Art Store Discounts

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Victoria Frances is a remarkable artist! I am slowly collecting her posters and I have 5 as of now, this being one of them. I get MANY compliments on these beautiful works of art and really enjoy seeing them on my walls everyday. I'll never regret owning them!

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Very detailed picture which is important due to its size. Loved the colors and the crisp sharpness of the picture. Nice quality glossy paper too.

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my husband is a collector and we have this out all year. Even though it is a halloween decoration it works for all seasons within a collection and has a long battery life.

My little sister loves skulls and was in need of a new night light. It runs on batteries, but it isn't like anything I have ever seen. She loved it and it's so heavy it doubles as a paperweight. lol

It made a great x-mas present and looks great! Glows great too! If you like skulls you will have to add this to your collection!

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Indeed the Devil does care in this flick. Another oddball movie that stirred a bit of controversy and i think got evil enough to scare the actors themselves. Diabolical. Mickey Rourke is an amateur in this, but not bad, really, it's worth watching just for DeNiro playing Satan.

The 1987 film "Angel Heart" should be considered, fundamentally, a mystery. Its a mystery in the sense of what the ancient Rosicrucians and other such mystical societies meant by that term: a spiritual truth made known to man by divine revelation. Harry Angel, a private investigator, is searching for Johnny Favorite. According to the Christian myth, Lucifer was God's favorite angel until he was replaced by the heavenly father's human creation (and we humans have been caught in this jealous struggle ever since). Even Johnny Favorite's original name was Liebling (German for "dearest or most precious"). Many religions and mystics speak of humans as half animal and half divine - that would make us all, in a way, "hairy angels". In the film the heart represents the center of the self, the divine aspect - and it was the heart that the infernal Johnny Favorite tore out of Harry Angel to take the innocent's place in the world and submerge his baser identity. "Angel Heart" is about the search for lost identity (the original case of identity theft, I suppose - in a metaphysical sense). Are we also, to one degree or another, private investigators of the soul, searching for our lost selves? This movie is filled with this kind of religious symbolism and Jungian archetypes. In a way it asks what came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it the creator or its creation? There's the character, Dr. Fowler (the drug addicted physician) - even his name is symbolic ("a handler of fowl") juxtaposed to the voodoo rites involving the handling and sacrifice of chickens in spiritual rituals. I see the chickens in "Angel Heart" as representative of the life force (the carrier of the egg, or "the Soul", afterall). Fowler is a man of science which, in many ways, is our modern world's new priesthood of materialism. Science's relationship with the life force has, of course, been quite self-destructive - besides the great comforts and breakthroughs in knowledge its created it has also brought about nuclear weapons and other meltdowns of the natural world. In addition, western man has become addicted to technology and increasingly under "the spell" of materialism. Beyond the layer involving the christian myth - Lucifer and the fall of humanity - the film also has the greater Jungian perspective that takes in all religious myth along with individual dreams. Carl Jung's central idea is what he calls the "process of individuation", which is what he feels leads to consciousness, to completeness (like a flower opening to sunlight). This involves confronting ones "shadow", which is basically the unconscious, negative part of ones psyche (the image in the mirror to painful to ponder). In the context of the film, the black race, as portrayed in Harlem and New Orleans, is shown as a societal projection of "the shadow" - one that white-western man has demonized as something to be kept apart and to be feared. Harry Angel's intrusion into this world is seen as something taboo and dangerous for he's venturing into an area thats "for colored patrons only", one in which the white man is not suppose to participate. This confrontation with the dark-side, "the shadow", contains the truth of who one really is as an individual, which is beyond good and evil and the world of duality - of heaven and hell. Jung speaks of "the anima" which in the case of the male is the totality of the unconscious feminine psychological qualities that he possesses. The anima (or dream-girl) is an archeptype of the collective unconscious (which all individual psyches emerge from) and it will manifest itself in life and by appearing as figures in dreams (I hear Rourke whistling "Girl Of My Dreams" in the background). Jung wrote that confronting ones "shadow" is an apprentice-piece, while confronting ones "anima" is the master-piece. The character Epiphany is a pure anima figure. The word epiphany also has the definition, among others, as "a manifestation of deitys on earth such as angels appearing to mortals". Harry Angel is drawn to her in his search, spiritually and erotically, because he seeks to be re-united with the unconscious aspect of his true identity - the one that was there before the original fall, before he hid himself behind a mask (what Jung refers to as "the persona"- the front that one presents to the world). But first Harry needs to confront the shadow-side, make the blood sacfrifice and make his hellish descent. This has to happen before he can ever be redeemed and experience grace - he will have to do his time in Hell. This is like Dante wandering through Hades before he can find his feminine ideal, Beatrice ( another classic anima, "Girl Of My Dreams" figure). The vicious attack dog that chases Angel is a contemporary hellhound which in myths are often depicted as chasing a lost soul - "There's A Hellhound On My Trail", to quote the great bluesman Robert Johnson. One could also say, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (to quote Bob Dylan) in discussing another reoccuring image in the film. The rain can be seen as a cleansing of the soul, a purification, which first must come with judgement and personally being held accountable for who and what one REALLY is. After that its possible to be resurrected, to be whole - the final flowering of the individuation process. Its not by coincidence that Lucifer the Angel in ancient texts has been referred to as "the bringer of light" (the latin translation of the name) since its his intervention that forces the hero to confront his real self. Its funny that I've seen people refer to this film as a simple story - I guess they also consider the bible simple, too. In some ways the most fascinating level going on in "Angel Heart" is that Mickey Rourke seems to have been acting out the mythic story in his "real" life. The film is filled with parallels with "the actor's" own development - selling ones soul for stardom, losing the bargain, undergoing facial re-construction, etc. ...This isn't just being a great poetic actor (as Sean Penn has referred to him) - its being an iconic actor . . . and "Angel Heart" is an iconic film.

