----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In response to Bridget's post on HEAVENLY CREATURES: I thought your comments were dead-on. The opening of an interior world (or set of worlds) was just one of the film's interesting features. I agree with your comments about the depiction of the girls' emerging sexuality and how their actions are really an acting out of somewhat typical adolescent fantasies. Some (thought not all, by any means) of the reviews of I've seen (usually in "alternative" publications) suggest that the girls are trapped in stifling society (which is somewhat true, as you suggest --but small-city Connecticut in the 1950s was nearly as boring and straight-laced as Christchurch). But, as you say, there would be a lot of bodies around if we all reacted in the way the girls did. I think there's a kind of chemistry between the two that turns toxic due to the combination of fantasy, resentment, and parental repression that is at the heart of their world. One of the reviewers found the mother who is killed "strangely sympathetic," but I didn't think there was anything strange about her at all. She's an intelligent woman trapped by some choices and circumstances that she doesn't want her own daughter to repeat, the most genuinely loving of all the parents, but she is the one who pays. The murder itself reminds me of Hitchcock's dictum that it can be very hard to kill a person--it adds to the horror of the scene. The horror, though, is also leavened by a lot of humor (I was especially tickled by the iconic use of Orson Welles). I suspect those reviewers who found the girls to be striking some sort of guerilla attack for freedom are playing off their own experience, rather than looking at the film itself. --Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN