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Rated R for horrific deaths, leaning a little harder into Saw style deaths than the previous entries.  Still, while gory, it isn't outside the scope of the previous films.  If anything, the upsetting part is the contemporary filming styles that somehow make these moments seem a little more troubling.  There isn't any sex or nudity, which is a breath of fresh air because, as silly as the movie gets, it doesn't feel superfluous.  Still, the movie is upsetting and gory as heck.  

DIRECTORS: Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein

Yeah!  I cheated!  I jumped the line to watch Final Destination: Bloodlines an hour earlier than I thought.  If the Final Destination movies are all about Death's Design, I'm all about the algorithm.   But I wanted, for once, to be done talking about horror movies once November showed up.  Also, like, I have a nice break from writing after this.  Taking all that into consideration, my viewership just jumped up in the middle of the night.  It could entirely be bots.  Who knows?  Considering that Cujo didn't get a lot of Threads attention, that makes the most amount of sense.  Still, I can't deny how good it feels to see that number spike up again.  I'm easily manipulated.

Before we go into the specifics of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I want to talk about the franchise as a whole.  I have always kind of shied away from these movies when it came to the blog.  On paper, I'm against gore.  I'm pro-character.  I'm pro-plot.  From any breakdown of these movies, I should absolutely hate this series.  As I've stated in all of my other entries, I realized that these movies are excuses for VFX artists to strut their stuff and story be darned.  I accepted that pretty darned quickly.  And when I accepted that, I had a really good time.  I would never advocate for stupid movies.  Okay, almost never, because he I am, talking about how sometimes a stupid movie franchise is exactly what is needed.  

The funny thing is, Final Destination, as a franchise, might be the most existential concept in the world.  It is a movie that personifies mortality.  It is a constant commentary on how anyone one of us, at any moment, are a loose screw away from being turned into a bag of red goo.  I mean, we're meant to laugh and scream at these moments.  There should be something profound to be said about how life is fleeting and that no one is immortal.  Instead, from moment one of this series, the narrative is something far sillier than anything I just wrote.  Instead of actually treating Death as something majestic, it's treated as a bit of a petulant child who doesn't like to be stymied.  

This kind of brings me to Bloodlines.  Bloodlines finally did the thing that I wanted the series to do: Death by Natural Causes.  I was always wondering why --in a completely practical society --that people didn't just...die.  I mean, if Death is really hurt by people surviving the grand design, why go through all the showmanship that these movies thrive on?  Why have the most gory disaster ever to pulp people by acts of God?  People die natural deaths all the time.  They die for no reason.  Do you know why Death is a crybaby about losing?  Because dying of cancer is all just a little bit sad.  By the way, I was actually heartbroken by seeing Tony Todd appearing in his last on screen film only to have him, in character, dying of cancer.  That's a bit rough.  It seems a little tactless on the part of the filmmakers.  But in my head, Tony Todd probably appreciated being welcomed back to the franchise.  Even moreso, he was able to put a cap and closure on his character, which is nice in a really screwed up way.  

Anyway, I have to say that, while I enjoyed Bloodlines more than many other entries in the franchise, I was a bit let down.  I'm going to complain for a while before I start talking about the things I liked.  It's what I always do.  (But what I also do is forget what I like and then, in a desperate attempt to close up yet another blog entry, just cap it off without the counterpoint.  I, at least, recognize some of my own inadequacies!)  I just spent the last two paragraphs talking about Death's personality, at least based on the Rube Goldberg events that happen in these movies.  The Death of Bloodlines might be the most confusing version of Death yet.  The opening sequence of the film, which is probably the most impressive opening death sequence, takes place in the '50s or '60s.  We have a World's Fair style exhibit of a Space Needle inspired Sky View Tower.  Now, we are all waiting for this thing to start crashing to the ground.  Because the filmmakers wanted to have this grandiose spectacle ever, don't allow the collapse of this tower to be in line with natural disasters.  A million things go wrong to make this tower collapse.  But the problem is that it doesn't really feel like Death's personality is coming through.   Maybe this is a bit of headcanon when it comes to this series, but I see the reason that Death is so spiteful in these films is that he sets these events in motion long before the actual bullet is fired.  These are stories of entropy and timing.  In the case of Bloodlines, Death puts the penny in the fountain in viewing of the child, who throws it off the roof, forcing it into the ventilation system.  Everything that happens poorly in the story should come from the ventilation system.  Instead, we have three separate wild coincidences (can't spell "coincidence" without "coin") that makes this seem absurd.  There's no reason for the split.  It could have just played out stemming from the coin.  The coin stops the fan.  The fan breaks, exposing the building to flammable gas.  The flambee blows up the main room, exploding the floor.  The explosion, combined with the people shifting in the building, tips the tower, causing the whole thing to collapse.  See?  Natural disaster.  Having the coin, the unscrewing of the pins, and the cracked glass floor is just silly.  

Also, Iris's den makes not a lick of sense.  What Bloodlines is doing is evoking Halloween Ends.  At least that trilogy.  And Halloween Ends is evoking Terminator 2: Judgment Day.  There's this cool concept that we have this battle weary woman, the one who has beat the odds so many times that she will not allow the evil to come to her without a fortress between the monster and her.  And, for Halloween and Terminator, that totally makes sense.  It's actually absurd that Sydney Prescott is about to fight Ghostface again and doesn't have a bunker.  But Iris's bunker makes no sense.  It's meant to look cool, not be effective.  The fact that it just exploded when other people tried using it kind of says that Iris would have died minutes into living there.  The only real safe place, in my head, is what Ali Larter's character (you know, the one with the absurd name?) does in Final Destination 2.  A padded cell is the only thing that even makes a lick of sense.  

Finally, as much as I like this scene, I want to talk about Erik and the tattoo parlor.  I mean, I love the sequence.  It's really gruesome and ornate.  But also, a fakeout?  I love a good fakeout.  I really do.  I like the idea that we were so invested in something happening, only to have that fade to something else.  But that sequence is in line with the personality that Death has in this movie.  It's so elaborate.  It also has the absurdity that Final Destination is known for.  The odds for those things to happen in succession is something that you only really see in these movies.  Like, the chain in the ceiling hits Erik's piercing perfectly and it raises him to the ceiling?  Yeah, I'm glad that he survived.  I don't know how he survived, but I'm glad he did.  But why would Death be playing with Erik the way he did.  Does Death not like Erik?  Like, Erik gets put through the wringer (and MRI machine).  What's the point of that?  Was Death just feeling a bit cheeky?  Or was Death aware that he was a character inside of a movie, which is entirely too frustrating.

But let's start talking about what I liked about the movie.  The shortest contribution is that it does something new.  I like that we have a story not about the person who escaped the tragedy, but the literal bloodline of that person.  The subtitle Bloodlines is such a trope, but Final Destination finally earned the title.  It's so good.  It plays with the wider implications of an absurd premise and I dig that a lot.  Sure, I wish we weren't seeing only Iris's family deal with the repercussions of the Sky Tower incident.  But at least it is something new to look at.

I do love Tony Todd's closure in this movie.  Yeah, we all wanted Bloodworth to be some kind of supernatural creature or maybe even the personificaiton of Death himself.  But I do like that we get a non-hamfisted origin story of this character.  It gives us enough of an insight into why this mystery figure is so knowledgable about how Death works while closing the book on a pantheon of characters all about.  If I had one gripe, Bludworth changes in this movie based on what we discover about him.  Bludworth, in the other films, almost seems gleeful about the trials that the survivors have to go through. Those clues were always cryptic because there was something sinisterly impish about the character as a whole.  Instead, Todd delivers a much more approachable version of Bludworth now that we know that he is the last survivor of the tower.  As morbid as it is to talk about this, it also raises a question of if Bludworth can die of his cancer if Stefani and Charlie didn't get smooshed by --once again --logs being transported.  (Golly, these people are aware of what phobia this franchise created and gosh darn it if they weren't going to exploit it.) 

