A post-apocalyptic road movie. Its not really a "good" movie per say. The acting isnt very good, the writing isnt very good, the editing isnt very good, there just generally is not a lot of "good" things. But in the end what this is, is a movie about paranoia and as cast reaches its destination, you watch the thin veils of trust fall from them until the last scene. A film that begins with a group in the desert, ends with individuals on a beach.
The premise is that there's a virus that is passed through direct contact with an infected person. Be it a person's blood, skin, or breath, if you touch it you get sick and die. Technically, I think its like a zombie virus, but luckily the movie never really addresses that. If there's one thing I'd be happy to never see again, it's a zombie movie. Anyway, the film begins with a group of four people in an expensive car driving across the country to get to the beach. Why the beach? Because its eden for two of the main characters. The movie is propelled along by these two characters wanting to get to the beach. Wanting to return to paradise. But in there way is Chris Meloni and his infected daughter, a squad of cleansuit survivalists, and the groups own growing distrust of each other.
Thats where the film shines. As people around them get sick and as quarantines get broken, the lines of dialog break down between the characters. Dialog becomes sparse and stilted, tensions and tempers flare, and it gets cool almost in spite of itself.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
House of the Devil (2009)
Hey, remember when I said that Dead End was trying to recreate an aesthetic that you cannot recreate twenty years later? House of the Devil did it. House of the Devil accomplished the impossible: It made an excellent late 70s-early 80s satanic horror movie in 2009. This movie is amazing in so many ways. A love letter to a very specific genre of movie, its clear the director has a passion for this very unique, and incredibly beautiful, space of cinema history. House of the Devil is the period piece to end all period pieces. House of the Devil is the horror throwback to beat, but I have my doubts that any movie could ever manage to nail the aesthetic as absolutely perfectly as House of the Devil did. If you have ever seen a satanic horror movie, you owe it to yourself to watch House of the Devil and then be put into a coma from it. Your system will not be able to handle the shock of seeing a 2009 copyright date on this film, and that's the best compliment it could ask for.
Audition (1999)
By this point it should be clear that I love Takashi Miike and he can do no wrong et cetera. But at first, while watching Audition, I wondered in the tags on netflix werent incorrect. This isn't a horror movie, its a slightly unsettling romance. But no, I was wrong, it is a horror movie and it is incredible and Takashi Miike can do no wrong.
Dead End (2003)
This movie. This dang movie.
This is a film where nothing happens for almost an hour and a half. Its a movie where the last scene undermines the rest of the movie in an unfulfilling way. Its a movie where no one can act and everything everyone says is ridiculous and hilarious. This movie is the quintessential "Hey its the 21st century, lets make a Modern B-Movie!" movie. Its a movie where everything is stilted because of the creative Powers That Be trying to recreate an aesthetic that its almost impossible to emulate today.
Thats why I love it. Its not a good movie by any means, but it tries to hard to be bad that its flailing limbs are entertaining. Ray Wise is legitimately hilarious in it.
This is a film where nothing happens for almost an hour and a half. Its a movie where the last scene undermines the rest of the movie in an unfulfilling way. Its a movie where no one can act and everything everyone says is ridiculous and hilarious. This movie is the quintessential "Hey its the 21st century, lets make a Modern B-Movie!" movie. Its a movie where everything is stilted because of the creative Powers That Be trying to recreate an aesthetic that its almost impossible to emulate today.
Thats why I love it. Its not a good movie by any means, but it tries to hard to be bad that its flailing limbs are entertaining. Ray Wise is legitimately hilarious in it.
Pulse (2001)
Full disclosure: I saw the (2005?) American remake with Kristin Bell way before I saw this movie. I actually enjoyed the remake, unlike literally everyone else who saw it, so I came into this with a little bit of skepticism. If I liked the movie everyone hated, then i should hate the movie everyone liked.
I was completely wrong. This movie blew me away. Its every bit as compelling and nervewracking and terrifying as any other horror masterwork and has the strong, solidly stated yet still stylistic political statement underlying it that really proves the wheat from the chaff. This movie is one of those golden films I mentioned in the Dark Remains post. This movie is great. It is absolutely nothing like the remake in anyway. Even like thematic elements dont carry over at all. Don't watch the remake.
I was completely wrong. This movie blew me away. Its every bit as compelling and nervewracking and terrifying as any other horror masterwork and has the strong, solidly stated yet still stylistic political statement underlying it that really proves the wheat from the chaff. This movie is one of those golden films I mentioned in the Dark Remains post. This movie is great. It is absolutely nothing like the remake in anyway. Even like thematic elements dont carry over at all. Don't watch the remake.
The Signal (2006)
Okay, so, apparently this movie was made by three different directors each directing one act. It shows re: the first act is just exposition, almost Fight Clubby in its execution, the second is slapstick and legitimately pretty funny in parts, and the third is screaming "Am I David Lynch yet???" at the top of its lungs. None of the three parts ever really feel that disconnected from each other and the film does come together to make a super entertaining, cohesive whole. Its really open ended and incredibly isolated so, like, don't come into this expecting a 28 Days Later style movie I guess. I really feel like I have to give the directors a lot of credit for this, considering how difficult it is to make something really actually funny and also something that really screws with your head and this film manages to do both in satisfactory fashion.
Infection (2005)
A severely understaffed and collapsing hospital is forced to put aside lingering tensions and antagonism to deal with a bizarre corpse brought in under weird circumstances. The corpse disappears and nurses/doctors start going mad and murderous. And then of course there's a twist ending that Really Makes You Think About Things (no it doesnt it doesnt make you think its just dumb.)
A thing i have with foreign films is like, im afraid that I dont have the required amount of cultural context to really Get what the director is going for, but with Infection that problem doesnt really exist. Its disgustingly misogynist and insulting to anyone who has ever seen a horror film, on top of being disgustingly boring. I've seen slasher movies with more substance and less hatred of women than this literal garbage.
The only good thing I can say about it is the lighting was pretty cool in a lot of places and the setting was neat. Its a real shame that you have a film like this, one that feels almost claustrophobic and busy in its tedium, set in a place like a huge near-abandoned hospital. Seems like a waste.
A thing i have with foreign films is like, im afraid that I dont have the required amount of cultural context to really Get what the director is going for, but with Infection that problem doesnt really exist. Its disgustingly misogynist and insulting to anyone who has ever seen a horror film, on top of being disgustingly boring. I've seen slasher movies with more substance and less hatred of women than this literal garbage.
The only good thing I can say about it is the lighting was pretty cool in a lot of places and the setting was neat. Its a real shame that you have a film like this, one that feels almost claustrophobic and busy in its tedium, set in a place like a huge near-abandoned hospital. Seems like a waste.
Ichi the Killer (2001)
I don't care if this doesnt count as a horror film. This is my new favorite, non-Clue, movie. Violent, silly, poignant, absurd, surreal, yet grounded in a way that makes it Even More Surreal. Just so brilliant. I struggle to think of something else to say about it. Even with that list of adjectives up there, none of them really describe it. When someone says Black Comedy, they usually are referring to something that generally isn't very dark and isn't very funny. Ichi the Killer satisfies both and then takes it to the next level. Kakihara is fascinating and his power struggles, within and without, are incredibly compelling. in the end, the movie comes down to societal condition as applied to sado-masochism and Ichi the Killer gives you all the pieces inside a hyper-violent, sometimes melancholy, sometimes hilarious, always entertaining shell.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Midnight Meat Train (2008)
This was a way cool Americanized Japanese horror film based on a Clive Barker story. Violent in a cool/silly way, bizarre in its development/resolution, and just really a fun time. Vinnie Jones plays the part of silent, sadistic Mahogany in a brutal, almost haunting way and everyone else was at least competent so it has that going for it. The most important part though, was in a scene when Mahogany begins stalking a party on the titular train. He hits Ted Raimi in the back of the head with a meat tenderizer so hard his eyes pop out of his head and bounce off the camera.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Masters of Horror: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005)
Okay so, Masters of Horror is an anthology tv show. Each episode is done by a classic horror director. I want to watch all of these. There's a Takashi Miike one at the end of season 1.
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was done by the guy who did Bubba Ho-Tep. Which explains why its not very good.
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was done by the guy who did Bubba Ho-Tep. Which explains why its not very good.
Trick 'R Treat (2008)
A movie made by a comic book movie writer (Michael Dougherty of X-Men credit) has very heavy comic book influences. Shocking, I know. Intertwining plot threads and just goofy halloween fun. It is literally the closest thing we are going to get to a new Goosebumps movie, even more so than the first 20 minutes of Cirque du Freak. So goofy. Also, there is a werewolf transformation that alone is worth watching the entire 82 minutes of the film's length. I wish more goofy horror movies had the integrity that Trick 'r Treat has. I would be way less embarrassed about talking about horror films, thats for sure.
Drag Me To Hell (2009)
Sincerely the funniest and scariest movie i've seen since i started this blog. I literally screamed and laughed out loud in parts. i don't do that during films. Drag Me To Hell is Sam Raimi at his absolute finest, an Evil Dead 2 caliber work.
The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter was a genius and this is definitely opus-esque. Deals with suspension and tension in an amazing way and really makes you feel like you yourself are trapped and vulnerable. Apparently, it was critically panned at release for being too reliant on gore but honestly thats completely ridiculous. Maybe its just the intervening 30 years of horror tinting my view, but the films ability to show the level of gore that it does and still have it create emotion besides 'grossssssssss' is admirable.
Funny Games (1997/2007)
Does this count? I guess if Eraserhead and Antichrist do, it does. And those are the most apt comparisons. This film, and its 10-year-later english-language shot-for-shot remake, are startling, impressive, violent, and poignant. And good. Really, really good. If you want to watch an amazing film that dissembles your expectations and then insults you for expecting things, watch this. Violent by not being violent. Profane by not being profane. Disgusting by not being disgusting. This movie is the antithesis of Hostel while still making the same general point. Really, really, REALLY, really good
Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Okay, full disclosure: I am a sucker for campy horror movies (huge surprise), musicals, the mall goth aesthetic (which is a subset of campy horror i guess), and Anthony Stewart Head. This movie was like engineered to appeal to me. It, however, is not really a good movie. Like, if you hate this movie, i completely understand. I'd probably actually encourage you to keep hating it. But I loved it. I had some of the songs stuck in my head afterwards. I think they could have capitalized on the setting and fringe characters a lot more, seeing as those things were like a billion times more interesting than the actual plot. The music was clearly "rock opera" and not "musical" and i think that harmed its execution re: seemed forced a lot of the time. It is kind of the epitome of "fat goth girl who really likes Rocky Horror and Dresden Dolls and wears pink/black gloves all the time." Again, though, in spite, or because, of that, I loved it. Anthony Head was miscast.
Eraserhead (1976)
Really don't think i have enough graduate degrees in film study/literature to say any more than "this movie is totally amazing."
Also i think this is the oldest film i've done here to date !
Also i think this is the oldest film i've done here to date !
Friday, September 17, 2010
[REC] (2007)
This is the diamond in the rough. This is the film I've wanted to see since Blair Witch. [REC] is a first-person haunted house story. It is a cast of unknowns and amateurs. The directors didn't tell the cast the script until they shot. All the rehearsals were recorded on straight-up handycams. The film was shot sequentially with 20 minute takes. On the last day of shooting the lead actress was kept entirely in the dark as to what was going to happen to her so her reactions could be real and pure. It is shot entirely with practical effects. It feels so real and so visceral. [REC] is the horror film to beat. Forgoing any message deeper than "don't trust the government/church," it relies on effective action, real scares, and the pleading invitation for you to fully suspend your disbelief and Become Pablo. Anyone who has read anything I've written before knows that I value suspension of disbelief over all else. This is the film that rewards that. There is not a single lagging section in the film, there's not a moment that pulls you out of the action. It throws itself at you full force and its all you can do to fight back. I don't want to write too much plotwise, because its so good, but let me assure you that this film makes you believe in it. [REC] is the holy grail.
Dark Remains (2005)
Antichrist-lite. A generally poor film about a sad couple but instead of delving into the meaning of loss, sexuality, and probing the danger of repression, it settles to be an average slasher with a few ghosts. Whereas Antichrist requires a full page to summarize the same story, Dark Remains takes a paragraph. Unfair2Compare? Perhaps, but like, screw it, Dark Remains is better than a lot of films ive watched for this blog. The ghosts had me watching the negative space more than the film and i dont know if that was intended or not but i liked it. Gives me an idea: Horror movie filmed in "letterbox" that, in the climax, breaks the frame and goes full 16:9. No, that's a terrible idea.
Dark Remains is not a bad horror movie. It makes me think, however, that maybe horror is a bad genre, but I'm sure a lot of that comes down to the dross that I watch. For every Friday the 13th there's a Jason Takes Manhattan and a Part 3D and a Jason Goes to Hell. I guess the payoff for watching the latter is finding the diamond in the rough that makes the Friday 1s and the Final Chapters and the Sleepaway Camps, and even the Antichrists that much sweeter.
Dark Remains is not a bad horror movie. It makes me think, however, that maybe horror is a bad genre, but I'm sure a lot of that comes down to the dross that I watch. For every Friday the 13th there's a Jason Takes Manhattan and a Part 3D and a Jason Goes to Hell. I guess the payoff for watching the latter is finding the diamond in the rough that makes the Friday 1s and the Final Chapters and the Sleepaway Camps, and even the Antichrists that much sweeter.
Antichrist (2009)
Brutal, haunting, serene, and effectual. I think its funny how a lot of critics have charged Antichrist with misogyny just because, as far as i can tell, it invokes negative sexuality and the villain is a woman (flawlessly portrayed by Charlotte Gainsbourg). The movie, a case study in post-traumatic stress, follows a couple's journey of self-discovery after the accidental death of their toddler son. The Man (a psychiatrist played by Willem Dafoe), in a foolish display of chauvinism, attempts to "fix" his wife's fractured psyche by making her face her physical memories and anxiety triggers. The Woman, blaming herself entirely for the death, responds aggressively at first but soon breaks through to another level of self-hatred. The vanity-layer of blame hides her blame of sexuality and of her essential woman-hood. The Man, by breaking down her self-protection, draws out a sadistic monster. Sexually voracious and hyper-violent, she begins to attack The Man, evolving through various stages of sexuality, from emotional manipulation to rape to smashing his penis with a brick to stabbing him repeatedly, lets say penetrating him, with a shovel. The film expresses the dark sides of human sexuality in a very brutal, yet tasteful, way. It reverses the gender expectation of a film like this (see Don Cosacrelli's Masters of Horror episode Incident On and Off a Mountain Road) and the imagery is stark, natural, and, most importantly, alive. The woods, the cabin, the dead tree, the revenge animals, they are as much a character as The Man or The Woman and the pain, emotional and physical, feel so real. Not a horror film in the sense of this blog. Art.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
District 9 (2009)
Good movie, awesome aesthetic choices that are unfortunately abandoned for a weak narrative after the first act, and frankly amazing technical work. The sound design is awe-inspiring and the cg is nearly flawless, which, from me, the guy who loves puppets, is very rare praise. The story is absolutely great in the first act, shows its cracks in the second when it abandons the documentary conceit, and completely falls apart in the third. Its a shame, but the movie manages to survive it. However, format changes, narrative cliches, and wacky hijinks aside, the characters of Wikus and Christopher are seriously amazing. The empathy that Wikus inspires and later betrays is built so satisfyingly and watching him let Chris down really felt like he was letting me down. Seriously would recommend watching this and am heavily looking forward to Elysium.
Blog Maintenance
So, I've watched a lot of horror movies since Nightmare on Elm Street. The problem being, none of them were incredibly awful and by being able to suspend my disbelief fully, re: not taking notes or liveblogging the entire time, i enjoyed them a lot. That throws me into a bit of a conundrum with the blog. I love horror movies, I watch a ton of them, several a day occasionally. I don't love blogging and I don't blog a lot. However, I do love the experience of watching horrible horror films with the intention of finding stupid, stupid, stupid things about them and typing about those stupid things on the internet. I love identifying what makes Jason Takes Manhattan different from The Final Chapter. I love being able to say, "I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Friday the 13th movies." I love looking back at what I've written and going, "Oh man, that blowjob scene was hilarious," or "Does he think I'm a farthead?" I love the idea that this blog exists.
Part of the reason Nightmare on Elm Street took so long to watch/write-up was a lot of burnout re: blog. I felt obligated to only watch crappy horror films that I could make fun of/feel despair over. Taking these last few months and watching a lot of Good Films has revitalized my hater spirit. Not completely though.
I think I'm going to hybridize the concepts of the blog. The stupid slasher liveblogs and summaries will continue, hopefully at a more frequent pace. I'm going to tackle the higher concept, more interesting horror films in a shorter format. That seems almost backwards but I feel like the liveblogs and jokes are necessary for my own enjoyment of the "worse" films while I still don't feel secure enough to srsly essay on the bigger pieces. Maybe in the future. Regardless, I've got a backlog.
Part of the reason Nightmare on Elm Street took so long to watch/write-up was a lot of burnout re: blog. I felt obligated to only watch crappy horror films that I could make fun of/feel despair over. Taking these last few months and watching a lot of Good Films has revitalized my hater spirit. Not completely though.
I think I'm going to hybridize the concepts of the blog. The stupid slasher liveblogs and summaries will continue, hopefully at a more frequent pace. I'm going to tackle the higher concept, more interesting horror films in a shorter format. That seems almost backwards but I feel like the liveblogs and jokes are necessary for my own enjoyment of the "worse" films while I still don't feel secure enough to srsly essay on the bigger pieces. Maybe in the future. Regardless, I've got a backlog.
Friday, July 30, 2010
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
What I Knew:
Its A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy, dreams, blood fountain, Johnny Depp.
What I Got:
A man is building a glove. This glove has hinged blades on it. A Nightmare on Elm Street. A man stabs a curtain and a girl runs down a hallway. A sheep scares her and a man laughs. She is now in some kind of a factory. Or hell. A Hell Factory. She creeps down the corridors and stumbles across a curtain. The gloved man, now wearing a fedora, slashes the curtain, disappears, and reappears behind her. She suddenly wakes up. She was just dreaming. She has a bunch of slashes in her nightgown. Maybe the dream was more real than she thought!
A bunch of teenagers are walking to school. The girl's name is Tina. All her friends had nightmares. Tina assumes that they're going to have an earthquake because things get weird before earthquakes. What. Tina and her friends, mixed gender friends, are having a sleep over. Male friend is a doofus. Tina has been having visions of her dream guy. That made her female friend remember her dream, which was the same dream as it turns out. He had "finger knives, something he made himself." Nancy is female friend. Nancy and Tina. They had the same dream. A creepy sound happens at the window and the friends go to investigate. They send Male Friend out into the yard to find out who made the noise. He threatens to punch the noise's lights out. A guy named Rod. Glen is the male friend's name. Nancy, Tina, Glen, and Rod. Tina and Rod go indoors to have sex. Nancy is a party pooper. Glen is Nancy's boyfriend. They go inside to have sex also.
Later that night, Glen is listening to Tina and Rod have sex. It turns out Rod had a nightmare too! In Tina's room, a crucifix falls off the wall and hits a sleeping Nancy. Tina hears a scary noise. She goes to investigate it. Something is being thrown at her window. Finally the window breaks and someone whispers "Tina." Meanwhile in Tina's room, a face stretches out of the wall over Nancy. Nancy knocks on the wall a few times to find it solid. This is really, really cool.
Tina goes downstairs and follows the whispers. They lead her out into the backyard and down an alley. A familiar fedora pokes around a corner and glove guy appears, except he has gigantic arms. He chases after her, teleporting back and forth in front of her. He chops off his own fingers for some reason but he bleeds green blood. Glove bro finally catches her and she rips his face off. She starts freaking out and this wakes up Rod. She is having a seizure in her bed. She starts getting thrown around and slashes/blood appear on her body. Rod is powerless to help her as she is smushed against the ceiling. She falls limp on her bed. Nancy and Glen wake up and come to investigate, finding a bloodsoaked and a missing Rod.
Later the police are investigating, they suspect Rod. Nancy's dad is the detective in charge. He lectures his daughter on the seriousness of death and the seriousness of premarital sex. Nancy tells her dad that Tina dreamed about her own death.
Later a news report tells us that they are hunting for Rod. Nancy's mom want to let Nancy go to school because she didnt sleep the night before. Eventually she relinquishes and Nancy makes her way down the block. She sees a bald guy. She no longer sees a bald guy. Rod grabs her and drags her into the bushes while she is distracted. Rod tells Nancy that he didnt do it. Nancy's dad shows up and tries to shoot Rod but Nancy helps him escape but cop cars show up and they arrest him. Nancy is mad at her dad. This is a good Father's Day Film.
In English class Nancy learns about something rotten in the state of Denmark. She starts to fall asleep as a hawaiian shirt guy reads Julius Caesar. Nancy sees Tina in a bloody bodybag. Hawaiian shirt bro quotes Hamlet. Tina disappears into a pool of oil. Nancy gets up from her desk to go investigate. Down the hallway, she sees Tina being dragged by an invisible force. A hall monitor wearing a red and green sweater asks Nancy for a hall pass, the hall monitor then grows a claw and develops the Man's voice. Nancy wanders down into the sub-basement, following a trail of what is presumably Tina's blood. The Man shows up, scares Nancy, and slices open his chest. Worms and green pus bleed out. Nancy tries to run but she is trapped. The clawed man chases her through boilers and upstairs and into dead ends. He laughs maniacally and taunts her. She shouts that its only a dream and he says come to "Freddie." He is Freddie. Nancy burns her arms on a boiler, screams, and wakes up, back in English class. She runs out. Out in front of the school she cries and notices a very real burn on her arm.
Later, Nancy interrogates Rod. Rod describes Tina's murder at the hands of an invisible razor monster. Rod's leather jacket is incredibly loud. Rod tells Nancy that he had a nightmare about a man with knives for fingers. Freddie.
That night, Nancy takes a bath. She sings a song about Freddie and falls asleep in the tub. Freddie's hand comes out of the water between her legs and tries to get her. Nancy's mom wakes her just before disaster strikes, but Nancy falls asleep yet again, Freddie dragging her under. The tub is miles deep now. Nancy screams and her mom breaks in to save her. Nancy is alright now. Nancy watches a horror movie in bed. Glen has climbed up her rose trellis and is trying to get into her room. Glen notices the burn. Nancy asks Glen to be her guard as she looks for someone.
Nancy walks alone from her house. She asks Glen if he's still watching, and he emerges from a bush. She continues walking. She goes through an old door and ends up out front of her school, i think. Through a window she sees Freddie. She shouts for Glen's protection. Oh its the jail that she is in front of and Freddie is trying to kill Rod. Nancy keeps screaming for Glen but Tina comes instead, and then she turns into a bunch of bugs. Freddie jumps out and starts chasing Nancy. She makes it back to her house, locks the door and tries to run up stairs. The stairs have turned to marshmallow. Freddie is still coming. Nancy keeps saying its just a dream and he isn't real, but he bursts through the door and begins to murder her. Nancy fights him off, but he keeps coming. Nancy's alarm clock goes off, waking her up. Glen was asleep the whole time. Nancy is pissed at Glen.
Glen and Nancy run down to the station, demanding to see Rod. Rod, asleep, is being attacked by his blankets. Nancy's dad is there and wont let the two of them see Rod. He decides to go down and see for himself. Rod is being strangled by his blankets. Freddie made it look like Rod hanged himself. The cops cut him down and declare him dead.
At Rod's funeral, Nancy is upset. Nancy describes Freddie to her parents. Nancy's mom takes her to a sleep clinic where they are monitoring her dreams. As Nancy drifts off, they doctors don't find anything wrong with her. Nancy starts freaking out and her hair turns grey. There's also a huge slash on her arm as well as Freddie's hat in her bed.
Back at home, Nancy's mom is whining about her daughter over the phone. Nancy overhears. Nancy is drinking coffee so she doesn't ever sleep. Nancy explains that there is someone killing her in the dream. Fred Kruger is the murderer. Nancy's mom is a jerk and also knows who Fred Kruger is. Nancy storms out
Down at the river, Glen and Nancy talk about dreams. Nancy is learning about booby traps from library books. Someone installed bars on all the windows of Nancy's house and also tore down the trellis Glen climbed on. Nancy is so pissed at her alcoholic mom. The two of them go down to the cellar to talk about why there are bars. Fred Kruger, says Nancy's mom, was a child murderer in the neighborhood. A murderer who never got convicted. The neighborhood parents, including Nancy's mom, murdered him by burning down his home. Nancy's mom even has his knives hidden in the furnace.
Nancy calls Glen. He makes a Prisoner of Zenda joke. She's planning on bringing Freddie out of the dream so Glen can kill him. She warns Glen not to fall asleep. Their plan goes into action at midnight. As the clock ticks, Nancy looks at a picture of her deceased friends and takes a sleeping pill. Glen's mom comes in an lectures him for having his music and television on at the same time. It is 11:42. Nancy has a hidden coffee machine and mug under her bed. Glen's parents think Nancy is some kind of lunatic.
Nancy calls a sleeping Glen's house but Glen's parents just hang up on her and leave the phone off the hook. Glen is doomed. Nancy unplugs her phone in retaliation, but it keeps ringing. She answers it and Freddie is on the other end. He sticks his tongue at her through the phone and she stomps it. Nancy runs downstairs where her mom is drunk. Nancy is trapped indoors.
At Glen's place, Freddie drags him into his bed. A fountain of blood rockets from the bed and soaks Glen's ceiling. Glen's entrails fill the room as his mother walks in. She screams. An ambulance arrives saying they need a mop, not a stretcher. Nancy's dad also shows. Glen has been entirely liquidized. Nancy calls her dad and gives him a proposition. She's going to trap Fred Kruger and needs her dad's help. Her dad acquiesces and hangs up.
Nancy creates a home alone-style series of booby traps and contraptions in her house. Gunpowdered light bulbs and spring-loaded sledge hammers. Back at Glen's house, the coroner is throwing up. Alcoholic Mom is still rambling about Freddie to Nancy. Nancy heads back to her room and prepares for war against Freddie via prayer and an alarm clock. She has ten minutes in her dreams to pull Freddie out. She falls asleep.
Nancy is climbing down some stairs while the score plays some creepy dream music. She heads down to a basement and checks for Freddie's glove in the furnace. Its missing. Nancy finds a secret passageway into the Boiler Room of Death and begins her hunt. The burn on her arm begins to hurt again as she cries Freddie's name, attempting to lure him out. In Freddie's bed, she finds her crucifix. Freddie begins clacking his finger-knives together ominiously. Nancy finds glen's headphones next to a furnace. Nancy begins swearing. Freddie jumps in from out of frame and Nancy falls out of her bedroom window into the lawn. Her alarm says seven seconds remaining so she leaps on Freddie and pulls herself out of her dream. She awakes covered in lawn trimmings and stuff but no apparent Freddie. Nancy laments her insanity as Freddie jumps out and scares her. Freddie's real and now he's in the real world. She locks him in her bedroom and calls for her dead, but her dad is an "asshole."
Freddie escapes only to get hit in the head with a sledgehammer and knocked down some stairs. He then like i dont even know trips over a bomb or something and explodes a little. He chases Nancy down into the basement were she soaks him in liquor and throws a match at him. Flaming Freddie chases Nancy upstairs, but she manages to lock him in the basement. Everything is on fire. Nancy's dad finally comes. There is smoke everywhere. The door is locked though and her dad cant get in. Finally he breaks down the door and leads the cops into the basement. Freddie however broke out of the basement and climbed up the stairs to kill Alcoholic Mom. They incapacitate Freddie but not before Alcoholic Mom gets charred and dragged into the bed. Her skeleton waves as she enters the abyss. "Now do you believe me?" shrieks Nancy.
She sends her father out of the room. Freddie climbs out of the bed to kill her. They have a little conversation, apparently it was all a dream. A dream fueled by Nancy's fear. Freddie goes to kill her and disappears. Nancy then steps out into the day with her living Alcoholic Mother at her side. Glen, Tina, and uh that other guy,are there! The car seals itself on them and drives off. Freddie grabs Alcoholic Mother and drags her through a door. Fade to black. The End.
How I Felt
Well, I feel like I should get the elephant here out of the way: It took me three months to watch this entire film. I have not watched a single horror movie since I started watching this on May 12th. For a while there I thought that maybe Dead Tone would be the last horror film I ever watched considering how low my enthusiasm for Nightmare was. I'm glad i finished it though. It is a good movie, significantly better than most of the Friday the 13th films. I guess my standards for "good movie" are pretty low these days. This movie would probably be better though being watched in a single sitting and not spread out over an entire summer.
Sequel
Well there's six of them before I can watch Freddie vs Jason and we all know how stoked I am for Freddie vs Jason.
Its A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy, dreams, blood fountain, Johnny Depp.
What I Got:
A man is building a glove. This glove has hinged blades on it. A Nightmare on Elm Street. A man stabs a curtain and a girl runs down a hallway. A sheep scares her and a man laughs. She is now in some kind of a factory. Or hell. A Hell Factory. She creeps down the corridors and stumbles across a curtain. The gloved man, now wearing a fedora, slashes the curtain, disappears, and reappears behind her. She suddenly wakes up. She was just dreaming. She has a bunch of slashes in her nightgown. Maybe the dream was more real than she thought!
A bunch of teenagers are walking to school. The girl's name is Tina. All her friends had nightmares. Tina assumes that they're going to have an earthquake because things get weird before earthquakes. What. Tina and her friends, mixed gender friends, are having a sleep over. Male friend is a doofus. Tina has been having visions of her dream guy. That made her female friend remember her dream, which was the same dream as it turns out. He had "finger knives, something he made himself." Nancy is female friend. Nancy and Tina. They had the same dream. A creepy sound happens at the window and the friends go to investigate. They send Male Friend out into the yard to find out who made the noise. He threatens to punch the noise's lights out. A guy named Rod. Glen is the male friend's name. Nancy, Tina, Glen, and Rod. Tina and Rod go indoors to have sex. Nancy is a party pooper. Glen is Nancy's boyfriend. They go inside to have sex also.
Later that night, Glen is listening to Tina and Rod have sex. It turns out Rod had a nightmare too! In Tina's room, a crucifix falls off the wall and hits a sleeping Nancy. Tina hears a scary noise. She goes to investigate it. Something is being thrown at her window. Finally the window breaks and someone whispers "Tina." Meanwhile in Tina's room, a face stretches out of the wall over Nancy. Nancy knocks on the wall a few times to find it solid. This is really, really cool.
Tina goes downstairs and follows the whispers. They lead her out into the backyard and down an alley. A familiar fedora pokes around a corner and glove guy appears, except he has gigantic arms. He chases after her, teleporting back and forth in front of her. He chops off his own fingers for some reason but he bleeds green blood. Glove bro finally catches her and she rips his face off. She starts freaking out and this wakes up Rod. She is having a seizure in her bed. She starts getting thrown around and slashes/blood appear on her body. Rod is powerless to help her as she is smushed against the ceiling. She falls limp on her bed. Nancy and Glen wake up and come to investigate, finding a bloodsoaked and a missing Rod.
Later the police are investigating, they suspect Rod. Nancy's dad is the detective in charge. He lectures his daughter on the seriousness of death and the seriousness of premarital sex. Nancy tells her dad that Tina dreamed about her own death.
Later a news report tells us that they are hunting for Rod. Nancy's mom want to let Nancy go to school because she didnt sleep the night before. Eventually she relinquishes and Nancy makes her way down the block. She sees a bald guy. She no longer sees a bald guy. Rod grabs her and drags her into the bushes while she is distracted. Rod tells Nancy that he didnt do it. Nancy's dad shows up and tries to shoot Rod but Nancy helps him escape but cop cars show up and they arrest him. Nancy is mad at her dad. This is a good Father's Day Film.
In English class Nancy learns about something rotten in the state of Denmark. She starts to fall asleep as a hawaiian shirt guy reads Julius Caesar. Nancy sees Tina in a bloody bodybag. Hawaiian shirt bro quotes Hamlet. Tina disappears into a pool of oil. Nancy gets up from her desk to go investigate. Down the hallway, she sees Tina being dragged by an invisible force. A hall monitor wearing a red and green sweater asks Nancy for a hall pass, the hall monitor then grows a claw and develops the Man's voice. Nancy wanders down into the sub-basement, following a trail of what is presumably Tina's blood. The Man shows up, scares Nancy, and slices open his chest. Worms and green pus bleed out. Nancy tries to run but she is trapped. The clawed man chases her through boilers and upstairs and into dead ends. He laughs maniacally and taunts her. She shouts that its only a dream and he says come to "Freddie." He is Freddie. Nancy burns her arms on a boiler, screams, and wakes up, back in English class. She runs out. Out in front of the school she cries and notices a very real burn on her arm.
Later, Nancy interrogates Rod. Rod describes Tina's murder at the hands of an invisible razor monster. Rod's leather jacket is incredibly loud. Rod tells Nancy that he had a nightmare about a man with knives for fingers. Freddie.
That night, Nancy takes a bath. She sings a song about Freddie and falls asleep in the tub. Freddie's hand comes out of the water between her legs and tries to get her. Nancy's mom wakes her just before disaster strikes, but Nancy falls asleep yet again, Freddie dragging her under. The tub is miles deep now. Nancy screams and her mom breaks in to save her. Nancy is alright now. Nancy watches a horror movie in bed. Glen has climbed up her rose trellis and is trying to get into her room. Glen notices the burn. Nancy asks Glen to be her guard as she looks for someone.
Nancy walks alone from her house. She asks Glen if he's still watching, and he emerges from a bush. She continues walking. She goes through an old door and ends up out front of her school, i think. Through a window she sees Freddie. She shouts for Glen's protection. Oh its the jail that she is in front of and Freddie is trying to kill Rod. Nancy keeps screaming for Glen but Tina comes instead, and then she turns into a bunch of bugs. Freddie jumps out and starts chasing Nancy. She makes it back to her house, locks the door and tries to run up stairs. The stairs have turned to marshmallow. Freddie is still coming. Nancy keeps saying its just a dream and he isn't real, but he bursts through the door and begins to murder her. Nancy fights him off, but he keeps coming. Nancy's alarm clock goes off, waking her up. Glen was asleep the whole time. Nancy is pissed at Glen.
Glen and Nancy run down to the station, demanding to see Rod. Rod, asleep, is being attacked by his blankets. Nancy's dad is there and wont let the two of them see Rod. He decides to go down and see for himself. Rod is being strangled by his blankets. Freddie made it look like Rod hanged himself. The cops cut him down and declare him dead.
At Rod's funeral, Nancy is upset. Nancy describes Freddie to her parents. Nancy's mom takes her to a sleep clinic where they are monitoring her dreams. As Nancy drifts off, they doctors don't find anything wrong with her. Nancy starts freaking out and her hair turns grey. There's also a huge slash on her arm as well as Freddie's hat in her bed.
Back at home, Nancy's mom is whining about her daughter over the phone. Nancy overhears. Nancy is drinking coffee so she doesn't ever sleep. Nancy explains that there is someone killing her in the dream. Fred Kruger is the murderer. Nancy's mom is a jerk and also knows who Fred Kruger is. Nancy storms out
Down at the river, Glen and Nancy talk about dreams. Nancy is learning about booby traps from library books. Someone installed bars on all the windows of Nancy's house and also tore down the trellis Glen climbed on. Nancy is so pissed at her alcoholic mom. The two of them go down to the cellar to talk about why there are bars. Fred Kruger, says Nancy's mom, was a child murderer in the neighborhood. A murderer who never got convicted. The neighborhood parents, including Nancy's mom, murdered him by burning down his home. Nancy's mom even has his knives hidden in the furnace.
Nancy calls Glen. He makes a Prisoner of Zenda joke. She's planning on bringing Freddie out of the dream so Glen can kill him. She warns Glen not to fall asleep. Their plan goes into action at midnight. As the clock ticks, Nancy looks at a picture of her deceased friends and takes a sleeping pill. Glen's mom comes in an lectures him for having his music and television on at the same time. It is 11:42. Nancy has a hidden coffee machine and mug under her bed. Glen's parents think Nancy is some kind of lunatic.
