Earworm Analysis: "Land of Confusion" by Genesis

This is pretty Patrick Bateman-y, but let's analyze Phil Collins.

"Land of Confusion" is probably the most popular Genesis song.¹ It's got a weird, intense video.² It's been covered by countless bands.³

You've heard it. It's clearly about the political and social chaos of Reagan's Cold War America, with a side order of the baby boomer generation failing to live up to the 1960's revolutionary promise, yes?

Well...no.

It's about loneliness.

Phil Collins totally buries the lead, hiding the song's key lyrics in the bridge section:

"I remember long ago when the sun was shining and the stars were bright
And the sound of your laughter as I held you tight
So long ago..."

That's the part nobody pays attention to.⁴ It's not as catchy as the chorus or any of the verses but please note- it's immediately followed by the song's most memorable and haunting bit of music as the keyboards rise to a crescendo. That's a dead giveaway that this is the real heart of the song.

"Land of Confusion" is a bunch of ranting to conceal the pain of losing a loved one.⁵ By death, by breakup, by losing touch- this song is about how hopeless and random the world looks when you're facing life on your own after losing someone. Collins wouldn't be complaining about all the confusion if he was still hearing his lover's laughter.

The world has always been and always will be a mess; it's a perpetual land of confusion.⁶ It's on us to "make it a place worth living in," as he says. It's not politics or social activism that's gonna save us or ease our pain, though. It's love.

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1. "I Can't Dance" and "Mama" have more views on YouTube, but this song's better.

2. Lady Gaga WISHES she could make a video this weird:

3. Covered by Nelly Furtado, In Flames, Disturbed, Fourth Dimension, etc.

4. It's worth noting that both In Flames and Disturbed eliminated or changed the lyrics on this section- they probably thought these lines were the wussy non-metal part.

5. "It's not about what it's about," as they say.

6. Things aren't unusually bad now, nor during the time this song was released. It's always easier to point out how messed-up everyone and everything else is than to deal directly with difficult things in your life. Phil Collins is calling all of us out here. Dude is hardcore.

-Phony McFakename

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Cinemasterworks: Life Lessons in "Hellraiser IV"

You doubt there is wisdom to be gleaned from "Hellraiser IV"?

Prepare for a blown mind.

Lesson 1: Time + Low-Budget Horror = Celebrities

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a horror movie in possession of a low budget, must be filled with unknown actors. And sometimes these actors go big time!

Twenty years after its release, this film's then-unknown, now-famous actor is Adam Scott from "Parks and Recreation":

And it's not like he just has a walk-on part here. He strangles a prostitute, helps conjure demons from Hell using black magic blood rituals, betrays his boss, traps a demon to be his slave for centuries, then gets slashed to ribbons and has his heart removed by said demon.

All in all, a far cry from his beloved sitcom character.

But much like Matthew McConaughey's pre-fame performance in the fourth "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" film, Adam Scott really has nothing to be ashamed of here. He did the best he could with the material.

Lesson 2: If You Suck Too Much, You Go Straight To Video

This was the last "Hellraiser" movie to see the light of projectors.¹ The three films that came before it were a mixed bag, but the films after it are fairly dismissed as suck-fests.²

It's unfortunate that this one rang the death knell on the franchise's theatrical run,³ because it's actually a neat idea- jumping around time from the origin of the demon-summoning puzzle box to the final confrontation with the box's demons on a spaceship in the distant future.

So what went wrong? Well...

Lesson 3: Don't Drastically Recut a Movie You Don't Understand

The force of studio interference is strong with this one.

Miramax was known as the indie powerhouse of the 90's,⁴ but they also had a bad reputation for recutting films over their directors' strong objections. Sometimes their cuts helped turn obscure films into successes, but this time they mangled it.⁵

The movie is already structurally fragmented, but Miramax confused it further by stripping each segment to the bone, undercutting every beat and plot point. Consequently, it collapses at the end into some silly cops-versus-demons chase scene that was clearly added by executive committee to try to wake the audience up at the last minute.⁶

If "Hellraiser IV" ever made sense, Miramax saw to it that we'll never find out.

Lesson 4: Alan Smithee is a Prolific Director

The movie's director is Alan Smithee. Need I say more?⁷

And it's not like you're not gonna notice the director name. This movie was made before the Internet turned us all into ADHD zombies who can't handle a slow movie beginning, so its opening credits are a plain white text against a black screen.⁸

I was a Fangoria reader during this film's production and release, so I didn't have to check Wikipedia to know that FX maestro Kevin Yagher was the director and he dropped out when Miramax started butchering the film.⁹ Joe Chapelle took over and did a bunch of reshoots, but he didn't want his name on it, either.

Enter Mr. Smithee.

This is probably his best film since "The Birds II: Land's End."¹⁰

Lesson 5: Pinhead is a Jerk

Quick history lesson: Pinhead is one of the major names in modern horror.¹¹ His thing is taking you to Hell and torturing you for eternity with chains and blades and needles and stuff, allegedly to the point where you can't distinguish pain from pleasure.¹² He can't just sneak up on you, you have to summon him with a puzzle box. And once he's summoned, you have a problem.

The sequels got right to work on bungling this character. In part three, he attacks bystanders who didn't invite him, including a club full of innocent people.¹³

This one takes his jerkiness even further.

During a really tedious part where Pinhead is basically complaining that things are taking too long,¹⁴ these two unknown security guards randomly wander into the room where Pinhead happens to be.

Now a reasonable person would look at these two guards and say "Hello" or "Good day, sir." But Pinhead decides to mangle these two poor strangers into an improvised set of Siamese twins, turning them into his demonic slaves for eternity.

Rude.

I repeat: Pinhead's a jerk. And I don't care who I offend by saying that.

Lesson 6: Space is a Bad Place for Horror

It's a cliche that horror icons go into space when the filmmakers run out of ideas.¹⁵ And they don't do much with the fact that Pinhead's in space here. The fact that he's on a spaceship at the end doesn't change anything. The rooms and hallways could be any ol' building.

If you're gonna do horror in space, go existential/ interdimensional-nightmarish like "Event Horizon." Anything less is uncivilized.

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1. My dad took me to see this movie on opening weekend. And my reaction was the same as everyone else's at that midnight screening: "Huh?"

2. Did the rest of the "Hellraiser" films suck because they were direct-to-video or were they direct-to-video because they sucked? That timeless mystery may never be solved. In fairness, I remember the fifth one being like an okay "Twilight Zone" episode with a predictable ironic twist ending. But it looked like what it was- a random horror movie that someone rewrote with Pinhead in it so they could sell it as a "Hellraiser" film. At its best, it was direct-to-VHS horror comfort food. And I did see it on VHS- an advance screener copy at the legendary Video Vault, where I worked at the time. That store had three floors of movies with a room for every genre. Top that, Netflix.

3. It rang "Hell's Bells," perhaps? But seriously- these endless sequels must be making somebody money. The last one was a reboot and they're threatening to make more. I tell you kids- they're still gonna be making "Hellraiser" movies long after we're all cold in the ground.

4. They released "Pulp Fiction," "Good Will Hunting," "The English Patient," "The Postman," etc. So of course they bought the rights to the "Hellraiser" franchise.

5. They recut and wrecked the sixth "Halloween" film around the same time as this one, but they probably just turned a cat turd into a dog turd there. Only "Fast & Furious" films are still worth watching after the fifth entry in the series.

6. Its climax is basically 15 minutes of people we don't know wandering down hallways we don't know doing things we don't care about. If that's your thing- you'll love it.

