John's Horror Banana-nanza Episode Sixty-One : Wes Craven's They

I absolutely adore this movie. First of all, I have to say I'm pissed at myself for choosing "Darkness Falls" over this in 2002. Turns out, Darkness Falls was barely a movie, with a third of the running time pretty much being credits. I just remember reading in "Fangoria" that the makeup for the Tooth Fairy in that movie would be the scariest of all time. Trust me. It wasn't.

So what about this movie? Well it opens with a kid getting attacked in bed. Typical for a Wes Craven movie, huh? Well, to be honest, I don't know why this is called "Wes Craven's "They" because the only thing I can find in the credits for him is that he "presented" it. Still, the beginning rings of "Nightmare on Elm Street."

Anyway, we meet Julia, who meets Billy from the beginning, now much older, in a diner. He rambles about the light and the creatures and what seems like nonsense, then to be a total jerk he shoots himself right in front of her. Don't know why he needed to drag her out there for that, but there you go.

So at Billy's wake, Julia meets Sam and Terry, who inform her that Billy had night terrors, and she must have too. That must be why he reached out to her. So despite being in the middle of a huge dissertation for school, Julia starts going nuts. She sees a creature running past her while driving home at night, then sees Billy's ghost in her jeep.

She goes to her boyfriend Paul for comfort only to find him drunk. So this continues on. She slowly goes crazier as the creatures start closing in. Terry dies at a pool late at night, although why she'd be out at night on her own if she was that afraid is beyond me. Then Sam is dragged down an elevator shaft which is an impressively suspenseful scene.

So now, all alone, Julia fails her dissertation, and goes to her child psychologist, who tells her she's hallucinating. She asks Paul to look for strange marks the creatures may have left on her as a child so they could find her later. He doesn't find any, so they have sex. Then, after being chased out of her home by the creatures, she finds a long black pin in her head which she pulls out in a chinese restaurant bathroom. She tries to tell Paul, who tries to put her to sleep. So she escapes to the subway, which shuts down, and she's locked in to fight the creatures alone.

There's more to this movie than my description really reveals. I'm not saying it lightly when I say it's one of my all-time favorites, especially with the ending, which will have you yelling at the TV. If you can ignore the false advertisement of this being another Wes Craven sleep monster movie, then you'll definitely enjoy it too.