TITLE & REVIEW
Kenneth (Andrew Lee Potts -
Primeval
) is a stuttering epileptic janitor with a crush on
Jessica Alba/Julia Stiles
looklike student doctor Catherine (
Arielle Kebble
). Of course, Catherine would rather hang out with her fellow medical students,
a gang of sociopathic malcontents and egotists led by Kim (
Sarah Carter
). Kenny bumps into the Medics on their night out on the town.
They are high on drugs stolen from the hospital pharmacy,
and poor Kenny becomes the victim of circumstance.
OK, he is not really a nice guy - he is a peeper who undresses corpses in the morgue.
But still ...
Kenny ends up in a coma, and Catherine is the only one who feels bad about it. She tries to save him with an experimental drug. Unfortunately it activates the part of his brain that causes out-of-body experiences. And he uses this power to possess peoples' bodies. His aim? Bloody vengeance on the people who destroyed his life!
The murder spree is suspenseful but not overly-graphic. It is certainly superior to the Director's previous effort, Shrooms . The final act is a bit too fast-paced, the script evidently trimmed down, but it all comes to a thrilling conclusion.
This is a very early stalker/slasher film from 1955.
Robert Mitchum (
Cape fear
) is a serial killer who preys on rich widows.
He spends a month with a bank robber (Peter Graves - Mission: Impossible)
as a cell-mate, and learns that the loot from the robbery has never been found.
The villainous preacher seems to have inspired the character of Caleb in Buffy: Season 7 . His menacing presence, disguised by a Puritan attitude of godliness, permeates the entire film. He marries the robber's widow ( Shelly Winters ), then stalks the children.
The cinematography in this effort is wonderful. The aerial shot of the opening sequence, the nature shots of wildlife as the children flee through the darkness, the murderer's silouette on the skyline as he pursues them.
The third act come to a conclusion too rapidly for modern tastes, though it is filled with irony and deeper meaning that may well elude fans of the Friday the Thirteenth series.
Domestic repair-man Josh Stewart is pressurised by a loan shark
into burglarising a domestic residence.
Unfortunately, once he is inside the lonely mansion
he realises he is not the only intruder.
A serial killer has taken over the place, and it is heavily booby-trapped.
The reluctant hero must save the family (including a topless
Madeline Zima
) from this cut-price Jigsaw.
Apparently this was written as a prequel to Saw , but got rejected by the franchise and was made as a stand-alone story. Apart from the Torture-Porn aspects, this is actually reminiscent of The People Under The Stairs ...
The Collector is back to his old tricks.
Well, he has certainly upped his game.
Instead of an isolated household burglary,
he conducts a high-tech massacre at a night-club.
So much for staying low profile, off the police radar.
Josh Stewart is back, recruited by Lee Tergesen ( Weird Science: The Series ) to lead a team of mercenaries to the Collector’s secret base. Naturally, the place is full of booby-traps. There also appears to be a small towns worth of victims, although there is no on-screen evidence the police are looking for dozens of missing persons.
This is an Aliens style sequel - This Time It’s War!
Josh Stewart is a career criminal who works for an organised crime figure in small-town USA.
He and his wife are planning to rip off the employer.
Yes, all typical crime-story stuff.
The wife discovers that something sinister is happening on the farm next door to their own. Yes, by incredible coincidence there are members of different criminal gangs living beside each other. The local sheriff might have her suspicions, but does not actually care. Anyway, the neighbour can see better without a telescope than the wife can see with one!
Stewart comes home to find his wife missing. He goes to the neighbour's house to look for her, and quickly deduces that something is wrong. From then on it is the same old story. The reluctant hero must save hostages from murderous abductors, in a house that has levels of fortifications which rise in direct correlation to the storyline's intensity.
This was written and directed by
Neil Marshall
, creator of several successful medium-budget horror efforts.
The protagonists are a group of women who are extreme sports enthusiasts. They go caving in the Appalachian mountains. They include Juno ( Natalie Mendoza ) and Sam ( MyAnna Buring ).
The women run into difficulties in their adventure. There is a cave-in, and they have to find another way out. Worse, it turns out that Juno has taken them into an un-explored cave system. But worst of all, they are not alone. A group of albino humanoids infest the caves, and they quickly develop a taste for human flesh.
This starts directly after the end of the previous film.
While the actresses have aged four years,
this is set two days after the team originally entered the cave.
The Sheriff (Gavan O'Herlihy - Willow ) decides to lead a rescue team down into the cave system. He takes his deputy (the token dark-skinned Latina), the sole survivor of the original trip (who has shell-shock and Amnesia), and a trio of pot-holers.
We are used to horror movies like this where screaming teens act like complete idiots and always make the wrong choice. This time it is the Sheriff who messes everything up on a regular basis! In fact, the characters generally act so stupidly that it is almost impossible to root for them. And if you do not care about the characters' fates, why bother watching?
The climax of the film creates so many plot holes that one can only hope it was all another hideous delusion.
This is set in a decaying Detroit neighbourhood
but was filmed in Eastern Europe.
Jane Levy
is best known for playing a teenager
(ten years younger than her real age)
in sitcom Suburgatory,
and recognisable as a Scream Queen/Final Girl
in this director's previous effort (the remake
Evil Dead (2013)
). Now she and a couple of friends decide
to burglarize a blind man (rent-a-villain Stephen Lang -
Avatar
). He is a former US Army Ranger,
and has a horrible secret in his basement.