But the final thing that I love that it retconned a retcon and made it work.  I still don't like that reviving a dead person is a loophole in the whole plan.  But at least the movie didn't ignore Final Destination 2.  The ending of Final Destination 2 always rubbed me the wrong way.  Instead, Bloodlines is a fanboy's obsession.  It's someone who tried to make all the various dumb ideas work and is mostly successful.  Like, none of it feels like it is trying too hard.  Instead, it says "There are two ways to escape Death and both are incredibly difficult."  And, to go beyond that, it also plays with the notion of tropes.  I love that Stefani is just Death's plaything at the end of the film.  We've all seen that someone breathing again is "being brought back from the dead" and the movie just calls shannanigans on that.  That kind of stuff brings me joy.

Again, these movies are about just enjoying the glee of a horror movie.  These movies seem to be filmmakers trying to gross each other out and there's something kind of sweet --if not deranged --about that kind of filmmaking.  Yeah, I'm not going to have some kind of deep moment with these films.  Instead, it's a reminder of why we go to the cinema.  We want to scream and giggle and that's what these movies are good for.  They aren't scary so much as they are surprising and fun.  So I don't regret this series.  Not one bit.

Rated R for being generally traumatic, especially when it comes to children in actual peril.  Like, Tad screaming and being afraid of the dog is actually pretty darned upsetting.  But there's also a moderate amount of gore.  You don't really get gore from violence, but Cujo, as the story progresses, gets more and more funky.  There's also an affair in the story that leads to an attempted rape.  While there is no nudity, it is pretty visceral.  Couple that with some language and this movie has a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR:  Lewis Teague

I'm gaming the system, guys.  I will say that I watched Cujo the honest way.  It was on the schedule.  I watched it during the workout.  But I know that tomorrow is Halloween and I really want to get the last Final Destination movie out before I close up October.  So I decided to jump ahead of the TV show that I was supposed to watch in-between and knock out that last entry.  Maybe there's a scenario that I am able to write about both Cujo and Final Destination: Bloodlines before people start heading out for Trick-or-Treating.  We'll see.

A lot of this blog is going to be a discussion about the book and the movie.  Like my blog of Christine, I just finished the novel, which inspired a viewing of the film adaptation.  Like with Christine, I was skeptical at the notion of Cujo as a story.  After all, it seems like a rabid dog seems like a fairly minor threat for a Stephen King novel.   Well, guess what?  Stephen King was probably aware of that and simply embraced it.  In my head, a rabid dog should be taken out by a stray bullet.  Heck, King even acknolwedges it in the novel by citing Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.  He knows what's up.  A dog shouldn't be able to rip apart a town, so King lets the story be incredibly small.  And, can I tell you something?  That's so good.  

There's something refreshing about the notion of a story understanding that scope matters.  While I'm a big fan of Avengers: Age of Ultron (against everyone else's opinion), I do wish that Whedon's initial statement about the movie held true.  Not every story has to be about escalation.  Where Cujo thrives is understanding that characters matter.  Ultimately, I find it weird that the book and the adaptation are called Cujo.  Yeah, the dog is the threat to all of the characters.  In the same way that Christine killed folks, Cujo is responsible for all of the deaths in the story.  Okay, except for those committed before this book with Frank Dodd.  (Now I wish that I read The Dead Zone first, another book that I own.  Frank Dodd was a character in that one.) In some ways, the story is so small that it almost reads as a disaster film.  I know.  Disaster stories tend to be large in scope.  But really, a disaster narrative tends to focus on a core group of characters who must survive the impossible.  There's no malice on the part of the disaster.  There are deaths in the background.  But we tend to care about these characters against something that can't be fought directly.  We care about Donna and Tad.  Yeah, Cujo can rip through Deputy / Sheriff Bannerman and Joe Camber all day long.  But those are just establishing that the disaster is something that needs to be taken seriously.  When we watch a disaster movie, those characters are so expendable that they often don't even have names.  

And the threat to Tad and Donna isn't necessarily the dog either.  Yeah, Cujo will get them if they leave the car.  The movie and the book go through a lot of backflip establishing that there's a good chance that Cujo is unable to get into the Pinto.  He can damage it pretty good.  He can give them some pretty good scares.  But both versions of the story seem pretty keen on Cujo being on the outside and the real danger is on the inside.  It's a story about setting because that car is getting hot and no one is coming to get them.  There's no food.  There's no water.  Any attempt at self-care is going to be violated by this Saint Bernard with rabies outside.  I mean, the dog dies by baseball bat (and revolver, if the movie is to be believed).  That isn't exactly Jason.  Instead, what kind of spirals out of this claustropobia-inducing car is the notion that Donna doesn't know what she's doing.  

There's some really cool stuff going on with Donna in terms of storytelling coupled with some mildly gross, kinda-sorta sexist stuff going on here.  Let's put the gross stuff first.  Vic is a bit of a Mary Sue in this story.  He's the perfect man, who has been wronged by the woman in his life.  Yes, we are supposed to have a mild level of sympathy for Donna, whose relationship with Steve Kemp was due to the slow death of a marriage.  But Vic never really faces many of his own demons in this story.  King points out that, in the heat of an arguement, Vic says something that he can't take back.  But ultimately, the slight is mild in the grand scheme of things and Vic's biggest crime is that he can't see past his own victim blinders to consider that Donna and Tad might be at the Cambers.  I don't love that Donna is so demonized through the story that we have to question her ability to mother because she has had this affair in the first two acts of the story.  It does color some of the characterization, especially when she takes out her frustration on Tad.  It also kind of hurts that Donna is juxtaposed to Vic, who is such a good father that it makes her seem incompetent, no matter what she does.  Sure, it makes compelling storytelling.  But I do wish that Vic sucked just a little more so it didn't make Donna look like a demon.

But what is interesting is that it talks about how fallible a parent is.  That's the story.  Again, I find it weird that the film is called Cujo because the story is about Donna in the car.  I mean, King made the right choice. The fact that this killer Saint Bernard is part of the cultural zeitgeist means that King was doing his job properly.  Still, the story is ultimately about mother and son and feeling helpless in the light of something that no one can control.  King spends a lot of the story pulling every safety net away from these characters.  In reality, the odds of these two being stuck in this boiling hot car for multiple days is addressed.  After all, Donna is right.  The postman should be coming to deliver the mail.  Vic should be able to return home and figure out that the car is missing instead of thinking that Steve Kemp kidnapped his family.  There are all these beats that force Donna to go through the unthinkable.  Her son is dying in front of her and she feels helpless to do anything about it.  That's the story and I find that story completely intriguing.  

And maybe that's what I'm slightly frustrated with this movie.  I don't want to throw any stones at the acting.  I want to commend Danny Pintauro as Tad.  Honestly, this is a kid acting.  It's the most effective thing that I've ever seen.  Pintauro did such a realistic job of being a terrified kid that I was kind of concerned that Teague was pulling a Stanley Kubrick and torturing his actors to get a proper reaction.  I mean, I really hope that's not the case because I've seen scared kids before and it looks like Tad in Cujo.  But Teague, as functional as this movie is, doesn't really push cinema too hard in this movie.  The film hits all of the beats of the book.  I mean, when I say that this is a faithful adaptation, for the most part, of the novel, I cannot stress enough how many of the details that this movie hits.  But in the process of doing that, we forgot that the crux of the film needs to be about Donna in that car.  While those scenes are great and do the job, I don't know if I get enough of the inner turmoil of Donna.  If anything, I get the idea that she's scared, which is what a horror movie does.  But I don't see a lot of the self-reproach that I kind of imagine Donna should be having.  In my head, there's a lot of failing to hold it together for the sake of Tad.  Instead, I get the vibe that Tad is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  It's Tad's reaction that makes the entire third act scary.  

The choice to let Tad survive is a choice for sure.  Leonard Maltin had a problem with Tad suriviving. This makes me feel a little bit gross, but I do think that cinema has always made kid death taboo.  I mean, the core of Pet Sematary is about kid death.  But it does matter that Tad survives this one.  I don't know if it is make-or-break.  But it still resonates with me.
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So part of me is kind of thinking that the film adaptation of Cujo is as effective as a movie about a book can be.  But I also wanted something with a bit more personality.  There are times where Cujo almost reads as a made-for-TV movie.  It's good.  It hits all of the notes.  But I don't get a lot of soul (outside of Tad) for this movie.  Still, I don't regret watching this one.  It does the job and that's not the worst thing in the world.

