Miss Dietrich is not so much a performer as a one-woman environment.

Horror need not always be a long-fanged gentleman in evening clothes or a dismembered corpse or a doctor who keeps a brain in his gold fish bowl. It may be a warm sunny day, the innocence of girlhood and hints of unexplored sexuality that combine to produce a euphoria so intense it becomes transporting, a state beyond life or death. Such horror is unspeakable not because it is gruesome but because it remains outside the realm of things that can be easily defined or explained in conventional ways.

When Uncle Bob (or Ted or Ray) promised to send a shooting star over the house to mark a young listener's birthday, the young listener, who had hung out the window for an hour without seeing the star, questioned not Uncle Bob (or Ted or Ray), but his own eyesight.

[His acting] remains forever fixed in a time that never dates.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

Semi-Tough pokes fun in rambling fashion, but it is vulgar in intelligent ways and almost always amusing in its perceptions of befuddled people who are perfectly healthy but often convinced they're not.

Nothing in Death Hunt makes a great deal of sense, though the scenery is rugged and the snowscapes beautiful.