The result is basically a new version of
The People Under The Stairs
.
This is set eight years or so after the original.
The blind man (rent-a-villain Stephen Lang -
Avatar
) is living off the grid in a
Cabin in the Woods
outside Detroit. He has a young girl who he calls his daughter,
and he has taught her lots of survival skills - like hit-girl in
Kick-Ass
.
One night a gang of murder thugs comes to the house. This is not a simple burglary like in the first film - these are bad men with means and purpose to match the old man. They are dishonourably discharged combat veterans, while he has been upgraded from Army Ranger to Navy Seal. They are still worthy villains against a modern version of Zaotichi .
When it was first released, the Feminists were unhappy about a movie which seems to redeem the former antagonist - just like the way they were upset about Joker (2019) , or the way MRAs were against Mad Max: Fury Road without even seeing it first. However, the real protagonist of this film is the daughter. The old man is not a hero, and does things for his own benefit rather than for the good of anyone else. All this actually works for the film, because as the story unfolds we discover that none of the characters is exactly what they appear to be.
This starts with the first movie's Final Girl (
Adrienne King
). She has an extended flashback from the climax of the original film.
This is necessary for us to understand that the final scene,
just put in as a final jump-scare for the audience,
has now been extended as the premise for an entire series of straight-to-video
Yes, somehow rather than go back to his grieving mother
Jason stayed alone in the woods and ate roadkill for a dozen years.
Five years later a new Camp starts up on Crystal Lake, with a whole new gang of tweenagers interested in premarital sex. It is not a new Camp Crystal Lake, it is the Packanack Lake Region Counselor Training Centre. The boss gives Jason's backstory as a campfire tale. This takes the story back to its roots as an urban myth, created by camp counsellors in upstate New York in the 1950s in order to stop the kids from wandering around after lights-out. Perhaps he would have more luck if he stuck to his other story, the one about there being wild flesh-eating grizzly bears in the woods.
Jason's identity is not yet fully established. He does not get the mask until the next movie, and he becomes undead a couple of films after that. At this stage is just a lurking presence, seen mostly as a shadow. However, it moves a lot faster than the original and does not sacrifice pace for the benefit of suspense.
The local Sheriff, wearing a patch for Sebastopol County, seems to know that something is up in the area. However, just like the average cop in this kind of movie he does not have the sense to know when he is walking into an ambush situation.
Since none of the tweenagers has a backstory, we do not know who the Final Girl is going to be until the Third Act has begun.
This starts with the campfire tale from
Friday The 13th Part II
, intercut with a selection of the best kills of the first three films.
This is all the exposition necessary to know what the series is about.
The story starts with the State Police cleaning up the mess from the previous film. Rather than wait for the Medical Examiner to check the bodies, they just put Jason in an ambulance and ship him off to the Wessex County morgue. Unfortunately the night-shift staff do not put up much of a fight. Then he walks home in broad daylight.
A nice suburban family live in a nice house nearby. One of the kids is 12-year-old Tommy (Corey Feldman - The Goonies ), who is obsessed with horror movies. Not in terms of the writing tropes, like in Scream , but in terms of latex prosthetics. However, he might just be Jason's nemesis.
Some tweenagers, including Crispin Glover ( Back To The Future ), get lost while out for a drive. They eventually get to their destination, the house next door to Tommy's family. This is an undefined distance from the lake, probably at least a mile or so by the direct route through the woods. However, a couple of tweenagers nip out for a midnight skinny-dipping session so it cannot be too far.
That night the local evening paper, the Wessex County Register, has a headline that states Mass Murderer's Body Missing. Nobody seems to care about the two murdered hospital staff. However, a young man with a hunting rifle goes hiking in the woods. If he is hunting for Jason he does not do a good job of it. He seems unfamiliar with concepts like camouflage and concealment. This may be an amateurish attempt to set a trap, but he also leaves his rifle lying around where it can be easily destroyed. A professional would never leave it more than six inches from his fingers.
The director tries to create some suspense, so we do not see much of Jason on-screen.
This starts with Tommy (Corey Feldman -
The Goonies
) paying a visit to Jason's grave.
Things end badly, but this certainly seems
to have inspired the opening sequence to the next film.
Someone starts to murder the local residents. Perhaps Tommy has been driven insane by his obsession with Jason, or it might just be a copycat killer. The Sheriff thinks it is Jason Voorhees himself, raised from the dead somehow. The Mayor claims that Jason was cremated, although nobody can really verify this fact.
The scares are by-the-book, with the standard jump-scare used twice - once with a cat, once with a rabbit. The kills are pretty standard too, and it is all a bit formulaic.
The victims are mostly white rednecks. However, there is actually an African-American family in the village. They include Demon (Miguel A Nunez Jnr - ), who dresses like a very dated Michael Jackson.
When the third act starts, Tommy is absent. This makes sense for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he is the main suspect. Secondly, he beats up everyone who gets in his way so we know he should stand a good chance of surviving. Instead there is a Final Girl, a young blonde woman who looks like Kristen Bell . And since Tommy was most popular as a 12-year-old there is a little 12-year-old black kid to fill the role.
This is set a year or so after the events of the previous film,
and Tommy is now played by his third actor.
Presumably he did not go full psycho,
as hinted at in the previous film.
He and a friend get out of the clinic, and drive to Jason's grave.
Yes, the Mayor was wrong last time
and Jason was not cremated after all.
Tommy insists they dig up Jason's grave, even though there is a lighting storm (but no rain). Unfortunately, Tommy's attempt to destroy the body backfires. All it takes is a lighting bolt to the chest and Jason's wormy maggot-ridden skeleton regenerates enough tissue (including an eyeball) to go on another killing spree.
Tommy tries to get help. However, nobody wants to believe that Jason can come back. The town of Crystal Lake has been renamed Forest Green, and the summer camp is about to be re-opened. The head counselor is Megan ( Jennifer Cooke ), the daughter of the local Sheriff. This was the 1980s, when a Sheriff was a big man with a bushy mustache as opposed to the female-as-standard Sheriff of the twenty-first century.
Jason's kills tend to be off-screen, with minimal bloodshed. This is probably more a result of the low budget as opposed to a deliberate dumbing-down for a lower rating.
The sound-track includes a couple of 1980s rock songs. The theme tune on the final credits is an Alice Cooper song, He's Back (The Man Behind The Mask), and clips from this movie were used in the song's music video. However, unlike the disappointing Demons (1985) the rock songs are used sparingly and only when appropriate.
The climax has another Tommy-versus-Jason face-off. However, Megan is more than just a love interest. She fulfills the role of Final Girl.
This starts with a montage of the best bits of the previous film.
Yes, just in case any new viewers start watching the series at number seven.
The story starts on October 13th, and unfortunately it is a Friday. Tina Shepard, a young girl with a nylon blonde wig, goes all Carrie and wishes that her daddy was dead. Unfortunately their house is beside Crystal Lake, and Jason Voorhees is chained to the bottom nearby. Property prices must have rocketed after the murder sprees stopped.
Ten years later, the girl is now a beautiful young woman. Her mother brings her home from a mental hospital, where her telekinesis was being analysed by a scientist. She has now added precognition to her skills. The scientist comes along to continue the research.
Presumably dady's body was never recovered from the lake. Our heroine tries to bring him back from the dead, but unfortunately brings Jason back instead. He is well rotted, with ribs and spine visible through rips in his shirt. Still, he was well decomposed at the start of the previous film.
A bunch of tweenagers hang out next door, at a birthday party in a cabin In The Woods . The old Crystal Lake signs are up again, but nobody seems to have heard of Jason or the curse.
The previous three movies all centred around Tommy as the hero. His absence means that this film focuses on Jason (Kane Hodder - ) - more in line with standard horror-movie tropes. The Final Girl's telekinesis means she is strong enough to take on a superhuman monster like Jason, and yet her love interest does not look weak in comparison to her.
Finally we get to the Third Act, and this is where most of the budget must have gone. In the fight they demolish the entire interior of the house. We get to see Jason without his mask, and the prosthetics on Hodder are quite impressive.
This starts with the New York City skyline at night,
with the World Trade Centre prominently featured.
Street crime also gets shown in the title sequence,
muggings and graffeti prominently shown.
Yes, this is the dark Manhattan of the 1980s,
a world away from the zero tolerance era of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, a couple of tweenagers have pre-marital sex in a motor-cruiser on Crystal Lake. The boy gives the girl some helpful exposition, a run-down of the events of the first couple of movies. Unfortunately their anchor ruptures an underwater power cable, and revives Jason from his watery grave.
Jason takes the cruiser down the river, to a dockside somewhere that looks like the Canadian Rockies. A bunch of teenagers have a High School graduation party aboard a ship, the MV Lazarus, en route to New York City. Jason hitches a ride.
The Final Girl, Rennie, is a psychic - although somehow her pet dog can see her visions too. It seems that she was originally meant to be Tina from the previous film, but was down-powered because Tina became an uber-powerful telekinetic. However, the new girl also has a back-story concerning Crystal Lake. She keeps having visions of a deformed boy drowning, apparently memories of what happened to her when she was younger. How this fits into the timeline is not explained, Because she is too young to be Jason's age.
The supporting characters have storylines of their own, some of them more interesting than those the Final Girl herself. The bossy headmaster is the Final Girl's Uncle Charles, while the other teacher is the her aunt. The ship's captain is her love interest's father.
The stereotypical American High Schoolers are played by a bunch of Canadian actors like Gordon Currie ( Codename Eternity ). Asian-American actress Kelly Hu has a couple of scenes as a scream queen. The ship's deck-hand (Alex Diakun - X-Files ) seems to have the sixth sense when it comes to Jason's presence. Will this keep him alive, or will he have a crappy off-screen death?
When the survivors realise that there is a murderer aboard the ship, they try to hunt down whoever is responsible. Unfortunately they split up to cover more ground, which just means Jason can pick them off one at a time. Worse, Jason apparently has the power of teleportation. Some people claim that he moved unseen through the woods in previous films due to his knowledge of secret underground tunnels, but there are no secret tunnels he can use a
Finally they get to Manhattan - well, some stock footage of the skyline. The streets look more like Vancouver or somewhere, so with the execption of a couple of scenes it really does not have the right feel for Manhattan.
