input: Home Room deals with a Columbine-like high-school shooting but rather than hashing over the occurrence itself the film portrays the aftermath and what happened to the survivors, their trauma, guilt and denial.

*Spoilers* The shooting itself is treated as a foregone conclusion, with no action footage other than the reaction of an almost teenage SWAT commando after shooting the high school killer. The film has three protagonists; the detective investigating the crime of which no guilty parties are left to convict and two teenage girls surviving the incident, played by a very young Erika Christensen and Busy Philipps.

The two girls having nothing in common besides the shooting are put together because of it and the drama ensues.

Erika Christensen, though only 24 has been around the block so much that film viewers are pretty much acquainted with her solid and reliable style of acting. Busy Philipps, three years older than Christensen and altogether unknown to me, blew me away with her overwhelming dramatic strength and screen presence. This girl was the part.

It's a great movie and it connects to you with its intimate focus on the fragile yet growing relationship between the two traumatized girls. Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003) though good, seems almost superficial and paltry compared to Home Room when it comes to dramatic flair and acting. What I can see this film got very little screen time and exposure - so much more a loss for an equally traumatized America.

Ten out of Ten

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: When a film is independent and not rated, such as the Hamiltons, I was expecting out of the norm, cut out your heart violence. I know that good movies don't always contain blood and violence, but I read reviews, I visited the website, and I even convinced a few of my friends to pay $9.50 to see this god awful movie with me. When there is a festival called Horrorfest, I am expecting horror, not Dawsons Creek with incestuous undertones. My expectations were extremely low for this film, yet the little expectations there was for the film were shot to hell once I saw that an hour had passed before we saw the first drop of blood come out of someones finger. There were too many plot holes and left too much to the imagination. I regret not seeing Happy Feet. I think there might have been more violence and gore in that movie than in the Hamiltons!

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: Trailers of this movie may show scenes of violence or non mainstream sexuality, but these scenes are just rare fragments, picked out to attract audience. They are, of course showing the main message of the movie:

People who are constantly kicked on their heads in their jobs and lives, using power, which they may have somewhere else, to notoriously oppress others. And at the low end of the oppression chain, mostly women.

A movie showing this as brutally as Hundstage is surely tough to face, but having to endure such lives, is even tougher.

Technically the film is much like Short Cuts, but consisting of documentary style episodes, featuring people like your neighbour, playing just the way they are. Without any glitter, and most disturbingly, without any hope. Its documentary style makes the movie even more disturbing, because you realize, such people are out there, and there are many of them, although our society focuses on the nice exterior looks. Somewhere the porn industry has to do its business, somewhere unreported domestic violence has to take place, somewhere hopes have to shatter. I sure do know such people.

If you want to see a movie without any funny scenes (some may think the handicapped woman repeating the top ten supermarkets is funny, but this happens for real) and without any melodramatic, go watch this movie. However it will lose when you are focusing on subtitles I fear, as subtitles can't transport accentuation.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: It seems like this is the only film that John Saxon ever directed, and that he had the good sense to stop after that and stay in front of the camera. This movie is a dog, from start to finish, and it's dull and wooden with nothing much going for it. A Viet Nam war hero takes a job working for a mob boss, gets a bit too friendly with the wife and then the wife is killed by the mob boss himself & the war hero framed and sent to prison, death row, specifically. Now, this particular prison has been experimenting on inmates and is testing some formula that will turn men into the ultimate killing machine (a zombie). Of course, everything goes wrong and then there's all these infected people trapped in the prison, some of whom are turning into zombies and the rest who suddenly just don't want to be there anymore. This just goes on and on and on with nothing particularly much to show or say for itself, and I stopped it before the end, which seemed like it was coming a few times but no, it was apparently only getting set to take off on a different and equally dull path. If one watched to the end they may well become a zombie themselves, so don't risk it. 2 out of 10.

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pos/neg ans:
negative