Freddy Vs. Jason

(2003) ****1/2

This was a great one to end on. That's right, this is my last review. My final score: Fifty-seven movies. Last year I watched forty-one more movies than that, and even just saying that right now makes my shoulders ache with exhaustion. Good gravy, the combination of glee and punishment that makes up this experience...I just can't wait till next year.

I went out with a bang; this movie completely rocks. I know that at face value it just seems like a big marketing maneuver, and that was probably why I didn't see it when it came out. But this turned out to be a really good idea. Look at where the franchises are. There's so many movies, their coexistence is already pretty clumsy. How did Jason get from being a little toxic waste-covered kid in the Manhattan sewer to the SWAT scene that opens Goes to Hell? Does it really matter anymore? And you know who else has so many stories told about them the notion of one single story is lost? Batman. Spider-man. All those guys. Treating horror icons like comic book characters is already what they're doing, conscious or not, so teaming two of them together is exactly the right move. Still, they could have screwed up, and they didn't.

This starts with something we've never actually seen: an alive Freddy Kreuger with one of his victims. No gore, just a scared little girl -- but what a punch. Then there's a fun montage of Freddy footage, as the voice-over tells us about the good old days when people feared him. Now he can't come back because nobody is afraid of him, which I think is a brilliant stroke. No more of this stuff about souls, they took a hint from New Nightmare and made him a creature of fear. He pops into Jason's dreams and, impersonating Mom, lays down Jason's new, broad rules: "You can never die. Go to Elm Street" That's it, it's that simple. Under the dirt, Jason's remains re-form, and off we go.

Another great twist is that this time, the stupid authority figures got it right. By pretending there's no such thing as Freddy, they actually made him go away. All the kids who had any contact with him are institutionalized, popping Nancy's dream-blocking Hypnocil pills. "We don't say his name!" says the older cop to the rookie. Freddy's like Voldemort, or a viral idea. This idea is pushed further when a discussion about him happens in a very crowded school hallway. You can see the fear spreading, hear Freddy growing stronger.

Then his first would-be victim slips right between his finger blades, macheted by Jason in the real world. Then another slamming thing we've never seen before happens: instead of covert killings, Jason wades into a crowd of teens, hacking away. Around this time our trusty teen troupe gets their act together, with the help of the rookie cop. With a lot of information to sift, they get through it quickly and put together something like a plan. The plan goes all wonky, Jason gets sedated and we get to the "Vs." part.

The best thing I can say about the battle is: they did it right. It starts in dream, and we get to see Freddy bring his full powers to bear against Jason's invulnerability. When the battle hits the real world, it's Jason's brute power vs. Freddy's speed and spite (Freddy reminds me a lot of Lady Deathstrike from X2 here, with the spooky-quick way he stabs and stabs). It's really clear that the writers asked themselves what a fan would want from this fight, and then stuffed it all in.

Besides the main event, the strength of this movie is the great job it does of showcasing the Big Two. Freddy's nightmares are creepy stuff indeed (including the return of that little girl), and his buzzkilling sense of humor is nowhere in sight. The shot of him ninja-jumping out of the water, with the dream Crystal Lake turning into a sea of red beneath him...it's downright iconic. Jason has that dark grey corpsey look I liked from #6, never takes off his mask, and actually gains a touch of depth in the picked-on-at-camp flashbacks (something else I can't believe we've never seen). Both characters are operating with a fresh new vibe before the first blade is crossed.

Sometimes the right people get to make their movie. This is an espresso shot of clever, scary fun.

Undead

(2003) ***

Undead was the eighth and final zombie movie of the month for me.

Zombie movies are inherently awesome for three reasons: 1) The concept of the zombie allows and encourages guilt free carnage. 2) It's great escapism. All of life's trivial problems and bullshit would disappear instantly when your immediate concerns become surviving a slew of rabid zombies . 3) Making a zombie movie has got to be so much fun.

Yes, Undead recreates Night of the Living Dead yet again but it does so with a great appreciation for the genre. And the Australian interpretation is worth looking into for many reasons. The Undead zombies are quick and nasty. They'll rip your brain out of your skull in the blink of an eye. The action is fast paced, super-violent, and workably cartoonish. The Aussies are capable of making a line such as "When I was a kid we respected our parents - We didn't fucking eat them!" extremely funny. The overly dramatic musical recalls 80's science fiction blockbuster films. Amazingly, the pieces all just fit together to make a great, watchable film.

Then things start to get X-Filey... I suppose it's commendable that they chose to go in an entirely different direction but it's also very stupid. I managed to block out most of the last 45 minutes but there was something about the aliens being responsible for reviving the dead. Wait a second, wasn't that Plan 9 From Outer Space?

Unlike Shaun of the Dead, the Undead ultimately only appeals to the real fanatics. But that's quite alright with me.

House on Haunted Hill

(1959)***

Five diverse people receive invitations to participate in a “haunted house” party with Fredrick Loren (Vincent Price) and his 4th wife Annabelle. The guests are informed that they will receive $10,000 each if they agree to stay in the house for one night. Things are never as easy as they seem, however, and Fredrick ratchets up the tension by giving everyone revolvers. After setting the stage for his frightfest, Fredrick proceeds to scare the living daylights out of his guests through a series of strange sounds, decapitated heads, and animated skeletons, which in turn provokes the guests to use their fully loaded weapons.

Vincent Price is at his swishiest in Haunted Hill. In truth, I’ve never found him to be particularly scary and it amuses me that he has this long horror movie legacy. For me Vincent Price is the bad guy on The Brady Bunch, the voice on the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyworld, and one of the rappers in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. Nevertheless there’s something almost hypnotic about his performances, particularly here. I recall Octopunk summarily dismissing this film last year, but I actually found it to be a lot of fun. I like the simple “I dare you to spend a night in a haunted house” plot, and the stupid decisions the characters make. This is one of those silly films where the only way that the various “traps” would work is if a number of precise events coalesced perfectly (e.g., standing in exactly the right place in a room, etc). This is the charm of Haunted Hill though, and it’s a hoot to see how each character will be dispatched. I’ll definitely throw this one in from time to time.

Bloody Beach

(2000)**1/2

Bloody Beach is Korea’s answer to the popular teen slasher genre. A good-looking group of internet chat room friends rents an apartment for the summer in order to get to know one another better. We learn early on that one of the chat room members, Sandmanz, was ousted from the chat room and later committed suicide as a result. The group has mixed feelings about this; some believing that he was an unstable loner who deserved his fate while others suspect that someone in the group spread lies about him, which engendered this negative opinion. Soon the group begins to receive threatening emails suggesting that they too are destined for the same fate as Sandmanz. One by one they are violently murdered and Bloody Beach becomes a paint-by-numbers slasher.

A pretty good slice-and-dice that borrows heavily from the Friday the 13th formula, Bloody Beach more than lives up to its title. While not original in any way, shape or form, the film is saved by a level of sex and violence that is much more graphic than American cinema would ever allow. This is no scarier than your average Jason installment, but the Korean setting makes it more intriguing than it actually is. I found it amusing that all of the pretty characters met in an internet chat room. A fellow student in graduate school once dragged me to an internet Halloween party and when the door opened a midget greeted us with her hand out saying, “Hi, I’m Pat”. She was the most normal of the bunch.

Halloween: Resurrection

(2002) *

I reviewed this last year, but only because it happened to be on cable at an opportune moment. Watching it this year, in context, I dropped its rating from one and a half stars to the dreaded one. This movie is so bad it made me wonder if they noticed the downward spiral of the Friday the 13th series and tried to catch up in one swift stroke.

First of all, they TOTALLY undermine everything that was cool about H20, just so they could have Jamie Lee Curtis appear in an intro with no bearing whatever on the larger story. I understand that by their very nature, slasher sequels are not kind to the victors of the earlier movies. But this was the cheapest of cheap, and I immediately wanted to pretend it never happened.

Second of all, for some reason this movie is a giant valentine to the coolness of Busta Rhymes, and he's just hateful in this. I don't know much about Busta Rhymes in general, and I'm actually inclined to like him. However, his character is the frontman for Dangertainment, the outfit that runs the Real World: Myers House show whose cast Michael uses as his next pool of victims. That means Busta's the axis point for most of Resurrection's major "ideas," so you're subjected to several self- righteous, sneering speeches directed at whichever character is holding the position of Fool Who Disagrees With Busta. By the end of the movie, each utterance of "muthaFUCKA" made me want to stick my boot through the TV.