Jason stays intent on killing the Final Girl and her love interest, even to the extent of ignoring other potential victims on the subway and in Time Square. The exception is for anyone who gets in his way, like a massive hulking fry-cook who later played Jason in Freddy Vs Jason .
The ending ties up Jason's story by totally destroying his body. Of course, the Franchise started up again in the 1990s with Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday - which led on to Freddy Vs Jason . Well, Jason X was released in between them - but it is outside the continuity.
Freddy Kreuger (Robert Englund -
V: The Series
), the dream demon from the
Nightmare in Elm Street
franchise, has a problem.
The kids on Elm Street, and the rest of Springfield, no longer dream.
The town fathers have drugged everyone to stop them from dreaming.
And without dreams, Freddy cannot attack them.
Freddy's strategy is simple. The final shot of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday indicated that he existed in the same universe as Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger - Jason takes Manhattan ). All he has to do is revive Jason and get him to wreak havoc.
The Final Girl ( Monica Keena ) and her friends ( Kelly Rowland and Katharine Isabelle ) team up with a helpful cop (Lochlyn Munroe - ). Can they defeat both monsters? Or will the monsters take each other out?
A recent remake of a 1980s slasher,
where a masked killer chases one of the Winchester Brothers from
Supernatural
? Sounds a bit like
My Bloody Valentine (2009)
, doesn't it?
Jared Padalecki visits the ruins of Camp Crystal Lake to discover what happened to his sister ( Amanda Righetti ), who went missing while camping there. He and a bunch of twenty-something television actors playing college kids (including Ryan Hansen from Veronica Mars ) are stalked by the machete-wielding freak.
This is pretty much a wasted effort. It is a nasty little shocker, full of plot holes and cliched characters. The humour of the original series is gone. This is to the original series what the Daniel Craig films are to the original Bond series.
Marcus Nispel directed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake a few years ago.
The film starts in Winter 1944.
The Red Army (with REAL T-34s, very impressive!) is pushing through Lithuania.
Nine-year-old Hannibal and his younger sister Misha
get mixed up with local fascist militia types Grutas (Rhys Ifans) and Kevin McKidd (
Rome
).
These scum of the earth (they did not make the grade for the SS!) end up trapped in a blizzard, with nothing to eat ...
Ten years later, Hannibal is a medical student. He gets the chance to get even with the militia, bumping them off one at a time in a series of gruesome murders that regularly splash blood across his face. Dominic West ( 300 ) is a Police Detective investigating the gruesome slayings.
This is an impressive period piece, a film noir suspense thriller with touches of gore.
This book was previously adapted as a film called
Manhunter
, with Brian Cox (
Troy
) in the role of Lector.
However, after the success of
Hannibal
it became apparent that the story would have to be added to the Anthony Hopkins series.
For some reason the Producers saw fit to entrust the task to Director
Brett Ratner
, who is a mediocre talent at best. This would not matter,
but he keeps getting projects where his work can be directly compared to that of far better directors.
The story starts a few years before Silence Of The Lambs , when Lector was noticeably younger. Hopkins has been suitably de-aged, with enough hair for a ponytail. FBI Agent Will Graham (Ed Norton - Fight Club ) visits him to ask for help catching a mysterious serial killer. Eventually Graham works out that Lector is the man they are hunting - but Lector is not so easily caught.
Several years later, Graham is pulled out of his premature retirement by his old boss Jack Crawford (Harvey Keitel - Saturn 3 ). Apparently Scott Glenn was unavailable to reprise his role from SOTL.
Francis Dollarhyde (Ralph Feinnes - Harry Potter ) has his hands full. Not only does he have a full-time job on top of his hobby as a serial killer, but he also wants to romance fellow Brit-playing-a-yank Emily Watson .
There are a couple of subplots that turn out to be pointless. One concerns a letter that the killer sent to Lector, and which might give the Feds a chance to lure him out. The other concerns Freddie Lounds (Philip Seymour Hoffman - Hunger Games 2 ), a sleazy tabloid journalist who helps the Feds bait a trap for the killer.
Lector is an obscurist. He knows the killer's secrets, and how to find him, but does not reveal them directly to Will. Instead he delivers a stream of obscure clues. Far more clues than in the previous adaptation, but this movie is intended to maximise Lector's screen time.
This is set in a swamp down in Dixie-land, USA.
After the events of the original film,
the tweenagers have been wiped out
by a supernatural spree-killer named Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder -
Jason X
). Their bodies have probably been eaten by the local wildlife,
and all that remains of them is some footage on a camcorder.
The sole survivor, Final Girl Danielle Harris , turns out to have family connections to the killer. This allows for some backstory, exposition and character development.
The heroine gets exposition from Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd - Candyman ), and demands he help her recover the bodies and get revenge on Crowley. He agrees, but only because he has his own agenda.
Zombie recruits a gang of gun-toting rednecks as cannon fodder. Also along is the brother of the token Chinese character from the first movie, played by the same actor. Despite being completely doomed, the rednecks are quite likeable. Instead of splitting up and getting picked off one at a time, they pair off and indulge in character-building post-Tarantino dialogue. One of them is Rick McCallum, who also serves as Assistant Stunt Coordinator.
Despite the title of the movie, which is also the killer's signature weapon, he actually uses a variety of different kill methods in order to spice things up. This includes a two-for-one chainsaw deal.
