Last idiot on the right

The critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, who I follow on Bluesky, highlighted this old review there today:

Not a fan, apparently (admittedly, neither am I, but that’s beside the point). I always think it’s bad form for a professional critic to walk out on a film and then still write about it (I only ever walked out of two previews, but I was never a pro critic as such and I never reviewed either film); Howard here seems to have found the whole thing so brain-scrambling he forgot the scene involved disembowelment, not dismemberment (I looked him up on Wiki, and apparently he began as a clerk for Bosley Crowther, who famously got let go from the NYT for not being hip to the violence of Bonnie and Clyde; Howard doesn’t seem to have been any less lily-livered about it either). But apart from any other considerations of, you know, lack of professionalism, there was another thirty-plus minutes left. There was vengeance still to be enacted on the rape gang. There was a penis to be bitten off, and an electrocution, and a chainsaw death. If he’d just stuck around another thirty-odd minutes he could’ve had SO MUCH MORE to complain about…