Word: reptilian
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...intertwining story lines hardly accommodate a summary. Donny Ribkin, the reptilian agent, longs for his ex-wife, who has taken up with a female novelist--his love for her continues "to grow, like nails on a corpse"; Zev Turtletaub, a brutalizing, gay producer, fantastically successful, is developing a modern adaptation of Gogol's Dead Souls to star Alec Baldwin; casting director Sara Radisson-Stein gives birth to a son who is blind, and she writes moving letters to him ("I'm sitting beside you as I write; the faintest light falls upon your marzipan cheek. You're the sweetest plum...
...rest of the town, it seems, stands. The townspeople are happy to revere Deeds Sr. and Sam's "saint" of a mother. But the new Sheriff Deeds is determined to dig up dirt about his father, spurred on by the discovery of bones and badge belonging to the relentlessly reptilian Sheriff Charley Wade (Kris Kristofferson) whom old Sheriff Deeds may have killed. Add to the picture other family mini-dramas--another family's father-son conflict; Sam's high school sweetheart Pilar (Elizabeth Pena) and her family--and there's more than enough for the canvas...
...evil. An eruption of such violence aimed at such targets, at such spotless innocence and hope, cannot be comprehended or diagnosed in language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss of precise instinctive controls of behavior. So society must teach those controls...
Medusa with a giant cobra rising from her reptilian coiffe...
...Tingler, visitors enter a circular room, are strapped into seats and see a huge hideous monster writhing in a plastic tube. Then the alien escapes--and the lights go out. Heavy footsteps approach, and your seat gets a violent rattle. You feel the creature's breath and reptilian tongue on the back of your neck. An icky liquid drenches you; is it someone's exploding guts or your own fear-sweat? The experience is divinely cheesy: 3-D radio, aiming only to scare you nuts. And it works; the crowd happily screams along...