We get a rehash of the climax of the second film in the series.
The Final Girl (
Danielle Harris
) defeats the monster, and goes to get help.
Unfortunately, we now get to see what happens AFTER the climax -
the consequences of the clean-up of a Slasher movie.
She walks into the Police station, drenched in blood,
with a shotgun in one hand and a severed human scalp in the other.
Naturally they arrest her for killing all the missing persons.
Sheriff (Zach Galligan - Gremlins ) calls in a clean-up crew, including coroner Sean Whalin ( Lois & Clark ) and the Chinese-American guy from the first two movies. Unfortunately, the monster - Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder - Jason X ) is unkillable thanks to a Voodoo curse.
The sheriff's ex-wife is a reporter, and she is obsessed with Victor Crowley. She gets the Token Black Deputy to escort her and the Final Girl to get the one thing that will put the monster's soul at rest. This means a memorable run-in with a racist scumbag played by Horror movie legend Sid Haig ( The Devil's Rejects )!
The film manages to move between OTT pitched-battle scenes and more suspenseful, more intimite scenes of danger. This is the final part in the trilogy, and we do not know who will survive. However, it successfully brings the story to a well-deserved end. After all, the events of the movie series take place over three consecutive nights, while they must have been filmed over a number of years.
Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder -
Jason X
) is back from the dead. Again.
And as is the manner of fourth films in trilogies,
this film has the name of the main character instead of something original.
There is nothing stylish about the kills in this series -
the completely OTT gore is so over-done that this is clearly self-parody.
The story proper starts ten years after the events of the previous films, the trilogy that took place over a couple of days. There is no mention of the Final Girl, Maybeth ( Danielle Harris ). Instead, the paramedic is feted as the sole survivor. He conducts a book-signing of his autobiography, although it is not well received. Most people do not believe in Victor Crowley, and assume the survivor was the killer.
The other main cast members, a trio of tweenage movie-makers, turn up to recruit the survivor for their film project. This is the most interesting part of the story, because these are the most sympathetic characters. One of them is clearly set up to be the new Final Girl.
The survivor is lured into a TV show with the offer of a million dollar pay-out. He takes a private jet to the island, but somehow the tweenage movie-makers got there first. Yes, their beat-up jalopy must be faster than a jet plane.
The tweens play an audio-recording of a voodoo spell, which somehow revives Crowley from death. At the same time, the jet plane crashes. Crowley besieges the survivors inside the fuselage.
The second aspect that gives this a comedy edge is the fact that the characters are unsympathetic. As members of the entertainment industry, they have all profited from the legacy of the massacre - an event in which forty people were killed.
Finally, there is a mid-credits sequence that potentially sets up yet another sequel.
Released a couple of years after
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, this is a similar story about a group of city folk
who get terrorised by inbred rednecks.
Like so many low-budget horror movies, this was written and directed by a single person. The only thing that saves this from being categorised as terrible is the fact that in this case the person responsible was Wes Craven . The cast are a group of unknowns. The only one who went on to bigger and better things is Dee Wallace , who was menaced by Cujo .
This film was made in the care-free 1970s, when the idea of a PG-13 horror movie was unthinkable. As a result, it is also politically incorrect. The father, an ex-cop, complains that he was never scared - even when the N-words shot arrows at him. To a modern 21st-Century audience, the use of a slang term to describe cop-killers is worse than any of the murderous acts portrayed on-screen. But we should think of this another way. This film is a modern-day western, with killer hill-billies instead of Native Americans. And an old-fashioned western, with a white family threatened by people of colour, would be deemed even more politically incorrect.
A bus-load of tweenagers take a road-trip.
One of them is a survivor from the first film.
The token black babe is a young (and topless)
Penny Jerald Johnson
!
By incredible coincidence the shortcut they take ends up taking them through exactly the same bomb range where the cannibal family live! Despite knowing the villains are around, the idiots still split up and act as if there were nothing to fear. Naturally, they get bumped off in unspectacular methods.
Director Wes Craven indulges in extensive use of flashbacks to ratchet up the tension. On the one hand, this enables the audience to appreciate the original film. However, it is a cheap and nasty storytelling trick.
This was Directed by Frenchman
Alexandre Aja
and filmed in Morocco (sitting in for the New Mexico desert).
It is a remake of a
Wes Craven
slasher from the early 1970s.
Craven himself Produced this, so it retains the standards of the original.
Ex-Cop Big Bob (Ted Levine - Silence of the Lambs ) and his family (including nubile teenager Emilie de Ravin ) take a detour off the highway, and end up in a remote former nuclear test site.
The radlands are inhabited by a family with hideous mutations (which actually look more like Vietnam-era Agent Orange birth defects). The mutants ambush the family, attack them and generally do terrible things. Bob's son-in-law, a bespectacled non-violent type, ends up laying down whup-ass like Hoffman in Straw Dogs.
The level of violence in the original film was ground-breaking. With this film, in contrast, the extreme violence is run-of-the-mill. The big break with Hollywood tradition is the depiction of sexual violence. It is a big no-no, even in Horror films,
Yes, another horror sequel about a group of people
who get stranded in the middle of nowhere and picked off one by one.
Usually it is a pathetic bunch of idiots passing themselves off as College students.
A pathetic bunch of idiots passing themselves off as National Guard reservists.