Disliking so-called reality TV as I do, I thought it might be fun to see such a show hacked to bits. You know: "and here's the roomate who's really hard to get along with." It soon becomes really clear that such a show would actually be pretty boring-ass shit (since that would be this movie, just without most of the slashings). The characters wander around the dark house, supposedly finding clues to some question nobody really ever asked. I started to choke on the bad logic: the normal-sized house behaves like a vast mansion, the first cast member killed is looking in a mirror when Michael pops out of it, yet NOBODY notices this despite the fact there’s a camera on the victim’s head and supposedly thousands of viewers with rewind buttons.

In the end we get another big speech by Busta about turning OFF the cameras (yes, this contradicts his earlier position) and the surviving cast member grabs the brass ring –- she’s famous! Ugh. This is a five-bushel bucket of suck.

Paranoiac

(1963)***

The fragile homeostasis of a dysfunctional family is disrupted when a mysterious man baring an uncanny resemblance to a long lost son/sibling arrives at the door one day. Although he is suspected of being an imposter, the psychological damage proves to be too much for the family, which is thrown into a spiral of turmoil, despair, and ultimately murder.

Summerisle reviewed this earlier (see below). What a strange little film. One thing I’ve noticed about horror films from the 60s is that they seem to be more violent and thematically more sinister than from previous decades. It could probably be argued that this reflects a shift from an innocent Leave it to Beaver world to a world where our president is assassinated. Sure, monster movies and the film noirs of the 30s, 40s and 50s were thematically dark, but they still had a different feel to them. One thing that makes these early films so striking is that regulatory committees forced directors to convey evil and violence in a much more artistic manner. The use of shadows, jump cuts, and deep focus substituted for overt brutality and sadism. When watching films from the 60s we begin to see a shift to more onscreen realism - check out The Sadist, also filmed the same year as Paranoiac, to see what I’m talking about. Paranoiac is ultimately a satisfying “horror” film that inadvertently examines the insidiousness of unresolved grief and the ravages of mental illness.

Jason X

(2001) *

The Friday the 13th series was already starting to feel like a bad hangover at this point, then Jason X upgraded it to a bad hangover with a dog barking outside your window. Maybe the idea of Jason on a spaceship isn't intrinsically bad, but I don't care to speculate. This movie didn't earn it.

Jason is being held captive by some government agency, about to be taken away by some other government agency. Agent Jerk, from the new agency...you know what? This part doesn't matter. There's a festival of mindless hubris and incompetence and Jason and his recent captor wind up frozen. Then it's 400 years later and a spacefaring salvage crew pick them up from a now-uninhabited planet Earth. Why is it the worst people wind up frozen for future generations? People thaw out Jason Voorhees or Khan Noonien Singh, but where's the secret bunker with Einstein or Ghandi? Hmm?

Anyhoo, Frozen Girl displays her previous uselessness by not mentioning that EVERY TIME Jason is unrestrained or unfrozen he gets up and starts killing everybody. And then Jason gets out and starts killing everybody. This is where I mention the production values in this crapfest, which are not quite as good as those on Babylon 5. Sci-fi movies with sub-tv level sets and effects are bad enough, but the reason this movie fails so completely is the complete lack of imagination on every level. The actors, the ideas, the costumes, the sets...none of this carries an interesting slant on the future. If there were a finite amount of sci-fi footage available in the world, the makers of this movie would be heavily fined.

With this tepid setting as background, they do an Aliens knockoff bit as a cadre of space marines get picked off one by one. Each time somebody says "Sarge, I found so-and-so," Sarge says "how is he?" (They're dead.) Then they knock off Jason Takes Manhattan for a while, until the awful, comic-relief girl Data knockoff gets an upgrade to a Trinity knockoff and blows his ass up. BUT, he lands on one of the nanotech med tables (which we saw repair some machete wounds earlier) and the nanites turn him into what an employee at a gay S&M club on a Borg ship might look like. You might think a cyborg Jason would possibly be cool, but somehow they manage to miss.

By my usual standards I'd give this one and a half stars, because of two creative deaths: the girl whose face is nitro-frozen and then shattered, and the guy who's dropped on the giant, upright drill-bit thing, because his body slowly spins around as it slides down. But I just wanted to slap this movie.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

(1998) ****1/2

I call it The Jamie Trilogy: Halloweens 4 through 6, featuring Laurie Strode's orphaned daughter. While they aren't exactly demonstrating the sharp decline the Jason movies are inflicting on us at this point in slasher history, they're not exactly great, either. Then H20 happens, totally knocking one out of the park and through old man Johnson's window. And how did they do it? They pretended The Jamie Trilogy NEVER HAPPENED. Right the fuck on.