7. If you're unfamiliar, here's the Wikipedia link to Alan Smithee:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee. If I ever meet Adam Scott, I'm gonna ask him "What was it like working with director Alan Smithee on 'Hellraiser IV'?" (UPDATE: Just discovered someone's already pretty much asked him that:  http://www.avclub.com/article/adam-scott-40316)

8. I think Woody Allen still does that with his movies, but Allen's work is a whole 'nother can of worms...

9. You might say they "recut the Hell out of it."

10. I know that was really you, Rick Rosenthal!

11. Along with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Chucky, etc.- all of these guys started out okay but got worse as the number at the end of their film's titles got higher.

12. I never understood the whole masochistic pleasure-for-pain thing, so this character's appeal was and is lost on me. Pain isn't fun.

13. It's almost an old-fashioned reactionary conservative scene- like if you're in this evil club listening to this evil music, a demon will probably murder you.

14. We noticed, Mr. Head, believe me. To the film's credit, this boring sequence set in the present was a legitimate attempt to follow-up on the third film's bizarre ending- the shot of a building made of puzzle-box designs, which looked like something they just did as a throwaway joke:

15. Leprechaun needs a new hunting ground? Space. Critters are running out of people to eat? Space. Jason's running out of camp counselors to kill? Space. This isn't unique to horror- the Muppets and James Bond went to space when their filmmakers ran out of ideas, too.

-Phony McFakename

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Literateur: "Gene Wolfe" Rhymes With "Teen Wolf"

So I read "The Devil in a Forest."

Gene Wolfe is best known for books that aren't this one.¹

There's a lot to recommend about the guy. Neil Gaiman likes him a lot.² His writing is lucid but loaded with odd and obscure words. His characters are engaging, even the ciphers and walk-on players. And he tells a solid, compelling story with an interesting and fully developed milieu in a short amount of space.³

And this is a really odd book. It seems superficially like a hero's journey, where a young protagonist is taken out of his village and out on a journey that transforms him into a noble hero, but it's really not. At all.

Every character is up to something and you keep waiting for some big reveal that will explain how nothing is what it seems- and by all means, there are plot twists aplenty- but very little is resolved. And people actually are what they seem, sometimes frustratingly so.

The big climax happens off-stage.⁴ The bad guy gets his comeuppance, but it's indirect and you just see him getting taken away after-the-fact. The main character gets safely home, but it's not clear what he's learned or what any of it really meant.

And then a brief epilogue, set in the present, makes the whole thing seem like a dark joke.⁵

It's all a metaphor for the struggle between paganism and Christianity in medieval Europe and it's fine as an allegory because it never gets preachy or takes sides.⁶ Wolfe consistently confounds expectations, but manages not to yank the reader's chain too obviously.

I don't know why this book works, but it does. Wolfe is an intriguing writer and nobody writes like him. This is my first book by the author and if this is one of his lesser-known, unheralded books, that bodes well for his more acclaimed work.⁷

I recommend you give the Wolfe man a chance.

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1. Its Wikipedia page is pretty bare-bones (and badly formatted), which is usually a good indication of how much folks care about it:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_a_Forest

2. In his latest collection, "Trigger Warning," Gaiman even wrote a story that takes place in one of Wolfe's worlds- "A Lunar Labyrinth."

3. The same is true of most 50's and 60's sf paperbacks- their brevity is often their charm. They're the exact opposite of "Game of Thrones"- they effortlessly knock out 1000's of pages' worth of story in a brisk 200 pages. You can devour them like potato chips. Strange that modern fantasy books are getting longer while our attention spans are getting shorter.

4. I HATE to compare this to "Twilight," that's not fair at all, but this is a lot like how right when the climactic action scene arrives in that book- the only time it seems to come to life- the narrator faints and it all happens offscreen. I trust Mr. Wolfe to have his reasons for doing this more than I trust Mrs. Meyer.

5. But it's a good dark joke!

6. It implies that they could and should coexist peacefully. Wolfe is Catholic but this book definitely skews anti-organized religion, which feels appropriate for the story.

7. "Book of the New Sun" is his big-deal literary work, I understand.