On the face of it, one could compare this to Southern Comfort rather than Aliens or Predator . Unfortunately, the kids making up this platoon of rookie part-timers (including a couple of supermodels) are in no way convincing as members of the US Military. Fair enough, the film is about cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, but when even the human protagonists are unbelievably stupid (invoking every cliche in Horror Movies) then suspension of disbelief is a thing of the past.
This is filled with sickeningly OTT violence. The monsters kill and eat any men they catch. Worse, and more controversially, the female victims are used for breeding.
This was originally written as a prequel to
Saw
. Although it was re-written as a stand-alone self-contained story,
the setup is familiar enough.
Average suburban male Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler - Dracula (2001) ) is victim of a home invasion. His wife and daughter are killed by brutal thug Darby and his henchman Ames (Josh Stewart - ). District Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx - Miami Vice ) is not certain of his chances of winning in court, so he makes a plea deal with Darby. Yes, the real villain gets the lesser sentence while the henchman gets the death penalty.
Ten years later, the two perps are murdered in horrific circumstances. Not only is Clyde the only suspect, but he seems to be coming after the legal team responsible for the case. Nick's cow-orker Sarah Lowell ( Leslie Bibb ) and his wife Kelly ( Regina Hall ) are both potential targets, as is the Mayor ( Viola Davis ) and DA Brian Bringham (Roger Bart - Hostel 2 ).
Police Detective Dunnigan (Colm Meaney - Star Trek: TNG ) arrests Clyde, but the murders continue. The obvious assumption is that Clyde has an accomplice. It turns out that he spent the previous decade doing secret work for the US Department of Defence. Yes, this Jigsaw clone helped win the War of Terror. Hence his weapons are more military-style than the usual Jigsaw gadgets, and his methods are hi-tech terrorism rather than torture porn. Clyde's new agenda is not just about getting revenge on a couple of perps. Instead, he wants to take out the whole Justice system that let him down. It is all focused on Nick, the man he wants to teach the error of his ways.
Despite having a Black director ( F. Gary Gray ) and protagonist, and featuring a Black Mayor, this is a mainstream film. A moment of Political Correctness (nowadays called Wokeness) occurs when boss-man Jonas Cantrell (Bruce McGill - Quantum Leap ) tells Nick a story about the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius hiring a servant to remind him You are only a man. In reality, the Romans bought slaves rather than hiring servants. Of course, in 2009 a Caucasian could not be seen to lecture an African-American about slavery.
The Police, led by
Dina Meyer
, close in on Jigsaw (Tobin Bell -
X-Files, Alias
). Unfortunately, the killer is actively targeting one of the detectives.
A handful of people wake up in a room. One is the detective's son. Another is Amanda ( Shawnee Smith ), a survivor from the first film. The victims have been dosed with poison, and have only two hours to find the antidote. Jigsaw has conveniently left the antidote hidden in the house, but the victims have to risk an array of hideous boobytraps.
Every Halloween, regular as a clockwork boobytrap, we get a new SAW film.
This starts after the previous film, but gives a completely different take on the ending ...
With most of the original cops left, it is up to Riggs (the SWAT Commander) and Costas Mandylor ( Fist of the North Star ) to solve the mystery. Unfortunately, they are part of JigSaw's next twisted game ...
We get yet more backstory on Jigsaw (Tobin Bell - X-Files, Alias ) - when the first was the best, really. Now he has an ex-wife, and a pitiful tale of how they lost their unborn child. Tear-jerking, but not really what this kind of film needs. There is plenty of gore and complicated murder-machines, of course ... but there is just too much being thrown at us. And as terrible as this sounds, it is just more of the same!!!
This is directed by someone new,
which explains the slightly flashier visual style.
This film is slightly better than the previous couple of efforts.
It still has a modicum of gore, but it also has something of a plot!
One of the survivors of the last massacre realises that Jigsaw (Tobin Bell - X-Files, Alias ) is still alive. He goes after the surviving killer - never realising that he is completely out of his depth. Jigsaw's specific and sadistic targeting of police officers shows his complete and utter hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, five people wake up in a dungeon. Julie Benz is in a black wig, but still looks good. Dexter and Rambo are nowhere in sight, but while she is not Darla from Angel she still does a reasonable job of surviving ...
Yes, it is Hallowe'en time again, and everyone's favourite torture-porn franchise is back.
Taking up where the previous film left off, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell -
X-Files, Alias
) has a new set of victims lined up.
This time he is inspired by a popular theme, that of the US health-care industry.
The victims are employees of a medical Insurance company.
Meanwhile, the FBI are closing in on Jigsaw. They have evidence that they have not even shared with the local police detective in charge of the case.
In the flashbacks we get to see even more tension between Jigsaw and his accomplices. The whole thing is remarkably convoluted, compared to the relative simplicity of the first film. And the problem is that there are no sympathetic characters. There is nobody to cheer for, just a bunch of idiots who are doomed to an unpleasant ending.
This is the final episode in the hideously drawn-out torture-porn saga.
This time, Jigsaw's apprentice targets petty criminals and the like.
Sean Patrick Flannery ( Dead Zone ) is a self-help guru who attends a support group for Jigsaw victims. Cary Elwes ( Princess Bride ) makes an appearance, although it is a pity a few other familiar faces are missing.
