I've been one of the biggest Havrilesky haters here, although I think she hates herself and life itself even more than I could. However, this is one of the best articles she has ever submitted. It shows sensitivity and understanding of The Sopranos that she has never lavished on any other series.

The thing is...after years of trying, I've never been able to warm to this series in the slightest, after renting season disk sets and trying to watch new episodes. There was a previous TV series that effectively and quickly established the same kind of pathos and sense of wasted life that it's taken The Sopranos seasons to establish.

That series never got heavily into the personal sorrow and anger of family life that The Sopranos detailed. It was blasted by critics and politicians for the violence it brought to broadcast TV. It was seen as selling violence to a generation - oddly, in a decade where government was selling it far more efficiently. But the old Quinn Martin-produced series The Untouchables, "Starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness...and narrated by Walter Winchell" told the same story week after week.

By the time the series produced "The Frank Nitti Story," the farewell to Bruce Gordon's performance as the series's regular nemesis, I could feel more sorry for the mob boss betrayed by a mysterious Mafia council than for the fumbling and wimpy Tony Soprano. And yes, The Untouchables fictionalized most of its stories; it is no more realistic than Soprano's affairs. (The real Nitti committed suicide due to being investigated over his corruption of the movie industry - including the companies and the exectives involved with The Untouchables. Too close for comfort.)

Maybe this generation prefers to chew over its tragedies and make them more tragic, and feels the need to drag in sexuality and sentimentality, as if sex was an answer to anything. I just prefer my Greek tragedies to be finished within fifty minutes and accompanied by the ominous music of Nelson Riddle than dragged out over seasons full of crappy pop tunes.

This will get me flamed for sure, but I don't like violence in movies. I don't like films where the principal goal is to see women killed in bloody fashion. Back in junior high, a literature teacher who was teaching Poe said that his ideal of beauty was "the death of a beautiful woman." I can't help imagining the result if that ol' goth alcoholic was strapped to a chair and forced to watch Blood Feast, Mark of the Devil, Pulp Fiction and this film.

I know, and accept, that there is tremendous vitality in exploitation film. It's a spirit that's been Wal-Marted out of American movies, as the megacorporations go for what is safe and predictable, even in horror. I would love to see that vitality on the screen.

But as someone who wound up with PTSD thanks to a violent home invasion, I know the effect these films have on me. I become numb like someone had shot me up with a surgical anaesthetic, and at the same time I grow angry and feel a desire to kick in the teeth of whoever was responsible for the film. Don't pity me or offer advice; PTSD is permanent and incurable, and is just barely treatable.

Much as I'd like to see this film, I could only stomach the first half of it. Seeing a woman with a machine gun for a leg, mowing down monsters, is appealing and kind of fun. But seeing a man kill lots of hot-pantsed women with a car for no reason, a pure expression of misogyny, would physically sicken and anger me.

There's lots of guys at Fangoria Magazine that would claim I'm a faggot, that the only valid kind of cinema is where women are killed in as gory and painful a fashion as possible. Good for you guys. I'm sure there's future jobs for you at Abu Gareb. As for me, if I see this film at all, it'll only be the first half, and probably on rented video.

As I said, don't pity me. Pity a nation where people are taught violence is fun by their entertainment media. And interestingly, Christian organizations that want to censor sex say nothing about this. They have no argument with violence; they helped Mel Gibson make sadomasochism a box office winner. Well, if they don't make sadism a proper Christian value, where will they get the next generation of abortion clinic bombers?