No, YOUR Mother Sleeps with Cats

I'm not much of a fan of horror movies in general and I think the '80s & early '90s provided us with plenty of examples of some of the worst film-making possibly ever. I could count the number of horror movies I've seen on one hand - with a couple of fingers cleverly hacked/gnawed off by a homicidal maniac. Having said that, you may better understand why it was so difficult for me to get through this film. Funny thing though, 2 of the 3 horror films I’ve seen were directed by Wes Craven. There's definitely something...different going on inside that guy's head. The actual length of the film is something like an hour and forty minutes, but it took me about 3 hours to watch, crossing the finish line around 1:30 AM. Most of the time when I'm interrupted while watching a movie I tend to get annoyed and want to go back to watching the movie, but for this one I wasn't in so much of a hurry to get back. It wasn't torture; it was just hard maintaining interest.

Starting off, it seemed pretty interesting with the whole tarot card thing. I'm sure was in there to foreshadow what the kid would have to go through. That's actually somewhat impressive since it's a technique the Shakespeare used a lot. So I think I can safely say that Wes Craven knows and used a correct structure of film writing (which I didn't expect from the horror genre). So that got my hope pretty high, but they came crashing down right about the time when the kid somehow calls off a Rottweiler, that is attacking his mentor, by giving him the ultimate assault:

"Your mother sleeps with cats."

See I'm not sure if it was intended to be humorous, but I thought it was hilarious. I actually hit rewind and had to show my wife. It was basically downhill from there. There were lots of slow-moving scenes involving crawling, lurking, and sudden bursts of frenzied panic that were boring, yet still disturbing in a way similar to the idea of Chinese water torture being disturbing. It all went away with the comic relief of the random "gimp" running around and the confusing one-liners. It honestly took me about 20 minutes to figure out that the guy in all the leather was the "man of the house" and I'm still trying to figure out if basically everything the kid said was supposed to be tongue in cheek. Either way, while I really don't like horror movies, I at least was entertained enough by the ambiguously humorous one-liners and ridiculous events - the dog bites the man, the man grabs the kid, the kid touches the doorknob and they all get shocked like the 3 stooges. It was enough to get me through the movie, but I didn't expect that my favorite thing about a horror movie would be that it made me laugh...