Can Young Indiana Jones survive the Death-trap Dungeon? More importantly, can he save his Entourage?
Meanwhile, Internal Affairs are closing in on the perp. But he is willing to kill as many cops again as he has already done!
Anna (
Laura Vandervoort
) and four others wake up in a locked room,
with buckets on their heads and chains around their necks.
Yes, they are victims of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell -
X-Files, Alias
) - and he wants to play a game.
When mutilated bodies start turning up, evidently victims of Jigsaw's deadly game, Detective O'Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie - Battlestar Galactica ) realises it is either a copycat or one of Jigsaw's acolytes. After all, Jigsaw could not have risen from the dead ...
There are a number of suspects as to who the copycat is. O'Halloran is a dodgy cop known for taking the law into his own hands, and his partner is running a parallel investigation. The pathologist has a professional dislike for O'Halloran, and pathology assistant Eleanor Bonneville ( Hannah Emily Anderson ) is obsessed with Jigsaw's technologies.
As the mainly Canadian cast should indicate, this is a low-budget attempt to re-start a franchise that was concluded seven years previously. The Spierig Brothers , presumably the male equivalent of The Soska Sisters , deliver a mediocre cash-in that has nothing new to offer.
This is a reboot of the franchise,
extending the original trilogy that concluded ten years ago.
But since the writer is
Kevin Williamson
, the director is
Wes Craven
and the Exec Producer is
Ehren Kruger
, the original creators are on board with it.
The film starts with a series of reversals, playing on the concept of Stab, the movie within a movie. We get some great cameos from Kirsten Bell, Anna Paquin, Heather Graham .
The story takes place ten years after the last series of killings. Sidney ( Neve Campbell ) is back in her home town, the last stop in a tour promoting her new book. There is now a NEW copycat killer - the THIRD copycat so far.
The potential victims include Sidney's cousin ( Emma Roberts , best known as the new Nancy Drew), Sidney's Agent ( Alison Brie ) and some Horror Movie nerds (Kieran Culkin, Hayden Panetierre ).
Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette - ) and his Deputies (Anthony Anderson and Marley Shelton ) try to solve the murders, with a predictable lack of success. Gail ( Courtney Cox ) has retired from news reporting, and wants to reinvent herself as a novelist. Naturally, she sees the new killer as a chance to get back in the game.
This film is very nice work! It really revitalises the Franchise by using New Media, satirises the celebrity culture that Sidney has found herself in (and that Gail misses).
Tara Carpenter (
Jenna Ortega
) is at home alone when her landline rings.
As always in Woodsboro,
it is a creepy-voiced serial killer
looking for someone to play a game with.
She is not a big fan of the Stab movies,
since her generation prefer so-called Elevated Horror films like
The Babadook
.
Tara's half-sister, Sam Carpenter ( Melissa Barrera ), comes to town when she gets news of the attack. Not only is she the Final Girl, but she is the illegitimate daughter of the original killer. Since she halucinates visions of her father, who looks the same as he did twenty-five years ago, she is clearly also a prime suspect.
Sheriff Judy Hicks ( Marley Shelton ) does her best, but with limited results. Vince Schneider (Kyle Gallner - Veronica Mars ) is such an obvious suspect he is clearly a red herring. The Final Girl and her love interest visit Dewey (David Arquette - ), who is now living alone in a trailer park. He left Gale Weathers ( Courtney Cox ) and was asked to quit as Sheriff. However, he offers to help catch the new Ghost-Face killer(s). Gale and Sydney do not want to catch or arrest anyone, they are intent on killing without mercy.
Token Black Girl Mindy Meeks-Martin ( Jasmin Savoy Brown ) is the daughter of Martha Meeks ( Heather Matarazzo ), sister of Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), so she does the big monologue scene. Well, there are several meta-textual scenes. One character even watches the Halloween episode of Dawson's Creek, written by the original Scream creator Kevin Williamson and featuring the guy who played Roman in Scream 3 (2000) . However, Mindy's monologue underpins the whole movie.
It turns out that the Stab movie-within-a-movie series ended with the eighth film, a tacked-on effort by Rian Johnson which was aimed to promote his political agenda rather than to actually please the hardcore fans. Mindy thinks that the new killer is a fanboy, intent on creating a Re-Quel. They want to soft-re-boot the series with a new sequel (like Scream 4 (2011) ). Yes, the aim of this film is to villainise so-called Toxic Fans. The writers even put sensible words in the mouth of the killer, in order to undermine logical arguments.
Sam complains that the killer is acting out fan-fiction. That is the core of the Scream franchise: its meta-textuality is basically about Life Imitating Art. By the year 2022, this has become mainstream. In fact, the outlaw Harry Longbaugh (AKA the Sundance Kid) took up a life of crime because he grew up reading dime novels about real-life outlaw Jesse James. Now the excuse the movie made me do it is not acceptable, because that would subject Hollywood to censorship again, but they are more than happy to brand fandom as Toxic.
This is set a year after the events of the previous movie.
Tara Carpenter (
Jenna Ortega
) is at University in New York City, rooming with
Liana Liberato
. Tara's half-sister, Sam Carpenter (
Melissa Barrera
), has been driven out of Woodsborough by cancel culture -
after all, she is an enthusiastic killer like her father -
so she is living in New York as well.
