How is this movie not more popular?

To be perfectly honest, I don't really like '80s movies. I generally don't go earlier than the mid-90's when it comes to film. Older movies tend to have a "look" about them that just draws me out of it.

However, this movie was $5.99 at Best Buy, and looked interesting enough. It really was one of the better movies I've seen from that era. And definitely still relevant to what's going on today with white-supremacists, and really hits on the stupidity of people wanting to kill other people that they don't know because of something that their ancestors did thousdands of years ago.

What's great is the character's slow breakdown and demise. We know from the beginning that he's going to die, which adds a whole new kind of tension. Throughout the whole movie I kept checking my DVD player's display to see how close to the end is (knowing logically that his death would be pretty much the end). His mental breakdown is really slow, but very natural. The outside threats have a kind of "No! Don't go in the basement!" kind of feeling about them. We see the character disregard clues and evidence that there's a credible threat to his life, and he ignores them casually.

In the end, when you have a movie like this in which you know that the character will die in the end, you have to make the movie his or her swan song. There has to be a purpose behind the death. You have to have seen the best and worse in them, and you have to have genuinely cared about the character.

In that regard, I think the movie did an excellent job of making us wish that the character could live on.

"Is this a joke? Because if it is, it's both funny and well-executed."