R, and this one is almost exclusively for gore.  Maybe it was an attempt to class it up just a little bit from what I consider the trashiest entry (The Final Destination), but this one seemed somehow more about the scares rather than the exploitation.  That being said, one of the survivors in this one is a sleeze.  That's his entire personality: sleeze.  So he's going to tell some raunchy jokes.  But the thing that is most upsetting is that we're back to the old gross visual effects when it comes to the accidents once more.

DIRECTOR: Steven Quale

They did it!  They Nostradamused my blog and knew what I hated so much about the last entry and course corrected entirely, leaving me with the best entry in the franchise...so far.  I mean, I hear glorious things about the final entry in the series, which is the next Final Destination movie that I have to get through.  So, you know, I'm not in a bad place.

But I have to tell you, this feels like it was meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  I love confessing stupid things on this blog, so I'll announce freely and without reservation that I skimmed the Wikipedia page.  The word "skimmed" is doing some heavy lifting there because there's a very good chance that I missed the piece of information that I was looking for.  I checked Wikipedia exclusively for an announcement that this as meant to be the last entry in the franchise.  Instead, I found out that the last one, The Final Destination, was meant to be the last one.  Instead, the people behind these movies rushed Final Destination 5 into production.  The other entries in the series are spread three years apart while the distance between The Final Destination and Final Destination 5 are only two years apart.  For a movie that isn't supposed to exist, I find it fascinating that, somehow, Final Destination 5 came out with such a level of class that I was taken aback.

I mean, I want to jump right to the big reveal.  The big reveal was icing on the cake for me.  I was watching this film honestly enjoying it and holding it as the standard for the franchise.  I'll try to talk about that later.  But the reveal is such a beautiful send up of the series as a whole.  Making the film a secret prequel to the first film is honestly a level of genius that I wasn't quite ready for.  I don't know if it works in terms of aesthetics.  The only real hint that you get for this secretly being a prequel is Isaac's phone and the VHS tape on the bus.  These are two things that almost feel like they were put there for the viewer watching this film in 2025 versus someone watching it in 2011.  Of course in 2025 did I assume that people were still using Motorola Razrs and VHS were more commonplace.  I have to remember that my wife bought me my first iPhone when we started dating in 2009.  It's that level of attention that I should have been holding onto when watching the film.  But there's something a little special about dismounting on this idea.  The funny things about prequels is that you often have your hands tied into what you are allowed to do with storytelling.  After all, you can't undo the events or specialness of the original film.  And the sequels to Final Destination seem to treat the Paris Flight 180 as this watershed moment for how death deals with being cheated, so you can't have this bridge accident be the center of attention.  But none of it feels like it is beholden to the original film --yet all the puzzle pieces work!  It's honestly rock-solid storytelling in a franchise that often does not care about story.

We were obsessed with The Office in 2011, right?  I mean, there had to be someone in the production department who was obsessed with this show during the making of this film.  While I do think that this movie is perhaps the pinnacle of the franchise so far, it does feel like the movie is going out of their way to put things in this Dunder Mifflin style location and have the bully factory worker named Roy while Todd Packer shows up as the boss of this place.  There's, like, a billion little things about this that seem to be a send-up to that show.  But even more than that, the story doesn't really need the office so much as it needs the location so Roy can die by hook to the jaw.  It's really weird that everyone in this office environment holds two jobs.  Perhaps it's the go-getterness of 2011 --an era that infamously lambasted millennials as lazy --to have every character have two jobs.  I mean, from a Final Destination screenwriter's perspective, two jobs means two locations with different horrors that could occur.  (Also, I don't think that the gymnast death could look like that.  It was a bit much.) But it is kind of fun having The Office dynamic while creating a movie that absolutely had nothing to do with The Office.

But the thing that absolutely made me love it is an embracing of the thesis.  I've been writing these things for the month.  I have now watched the majority of the Final Destination films and, for the most part, no regrets.  They are fun movies, if they are lacking a little bit on the nutrition of film.  But I always theorized that the Final Destination movies should have been a home for special effects dorks to have free rein over making a movie that highlights gory deaths.  Now, Parts One through Three absolutely lived up to that edict.  But Final Destination 5 completely crushed that.  It is a movie that not only has good special effects (for the most part), but also the film looks great.  I know.  A lot of this is that color grading that movies in the 2010s absolutely loved.  But it also gave the film a sense of not just being a throwaway entry in a long running series.  I can't stress how dumb this franchise is.  Dumb is not a bad thing, in cases of Final Destination movies.  These are movies made for the sake of making movies.  But do you understand how much better a movie feels when it seems like the director kind of cares.  Like, he shot the movie well.  He made us like and dislike characters and that's something that I don't want to necessarily ignore or downplay.  

God bless Final Destination 5 for picking up a thread from Final Destination 3 that I felt was overlooked.  One of the things that I thought Final Destination needed as a franchise was the notion that there needed to be a bad guy to rally against.  One thing that was getting increasingly muddy was the effect of free will against fate.  It's a central concept (in, if I may repeat myself, what is an incredibly dumb premise) that keeps kind of stepping on its own toes.  Sometimes, free will is the bringer of respite. Sometimes, it's all part of death's plan. It's a mess, if I may be honest.  But when you make a character have a reason to start murdering other characters, that makes the story have some kind of investment in motivation.  Now, I'm not going to say that Final Destination 5 is brilliant in terms of choices going into these movies.  After all, Peter choosing Molly as his target really makes you do some mental backflips to figure out his motives.  He says that he can't kill some stranger because they've done nothing to deserve it.  But Peter believes that Sam saving Molly in both realities makes her undeserving of life?  I mean, I don't quite get it.  It almost feels like Peter is arbitrarily mad at Sam for giving him a second chance at life.  Whatever.  They wanted the story to have some personal stakes and I get the desire to make that happen in this story.  

But this also leads to a weird retcon.  Don't get me wrong.  Final Destination 5 absolutely made the right choice in changing the rules of death.  One thing that completely frustrated me about Final Destination 2 was the fact that Death's plan could only be overwritten with new life. That seems like Death would get more mad about that.  (I also love that I know that Final Destination 2, while being canonical, even going as far as to show the logging truck in Final Destination 5, is ignoring its own rules.)  But I love that Death would be satiated with one of the survivors swapping lives with someone else.  That Nathan epiphany when we find out that Roy was dying of cancer is pretty fantastic.  Silly, but fantastic.  I champion this retcon because it makes Death a character that is oddly spiteful.  I mean, think about it.  One of the things that always kind of bothers me about this series is the idea that these people have to die by some kind of Rube Goldberg killing accident.  Death could easily just give people some kind of aneurysm and that would be in line with Death's master plan.  But making these deaths horrific every single time means that Death's kind of spiteful.  That's why I've been capitalizing the first letter in death because this is a personality attacking each of these surivors in the most salty way possible.  So the notion that Death would get a kick on these guys turning on each other.

It also gives Tony Todd's character a closer tie to Death.  I always treated Mr. Bludworth as some kind of old soul, like Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation, who had insight into the things that mere mortals could not understand.  Maybe he was a little imp or something or a medium who had insight into the afterlife.  Nope.  I'm saying now that Tony Todd's Bludworth might be Death himself.  It would explain the changing of the rules.  It's how Death is feeling in the moment.  And with the case of Final Destination 5, instead of having simply the one visit by the survivors looking into what is happening, Bludworth is stalking them at every death.  Yeah, yeah, he's a coroner.  Of course he'd be picking up these bodies as he goes along.  But there's almost something gleeful at seeing these kids being manipulated into their respective scenarios.

