Horrors

Now see what you have done! You've got me agreeing with an oil man. Theodore A. Burtis, chairman of the board of Sun Co., was right when he said (Letter to the Editor, Jan. 12) that The Inquirer was wrong to suggest a new levy on oil to get the country out of the red. We must cut out luxury items to balance the budget. I can see no greater luxury than spending a trillion dollars on military gadgets when we already have enough to destroy the world too many times. Hezekiah Nickelson Philadelphia.

your doctor, dentist, pharmacist, phone company, cable company, you have to push six different numbers. First, you have to choose English, or Espanol. This is nonsensical. Then you have a long staccato burst of Spanish. Why does the second language have to be Spanish? Why not Italian, German, Polish, or Yiddish? You call Social Security, or the Senior Citizens Advocate Center for days on end, nobody answers. If they have so many callers, why don't they hire more reps? They usually tell you to call tomorrow.

Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (1994) was made four decades after the death of Joseph Stalin and five years after the end of the Cold War. The first Russian appraisal of the real dimensions of Stalin's tyranny may have been a long time coming, but it was well worth the wait. Mikhalkov's profoundly moving work, which won the Oscar for best foreign film, is a piece that shuns both polemic and melodrama. The director took the lead as Sergei Kotov, a hero of the Bolshevik revolution who is to learn the painful lesson that past victories will not prevent him from becoming a victim of the new order.

Rosalind Lavin's four-acre Villanova estate was notorious on the Main Line even before Lavin lived there. It was the site of a triple murder. In July 1982, aviation pioneer Courtlandt Gross was shot to death during a robbery at the Arrowmink Road mansion, along with his wife, housekeeper and family dog. The Boston-born and Harvard-educated Gross, 77, was co-founder and chairman of Lockheed Corp. His wife, Alexandra, 68, was a great-granddaughter of banker Anthony J. Drexel, for whom Drexel University is named.

"Come and See"(Idi I Smortri), a Russian war drama starring Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova and Lubomiras Lauciavicus. Directed by Elem Klimov from a screenplay by Klimov and Ales Adamovich. Based on "The Story of Khatyn" by Adamovich Photographed by Alexei Rodionov. A Heritage Entertainment Film released through International Film Exchange Ltd. In Russian with English subtitles. Running time: 142 minutes. At the TLA Roxy. Very few war movies from any country - including our own - pummel our insides like "Come and See," the award-winning Soviet World War II epic by Elem Klimov, in which the grand, sprawling style of the classic battle epics is used to take in the full measure of wartime atrocities.

Feed me! That's what the bloodthirsty, other-worldly plant named Audrey II implores, then demands, in Little Shop of Horrors. Well, she got what she asked for. Two of the region's smaller professional stage companies - Theatre Horizon and 11th Hour Theatre Company - have banded together to produce the musical, and they've not only heartily fed the maniacal plant, they've re-seeded and carefully tended the show itself. Their gleefully sassy production puts a fine point on every caricature it draws and treats each song by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken like a show-stopper.

For years, everyone in town has recognized the crying need for a middle- size theater suitable for the commercial booking of Off-Broadway hits. We have needed a house with enough seats for an impresario to turn a profit with an attractive show, but not so big as to be a burden. The return of the 400-seat Theater of Living Arts to the legitimate fold was exactly what we needed, especially with the installation of that good-time show, The Little Shop of Horrors. The conversion of TLA from film repertory to live theater by Electric Factory Concerts will go down as one of the major developments of the 1987-88 season - provided, of course, that it lasts out the season.

The former Pennsylvania Pennhurst Center, once the site of real life horrors committed against the mentally handicapped, will become a fictional house of horrors tonight. After listening to two hours of testimony, Chester County Judge Robert J. Shenkin declined to issue an order that would have prevented the "Pennhurst Asylum" from opening at 6:30. "We're very happy," said Richard Chakejian, who owns the 110-acre property. "I'm disappointed," said Saul Rivkin, chairman of the East Vincent Township Historical Society on whose behalf the request for an injunction had been filed.

Robin Cook - that would-be Dr. Cook - is back, doing the thing that has made him a household name: scaring the bejabbers out of you over what happens in those presumed houses of healing, namely, hospitals. Mortal Fear (Berkley, $4.95) begins with this chilling observation: "The sudden appearance of the foreign proteins was the molecular equivalent of the Black Plague. " Got your attention? Chapter One continues the break-neck pace as one Cedric Harring, barely controlling his car in the "maddening Boston traffic," tries to fight down pain "like a white-hot knife" and get to a hospital.