-Phony McFakename

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"The Vaxx": A True Story

(The following is a true story. Only the names have been changed.)

The evil Vaxx knocked on Jenny's door.

The heroic Jenny held her daughter close.

“We can’t let them take our little girl away to get the Vaxx injection!” Jenny said to her husband.

“I know,” said her husband, who was named Andrew Wakefield. “They are trying to force us to let them give her the Vaxx injection. But we know it’s bad!”

“I know,” said Jenny.

They were in the near-future apocalypse world of 2017. The government was taken over by the doctors who wanted to force everyone to get injected with autism so they couldn’t fight back. These doctors were called "The Vaxx." They were evil.

Their daughter looked at the door, which made a knocking noise again. “Please, mother and father, don’t let them give me autism!”

“Fear not!” Andrew Wakefield said. “We will never let them get you with their Vaxx injection!”

Andrew Wakefield and his wife, Jenny, were the only two parents in their neighborhood who knew the truth about the Vaxx injection. They tried to tell people, but people wouldn’t listen. The people all thought the Vaxx injection was good for them because that’s what they were told. Now it was too late. All the people had autism. Only Andrew Wakefield and Jenny and their little girl didn’t.

But then the Vaxx found out. Jenny heard the whole thing because she put a tape recorder in the Vaxx office after she snuck in there. This is what she heard on the cassette she recorded:

“Are all the people now infected with the Vaxx injection?”

“Yes, my lord. All but three.”

“Impossible! My evil Vaxx, who used to be doctors before they took over the government and forced their unproven science on the world, were instructed to give EVERYONE the Vaxx injection.”

“True, my lord. But one woman named Jenny discovered our secret evil plot and refused the injection. She protected her daughter and her husband, who is named Andrew Wakefield, from our wicked Vaxx injection.”

“So she doesn’t have autism?”

“No, my lord. And neither do her daughter or her husband, Andrew Wakefield.”

“Unacceptable! You must go give them the Vaxx injection right now.”

“Yes, my lord. We will go force them to get the Vaxx injection.”

“Hahaha. Because after all, hahaha, we know...WHAT’S BEST FOR THEM!”

“Yes, my lord. Hahaha. Hahaha!”

“Hahaha!”

Jenny locked her front door as soon as she heard the cassette that said that stuff.

But the evil Vaxx found them anyway.

The Vaxx agent knocked on their door again, even harder this time.

“You can’t force us to take the Vaxx injection!” screamed Andrew Wakefield.

“That is true,” the Vaxx agent said, then he laughed. “Because you are adults, we can not legally force you to take the Vaxx injection.”

“A-ha!” screamed Jenny. Jenny used to pose naked in magazines before she discovered the truth about the Vaxx.

“But!” interjected the Vaxx agent. “Your child is not an adult! So you are legally forced to let us give her the Vaxx injection!”

“Mommy! Daddy! I don’t want autism!” cried out their daughter, who was named Innocence.

“Oh, Innocence!” cried Jenny. “We don’t want to let them give you autism!”

“But you have no choice!” cackled the Vaxx agent.

“That is not fair!” yodeled Andrew Wakefield.

“Oh, but it is fair,” snarled the Vaxx agent. “Because after all, we know...WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU!”

All the Vaxx agents outside all laughed at this in a very evil way.

“We must fight them!” whispered Jenny to Andrew Wakefield.

“But how? We are only armed with the truth!” whispered Andrew Wakefield back to her. Andrew Wakefield was fired from several jobs for deliberately falsifying his scientific research.

“Sometimes…” Jenny said. “The truth is enough!”

Jenny triumphantly stood up, opened the front door, and glowing waves of rainbow-colored light burst out of her heart and murdered all the Vaxx agents that were outside her house.

“Yay!” Andrew Wakefield and his daughter, Innocence, said at the same time. “You defeated the evil Vaxx agents!”

"I know," said Jenny.

“How did you do it?” asked Andrew Wakefield.

