Reviews

Years after two counselors were brutally murdered, a group of young counselors set out to reopen the cursed Camp Crystal Lake, but someone out there doesn't want them to succeed and will stop at nothing to make sure the camp never reopens.

Unlike the sequels, the joy of Friday the 13th is the murder mystery aspect. While the ending reveal is a bit of a cheat, it still makes the finale no less exciting. Tom Savini's graphic special effects still continue to gross out and inspire awe and Harry Manfredini's strings-heavy score makes the film work better than it has any right to.

Jason, having survived his drowning all those years ago, goes after a new group of camp counselors who have set up shop across the lake from Crystal Lake.

If you ignore the obvious plot holes about Jason surviving his drowning and living in the wild for years, Friday the 13th Part 2 is a suspense-filled slasher with some of the more likable characters in the series and an excellent heroine in Ginny (Amy Steel). There's a scary simplicity to both the story and Jason's disguise - a plain white sack to hide his face.

Jason licks his wounds and moves to another spot of the woods to terrorize a new batch of friends who have come to one of their family's cabins to have some fun and encounter Jason instead.

Friday the 13th Part III offers lots of fun 3D effects, but not a lot of originality in anything but the murder sequences. We're treated to spear guns going through eye balls, heads being crushed, and fire pokers going through torsos, but the characters aren't colorful or engaging enough to feel any fear for them.

Having survived all the damage inflicted to him in the last two films, Jason escapes from the city morgue and returns back to his stomping grounds just in time to stalk and murder a group of teenagers and a single parent family next door.

While still offering the requisite shocks and gore effects that fans expect from these movies, The Final Chapter offers us a more developed group of victims than usual and that goes a long way to make some of the suspense moments work as well as they do. The family unit is especially likable and you do pull for them to vanquish Jason once and for all. Tom Savini returns to do the makeup effects and they're some of his best work.

Tommy Jarvis is a teenager now, but he's still haunted by memories of his encounter with Jason and fears that he'll return. When bodies start piling up at the halfway house for troubled teens that he's living at, he fears that Jason has returned for another slash fest.

A New Beginning bypasses any story logic or traditional suspense and delivers kills in the same way an adult film delivers "money shots." I didn't do a count, but there have to be more dead bodies per 5 minute interval than any other film in the series. The twist is sure to alienate many of the franchise fans, but at least they tried something different.

Tommy Jarvis is out of the asylum and his first bit of business centers around digging up Jason and making sure he's really dead. In a horrible twist of fate, he ends up bringing him back to life and, now, he has to warn everyone in town that Jason is back and hungry for camp counselor blood.

Wisely, Jason Lives doesn't try to make the audience take the 6th entry in a series seriously and embraces a lot of the campier and more over the top aspects of the series and has fun with it. The kills are still creative, but any scares or seriousness have long departed and it's all the better for it.

A teenage girl with telekinesis resurrects water-logged boogeyman Jason to wreak havoc on a whole other group of vacationing teens in the woods.

Unfortunately edited of all its gory punchlines by the MPAA, The New Blood still manages to entertain in its own cheesy way even if the violence has been left feeling like you're watching an edited version for network TV. The makeup effects for Jason are really great and Kane Hodder cuts an imposing figure as the masked madman.

A terrifying Bloody Mary-esque urban legend is investigated by an intrepid grad student, but she quickly finds more than she bargained for as the legend himself doesn't take too kindly of her trying to prove he doesn't exist.

The first half of Candyman is more effective in the traditional horror film sense than the second half. There's an intriguing mystery and dread that does lessen once the titular Candyman is revealed, but then it turns into a different but no less effective film. Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd are extraordinary as the two leads and the authentic Cabrini Green locations help a lot to create an uneasy mood.

Picking up right where the last film ended, we find Laurie Strode being taken to the hospital and Dr. Loomis trying to warn everyone in town that Michael Myers is still out there.

Stuck with the unenviable task of being mostly bed ridden for the majority of the film, the previous film's heroine, Laurie, is mostly sidelined and a not as appealing crew of hospital staff are given most of the film's runtime. Pleasance's Dr. Loomis also returns and does the same thing he did in the last film - try to convince everyone in town that Michael Myers is dangerous. At least this time, he has more proof. The death scenes are creative with Myers cleverly dispatching of his victims with everything from hypodermic needles to overheated hot tubs and scalpels.

After being blown to bits by a SWAT team, Jason has been presumed deader than doornail. Somehow, his heart is still beating and it's able to convince a mortician to devour it, thereby possessing him and sending him on yet another gruesome rampage.

This is a Friday the 13th sequel by way of The Hidden and it deserves credit for creativity. It brings back in some hidden family lore for the character of Jason while still supplying all the required blood and guts for the hardcore fans. One sequence involving a love-making couple and a tent pole ranks as one of the most creatively disgusting moments in the series.

