I watched two DVDs this weekend while Elisa is visiting her Mom:

1. Hard Candy - tables turned on a suspicious adult who might be a sexual predator.
2. The Descent - adventurous ladies spelunking running into mishaps and horror.

Both are kinda horror movies. Well, okay, The Descent is 110% horror. I recommend both, but you have to be into subjecting yourself to the subject matter.

Hard Candy is certainly horror for any adult indulging their naughty side in chat rooms with young people (perhaps it is this generation's Fatal Attraction, meant to scare them back onto the straight and narrow road). Hard Candy is also a wonderfully filmed and put together movie. I cannot believe the focus control used in the movie. It is super human. There are scenes where the focus point can't be more than four inches wide, and the camera is moving and the actress is moving and still, it all stays in focus.

If you're into understanding movies and movie making, its behind-the-scenes extras is fantastic. Just like the movie, the discussion of getting the movie funded, how it was made, and how post-production and the premiere went is tight and well put together.

And the movie had me squirming in my seat and exclaiming "Holy crap!" several times.

And I loved the dialog. The writer, Brian Nelson, said he thought of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as a strong female role and you can see that in the dense, fast, smart dialog that Hayley had.

The Descent didn't need the Crawler cave adversaries to make me any more scared or exhausted. After seeing news reports of Vietnamese soldiers who would squirm along tunnels just wide enough to hold a body, I started having nightmares of being caught in a tunnel - like having to turn around when there wasn't enough room.

Scenes like that, where the cavers were crawling and twisting through tight spaces, had me curled up on the couch in suspense. Then it goes to all hell.

A cast of powerful, all women adventurers was refreshing, too.

Both of these movies are a bit of a change for me, too. I've been focused on safe flights of fantasy in my movie watching for years now. When I was in my early twenties, I was focused on movies full of angst and the terrible trials of being human. Then I had my own trials. Those movies offered no escape, no lessons that I didn't already know. So now, bit by bit, I'm gravitating to more challenging movies. And I've got some catching up to do.