Nancy calls a sleeping Glen's house but Glen's parents just hang up on her and leave the phone off the hook. Glen is doomed. Nancy unplugs her phone in retaliation, but it keeps ringing. She answers it and Freddie is on the other end. He sticks his tongue at her through the phone and she stomps it. Nancy runs downstairs where her mom is drunk. Nancy is trapped indoors.
At Glen's place, Freddie drags him into his bed. A fountain of blood rockets from the bed and soaks Glen's ceiling. Glen's entrails fill the room as his mother walks in. She screams. An ambulance arrives saying they need a mop, not a stretcher. Nancy's dad also shows. Glen has been entirely liquidized. Nancy calls her dad and gives him a proposition. She's going to trap Fred Kruger and needs her dad's help. Her dad acquiesces and hangs up.
Nancy creates a home alone-style series of booby traps and contraptions in her house. Gunpowdered light bulbs and spring-loaded sledge hammers. Back at Glen's house, the coroner is throwing up. Alcoholic Mom is still rambling about Freddie to Nancy. Nancy heads back to her room and prepares for war against Freddie via prayer and an alarm clock. She has ten minutes in her dreams to pull Freddie out. She falls asleep.
Nancy is climbing down some stairs while the score plays some creepy dream music. She heads down to a basement and checks for Freddie's glove in the furnace. Its missing. Nancy finds a secret passageway into the Boiler Room of Death and begins her hunt. The burn on her arm begins to hurt again as she cries Freddie's name, attempting to lure him out. In Freddie's bed, she finds her crucifix. Freddie begins clacking his finger-knives together ominiously. Nancy finds glen's headphones next to a furnace. Nancy begins swearing. Freddie jumps in from out of frame and Nancy falls out of her bedroom window into the lawn. Her alarm says seven seconds remaining so she leaps on Freddie and pulls herself out of her dream. She awakes covered in lawn trimmings and stuff but no apparent Freddie. Nancy laments her insanity as Freddie jumps out and scares her. Freddie's real and now he's in the real world. She locks him in her bedroom and calls for her dead, but her dad is an "asshole."
Freddie escapes only to get hit in the head with a sledgehammer and knocked down some stairs. He then like i dont even know trips over a bomb or something and explodes a little. He chases Nancy down into the basement were she soaks him in liquor and throws a match at him. Flaming Freddie chases Nancy upstairs, but she manages to lock him in the basement. Everything is on fire. Nancy's dad finally comes. There is smoke everywhere. The door is locked though and her dad cant get in. Finally he breaks down the door and leads the cops into the basement. Freddie however broke out of the basement and climbed up the stairs to kill Alcoholic Mom. They incapacitate Freddie but not before Alcoholic Mom gets charred and dragged into the bed. Her skeleton waves as she enters the abyss. "Now do you believe me?" shrieks Nancy.
She sends her father out of the room. Freddie climbs out of the bed to kill her. They have a little conversation, apparently it was all a dream. A dream fueled by Nancy's fear. Freddie goes to kill her and disappears. Nancy then steps out into the day with her living Alcoholic Mother at her side. Glen, Tina, and uh that other guy,are there! The car seals itself on them and drives off. Freddie grabs Alcoholic Mother and drags her through a door. Fade to black. The End.
How I Felt
Well, I feel like I should get the elephant here out of the way: It took me three months to watch this entire film. I have not watched a single horror movie since I started watching this on May 12th. For a while there I thought that maybe Dead Tone would be the last horror film I ever watched considering how low my enthusiasm for Nightmare was. I'm glad i finished it though. It is a good movie, significantly better than most of the Friday the 13th films. I guess my standards for "good movie" are pretty low these days. This movie would probably be better though being watched in a single sitting and not spread out over an entire summer.
Sequel
Well there's six of them before I can watch Freddie vs Jason and we all know how stoked I am for Freddie vs Jason.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Final Destination (2000)
What I Knew:
Well, I decided that after like two month or whatever of watching 80s slasher films I wanted to bring something from this millennium. Jason X doesn't count. I've seen this movie before and am familiar with the basic plot: Kid escapes plane crash, death seeks revenge. I've also seen Final Destination 2 which I remember being a lot better if only because it was a lot gorier. I'm terrified im going to end up comparing this unfavorably to Friday the Thirteenth, but i guess if i do, who cares? Its just Final Destination.
What I Got:
Alex is getting ready for his senior class trip to Paris. At the airport, we meet some of Alex's classmates. He has some premonitions about death that seem really stupid. He has a lot of premonitions that are all really stupid. He gets on the plane and starts freaking out. He trades seats with these girls and then his tray table breaks. After the shortest runway delay in the history of airports, they take off. His friend Todd is really annoying. There is some turbulence and he freaks out a little more. There is some more turbulence and the entire plane starts freaking out. The oxygen masks drop and the plane is tailspinning. An engine blows, dragging half the cabin wall with it. People are getting sucked through the breach and eventually the plane explodes. But it turns out its all a dream.
He's still on the plane and the girls just asked him whether he would trade seats. He freaks out because he just saw everyone die. They drag him off the plane along with a guy who tried to beat him up for freaking out, that guy's girlfriend, Todd, a weird girl, Seann William Scott, and a female teacher. They all start fighting because they missed the flight. The plane blows up out the window and shatters a bunch of glass. Alex was right after all and he saved all of their lives. His other classmates however, all dead.
Everyone thinks he's a witch except for the weird girl, who i suspect is a witch. Some FBI agents come and interrogate them. They think Alex was on drugs. The weird girl, Claire, says she got off the plane because she believed Alex's insane screaming.
Everyone's parents arrive at the airport except Claire's. Alex's parents give her a ride home. The news says that there were no survivors. All 287 passengers assumed dead. Lightning strikes his lawn outside his house.
A month later at a remembrance ceremony, they unveil a big ol eagle statue. People walk up and put roses on it. The guy who fought him tells him that he's never going to die. Seann William Scott's character Billy tells Alex that he passed his driver's test and asks Alex whether he's going to die and whether he's going to get rejected by a girl because he thinks Alex is a psychic. The teacher, Ms. Lootman i think, says Alex scares her. Todd hasnt talked to Alex in a long while because his dad hates Alex for not saving his other son. Claire gives Alex a rose and a photographer takes a picture of it. Todd reads a poem about death.
That night Todd looks at himself in the mirror. A light breeze blows through the window. He closes it and the breeze continues to blow. The breeze shuts the door on him. Todd sits on the toilet and the breeze starts to make a valve leak.
Meanwhile Alex is obsessively studying plane crashes, searching for meaning as a way to cope with such a senseless act. He then pulls out an issue of Penthouse, another way to cope I guess.
Back at Todd's house, he cuts himself shaving. The leaking water creeps towards him as a black, shadowy mass grows behind him. He starts plucking his nose hair as the water gets closer. He plugs in a radio, which starts playing a John Denver song, so he unplugs it. The outlet sparks.
Alex is looking listlessly at his Penthouse when an owl flies into his window. He throws the Penthouse at it. The magazine lands in a fan which shreds its pages. A piece that says "TOD" lands on his lap.
Todd is looking at underwear hanging on a clotheslines in his bathtub. The water is creeping closer. He slips, snagging his neck on the clothesline. It snaps and starts to strangle him. He reaches for his nose hair scissors but the more he struggles the more the line tightens. He fights to get to his feet, but finds no traction in the tub. He succumbs to the grave as the water retreats back into the valve.
Alex is jogging to Todd's house when he sees the coroner's van and a bunch of police cars. Claire is there too. Todd's parents think Todd killed himself because of Alex. Alex knows thats crazy. The FBI agents investigating Alex look at him curiously. Claire has disappeared.
In the daytime, Alex looks at a maple leaf. He is at Claire's house, asking her why she was at Todd's house. She tells him why the FBI agents were there. He asks her again why she was there. She shows him some art, a depiction of him. She says that she is emotionally linked to him and felt his vision. She thinks there's still an emotional bond between them and that she knows that Alex is still having premonitions. Alex tells her his theory that there's something after all the kids who got off the plane.
They sneak into a funeral home to ogle Todd's corpse. Todd's arm moves. A guy shows up. The guy tells them that he's still spasming. He tells Alex that Todd did not kill himself, but there is no accidents in death, and no escape from death. I think this guy might actually be Death. He tells Alex that he cheated death once and that death is coming for him and everyone else who survived. The guy tells Alex not to "fuck with that mac daddy," meaning the grim reaper.
Alex tells Claire at a coffee shop about the butterfly effect and what it has to do with Todd's death. He shows her his scrap of paper. She says he's crazy. He has a vision of a bus in a window reflection. Carter and his girlfriend are driving by, listening to Nine Inch Nails. Claire tells Alex that she doesn't believe him. Billy is riding his bike nearby too. Carter hits a u-ie and knocks Billy off his bike. He hops out and goes to confront Alex. Mrs. Luten is there too. Carter's girlfriend is the voice of reason. She then gets hit by a bus and everyone gets covered with blood.
Everyone drinks some alka-seltzer. Claire calls Alex but he ignores her call. He has somethings he has to understand before he can talk to her. The news report shows a seating chart that shows the path of the explosion. Everyone is dying in order. Ms. Lewton is next.
Ms. Lewton is having a breakdown. She is blaming herself for the kids' death. She calls the FBI because Alex is chillin outside her house making sure she doesnt die. Alex is inspecting her car. The agents show up and he tells them the truth about why he's there but they take him into custody.
A light breeze enters Ms. Lewton's house. Down at the station, Alex is telling the FBI about the pattern. Ms. Lewton digs out an old record, her mom's favorite John Denver compilation. Alex tells the FBI that he's going to break the pattern. Ms. Lewton sees the same dark, shadowy figure that Todd saw. She starts to make some tea. Her gas stove's ignition goes out but the gas keeps running. She lights a match to relight it, and it relights safely. The FBI thinks Alex is killing off people. The tea is done and Ms. Lewton pours herself a mug. She freaks out and throws the tea on the ground. She then starts filling the mug with vodka and ice. The mug cracks and vodka slowly starts leaking from it. She sets the mug on top of her computer monitor where it pours down into the electronics causing it to short and smoke. It explodes, a shard of glass from the screen stabs her in the throat. She slips on her blood and makes her record slip. Her computer ignites the spilled vodka which then lights her entire kitchen on fire. Ms. Lewton tugs at a towel but the towel is attached to some kitchen knives which topple and kill her. Alex runs in, trying to save her, when the oven explodes and
Alex's footprints and fingerprints end up in Ms. Lewton's house. Billy sees Alex escape right before it explodes.
That night Carter tries to run Billy over by the eagle memorial. Claire shows up there too. Carter is carving his girlfriend's name into the wall. Apparently Claire invited the two of them to the statue so they could see Alex and find out who's next. They drive to the city. Carter has terrible taste in music.
They end up at the crash site and start searching for Alex. He is just sitting on the beach, contemplating crazy things. Claire tells Alex that her parents died, her dad in a botched robbery and her mother abandoned her. Claire believes the afterlife is just like this life except everyone has a second chance.
They all start driving to Claire's cabin. Alex reveals to them that he knows the pattern. Billy is concerned about football. Carter resigns to death and starts speeding and running stop signs. Everyone tries to talk Carter out of killing them all. Alex has a premonition about the seatbelt breaking. Alex has a premonition of a train hitting them. Carter stops on the train tracks as a train approaches. Everyone runs except for Carter. They try to talk him out of letting himself get hit by a train. He decides to go but his car wont start. The black shadow locks Carter's doors. Alex cuts his seatbelt and drags him to safety as the train slams into the car. A sheet of sheet metal breaks off the car. Billy is screaming at Carter about how he's next when a the sheet metal decapitates him. Gross. This breaks the pattern and Alex realizes how he can cheat death. He believes he's saved Carter permanently.
Claire and Alex hide out in her father's cabin and start childproofing it. Alex has a very safe way of eating food: Only Tuna. A very tense scene where he eats the tuna occurs. The breeze blows into the cabin and Death knocks over his trash bag, making a can of tuna hit a fishing pole that opens a door. Death tries to kill him via tetanus but Alex is having none of it.
Back at home, Claire looks at pictures of her father and decides to turn Alex in. Alex figures out that Claire is actually the one who is next, not him. A thunderstorm starts causing havoc at Claire's. The police show up at the cabin and Alex starts canoeing across a lake. Claire lights a candle because the power is out. She is afraid her dog is going to get electrocuted while the black shadow makes its way toward her, blowing the candle out. The police are right on Alex's tail as he gets out of the canoe on the other side of the lake. They manhunt through the woods as Claire tries to save her dog. A big metal thing stabs itself into a pool.
Alex falls down a hill and almost impales himself on a spikey stick. The pool breaks, leaving Claire in a puddle of water. The powerline falls into the water but she manages to narrowly escape to the safety of her porch lattice. A tree falls on Alex, trapping him facedown in a puddle. Claire tries to climb to her bedroom window but her gutters aren't safe. Alex manages to fight his way out of the puddle as Claire slowly powers her way up, breaking the window and climbing into her house. All her electric things are exploding as she gets in her car. The powerline is trying to bash its way through the garage door. The garage door opener falls and traps her car there. A can of turpentine falls. The powerline falls on the car, killing its alternator. Alex arrives and tells her that as long as she doesnt touch anything she's safe.
I swear this movie exists just to make it difficult for me to liveblog it. Alex tries to hit the power line off of Claire's car using a shovel but the shovel flies out of his hands and hits a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher activates and flies under Claire's car. A thing falls and ignites the turpentine which is flowing in a line directly to the fire extinguisher. Alex tells Claire the car's going to explode. Alex is going to kill himself so death skips Claire. He grabs the power line and Clare jumps out. The car explodes, knocking Alex loose of the electricity. He's not breathing.
Six months later, a plane lands in France. on board is Carter, Claire, AND ALEX. They finally flew to France, now that death is off their back. Eating dinner in a cafe, they share a beer in the memory of their fallen friends. They're going to live a full life now but Alex is still obsessing over the design. Alex hears someone sing a John Denver song and starts to notice things going wrong. Alex is positive he is next now. Claire has a vision of a bus hitting Alex and she calls out to him.He stops short and bus narrowly misses, although it slams into a big neon sign. The sign swings free and heads down to kill Alex, but Carter tackles him. The design has circled around though and the sign slams into Carter, killing him and ending the movie.
How I Felt
Its a refreshing change of pace from 80s slasher movies I think. The pacing is good, the plot, nonsensical as it is, is still internally consistent, cool stuff happens. I think its kind of sad that all that makes a movie good for me after watching the Friday films is internal consistency and a pacing good enough to keep my attention. Jason has slashed my standards.
Sequel
2, 3, and The are left. I've seen 2 but seeing as a ton of stuff that i thought happened in 2 (the clothesline, the knives, the decapitation) happened in 1, i don't think i remember it very clearly. I've been meaning to watch 3 and The for a little while now, seems like now is as good a time as any right.
Well, I decided that after like two month or whatever of watching 80s slasher films I wanted to bring something from this millennium. Jason X doesn't count. I've seen this movie before and am familiar with the basic plot: Kid escapes plane crash, death seeks revenge. I've also seen Final Destination 2 which I remember being a lot better if only because it was a lot gorier. I'm terrified im going to end up comparing this unfavorably to Friday the Thirteenth, but i guess if i do, who cares? Its just Final Destination.
What I Got:
Alex is getting ready for his senior class trip to Paris. At the airport, we meet some of Alex's classmates. He has some premonitions about death that seem really stupid. He has a lot of premonitions that are all really stupid. He gets on the plane and starts freaking out. He trades seats with these girls and then his tray table breaks. After the shortest runway delay in the history of airports, they take off. His friend Todd is really annoying. There is some turbulence and he freaks out a little more. There is some more turbulence and the entire plane starts freaking out. The oxygen masks drop and the plane is tailspinning. An engine blows, dragging half the cabin wall with it. People are getting sucked through the breach and eventually the plane explodes. But it turns out its all a dream.
He's still on the plane and the girls just asked him whether he would trade seats. He freaks out because he just saw everyone die. They drag him off the plane along with a guy who tried to beat him up for freaking out, that guy's girlfriend, Todd, a weird girl, Seann William Scott, and a female teacher. They all start fighting because they missed the flight. The plane blows up out the window and shatters a bunch of glass. Alex was right after all and he saved all of their lives. His other classmates however, all dead.
Everyone thinks he's a witch except for the weird girl, who i suspect is a witch. Some FBI agents come and interrogate them. They think Alex was on drugs. The weird girl, Claire, says she got off the plane because she believed Alex's insane screaming.
Everyone's parents arrive at the airport except Claire's. Alex's parents give her a ride home. The news says that there were no survivors. All 287 passengers assumed dead. Lightning strikes his lawn outside his house.
A month later at a remembrance ceremony, they unveil a big ol eagle statue. People walk up and put roses on it. The guy who fought him tells him that he's never going to die. Seann William Scott's character Billy tells Alex that he passed his driver's test and asks Alex whether he's going to die and whether he's going to get rejected by a girl because he thinks Alex is a psychic. The teacher, Ms. Lootman i think, says Alex scares her. Todd hasnt talked to Alex in a long while because his dad hates Alex for not saving his other son. Claire gives Alex a rose and a photographer takes a picture of it. Todd reads a poem about death.
That night Todd looks at himself in the mirror. A light breeze blows through the window. He closes it and the breeze continues to blow. The breeze shuts the door on him. Todd sits on the toilet and the breeze starts to make a valve leak.
Meanwhile Alex is obsessively studying plane crashes, searching for meaning as a way to cope with such a senseless act. He then pulls out an issue of Penthouse, another way to cope I guess.
Back at Todd's house, he cuts himself shaving. The leaking water creeps towards him as a black, shadowy mass grows behind him. He starts plucking his nose hair as the water gets closer. He plugs in a radio, which starts playing a John Denver song, so he unplugs it. The outlet sparks.
Alex is looking listlessly at his Penthouse when an owl flies into his window. He throws the Penthouse at it. The magazine lands in a fan which shreds its pages. A piece that says "TOD" lands on his lap.
Todd is looking at underwear hanging on a clotheslines in his bathtub. The water is creeping closer. He slips, snagging his neck on the clothesline. It snaps and starts to strangle him. He reaches for his nose hair scissors but the more he struggles the more the line tightens. He fights to get to his feet, but finds no traction in the tub. He succumbs to the grave as the water retreats back into the valve.
Alex is jogging to Todd's house when he sees the coroner's van and a bunch of police cars. Claire is there too. Todd's parents think Todd killed himself because of Alex. Alex knows thats crazy. The FBI agents investigating Alex look at him curiously. Claire has disappeared.
In the daytime, Alex looks at a maple leaf. He is at Claire's house, asking her why she was at Todd's house. She tells him why the FBI agents were there. He asks her again why she was there. She shows him some art, a depiction of him. She says that she is emotionally linked to him and felt his vision. She thinks there's still an emotional bond between them and that she knows that Alex is still having premonitions. Alex tells her his theory that there's something after all the kids who got off the plane.
They sneak into a funeral home to ogle Todd's corpse. Todd's arm moves. A guy shows up. The guy tells them that he's still spasming. He tells Alex that Todd did not kill himself, but there is no accidents in death, and no escape from death. I think this guy might actually be Death. He tells Alex that he cheated death once and that death is coming for him and everyone else who survived. The guy tells Alex not to "fuck with that mac daddy," meaning the grim reaper.
Alex tells Claire at a coffee shop about the butterfly effect and what it has to do with Todd's death. He shows her his scrap of paper. She says he's crazy. He has a vision of a bus in a window reflection. Carter and his girlfriend are driving by, listening to Nine Inch Nails. Claire tells Alex that she doesn't believe him. Billy is riding his bike nearby too. Carter hits a u-ie and knocks Billy off his bike. He hops out and goes to confront Alex. Mrs. Luten is there too. Carter's girlfriend is the voice of reason. She then gets hit by a bus and everyone gets covered with blood.
Everyone drinks some alka-seltzer. Claire calls Alex but he ignores her call. He has somethings he has to understand before he can talk to her. The news report shows a seating chart that shows the path of the explosion. Everyone is dying in order. Ms. Lewton is next.
Ms. Lewton is having a breakdown. She is blaming herself for the kids' death. She calls the FBI because Alex is chillin outside her house making sure she doesnt die. Alex is inspecting her car. The agents show up and he tells them the truth about why he's there but they take him into custody.
A light breeze enters Ms. Lewton's house. Down at the station, Alex is telling the FBI about the pattern. Ms. Lewton digs out an old record, her mom's favorite John Denver compilation. Alex tells the FBI that he's going to break the pattern. Ms. Lewton sees the same dark, shadowy figure that Todd saw. She starts to make some tea. Her gas stove's ignition goes out but the gas keeps running. She lights a match to relight it, and it relights safely. The FBI thinks Alex is killing off people. The tea is done and Ms. Lewton pours herself a mug. She freaks out and throws the tea on the ground. She then starts filling the mug with vodka and ice. The mug cracks and vodka slowly starts leaking from it. She sets the mug on top of her computer monitor where it pours down into the electronics causing it to short and smoke. It explodes, a shard of glass from the screen stabs her in the throat. She slips on her blood and makes her record slip. Her computer ignites the spilled vodka which then lights her entire kitchen on fire. Ms. Lewton tugs at a towel but the towel is attached to some kitchen knives which topple and kill her. Alex runs in, trying to save her, when the oven explodes and
Alex's footprints and fingerprints end up in Ms. Lewton's house. Billy sees Alex escape right before it explodes.
That night Carter tries to run Billy over by the eagle memorial. Claire shows up there too. Carter is carving his girlfriend's name into the wall. Apparently Claire invited the two of them to the statue so they could see Alex and find out who's next. They drive to the city. Carter has terrible taste in music.
They end up at the crash site and start searching for Alex. He is just sitting on the beach, contemplating crazy things. Claire tells Alex that her parents died, her dad in a botched robbery and her mother abandoned her. Claire believes the afterlife is just like this life except everyone has a second chance.
They all start driving to Claire's cabin. Alex reveals to them that he knows the pattern. Billy is concerned about football. Carter resigns to death and starts speeding and running stop signs. Everyone tries to talk Carter out of killing them all. Alex has a premonition about the seatbelt breaking. Alex has a premonition of a train hitting them. Carter stops on the train tracks as a train approaches. Everyone runs except for Carter. They try to talk him out of letting himself get hit by a train. He decides to go but his car wont start. The black shadow locks Carter's doors. Alex cuts his seatbelt and drags him to safety as the train slams into the car. A sheet of sheet metal breaks off the car. Billy is screaming at Carter about how he's next when a the sheet metal decapitates him. Gross. This breaks the pattern and Alex realizes how he can cheat death. He believes he's saved Carter permanently.
Claire and Alex hide out in her father's cabin and start childproofing it. Alex has a very safe way of eating food: Only Tuna. A very tense scene where he eats the tuna occurs. The breeze blows into the cabin and Death knocks over his trash bag, making a can of tuna hit a fishing pole that opens a door. Death tries to kill him via tetanus but Alex is having none of it.
Back at home, Claire looks at pictures of her father and decides to turn Alex in. Alex figures out that Claire is actually the one who is next, not him. A thunderstorm starts causing havoc at Claire's. The police show up at the cabin and Alex starts canoeing across a lake. Claire lights a candle because the power is out. She is afraid her dog is going to get electrocuted while the black shadow makes its way toward her, blowing the candle out. The police are right on Alex's tail as he gets out of the canoe on the other side of the lake. They manhunt through the woods as Claire tries to save her dog. A big metal thing stabs itself into a pool.
Alex falls down a hill and almost impales himself on a spikey stick. The pool breaks, leaving Claire in a puddle of water. The powerline falls into the water but she manages to narrowly escape to the safety of her porch lattice. A tree falls on Alex, trapping him facedown in a puddle. Claire tries to climb to her bedroom window but her gutters aren't safe. Alex manages to fight his way out of the puddle as Claire slowly powers her way up, breaking the window and climbing into her house. All her electric things are exploding as she gets in her car. The powerline is trying to bash its way through the garage door. The garage door opener falls and traps her car there. A can of turpentine falls. The powerline falls on the car, killing its alternator. Alex arrives and tells her that as long as she doesnt touch anything she's safe.
I swear this movie exists just to make it difficult for me to liveblog it. Alex tries to hit the power line off of Claire's car using a shovel but the shovel flies out of his hands and hits a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher activates and flies under Claire's car. A thing falls and ignites the turpentine which is flowing in a line directly to the fire extinguisher. Alex tells Claire the car's going to explode. Alex is going to kill himself so death skips Claire. He grabs the power line and Clare jumps out. The car explodes, knocking Alex loose of the electricity. He's not breathing.
Six months later, a plane lands in France. on board is Carter, Claire, AND ALEX. They finally flew to France, now that death is off their back. Eating dinner in a cafe, they share a beer in the memory of their fallen friends. They're going to live a full life now but Alex is still obsessing over the design. Alex hears someone sing a John Denver song and starts to notice things going wrong. Alex is positive he is next now. Claire has a vision of a bus hitting Alex and she calls out to him.He stops short and bus narrowly misses, although it slams into a big neon sign. The sign swings free and heads down to kill Alex, but Carter tackles him. The design has circled around though and the sign slams into Carter, killing him and ending the movie.
How I Felt
Its a refreshing change of pace from 80s slasher movies I think. The pacing is good, the plot, nonsensical as it is, is still internally consistent, cool stuff happens. I think its kind of sad that all that makes a movie good for me after watching the Friday films is internal consistency and a pacing good enough to keep my attention. Jason has slashed my standards.
Sequel
2, 3, and The are left. I've seen 2 but seeing as a ton of stuff that i thought happened in 2 (the clothesline, the knives, the decapitation) happened in 1, i don't think i remember it very clearly. I've been meaning to watch 3 and The for a little while now, seems like now is as good a time as any right.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Jason X (2001)
What I Knew:
I've seen this one before, though its all a blur. I think Jason is on a space station and he uses one girl to beat another girl to death. I remember it being very tolerable so i'm kind of looking forward to it. Really, i'm looking forward to anything after Jason Goes to Hell. I hope there's a call back to "Does he think i'm a farthead?" in this one.
What I Got:
Hell. This film begins in hell. The title card says JAXON. Hell is apparently inside of this guy's eyeball, judging from that cut. Oh, Kane Hodder (the Jason from the previous few movies) is reprising the role eight years later. That's pretty cool. Something to look forward to, i guess, since Kane is a pretty imposing bro.
At the Crystal Lake Research Facility, Jason Voorhees is apparently alive and not in hell and chained up. He of course is wearing his mask. A lone guard is guarding him. He approaches to cover Jason's face because he is creeping him out.
Jason is going to be frozen but a guy wants Jason soft to move him to Scranton. A hot doctor thinks thats stupid. Its none of her concern now. The doctor and a cadre of soldiers take the hood off Jason's face, but it turns out that the guard is under it. Jason is free. He kills everyone except the hot doctor. The hot doctor grabs a shotgun and tries to hide. Jason stalks her into a science room that is making a hissing noise. She shoots him into a pod thing and freezes him. Jason stabs his machete through the pod door, stabbing the hot doctor and making the whole science room freeze.
In the fairly distant future a group of folks are exploring the old Crystal Lake Research Facility. They stumble into the cryo room. There's a cyborg encyclopedia with them. The open the door to Jason's pod. He is still frozen and intact. They also find the hot doctor who they can save. Jason, still frozen, falls and slices a kid's arm off. The group of folks take Jason and the hot doctor to a spaceship that looks exactly like Jason's mask.
The ship is apparently a marine corps vessel. They fly the USS Jason to a space station where they begin to bring the woman back to life. The kid without an arm's arm is growing back. The people in the ground party were apparently Space Medical University students. They use some kind of technology to reattach armless bro's arm all the way.
They take off Hot Doctor's clothes and start reanimating her. They check if Jason is able to come back. He has a tiny brain and a big dick. They use the arm reattach thing to bring hot doctor back and start ripping out Jason's eyeballs. The arm reattach thing is a system called "ants," lil nanobots apparently that cover a surface and start repairing tissue. Hot doctor revives and punches a dude. She finds out she is in the year 2455. The ship is called Grendel.
The guy she punched, apparently some kind of professor, calls his boss to tell him there are two 455 year old bodies on his ship. Tons of people have been reanimated. He wants to charge people to look at the bodies, but his boss thinks its a bad idea, but selling Jason Voorhees could net him a huge income. He is excited
The space coroner is sawing away at Jason's mask. Jason bleeds a black, viscous liquid. Definitely not blood. Meanwhile the professor is having weird femdom sex with one of his students, a guy is attaching nipples to the android, an annoying couple is having sex, and Jason is beginning to move around. Jason sits up and kills the coroner by pushing her face into liquid nitrogen and then shattering it against a counter. Jason finds a future machete and begins stalking the space station.
The professor brought the hot doctor some food and told her that Earth is dead. She tells the professor that Jason can't die. The professor introduces her to the students and lets her know that Jason is stowed on board. She freaks out and they discover the coroner's corpse. Jason shows up in the sexing couple's room, kills and kidnaps the guy. The girl stumbles, bloodsoaked into the rest of the gang and tells them that her boyfriend is dead. The marines assemble and load up on guns. There is going to be nothing left of Jason by the time they reach Solaris, according to the sergeant.
Some kids are playing Doom when Jason shows up and kills them but it turns out they are simulations of people. When the simulation ends its just two kids in a room with Jason. One of them shoots Jason while one jumps on his back. Jason breaks the guy on his back in half and then slaps the other one into a wall.
The professor offers to pay the sergeant $500,000 if he brings Jason back alive. The sergeant agrees and makes sure one of his marines has a BFG. I'm not making a joke there or whatever, he says "Do you have the BFG?" This movie is Doomier than Doom was. Behind the professor's back, the sergeant says to just kill him. The marines find the corpses of the video gamers and track Jason to the cargo bay.
At his rainy day craft table in the cargo bay, the ship engineer is listening to some tunes and putting together some puzzles. Maybe they are Gundam models. Jason nearly kills him when the marines light him up and also tear apart the rain day craft table. Rest in peace, fair gundams. Jason has disappeared. The marines fan out and search for him.
That proves to be a bad idea as Jason snaps a bro's neck. Another guy tries to have a karate fight with Jason, but he just shoves him onto a big screw where he spins down to the bottom. When the other marines find him, they say he's screwed. LOL. They find the other marine and everyone starts panicking. He slits one marine's throat. She doesnt die though and stumbles gurgling towards her teammates. One marine opens fire at him with his miniature chaingun and picks him up using a crane. After the guy reports Jason as dead, Jason climbs off the crane and slices him in half. As the sergeant approaches, he sees his last marine dangling from the crane. The sergeant is the only one left. Jason stabs him twice in the stomach.
The professor is lying to his students now and they are all waiting in one room for Jason to come and kill them. The engineer shows up in the lab with the students. The pilot sends them to land at the Solaris station, but Jason kills him. They crash into the Solaris and mostly destroy it. They do that Star Trek thing where the camera shakes and everyone holds onto a bit of the set. Solaris then explodes. They are stranded.
They are stranded with no propulsion and limited life support. Jason starts breaking down the lab door but quickly gets bored. He crashed through the lab window and everyone runs. They're actually keeping together which is a refreshing change of pace for the Friday movies. The professor tries to sell Jason on the idea of being celebrities. Jason just wants his machete back. "Guys, its okay he just wanted his machete back." The professor then gets macheted.
The survivors try to formulate an escape. They decide to use the docking shuttle. The android and her programmer go to a different room and kiss. Definitely creepy. They grab a bunch of guns. The engineer and the other male character go to the bridge to start the launch procedure. The others head towards the shuttle bay. The hot doctor finds a gun and goes on the hunt for Jason.
The engineer and bro find the bridge and see the pilot's corpse vivisected and scattered around the bridge. Gross. Hot doctor finds the sergeant in the cargo bay. He's not all the way dead. Gross. Hot doctor promises that she'll get help. The male bro in the bridge leaves the engineer alone to go help. When he arrives, the sergeant's body disappeared and the engineer gets fried. One of the girls has locked herself on the shuttle and wont let the people in. She takes off on her own but sucks at flying and just crashes the shuttle into the ship. They're trapped now, except the android shows up wearing bondage gear and wielding mad guns. Jason just stabs her in the stomach. Jason thinks she's dead but she's just playing android possum and blows him into the next room. She chases him, filling him with bullets all the way. She kicks him in the groin and he falls down. She hops on top, yells "giddy up," and gets shot in the face. Jason has her cornered when the sergeant reappears and stabs him in the back. She gets up and shoots Jason through a wall and then blows off his leg and his head. She stabs him in the chest with his own machete and the nightmare is over... OR IS IT.
They start patching the sergeant up when the ship begins shaking. The ship is dying, but a rescue ship is 45 minutes away. The ship's core is going to explode in 30 minutes. The male student tells the rescue ship not to bother. Hot doctor comes up with a good idea to separate the combat bridge or something and the rescue ship is continuing on its vector.
Jason starts to get healed by those nanobot things. The students set some c4 charges to blow one of the pontoons away so they can survive the core explosion. Jason, now mostly made out of metal, arrives. The android opens fire and starts fighting, but Jason no-sells and punches her head clean off her body. The male character blows the charges and sends Jason into space with the pontoon and the android's body and himself. The rescue ship shows up just in time. Jason punches through the airlock and sucks the last female student out into the vacuum. Its just the sergeant, hot doctor, the android's head, and the programmer left. The escape shuttle attaches but the escape doors wont open. The sergeant goes EVA and Jason goes IVA.
The programmer and hot doctor decide to buy the sergeant some time by throwing Jason a surprise party. The programmer wires his robot girlfriend into the mainframe. Jason makes it into the holodeck. They run a Camp Crystal Lake simulation. They spawn some naked girls in sleeping bags. Jason beats one girl to death by smashing her with another girl in a sleeping bag, and then slamming the second girl into a tree.
The escape hatch opens and they run into the rescue boat, slamming the door on Jason just in time. Just the sergeant and Jason remain on the ship and start fighting each other as the ship catastrophically explodes. Jason's body launches at the rescue ship, but the sergeant tackles him and they hurtle towards Earth-2, incinerating in the atmosphere and crashing into Camp Crystal Lake-2. Some campers decide to investigate. OH NOT AGAIN!
How I Felt:
So this was the fourth best Friday movie which really, really, really isnt saying much. Its almost the right amount of stupid and campy and violent but they overshoot their mark a few times and enter the realm of "silly at best and unwatchable at worst." They're clearly going for a Doom meets Alien meets Friday vibe, which makes sense and should be exactly what they are aiming for with this style movie, but unfortunately they land often on none of the above. Its not terrible and the special effects are dated but okay for CG, so really its a perfectly mediocre film, which again makes it stand leaps and bounds ahead of Fridays 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 and edges seven pretty far out of contention.
Sequel:
I figure now that i've seen all the Friday the 13th movies i have the right to say how i feel about them and this is the perfect space in my opinion. I'd say that, taken as a whole 15 hour long series, these movies are absolutely horrible. The redeeming aspects of the few good, "good," films is vastly overwhelmed by the bad bad bad bad badness of the greater-in-number bad films. If i was forced to rank them from best to worst, i'd probably say 1, 4, 5, X, 7, 2, 8, 3, 9, 6. The Alice Hardy and Tommy Jarvis movies (1, the first act of 2, 4, 5, and 6) show the most potential for being quality. They both have protagonists we care about in situations that feel familiar enough to relate to acting (mostly) like real people. I think anyone who watches 1 is rooting for Alice to take out Mrs. Voorhees and 4, 5, and 6 for Tommy to put an end to his nemesis once and for all. Its a shame 6 opts for poor meta-humor and "sly" winks-and-nods at its own expense. "Does he think I'm a farthead????"
More than anything in this new series of Friday the 13th movies, I want Tommy Jarvis. I want an adult Corey Feldman in the role he was born to play. Maybe cross it over with the Lost Boys franchise and have the Brothers Frogg show up in Crystal Lake to fend off Jason. I just want more Corey Feldman. All Feldman, All the Time.
In my opinion, the worst Friday movies were the ones that either tried to establish additional continuity (his backstory in 2, him being a lil lizard dude in 9) and the ones that ignored previous continuity (Mrs. Voorhees coming back as a zombie in 3, Jason being able to teleport in all of them post-6, Crystal Lake changing location like a million times in the later films). There's enough established in Friday 1 where you didnt need the overexplanation of 2 and you dont need Jason to be magically retconned in 6. Jason can show up in 2 and just be a full-sized killing machine and there's no need to explain, no need to say "he was a swamp mutant who lived in the lake and loved his mother very much," no need to show his face. Just say, "He's Jason Voorhees, he wants to kill people, he does kill people, nothing can stop him." And never, ever show his face. Jason without his mask is just a dumb idea. Any masked monster without their mask is a bad idea. It humanizes them, shows them not as unstoppable killing machines like Jason or Michael Myers, but as people like you or I. Makes them seem like they have emotions and I don't know about you, but emotions don't terrify me as much as an absolute cold lack of them.
If you ask me, Friday 1 is classic, a must-see. 4 and 5 are excellent if you are into a very specific kind of campy, funny, violent movie. I guess if you enjoy Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman, 4 is a must-see and 5 is just a solid follow up. Avoid 3, 6, 8, and 9 like the plague. They don't add anything to the canon and only take away.
So next on the campy 80s horror docket is the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, culminating with Freddie Vs. Jason. Then the remakes!
I've seen this one before, though its all a blur. I think Jason is on a space station and he uses one girl to beat another girl to death. I remember it being very tolerable so i'm kind of looking forward to it. Really, i'm looking forward to anything after Jason Goes to Hell. I hope there's a call back to "Does he think i'm a farthead?" in this one.
What I Got:
Hell. This film begins in hell. The title card says JAXON. Hell is apparently inside of this guy's eyeball, judging from that cut. Oh, Kane Hodder (the Jason from the previous few movies) is reprising the role eight years later. That's pretty cool. Something to look forward to, i guess, since Kane is a pretty imposing bro.
At the Crystal Lake Research Facility, Jason Voorhees is apparently alive and not in hell and chained up. He of course is wearing his mask. A lone guard is guarding him. He approaches to cover Jason's face because he is creeping him out.
Jason is going to be frozen but a guy wants Jason soft to move him to Scranton. A hot doctor thinks thats stupid. Its none of her concern now. The doctor and a cadre of soldiers take the hood off Jason's face, but it turns out that the guard is under it. Jason is free. He kills everyone except the hot doctor. The hot doctor grabs a shotgun and tries to hide. Jason stalks her into a science room that is making a hissing noise. She shoots him into a pod thing and freezes him. Jason stabs his machete through the pod door, stabbing the hot doctor and making the whole science room freeze.
In the fairly distant future a group of folks are exploring the old Crystal Lake Research Facility. They stumble into the cryo room. There's a cyborg encyclopedia with them. The open the door to Jason's pod. He is still frozen and intact. They also find the hot doctor who they can save. Jason, still frozen, falls and slices a kid's arm off. The group of folks take Jason and the hot doctor to a spaceship that looks exactly like Jason's mask.
The ship is apparently a marine corps vessel. They fly the USS Jason to a space station where they begin to bring the woman back to life. The kid without an arm's arm is growing back. The people in the ground party were apparently Space Medical University students. They use some kind of technology to reattach armless bro's arm all the way.
They take off Hot Doctor's clothes and start reanimating her. They check if Jason is able to come back. He has a tiny brain and a big dick. They use the arm reattach thing to bring hot doctor back and start ripping out Jason's eyeballs. The arm reattach thing is a system called "ants," lil nanobots apparently that cover a surface and start repairing tissue. Hot doctor revives and punches a dude. She finds out she is in the year 2455. The ship is called Grendel.
The guy she punched, apparently some kind of professor, calls his boss to tell him there are two 455 year old bodies on his ship. Tons of people have been reanimated. He wants to charge people to look at the bodies, but his boss thinks its a bad idea, but selling Jason Voorhees could net him a huge income. He is excited
The space coroner is sawing away at Jason's mask. Jason bleeds a black, viscous liquid. Definitely not blood. Meanwhile the professor is having weird femdom sex with one of his students, a guy is attaching nipples to the android, an annoying couple is having sex, and Jason is beginning to move around. Jason sits up and kills the coroner by pushing her face into liquid nitrogen and then shattering it against a counter. Jason finds a future machete and begins stalking the space station.
The professor brought the hot doctor some food and told her that Earth is dead. She tells the professor that Jason can't die. The professor introduces her to the students and lets her know that Jason is stowed on board. She freaks out and they discover the coroner's corpse. Jason shows up in the sexing couple's room, kills and kidnaps the guy. The girl stumbles, bloodsoaked into the rest of the gang and tells them that her boyfriend is dead. The marines assemble and load up on guns. There is going to be nothing left of Jason by the time they reach Solaris, according to the sergeant.
Some kids are playing Doom when Jason shows up and kills them but it turns out they are simulations of people. When the simulation ends its just two kids in a room with Jason. One of them shoots Jason while one jumps on his back. Jason breaks the guy on his back in half and then slaps the other one into a wall.
The professor offers to pay the sergeant $500,000 if he brings Jason back alive. The sergeant agrees and makes sure one of his marines has a BFG. I'm not making a joke there or whatever, he says "Do you have the BFG?" This movie is Doomier than Doom was. Behind the professor's back, the sergeant says to just kill him. The marines find the corpses of the video gamers and track Jason to the cargo bay.
At his rainy day craft table in the cargo bay, the ship engineer is listening to some tunes and putting together some puzzles. Maybe they are Gundam models. Jason nearly kills him when the marines light him up and also tear apart the rain day craft table. Rest in peace, fair gundams. Jason has disappeared. The marines fan out and search for him.
That proves to be a bad idea as Jason snaps a bro's neck. Another guy tries to have a karate fight with Jason, but he just shoves him onto a big screw where he spins down to the bottom. When the other marines find him, they say he's screwed. LOL. They find the other marine and everyone starts panicking. He slits one marine's throat. She doesnt die though and stumbles gurgling towards her teammates. One marine opens fire at him with his miniature chaingun and picks him up using a crane. After the guy reports Jason as dead, Jason climbs off the crane and slices him in half. As the sergeant approaches, he sees his last marine dangling from the crane. The sergeant is the only one left. Jason stabs him twice in the stomach.
The professor is lying to his students now and they are all waiting in one room for Jason to come and kill them. The engineer shows up in the lab with the students. The pilot sends them to land at the Solaris station, but Jason kills him. They crash into the Solaris and mostly destroy it. They do that Star Trek thing where the camera shakes and everyone holds onto a bit of the set. Solaris then explodes. They are stranded.
They are stranded with no propulsion and limited life support. Jason starts breaking down the lab door but quickly gets bored. He crashed through the lab window and everyone runs. They're actually keeping together which is a refreshing change of pace for the Friday movies. The professor tries to sell Jason on the idea of being celebrities. Jason just wants his machete back. "Guys, its okay he just wanted his machete back." The professor then gets macheted.
The survivors try to formulate an escape. They decide to use the docking shuttle. The android and her programmer go to a different room and kiss. Definitely creepy. They grab a bunch of guns. The engineer and the other male character go to the bridge to start the launch procedure. The others head towards the shuttle bay. The hot doctor finds a gun and goes on the hunt for Jason.
The engineer and bro find the bridge and see the pilot's corpse vivisected and scattered around the bridge. Gross. Hot doctor finds the sergeant in the cargo bay. He's not all the way dead. Gross. Hot doctor promises that she'll get help. The male bro in the bridge leaves the engineer alone to go help. When he arrives, the sergeant's body disappeared and the engineer gets fried. One of the girls has locked herself on the shuttle and wont let the people in. She takes off on her own but sucks at flying and just crashes the shuttle into the ship. They're trapped now, except the android shows up wearing bondage gear and wielding mad guns. Jason just stabs her in the stomach. Jason thinks she's dead but she's just playing android possum and blows him into the next room. She chases him, filling him with bullets all the way. She kicks him in the groin and he falls down. She hops on top, yells "giddy up," and gets shot in the face. Jason has her cornered when the sergeant reappears and stabs him in the back. She gets up and shoots Jason through a wall and then blows off his leg and his head. She stabs him in the chest with his own machete and the nightmare is over... OR IS IT.
They start patching the sergeant up when the ship begins shaking. The ship is dying, but a rescue ship is 45 minutes away. The ship's core is going to explode in 30 minutes. The male student tells the rescue ship not to bother. Hot doctor comes up with a good idea to separate the combat bridge or something and the rescue ship is continuing on its vector.
Jason starts to get healed by those nanobot things. The students set some c4 charges to blow one of the pontoons away so they can survive the core explosion. Jason, now mostly made out of metal, arrives. The android opens fire and starts fighting, but Jason no-sells and punches her head clean off her body. The male character blows the charges and sends Jason into space with the pontoon and the android's body and himself. The rescue ship shows up just in time. Jason punches through the airlock and sucks the last female student out into the vacuum. Its just the sergeant, hot doctor, the android's head, and the programmer left. The escape shuttle attaches but the escape doors wont open. The sergeant goes EVA and Jason goes IVA.
The programmer and hot doctor decide to buy the sergeant some time by throwing Jason a surprise party. The programmer wires his robot girlfriend into the mainframe. Jason makes it into the holodeck. They run a Camp Crystal Lake simulation. They spawn some naked girls in sleeping bags. Jason beats one girl to death by smashing her with another girl in a sleeping bag, and then slamming the second girl into a tree.
The escape hatch opens and they run into the rescue boat, slamming the door on Jason just in time. Just the sergeant and Jason remain on the ship and start fighting each other as the ship catastrophically explodes. Jason's body launches at the rescue ship, but the sergeant tackles him and they hurtle towards Earth-2, incinerating in the atmosphere and crashing into Camp Crystal Lake-2. Some campers decide to investigate. OH NOT AGAIN!
How I Felt:
So this was the fourth best Friday movie which really, really, really isnt saying much. Its almost the right amount of stupid and campy and violent but they overshoot their mark a few times and enter the realm of "silly at best and unwatchable at worst." They're clearly going for a Doom meets Alien meets Friday vibe, which makes sense and should be exactly what they are aiming for with this style movie, but unfortunately they land often on none of the above. Its not terrible and the special effects are dated but okay for CG, so really its a perfectly mediocre film, which again makes it stand leaps and bounds ahead of Fridays 2, 3, 6, 8, 9 and edges seven pretty far out of contention.
Sequel:
I figure now that i've seen all the Friday the 13th movies i have the right to say how i feel about them and this is the perfect space in my opinion. I'd say that, taken as a whole 15 hour long series, these movies are absolutely horrible. The redeeming aspects of the few good, "good," films is vastly overwhelmed by the bad bad bad bad badness of the greater-in-number bad films. If i was forced to rank them from best to worst, i'd probably say 1, 4, 5, X, 7, 2, 8, 3, 9, 6. The Alice Hardy and Tommy Jarvis movies (1, the first act of 2, 4, 5, and 6) show the most potential for being quality. They both have protagonists we care about in situations that feel familiar enough to relate to acting (mostly) like real people. I think anyone who watches 1 is rooting for Alice to take out Mrs. Voorhees and 4, 5, and 6 for Tommy to put an end to his nemesis once and for all. Its a shame 6 opts for poor meta-humor and "sly" winks-and-nods at its own expense. "Does he think I'm a farthead????"
More than anything in this new series of Friday the 13th movies, I want Tommy Jarvis. I want an adult Corey Feldman in the role he was born to play. Maybe cross it over with the Lost Boys franchise and have the Brothers Frogg show up in Crystal Lake to fend off Jason. I just want more Corey Feldman. All Feldman, All the Time.
In my opinion, the worst Friday movies were the ones that either tried to establish additional continuity (his backstory in 2, him being a lil lizard dude in 9) and the ones that ignored previous continuity (Mrs. Voorhees coming back as a zombie in 3, Jason being able to teleport in all of them post-6, Crystal Lake changing location like a million times in the later films). There's enough established in Friday 1 where you didnt need the overexplanation of 2 and you dont need Jason to be magically retconned in 6. Jason can show up in 2 and just be a full-sized killing machine and there's no need to explain, no need to say "he was a swamp mutant who lived in the lake and loved his mother very much," no need to show his face. Just say, "He's Jason Voorhees, he wants to kill people, he does kill people, nothing can stop him." And never, ever show his face. Jason without his mask is just a dumb idea. Any masked monster without their mask is a bad idea. It humanizes them, shows them not as unstoppable killing machines like Jason or Michael Myers, but as people like you or I. Makes them seem like they have emotions and I don't know about you, but emotions don't terrify me as much as an absolute cold lack of them.
If you ask me, Friday 1 is classic, a must-see. 4 and 5 are excellent if you are into a very specific kind of campy, funny, violent movie. I guess if you enjoy Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman, 4 is a must-see and 5 is just a solid follow up. Avoid 3, 6, 8, and 9 like the plague. They don't add anything to the canon and only take away.
So next on the campy 80s horror docket is the A Nightmare on Elm Street series, culminating with Freddie Vs. Jason. Then the remakes!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
What I Knew:
Haha
What I Got:
This sure is the 90s alright. A 91 Toyota convertible is driving to Crystal Lake. I have entirely forgetten how they stopped Jason in the last film. The Toyota pulls up to a house that looks a whole heck of a lot like Tommy Jarvis' house and a young woman in a Mets cap steps out. She blows a lightbulb and goes out to the shed to get some more plus a step ladder. The shed door slams on her, apparently of its own volition.
The woman successfully replaces the light bulb, stows the ladder, shuts the front door, and brushes her teeth. She then starts removing clothing, otherwise this wouldnt be a Friday movie now would it. She starts to run a bath when the power goes out. Wrapping a towel about herself, she goes to investigate. A man in a hockey mask with a machete tries to kill her. She flees from the house, still wearing nothing but a towel that is apparently secured with superglue or maybe roofing nails. Jason follows her at a plodding pace. Finally, she thinks she has lost him, only to have him teleport in front of her. Then some searchlights turn on and a paramilitary force opens fire on Jason. They riddle Jason with lead and then start mortaring him until he literally explodes. Flaming Jason body parts land everywhere.
A black dude is watching the celebrating military from the woods. He doesnt think Jason is truly dead, and indeed his heart is still beating.
Jason's bits get taken to a morgue in Ohio by a black dude. I'm not sure if it was the black dude or not i wasn't really paying attention. Jason's heart is sitting in a separate container from the rest of his body. An autopsy is being performed. Why they didnt do this the first two times he died, I don't understand. Jason's body is steaming. I guess decomposition does that? The coroner begins reassembling him for examination. He is not looking forward to trying to assess a zombie's cause of death. In his professional opinion, "this guy is deader than shit." This movie really has quality written all over it. Jason's heart is dripping water for some reason. Oh right, probably because he drowned four times. It is also filled with a black viscous liquid, something that isnt blood. The heart beats some more and it scares the doctor. The doctor starts to eat it. What. He then vomits up some bile while shards of energy fly from Jason's body into his.
A dorky doctor shows up and starts making fun of Jason. The apparently possessed-doctor stabs him with a metal instrument and mashes his face into some grating. Jason walks out and finds two guards making fun of Jason. Later, a news report says that the two guards and the coroner are dead. It is an America's Most Wanted style profile of Jason Voorhees. Why would people still go to Crystal Lake if they knew how many people were killed by Jason.
The black guy from before, bounty hunter Creighton Duke, is being interviewed about Jason. This interview is apparently trying to address the inconsistency in Jason appearance by saying he is a quantum leaping demon. Duke charges $500k for the capture of Jason. Jason has been cutting a warpath between Ohio and Crystal Lake and Duke is on the trail.
A Crystal Lake diner is having a 2 for 1 hamburger sale in honor of Jason's death. Duke is eating a Voorhees Burger with a side of Jason Fingers. Duke asks the waitress for help in killing Jason. Duke antagonizes the waitress' boyfriend who is also the sheriff. He kicks Duke out of the town. Duke tells the waitress, Diana, that Jason is coming for her and her daughter. Diana tells her daughter Jessica's boyfriend Stephen that there's a secret about Jessica that he doesnt know and to have a secret rendezvous that night.
On his way there, Stephen picks up some hitchhikers on their way to Crystal Lake. They try to talk Stephen into skinny dipping with them. Stephen bails and the three hitchhikers make their way into the woods. After some skinny dipping, they come back to their campsite. One of the girls goes to pee in the woods, while the remaining couple start doing it in a tent. The zombie doctor slashes her up. The girl in the tent goes to pee and barely misses seeing her slashed up friend. The dangers of unprotected sex are detailed. STDs, pregnancy, slashing. Black Doctor Jason stabs the girl with a fence post thought the tent wall and the guy is unceremoniously killed off-screen.
Back in town, Diana is taking some dog food to the dumpster but is scared by a dog. Black Doctor Jason is watching her from the woods. Her sheriff boyfriend's deputy scares her. BDJ kidnaps him, straps him to a table, and starts giving him a shave. Jason is a mad barber now. BDJ then starts eating him. What.
Diana's daughter calls her and tells her that she has a new boyfriend. Her new boyfriend is the America's Most Wanted knockoff host. Jason is now inhabiting the body of the deputy who hangs up the phone and tries to kill Diana. Jessica calls Diana's sheriff boyfriend. White Sheriff Jason sticks his tongue out at Diana and might have licked her if Stephen didnt stop him. WSJ grabs a kitchen knife and stabs Diana. WSJ sees himself in the mirror, giving Stephen just enough time to stab him with a fireplace poker. Diana's dying wish is for Stephen to save Jessica. What is going on. Are we really half way into this movie already?
The sheriff arrives to find Stephen standing over Diana's corpse. WSJ is missing. Stephen is brought into custody.
Jessica returns home to find a a sobbing woman washing Diana's blood out of the carpet. The sobbing woman oggles Jessica's infant daughter, Stephanie. Jessica has been keeping her and Stephen's baby a secret. Jessica doesnt know that Stephen probably killed Diana. Jessica goes to visit the sheriff and a still blood-soaked Stephen sees his baby from a distance.