The French haven't exactly been famous for their horror films, having entered the game only in the past two decades with a crop of directors including Eric Valette ( Maléfique ), Alexandre Aja ( High Tension ), and Pascal Laugier ( House of Voices ). That is, unless you count the prolific visionary (or charlatan, depending on your point of view) Jean Rollin (1938-2010), a master of the peculiarly Gallic genre, the fantastique, and who released 52 features between 1968 and 2009.

OSLO, Norway - Norwegians who lost loved ones on Utoya island relived the horror Friday as far-right fanatic Anders Behring Breivik described in harrowing detail how he gunned down teenagers as they fled in panic or froze before him, paralyzed with fear. Survivors and victims' relatives hugged and sobbed during the graphic testimony. "I'm going back to my hometown tonight. My husband, he's going to drive me out to the sea, and I'm going to take a walk there and I'm going to scream my head off," said Christin Bjelland, whose teenage son survived the attack.

STATE REP. Louise Bishop says that she was 12 years old when her stepfather stripped her of her innocence in the middle of the night inside their Georgia home. The Philly Democrat shared her story Thursday with City Council, which voted 16 to 0 to pass a resolution sponsored by Councilmen Bill Greenlee and Denny O'Brien urging the state Legislature to move forward on bills that would protect victims of childhood sexual abuse. Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez was absent. "No one really understands what these young men and women experience, unless you've been there," said Bishop.

IT WAS 11 at night, dark as coal, when kidnapper Gary Heidnik stopped his Cadillac Coupe DeVille in a remote wooded section of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Josefina Rivera, the savviest of Heidnik's captives, sat in the passenger seat, trying to mask her nerves, her repulsion. Heidnik put the car in park, satisfied he'd found the perfect spot to dump a body. The tall, lumbering man with cold, faraway eyes, hollow cheeks and a scruffy beard, stepped out to pop the trunk. "I could hear him pulling the plastic off Deborah's body because I could hear the thump of her body," Rivera said.

STELLA , THE BUXOM host of "Saturday Night Dead" on KYW-TV from 1984 to 1990, was inducted into the HorrorHound Hall of Fame at the annual convention in Columbus, Ohio, over the weekend. Stella, the "Maneater from Manayunk" a/k/a Karen Scioli , was excited to meet fellow horror Elvira , Mistress of the Dark, and have what she called, "A meeting of the cleavage," but was disappointed that Elvira didn't show up in character and was inducted under her real name, Cassandra Peterson . Stella now works on "Goth Mothers of Transylvania," which can be found on YouTube.

Every time I hear Trayvon Martin's mother speak, I get a lump in my throat. I hear the grief in Sybrina Fulton's voice. I see the pain in her eyes that look so much like her son's. She is living the nightmare that every mother - particularly those of black sons - dreads, yet that too many know all too well. We teach our sons early in their lives how to avoid potentially deadly confrontations, knowing they will be judged and feared just because of the color of their skin.

One in a series of occasional articles on activities and events you may want to add to your itinerary. APPOMATTOX, Va. - Private Jesse H. Hutchins joined the Confederate Army five days after the South bombarded Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C. He enlisted on April 15, 1861. His unit, Company A, 5th Alabama Battalion, was initially sent to Florida. It then moved to join Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Hutchins was at virtually every major Civil War battle in the East: Seven Pines, Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill, the second battle of Manassas or Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Winchester, and Petersburg.

The Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland wrote to me in January 2010, before filming began on her new movie. "Believe me, I know the importance of your mother's achievements and I deeply value them," she wrote. "The reason she's not in the script is that we had to compress and partly fictionalize the events and characters in order to make the story compact and interesting. . . . We didn't want to add some fictional story line to her, knowing how important a Holocaust figure she became after the war because of her own activity and your writings.

All Jamil Pollard knew about his signing-day ceremony was that he needed to bring a Penn State sweatshirt, and that his parents should be there. When the 6-foot-4, 275-pound defensive tackle walked into the small gym at West Deptford High on Feb. 1, his parents were there as planned, but their stern expressions indicated this might not be such a joyous occasion after all. They had already been told that Pollard's most recent grades had fallen short, putting his college future in doubt.

EDDIE WRIGHT, a self-proclaimed street preacher from Texas, should get comfortable at the defendant's table because he's headed to trial on charges that he helped imprison four mentally disabled adults in a dank Tacony basement in a scheme to steal their Social Security benefits. During a second preliminary hearing yesterday, Common Pleas Judge Paula Patrick reversed a lower-court decision to dismiss kidnapping, aggravated-assault and other charges against Wright. The reversal came after Assistant District Attorney Erin O'Brien presented additional evidence, including a Social Security disability application listing Wright as a friend and contact for one of the four alleged victims.