“With the power of the truth!” shouted Jenny, whose last name was McCarthy. “And now it’s time for us to take the truth to the bad guys!”

They held hands and skipped off in the direction of the Vaxx office, so they could murder the evil guys who Jenny McCarthy recorded on that cassette.

The little girl, Innocence, smiled up at her mom. “Thanks for not letting them give me autism, mommy!”

“Oh, you’re welcome, my dear. You are welcome!”

Her husband smiled a big smile at her. “You’re a hero!”

“No,” Jenny McCarthy said. “I’m not a hero. I’m just a heroic woman armed with the truth. And I’ll use the power of the truth to save everyone!”

She smiled with joy as more glowing rainbow waves of light shot forth from her heart and lit up the sky. People from miles around saw the blazing multi-colored display and were instantly cured of autism.

"The truth is so beautiful!" Innocence said as she smiled up at the rainbow of truth power.

"It sure is!" Jenny said. "It sure is!"

-Phony McFakename

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Literateur: "Jason's Curse" and "Road Trip"

I Judged a Book By Its Cover.

In 1994, YA horror was booming. R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike were cranking out a new book about once a week.¹ They all looked like this:

I read a handful of them.

"Meh" is putting it mildly.

I was already wearing big-boy pants and reading grown-up horror by this time. I'd devoured everything by Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, and anyone else who looked interesting.²

So when I dabbled in these teenybopper YA horror books to see what they were about, I quickly realized I wasn't the target demo.

Their horror was diluted by cop-out endings and narrative trickery. No one ever really died. It was always just a dream, a misunderstanding, a hallucination caused by an evil doctor drugging the main character, or an illusion unveiled with a "Scooby-Doo"-ish unmasking ending.³

So I told you that to tell you this. These books came out around that time:

I was understandably dismissive.

I mean, they look exactly like the covers of the wimpy YA horror books of their time, yes?

Clearly, they were aiming for the same audience, yes?

Well...that is why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

I just read them and discovered that these books are better, more intense, and more gruesome than almost any of the nine "Friday the 13th" films that preceded it.⁴

These are the second and fourth entries in the four-book "Camp Crystal Lake" series. "Jason's Curse" and "Road Trip" have the same basic plot. A bunch of redshirts come to Crystal Lake while an outcast finds Jason's mask, puts it on, gets possessed, and hacks away until the redshirts are extra-red.⁵

"Road Trip" is the weaker of the two. It's got a nerdy football mascot who takes revenge on the cheerleaders and football players who always bullied him. He also whacks a local cop who's in the middle of abducting and murdering his cheating wife and her paramour.⁶

The middle section drags, with a teenage wasteland of spin-the-bottle games, gossip, and love triangular soap opera antics between the interchangeable catty cheerleaders and their various man-crushes.

There's also some nonsense about vampire bats in a creepy cave with a Jason-worshiping altar. None of that was entirely clear. Who built this altar and why? Bats are never mentioned in any of the "Friday" movies, but they kill almost as many characters as the Jason-possessee in this book. Really- why bats?⁷

Granted, I didn't read the first or third book, maybe this is all addressed there. But I'm a busy guy so I'll just complain and ask rhetorical questions instead.

"Jason's Curse" is much better. It's a decent horror book by any standard, despite awkward passages such as this:

"Very funny," Miguel told her tensely. He gave her a meaningful look. In fact, he practically went bug-eyed giving her his best angry glare.

But it transcends its weaknesses and feels deeply subversive in the process.

It superficially resembles YA horror- the fonts and margins are large, there's no swear words, the writing is simple and straightforward, and the characters are mostly teenagers doing teenage stuff.

But "Jason's Curse" is an extremely mean machine. It's as intense and graphic as any splatterpunk novel of its time. Right off the bat, a deformed hillbilly murders his parents and feeds them to his pigs, and it goes downhill from there.

Our lead female protagonist brings her friends along to Crystal Lake to get revenge on Jason for murdering her brother.⁸ And she's actually a believably written human being- which is more than you can say for 99.9% of the characters in slasher films.