Would I like this movie as much if I hadn't just watched the nadir of the series, The Final Destination?  Maybe not.  But after seeing a movie that straight up bothered me, Final Destination 5 comes across as a breath of fresh air.  The movie works all around.  It's still fun, but it's also filmed with a sense of respect that I hadn't seen coming.  I hope I can knock out two more movies before Friday.  It's going to be tight, but I think that I can do it.  Maybe.  I don't know.

Rated R for gore and generally upsetting stuff.  There were a couple of scenes where my wife asked me to tell her when it was over.  It's that kind of movie.  While Zach Cregger also did Barbarian, this isn't as brutal as that film.  But that's a pretty high bar to match in terms of upsetting imagery.  This one has that in spades.  Also, there's a bit of alcoholism, sexuality, language and violence thrown into the movie.  It's all a bit much.

DIRECTOR:  Zach Cregger

How much do I want this blog done?  Like, a lot.  How much do I want to write it?  Like, not at all.  The funny thing is that I really enjoyed Weapons.  That's not a shock.  Everyone seems to be really getting into the movie and I'm actually pretty late to the game.  I'm one of those HBO Max folks now.  But I want to be lazy like I've been all day.  Also, I know that I have another movie after this to write about, so that's just making this whole process seem overwhelming.  Don't worry, folks.  I made myself a late night cup of Earl Grey and, hopefully, that will get me through this overwhelming, self-imposed torture I've decided on.

People lost their minds for Barbarian, right?  I mean, I really liked it.  I thought the opening act of the movie was one of the most clever horror movie openings that I've seen in a long time.  I'm also a fan of The Whitest Kids U Know, so I have that going for me.  But I have to say that Weapons is something else.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is my favorite witch horror movie.  That's a pretty low bar.  I don't know why witches don't really do it for me.   I kind of want to break that down, if only for an excuse to dump a lot of writing onto this blog.  But I don't know why.  I find them normally silly or toeing the line into other monsters' lanes.  But Gladys, for some reason, works.  Maybe its because she's so absurd of a character that I can't help but find her charismatic.  I actually am reminded a lot of the OG film of Roald Dahl's The Witches.  It's the cackling that we get from the Werid Sisters of Macbeth that we haven't really seen in a lot of films lately.  I kind of blame the A24 embracing of the super dry and subdued witches.  But Cregger, with his comedy background, knows how to play up that real discomfort that comes from a comical character being the scariest thing in the room.

Now, I have to tell you, my wife didn't care for this movie.  She doesn't like horror.  She's a lovely lady who gives me my horror movie on Halloween.  And, nomally, I don't have a horror movie in the chamber to watch.  We tend to watch a lot of garbage on Halloween, mainly because I've seen too many horror movies and I'm trying to find something that might intellectually tickle us as well.  Well, this is the first year that I feel like I've absolutely picked a gem.  We watched it a little early because I've been avoiding spoilers for this long and I really wanted to see this movie.  The reason why I'm prefacing all of this is because I want to talk about the fact that Zach Cregger is probably one of the best directors out there right now.  I can't help but make the natural connection to Jordan Peele.  Both of these writer / directors came from a sketch comedy background and I'm trying to find the throughline that brings them from short form, occasionally low-budget storytelling to making feature length films that look absolutely gorgeous while lifting up the genre.  

The easy answer is that both comedy and horror depend on the understanding of how surprise and suspense work.  But here's the deal: while Key & Peele looked gorgeous, The Whitest Kids U Know was functional at best.  I laughed at it because it was funny.  But I never imagine that Zach Cregger cut his teeth making those clips.  I also know that there was a Whitest Kids movie that infamously looked terrible.  Instead, maybe there's this drive to be something more than simply a sketch director.  These guys happened to be funny, but also seem to have a genuine appreciation for film.  We've seen movies switch out perspectives before.  Tarantino's done it a few times, most notably in Pulp Fiction.  But these are both dudes who understand that genre storytelling have gotten the raw deal over time and have pushed themselves to make something gorgeous while absolutely terrifying the audience at the same time.  I know my wife didn't care for the movie, but it didn't mean that she wasn't invested for the majority of the film.  (Note: because I'm a terrible husband and a borderline irresponsible father, I taught my kids to run like the kids in Weapons so they can terrify their mother on a moment's notice. You're welcome, Lauren.  Slash, I'm also sorry.)

One of the frustrating things I'm getting from the film is the interpretation of Weapons as an allegory for school shooting.  I mean, I get it.  But I'm also secretly happy that Cregger came out and said that he never intended it to be an allegory for school shootings.  Let's explore why people think that the movie is about such a heavy topic and why I don't think it works as a concept all the way through.  What Weapons is really good at is looking at a tragedy and showing how people react to the unthinkable.  Now, there's an easy temptation to attach the notion of "school shooting" as the framework for that.  After all, it's becoming the most common "Breaking News" story that we get on a regular basis.  It's something that's always on our mind.  Coupled with the fact that the movie is called Weapons, it scans.  But instead of saying that Cregger is tackling a heavy topic like school shootings, what he's actually doing is creating a real, lived-in world.  The thing that makes Weapons great isn't so much when it comes to plot twists or anything like that.  Honestly, if you told Weapons chronologically and from a singlular perspective, it might actually be pretty mediocre.  No, what Cregger is good at is understanding is that we need to have challenging characters that we can relate to.  Horror has always been plagued by having disposable characters and Cregger doesn't really let us off the hook when it comes to that.  It would be easier to make this about a horror movie body count.  Nope.  Each of the characters matter and nothing about the movie is easy.  I like that a lot.

I do lightly feel betrayed over one thing though.  Maybe I'm misremembering the introduction.  The opening of the film is incredibly effective.  The film starts off with a little girl doing a voice over, stating that the horrific premise of the film --an entire third grade classroom having disappeared overnight --is not really the start of the film.  It's about the characters that I talked about earlier.  But I'm pretty sure that she stated that the children would never be seen again and...um...they totally are.  For people wondering, I'm going to go spoiler light:  there is a concrete explanation of what happens to the kids.  You get to know more than you need to know about the kids and that's fantastic.  But it also is a bit of a lie because I am trying to unpack this story as we discover a whole bunch of stuff about this mystery.  I mean, this is fairly minor, but I liked it a lot.

Also, I'm super glad that I went into this movie completely blind.  I had no idea that it had such a stacked cast.  I honestly love every casting decision in this movie.  I mean, when we see Julia Garner, that oddly makes sense.  She's one of those top-tier actresses that comes from television.  For those who haven't seen Ozark, you are missing out.  But it makes sense when TV royalty do horror.  There's always a little bit of a transition issue when it comes to breaking out to other drama.  It's why I'm never quite surprised to see Jon Hamm in fun things.  But then we have Josh Brolin and I honestly thought that Josh Brolin wouldn't be showing up in horror movies about a witch.  My theory is that they just fell in love with the script.  I mean, there's a chance that Barbarian transcended the zeitgeist so much that there was a need for big name actors beyond Justin Long to show up for this thing.  But man, it was kind of refreshing seeing horror taken seriously.

Listen, I have a hard time writing about movies that I like, especially when they kind of hinge on spoilers.  This is one absolutely fantastic, yet fairly brutal, horror movie.  It lived up to the expectations and I'm now jazzed to follow Zach Cregger.

Rated R for mostly pretty bad looking 2009 CGI death coupled with a sex scene that has completely unnecessary nudity.  Also, there are some comments about  racism that probably need further exploration.  Oh, and hey, they finally addressed how suicide works, which creates some pretty troubling imagery.  There's language throughout and bad behavior galore.  It's a well-deserved R-rating.

DIRECTOR: David R. Ellis

It's the 3D one, okay?  

I know it is going to be the thing that colors this entire blog.  I did not watch this in 3D.  I watched this on HBO Max.  So there's going to be this whole thing where I watched the film in a format that it really wasn't meant for.  There's a whole history of horror and tailoring the film to a 3D audience not reading for the 2D.  I actually have a DVD of Friday the 13th 3D with the red-and-blue glasses.  I won't even shy away from this.  I'm, oddly enough, a huge fan of 3D movies.  Less so now, but there were times when I would shell out as much as was needed to go see a movie in 3D.  Heck, I even convinced my wife to buy a 3D TV and I bought four very expensive pairs of 3D glasses to pair with that TV.  I may have used the 3D feature on our TV twice.  Yeah, I'm not proud of that moment. 