And why not? They've got Jamie Lee Curtis back, who's had a lot of acting experience thanks to her old scream queen days. She pulls off an engaging, layered performance as the grown up Laurie Strode. Twenty years after that bad night, her personal strength has earned her a postition as dean of a private school in California -- yet she is still terribly haunted, knocking back booze and pills and seeing Michael in every reflection. Her paranoia makes things difficult with her 17-year old son (Josh Hartnett, who I like), to the point where he is forced to tell her off about it. He's right, but she's more right, because Michael is on their trail.

This tale of Halloween night is a good, tight story with no fat at all. Josh and three friends (including Michelle Williams, whose appeal I completely don't get) sneak to a quiet corner of the school to secretly party while everyone is off on a trip. Laurie, who's been living under an assumed name, gets drunk with her boyfriend Adam Arkin and finally opens up and tells him who her brother is. Meanwhile, Michael is already stalking the campus.

Much like the original, this movie counterbalances a good, suspenseful buildup with an exciting endgame. Watching Laurie square off against Michael is perfect: at every step she flat-out refuses to commit any of the mistakes which sealed the doom of her countless imitators through the last two decades. There's a stellar moment when she opens up a closet as a possible hiding place, looks in it and says "shit!" Does she follow the same plan she did last time? I'm not telling.

H20 revitalizes a spent franchise to make a perfect bookend to the old story we loved so much, a lot like New Nightmare did for Freddy. I guess you'd call it the Jamie Lee Trilogy, which I realize sounds inconveniently similar to the other one. It's not my fault.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

(1995) **1/2

I recall seeing this with JPX when it first came out and thinking it was the worst movie ever. It was the first Michael Myers movie I viewed since #2, so rather suddenly I was thrown in with Michael’s niece, Celtic baby rituals and some guy in a black hat. I wasn’t feeling very charitable towards the doddering Donald Pleasance, either. So I was mildly surprised when I threw this in and it wasn’t quite that bad. It wasn’t particularly good, mind you, but certainly not the wandering mishmash I remembered.

We open with a rather painfully long scene of Jamie Lloyd giving birth. Seems she’s been a captive of the group led by the black-clad mystery man from #5, a group that finally fleshes out the Celtic/Samhain/Halloween presence hinted at since #2. They employ Michael as sort of a free-lance security guard, and when Jamie escapes with her baby he takes off after her. I would’ve liked to see Danielle Harris reprise her Jamie role, but it’s just as well she didn’t do it since Michael impales her quickly. I suspect that would have honked me off.

(If they’d just let him kill her in #4 or #5, would he have stopped since he has no blood relatives left? I mean, do the math, people.)

Then we’re back in Haddonfield, where Tommy Doyle (the babysat kid from the first movie, played by the likeable Paul Rudd) lives across from the old Myers house, recently occupied by the relatives of Laurie’s adoptive Strode family. This includes unbelievable Asshole Dad and the actual mom from Better Off Dead, hee hee. She doesn’t serve any Frahnch fries, though. We get the basic “don’t get killed” plot along with a “keep the baby safe” plot, and a more subdued Loomis is on the scene. This time around I liked him a lot more; I thought the beard suited him. There is one line of his I remembered griping about in ’95. I think he says “do you mean to say—“ (that Jamie had a baby), but it sounds like a gout of escaping wheezy air instead of speech. Eh, he was old.

This was the third movie I watched over the weekend that featured uncontrollable minions. The Phantasm balls, the Jason hands from Hell, and this time Michael himself: as the Celtic cabal is prepping for whatever it is they do, he walks in and whacks the lot of them. Suckers!

There was only one scene in this movie that maintained its flagrant stupidity from my viewing of it ten years ago. Michael stuffs one of his kills in a tree, and the discovery happens when a little girl spends two whole minutes saying “Mommy, it’s raining red” without 1)looking up, or 2)knowing what blood looks like. I suppose that’s a decent conclusion for this review: this movie won’t piss you off too much.

New Nightmare

(1994) ****1/2

Wow. After a trio of really mediocre movies, Wes Craven returns to the helm and shows us that the Kreuger/Craven team is totally money, yo. This might have been the first time I've watched this movie from beginning to end, and I was impressed. Damn impressed.

