru-out the movie indicating a slow and visual death, including feelings of desire. Shawnee Smith fans will enjoy her singing talent, playing the younger also attractive woman.

The 1998 version of the 1962 low-budget horror classic.

It was a bad idea to classify this as a "horror" story, even though some of the events do qualify as horror. But too many people try to match this to the original, and that in itself is a mistake. In the day where original films are passe, at least this tries to make a new story based on a similar premise. That being a young woman is made to face her fear.

The Phillips character (Alex), as a young naive girl, witnesses the rape and murder of her mother, and could have shot this fiend (Louis, portrayed by Larry Miller) before he killed her; he foolishly left his gun on the nightstand. Watching the mother character's neck snap in the hands of Louis, is singularly unpleasant to watch, and downright disturbing. Instead, she panics and runs. He was obviously caught, and served twenty years for his offense, and now he's out to even the score ("I never hold a grudge, once I get even").

It's about sacrifice, facing the thing that scares you the most, and letting your worries go. Many times in the film, the Sandra character (Shawnee Smith) tells her big sister not to worry about her, "You worry too much, I'll be fine." Alex sees herself as the reason the girls were orphaned so early, and denied the relationship with their mother; she could have shot Louis before he killed her mother (the father was absent all along, pretty typical in too many families) and fretted over Sandra as if she were her own daughter. In an act of closure, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Alex goes to the seaside to let the wind blow the ashes of her dead mother over the ocean, and when she returns to the car, there's a balloon on her car's antenna. Louis has obviously been stalking her, and at gunpoint, he decides it's time to finish old business. You are forced to drive to your home and watch this monster at work again. So what do you do? With a murderer's gun to your ear, you floor your gas pedal, steer your car off the pier, and even though you die yourself, you rid the world of this filth who has ruined at least three lives.

The entire middle of the film is a personal journey through life in an alternate dimension. Her aquaintences are all there, with their own lives, but everything they say and do, is geared to her dilemma. She's dead, and refuses to face it. She is afraid to leave her sister behind, and afraid of the man who has tormented her for twenty years, and afraid to move to the next. The "beings," I'll call them, are symbolic of crucial times , people and events in her world, and they are called "annoying" by some people, but they are symbolic of personal demons in her life; they pop up at crucial moments. Startling to look at, because they come in so unexpectedly, they are meant to catch you off guard, as they do Alex.

The events are about closure, and moving on, and in one flashback scene toward the end, the old man in the bar asks her, "You're not afraid, are you?" And again, Sandra says "You worry too much; I'll be fine."

It's a movie about life, that's all.