But what I'm dancing around is that The Final Destination looks bad.  Like, it looks really bad.  I don't know what it is.  I feel like adding the definite article "the" in front of a franchise film means that there's going to be something attempting prestige.  The funny thing about The Final Destination is that it definitely is the one that shies away from any form of class whatsoever.  Now, I know where my following statement is coming from.  Nick Zano, who plays Hunt, was a long-time castmember of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a show that I watched a lot of (but never actually finished...yet).  What I was going to say was that The Final Destination feels like the CW TV adaptation of the franchise.  If you turned this into a teen drama where people died kinda gory deaths, but those deaths didn't look even remotely real, you'd have The CW's The Final Destination.  A lot of horror franchises do this.  As they realize that a franchise doesn't really matter in the later numbers and that they can probably get a bigger investment on return by cheapening up the production value, you get stuff that looks like it is completely disposable.  I'm not breaking anyone's brain here.  Is there a chance that a lot of the budget was thrown into the 3D gimmick?  Oh, absolutely.  There's a lot of CG sequences that are meant to pop out at the viewer, things that the previous movies wouldn't do.  But they don't look good.

And so much of it is based on whether or not it looks good.  I am ashamed to say it.  That's been something that has bothered me about film lately.  I hate that I'm getting to be a crotchety old man. I was reminded about the concept of the "second screen storytelling" where movies and TV have to get dumber because people are going to be distracting themselves with their phones.  The Final Destination movies are key films for second screen storytelling because they are a phenomenally low bar to understand.  Because they are so fantastically simple, you have to hold on tightly to the things that do work.  And the things that worked in the other films were how gnarly the gore was. It always bothered me that Gen Z liked the Star Wars prequel films because the "lightsaber fights were so cool."  Listen, I'm now excited that people like those movies while I don't.  I'm secretly always rooting for Hayden Christiansen and Ewan McGregor because they seem to be fighting for those films all the time.  But I don't like that I like the Final Destination movies because how cool they should look.  But when you get a movie like The Final Destination, there's nothing to hold onto.  Honestly, a character like Hunt becomes more frustrating because there is so little redeeming about the film.  

Heck, let's have a conversation about Janet, why don't we?  These characters don't make a ton of sense. There's no excuse for a character like Janet to exist.  One of the tropes of these films is the hump that it takes to get over when it comes to accepting that Death has a design.  It's part of it.  One of the tropes of a time loop movie is shorthanding re-explaining that people are in a time loop.  For Final Desintation movies, it is the notion that they are going to be killed off in order.  I'm not mad at Janet for being skeptical that she's going to die the first time.  It's an absurd premise and a lot of us would act like Janet.  But then Janet narrowly escapes her second death, thanks to George and Lori.  She should be the most devoted believer in Nick and his visions.  She went through the trauma.  She went through all of it.  It's understandable that she wants to go back to her old life. But Lori, when she gains the ability to see the signs, should have an acolyte in Janet.  When Lori starts seeing the signs, Janet fights it tooth-and-nail...over a movie.  That's it.  The stakes are "I want to see the rest of this movie."  That doesn't make any sense.  The worst case scenario would be that Janet misses the film and the two of them are put at ease that Lori's fear over what just happened was just a healthy dose of paranoia.  And I would even accept that Janet could be tired of running.  It makes little sense, but also the movie teases the notion of survival fatigue.  Maybe she has that.  The performance she gives is...not that.  Instead, Janet 180s the whole thing because the movie needed her to be a different person than she was.  I hate that so much.

One thing that kills me about a horror movie is when it breaks its own rules. This is double when they introduce something quasi-supernatural into the story.  With most genre storytelling, the audience is meant to make a logical leap.  We are asked to trust the film to tell us what can and cannot happen.  Now, loopholes are fine.  To a certain extent, The Final Destination tries playing a loophole, which I call a betrayal of trust.  One of the key concepts that repeats throughout this franchise --and The Final Destination goes out of its way to confirm --is that the survivors of the initial inciting incident must die in the same order that they do in the previous timeline.  It makes no sense and I don't get it.  (Also, I still don't get why they just don't die of natural causes, but let's ignore that.) Anyway, it's a trope that we're asked to invest in because that's the story.  When George wants to kill himself --and I am quasi grateful for peace to my nerd side that has been asking this question --he is not allowed to because the order would be messed with.  George tells the audience that he's been trying to kill himself all day and the universe won't let him.  But that order is thrown out the window at the end of the film.

The movie desperately wanted to have the "It's Here" play its way out.  The movie thinks it is being clever, but I can honestly say those words mean nothing.  It says that Nick's visions are messing with him to get to this specific spot and everything is part of Death's plan.  But that doesn't really scan, now does it.  You might think that the truck slamming into the coffee shop might technically kill them in the right order and that's fine.  I'm more talking about Nick saving all of the people at the theatre, a vision that should have Death really angry.  After all, Nick has a vision of Lori getting ground up in an escalator, but he's not just saving her.  The explosion on the construction site kills a lot of people.  But when Nick interferes, he gets nailgunned to a wall.  Now, the nailgun isn't killing him.  The rules are still working.  But Nick uses his ingenuity to use the sprinklers to stop the fire.  If Nick didn't interfere in this moment, he would be the first to die. The explosion would have gone off right next to him.  Maybe that's my whole frustration.  The movie keeps playing with the notion of what is free will and what is scripted.  Final Destination 3 also played with that notion and it's just annoying. 

This is also small, but I hated the NASCAR race.  Each of these giant set pieces are meant to be intense for the audience.  But what is also true is that they are supposed to be grounded in oddly realistic tragedy.  (I know, the highway scene in Final Destination 2 is pretty massive.) But the NASCAR sequence has screws unscrewing themselves.  If Death has a plan, these moments are supposed to happen slowly.  We don't need to have magic Death killing anyone.  Wear and tear tend to lead to Death, not the heavy finger of the Grim Reaper pushing everyone to their demise.  It's stuff like this.

There is one fun moment.  In all this complaining, I need to have one moment that brought me joy.  Boy-oh-boy, did they put the racist redneck stereotype in the movie.  I don't mind.  As the United States starts re-entering that phase where racism is the new normal, I'm not going to fight the over-the-top stereotype (although, just because people don't look like this, doesn't mean they aren't racist).  But that entire death for the racist was pretty funny.  The radio station changing to War's "Why Can't We Be Friends?" got me pretty good, especially considering that this death was maybe the only grounded effect (for the most part).  

I read that this is universally the low point in the franchise, so that gives me hope for the final two films.  I don't know if I have the time to knock out another two movies in the franchise before Halloween, but I hope to.  

Rated R for demon stuff, nudity, and general sacrilege.  Also, the movie really dances around the fact that it is sexualizing a sixteen-year-old character.  It doesn't do it overtly, but it is still something that happens in the film and is part of the plot.  There's a lot of "Geez Louise" moments, not because you are watching something so horrifying as opposed to "That's the thing that they decided to keep in the movie?"  It's all stuff that doesn't add to the vibe of the movie.  It's almost like it's trying to be a "big boy" movie while overly stressing that this movie is incredibly immature.  Also, the commentary on Africans is juvenile and unresearched.

DIRECTORS:  John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg

People told me it was bad.  I knew that I was going into something that might not have been amazing.  But, woof!  I'm going to try to be as generous as I can with this film, mainly because I don't regret watching it.  But this might be the worst sequel I've ever seen.  At least the worst sequel to a banger that I have ever seen.  Here's the deal.  I have been reading the scary novels that I own.  I own The Exorcist.  I read The Exorcist.  But I did not want to rewatch the original Exorcist again.  I've seen it two-or-three times (admittedly, not recently enough to blog about it).  But I thought, let's at least see where the story could have gone.  I've seen some of the newer Exorcist sequels / prequels.  But I never knocked out the numbered sequels.  I also hear that Exorcist III is halfway decent.  