What Tobe Hooper and co. Manage to create out of very little is downright inspiring. With just a few locations, a handful of actors, and an unnerving and sparse music score, they get more terror and intensity on screen than most films with 50 times their budget. The final act with a terrorized Marilyn Burns fighting to escape the deranged family dinner is what nightmares are made of.

A computer mix up at a mental hospital leads to an accidental discharge of a madman who murdered several sorority girls many years ago and, now that he's on the loose, he heads back to the scene of the crime to terrorize a new batch of sorority girls.

Silent Madness doesn't do anything that we haven't seen in other sorority slashers and, in actuality, the script feels much less interesting in sorority slashings than medical world drama between doctors and psychiatrists. Some of this drama is interesting, but you might find yourself wishing they'd have focused a little bit more on giving the horror elements a boost.

If you haven't already seen the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, Part 2 will catch you up to speed for its first hour which mainly consists of recycled and remixed scenes from the previous film. The new material centers around Ricky, Billy's younger brother, who has snapped as well after witnessing his brother's gruesome Christmas massacre a few years earlier.

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 might seem like a waste of space on the surface, but the new footage and continuation of the storyline is entertaining enough to warrant a viewing.

A traumatized young man who witnessed his parents being murdered by a robber in a Santa suit loses his grip on reality when he's forced to put on a Santa suit at the toy store where he works. This triggers a bloody holiday rampage.

Silent Night, Deadly Night has all the trappings of your average holiday-themed body count film but with some much appreciated human drama and character development. In fact, the entire first act is dedicated to homicidal Billy's childhood trauma and the filmmakers make it seem almost plausible that something like this could happen. The massacre portion of the film will delight gore fans.

After his wife is mysteriously murdered, a man return back to his hometown to research the local legend of Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who was wrongly accused of murdering several children.

James Wan took a break from the torture films he helped create with Saw and goes back to a more simple type of horror. Dead Silence is loaded with images that conjure up memories of old Hammer horror films or the European horror films of Mario Bava or Dario Argento. The script has its issues and Ryan Kwanten isn't always the most exciting lead, but it's a great film to pull out around Halloween time for all of it's dark, fog-shrouded atmosphere.

A group of either annoying or bland actors are taken to an island to film a low budget movie and are killed, one by one, by someone obsessed with the lyrics of a punk rock song a la And Then There Were None.

It's not the concept of Island of Blood that's bad, but the execution is as uninspired as murder mysteries can get. It's impossible to feel anything for the victims as they're barely given names let alone character development and even though some of the murder scenes try to be a little creative, that's about the only thing I could recommend this film for. If you're interested in seeing a guy boiled alive in a pool, a guy getting a spear through his eye, and a woman being brunt with battery acid while showering, go ahead and give it a shot, but keep your finger on the fast forward button for everything in between.

An furniture store after hours is a great location for a slasher and Hide and Go Shriek makes the most out of it as a group of high school friends decide to break into their father's store for a little partying, not knowing that a psychotic killer has picked the same spot for a hideout. In fine slasher tradition, this killer doesn't take kindly to intruders and kills the teens one by one.

As cliched as Hide and Go Shriek sounds, there's a few genuine surprises throughout including characters who are smarter than your average psychokiller fodder. When the group discovers that a few of their own have already been dispatched, they make the wise choice to stick together and not split up. For that alone, Hide and Go Shriek deserves some respect for maintaining some degree of intelligence, but it's the wacky killer reveal that really pushes it over the top.

Buddy Boy has been somewhat forgotten over the years, but it's worthy of a look for art film fans.

A stuttering anti-social man named Francis spends his days working at a photo shop and caring for his invalid mother, but when he becomes obsessed with the neighbor he spies across the street, his life begins to make a change for the surreal and nightmarish.

While the performances are strong all around and the visuals are interesting, Buddy Boy can be a bit of a slog to get through with its slow pacing and nonsensical plotting. It's somewhere between kitchen sink melodrama and David Lynch mind bender and it doesn't always balance it as well as it should.

Things get stranger as the film goes along, but it leads to a bizarre, anti-climactic conclusion that'll leave most viewers with more questions than answers.

Men Don't Leave is one of those films that seems to have disappeared completely and I'm not sure if that's entirely fair. It might not be the best drama from the early 90's, but there's so much in it to treasure.

A housewife is stunned by the sudden death of her husband which leaves her with two children to raise by herself. With no other source of income, she sells their house and moves to Baltimore where she gets a new job and meets a new love interest as her children begin to act out and deal with loss in their own ways.

Any film that stars Jessica Lange is immediately worthy of a look and Men Don't Leave is no exception. Lange is excellent throughout, bringing a lot of warmth to the role of the put upon housewife who must join the real world in order for her family to survive.

