***

Marijane Meaker's first book, written under the first of several pseudonyms she was to use during her career, and generally credited with ushering in the lesbian pulp fiction genre.  Chock full of guilt, shame, and melodrama as a naive coed joins a sorority and falls tragically in love with a beautiful girl hiding her true sexuality behind a randy boyfriend.  Good, honest pulp, written with an awkwardness at times that works to its credit by charmingly reflecting that of the heroine.  With suitably extreme plot twists and a pro forma ending that isn't fooling anyone.  Men take a beating, but male readers get a fascinating glimpse of life in a 1950s sorority.  Meaker explains in a foreward to the Cleis Press edition that the title was suggested by her editor who was hoping to cash in on confusion with James Michener's recent bestseller The Fires of Spring.  The working title was Sorority Girl.

*

Young woman writer (Camille Keaton) spending the summer in a backwoods house is beaten and raped by four local men, prompting her to bloody revenge.  Infamous "horror" film, thanks mostly to Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert who excoriated it on their television show Sneak Previews.  And not without reason:  this, in spite of Zarchi's claims to the contrary, is a movie with no point of view other than the celebration of torture for its own sake.  Any other result is hard to imagine, given the distorted lens through which Zarchi views this material:  the film, after all, was originally titled Day of the Woman (and that is the title Zarchi himself prefers), as if it is to a woman's credit that she exacts retribution on her rapists not by appealing to the law, not even by shooting them with her gun, but by first suckering them into consensual sex.  The poster for the re-release under the present title claims that "no jury...would ever convict her" -- but only if she were judged hopelessly insane.  Day of the woman, indeed.  With loads of violence, a great deal of full (female) body nudity, and the as-yet-unmarketed gimmick Slime-o-Vision.  Remade in 2010.

***

Highly skilled ex-Intelligence agent finds new career as vigilante after prostitute gets beaten up by her Russian pimp, but the trail of evil leads him inexorably to bigger and bigger fish.  Solid thriller all around, with Denzel Washington giving another excellent performance as a quiet man of power and resolve.  Lacks only an emotional center to complement its hardboiled moral core.  Based on the Edward Woodward television series of the same name.  With Chloë Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas, and, in small roles, Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman.

**

The father of a third-grader with extraordinary pyrokinetic ability (her parents were once subjects in a government-sponsored psionics experiment) does what he can to protect her from agents who want to turn her into a laboratory rat.  Reasonably effective horror thriller has King's typical everyman appeal and all the author's usual stylistic curlicues, but fails to provide a worthwhile adversary.  Here, the bad guy is The Shop, a CIA-like agency that King paints as totally evil, and which is most often represented by the ridiculous caricature of an American Indian who starts out as a hitman and ends up essentially running the agency -- simply because everyone else is afraid of him.  Worse still is his motivation, which manages to be both incomprehensible and silly.  Made into a movie in 1984, starring David Keith and Drew Barrymore.

**

Two teenage girls (Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale) take a trip to Thailand, meet a smooth-talking stranger, and get arrested for drug trafficking.  Facing 33 years in a Thai prison gives them plenty of time to learn such things as that the Thai government is corrupt, the silent treatment works, and having a roach burrow into your ear is decidedly not good for your health. A movie as naive as its protagonists and equally shallow.  Doesn't even work as a travel advisory, as the prison itself, though culturally different, isn't any worse -- and is in some ways better -- than a good old American lockup.  Pointless.  With Bill Pullman as a do-gooder lawyer who tries to help the girls.

**

A boy wants to fall in love. An actress wants to be famous. And the kids of American astronauts want to name the new Gemini rocket "Herman's Hermits." And you thought the 60s were radical.  Well, there never was anything radical about Herman's Hermits. That's "Herman," Peter Noone, and four other guys named Karl Green, Keith Hopwood, Derek Leckenby, and Barry Whitwam.  They're all in this movie, though they rarely speak other to remind Herman that he's the leader and that's his job.  Shelley Fabares plays the girl Herman falls for.  Story goes that the film was going to be named after a different song, but then somebody realized that "A Must to Avoid" probably wasn't a message they wanted to send to the moviegoing public.  The natural title might have been "Make Me Happy," but that's Fabares' song.  Harmlessly entertaining fluff if you like Herman's Hermits, though you might get more mileage from the soundtrack.

**

​Successful couple's tranquility is disturbed after a hotshot architect builds his first house on the woodsy lot next door and horrible things begin happening to every family that occupies it.  Readable haunted house story with a few good ideas and a satisfying ending, but marred throughout by the treacly self-satisfaction of the main characters and its hypocritical gossip-minded sensibility (at one point, our heroine contemptuously dismisses a neighbor who runs into her house to get on the phone with the other hens for a gossip-fest, but we know that's only because, of course, one must settle first into a comfortable chair with a drink in one hand before discussing the embarrassments of one's friends and neighbors).  Discussed at length in Stephen King's Danse Macabre and marked by him as a "particularly important" work in the horror genre.

**

Distraught after the brutal rape of his wife, English teacher Will Gerard (Nicolas Cage) accepts the offer of Simon (Guy Pearce), a mysterious man who tells him his organization will take care of the rapist in exchange for a simple favor at a later date.  Will, clearly more familiar with Shakespeare than the movies, is shocked six months later to learn that Simon wants him to kill a man.  Screenwriter Robert Tannen strings together one cliche after another (Simon’s organization turns out to be unbelievably high, wide, and deep; Will magically acquires superhuman resourcefulness; and so on), finally closing the loop with a predictable showdown in an abandoned mall.  Cage makes it watchable, but can’t make it worth watching.

***

Bittersweet time-travel fantasy about the love affair between a seventies playwright and an actress in 1912.  Pleasant movie with good performances by both Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.  The script -- by Richard Matheson, based on his own novel Bid Time Return -- has everything you would want, and less:  the romance itself relies a bit too heavily on destiny and not nearly enough on good old fashioned wooing.  Still, not a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

**

Originally published in 1966 and written by a reporter who covered the case, this book deals with the crime and subsequent trial of Gertrude Baniszewski, her three oldest children (aged 12, 15, and 17), and two teenage neighbor boys who beat, tortured, and abused a 16-year-old female boarder in the woman's home for several months in 1965 until the girl succumbed at last to her injuries and died.  Because so many of the eyewitnesses to the crime were involved in it and since the others were children themselves with their own individual loyalties, Dean is forced to reconstruct the events leading to the girl's death from often unreliable and contradictory testimony.  Though this was unavoidable, it makes for a convoluted and confusing summary, the power of which isn't in the details but rather the accumulated weight of so much cruelty.  The larger trial portion of the book (the judge ruled against separate trials for the defendants, though these were later granted on appeal), is much more straightforward, but also much less interesting, and adds neither insight to the trial procedure itself nor anything of substance to the earlier reconstruction.  (It does, however, contain one memorable line of testimony.  When asked whether he'd ever seen the victim doing anything "unusual" in the woman's house, a neighbor boy replied, "I seen her studying a few times.")  A truly tragic case, but as for this book it isn't entirly immaterial to its quality to mention (as Dean does himself in a new preface for the 2008 edition) that it was commissioned by Bee-Line, a publisher of pornographic novels, in an attempt to go mainstream.