redcabbage-17083 Nothing good about it. No story line and bad acting.

djderka Another graduate student production shot on video. Very tireless and one of those 'when will this end' type of film. View the first chapter. Then the last chapter. You missed nothing. Except 10 minutes of your time. A psycho drama about Rodriguez the stalker in LA that tries to relate it to his early childhood upbringing and the usual satanic abuse. You learn nothing here, except over acting, poor special effects, lack luster direction, and a hastily written script. But realizing that you might learn something. The killer seems to be doing the same thing every time with 'explaing' of his psychosis through flashbacks of his early childhood and how his father killed a few women in front of him causing a traumatic influence on his behavior. Not very original and poorly executed. A few hot babes tho. And one that doesn't seem to mind being followed by a psycho killer. I mean really. She did have a hot outfit on tho, I'll give her that. Didn't she get the message when she saw him sucking on lollipops all day. Get a clue.

charlytully And if you check the date of my comment, you will know WHICH headline I'm talking about. If more of the people of Tucson had just taken the time to see this vital film about current American affairs in the year it's been out, it is possible many lives would have been saved. Prescient NIGHT STALKER director Lommel ends his version of "Richard's" killing spree with a gang of 11 male vigilantes permanently disabling him in an alley. Prior to this climax, Lommel portrays Richard with all the classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. None of the countless people the movie shows shirking away from Richard on the sidewalk as he mutters away take any steps to refer him to the proper mental health authorities (Richard obviously would come under the Medicaid umbrella; most western states in the U.S. have eliminated their mental health services for Medicaid sufferers in recent years, if they ever had them to begin with). All of this week's endless news reporting estimate there are up to 6.14 MILLION people in the U.S. with Richard and you-know-who's condition. We are told only a "tiny fraction" are able-bodied people who actually commit crimes like Richard's ("at least 16 dead," according to this flick's postscript). However, no one can predict WHICH ONE of these millions will "suddenly snap" next, get a gun, and become the next notorious nut job. But director Lommel bravely posits in NIGHT STALKER that even ONE Richard is one more than a society "protected" by bumbling, namby-pamby law enforcement should tolerate, which is WHY Lommel has the vigilante mob do in Richard simply for muttering on the sidewalk. After all, the mob's collective intelligence realizes that taxes are high enough, and it would literally cost several trillion dollars to construct secure but humane holding facilities for these 6.14 million individuals run by high-priced professionals (at an acceptable staff-patient ratio), as well as to train and pay countless more social workers enough to do a conscientious job of running interference for any Richards released back into society on electronic tethers. After all, mental health demographers are talking about 1 in every 50 Americans. Obviously, given the U.S. economy, the choices are 1)the present system of expecting and accepting an increasing number of serial killers such as Richard and people like this week's mass murderer, 2)bankrupting the U.S. treasury to neutralize the threat humanely, or 3)Lommel's mob justice (which sweeps up and kills dozens who fit the "schizo-in-the-headlines" profile every time one of these tragedies occurs). Option #2 might be accomplished by eliminating the space program, agriculture subsidies, selling the national parks to Disney and other recreation pros, and restricting a down-sized U.S. military to U.S. territory and waters (unless these actually are attacked). Anyone who disagrees ought to at least view Lommel's film, since outsiders sometimes can put their finger's on a society's main problem (and the best solution to it).

Bloomer This is a pretty monotonous and factually inaccurate portrait of Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. The Night Stalker, the serial killer and self-proclaimed Satanist who terrorised Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mid-1980s. It offers little characterisation, next to no story, no suspense and lots of badly executed violence. Most of the short running time is filled with Richard's repetitious bad-beat-poetry voice-over of a soundtrack ('She was my dark Princess. Dark like hell. Darker than night, my Satanic queen, she was so dark..' etc) plus endless close-ups of him sucking suggestively on a lollipop.What the film does have going for it is difference - the style and delivery are significantly unlike those of the majority of straight to DVD horror films. This doesn't save it from being a real chore to sit through, but seems worth commenting on in these times when so many films are bad in exactly the same way as each other.The grainy video cinematography and no-budget location shooting give the film a gritty sense of place. Richard's voice-over seems designed to fill the void where a recording of the outdoor location sound would normally be. It looks like they only bothered to record sound when it wouldn't be blotted out by traffic and the din of the world - i.e. mostly when they were indoors.This is actually a pretty good film for the actors when they are able to snatch any screen time away from Richard and his lollipops. It looks like the performers were allowed to improvise nearly all of their conversations. When this works, it gives the scenes a ring of non-movie reality. Of course when it doesn't, the actors end up riffing the same ideas repeatedly.The Night Stalker was called the Night Stalker because he attacked people at night. Well, he goes in for a lot of daytime attacks in this film. Very few of the crimes match up to the real case history, the scene in which he is apprehended is abysmally directed, you never see how he gets into any of the victims' houses, and there is no real illumination of the man, either real or imaginary. I would have settled for either.I didn't stop watching this film, but I wouldn't recommend that you start. It's also not a good sign that the film's opening and closing credits take up one eighth of the running time ... but then again, the actors in this film did get a very good deal. They got to improvise, and everyone's name was displayed twice.