There's a fascinating mythos going on here, too. Crystal Lake is well-developed as a creepy and unique milieu. Early on, a local warns the intruding kids that everything in the town is evil and wrong and he's quite believable. There's an undercurrent of dread in every interaction and everyone's words.⁹

Whatever's wrong with this town goes well beyond a maniac in a mask and the author should be commended for not just randomly hacking up a bunch of teens and calling it a day. This is disturbing and eerie, sometimes on a cosmic level. The "zombie ghost" is a good example- it's cruel and unforgiving and unexplained. Everything about this book leaves you intrigued around the dark edges, wondering what else is going on in Crystal Lake and what's causing it all.

Also- EVERYONE DIES. Main characters, secondary characters, good guys, bad guys. No mercy whatsoever!¹⁰

I can imagine the marketing meetings for this franchise: "Hey kids, did you like R.L. Stine's 'The Snowman'? Then you'll love this book where there is NO EXIT BUT GRIM DEATH!"¹¹

Horror narratives work best as roller-coaster rides or trips through a dark fun house. Some are better rides than others, and "Jason's Curse" is as good a ride as they come in this particular amusement park.¹²

If you like a good slasher story with a sharp supernatural edge, these deceptively juvenile-looking books are for you. They don't make 'em like this anymore.

                                                                         * * *

1. Now this was pre-"Goosebumps." R.L. Stine made his name with books aimed at teens, not kids. He did this over a decade before Stephanie Meyer castrated vampires for teenage girl consumption.

2. I didn't get to the crazier and more hardcore horror writers until used-books-over-the-internet became a thing. But yes, I did eventually devour Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, John Skipp & Craig Spector, Bentley Little, Joe R. Lansdale, Shaun Hutson, etc.

3. At best, they would acknowledge that maybe something supernatural happened. But MAYBE NOT! YOU DECIDE!

4. Despite that ninth film being called "The Final Friday," there have been three more since- "Jason X" (JASON IN SPACE!), "Freddy Vs. Jason," and an okay remake. Heck, the fourth film was also called "The Final Chapter." Hollywood lies, kids.

5. This all seems to take place in a separate timeline from the "Friday" movies. In the last shot of the "Friday" film before this series, Freddy's glove bursts out, grabs Jason's iconic mask, and drags it underground- presumably to Hell- so it's unclear how the mask found its way back to Crystal Lake. Maybe the author addressed that in the first book in this series, which I admittedly haven't read. But the notion of the mask possessing people is never even hinted at in the films. Jason doesn't even put on the iconic hockey mask until halfway through the third film in the series. The ninth film went totally off the rails and implied that the true evil entity behind all the mayhem is a big slimy worm that crawls from person to person by mouth, randomly possessing them, and thus implying Jason was just another vessel for that thing. That theory has been met with skepticism and dismissal by most respectable "Friday the 13th" scholars.

6. Who on Earth thought 13-year-olds could relate to THAT subplot? Answer: Eric Morse. You should check out his somewhat primitive-looking website, it's neat how totally proud he is of his work with this series: http://authorericmorse.webs.com/ He even reveals that he wrote a follow-up book to this series- unpaid fan fiction, basically- where he ties the Jason mask mythos in with the short-lived "Friday the 13th" TV series, a totally unrelated show about an antique shop full of cursed artifacts (And the mask is a cursed artifact, so that's a pretty good fit!). Morse wasn't just some hack who wrote this stuff for a paycheck and is now ashamed of his horror ghetto past. He's a real fan. In fact...Morse seems like the kind of dude who regularly checks Google Alerts for his name or the titles of his "Crystal Lake" books. So he might actually be reading this. Hi, Eric Morse! You did a pretty good job with these books and everyone I know who has read them also enjoyed them. They've stood the test of time better than any YA horror of its time. Props.