Duke, also in prison, antagonizes Stephen. I really like Duke. Duke makes Stephen give him his hand. Duke gently caresses it. Duke breaks Stephen's fingers. He tells Stephen that the only way Jason can die is for Jessica to destroy his heart. Duke keeps breaking Stephen's fingers whenever he asks a question. It turns out Diana and Jessica and Stephanie are Voorheeses and only a Voorhees can kill Jason or bring him to life. Stephen breaks out of jail.
Stephen is hiding in the stockroom of the diner fixing his finger when the sobbing girl sticks the baby in a cardboard box. Jason plays with his daughter. A fat guy sees him and gives him his car. Stephen drives out to a big abandoned house. He is attacked by an ironing board. He finds the Necronomicon. Like i think this is the actual Necronomicon from Evil Dead 2. This is blowing my mind. The Evil Dead and Friday the 13th are in the same universe. Stephen hides from it and falls through the floor.
The America's Most Wanted guy shows up and starts trying to scam the American people. He stole Diana's corpse from the morgue and hid it in the Voorhees House as a way to increase ratings. White Sheriff Jason attacks and makes out with the reporter until he takes over his body while the sheriff's body melts. Diana's body falls on Stephen. White Sheriff Bro is hella melty. America's Most Jason is alive and stalking now.
In the second bath scene in the film, Jessica gets sobby and soggy. Jason cuts the power. She sneaks into the garage, gets a hammer and a flashlight. AMJ starts to kill her when Stephen stops AMJ and kidnaps Jessica. Stephen hits AMJ with a car and then backs over him.
A few miles away, Stephen stops the car and explains to Jessica whats happening. She thinks its a ploy to murder her, punches Stephen in the dick, and hijacks the car. Jessica shows up at the sheriff's office and says that Stephen killed America's Most Wanted bro and tried to kill her.
Stephen gets arrested while AMJ storms the police station. He starts making out with Jessica when the sheriff interrupts. AMJ kills him and Jessica starts to run. AMJ and Jessica run into Stephen who steals a cop's gun and shoots the hell out of AMJ. Duke thinks this is hilarious.
Stephen and Jessica take shelter in the diner, where the owner holds him at gunpoint. She sends a fat guy over to the police station. He sees AMJ stalking towards him. In the diner, Jessica tries to wrangle the gun away from the owner but shoots the power out. AMJ throws the fat guy through the door. Jessica and Stephen hide in slow motion. The diner's employees are apparently heavily armed and everyone opens fire at AMJ. The baby is missing with just a note in its place. AMJ sticks a dude's head in the fryer and punches the owner in the face so hard her jaw turns inside out. AMJ grabs Jessica only to get shot by the sobbing girl who then stabs him with a big stick. He then stabs her with the same stick and crushes her skull before dropping dead.
Jessica makes a run for it in a stolen pickup truck. Stephen finds a note from Duke instructing Jessica to come to the Voorhees house alone if she wants her baby. He also finds a machete.
Jessica arrives at the Voorhees house to be met with Duke & Baby. Duke threatens the baby with a knife. He gives the baby back and throws her the knife which turns into a magic knife. Jessica has to kill Jason. Back at the diner, the cops have arrived. They find a ton of corpses, Robert's among them. Robert attacks one of the cops and takes his body. Two cops arrive at the Voorhees house and Duke tells Jessica to kill both of them. She kills the wrong one and he starts to make out with the baby. Stephen slits that guy's throat with a machete. A little baby thing crawls out of the cop's throat and attacks Stephen. What is going on.
Duke has fallen down a hole and so has the little baby dragon Jason thing. Duke gets pulled up to the surface and baby dragon Jason thing rapes Diana's corpse and is reborn as hockey mask Jason.
Duke handcuffs Jason to himself. Jason gives Duke a big hug. The dagger Jessica needs to kill Jason with falls down to the basement. Stephen tackles Jason out a window in order to buy Jessica some time. Jason beats Stephen with a rake. Jessica sticks the baby in an unguarded bassinet and crawls down into the basement, retrieving the dagger.
Stephen hits Jason repeatedly over the head with a shovel until Jason hits him over the head with a shovel and throws him into a jungle gym which he then throws into a tree. Jason then begins to drag stephen around and then throw him.
Jessica manages to run up behind Jason and stab the dagger deep into his chest. Red orbs of light pop out and shoot into the sky. I have a feeling Jason is Going To Hell at the moment. Stephen punches Jason a bunch of times while yelling "GO TO HELL." Some blue lights start shooting into him while a bunch of zombie hands shoot out of the dirt and grab Jason and Stephen, dragging them, presumably, to hell. Jessica saves Stephen but Jason is lost to the sands of hell. Jessica and Stephen kiss. What.
What.
Later they are walking arm in arm around a field that is decidedly not Bergen County, NJ. Jason's mask is uncovered in the dirt by a dog and some wind. Freddy Krueger's hand reaches out and drag's Jason's mask down. What.
How I Felt
Well, this movie undermined all the previous Friday movies by insisting that Jason was not actually a mutant zombie but some kind of lizard dude. So, uh, I guess we've got to give them credit for that.
Sequel
Do I have to :[
Haha
What I Got:
This sure is the 90s alright. A 91 Toyota convertible is driving to Crystal Lake. I have entirely forgetten how they stopped Jason in the last film. The Toyota pulls up to a house that looks a whole heck of a lot like Tommy Jarvis' house and a young woman in a Mets cap steps out. She blows a lightbulb and goes out to the shed to get some more plus a step ladder. The shed door slams on her, apparently of its own volition.
The woman successfully replaces the light bulb, stows the ladder, shuts the front door, and brushes her teeth. She then starts removing clothing, otherwise this wouldnt be a Friday movie now would it. She starts to run a bath when the power goes out. Wrapping a towel about herself, she goes to investigate. A man in a hockey mask with a machete tries to kill her. She flees from the house, still wearing nothing but a towel that is apparently secured with superglue or maybe roofing nails. Jason follows her at a plodding pace. Finally, she thinks she has lost him, only to have him teleport in front of her. Then some searchlights turn on and a paramilitary force opens fire on Jason. They riddle Jason with lead and then start mortaring him until he literally explodes. Flaming Jason body parts land everywhere.
A black dude is watching the celebrating military from the woods. He doesnt think Jason is truly dead, and indeed his heart is still beating.
Jason's bits get taken to a morgue in Ohio by a black dude. I'm not sure if it was the black dude or not i wasn't really paying attention. Jason's heart is sitting in a separate container from the rest of his body. An autopsy is being performed. Why they didnt do this the first two times he died, I don't understand. Jason's body is steaming. I guess decomposition does that? The coroner begins reassembling him for examination. He is not looking forward to trying to assess a zombie's cause of death. In his professional opinion, "this guy is deader than shit." This movie really has quality written all over it. Jason's heart is dripping water for some reason. Oh right, probably because he drowned four times. It is also filled with a black viscous liquid, something that isnt blood. The heart beats some more and it scares the doctor. The doctor starts to eat it. What. He then vomits up some bile while shards of energy fly from Jason's body into his.
A dorky doctor shows up and starts making fun of Jason. The apparently possessed-doctor stabs him with a metal instrument and mashes his face into some grating. Jason walks out and finds two guards making fun of Jason. Later, a news report says that the two guards and the coroner are dead. It is an America's Most Wanted style profile of Jason Voorhees. Why would people still go to Crystal Lake if they knew how many people were killed by Jason.
The black guy from before, bounty hunter Creighton Duke, is being interviewed about Jason. This interview is apparently trying to address the inconsistency in Jason appearance by saying he is a quantum leaping demon. Duke charges $500k for the capture of Jason. Jason has been cutting a warpath between Ohio and Crystal Lake and Duke is on the trail.
A Crystal Lake diner is having a 2 for 1 hamburger sale in honor of Jason's death. Duke is eating a Voorhees Burger with a side of Jason Fingers. Duke asks the waitress for help in killing Jason. Duke antagonizes the waitress' boyfriend who is also the sheriff. He kicks Duke out of the town. Duke tells the waitress, Diana, that Jason is coming for her and her daughter. Diana tells her daughter Jessica's boyfriend Stephen that there's a secret about Jessica that he doesnt know and to have a secret rendezvous that night.
On his way there, Stephen picks up some hitchhikers on their way to Crystal Lake. They try to talk Stephen into skinny dipping with them. Stephen bails and the three hitchhikers make their way into the woods. After some skinny dipping, they come back to their campsite. One of the girls goes to pee in the woods, while the remaining couple start doing it in a tent. The zombie doctor slashes her up. The girl in the tent goes to pee and barely misses seeing her slashed up friend. The dangers of unprotected sex are detailed. STDs, pregnancy, slashing. Black Doctor Jason stabs the girl with a fence post thought the tent wall and the guy is unceremoniously killed off-screen.
Back in town, Diana is taking some dog food to the dumpster but is scared by a dog. Black Doctor Jason is watching her from the woods. Her sheriff boyfriend's deputy scares her. BDJ kidnaps him, straps him to a table, and starts giving him a shave. Jason is a mad barber now. BDJ then starts eating him. What.
Diana's daughter calls her and tells her that she has a new boyfriend. Her new boyfriend is the America's Most Wanted knockoff host. Jason is now inhabiting the body of the deputy who hangs up the phone and tries to kill Diana. Jessica calls Diana's sheriff boyfriend. White Sheriff Jason sticks his tongue out at Diana and might have licked her if Stephen didnt stop him. WSJ grabs a kitchen knife and stabs Diana. WSJ sees himself in the mirror, giving Stephen just enough time to stab him with a fireplace poker. Diana's dying wish is for Stephen to save Jessica. What is going on. Are we really half way into this movie already?
The sheriff arrives to find Stephen standing over Diana's corpse. WSJ is missing. Stephen is brought into custody.
Jessica returns home to find a a sobbing woman washing Diana's blood out of the carpet. The sobbing woman oggles Jessica's infant daughter, Stephanie. Jessica has been keeping her and Stephen's baby a secret. Jessica doesnt know that Stephen probably killed Diana. Jessica goes to visit the sheriff and a still blood-soaked Stephen sees his baby from a distance.
Duke, also in prison, antagonizes Stephen. I really like Duke. Duke makes Stephen give him his hand. Duke gently caresses it. Duke breaks Stephen's fingers. He tells Stephen that the only way Jason can die is for Jessica to destroy his heart. Duke keeps breaking Stephen's fingers whenever he asks a question. It turns out Diana and Jessica and Stephanie are Voorheeses and only a Voorhees can kill Jason or bring him to life. Stephen breaks out of jail.
Stephen is hiding in the stockroom of the diner fixing his finger when the sobbing girl sticks the baby in a cardboard box. Jason plays with his daughter. A fat guy sees him and gives him his car. Stephen drives out to a big abandoned house. He is attacked by an ironing board. He finds the Necronomicon. Like i think this is the actual Necronomicon from Evil Dead 2. This is blowing my mind. The Evil Dead and Friday the 13th are in the same universe. Stephen hides from it and falls through the floor.
The America's Most Wanted guy shows up and starts trying to scam the American people. He stole Diana's corpse from the morgue and hid it in the Voorhees House as a way to increase ratings. White Sheriff Jason attacks and makes out with the reporter until he takes over his body while the sheriff's body melts. Diana's body falls on Stephen. White Sheriff Bro is hella melty. America's Most Jason is alive and stalking now.
In the second bath scene in the film, Jessica gets sobby and soggy. Jason cuts the power. She sneaks into the garage, gets a hammer and a flashlight. AMJ starts to kill her when Stephen stops AMJ and kidnaps Jessica. Stephen hits AMJ with a car and then backs over him.
A few miles away, Stephen stops the car and explains to Jessica whats happening. She thinks its a ploy to murder her, punches Stephen in the dick, and hijacks the car. Jessica shows up at the sheriff's office and says that Stephen killed America's Most Wanted bro and tried to kill her.
Stephen gets arrested while AMJ storms the police station. He starts making out with Jessica when the sheriff interrupts. AMJ kills him and Jessica starts to run. AMJ and Jessica run into Stephen who steals a cop's gun and shoots the hell out of AMJ. Duke thinks this is hilarious.
Stephen and Jessica take shelter in the diner, where the owner holds him at gunpoint. She sends a fat guy over to the police station. He sees AMJ stalking towards him. In the diner, Jessica tries to wrangle the gun away from the owner but shoots the power out. AMJ throws the fat guy through the door. Jessica and Stephen hide in slow motion. The diner's employees are apparently heavily armed and everyone opens fire at AMJ. The baby is missing with just a note in its place. AMJ sticks a dude's head in the fryer and punches the owner in the face so hard her jaw turns inside out. AMJ grabs Jessica only to get shot by the sobbing girl who then stabs him with a big stick. He then stabs her with the same stick and crushes her skull before dropping dead.
Jessica makes a run for it in a stolen pickup truck. Stephen finds a note from Duke instructing Jessica to come to the Voorhees house alone if she wants her baby. He also finds a machete.
Jessica arrives at the Voorhees house to be met with Duke & Baby. Duke threatens the baby with a knife. He gives the baby back and throws her the knife which turns into a magic knife. Jessica has to kill Jason. Back at the diner, the cops have arrived. They find a ton of corpses, Robert's among them. Robert attacks one of the cops and takes his body. Two cops arrive at the Voorhees house and Duke tells Jessica to kill both of them. She kills the wrong one and he starts to make out with the baby. Stephen slits that guy's throat with a machete. A little baby thing crawls out of the cop's throat and attacks Stephen. What is going on.
Duke has fallen down a hole and so has the little baby dragon Jason thing. Duke gets pulled up to the surface and baby dragon Jason thing rapes Diana's corpse and is reborn as hockey mask Jason.
Duke handcuffs Jason to himself. Jason gives Duke a big hug. The dagger Jessica needs to kill Jason with falls down to the basement. Stephen tackles Jason out a window in order to buy Jessica some time. Jason beats Stephen with a rake. Jessica sticks the baby in an unguarded bassinet and crawls down into the basement, retrieving the dagger.
Stephen hits Jason repeatedly over the head with a shovel until Jason hits him over the head with a shovel and throws him into a jungle gym which he then throws into a tree. Jason then begins to drag stephen around and then throw him.
Jessica manages to run up behind Jason and stab the dagger deep into his chest. Red orbs of light pop out and shoot into the sky. I have a feeling Jason is Going To Hell at the moment. Stephen punches Jason a bunch of times while yelling "GO TO HELL." Some blue lights start shooting into him while a bunch of zombie hands shoot out of the dirt and grab Jason and Stephen, dragging them, presumably, to hell. Jessica saves Stephen but Jason is lost to the sands of hell. Jessica and Stephen kiss. What.
What.
Later they are walking arm in arm around a field that is decidedly not Bergen County, NJ. Jason's mask is uncovered in the dirt by a dog and some wind. Freddy Krueger's hand reaches out and drag's Jason's mask down. What.
How I Felt
Well, this movie undermined all the previous Friday movies by insisting that Jason was not actually a mutant zombie but some kind of lizard dude. So, uh, I guess we've got to give them credit for that.
Sequel
Do I have to :[
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
What I Knew:
:[
What I Got:
A Horror Inc. Production
Some punks are smoking while a terrible 80s pop song plays. Why do I keep doing this to myself. Some punks mug a businessman. Mister Miyagi is eating at a diner with Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Some punks do crack. Yes, this truly is the Manhattan experience.
Back at Crystal Lake, some people are having sex on a boat. They've gotta throw the anchor over. While they recap the last seven movies, the anchor hooks a power cable and begins bringing Jason back to life. The girl hears a spooky noise and the boy goes to check it out. Jason is also checking it out. The boy pulls a prank on her by putting on a Jason mask and stabbing her with a fake knife. The girl is irritated. Good thing they brought a Jason mask on the boat trip as Jason makes quick use of it and finds a spear gun. The couple resumes having sex as Jason cocks the gun and methodically takes aim. He misses and the girl flees. The guy is stunned and gets his intestines ripped out. Jason picks the spear up and begins stalking. This stalking is at least 20 times better than the cabin stalking from the last two movies. Jason finds the girl and she begs for her life as Jason plunges the spear into her chest. He's back.
Meanwhile, a girl, her mother, and her dog pull up to a port on what i am assuming is the hudson river. The girl is gifted Stephen King's fountain pen. "You have a gift, and if there's anyone who can make use of that pen, its you." Its certainly not Stephen King! ZING! A dude is swabbing the poop deck of a cruise ship when he sees a ghost ship float into port. The cruise ship is the Crystal Lake High senior class trip boat to New York City. The Stephen King Pen Girl, Rennie apparently?, is not supposed to be there.
The captain relinquishes control of the cruise ship "Lazarus" (lol) to his son, who is also on the class trip. He gives his son a sextant as well. His son screws up and storms out. Jason starts climbing up the anchor. The poop deck swabber says the voyage is doomed.
The sextant boy Sean and pen girl Rennie have a conversation. Sean gives her a statue of liberty pendant. They are in awe of a 22 story statue. Rennie's uncle Charles, the principal apparently, interrupts them and sends Sean off. Cant be admiring statues on this cruise! Meanwhile, a girl, JJ, plays a sick guitar solo while a bro, Wayne, tapes a "shockumentary."
JJ goes downstairs to play sick guitar riffs below deck. Uncle Charles starts echoing while lecturing Rennie. Rennie is afraid of something and thats why she's on the boat even though Charles doesnt want her there. JJ is slammin licks like no one's business. Jason makes his way down to greet her. Jason is a jazz fusion fan and cant stand what the 80s have done to rock and roll. He puts her ax through her face.
Rennie talks to her dog while Jason watches on. She has auditory hallucinations. I really hope this isnt another super-powered victim Friday movie. Part VII was about all I could stand of that. She hallucinates seeing Jason drown in a porthole.
Some manly bros are boxing in a very terrible way while some girls spy on them through a sky light.The 80s were a weird time for hot guys. Charles lands a sick burn on Wayne while the spying girls do cocaine. Rennie interrupts them looking for her dog. She wanders down empty hallways, or should i say nearly empty hallways, as Jason is stalking her. Charles stumbles across the coke gals. The coke girls reveal that Rennie is afraid of water.