So I watched Exorcist II: The Heretic.

I can't imagine trying to sequelize the first film directly.  I can see making a tonal sequel about a different possession with a different priest.  But following the Regan / Fr. Merrin storyline is a bad choice.  A lot of the problems that I have with this film is the fact that it is an attempt to capitalize on the success of the first film.  What made the first film so scary is that it is such a small and intimate film.  We don't get a lot from the first movie.  There's a little hint that some foreign land holds a key to the devil.  Okay.  But most of the movie ignores that stuff.  It's there to make the devil seem old.  Because an ancient evil has been stirred, our modern sensibilities probably aren't equipped to handle anything ancient or of that scale.  That's fascinating, but ultimately unimportant to the character drama that unfolds over the course of the movie.  What makes the film scary is that Regan didn't do anything to deserve this.  She's an average twelve-year-old.  I also like the fact that this is a story about a priest who is overwhelmed by the notion of putting his faith to the test.  He is the most human character ever.  Fr. Merrin is the superhero priest, but we relate to Fr. Karras, who is trying his best in spite of being woefully unready to face this demon that possesses Regan.  That's the story.  It places a demonic / supernatural battle in the scope of upper-middle class America and that's the cool part.  

No one involved in Exorcist II: The Heretic understood that.

What the folks behind The Heretic saw was that Fr. Merrin was a Van Helsing type and Regan was able to fight off the devil, making her something special.  Nope.  None of that.  I don't care for that.  Cool, I get that people might be interested in that short scene at the beginning with Fr. Merrin uncovering an ancient evil.  That's Vatican I meets Indiana Jones.  But what makes that mystery interesting is the fact that it is a mystery.  And the movie dosen't even handle the mystery right.  Part of why mysterious things are cool is that our imaginations probably do more with that mystery than anything that the movie can tell us.  Everyone involved in The Heretic quickly discovered that every answer kind of sounded stupid.  So the mystery is shrouded in figurative language.  I'm going to give them some points. A mystery like the devil should be talked about in terms of metaphor.  We don't want the devil to be a guy in a mask or a rubber suit.  So keeping that ancient evil as a metaphor is smart.  But the problem with metaphor that it, too, needs to be used sparingly.

Extended metaphor can be an impressive thing.  After all, I adore a well-developed allegory.  But an allegory is canonically the story while keeping a deeper meaning.  The Heretic uses metaphor not as allegory, but as covering up for the fact that it doesn't really know what it is talking about.  One of the few effective images in the movie is this shot of a locust.  I'm sure that it doesn't age well, but I actually found it kind of impressive, having this giant hovering locust observing the events of the story.  But then the movie tried explaining the heck out of the locust.  It started talking about how there is a good locust who can bring the bad locusts out of their frenzy.  It talked about bumping legs.  Yeah, okay.  That might be a thing.  I'm skeptical, but I can pretend that someone did a deep dive into locust research.  But "bumping legs" doesn't apply to humans.  The movie commits to this locust story for Regan and her relationship to the demon Pazuzu.  (By the way, that's a name that should be used conservatively so it doesn't come across as silly.) But when demons are screaming "Brush legs", you know there's nothing really at stake.  This isn't a story about people fighting something that they don't understand.  It's undefined metaphor that screenwriters are hoping that no one calls them on.  

My biggest frustration in the movie is just how inauthentic the whole thing feels.  The first Exorcist film gave us a narrative and a tone that felt like we were looking behind the curtain at something forbidden.  Sure, the first Exorcist is a lot of Hollywood.  But there's an element of verisimilitude to the whole thing.  It felt like Fr. Merrin and Fr. Karras were representations of what it meant to be an exorcist, standing on the front lines to fight the devil.  Everything in that felt like they were trying to make this thing feel right.  Nothing in The Heretic feels right.  Honestly, nothing.  This is a movie, once again, that talks about the divide between mental health and spiritual warfare.  But neither of them feels like it is fighting the actual fight.  Instead, the movie decided to go with cool imagery versus anything that might be close to reality.  A lot of this movie takes place at a mental health facility.  Regan attends regular therapy with Gene.  I always liked that the Exorcist films would acknowledge that things that one generation called possession, another would attribute to lacking mental health access.  Sure, these things would be opposed to each other in these narratives, but that's just part of storytelling.

But honestly everything about how this movie viewed the mental health field is so bananas.   If anything, the movie is so obsessed with doing crazy imagery and something different --a concept, in theory, that I'm not opposed to --that it reads as wrong all the way through.  What mental health office would treat patients like subjects in a zoo that all the other subjects can monitor?  That glass office design was the worst example of retro-futurism that I've ever seen.  It made not a lick of sense.  Also, every single mental health thing was being treated almost like a 1920s insane asylum, only now coupled with a sense of empathy.  I'm pretty sure that the writers of this movie have no idea what autism really is.  That's pretty darned bad.  But now I have to call out the elephant in the room: the technology.

Why was the script so lazy when it came to having Regan and Fr. Lamont exchanging images?  The notion that there is a therapist out there sitting on mind-transference and that's just casually accepted?  Everyone in this movie somehow feels incredibly comfortable with something that doesn't make a lick of sense.  All of them seem to have an intimate understanding of what the rules of this tech really is and are willing to comment on it.  Seriously, this would change the way that science is viewed and it's only used as a device to put images of the devil in each others' brains?  And so much of the movie depended on this thing for storytelling.  It just kept on showing up in scene after scene.  It's like a low-budget film (not unlike Phantasm) where the movie kept finding excuses to come back to this piece of tech for no reason.  I stress this "no reason" bit because the story doesn't actually know what the story of Exorcist II really is.

Nothing in this movie feels like an imminent threat.  If anything, a lot of the story imbues meaning into stupid decisions.  From Fr. Lamont's perspective, he's trying to salvage Fr. Merrin's reputation before gossip labels him a heretic.  That, at least, ties into the title.  It's a small goal considering that the last movie had Regan being tortured by the devil.  That stuff will still come into play.  But Regan doesn't seem all that bothered by the devil in this one.  If anything, it is the constant appearance of Fr. Lamont that seems to awaken Pazuzu inside of her.  But even that, it feels like the movie has to go there because Regan has a wealth of random plot threads inside of her instead of just a devil who was possessing her at one point.  (I'm also not sure how Pazuzu is back inside Regan or why its so interested in this girl who seems a bit distant from the story?)   Instead, Regan really wants to communicat that there is a church in Africa that has a history of locusts?  I don't know why we're so on the locusts.  I mentioned them early as a metaphor, but the movie really wants to talk about these locusts and this priest who may or may not be a doctor?  There's so much that is left up to interpretation that the movie doesn't really know what it is talking about at almost any point in the movie.

What I do like is the notion that Fr. Lamont makes some poor decisions in his desperate attempt to do something good.  I don't know why.  Sure, I'm not exactly backing his character here.  It was just something that I could at least get invested in.  In his hunt for Kokumo (another name that gets shouted as much as possible), he feels frustrated.  Sure, that frustration happens pretty early in the story.  I will admit that Fr. Lamont gets pelted with stones (so I don't have to write the word "stoned").  But it seems like Pazuzu is desperate to take over Fr. Lamont.  It really isn't clear what Fr. Lamont is going through for a chunk of the movie except that he walks around in a fugue in the final act of the film as he heads to Washington.  (Also, returning to Washington shouldn't matter to Pazuzu.  That's such a callback for the viewer and not the story.) I do have to throw Richard Burton under the bus for this one.  This movie, for all of its terribleness, has an incredible cast who just don't know what to do with this movie.  But Richard Burton is one note throughout.  I feel like he's hate-acting his way through this movie, meaning that we don't have much insight into Lamont as a character.  If this is a franchise where people get possessed and could have character changes, angry-ing each scene doesn't make a lick of sense.

Golly, this movie was terrible.  I doubt that I'll be able to get to Part III this year.  I know that I should, just because I'll have the momentum behind me.  But if Part III isn't an improvement, I'll eat my hat.

