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This horrible horror flick is based on a Dean Koontz book, which is unread by me. He’s a writer that seems to fall into the categories of love him or hate him. Considering that he adapted the screenplay for this film, I’m not leaning toward the love him camp to be honest.

Like so many horror movies, there is a kernel of an intelligent premise buried within spooky clichés and paper-thin characters. Horror writers really love their monsters, but can’t find central characters that aren’t from stock character central. Dr. Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going, INVENTING THE ABBOTTS) picks up her sister Lisa (Rose McGowan, TV’s CHARMED) from L.A. to take her to a small town in Colorado so she can get away from the hectic life of the City of Angels. When they arrive in Colorado, the town they visit is deserted or dotted with dead people (or at least parts of dead people). The only living people the sisters run into are Sheriff Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck, GOOD WILL HUNTING) and his deputies Stu Wargle (Live Schreiber, SCREAM 2) and Steve Shanning (Nicky Katt, SECONDHAND LIONS).

Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe returns, but this time the dic is transported to the 1970s. Elliott Gould (MASH) plays the Marlowe character as a cocky mumbling slob and he’s wonderful.

Early one morning his friend Terry Lennox (former pro baseball player Jim Bouton) shows up and says he fought with his wife and needs a ride to Tijuana. When Marlowe gets back to his apartment, the cops are waiting for him and want to know where he took Terry, because Lennox’s wife was found dead. The rest of the film chronicles Marlowe’s meandering path to finding out the truth behind what really happened to Terry and his wife.

Along the way, Eileen Wade (Nina Van Pallandt, AMERICAN GIGOLO) hires Marlowe to locate her booze-hound writer husband Roger (Sterling Hayden, DR. STRANGELOVE). Also working into the plot are gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell, HAVANA) and strange clinic doctor Verringer (Henry Gibson, NASHVILLE).

Director Stanley Kramer was a director who never shied away from taking on topical issues in his films. In THE DEFIANT ONES and GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, he tackled race, and in INHERIT THE WIND, he tackled evolution. In JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, he addressed the issue of who is to blame for the Nazis and presents a nuanced argument against many people.

Spencer Tracy (ADAM’S RIB) stars as Chief Judge Dan Haywood, who moves to Nuremberg to head up the trial of four Nazi judges, the top being Dr. Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY). Heading up the prosecution is Col. Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS), a man who saw the horrors of the concentration camps first hand and makes it a personal crusade to take down as many Nazis as he can. Heading the defense is Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell, JULIA), a brilliant, young attorney, who uses the law as leverage in his defense of evil acts.

Luis Buñuel’s EXTERMINATING ANGEL was completed in Mexico in 1962, but wasn’t released in the U.S. until August 1967, which was the same year that his most famous film, BELLE DE JOUR, was released. Buñuel is known for his surrealist cinema and EXTERMINATING ANGEL is his most surreal feature. This satire uses absurdity to uncover hypocrisy.

Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) is a wealthy elite who throws a party for the rich set in town. Buñuel is not worried about character here, but brings archetypical characters to his party. After dinner, the host and his guests move into the sitting room, where no one leaves — literally. Some unexplained force makes the guests unable to walk out of the room. Once you enter the room, you cannot leave. The guests camp out on the floor for the night and try to remain dignified. However, when days turn into weeks, niceties of decorum begin to fade and the “pure bloods” are savagely at each other’s throats.

Twins have been a common theme in horror films and macabre master David Cronenberg tackles the topic here. Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons, A REVERSAL OF FORTUNE) are identical twin gynecologists. Beverly is the shy, scholarly scientist, who developed a revolutionary surgical instrument when he was a student at college. Elliot is a flashy ladies man, who serves as the public face for Beverly’s work.

One day, actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold, THE HOUSE OF YES) comes to see Beverly at his office to see if she can get pregnant. During the examination, Elliot switches places with Beverly and seduces Claire. When Elliot gets bored of Claire, he hands her over to Beverly again. Beverly falls in love with Claire, who is quite disturbed when she finds out about Elliot.

The filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were early adopters of color in their films. Along with THE RED SHOES, this film is a shining example of how color can play a huge role in a picture when used correctly. The intoxicating eroticism of the Himalayan setting is brought brilliantly to life in rich visual splashes. Color works as a mysterious character that haunts every frame of this masterpiece.

Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr, THE INNOCENTS) is a snobby and arrogant nun, who is assigned her own mission in the Himalayas with a handful or so of other nuns under her, despite her young age. A prince has given the nuns an old palace where a harem was once housed. The prince pays his people to attend the school there and the nuns are afraid to treat the sick in their hospital because of the fear that the natives will rebel against them if the patient ends up dying. British ex-patriot Mr. Dean (David Farrar, GONE TO EARTH) tries to help the nuns, but he butts heads with Sister Clodagh due to her holier than thou disgust for his frivolous lifestyle. However, Mr. Dean’s sexual appeal is not lost on off-kilter nun Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron, 1996’s EMMA).

For me a comedy needs to do two things — 1) establish a world and keep with it and 2) make me laugh. If a comedy can also make me think and care about the characters, then that’s just gravy. ANCHORMAN is just plain lumpy, mashed potatoes, but I liked the taste of it nonetheless.