A bro is steaming himself in the sauna. Jason has other plans, picking one of those hot rocks up and sticking it in the bro's chest until he dies. Jason casually leaves.
Rennie and the woman she rode in with, her english teacher i think, are walking perilously close to the edge when the coke girls shove Rennie into the water. The teacher throws Rennie a life preserver. Rennie panics and hallucinates seeing Jason pull her under. Sean dives in and saves her. Charles freaks out. The poop deck swabber fortells deaths ominously. Rennie goes to the bathroom to wash up and the faucet starts running with blood and lil kid Jason reaches out of the mirror and tries to grab her.
One of the coke girls tries to seduce Charles. She shows him her biology project, which is just drawings of organs on her naked body. Wayne catches them on camera. It is an unsuccessful seduction, though Wayne catches just enough to incriminate him. That apparently was the shockumentary he spoke of earlier. Wayne has had the major hots for coke girl, Tamra, since sophomore year and he finally tells her. Tamra blows him off and kicks him out.
Tamra goes to take a shower. As she's drying off, Jason decides now would be a good time to join her. He punches through the bathroom door, tears her robe off, and throws her into a mirror. Jason grabs a shard of broken glass and stabs her.
It is thunderstorming and the captain is trying to safely navigate them to New York. I'm starting to doubt they are going to make it there. A half an hour in and Jason hasnt taken any cities, let alone manhattan. He does, however, take the first mate's life while the captain uses the restroom. He then slits the captains throat in slow motion.
Sean and Rennie try to escape just to find the captain's corpse propped up like he's driving the boat. He calls everyone to the bridge where they also see the corpses. Sean radios the coast guard but Jason cuts the radio before they can establish communication. The poop swabbist comes to tell them that Jason is the killer. Charles tries to kill him. "Walking corpses are not real," says Charles. The black boxer develops a plan to hunt down and kill Jason. Charles tries to stop him, but "school is out motherfucker."
Rennie is dropping the anchors and Jason is very interested in that. She comes face to face with Charles who reverses the anchor dropping because dropping anchor in a storm doesnt make sense???
The asian coke girl finds Tamra's body and also her killer. She stumbles into some kind of a nightclub. Jason is in no mood for dancing. All the doors are locked and Jason has very poor posture. He can also teleport. He strangles her to death and then throws her so hard the record stops playing.
The black boxer gathers up weapons. He refuses to carry a weapon, except no he's got a shotgun. The boys search the ship independently. Wayne goes to look for JJ. Wayne's glasses fall off. Wayne shoots and kills a classmate. Jason shows up and breaks his camera. Wayne takes off running. He trips over JJs bloody guitar and lands on her corpse. Jason throws him into some kind of memory bank where he catches fire.
Charles has locked Rennie in her room and goes to berate Sean on not being able to drive the ship well. While Wayne's body sets a blaze, Jason sets off the fire alarm. Charles thinks its a prank and is going to murder the deckhand.
Meanwhile, up on deck, a guy with an axe tries to kill Jason only to be disarmed. He flees, Jason teleports in front of him. He climbs a ladder, Jason teleports next to him. The black boxer saw the falling weapon and finds the battered corpse. Jason throws him into the drink.
Rennie is trying to break out of her room. She has some more Lil Jason hallucinations as the real Jason attacks her and tries to strangle her through a porthole. She stabs him in the eye with Stephen King's pen. Jason bleeds purple water. Sean shows up and breaks her out while the ship begins to explode.
Charles is hunting down the deckhand with a flare gun. The deckhand jumps him and threatens him with a butcher knife before running off.
The ship starts to flood and Sean and Rennie act out that scene from Titanic ten years before it was shot. Charles confronts Sean. Sean is a baby. Everyone is dead except the english teacher, Charles, Rennie, Sean, and the deckhand, but the deckhand has an ax in his back. The four survivors pile into a lifeboat as Jason ominously watches. Charles and Sean do a very poor job of rowing. BUT WAIT DEAR READER, THE BLACK BOXER IS STILL ALIVE AND JUMP SCARES HIS WAY INTO THE LIFEBOAT. The five row away into the stormy night. They are all wearing life vests. Sean's gigantic 80s GPS thing finds their location. How is there a half hour left everyone is either dead or lost at sea.
They finally arrive in New York. They are approaching it from what looks like a mile out in the atlantic. Jason also arrives in new york and sees a billboard of himself. The five of them get mugged by some punks, one of whom takes Rennie's necklace. The necklace stealer tries to kill Rennie's dog but she stops him. He then threatens to rape her and kidnaps her. Charles stops the black guy Julius from stopping them.
Charles storms off in the opposite direction. The rapists didnt even take the cheap necklace as Sean finds it on the ground.
The rapists bring her back to their hideout and forceably inject crack into her before raping her. She spits in their face. Jason finds a hypo laying on the ground nearby and just hates littering. He jabs it straight through the guy's body. The second rapist sees Jason and shoots him. We know by now how useful that is. He keeps dumping rounds into Jason while Rennie tries to get out from underneath the dead rapist. Jason hits the second guy's head into a pipe as Rennie escapes.
Julius finds a payphone and dials 911. Jason prevents the call from going through. They've gone from the port authority to midtown very quickly. Jason teleports up to the rooftop where Julius is hiding. Julius tries to box the inhuman monster. He is doing a mostly good job until he runs out of steam and Jason punches his head clean off his body, off the roof, down a slide, and into a dumpster which slams shut.
Rennie is lost in new york and there is no bird lady to help her. Sean finds her though and they commune on Jason. They reunite with Charles, the english teacher, and a police officer. The cop has a very thick accent. Jason has placed Julius' head on the cop's dashboard. He then murders the cop by pressing his radio into his throat. Rennie steals the cop the car with everyone inside and runs over Jason. She starts to have a hallucination of Lil Jason, goes into slow motion, and crashes the car. Charles, Sean, and Rennie manage to get out but the car explodes with the teacher still inside. Three left.
Rennie has a flashback. Charles is trying to teach her how to swim by telling her terrifying Jason stories and then shoving her into the water. This is an awful way to teach a kid. How is he a teacher.
Rennie and Sean run off, leaving Jason and Charles alone. Charles tries to run and makes it to an abandoned warehouse where he is thrown out the window by Jason. He is then thrown into a trash can and drowned.
Rennie, who i think is still high, is sitting in a recliner in an alley, telling Sean about her dead parents. They kiss. Jason does not like that one bit. They run into the subway as Jason chases them, but Jason is already on the train! They run from car to car, but eventually reach the end of the line and are forced to pull the emergency break. They escape past some graffiti that says Jason Lives. They shove Jason onto the third rail. There is no way he's coming back from that!
They surface in Time Square. Sean says, "its over," but Jason is standing right behind him. Sean and Rennie take in the lights before spotting their erstwhile killer. Some punks see them run by. Jason breaks their stereo and they pull knives on them. Jason takes off his mask and scares them into running away.
Sean and Rennie run into a diner where the waitress refuses to let her call 911. Jason bursts through the door and starts messing up the place. Sean and Rennie escape out the back only to be met with a dead end. Jason finds them. They run into the sewer, Jason follows them. A sewer worker scares them and tells them that toxic waste is going to flood the sewer.
Ambushes them and caves the sewer bro's head in with a wrench. He is about to do the same to Sean when Rennie shines a flashlight at him. Rennie runs and eventually throws acid at him. Jason takes off his mask again. He looks stupider now than he did in Part II and really, that's saying something. Rennie runs back to Sean and they try to flee the sewer.
Their escape is hindered by a monster grabbing their leg. Jason vomits a bunch of water out and is crushed by tons of toxic waste. Jason, not quite double dead, starts screaming and having flashbacks. The toxic waste subsides revealing the body of a little boy. Jason's mask floats downstream. They abandon the boy.
Sean and Rennie try to go on with their trip even though everyone they know is dead.
How I Felt:
THIS IS A BAD MOVIE. THIS IS A BAD BAD MOVIE.
Sequel:
Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X before i can start watching movies that arent entirely awful.
:[
What I Got:
A Horror Inc. Production
Some punks are smoking while a terrible 80s pop song plays. Why do I keep doing this to myself. Some punks mug a businessman. Mister Miyagi is eating at a diner with Hacksaw Jim Duggan. Some punks do crack. Yes, this truly is the Manhattan experience.
Back at Crystal Lake, some people are having sex on a boat. They've gotta throw the anchor over. While they recap the last seven movies, the anchor hooks a power cable and begins bringing Jason back to life. The girl hears a spooky noise and the boy goes to check it out. Jason is also checking it out. The boy pulls a prank on her by putting on a Jason mask and stabbing her with a fake knife. The girl is irritated. Good thing they brought a Jason mask on the boat trip as Jason makes quick use of it and finds a spear gun. The couple resumes having sex as Jason cocks the gun and methodically takes aim. He misses and the girl flees. The guy is stunned and gets his intestines ripped out. Jason picks the spear up and begins stalking. This stalking is at least 20 times better than the cabin stalking from the last two movies. Jason finds the girl and she begs for her life as Jason plunges the spear into her chest. He's back.
Meanwhile, a girl, her mother, and her dog pull up to a port on what i am assuming is the hudson river. The girl is gifted Stephen King's fountain pen. "You have a gift, and if there's anyone who can make use of that pen, its you." Its certainly not Stephen King! ZING! A dude is swabbing the poop deck of a cruise ship when he sees a ghost ship float into port. The cruise ship is the Crystal Lake High senior class trip boat to New York City. The Stephen King Pen Girl, Rennie apparently?, is not supposed to be there.
The captain relinquishes control of the cruise ship "Lazarus" (lol) to his son, who is also on the class trip. He gives his son a sextant as well. His son screws up and storms out. Jason starts climbing up the anchor. The poop deck swabber says the voyage is doomed.
The sextant boy Sean and pen girl Rennie have a conversation. Sean gives her a statue of liberty pendant. They are in awe of a 22 story statue. Rennie's uncle Charles, the principal apparently, interrupts them and sends Sean off. Cant be admiring statues on this cruise! Meanwhile, a girl, JJ, plays a sick guitar solo while a bro, Wayne, tapes a "shockumentary."
JJ goes downstairs to play sick guitar riffs below deck. Uncle Charles starts echoing while lecturing Rennie. Rennie is afraid of something and thats why she's on the boat even though Charles doesnt want her there. JJ is slammin licks like no one's business. Jason makes his way down to greet her. Jason is a jazz fusion fan and cant stand what the 80s have done to rock and roll. He puts her ax through her face.
Rennie talks to her dog while Jason watches on. She has auditory hallucinations. I really hope this isnt another super-powered victim Friday movie. Part VII was about all I could stand of that. She hallucinates seeing Jason drown in a porthole.
Some manly bros are boxing in a very terrible way while some girls spy on them through a sky light.The 80s were a weird time for hot guys. Charles lands a sick burn on Wayne while the spying girls do cocaine. Rennie interrupts them looking for her dog. She wanders down empty hallways, or should i say nearly empty hallways, as Jason is stalking her. Charles stumbles across the coke gals. The coke girls reveal that Rennie is afraid of water.
A bro is steaming himself in the sauna. Jason has other plans, picking one of those hot rocks up and sticking it in the bro's chest until he dies. Jason casually leaves.
Rennie and the woman she rode in with, her english teacher i think, are walking perilously close to the edge when the coke girls shove Rennie into the water. The teacher throws Rennie a life preserver. Rennie panics and hallucinates seeing Jason pull her under. Sean dives in and saves her. Charles freaks out. The poop deck swabber fortells deaths ominously. Rennie goes to the bathroom to wash up and the faucet starts running with blood and lil kid Jason reaches out of the mirror and tries to grab her.
One of the coke girls tries to seduce Charles. She shows him her biology project, which is just drawings of organs on her naked body. Wayne catches them on camera. It is an unsuccessful seduction, though Wayne catches just enough to incriminate him. That apparently was the shockumentary he spoke of earlier. Wayne has had the major hots for coke girl, Tamra, since sophomore year and he finally tells her. Tamra blows him off and kicks him out.
Tamra goes to take a shower. As she's drying off, Jason decides now would be a good time to join her. He punches through the bathroom door, tears her robe off, and throws her into a mirror. Jason grabs a shard of broken glass and stabs her.
It is thunderstorming and the captain is trying to safely navigate them to New York. I'm starting to doubt they are going to make it there. A half an hour in and Jason hasnt taken any cities, let alone manhattan. He does, however, take the first mate's life while the captain uses the restroom. He then slits the captains throat in slow motion.
Sean and Rennie try to escape just to find the captain's corpse propped up like he's driving the boat. He calls everyone to the bridge where they also see the corpses. Sean radios the coast guard but Jason cuts the radio before they can establish communication. The poop swabbist comes to tell them that Jason is the killer. Charles tries to kill him. "Walking corpses are not real," says Charles. The black boxer develops a plan to hunt down and kill Jason. Charles tries to stop him, but "school is out motherfucker."
Rennie is dropping the anchors and Jason is very interested in that. She comes face to face with Charles who reverses the anchor dropping because dropping anchor in a storm doesnt make sense???
The asian coke girl finds Tamra's body and also her killer. She stumbles into some kind of a nightclub. Jason is in no mood for dancing. All the doors are locked and Jason has very poor posture. He can also teleport. He strangles her to death and then throws her so hard the record stops playing.
The black boxer gathers up weapons. He refuses to carry a weapon, except no he's got a shotgun. The boys search the ship independently. Wayne goes to look for JJ. Wayne's glasses fall off. Wayne shoots and kills a classmate. Jason shows up and breaks his camera. Wayne takes off running. He trips over JJs bloody guitar and lands on her corpse. Jason throws him into some kind of memory bank where he catches fire.
Charles has locked Rennie in her room and goes to berate Sean on not being able to drive the ship well. While Wayne's body sets a blaze, Jason sets off the fire alarm. Charles thinks its a prank and is going to murder the deckhand.
Meanwhile, up on deck, a guy with an axe tries to kill Jason only to be disarmed. He flees, Jason teleports in front of him. He climbs a ladder, Jason teleports next to him. The black boxer saw the falling weapon and finds the battered corpse. Jason throws him into the drink.
Rennie is trying to break out of her room. She has some more Lil Jason hallucinations as the real Jason attacks her and tries to strangle her through a porthole. She stabs him in the eye with Stephen King's pen. Jason bleeds purple water. Sean shows up and breaks her out while the ship begins to explode.
Charles is hunting down the deckhand with a flare gun. The deckhand jumps him and threatens him with a butcher knife before running off.
The ship starts to flood and Sean and Rennie act out that scene from Titanic ten years before it was shot. Charles confronts Sean. Sean is a baby. Everyone is dead except the english teacher, Charles, Rennie, Sean, and the deckhand, but the deckhand has an ax in his back. The four survivors pile into a lifeboat as Jason ominously watches. Charles and Sean do a very poor job of rowing. BUT WAIT DEAR READER, THE BLACK BOXER IS STILL ALIVE AND JUMP SCARES HIS WAY INTO THE LIFEBOAT. The five row away into the stormy night. They are all wearing life vests. Sean's gigantic 80s GPS thing finds their location. How is there a half hour left everyone is either dead or lost at sea.
They finally arrive in New York. They are approaching it from what looks like a mile out in the atlantic. Jason also arrives in new york and sees a billboard of himself. The five of them get mugged by some punks, one of whom takes Rennie's necklace. The necklace stealer tries to kill Rennie's dog but she stops him. He then threatens to rape her and kidnaps her. Charles stops the black guy Julius from stopping them.
Charles storms off in the opposite direction. The rapists didnt even take the cheap necklace as Sean finds it on the ground.
The rapists bring her back to their hideout and forceably inject crack into her before raping her. She spits in their face. Jason finds a hypo laying on the ground nearby and just hates littering. He jabs it straight through the guy's body. The second rapist sees Jason and shoots him. We know by now how useful that is. He keeps dumping rounds into Jason while Rennie tries to get out from underneath the dead rapist. Jason hits the second guy's head into a pipe as Rennie escapes.
Julius finds a payphone and dials 911. Jason prevents the call from going through. They've gone from the port authority to midtown very quickly. Jason teleports up to the rooftop where Julius is hiding. Julius tries to box the inhuman monster. He is doing a mostly good job until he runs out of steam and Jason punches his head clean off his body, off the roof, down a slide, and into a dumpster which slams shut.
Rennie is lost in new york and there is no bird lady to help her. Sean finds her though and they commune on Jason. They reunite with Charles, the english teacher, and a police officer. The cop has a very thick accent. Jason has placed Julius' head on the cop's dashboard. He then murders the cop by pressing his radio into his throat. Rennie steals the cop the car with everyone inside and runs over Jason. She starts to have a hallucination of Lil Jason, goes into slow motion, and crashes the car. Charles, Sean, and Rennie manage to get out but the car explodes with the teacher still inside. Three left.
Rennie has a flashback. Charles is trying to teach her how to swim by telling her terrifying Jason stories and then shoving her into the water. This is an awful way to teach a kid. How is he a teacher.
Rennie and Sean run off, leaving Jason and Charles alone. Charles tries to run and makes it to an abandoned warehouse where he is thrown out the window by Jason. He is then thrown into a trash can and drowned.
Rennie, who i think is still high, is sitting in a recliner in an alley, telling Sean about her dead parents. They kiss. Jason does not like that one bit. They run into the subway as Jason chases them, but Jason is already on the train! They run from car to car, but eventually reach the end of the line and are forced to pull the emergency break. They escape past some graffiti that says Jason Lives. They shove Jason onto the third rail. There is no way he's coming back from that!
They surface in Time Square. Sean says, "its over," but Jason is standing right behind him. Sean and Rennie take in the lights before spotting their erstwhile killer. Some punks see them run by. Jason breaks their stereo and they pull knives on them. Jason takes off his mask and scares them into running away.
Sean and Rennie run into a diner where the waitress refuses to let her call 911. Jason bursts through the door and starts messing up the place. Sean and Rennie escape out the back only to be met with a dead end. Jason finds them. They run into the sewer, Jason follows them. A sewer worker scares them and tells them that toxic waste is going to flood the sewer.
