The 50 Nights of Horror will probably be a tad unbalanced this year. Lots of things going on all at the same time. So bear with me. That's not to say that this is going to be a tosser of a Marathon. But it might be aggravatingly weird. So it goes.
Long Weekend (1978)
Genre: Environmental Terror
Format: DVD
I should also mention that this movie is Australian. Very Australian. The stars of the movie hit a kangaroo with their car and accidentally shoot a dugong.
An Australian couple weekend takes a holiday to go camping. They're having a difficult time with their marriage (affairs, abortions, and other typical marital stumbling blocks). They're also real jerks to nature, and nature, in its infinite wisdom decides to get its revenge. The writer noted that he wishes he would have explained at the beginning of the movie that neither star survives. I'll spare you a boring hour of this movie and tell you that up front so you can enjoy the movie more than I did.
The last 30 minutes, though, get thoroughly creepy.
So if you're into Australian horror, or 70s horror, or "Green" horror (Gore = gore), you'll probably like this movie, but I won't recommend it for casual scary movie fans.
Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984)
Genre: Slasher
Format: DVD
Holy crap. I thought the F13 series was basically tired and done after the 3D installment that more or less fizzled, but Joe Zito's chapter of the franchise was really exciting and well done. Crispin Glover is in this movie, and so is Corey Feldman so....80'S PARTY!The premise doesn't stray too far from the successful F13 formula, but there is a nice, new kink thrown into this one. Instead of taking place right in the middle of a summer camp with a bunch of horny teenagers, this one takes place with the same stereotypical teenagers renting a vacation cabin and partying next door to a family of three (right next to Camp Crystal Lake).
**FULL DISCLOSURE**
Since last year's 50 Nights of Horror Challenge, my customer moved from Brooklyn to a new warehouse and office near Princeton. Now I spend a lot of night's on the road, traveling between home and my new workplace. Coincidentally, this new office is not too far from Blairstown, NJ, the actual home of Camp Crystal Lake. Not-so-coincidentally, I have purchased all of the F13 movies and have been gradually working my way through the entire oeuvre. I have a new found appreciation for the movies. [END FULL DISCLOSURE][RETURN TO ONLY PARTIAL DISCLOSURE]
The kills here just seem.. better.. which sounds like the kind of thing a crazy person would say. But hear me out. The kills are more meaningful because the charaters are more sympathetic. Yes, they're still stereotypical, but c'mon... watch Crispin Glover dance to impress a girl. Even the annoying schmucks are a little more sympathetically-annoying.
Part of me wonders if this was so good, if so much additional attention to detail was given to this entry because it was supposed to be the last in the series. You and I both know that it definitely was not the last of the series, but perhaps that is what gave it that extra zing to set it apart.
I actually enjoyed this one so much that I sought out a VHS copy to have for my collection. If you only watch one of the sequels to the F13 franchise, at this point I recommend this one. Of course, you owe it to yourself to see the original, because it was not terrible, and it influence the crummy Halloween costume decision that millions of asshole big brothers and shitty older neighbors would make for years to come.
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)
Genre: Slasher
Format: DVD
One of my problems with this movie is that we're supposed to believe that in the years between F13:4 and F13:5, Tommy Jarvis, a smart kid that appeared to have everything going for him, has grown up to become become an off-balanced, psychotic, dispassionate, anti-social weirdo ever since he encountered Jason Voorhees.
Another problem I have with this installment is that, unlike F13:4, the stereotypical teenagers are all unlikable. Unlike the last chapter, in F13:5, you WANT all of these buttholes to get disemboweled.
The only saving grace of this movie is that we're force fed a lot of red herrings as to whom the killer is. Unique to this installment, we don't know if Jason is killing these jerks or if it's another character that we may or may not have met. So that's kind of neat. Otherwise, I think you're safe to pass on this.
I don't want to give too much away, but the killer's reveal is really, really dumb and anticlimactic.
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| Red Herrings? Or just jerks? |
It is notable that the intention of the producers was to step away from Jason Voorhees as the big baddie in the franchise. Like the Halloween franchise, F13 was going to feature a different villain in each movie. Unlike the Halloween franchise, however, F13 recognized not to stray too far from what made the franchise work in the first place - horny coeds getting slaughtered. So the slasher angle was meant to stick around (again, as opposed to Halloween 3's half-assed Stonehenge sci-fi masks taking over the world....so dumb...). When you consider that this was supposed to be the first of a new "breed" of F13 movies, you can almost forgive it for being what it is, the weakest link (to date) in the F13 series. I've seen bits of Jason vs. Manhattan, and I haven't seen Jason X yet, so there's still time to make this seem less awful.
Redeeming Quality: The African American punk from Return of the Living Dead pops up here as the older cousin of one of the film's "heroes." [POSSIBLE SPOILER] He may or may not die while taking a dump in an outhouse.
