The Movie: Heavenly Creatures (1992)
What Is It?: In a
tiny window between his early career as a Herschell Gordon Lewis-inspired gore
hound and his mainstream success as a maker of blockbusters, Peter
Jackson made his very best movie. Heavenly
Creatures recounts the disastrous friendship between two troubled girls at
a New Zealand school. The girls find solace with each other, escaping into
adolescent fantasies, composing stories about a disturbingly violent,
alternate-universe royal family. Audaciously, Jackson visualizes these
fantasies in bizarre sequences, one of which involves a massive orgy among
life-size clay figures. The relationship between the girls intensifies and
intensifies, building up to an extremely disturbing climax. Melanie Lynskey as
Pauline Parker and Kate Winslet as Juliet Hulme make their film debuts here,
and both are extraordinary.
Why Today?: On
this day in 1954, Parker and Hulme are found
guilty (at least by some accounts... others claim the date was the 28th).