When ANCHORMAN works, it’s really funny. When it’s doesn’t, it’s dead silence bad. However, the good really outweighs the bad and it moves on so quickly to a new joke that you forget that the one right before really tanked. Sometimes the joke starts out bad and they just go with it until it works. This is where the talent of the performers is highlighted.

Will Ferrell, possibly the most consistently funny guy working in Hollywood today, plays Ron Burgundy — an anchorman for a local San Diego news station, who has made himself a legend in his own mind. The film is set in the 1970s when men ruled the newsroom and sexual harassment was an alien concept. Ron is worshipped by his crew, which includes Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd, THE SHAPE OF THINGS), dimwitted weatherman Brick Tamland (Steve Carell, THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN) and sportscaster Champ Kind (David Koechner, A GUY THING). The station head Ed Harken (Fred Willard, BEST IN SHOW) is pressured to add diversity to the newscast and hires ambitious reporter Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate, TV’s MARRIED… WITH CHILDREN). Ms. Corningstone must endure endless harassment and ridicule, but she hangs in there, trying to hold off her attraction to Ron.

Director Todd Solondz is a director of films that are for an audience with extremely open minds. He is not afraid to push buttons, take chances or offend. He is also very cynical and sarcastic, which to some is off putting.

PALINDROMES is his most experimental film and the film in which he has taken the most chances. At the beginning, he brings back characters from his first movie WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE and then runs them through the wringer for the entire picture.

The main character of DOLLHOUSE, Dawn Weiner, has committed suicide and her snobby sister has told their young cousin Aviva that she is destined to turn out just like Dawn, a pathetic loser who will be unloved. Aviva’s mother Joyce (Ellen Barkin, THE BIG EASY) reassures her 14-year-old daughter that she will be fine and that her and her father will always love her. At this point Aviva declares that she wants to have lots and lots of babies so that she will always have someone to love. So Aviva hooks up with horny Judah (Robert Agri), the son of a family friend, so she can get pregnant.

Director George A. Romero created our modern image of the zombie as the flesh-eating walking undead. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD are horror classics and DAY OF THE DEAD is very underrated. LAND OF THE DEAD is the beginning in a new cycle of Romero zombie films. For the four films it’s on par with DAY.

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where zombies roam the streets of cities while humans hole themselves up in a small community surrounded by water. Rich people live in a huge apartment complex called Fiddler’s Green while the poor people scrounge the abandoned cities for food and luxuries.

Riley (Simon Baker, THE RING TWO) has created the Dead Reckoning, a mobile fortress that allows the humans to venture out into zombie-infested areas. However, Riley wants to leave the city behind, because he sees how the decks are loaded and doesn’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. Cholo (John Leguizamo, MOULIN ROUGE), on the other hand, believes that if he does enough favors for the Fiddler’s Green boss Kaufman (Dennis Hopper, EASY RIDER) that he’ll be able to buy his way into the luxurious high-rise.

First off, I have read the famed book that inspired this film and I found it disappointing. The film does capture the silly anarchy of the book fairly well, but it still wasn’t all that funny.

Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman, LOVE ACTUALLY) wakes up one morning to discover that his house has been scheduled for destruction to make way for a throughway and he didn’t know it. But this is the least of his worries, because his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def, BROWN SUGAR), who is really an alien, informs him that the Earth has been scheduled for destruction to make way for an intergalactic throughway. So Ford and Martin hitch a ride on the demolition crew’s spaceship and thus starts their crazy adventures throughout the galaxy.

This film was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign language film for 2004. It’s the first German film to tackle the topic of the Nazis, chronicling the last days of the Third Reich as a paranoid Adolf Hitler desperately clung to the hope of victory and his sanity.

The film was controversial and a huge box office success in Germany. It was controversial because it attempts to present Hitler as an evil human not just a caricatured monster. Those who have discovered the film know how good it is. On the invaluable movie website IMDB.com, readers currently rank this film as the 56th best film of all time.

Bruno Ganz (WINGS OF DESIRE) is magnificent as the Fuhrer, who is kind and respectful to his loyal servants, but enraged with irrational hatred, racism and anger. Our point of view for the film is Hilter’s secretary Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), who in real life has written a book about her experiences and participated in a documentary called BLIND SPOT right before her death. She claims that she knew nothing of the atrocities the Nazis carried out, but many feel that she must have known something and could not bring herself to admit it.

David Cronenberg is best known for his horror films like THE FLY and VIDEODROME. Of late he has been moving into more dramatic territory with films like SPIDER. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is his most mainstream film and probably his best film thus far.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen, LORD OF THE RINGS) is a family man who owns a diner in a small Mid-Western town. One day, gun-totting bad guys come to the diner looking to rob it. We already know they’re cold-blooded killers. Soon enough Tom has disarmed and killed the men, becoming a reluctant hero to his town. He is also a hero to his loving wife Edie (Maria Bello, THE COOLER) and his son Jack (Ashton Holmes, TV’s ONE LIFE TO LIVE), who is picked on by the jocks at school. The media attention given to Tom then brings new bad men to town. Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris, APOLLO 13) is a gangster from Philly who believes Tom is not the person he says he is.