Surprisingly 'dark'

Because almost everyone has seen that overrated TV show first, which was UNsurprisingly dark, and they expected this to be some dumb B-list teen comedy with lame jokes and no real scary parts.

http://i44.tinypic.com/x4ozk.jpg

I think it all depends on where you are in your life - and, for that matter, where you're geographically located. If your family's hometown can be likened to your ethnicity, then I am half-Angeleno (mother born in L.A. in 1951). I have been to the city many times (including the part of town where this movie was set) and consider myself a pretty fair judge of it.

Growing up, I frankly hated Los Angeles. It was like an amalgamation of everything that sucked about America: looked like Des Moines (flat and boring), felt like Detroit (gangs and graffiti everywhere), and had the weather of El Paso. I indeed felt like I was living in one of those dystopian sci-fi thrillers that were so popular in the 1980s and much of the '90s. To me, the only thing to love about the city was Hollywood - and by the years of my childhood it was only a shadow of what it once was.

The funny thing is, now I am nostalgic for the L.A. I once hated. Looking back, it's become clearer to me that the city definitely had an undercurrent of vibrant glamour that I too often missed because I was focused so much on all the negative stuff. Now that Los Angeles is becoming rather more like New York, with ever more people fleeing to the suburbs of Ventura and Orange Counties and gentrification setting in at the core, I feel as if it's all shrinking somehow. It probably will never be the same again.