Rated R for more gore that is based on being smooshed or stabbed or electorcuted or burned or all kinds of stuff that Mother Nature could do to you.  I don't know why I thought the last one was more upsetting.  Perhaps I'm getting desensitized to the entire franchise, which is probably not the healthiest thing.  But there's also more nudity in this one, which is probably an attempt to comment on morality and death.  Still, a very well deserved R.

DIRECTOR: James Wong

Do you understand that I almost forgot to write this thing?  Here I was, amazed by having a few minutes of time to myself.  Then, given a few minutes before I have to start teaching my class, I remembered that I have this thing on my To-Do list.  It's kind of a bummer.  I have such a busy week that I don't know if I'll be able to get another movie in this week besides Final Destination 3.  

​I have to be watching these movies differently than anyone else who has watched these movies.  Between binging them and knowing that I have to write something unique about them, I am so grateful when there is anything to discuss.  I can tell you right now.  I'm going to be insufferable about two tiny things: technology and villains.  I have an inordinate amount of joy knowing that someone producing Final Destination movies understands that there has to be something new in each movie.  And these things are so objectively insignificant that most people would probably shrug them off.  But I am going to say, Final Destination 3 is the one with the camera.

Now, I am still going to give this movie some nonsense.  I can't deny that this change is important enough to say that Final Desintation 3 did anything risky.  Oh, sweet mercy, this movie is by the book...for the most part.  We still have a protaognist who witnesses everyone's death for arbitrary reasons and saves everyone...only to have them be ripped apart by terrible death traps.  But for a moment, there was a brief second that the movie was going to get to the same conclusion with a different approach.  See, the movie didn't really need Wendy to have a magic vision that acts as the insighting incident.  One of the more frustrating parts of the previous movies is that the protagonist has to explain all the things that they saw in their visions and everyone else instantly becomes an expert.  However, by having a digital camera catch clues to how people are going to die makes the movie about deduction, not simply trust.  

Maybe this is stupid.  The more I write about, the dumber it gets, so there's that.  But I like the notion that we have a concrete image that people can have real conversations about.  After all, there are these characters who know that they are going to die and if they can at least have insight into what these clues possibly mean, that takes a little bit of the pressure of having an all-knowing chosen one.  But I find it weird that we still have this all knowing chosen one.  Wendy doesn't need to have any kind of magic power.  In fact, one of the more frustrating parts about having an all-knowing chosen one is that it doesn't make sense with the narrative.  As much fun as I'm having with Death-having-a-design, why is that protagonist given magical insight into a way to undo Death's design?  We have so little lore about what is actually happening.  Heck, Tony Todd's mortician is gone.  He was the only guy who gave us clues last time.  I mean, he's still in the movie as the voice of the devil on the devil ride.  But Final Destination 3 gives us an out of this silly plot device.  

If you have a camera capturing the way that people were going to die, it's not about a mysterious force helping people out.  Instead, it gives us all the ability to see how we're going to die.  If anything, that gives the world of Final Destination a concrete rule.  Instead of Wendy being the chosen one, she's instead rewarded for her observation and trust in a more complicated world.  I don't know why I'm so wired for horror films to have a moral component to them.  Wendy is clearly the good guy of this story, despite the fact that she's a little mean to Kevin.  But we root for her because she is so observant.  She is willing to look at the mundane through a fresh perspective.  Honestly, it doesn't just imbue her with something almost unearned.  The first two films gave the characters a power that has almost nothing to do with their personality.  If anything, the only thing that was rewarded in the first two films was their irrational phobias.  It's odd, because that shouldn't necessarily be a trait that is encouraged.  Yet, the Final Destination movies are constantly about reaffirming that you shouldn't try anything out of your comfort zone.

The second element that makes Final Destination 3 not just another entry is that the movie gave us a villain.  The nature of these films is that there is no Big Bad to rally against.  It's punching the ocean.  There's nothing there to beat head-on.  Instead, these movies tend to be about loopholes.  These stories are almost arguing with the wording of a contract.  But adding McKinley as a villain brings about an interesting idea.  It's a wasted idea, but it's an idea nonetheless.  The previous movies teased the notion that if someone died out of order, it may throw Death's design into a tizzy.  Again, this is an attempt to get out of a contract.  But McKinley, instead of making it about suicide, decides to go homicidal.  If McKinley can kill someone on the list who isn't scheduled to die, that would potentially end the run.  Now, I cannot stress enough how wasted of a concept that this is.

I don't think that the screenwriter, nor the director, knew what to do with McKinley.  McKinley is aggressively an archetype.  The only mood that McKinley consistently portrayed was "aloof."  Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes considering that I'm really going in deep with the third entry of a franchise that most people don't care about to begin with.  Tough.  I want to talk about how McKinley can't just be aloof.  McKinley is a side character until the funeral for the tanning bed girls.  (Yeah, I wrote that sentence which you should be able to use to justify why all this writing is just wasted digital real estate.)  McKinley makes a point to stress that the pastor's words are empty and that Death should make a point out of giving people long and full lives.  He's dismissive of the structure of funerals, so he walks off.  Okay, it seems like he's anti-establishment.  But the next time we see McKinley in any real context, he's at his job at the hardware store with his girlfriend.  It's weird that McKinley, who seems to pride himself on being counter-cultural, works for a big box store and that he murders pigeons with a nail gun, considering that he just advocated for the value of life.  When Wendy and Kevin present a case that should be up McKinley's alley --a guy who just treated Death as a conscious entity at a funeral --McKinley is not only dismissive of them; he's mocking them.  He thinks its all silly and he starts playing it fast and loose with safety.

When Erin dies because of Wendy's intervention, he's now wrathful not at death, but at Wendy. He comes up with that idea to kill Wendy, which is now a different personality than the previous two scenes.  He even stresses that he's been skipped anyway, so it shouldn't matter.  (Note:  I find it weird that McKinley was supposed to die before Erin and he believes he's been skipped over.  It's actually Wendy's intervention that leads to Erin dying, meaning that interventions seem to be part of Death's design?  I don't know how free will works in this universe!) But the notion that they can fight something is fun.  The problem is that they don't fight McKinley.  McKinley simply stated that he was safe because he didn't know the order in which he died.  Then he's taken out fairly unceremoniously and that villain element disappeared.  But how much better would that have been?  I wanted to see this McKinley stalker playing out among the random death that is closing in among them.  The concept is so good and I don't think we'll ever get that kind of character in the future.  Maybe I'm wrong.  I feel like this a franchise that probably can't repeat that beat twice.

Anyway, this is a fun movie.  I don't necessarily love that Wendy got a vision of her own death after it was too late to prevent it.  Still, these movies tend to be fun.  And apparently, all I need is small changes to the formula to write about these movies beyond this point.   Yay.

Rated R.  This is an intense R.  Honestly, this might be one of the cruelest movies that I've watched in a while.  It is visually brutal, capitalizing on having some of the most graphically violent images.  In fact, most of the scares are exclusively from seeing things that you thought would be too far by any extent of the imagination.  Couple that with nudity, language, underage drinking, and a whole mess of horrible things happening to a child, this is one of the most well-deserved R-Ratings that I've seen in a while.

DIRECTORS:  Daniel and Michael Philippou

This movie is so brutal that I had blurred images galore on Google image search.  I know that this might actually be subtly seducing some of my readership into wanting to see what all the hubbub is about.  But I have to be honest:  I don't like visceral imagery.  It's not for me.  I think one of my most detested horror movies was Cabin Fever because it was just that upsetting to watch.  This movie...honestly, it ranks up there.  There's a scene midway through the movie that still makes me pause.  I know that I'm not putting any kind of format or style into this writing, but I also am still immediately reeling from what I saw.

Okay.  Take a breath.  Here's the deal.  My buddy at work really likes horror movies.  I'm going to be slightly critical and imply that he likes them too much.  There's a mild chance that he might be reading this.  I've given him guff for this before, so this isn't exactly talking out of school.  And I'll be forthright.  A lot of the time, our horror tastes tend to align.  But this was too much.  Maybe that's why I have been so burned out by the Ari Aster stuff and the stuff that A24 has been putting out.  I realized that I'm a far bigger fan of the jump scare than I am anything that has a brutal tone to it.