Wes obviously thought really hard about how to make the character interesting again, and he came up with a doozy of an idea. Well, actually it was the same idea, just moved to a new place: here. Starring as themselves are the key players of the (good) Elm Street flicks, and Craven too, trying to come to grips with the strange emergence of a new, darker Freddy who is crawling out of their nightmares.

One feature that makes this work is the balls-out level of the self reference, which crescendos with a closeup of the script Craven's writing. It's the script for the very movie you're watching, and it reads "close-up on computer screen, fade to black" and then fades to black. This is a level of meta-ness that will make you dizzy, and it's deployed with skill (and much more smoothly than the similar bag of tricks used in Scream).

A wonderful feeling of dread settles over the sunny LA setting. Freddy's manipulations run concurrent with a series of earthquakes, putting everyone on edge. After the first major death (Heather Langenkamp's husband - gutsy move), her young son carries the bulk of the encroaching fear as he tells how "the mean man" is trying to climb up to the foot of his bed every night. The wrong kid can sink any movie, but this kid pulls it off amazingly. The moment I realized how well it had come together was when Heather asked him where he learned the Freddy chant, and he says "little kids singing...under my covers." Atchi matchi, it's giving me the willies right now.

Despite all that good stuff, the best thing about this flick is Freddy. When Heather is telling Robert Englund about her nightmares, he asks "is it me?" She says "no, darker" and she's right. There's a slight makeover: the claw is now part of Freddy's hand, his face is more skull-like, and he's sporting a long black coat that really makes him seem like a creature of shadow. More than his new looks, he works a menacing presence that reminds you of his scariest moments. He ain't funny this time, he's a creature made of fear. Literally.

As Horrorthon fare goes, this is a pretty rich movie, full of clever commentary about our country's often bizarre relationship to our fiction. But at its heart, like the best horror flicks, it's about what scares us.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

(1993) **

Sigh. This one is stupid down to its very roots. It starts with a deceptively promising opening, as the scantily-clad girl dashes out of the house at the first sign of trouble (smart) and flees into the woods, Jason stalking behind her, sporting his new "rutabaga head" look. Suddenly the big man's surrounded by spotlights and a SWAT team is peppering him with bullets. Turns out she was a scantily-clad agent, ha ha, and we're finally seeing the authorities muster the right response -- the one we've been waiting to see for years. They blow him to bits and then it's off to the morgue and cinematic suckery.

Just after the coroner discovers that Jason's heart is filled with some unknown black liquid, the heart starts beating. Naturally, the coroner grabs it and starts greedily devouring it like a tar-filled calzone. Then all these orange lights swarm out of the Jason parts and go into the coroner. Get it? He's being possessed. Wow, gosh, jeez, thud.

In principle, I'm not against the "disembodied killer that possesses people" idea. I haven't seen Fallen, but the same premise is done really well in both The Hidden and Shocker (oh wait a second, Shocker sucked). But this is a Jason movie, dammit; didn't they learn their lesson with #5? Even if I got an iota of fun out of seeing Jason's murderous glare coming from regular, unmasked people, I want the mask, dude!

Unfortunately, ripping off The Hidden is only part of the game, as they open up new story ideas that amount to a huuuge pile of horse hocky. This is all thanks to a foolish, instantly-unlikeable bounty hunter played by the captain from 21 Jump Street. He's supposed to be the movie's tough guy, but I hated every moment of his screen time. For some reason he's the only one who knows that Jason can only be killed by a blood relative, and only with a special dagger that this dude happens to have on him. Apparently someone decided, at this very late stage, that they weren't ripping off Halloween enough. So here's Jason's sister and niece, and here's the Voorhees house!

In the end, Jason's host body totally craps out and he emerges as a little demon puppet (if they were smart, it'd have a face like a hockey mask). Instead of putting a bucket over it, our hero (the guy from Friday the 13th TV series) drops it like a spooked housewife and Jason manages to use his sister's corpse to rebirth himself. You heard me. When the kill stroke finally happens, big muppety arms come out of the ground and pull Jason down. They try to inject some drama by having the arms nearly pull TV series guy down, too (I guess Hell has the same safety standards as the Tall Man), but I was just laughing at the arms.

In the end Freddy's hand reaches out of the dirt and grabs the hockey mask. Whatever. I say skip this clunker.