Reviews

First of all someone said " The Girl Next Door" wasn't based on actual events .You'd have to be oblivious not to see it's based on this case with some minor changes.

I feel that The Girl Next Door is a much more disturbing film then An American Crime because the degree of abuse is much more accurate in relation to what happened in real life.

Also I was somewhat disturbed that the the director tried to show Gertrude in a somewhat sympathetic light as if he was trying to make some sort of feminist statement that Gertrude was a victim of 50's male oppression.In reality she was a sexual sadist of unspeakable proportions.

I just saw the movie,thought it was good until it lapsed into implausibility near the end and then ended way too soon.

As far as the violence in this movie is concerned I'm shocked and amused at how over the top the reaction is to the violence in the reviews I've read.I'm guessing most of you people either live in the suburbs or don't watch very many non-Hollywood movies.You have people warning people,people saying they couldn't sleep,covering their eyes!What a bunch of pussies!

I'd really like to see how some of you would react if you saw a movie like Ichi the Killer,Audition,Salo or Oldboy or god forbid a Iraqi beheading video!Or better yet come stay in my neighborhood for a week. Get a grip on yourselves for the love of MANkind, it's called real life.

Also could we leave the pretense at home and stop reading too much into these things.Like waxing poetically about how Cronenberg is channeling Nietzsche,Dostoyevsky and Anne Frank?It was a good watered down Cronen- berg film that collapsed near the end,nuff said.

Originally I wrote what was a sarcastic,scathing review of this pathetic piece of dung,but every time I submitted the review I got "this contains a very long word which is not allowed", also words that were not misspelled were judged incorrect.

Now the word that was judged too long was never identified.After numerous attempts at eliminating words eventually I got the sneaking suspicion that the IMDb site is politically sensitive and set to reject certain words automatically.Nothing I wrote was obscene or racist in itself.But after eliminating all of the longest words the same message was repeated again and again,also words that weren't judged misspelled were all the sudden considered misspelled!

The pc police are everywhere.

The reason for this movies success in 1978 is the same reason it shows up on a lot of top ten lists today.Mindless middle of the road conformity and a general hostility of anything approaching art or subtlety on the part of a certain section of the horror genre fan base.It is seen today in the raves given to really dumb and implausible films such as Saw,Hostel,Devils Rejects et al.

Let me say I love disturbing movies(Audition,Happiness,Salo,etc..)so it isn't the gore I object to in any of the newer horror films,it's the complete lack of intelligence and style.Going back to 1978,the people who liked Halloween were the same people listening to Van Halen and Kiss as opposed to the Pistols or The Weirdos.A horror film for the Aaron Spelling kiddies.