CineNiche

Dear Mr. Gacey Svetozar Ristovski's adaptation of Jason Moss' superb book The Last Victim plays out like a made-for-TV movie.  Jason Moss was a young eager student who developed a theory to gain unfettered access to the mind of a serial killer by portraying himself as their perfect victim.  He wrote to Charles Manson , Jeffrey Dahmer , Henry Lee Lucas , Richard Ramirez , and of course John Wayne Gacy .  The correspondences between himself and these monsters led Moss to his darkest place.  His desire to become an FBI profiler was eventually met with open arms and his research provided a deeper understanding of the psyche of these killers.  Unfortunately this film really doesn't dive into the complete story of Jason Moss, instead it keeps to a simple plot of being driven mad by his encounters with Gacey.  William Foresyth plays Gacey extremely well and the film delivers most of Gacey's brilliance in manipulation: which did cause the real Moss ...

Tony Williams describes the undercurrent in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist by writing, “In an era of recession, oil embargoes, the debilitating effects of Vietnam, and crisis of confidence in presidential leadership, cinema provides an ideological answer by invoking a traditional enemy - Satan (107).” Everything terrible that occurs in our lives, by Christian standards is the work of the devil. It is never the work of humankind, we could never be that horrible, it must be the devil working through us. Human’s represent a duality between good and evil, if we can recognize something to be good or an action that we have to be right than we must have known wrong or evil within our lives. We are light and dark, we are the shadow and the ego, we are the id and the superego, we are heaven and hell, yet we cannot admit to this. The Exorcist can be interpreted as a lashing out on the family structure. Ragan played by Linda Blair has no father and an actress mother who is sleeping w...

This may be the shortest review of any film on CineNiche, and it's out of spite.  Maybe not spite, but definitely to teach Jon Knautz a lesson.  We wanted to love Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer .  It had been sitting on the unwatched shelf for nine months, just waiting for that right moment to indulge in an Evil Dead type of horror comedy.  Finally, the day came - it was the right time - you know cosmos aligned and all that.  Final summation: This is the longest 85 minute film you will ever see.  It's not bad, far from it.  The main problem with Jack Brooks is they didn't have content to fill the running time so a lot of details that are not needed are included.  Here's a main example: Professor Gordon Crowly (Robert England) is possessed and ends up walking out his second story window and we cut to the next day.  Crowly wakes up with no clue how he got there and sees his hands are covered in dirt.  He turn...