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Genre: Slasher
Format: DVD
In an odd twist, Tommy Jarvis (recast from John Shepherd in F13:5 to Return of the Living Dead's Thom Mathews here in F13:6) no longer an anti-social psychopath living in a Jason-haunted drug-haze, decides to take his friend along as they dig up...Jason Voorhees...who...
So resurrected-Jason returns to his roots and begins killing camp counselors and any camp-related attendee or employee while poor Tommy Jarvis does his best to convince the police and the hottest female camp counselor that Jason is alive and on a killing streak. You pretty much know what to expect from this one. It's nice to have that familiarity back, but it's still missing something. There's a lot of humor sprinkled in here. Maybe that's what throws this one off from being a typical, bloody, fun slasher. Not terrible. Better than the last one.
Nightmare City (1980)
Genre: Zombies(?)
Format: Netflix Streaming
(sigh) This is almost a zombie movie, and it almost makes sense. The premise sounds really cool: reporter makes his way through a city from start to finish as a zombie plague works its' way through the population (think 28 Days Later on Day 1), but it's just too cheap and silly and inconsistent to really work.
If you're a zombie completionist, absolutely go for it.
There are a few neat gags (jerk doctor expertly throws scalpel into a zombie's face from across an operating room), but there are way too many characters in this movie, and too often they're introduced with no relevance or weight. So even when they get killed by their wicked stepmother, you don't really care.
The gore here is kind of weak. In fact, it usually looks like cow pies liberally applied to the face. And if I remember correctly, we also get the vacant-eyed, blue makeup to make people look like they've lost all of their blood (think Dawn of the Dead).
It's a cheap, sloppy zombie movie, and some people like that. In this case, I just wasn't feeling it.
REDEEMING QUALITY: The movie stars Hugo Stiglitz, an actor later memorialized by Quentin Tarrantino in Inglorious Bastards (though I don't see any correlation between real Stiglitz and movie Stiglitz).
House of Wax (2005)
Genre: Slasher
Format: Cinemax On Demand
You probably know this as the horror movie with Paris Hilton in it. There's a little bit more going on that that, but not too terribly much more.
Such as special effects! They're really awesome in this movie! Sweet! Do you see that guy's jaw melting off? How cool is that?! Hopefully this movie is full of this kind of body-melting effects!
Well...shit. It's not. This movie probably would have been borderline great if these gory scenes weren't spread so far apart. At one point I actually gagged and choked at the disgusting scene I was watching. But then I was bored again for 30 minutes. Then it peaked again! Then it was boring again. And so on.
This being a slasher movie, one indistinguishable if not for the special effects, we're treated to the stereotypical high schoolers/college kids doing stereotypical kid things. The atmosphere, though, and I can't stress enough how cool the special effects are, those are my big takeaways from this film.
I would also like to point out that this movie was released in 2005 and has an extremely 2005 nu-metal soundtrack. Check this out:
Booyah! I guess System of a Down and AFI were busy that weekend.
I was kind of bummed that my wife had seen this movie before I had. She walked into the room while I was watching the movie and said, "Oooh! Chad Michael Murray!" I didn't know who that was, and when I asked, she explained that he was on shows like One Tree Hill and Gilmore Girls. This kind of ruined the movie for me, too. That, and there were about 10 minutes where this was too torture-porn-y for me. A little too unnecessarily graphic. But some people are into that. So there you go.
Audrey Rose (1977)
Genre: Exorcism, Haunting
Format: Netflix Streaming
With the exception of Sir Anthony Hopkins' creepy performance (almost as good as 1978's Magic), this movie fell pretty damn flat. Others found the performances to be exceptional. I found all of them to be exceptionally bland (if not bad).
The gist here is that a daughter is beginning to have severe nightmares, and the nightmares are affecting her on a physical level. One such nightmare results in burns appearing on the girl's arms. Around the same time the nightmares start, a creepy dude begins showing up regularly. After the first act of the film, we find that the creepy dude is Anthony Hopkins in disguise. Duh duh duhhhh!
But wait! He's not here to eat the family's faces or anything! He's actually here because the nightmare daughter is actually HIS daughter. Well, sort of. Y'see, HIS daughter died 11 years ago in a terrible car accident, and the NIGHTMARE daughter was born two seconds after HIS daughter died. And to help cope with the death of his wife and daughter, Anthony Hopkins has been on an international religious journey where he's studied all kinds of religions, and now he knows that HIS daughter's soul is actually trapped in NIGHTMARE DAUGHTER'S body and... ok.... you know this is going to end badly.
It's hard to tell who's the bad guy here, and sometimes that can make for a good movie, but not here. So save yourself the time and go watch Friday the 13th Part IV on VHS. You can skip this one as far as I'm concerned.
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So, that's the wrap-up for week 1. I'll take the time to write a summary of Week 2 as soon as I can. If you're hungry for more horror reviews, check out my buddy's blog, IcyJones Movie Mayhem!
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