It's Christmas Eve. You're 4000 miles away from your friends and family. Who is there for you?

Sam Raimi.

A Simple Plan was directed by Sam Raimi, the mastermind behind the Evil Dead trilogy, and one of my favorite directors of all time. He didn't let me down tonight.

Watching the plot of this movie unfold was like sitting in a sewer under a football stadium right before halftime. Everything looks pretty good at the start, but before long it's so deeply buried in feces that there is no way out. Seeing the characters in this movie scraping their way further and further into desperation was just the kind of thing that I needed to boost my spirits about being alone for the holidays. Hey, at least I'm not them!

I don't like to look at Bill Paxton for this long. There's something about the way that his teeth line up that I don't approve of. Something weird about the spacing I think. Billy Bob's teeth are nothing to pin a gold star on either, but I suspect that they were specially yellowed for this part... and every other part that I've ever seen him play.

Now that's the kind of thing that you don't get from Siskel and Ebert, eh? Complaints about Bill Paxton's teeth.

Anyhoo, it's getting late. If I don't go to bed, Santa won't come.

Goodnight, God bless, Merry Christmas!

You know, the whole way through I thought that this movie was going to end with Billy Bob sipping a martini on a tropical beach, having done away with the others and taken all of the loot himself. The old "dumb one is really the craftiest of them all" story like in Wild Things. I was happy to see that it didn't end that way. It ended with everybody dead or wishing they were. Especially that shrew Fonda.

Geez louise! Could she have been any more evil? Lady Macbeth looks at her and goes, "Damn! You're nasty!" When we first meet her she's little miss happy librarian, and then by the end she's like "If we shove the guy at the drive through in the meat grinder, we can get away with these Big Macs without paying for them!"

The moral of the story is: If you are in the woods with some friends and you stumble across four million dollars, just kill the others right there on the spot, take the cash, and save yourself a lot of trouble and heartache.