And You Thought It Was…Safe(?)

Tag: Slasher Movies

  • Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

    Or, The One Everyone Hates. And I mean really, really, really hates. That’d be Part V for me, but I understand why everyone pretends that false start of A New Beginning never happened. And I understand the hatred of this…thing. Seriously, this is Friday the 13th Lite, a cringing, half-hearted attempt to shift the series […]

  • Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

    In all the history of cinema, Godzilla and Star Trek stand alone as the only franchises in history who’ve managed field strong fourth films (Mothra vs. Godzilla and The Voyage Home, respectively – though this feels like an invitation for everyone to “well, actually” me). One day they will do epic battle for the hearts […]

  • A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

    Or, The one where they dropped the word “Part” from the title. Most of the the Slasher series that chose this  route tend to go downhill rather fast. Except when they already hit their nadir (and gaydir) in Part 2. Things just had to improve after that, right? Right!? Hell yeah! That’s what I’m talking […]

  • A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

    The first Nightmare on Elm Street is one of those remarkably few Slasher films where tacking on a cliffhanger ending actually worked. It felt like a thematically appropriate way to end that story because, as Tommy Wallace said to Laurie Strode all those years ago, “You can’t kill the bogeyman.” And what else is Fred […]

  • Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

    In my Part V review I called that film the point where the series stopped taking itself so dang seriously, signing its own aesthetic death certificate. I stand by that, as I stand by every other half-coherent statement I’ve ever made, sensible or otherwise. But I’d be remiss not to confess that the very thing […]

  • Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)

    A New Beginning is bad…but there’s more to it than that. Yes, it’s The One Without Jason, but it’s also the one without standards, any regard for pace, storytelling, or even its own audience expectations. It’s the one that threw the series over a bridge. The point where casts and crews stopped even pretending to […]

  • Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

    The presumptively-named Final Chapter opens with a highlights reel, reminding you (by which I mean me) of an editor’s power to twist truth into previously unthinkable of geometries. Intercutting Paul’s campfire recap of series’ mythology from Part 2 with shots from Jason Voorhees’ Greatest Murders might give the uninitiated a false impression of this series’ […]

  • Halloween II (2009)

    I get what Rob Zombie’s going for. No, no, I really do. I even appreciate it. He’s trying to inject the iconography of real-world serial murderers into mainstream Slasher movies, and my hat’s off to his efforts. I, too, once harbored the delusion that the two had anything to do with each other. But both […]

  • Halloween II (1981)

    And here we have a film never should’ve seen the light but, like that three-car pile-up on your way to work, resolutely sits right in the middle of the road refusing to be ignored. The same way most critics ignore John Carpenter’s made-for-TV movies. Awkward segues aside, there’s two very good reasons to focus on […]

  • Halloween (2007)

    Two thousand seven was a black year all around. Spider-man jumped the shark, the Fantastic Four died, and Michael Bay sodomized the Transformers amidst a shower of derision and money…mostly money. As if that weren’t depressing enough, in the midst of it all some brain-damaged soul looked both ways and said: “I know! We’ll remake […]