Devil

"Hunk," a comedy starring John Allen Nelson, Steve Levitt, Rebeccah Bush, Deborah Shelton, Robert Morse, and the late James Coco. Produced by Marilyn J. Tenser. Written and Directed by Lawrence Bassoff. A Crown International Pictures Release. Running time 102 minutes. At area theaters. Bradley Brinkley, computer nerd, (Steve Levitt) longs to be the kind of guy that women lust after. Instead, he's the kind of guy who throws a party and nobody comes. When he attempts to mingle with the self-congratulatory Yuppie crowd on the beach at Malibu, somebody kicks sand in his face.

Devil , the superior, super-creepy supernatural thriller from producer M. Night Shyamalan, opens with a gorgeous aerial shot of the Philly skyline. Gorgeous, but also superbly unsettling: The city is upside down. Skyscrapers, churches, apartment blocks - William Penn's statue atop City Hall - jut out and down above us as the camera sweeps across the city to the intense swells of Fernando Velázquez's score. "The time," to quote the poet, "is out of joint. " And the devil walks among us. That's the scrumptious premise behind Devil , a tight, imaginative little flick about three men and two women stuck in a Center City elevator who are murdered - one by one - in inventive, gruesome ways.

Joseph Guagenti thought he shot the devil when he killed his ex-girlfriend, a go-go dancer, after she stepped offstage in a Camden bar in August 1985, a psychiatrist testified in Guagenti's murder trial yesterday. Forensic psychiatrist Robert Sadoff testified that Guagenti was legally insane when he shot Patricia Nace in the Admiral Liquor Store & Bar because he "did not know the nature and quality of his actions. " Sadoff was the first of seven expert witnesses expected to testify about the sanity of Guagenti, 28, a former house painter from Williamstown, Gloucester County.

Shake hands with the devil and next thing you know, you've got the devil to pay. He doesn't take checks. His is a souls-only business. And be advised: Satan never sleeps. This pretty much summarizes The Ninth Gate, Roman Polanski's overwrought and underwritten thriller set somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. It's about an unscrupulous bibliophile (Johnny Depp!?) hired by an ungodly industrialist (Frank Langella?!) to authenticate a rare volume believed to be the devil's work.

Delores Castro told police the devil forced her to set fire to an apartment building on April 2 that resulted in the death of one resident and the hospitalization of four others. "The devil made me light that book of matches," said Castro in a statement to Homicide Detective Theodore Cannon, read during her preliminary hearing yesterday. She also said she wanted to make sure there were no rats in the building. "I ain't that crazy," Castro said. "That's arson. " Municipal Judge Eric L. Lilian held Castro without bail for trial on murder and arson charges.

After Meryl Streep's heavily awarded, heavy-going roles in Silkwood, Sophie's Choice and Out of Africa, you wouldn't mistake her for a party kind of gal. But you would be mistaken. Resembling a drag-queen Greer Garson with her strawberry-blond, flouncy mane and her raspberry-mousse, flounced dresses, Meryl Streep has diabolical fun in She-Devil. And she proves that a serious actress can play comedy broader and wilder than career funny lady Roseanne Barr, co-starring here as Streep's nemesis, a homemaker who has a wart the size of Australia above her meaty lip. An Americanized, defanged version of Fay Weldon's biting revenge fantasy, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, director Susan Seidelman's movie takes the novel's vitriol and confects something fluffy, pink and sugary as cotton candy.

"The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" won't do much to change Terry Gilliam's rep as the industry's hard-luck director. Gilliam's had entire productions washed away by flooding, and even a success like "Twelve Monkeys" had setbacks - he was seriously injured falling off a horse. The difficulties that beset "Parnassus," of course, are notorious - star Heath Ledger died midway through production, sending Gilliam scrambling for some way to finish it. (And though not as widely known, his producer, William Vince, also died during production)

The Civil War was never pretty, but on battlefields like Gettysburg or Antietam, it was at least, well, civil. Officers were, for the most part, gentlemen and fought like gentlemen. Opponents even sent letters across the lines, signed with such phrases as "Your obedient servant. " But in the Missouri-Kansas border country, the setting for Ang Lee's "Ride with the Devil," both sides quickly saw "civilized warfare" as an oxymoron. Here, the war degenerated from a struggle over slavery and union into a mass blood feud, with hatred and greed as its motivation.

Early Monday morning, former Eagles safety Andre Waters died from a single self-inflicted gunshot to the head. Yesterday, his mother spoke of her son and alluded to the personal problems that led to the suicide in his Tampa home. "[When he called] we would pray and stuff whenever the devil got on him," Willie Ola Perry told the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. Referring to her son's suicide, she said: "He let the devil fool him. " Perry told the newspaper she often quoted scriptures to Waters, and said she suspected he was unsettled.

A Camden jury yesterday rejected the claim that a spurned lover was insane and thought he shot the devil when he killed his ex-girlfriend inside a Camden go-go bar. The panel found Joseph Guagenti guilty of murder. Today the jury will decide on life in prison or death by lethal injection for Guagenti, 29, of Williamstown, N.J. Under the influence of the drug sodium amytal - sometimes referred to as truth serum - Guagenti told a psychiatrist he saw go-go dancer Patricia Nace, 23, of Cherry Hill, turn into the devil - complete with horns and tail - as she danced at the Admiral Lounge in August 1985.