Infanticide.

So there I was, yesterday, freshly back from London, with nothing to do but relax and unwind. Time for a film or two.

I started out with The Ruins, that deeply silly horror flick about four insanely attractive people stuck on top of a Mayan temple (where else?) and who are besieged by, wait for it, killer weeds. Yes, an intelligent, sentient, cell-phone mimicking shrub. Oh joy. But I have to admit, it had a handful of good scares, some nice gore, terrible acting and an appropriately shifty ending.

But it was halfway through this film when I hit the pause button and thought to myself: "What the fuck, they shot a kid through the head. They never kill off a kid!"

Other than that, instantly forgettable.

Later on, I popped in Michael Haneke's Funny Games, that remake of Haneke's own 1997 German thriller of the same name, a great chiller that strikes a nerve bij breaking the basic groundrules of film making, thereby cunningly making the viewer (you! Or, in this case, me) a direct accomplice to the cruel games the innocent family is put through by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet (both superbly unsettling with their preppy clothes and gleefully smiling babyfaces). A film brilliant in it's simplicity and frankness.

However, here again I smacked the pause button about halfway through and experienced a bit of deja-vu: "No fucking way, they killed a kid. Again! How awesome!"

I was, you'll understand, flabbergasted. I found it disturbingly refreshing; and vice versa.