I am rating this movie simply for volume (there were only three other reviews). "Angel Heart" is a dandy. There's really no other movie quite like it.

One of the forgotten gems of the 1980s', "Angel Heart" attracted a great deal of controversy due to its violence and sexual contebt (mostly because it involved a squeaky clean Cosby kid). 23 years later, the film remains a stylish, tightly scripted and marvellously acted combo of horror and neo-noir. Mickey Rourke gives the most layered and dynamic performance of his career as Harold Angel, a sleazy Brooklyn private eye hired by the mysterious Louis Cyphre (a creepy, bearded Robert DeNiro) to find Johnny Favorite, a famous 1940s' crooner who mysteriously dissapeared some time ago. Apparently, Favorite backed out on a business deal with Cyphre, and Cyphre is intent on getting back what is his. What starts out as a routine 'missing persons' case becomes a more sordid, darker affair. Those involved in Favorite's disappearance seemingly wind up dead not long after Angel interviews them. Things take a turn for the worse when Angel ventures out to New Orleans, where he encounters a voodoo preistess (Lisa Bonet) whose mother had a romantic liason with Favorite. As bodies continue to pile up and Angel becomes increasingly implicated in their murders, the truth about Favorite and Cyphre is revealed in a devasating and unpredixtable climax - one that does not bode well for Angel. As stated earlier. "Angel Heart" is a dynamite movie. What could've been a messy attempt at combining genres works flawlessly thanks to a solid script. Rourke gives an Oscar worthy performance. He appears in every scene and is dynamite from start to finish, perfectly showcasing the evolution of Angel from confident, streetwise detective to a frightened novice in way over his head. DeNiro gives one of his most underrated performances as Louis Cyphre, and Bonet proves to be a surprisingly adept romantic interest. Alan Parker does an amazing job as director, with lush cinematography that makes the grimy streets of Brooklyn and the dark, dank swamps of New Orleans come alive, allowing them to add as much to the development of the story as the three leads. "Angel Heart" is a chilling supernatural thriller, and a high water mark for all those involved in its prosuction.

Great movie I already had regular DVD had to get the blu-Ray version really supenseful

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I asked myself why this fine book generated so many negative reviews on Amazon, and I have concluded that the answer is - because it is an academic book. It is a book on critical and literary theory (although it deals with horror and Gothicism). Unfortunately the title of the book has misled people to believe it another Joe Bob Briggs type of book, which it definitely isn't. Having said that you will find comments on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween in "Nightmare on Main Street" but those comments deal with what's under the surface in these films (hidden meanings). Some people (mostly non-academics) will find some of those comments labored and dry, but hey I am a big horror buff and an academic and I love Edmundson's book. He makes some incredibly intelligent observations about Romanticism, Gothic literature and horror films. Also if you ever wanted to understand Freud, Derrida and Nietzsche, Edmundson offers some of the best summaries I have come across on these great thinkers. This is a great mind at work, and the connections may sometimes seem stretched but Edmundson will always tie things up (often with a twist) and leave you gasping for more.