Ambushes them and caves the sewer bro's head in with a wrench. He is about to do the same to Sean when Rennie shines a flashlight at him. Rennie runs and eventually throws acid at him. Jason takes off his mask again. He looks stupider now than he did in Part II and really, that's saying something. Rennie runs back to Sean and they try to flee the sewer.
Their escape is hindered by a monster grabbing their leg. Jason vomits a bunch of water out and is crushed by tons of toxic waste. Jason, not quite double dead, starts screaming and having flashbacks. The toxic waste subsides revealing the body of a little boy. Jason's mask floats downstream. They abandon the boy.
Sean and Rennie try to go on with their trip even though everyone they know is dead.
How I Felt:
THIS IS A BAD MOVIE. THIS IS A BAD BAD MOVIE.
Sequel:
Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X before i can start watching movies that arent entirely awful.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
What I Knew:
Why do i keep doing this to myself. Also, apparently "Many fans have also considered this film to be a crossover to Stephen King's Carrie due to the main protagonist having telekinetic powers." Thanks wikipedia. Also apparently this is the one with the infamous sleeping bag kill, though i don't know if its edited or not.
What I Got:
Oh great, a recap of the last six movies. Thats my favorite part about Friday movies. They did a pretty good job editing Part VI into a not entirely retarded film. Aw, there's no "Jason Bond" thing in this one. Pretty disappointed.
Jason is right where we left him in Part 6, at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Over at shore, a guy beats a woman until a little girl runs away. Jason is now a metaphor for domestic abuse. Well, the little girl canoes out to the middle of the lake and telekinetically murders her abusive father. Ten years later, she is in a car with her surviving mother and seeing a Dr. Cruise at Crystal Lake. Crystal Lake, not Forest Green. I really hate these movies. It looks like Dr. Cruise's office is at Camp Crystal Lake. Maybe its Pinehurst. It looks like the same cabin Jason destroys every year. Oh, its actually telekinetic Tina's old home where she killed her dad. Also there are teenagers camping there.
Tina is seeing things and being video recorded by Dr. Cruise during their session. Dr. Cruise is trying to manipulate her into using telekinesis. It works and she moves it. Also she's pyrokinetic. Tina runs out to the lake in a huff, has a flashback to a scene we just saw, and accidentally resurfaces Jason. Dr. Cruise tries to write the wet monster emerging from Lake Blood as a hallucination of Tina's father.
A couple is on their way to a birthday party at the cabin next door to Tina's. Tina is attending that party. The couple's car breaks down and they begin wandering through the woods of Crystal Lake. The bro in the couple stops to take a leak and Jason kills his girl. He returns to find her pinned to a tree with some kind of blade. He takes off running and Jason stalks after him. He throws the blade and it stabs the bro in the back. He crawls away and Jason just picks him up by the blade, killing him.
At the party, Tina meets a nerd. She also meets a bunch of other awful people, who she has visions of dying. Her psychiatrist doesnt believe her.
A man and a woman are camping, I'm not sure if we're supposed to know them yet or not. The man goes to gather wood with a machete. Jason punches a hole through his chest and steals his weapon. The woman is wearing some ugly underwear. Jason hauls her out of the tent, dragging her along in the sleeping bag and kills her by slapping her against a tree. So Great.
Tina is bad at flirting. Jason is bad at hiding. So is the Snooty Girl from the party.
The dopehead just rolled a huge blunt. The snooty girl reveals her crazy secret and Tina destroys her pearl necklace. The doctor says she's dangerous. She throws a TV at him with her mind. As she escapes the house, Nick confronts her and Tina tells him she wants to run away because she had a vision of Michael getting killed. Nick calls her "Jenny." Tina's mom says she is making her leave come morning.
Skinny Dipping at Night. These two skinny dippers are the most annoying characters in any Friday movie to date. I am relishing in their death. Jason slashes the male one in the face and then teleports into the lake to kill the girl. Good riddance.
The dopehead likes girls who don't sweat. The ugly girl is putting on makeup in order to impress him. Jason is dragging a bloody corpse out of the lake.
Dr. Cruise decides to take a walk in the woods and finds a corpse. Michael's corpse. Tina's mom finds the murder weapon in Dr. Cruise's desk along with a video tape. The tape reveals that Dr. Cruise is a dick. Dr. Cruise returns and confronts Tina's mom. Tina steals a car and runs away. She has a vision of Jason killing her mom which causes her to wreck the car. They are all trapped now in Crystal Lake.
The ugly girl stole the snooty girl's clothes and jewelry and darts off into the woods to find the dopehead. She loses and earring and bends down to look for it only to stand up and see a corpse landing in front of her. Jason follows her to a toolshed. She thinks she has fooled Jason and tries to escape but alas. Jason is still there and this time he has a sickle. A sickle that comes crashing through the wall and executes her.
Tina is running in the woods and bumps into Nick. Tina's mom and Dr. Cruise are hunting after Tina. Jason has made it to the cabin. Everyone is having sex in the cabin. Everyone is also having sex in the van.
The van people hear Jason but think it is michael trying to give them a good surprise. They decide to surprise him instead. Jason turns the tables yet again and surprises them with murder. He crushes the boy's head and then slams a birthday horn into her eye.
Jason cuts power to the cabin. Nick and Tina run into Michael's corpse. Back at the Cabin, the dopehead goes to track down some grub. He gets butcher knifed by Jason. Tina and Nick find out that Jason Voorhees is the monster. Nick finds out she is telekinetic. I'm having a very hard time paying attention to this movie.
I feel inclined to mention that, usually, i watch these films in one straight burst. No breaks, no pausing, just sit down, watch, type, done. I couldnt do that with this movie. I paused it at 9:09 on friday night and it is now 8:20pm on saturday. I am literally forcing myself to click the play button. I can't remember anything that happened yesterday. I'm doing it.
And of course the first thing that comes out of someone's mouth is "cunt."
Nick and Tina are trying to organize an escape to save everyone, but Jason has other plans. He machetes the nerd. Meanwhile the dopehead's girl is exploring the upstairs and finally finds a cat. Jump scare cat, the staple of Friday the 13th. The girl puts her hand in a puddle of blood (icky), sees an homage to Part II (terrifying), and Jason throws her out a window (boring).
Nick abandons Tina in order to gather up the partiers, but I'm pretty sure they're all dead now. Jason is stalking Tina's mom and Dr. Cruise. Dr. Cruise calls Tina's mom Deborah but im pretty sure her name is Amanda. Jason arrives carrying what appears to be a hockey stick with the end replaced with a big knife. They run and Jason chases them. Dr. Cruise offers Tina's mom up as a sacrifice. She's dead.
Nick finds corpses at the cabin. Also he has a gun. Did this gun reveal happen already? Nick runs back to Tina's cabin to find it empty. Where has Tina gone? Nick readys his gun and almost shoots the snooty girl. He tells the snooty girl that there are dead people. She tells him to get real.
Tina is searching the woods for her mother. She finds Dr. Cruise. Dr. Cruise tells her that she's "gone" and Tina runs into the woods looking for her. Dr. Cruise runs off in the other direction but oh no Jason has a weed whacker and he's not afraid to use it. Dr. Cruise runs and thinks he has escaped before Jason teleports in behind him, punches him down a hill, and weed whacks his guts out.
Tina is still wandering in the woods. She finds her mom's corpse. She finds the corpses of all the other people too. She also finds Jason.
She starts to fight him with telekinesis. First by making him trip into a puddle, then by breaking a telephone line and dropping it in the puddle. Jason is dead. GET REAL. Tina walks over to investigate only to be greeted by a still fully undead Jason Voorhees.
Tina makes it to the Murder Cabin. It is thunderstorming outside and the thunder sounds like gun shots. Jason jumps through a window in slow-motion. Tina slams a door using her mind but for some reason this fails to stop Jason. She then throws a couch, a tree, and a decapitated head at him. These all prove futile. She then collapses the porch balcony on him.
Tina reunites with the Snooty Girl and Nick at her cabin and tells them that Jason is dead. The snooty girl doesnt believe her and opens the front door. Jason is standing there, puts an ax in her skull, and then throws her at a television. Jason has trapped Tina and Nick in the living room. They narrowly manage to escape upstairs but the doors are all locked. Tina squares off with Jason, each on one end of a staircase. She swings a chandelier at him Home Alone-style and he falls backwards, through the staircase, into the basement. Jason then explodes through a wall and begins stomping nick to death.
In retaliation, Tina makes his mask explode, hangs him from another chandelier, and drops him, yet again, into the basement. Jason is on the concrete floor, broken and maskless but alive. He drags Tina down with him and rips off her shirt. Tina shoots nails at him, but the bro's a zombie that aint gonna do anything. She then sprays gasoline at him, gets some on herself, and uses her pyrokinesis to light him up. Jason is a lot less intimidating with his mask. He pinwheels in the flames and eventually collapses. Nick and Tina run from the burning house.
Outside, they make it to the dock before the house explodes. The house explodes. Gonna say that again, the house explodes. Nick comforts Tina as she cries over it all being gone. Jason teleports in behind them and throws Tina up the dock. Nick uselessly shoots him a few times and Jason shoves him into a boat. Jason turns his attention back to Tina as she telekinetically brings her dad back from the dead to drag Jason to the bottom of the lake. What.
The next day, the fire department is still putting out the exploded house. They find Jason's shattered mask, Nick, and Tina. Tina tells Nick that Jason is taken care of. The End........OR IS IT?
How I Felt
I no longer have any emotions thanks to this film. Also according to the credits, the man I've been calling "Dr. Cruise" is actually "Dr. Crews." Sorry, Friday Fans.
Sequel
It can't get worse than this............OR CAN IT
Why do i keep doing this to myself. Also, apparently "Many fans have also considered this film to be a crossover to Stephen King's Carrie due to the main protagonist having telekinetic powers." Thanks wikipedia. Also apparently this is the one with the infamous sleeping bag kill, though i don't know if its edited or not.
What I Got:
Oh great, a recap of the last six movies. Thats my favorite part about Friday movies. They did a pretty good job editing Part VI into a not entirely retarded film. Aw, there's no "Jason Bond" thing in this one. Pretty disappointed.
Jason is right where we left him in Part 6, at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Over at shore, a guy beats a woman until a little girl runs away. Jason is now a metaphor for domestic abuse. Well, the little girl canoes out to the middle of the lake and telekinetically murders her abusive father. Ten years later, she is in a car with her surviving mother and seeing a Dr. Cruise at Crystal Lake. Crystal Lake, not Forest Green. I really hate these movies. It looks like Dr. Cruise's office is at Camp Crystal Lake. Maybe its Pinehurst. It looks like the same cabin Jason destroys every year. Oh, its actually telekinetic Tina's old home where she killed her dad. Also there are teenagers camping there.
Tina is seeing things and being video recorded by Dr. Cruise during their session. Dr. Cruise is trying to manipulate her into using telekinesis. It works and she moves it. Also she's pyrokinetic. Tina runs out to the lake in a huff, has a flashback to a scene we just saw, and accidentally resurfaces Jason. Dr. Cruise tries to write the wet monster emerging from Lake Blood as a hallucination of Tina's father.
A couple is on their way to a birthday party at the cabin next door to Tina's. Tina is attending that party. The couple's car breaks down and they begin wandering through the woods of Crystal Lake. The bro in the couple stops to take a leak and Jason kills his girl. He returns to find her pinned to a tree with some kind of blade. He takes off running and Jason stalks after him. He throws the blade and it stabs the bro in the back. He crawls away and Jason just picks him up by the blade, killing him.
At the party, Tina meets a nerd. She also meets a bunch of other awful people, who she has visions of dying. Her psychiatrist doesnt believe her.
A man and a woman are camping, I'm not sure if we're supposed to know them yet or not. The man goes to gather wood with a machete. Jason punches a hole through his chest and steals his weapon. The woman is wearing some ugly underwear. Jason hauls her out of the tent, dragging her along in the sleeping bag and kills her by slapping her against a tree. So Great.
Tina is bad at flirting. Jason is bad at hiding. So is the Snooty Girl from the party.
The dopehead just rolled a huge blunt. The snooty girl reveals her crazy secret and Tina destroys her pearl necklace. The doctor says she's dangerous. She throws a TV at him with her mind. As she escapes the house, Nick confronts her and Tina tells him she wants to run away because she had a vision of Michael getting killed. Nick calls her "Jenny." Tina's mom says she is making her leave come morning.
Skinny Dipping at Night. These two skinny dippers are the most annoying characters in any Friday movie to date. I am relishing in their death. Jason slashes the male one in the face and then teleports into the lake to kill the girl. Good riddance.
The dopehead likes girls who don't sweat. The ugly girl is putting on makeup in order to impress him. Jason is dragging a bloody corpse out of the lake.
Dr. Cruise decides to take a walk in the woods and finds a corpse. Michael's corpse. Tina's mom finds the murder weapon in Dr. Cruise's desk along with a video tape. The tape reveals that Dr. Cruise is a dick. Dr. Cruise returns and confronts Tina's mom. Tina steals a car and runs away. She has a vision of Jason killing her mom which causes her to wreck the car. They are all trapped now in Crystal Lake.
The ugly girl stole the snooty girl's clothes and jewelry and darts off into the woods to find the dopehead. She loses and earring and bends down to look for it only to stand up and see a corpse landing in front of her. Jason follows her to a toolshed. She thinks she has fooled Jason and tries to escape but alas. Jason is still there and this time he has a sickle. A sickle that comes crashing through the wall and executes her.
Tina is running in the woods and bumps into Nick. Tina's mom and Dr. Cruise are hunting after Tina. Jason has made it to the cabin. Everyone is having sex in the cabin. Everyone is also having sex in the van.
The van people hear Jason but think it is michael trying to give them a good surprise. They decide to surprise him instead. Jason turns the tables yet again and surprises them with murder. He crushes the boy's head and then slams a birthday horn into her eye.
Jason cuts power to the cabin. Nick and Tina run into Michael's corpse. Back at the Cabin, the dopehead goes to track down some grub. He gets butcher knifed by Jason. Tina and Nick find out that Jason Voorhees is the monster. Nick finds out she is telekinetic. I'm having a very hard time paying attention to this movie.
I feel inclined to mention that, usually, i watch these films in one straight burst. No breaks, no pausing, just sit down, watch, type, done. I couldnt do that with this movie. I paused it at 9:09 on friday night and it is now 8:20pm on saturday. I am literally forcing myself to click the play button. I can't remember anything that happened yesterday. I'm doing it.
And of course the first thing that comes out of someone's mouth is "cunt."
Nick and Tina are trying to organize an escape to save everyone, but Jason has other plans. He machetes the nerd. Meanwhile the dopehead's girl is exploring the upstairs and finally finds a cat. Jump scare cat, the staple of Friday the 13th. The girl puts her hand in a puddle of blood (icky), sees an homage to Part II (terrifying), and Jason throws her out a window (boring).
Nick abandons Tina in order to gather up the partiers, but I'm pretty sure they're all dead now. Jason is stalking Tina's mom and Dr. Cruise. Dr. Cruise calls Tina's mom Deborah but im pretty sure her name is Amanda. Jason arrives carrying what appears to be a hockey stick with the end replaced with a big knife. They run and Jason chases them. Dr. Cruise offers Tina's mom up as a sacrifice. She's dead.
Nick finds corpses at the cabin. Also he has a gun. Did this gun reveal happen already? Nick runs back to Tina's cabin to find it empty. Where has Tina gone? Nick readys his gun and almost shoots the snooty girl. He tells the snooty girl that there are dead people. She tells him to get real.
Tina is searching the woods for her mother. She finds Dr. Cruise. Dr. Cruise tells her that she's "gone" and Tina runs into the woods looking for her. Dr. Cruise runs off in the other direction but oh no Jason has a weed whacker and he's not afraid to use it. Dr. Cruise runs and thinks he has escaped before Jason teleports in behind him, punches him down a hill, and weed whacks his guts out.
Tina is still wandering in the woods. She finds her mom's corpse. She finds the corpses of all the other people too. She also finds Jason.
She starts to fight him with telekinesis. First by making him trip into a puddle, then by breaking a telephone line and dropping it in the puddle. Jason is dead. GET REAL. Tina walks over to investigate only to be greeted by a still fully undead Jason Voorhees.
Tina makes it to the Murder Cabin. It is thunderstorming outside and the thunder sounds like gun shots. Jason jumps through a window in slow-motion. Tina slams a door using her mind but for some reason this fails to stop Jason. She then throws a couch, a tree, and a decapitated head at him. These all prove futile. She then collapses the porch balcony on him.
Tina reunites with the Snooty Girl and Nick at her cabin and tells them that Jason is dead. The snooty girl doesnt believe her and opens the front door. Jason is standing there, puts an ax in her skull, and then throws her at a television. Jason has trapped Tina and Nick in the living room. They narrowly manage to escape upstairs but the doors are all locked. Tina squares off with Jason, each on one end of a staircase. She swings a chandelier at him Home Alone-style and he falls backwards, through the staircase, into the basement. Jason then explodes through a wall and begins stomping nick to death.
In retaliation, Tina makes his mask explode, hangs him from another chandelier, and drops him, yet again, into the basement. Jason is on the concrete floor, broken and maskless but alive. He drags Tina down with him and rips off her shirt. Tina shoots nails at him, but the bro's a zombie that aint gonna do anything. She then sprays gasoline at him, gets some on herself, and uses her pyrokinesis to light him up. Jason is a lot less intimidating with his mask. He pinwheels in the flames and eventually collapses. Nick and Tina run from the burning house.
Outside, they make it to the dock before the house explodes. The house explodes. Gonna say that again, the house explodes. Nick comforts Tina as she cries over it all being gone. Jason teleports in behind them and throws Tina up the dock. Nick uselessly shoots him a few times and Jason shoves him into a boat. Jason turns his attention back to Tina as she telekinetically brings her dad back from the dead to drag Jason to the bottom of the lake. What.
The next day, the fire department is still putting out the exploded house. They find Jason's shattered mask, Nick, and Tina. Tina tells Nick that Jason is taken care of. The End........OR IS IT?
How I Felt
I no longer have any emotions thanks to this film. Also according to the credits, the man I've been calling "Dr. Cruise" is actually "Dr. Crews." Sorry, Friday Fans.
Sequel
It can't get worse than this............OR CAN IT
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