Castle Rock (2000)

Castle Rock opens with a juvenile delinquent daughter. She is so rude, self-centred and obnoxious, you find yourself hoping she gets eaten by a bear in the first reel. Her mother is a harpy and her grandfather is a bully. The carping goes on and on. I could barely stand the movie. Was this rudeness supposed to be amusing? Then finally some relief, there developed an unrelated back-story about a handsome illegal Guatemalan teen on the lam.The basic story requires the girl to walk home 12 miles through the desert, gradually coming meet, then trust, rely on and even help the Guatemalan boy.Though you hear rabid coyotes, you never see them. The perils are getting lost, medical, gangrene, snake bite, lack of food and water. There is no sudden adrenal rush, just slow feeling of increasing distress and doom. The boy limps, screams, yelps and suffers and suffers and suffers. It is quite distressing watching him and studying and attempting to treat his infected wound.The ordeal gradually transforms the girl, beating the selfishness out of her. Oddly there is no romantic attachment. By the end she became a completely reasonable and kind person.This is not a movie for small children. There are two tear-jerker deaths and protracted suffering.In one scene, a German shepherd runs off then comes back wounded. The pair presume the dog has rabies. To my eyes, the dog just wanted to be patted, but the pair were terrified and scrambled to get away. Everyone seems to assume the dog is rabid, even though it looks perfectly normal and behaves normally. The movie makers could have done something to at least make the dog growl, froth, or stagger. Even with the technology available back in the day of "To Kill A Mockingbird", they produced a completely convincing rabid dog.The end of the movie has two out-of-the-blue surprise happy endings. One of them caps the transform of the girl's dropping selfishness. It gives you a very happy buzz.

This is a movie for all ages and I recommend it to parents who are having "rebellious" teens. This review contains spoilers! Since this movie is already five years old and nobody really knows about it it will be my job to explain why it is so good.I was up Saturday night at 2AM and I couldn't sleep so I turned on the TV to channel 7 and was looking for something to watch. Thats when I caught this movie coming on called Castlerock. It seemed to be a family film so I started watching it. All I can say is WOW! The girl was fighting with her mother and was eventually sent to visit castle rock with her grandfather. She had an adventure in store for her that she could not have prepared for. There was an illegal (the boy from Guatemala had lost his Identification papers and was not really illegal)alien from Guatemala who was running from the border patrol and eventually crossed paths with the girl.What makes this movie shine like polished chrome was the friendship and love that the girl and the illegal shared on their trek across the forbidding desert and how it demonstrates that we are all the same - we need to stop fighting each other over stupid petty things and come together and love one another and create a fellowship of understanding and tolerance.

*some spoilers*If you want a good laugh, see this terrible "movie". It doesn't even deserve the title. I think the funniest part is where Ernest Borgnine appears in a hallucination. I never thought I'd hear him yelling at me "Dog gone it, climb up higher". It made me wanna climb like never before. Seriously, it's so bad it's funny. I don't know if anyone else heard this but there seemed to be a really bad echo for about half an hour during the movie, after the truck drives away in a hurry. I think the sound engineer used a tin can to record. Really funny material.Ah yes, stay away from those sand dunes. They can really tear through your jeans and cut you open like butter.

This is the most excellent movie I had ever seen,I really enjoyed this movie,a good ending also,It's a good movie on how they knew how to survive,this movie makes a perfect 10,I hope this movie is out on video,I would really love to see it again.