There are more Ghostface copycats on the loose. Luckily, the sisters have some help. Gail ( Courtney Cox ) is in town, always looking for more material for her next book. Yes, even though she promised not to in the previous film. Kirby ( Hayden Panetierre ) somehow survived her injuries from Scream 4 , and went on to become an FBI Agent. This seems to be an important ability that certain characters have - no matter how many times they get stabbed, the more non-male/white a character is the quicker they heal.
Token Black Girl Mindy Meeks-Martin ( Jasmin Savoy Brown ) explains the rules again. Since this is now a Franchise, everything must be overblown. Basically just like the Sequel rules in Scream 2 (1997) . Certainly there is more gore. However, there is no originality. The most exciting scene is stolen from Nerve (2016) , starring Emma Roberts ...
The sisters realise the killer must be someone close to them, so they push away anyone who does not come from Woodsborough. However, at least five of the previous nine killers came from there ...
A yuppie (Desmond Harrington -
Ghost Ship
) takes a shortcut along a remote country road through West Virginia.
His car is totalled in a crash,
but he meets up with some tweenagers in the same situation.
They include some spectacularly beautiful girls (
Eliza Dushku, Lindy Booth, Emanuelle Chiqui
). However, the monsters lurking in the woods are not attractive at all.
The survivors are stalked by a trio of inbred hillbilly cannibals. Dushku insisted that the monsters be of a non-magical origin, because she did not want to get typecast after her role in Buffy the Vampire Slayer . This is a good thing, it meant the film retained a sense of authenticity that helps suspension of disbelief.
After the events of the previous film, the family of inbred cannibals are back in business.
This time they take on contestants in a reality TV show contest - like in
Halloween: Resurrection
!
Scream Queen Erica Leersen is one of the contestants. She faced off against the Blair Witch and Leatherface, but now she has got main billing in a straight-to-DVD sequel.
American-accented Englishwoman
Janet Montgomery
and some fellow tweenagers are whitewater rafting (presumably a
Deliverance
reference instead of the usual
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
one). They run into the inbred hillbillies ...
Later, a prison van full of dangerous convicts drives on the killers’ stretch of road. This would have been a good idea for Jeepers Creepers 2 , with the inmates of Oz instead of tweenager cheerleaders and football jocks. However, this is a low-budget straight-to-DVD sequel, so the execution is badly botched.
Back in 1976, the inbred cannibalistic Hillbillies have all been rounded up and locked in an insane asylum.
Naturally, they escape and eat all the staff.
Presumably they eat the other inmates, because three decades later they are still lurking in the basement.
After the torture porn of the prologue, we get softcore porn to start the main story. Some college students hang out and have sex a lot. Then they go on a skidoo vacation in a remote mountain area. An unexpected storm comes it, and they seek shelter in a conveniently located old abandoned insane asylum. Even Daphne in Scooby Doo (The Movie) Would not make such a basic mistake!
This is the worst of the series so far. The first one was watchable, and even the third one had some good ideas. This is just ideas taken from better B-movies, then executed so poorly that the original efforts seem like masterpieces in comparison. The characters are unlikable, the killings predictable, it is all a waste of time and effort.
Worse than that, it undermines the backstory of the earlier films. The main story is set in 2003, when the first film came out (and was presumably set). So why did the killers spend thirty years in the asylum (which the owners never realised was scene to a mass escape) instead of just lurking in the woods? And where did the teenagers from the second film come from?
The backstory of the murderous mutated hillbillies has been changed several times.
In the first movie they were just inbred cannibals,
while the second one implied it was the result of exposure to toxic chemicals in the water supply.
A later one revealed the three main hillbillies were escaped inmates from a lunatic asylum.
Now it turns out that they have an extended family of normal-looking folk,
who are also canniballistic serial killers.
Apparently the family tradition goes back to 1817.
Roxanne Mckee and her tweenager friends hang out at the Mountain Man Festival, the (West) Virginia equivalent of Burning Man. They get some exposition by way of a campfire story, although it would have been a lot more atmospheric if it was shot at an actual campfire instead of in broad daylight.
The hillbillies' father (Doug Bradley - Hellraiser ) is caught attempting to murder someone. The sheriff locks him in the drunk cage, and when she checks her files she discovers he has been on the run for murder for thirty years. The Federal Marshals will pick him up in the morning. But just like in the Westerns, the hillbillies will try to bust him out.
This starts with a mountain-biking couple
who visit the hot springs out in the woods.
The murderous hillbillies are in the area, and quickly wipe them out.
The first movie was all about suspense,
while this is just about maximizing the splatter and gore.
Typical of how movies get worse as as the franchise develops.
The main story is about a young man and his friends who visit Hobb Springs sanitorium. He is a long-lost relative of the staff, and by the law of primogeniture he inherited the hotel from his ancestor. Now the locals try to recruit him into their incestuous cannibal cult. Well, it is fun for all the family!
Despite the story being set in Appalachia, West Virginia, it features a group of little old ladies from the Daughters of the Confederacy. Likewise Jefferson Davis is listed among famous Presidents, even though he was President of the Confederacy instead of the USA. These references to the Confederacy are shorthand that make it easy to characterise the villains. However, in reality West Virginia fought for the Union.
This is not a standard Final girl slasher movie. Perhaps the closest thing is Texas Chainsaw 3-D , which also has the theme of family.
