My friends, I have seen the future of horror cinema, and strangely enough, it's arriving not on the silver screen, but rather right through your humble television set.

I have not actually seen the movie yet. I do not need to. I have seen the advertisements, and even those tiny glimpses into this movie fill my bowels with icy fear; my brain screams for reprieve from the roiling sensations bombarding it; my skin writhes with creeping dread. Just a few 30 second spots have done this to me. They have exhausted me and debilitated me and now it is all I can do to master my shaking hands enough so as to pour my calming whiskey.

It is getting more difficult to sleep since seeing what I have seen.

Do you know this terror? Have you seen? It is coming, and I do not know if I can survive the full gale force of this picture's dark promises. I will tell you:

It is called Riding the Bus with My Sister. From the twisted people at Hallmark's Very Special Cloying Theater That Makes You Want To Die Studios comes this ebon thing, this shambling mass, this abomination: it stars, cruelly, Andie MacDowell, one of our most potently untalented actresses and Rosie O'Donnell, beloved TV personality similarly bereft of any gift for acting. They are sisters, you see, but THERE IS MORE! For Ms. O'Donnell's character is, from what I can only assume from these morbid clips, retarded.

This is really all I need to know, which makes the ads so brilliant and disturbing. (Though I suppose there's some ancillary bus-riding going on in there too, as the title suggests.) We have long been accustomed to the tabula rasa that is MacDowell, and it doesn't appear that she disappoints here either: even in these brief ads, her uselessness shines out from the screen like a beacon of sadness and quelled hopes. (She has been used effectively only once in her career, in sex, lies & videotape, where her implacable blankness was exploited by Soderbergh brilliantly, setting her passivitey against the other firebreathing personas in the film. Or I'm full of shit and he just got really lucky. Whatever.)

But it's Ms. O'Donnell's presence that really commands attention. I have never, ever been . . . what's the word? . . . so destroyed by such tiny glimpses into a performance before. I felt--I feel--crushed, almost oppressed by what I have seen.

Why?

It's hard to explain. These are, after all, only 30 second spots. But even in those fleeting 30 seconds, the humiliation one feels is astonishing. Humiliation for Ms. O'Donnell, humiliation for the art of acting, humiliation for sharing a taxonomic affiliation for the creatures--if they are human--who were responsible for shepherding what I was viewing into the public domain. Every time I see these ads, I want to apologize to . . . well, anything. I go over to my neighbor's and knock on the door, and when they answer, I say, "I am so sorry for Rosie O'Donnell." "What?" they ask, but I do not answer. I am already on my way outside so I can apologize to the curb, a passing dog, and the concept of free will. I apologize to all of them for Rosie O'Donnell.

People will cry, perhaps, that I am unfair in my assessment, that I'm judging a book by it's shabby, lurid, nightmarish cover. I disagree. When a filmmaker (here the director is Angelica Huston) creates something so shattering that even the ads for it are nearly Lovecraftian in their air of suffocating madness, I think a masterpiece has been created. I did say, after all, that I had seen the future of horror. I stand by that statement. This is unquestionably going to be the most sinister and terrifying film of our generation. I challenge everyone out there to see it, to confront it head on. And having lived through it--I'm assuming that some strong-willed people will perhaps actually live through it--then discuss it.

I want to hear all about it. Because I'm not strong enough to see it myself.