Equally as strong is Chris O'Donnell who plays Lange's eldest son and Arliss Howard is charming as Lange's new love interest. Kathy Bates has a minor supporting role and does what she can with it, but there's not much there for her to do and Joan Cusack is given an even stranger role as tenant in the family's building who starts dating the underage O'Donnell.

Take all the major giallo hallmarks - tons of style, sleaze, and creative murders and toss them out the window and you're left with something that resembles The Forbidden Photos of A Lady Beyond Suspicion. It's a plodding, turgid affair with little flair and even less thrills.

A woman is attacked by a perverted creep who tells her that her husband isn't the man she thinks he is. He ultimately blackmails her into taking lurid photos and, by that point, we've all gone to sleep.

Not one of the better giallos and I'm starting to believe that, unless Argento or Bava's name is attached to a giallo, I'm not going to love it.

If you're looking for something a little off the beaten path, Baby Blood might just do the trick. It's a story about a woman who gets pregnant and starts hearing the voice of her unborn child telling her to kill and drink the blood of her victims. Wanting to be a good nurturing mother, she does what her baby wants and gets into all sorts of trouble.

Baby Blood might be stylish and filled with nasty special effects, but it also suffers from redundancy midway through. It turns into a series of murders as the lead character lures one hapless victim after another into her web, killing them, and drinking their blood. Pretty soon after, her baby gets hungry again and she does the same thing. The first few times, it's somewhat shocking and interesting, but it gets old after awhile.

Thar said, Baby Blood does deliver the gore, so if that's what you're in the mood for, you could do much worse.

After seeing the trailer for The Strangers, I was incredibly hyped up for it. It looked like it could, potentially, be one of the scariest movies ever made. The reviews came in and many seemed to think it was pretty dang scary, so I gave it a shot and I have to ask what all the fuss was about.

The Strangers is basically a two character movie with a couple spending time at their secluded home in the middle of nowhere when they get a strange knock on the door. A young woman stands at the door and asks if "Tamara" is home. They tell her that no one by that name lives here. Soon after, they are harassed and tormented by two other mask-wearing psychopaths who want them dead.

If I can be positive for a minute, The Strangers does start off on the right ominous note. The couple, played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, are likable and there's a sense of dread at first that keeps the audience on its toes, but by the midpoint, it becomes predictable. A character goes into a room, doesn't notice one of the killers is right behind them or hiding somewhere, and repeat. After the third time, this gets stale and you wonder why these people don't just go ahead and kill them. Perhaps The Strangers would have worked as a better 30 minute short, because so much of the film feels like padding.

Even potentially suspenseful scenes like someone leaving their safe hiding space to go outside and try to start the car are ruined, because we never really believe either of the two leads will die until the end. We know that they'll be safe and that takes a lot of the suspense and terror away.

Greenlighting sequels immediately after the first one was a hit and rushing them into production seems like such a Hollywood thing to do, but Italians clearly took a page from Hollywood's playbook for this one and I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Demons 2 was released the year after the original hit theaters and it appears to have had about as much thought and care put into it as one would think. There are a few imaginative moments, but it's mostly a slow retread of the previous film down to even aping the aimless young people riding around the city in their car subplot while the theater/apartment complex is being infested with the titular demons.

This time, the demons emerge through a movie on the TV (via some admittedly excellent effects work) and infect a spoiled birthday girl named Sally who, in turn, ends up infecting her entire birthday party who, in turn, end up infected the whole floor who, in turn...well, you get the picture.

The special effects and makeup are great, but the whole film feels a lot more tame than the original (usually, sequels try to ratchet up the gore a bit) and it's too hard to care much when you can feel them repeating every beat of the original.

I'm not a huge fan of "funny Freddy", but the concept behind this film is great and it might have the most likable cast of any of the Nightmare on Elm Street films. Each one brings a lot of charm to their roles even when they don't have much to work with on the page and each one feels unique so that you never have to stop and go "who is that again?"

The journey that Alice goes on throughout the film might be one of the most moving character arcs I've ever seen in a horror film where she grows stronger and more confident with every loss she endures. It's as if all her friends are lifting her up and pushing her from beyond the grave to be the best she can be. Lisa Wilcox is excellent in the role where she's allowed to go from shy, mousy wallflower to strong, empowered woman by the end.

If you're just in it for the special effects and death scenes, you're also in luck, because this is one of the most imaginative sequels in the series.

It's hard to call Pet Sematary a bad film. It's not really. It's more of a disappointing film considering the wonderful source material it springs from. The original film wasn't a perfect work of art, but there were still some memorable and even frightening moments and images that managed to stick with people for years. I have a hard time imagining that anything in this film will stick with viewers for more than 30 minutes after they turn off the movie.

What makes it even stranger is that, besides a midpoint twist (and a truly odd ending), it's basically the exact same story as both the novel and the original film, but condensed and sped up. It also doesn't help that Jason Clarke seems awfully miscast as Louis and it's incredibly hard to warm up to him. Since he's the lead, that makes for tough going.