`Garbage' movie

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My fault. I chose to go to the movie. No one forced me. My 14-year-old had seen it the night before.

"It was so scary," she said.

She hated it. I assumed I'd love it because I like scary movies - "Psycho" scary, "Fatal Attraction" scary, bloodless, I'm-gonna-get-you, bogeyman in the closet, scary.

"Cape Fear" I thought was that kind of movie. I knew it was about a guy, just out of prison, who stalks and terrorizes the lawyer he blames for his long prison term. I anticipated revenge in terms of psychological horror - footsteps on the stairs, creaking doors, shadows in the dark, spine-tingling menace.

What I didn't expect was unrelenting violence, Freddy Krueger style. But that's the only thing this movie - which pulled in $10 million at the box office and was the second most watched film Thanksgiving week - delivered: senseless, mindless, needless blood and hate.

I should have walked out right after the ex-con, played by Robert De Niro, sunk his teeth into and actually devoured half the face of a woman he then raped - a supposedly intelligent woman who, knowing he was just out of prison and knowing nothing else about him, followed him home and into his bed, where she allowed him to handcuff her. I stayed in my seat only because my daughter had seen the entire film, and I needed to see how bad it got.

It got unbelievably bad.

"Cape Fear" is a totally evil film. Nothing justifies its existence. It doesn't teach, entertain, enlighten, delight or provoke. It doesn't even frighten very well. It simply shocks.

Nick Nolte plays the lawyer Sam Bowden who, 14 years before the film begins, hides evidence that could have saved his rapist client, Max Cady (De Niro), years in jail. Not to worry, though. Cady is illiterate. He's too dumb to know what could have been.

But Cady becomes a genius in jail - no doubt a social comment on these times - and an avenging devil. He discovers what has been done, gets paroled, then sets out to even the score by torturing Bowden, Bowden's miserable chain-smoking wife and his sullen, unlikable 15-year-old daughter.

This movie is totally vile, totally unredeemable and epitomizes exactly what's wrong with society today. People ask, what has happened to this country? Why isn't a woman safe sitting at the kitchen table at her friend's house? Why are our children killing each other? Why is the murder rate rising? Why is there so much hate and violence?

Because of movies like this. Because it is impossible to be exposed to senseless, dehumanizing, degrading behavior and not be changed, not be lessened, in some small way.

Yes, there are hundreds of films as violent as this one, video store racks full of grisly gore. But most of these, as horrible as they are, are genre films and the viewer is at least forewarned.

"Cape Fear" is mainstream. It's a remake of a 1962 psychological thriller. Reviewers said it was good. Reviewers said go see it.

Don't. It's undiluted garbage that does only one thing: It feeds a malevolence that is killing this country.