I had some business in Charlotte, NC last week and could not resist tracking down the ruins of Heritage USA, the theme park built by the Jim Baker PTL empire before being wrested from him in the wake of the sex scandal by Jerry Falwell and then crashing and burning in disarray.
From what little scraps of information I could find on the internet, the place is now under heavy development. You can drive right in and not even know you're inside the park until you see the castle.
It's hard to believe now that this joint was second only to Disneyland. Most of it has been bulldozed but a concrete seahorse, a burned out dock/bridge, some fake rocks and the amphitheater remain. No haunted house could ever some close to being as creepy as this place.
Horsemen
(2009) D: Jonas Åkerlund
P: Michael Bay
S: David Callaham
Platinum/Radar
I SWEAR I HATE BEETHOVEN NOW!!!!
This might remind some viewer of
Se7en or maybe Dee Snyder's Strangeland with elements lifted from Silence of the Lambs. Dennis Quaid is a single father forensic odontologist always getting called away to crime scenes and can tell a lot about a victim by examining the teeth. I worked in a forensic lab and believe me, it's nothing like portrayed in the movies, but we won't get into that here.
He's on the trail of a group of sadistic torture killers who use motifs from the Book of Revelations and hand their victims from the ceiling with hooks. In one scene a gay character hangs his homophobic brother up and clips his eyelids open like in Clockwork Orange before cutting his own heart out with a surgical saw. The dusturbingly real effects were done by Greg Nicotero and Co. Filmed near Winnipeg, Alberta trying to be Detroit.
Le Samourai
(1967)
D:Jean-Pierre Melville
P:Raymond Borderie
Eugène Lépicier
S: Joan McLeod novel The Ronin (uncredited)
Jean-Pierre Melville
Georges Pellegrin
Alain Delon is a hit man who whacks a jazz club owner and then gets picked up by the cops. The piano playing hottie won't squeal on him, but the fuzz know he did it anyway. They break into his apartment and plant a bugging device which he promptly finds. To make matters worse for our stone faced anti-hero the mobsters who hired won't pay him. There's a scuffle at a train station and he finally has a showdown with a guy who can tell him who put up the money to hire him.
It's not an action-packed roller-coaster ride. The pace isn't slow, just unhurried. It seemed like it would have been one of those that Quentin Tarentino might have seen in his video store days.