7. Author Eric Morse- seriously, if you're reading this, holla at your boy here and answer this- why bats?

8. A character also did this in the fourth "Friday" film and in the 2009 remake. The main character started the sixth film seeking revenge on Jason, too. This almost never ends well for people. I don't recommend it.

9. At times, this thick atmosphere even reaches the heights of classical horror from the 20's and 30's, when Lovecraft and his contemporaries started the whole "doomed town" trope; there's a mysterious and unspeakable evil only gradually unveiled and the protagonists are helpless to resist. What is implied here is just as disturbing as what is presented. The author is hunting bigger game than you would expect from franchise fiction.

10. "Road Trip" is pretty intense, too, but it has the more traditional ending where the main couple survives and rides off into the sunset together. But hey, you can't kill all the people all the time.

11. If anyone reading this blog happened to read "Jason's Curse" when you were a kid, I'd like to hear about how it traumatized you.

12. Confession: Good as "Jason's Curse" is, it reminded me why I don't watch slasher films anymore (And I've seen a LOT). There's something fundamentally hopeless and nihilistic about a narrative where everyone's just a domino to be knocked down. The stakes amount to the catchphrase of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre": "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" When you engage with a story, you want to share the hopes and dreams and struggles of your protagonist. When all you have to work with is "Are they gonna get whacked or not?" then that doesn't give you a lot to work with.

-Phony McFakename

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Legal disclaimer: Me am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and even Pinterest if that's your thing. And me books am on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.

"It Follows" and "Kimmy Schmidt": Pointless Comparisons

(This is an ongoing series of entries where I compare and contrast the last two things I randomly watched.)

What Are They?

"The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" is a high-spirited show about a vibrant young woman adjusting to modern life in Manhattan after 15 years spent living in an underground doomsday cult bunker.

"It Follows" is a movie about a sexually-transmitted disease that manifests as a person walking toward you that only you can see. It never stops following you. And if it catches you, things don't go so well for you. The only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else, who will then be followed forever, or until they're caught. And once they're caught...you're in trouble again.

So What's the Connection?

Both of them are about loss of innocence and dealing with bad things beyond your control.

In "Kimmy," a naive and angry young girl was taken in by a cult leader and tricked into living underground with him and three other women, believing the world has ended.

In "It Follows," a naive but normal young woman loses her virginity and discovers that she has been put in a position of unimaginable horror, as an unstoppable monster in human form is coming after her.

As the show's title suggests, Kimmy never breaks. In all the bunker flashbacks, she remains strong-willed and vivacious. And no matter what challenges she faces in her new life above ground, she maintains her hope and sense of humor, inspiring and uplifting the people around her.

The forgettable young woman in "It Follows" caves in on herself as she's constantly terrorized. She has good friends who stay by her side and protect her as well as they can. But she remains a haunted and withdrawn cipher throughout, sometimes literally dragging her friends down with her. Even when they try to fight "It," she's half-hearted and despairing about it.

Both approaches work. Both girls lose their innocence and deal with it as well as they can. Kimmy is never so sweet that she's overbearing. She has an edge. And it's okay that the girl being followed makes dumb decisions and doesn't have much of a personality- she's a young woman who hasn't experienced much. Plus, her blankness invites the viewer to project one's own personality and fears on her, making the movie that much more engaging and disturbing. The movie would probably be unbearable to watch if she was as colorful and cheerful as Kimmy.

Are They Any Good?

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln- if these are the kind of things you like, you will like these things.

"It Follows" is a near-perfect exercise in nerve-jangling terror. There are logic holes and some story points that might leave you scratching your head, but they're forgivable if you accept it all as a nightmare operating on dream logic. Music hasn't been used this intensely in a horror film since "Suspiria." It delivers subtle and over-the-top scares and it never lets up.

"Kimmy Schmidt" is a funny, uplifting, ribald sitcom. Lots of belly laughs and funny subtle throwaway gags. If you like the pilot, you'll like the show.

-Phony McFakename

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