jessegehrig This movie, its like: You come home from work, right, come home and there are your kids, only it appears that they've performed some sort of autopsy/voodoo ritual on a llama and now the reanimated mutilated corpse of the beast lumbers about through your trashed living room, at your children huddled together for safety in the corner you yell, " What did you DO!? ". So to this movie do I yell, " The f*ck did you do!? " I mean there's a scene where a cock-fight is depicted as erotic, who would DO that ? How is that erotic ? Sh*tty people who force animals to mutilate one another to death and bet on the outcome, that sound sexy to you ? Awesome bro good for you. No, for real this movie is nuts, if you've never seen this movie I dare you-I DARE YOU- to watch this movie

joshg1 I wasn't going to write a review but felt guilty that someone might read all the film school gushing and watch this dreck. I'm not a young man and I regret wasting 2½ hours just to learn a lesson.Very good acting, great characterization, loathsome characters (which I like) and an excellent premise, but just a premise. We unfortunate viewers are bashed over the head with the idea that people in Hollywood are bad. Over and over and over for two hours and twenty four minutes. This may be a spoiler, but how can I spoil something that rotted before the novel's author sat down at his Corona portable? The over the top ending is not needed to reinforce Hollywood bad- it is needless violence- not even entertaining violence. I've said this before and fear I will say it again- you can't act your way out of a bad script. Don't watch this movie, if only to learn from its mistakes. Find a copy of Carey McWilliams' Southern California Country (1946). His book covers the thinking behind Hollywood and its neighbors in greater depth and with wit. Lesson learned for the short remainder of my life- no more 1970s dramas except for thrillers.

PippinInOz This is a remarkable film for so many reasons.I first discovered this film completely by accident about 16 years ago - there used to be a mid -day movie everyday on a free to air channel. If I was home, would switch on in the fast vanishing hope that one day, just one day, something half decent would be screened. Most of these films were abysmal, so you can imagine my shock when this started. I was glued to the screen. The feelings of shock and horror that 'The Day of the Locust' left me with have never left. So when I saw it was being shown on Foxtel the feeling was one of excitement and fear. Fear that after so long maybe this film was not quite as good as I remembered it being. Fear not! But on the other hand, do fear. This is a classic film.1. In the year 2011, 27 years after it was made, the themes it engages with are never more appropriate. The 1930s world of Celebrity culture in Hollywood and the desperation of the characters we get to meet, hold powerful 'truths' for the Western World of 'now' - you know, the world of everyone wanting FAME FAME FAME FAME FAME - (as David Bowie sang it).2. The acting is superb. Watch out for those moments when the lead characters are trying SO HARD to be jolly and happy, that their forced jollity splits into anger laced with madness. 'Beepers, Peepers......' the stuff that nightmares are made of. 3. The film reveals a world where everything is a simulacra (a perfect copy of an original that never existed - Jean Baudrillard). The sets, the costumes. The young Shirley Temple would be who lives in the apartments is a boy dressed as a girl by a mother desperate for fame. ('Toddlers and Tiaras?') 4. There are subtle reminders throughout the film that Nazi Germany is on the rise. The parallels with the hysteria of the crowds cheering Adolf Hitler, particularly in that final horrifying scene (listen: you can hear the click click click of locusts on a feeding frenzy), where the crowd 'devours' - smashing windows - reminiscent of Kristalnacht, when the equally crazed hysterically 'whipped up' crowd attack Jewish businesses and Jewish people. While the focus is different, the hysteria of the crowds is linked. So too, the hysteria of the crowd at the 'Sister's Religious Revival meeting' (Geraldine Paige playing a character based on the real life Amy Semple). It isn't that there haven't been other films in the past ten to fifteen years that have passed comment on celebrity and Hollywood, but what marks this one out - even after so much time - is the complete refusal to allow you, me - the audience - to stick our tongue in our cheek and nod with post modern knowingness, maybe even have a little laugh. No, this one hits you right between the eyes. Still brilliant. Still terrifying......and for me at least, has some important reminders for all of us living in the Celebrity obsessed Western World. If it has all started to get a bit too much for you and you suspect it is all getting a bit, well, weird, - get this film!If you haven't seen it yet, get ready to have this film indelibly stamped on your mind. Lend it to your mates, because you will want to talk about this one. It is THAT powerful.

Robert J. Maxwell Nicely done skewering of Hollywood in the 1930s. Well, maybe more than just Hollywood bites the dust. In sociology, "Hollywood" is simply a more intense expression of what goes on in everyday life, as the nose is a prominent feature but is still part of the face.The movie preserves Nathaniel West's distinction between the performers and the audience, though they meld towards the end. Among the more obvious of the actors is Karen Black as a flirtatious movie extra, and her father, Burgess Meredith, a salesman selling a bag of tricks. The observers include William Atherton as the viewer's proxy, a recent graduate of Yale summoned to Hollywood as an art director; and Donald Sutherland as Homer Simpson (great name), a pathologically inhibited accountant from the Midwest who has "come to California to die." They all live in the San Bernardino bungalow courts or garden apartments or whatever they are. The architecture of Southern California is a marvel, with fake mission style, fake Southern plantation, fake thatch-roofed English cottage, fake Arabian Nights apartments. Robert Benchley lived in The Ali Baba bungalows, which may, in itself, have been enough to drive him to drink. I recently stayed at the Taj Mahal Motel, which vaguely resembled a miniature of its namesake, only painted Day-Glo purple -- unless the whole thing was some Arabian apparition induced by the toxic atmosphere. But, in any case, nothing is what it seems to be made of. The huge, hammered-metal hinges on the doors of the Medieval castle turn out to be of insubstantial tin.All the characters are pathetic but the one I found most nearly sympathetic is Homer Simpson, Sutherland, who wants only to be left alone until he drops, like the over-ripe oranges on his back yard tree. But he's swept up by incidents into coming to adore and house Karen Black's fake slut. She acts like a floozy and, until she needs the money, she may actually be the seventeen-year-old virgin she claims to be. But Sutherland is to Black what a Handiwipe is to us.Characters come and go, and their relationships become complicated. William Atherton, for instance, the sophisticated artist from the East, falls for Karen Black and becomes embittered when she dumps him for someone she can get more out of. He's blandly handsome and a little innocent. Karen Black is sadly miscast. She's big and strong and her eyes are close together, making her manipulativeness obvious. What was needed was a beautiful young teen-ager whose narcissism is justified and who could lie convincingly to herself and others. Burgess Meredith dies and leaves a lovely pink-cheeked corpse. One expects someone to walk up to the casket and remark, "My, doesn't he look natural." Except he doesn't. He looks more beautiful than ever, the handiwork of an expensive undertaker who knows exactly how to make death mimic life.There are a couple of action scenes. The armies of Napoleon and Wellington fall from a fake wooden hillside that collapses. It's difficult not to chuckle as one absurdly clad soldier after another charges into the widening crater.At the end, there is a self-destructive riot built around the premier of a Major Motion Picture and Sutherland's finally popping like a zit and stomping a noxious child to death as Mr. Hyde did. The letting loose of the built-up tension in frenzied hysteria lasts maybe a little too long but it successfully projects the empty, thumotic restlessness that animates the everyday masquerade.