I only made it up to p. 45 for a paper I was writing on "Carrie." Along with a pompous tone, I didn't find this added anything concrete to what I know about horror flicks. The author might have found the Main Street and nightmare metaphors personally powerful for some reason, but they were idiosyncratic and I didn't find them in any of my other horror movie secondary sources. Not interested in having a conversation with myself, I moved on. Also, I'm put off by the author's need to see violence, sex, and greed in almost every detail of these films. Even Carrie and other horror movies have their moments of reflection and thoughtfulness that the author was too quick to suppress.

Edmundson has got hold of a powerful idea here: that strategies and characters of Gothic literature have burst out of the realm of fiction and infiltrated our public life. While he sometimes pushes his broadly defined notion of the Gothic too far (it sometimes it seems as if everything belongs to the realm of the Gothic depending on his say so), for the most part he does stick to his original definition of a hero/villain, haunted structures, seduced and screaming heroines and the occasional heroic rescuer. He suggests, quite believably, that the powerful Gothic themes, have been used by Marx (the capitalist as vampire), and by Freud (humanity haunted by the past, in the grip of infantile memory which dooms us to behavior we can never fully escape except with the help of modernist magicians like Freud). Moving from the talk show (where families reenact Gothic scripts wherein hero/villains describe their inexplicably destructive behavior without understanding or regret as their families hurl abuse at them), to movies (pick just about anything including Disney films), Edmundson strikes at the root of the malevolent vine of the Gothic, a vine which snakes through our political life - Gothic monsters such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, through our social life - our collective perception that we are in danger even in the most benign circumstances.He does see hope for using the Gothic the way it was intended: to throw off the dead hand of the past, originally the aristocratic, then the plutocratic, or therapeutic, now bureaucratic hand of power and discipline. His writings on Freud are particularly incisive on the therapeutic hand. Here's a quote: "Freud, in his most resolutely Gothic moods, believed that we never forget anything, so that every past moment is stored somewhere in the psyche... He also thought, at least at times, that *any* negative event that befalls us -- no matter how apparently contingent -- is in some measure the result of our guilty need for punishment, our wish to self-destruct. Edmundson also notes that Foucualt and Derrida and other "new" critics favor the Gothic as well. And if you think of Foucault's evocative prose style, and Derrida's "terrorism," Edmundson has a point, a minor point, but a point nonetheless. The Cold War Gothic has now been replaced by the Terrorist Gothic, the apocalyptic version of Gothicism. George W. Bush whips up the external apocalyptic Gothic, while at the same time we're being terrorized internally by the second variety of the Gothic - the "terror" gothic - in this case, the recession terror gothic. The Gothic can be a powerful tool for critiquing the status quo. The problem is, it has become the status quo, and, unlike "healthy" Gothic horror, it never opens out into new territory now. Instead, we're all doomed, doomed, doomed!. Edmundson notes a few exceptions: the first Nightmare on Elm Street by Wes Craven for one. I heartily agree on that score!

I admit that I didn't do more than skim this book. As a horror fan I couldn't get past the authors' factual error in stating that the early 1990's was a pinnacle of horror. WRONG! In terms of the number of horror films released the height would be the mid-1980's. In terms of box office returns it would be the mid-1970's (The Exorcist, Jaws, The Omen, Carrie, Halloween). We are now (2002) at a much higher peak for horror than the period that the Professor calls the pinnacle; the early 1990's was actually a nadir.

The first exasperating aspect of this book is its overambitiousness. Through some divine insight, it purports to explain ALL of American culture (almost) through the trope of the gothic. Forrest Gump, Tonya Harding, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth. They're all in there. Moreover, it uses broad brush strokes that hide more than they reveal. Its second offensive characteristic is a tone that's self-righteous. It stands far above the foibles of all these pathetically mortal characters.

Reviews

This product is a very good sword, finely crafted, with a custom scabbard. The blade is only 1 inch wide, and extends beyond 30 inches. The case handle and blade are sturdy, although the blade is a bit flimsy and not suited or recommended for actual combat purposes. It's small enough to make for a great decoration without taking up too much room.