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Pitch-Black

Peter Berg\'s \"Very Bad Things,\" the tale of a Las Vegas bachelor party gone terribly wrong, is the season\'s most twisted black comedy.
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November 19, 1998

Peter Berg’s “Very Bad Things,” the tale of a Las Vegas bachelor party gone terribly wrong, is the season’s most twisted black comedy: What else can you say about a film in which a boychik cites Jewish law to justify unscrambling hacked-up corpse parts?

Edgy, intense Berg, 34, who plays the volatile Dr. Billy Kronk on CBS’ “Chicago Hope,” temporarily left his day job to shoot his debut film. It is, he insists, a morality tale inspired by his own trips to Vegas several years ago.

“I was constantly aware of these packs of white suburban males roaming around with a look of real trouble in their eyes,” the writer-director told The Journal. “It seemed that Vegas opened the cages within men where various beasts lurked. These guys were looking for trouble, and I wondered what would happen if they found it?”

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