It just feels like a mean movie.  The funny thing is that I also heard that everyone involved in this movie had a fun time making it, especially the kid who was brutalized for most of the film.  So I should be all "Rah! Rah!  It's just special effects." But it isn't, is it?  See, I'm watching the Final Destination movies right now.  Trust me, these aren't great films.  But do you know what they are?  They are fun.  These movies have that level of shock value.  We're going to see some special effects that are going to make me make some gag faces.  But I don't consider those movies very mean.  Ultimately, what I'm dancing around here is tone.  

The crazy part is that I really had a good time with these guys' other movie, Talk to Me.  It's not like Talk to Me felt like it was made by other directors.  These guys are shaping up to be auteurs.  They have a certain style and they seem to be embracing dark genre storytelling.  But what the difference between Talk to Me and Bring Her Back (even though they kind of seem to share similar title styles) is the fact that Talk to Me didn't forget to have fun.  I'm not saying that Bring Her Back is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination.  Despite the fact that I had to power through some stuff, ultimately the movie is incredibly effective and does the job it sets out to do.  But I will tell you what.  I bought Talk to Me because it was affordable and I hadn't seen the movie.  I'm really stoked that Bring Her Back was on HBO Max because I can tell you that I never want to see this movie again.

I'm about to parade my complaints down this blog in the more forthright way imaginable.  I can already see myself getting petty while writing this, so be aware that I'm on your team when I state some incredibly whiny things.  I, too, wish that I had a better critique of this movie than what I'm offering you.  But again, I don't hate it.  It's just that there's a couple things that really bother me about the movie.  

Part of what bugs me is Laura, the central antagonist of the film.  I really like Sally Hawkins in this role.  My goodness, Sally Hawkins knows what to do with parts.  She's in a bunch of stuff that I'm not the biggest fan of, but I can always attest that Hawkins is the most interesting part of the film.  (Honestly, the acting all around is top notch.  There isn't one complaint there.  I just really like Sally Hawkins and I feel the need to secure this plot of digital real estate to put that down.)  But Laura's character doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  A lot of it is hinged on the fact that Laura has had a mental break following the death of her daughter Cathy.  She used to be this great social worker and the best that Australia has ever seen.  She still talks like she's this wholesome loving person, but from moment one, she's enacted a plan to make Andy seem like he's lost his faculties.  It makes sense.  After all, if Andy turns 18 with no red flags, he gets to take custody of Piper.  That clearly wasn't in Laura's plan, so everything she does is to make sure that Andy is out of the picture so she can put Cathy's soul in Laura through Ollie.  It's all very confusing.

But it also feels like Laura knows that she's the villain of a horror movie at times.  From her perspective, she has to be unimpeachable so that Andy can look bad and Laura can take custody of Piper.  Now, from meeting Andy, she seems to be torturing him.  She intentionally calls him by the wrong name. She steals his phone to see what he is thinking about her.  She makes him kiss his father, despite the fact that she shouldn't know that Andy's father was secretly abusive.  Now, we can all squint and pretend that these moments somehow align with her master plan to make Andy do something harsh. But the thing that I don't really understand is the concussion scene.

Andy is visited by the ghost / hallucination of his dead father.  I read this more as a hallucination sequence because Andy is so afraid of taking a shower ever since discovering his father's body splayed outside of a shower.  But his father tells him that Piper is going to die in the rain and warns Andy not to let Piper go out in the rain.  Okay, Andy retains the message and wakes up in the hospital, desperately trying to save Piper because it is raining out.  Little did we know that a sizable portion of the movie is going to have rain, so Andy could have taken a breather.  But he was in the dark as much as we were.  But this is where I'm frustrated.

Andy gets a visit from Laura.  That's fine.  She's messing with his head, which is her modus operandum.  But he begs her not to let Piper play out in the rain.  He, in a state of desperation, tells her that he got this secret message from his dad and begs her not to go out.  Laura agrees to keep Piper out of the rain.  Smash cut to Laura saying it would be whimsical to play out in a downpour. Now, Andy's not there.  He's still in hospital (I say "in hospital" because we're in Australia and maybe commonwealth rules still apply?).  Laura needs Piper healthy to bring back Cathy.  Why would she be tempting fate to mess with Andy in a way that he would never find out about?  She needs Piper in good shape.  If there was even a risk that the rain could hurt her, Laura would be keeping her safe inside.  The central conflict are these two parental figures duking it out for Piper's love and safety.  The idea that Laura would be risking Piper in any way doesn't make sense to me.

Can I be honest about something?  Intellectually, I understand the whole Ollie bit.  Horror nerds, by the way, aren't tuning in for the Laura / Piper / Andy hour.  Nope.  They want to see this demonic kid self-harm himself for the length of a film.  Anyway.  Ollie.  I understand that Ollie is a vessel for Cathy's spirit.  Laura watches these homemade Russian black market demon videos explaining what it takes to transfer the soul out of a person into another person by turning people into Golems / vessels for souls.  It's all very graphic, which I've already stressed at length.  And I get that Ollie is not Ollie.  He's a missing child named Connor.  If Ollie leaves the circle surrounding the home, Connor starts taking control and killing Ollie.  Fine.  It's just...I'm not sure what the rules of Ollie are.  I get the circle bit.  I also know that Connor is desperate to get out from the control of Ollie based on what he wrote on the notepad.  But that end?  Ollie hangs out in the swimming pool because that's where Cathy drowned?  The end has Piper being held underwater and she shouts "Mum", which Laura asked Piper to do earlier.  The thing that was frustrated was that the subtitles said, "[in Cathy's voice] Mum!"  Um...Ollie hadn't done anything yet.  Also, he's eating bodies.  Does Ollie need people to survive?  Also, what is the timeline it takes to transfer a soul from one body to another?  That entire thread, if you were trying to follow the rules, is confusing as heck.

But can I tell you one shot I liked that makes me feel like a sadist?  Wendy getting hit by a car was the most effective someone-dying-by-vehicular-homicide I've ever seen.  I've seen that bit a few times, but this one genuinely impressed me.

I really do want to stress that I didn't hate it. But gross out movies like this one are not for me.  If anything, the movie bummed me out more than scared me.  I don't like a world where everyone is just cruel to one another.

Rated R for a lot of cursing, sexual references, and gore that involves people getting mowed down by a killer car.  There's also a bit of sex stuff in it, but there is no nudity. I remember being kind of aghast at one thing that didn't age well, but for the life of me I can't remember it right now.  Still, it is a horror movie adapted from a Stephen King novel.  It's going to have inappropriate content in it.

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

Okay, this is going to be a secret book review along with being a movie blog.  You got it?  I'm not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.  I just read the book and I went directly into the movie after that.  I think I might not be alone out there when I say that I had a healthy skepticism about the premise of Christine.  There's a Family Guy bit about Stephen King implying that he just looks at objects and makes them spooky.  In the case of the clip, it was a lamp.  But that criticism comes from the notion that you could write a novel about a killer car and somehow make it compelling.  Well, he did it.  Christine, as a novel, is a banger.  But the more insane thing is that John Carpenter adapted that novel at the peak of John Carpenter's work and made a banger out of that novel.  I don't know how it is possible, but both the book and the movie shouldn't work, yet they absolutely do.

I have a theory about it.  Actually, I have two theories and they both, somehow, may be true.  Let's go with the dumber theory first.  Christine almost works in the exact same way that Jaws does.  We know the shark is out there.  We know it's going to kill anyone that it is coming across.  But because the car is barely in the movie, it makes it so much scarier and more compelling to care about the people who aren't cars in the movie.  (The good news is that very few people in this movie are cars.) Because Christine in either medium barely shows up (not no-time, but sparingly), this is a story about character, which leads me to my second theory.

If Christine is scary because it barely shows its monster, much like Jaws, then the story works because of its allegory that Spider-Man also embraced.  I rarely read King novels looking for allegory or deeper meaning.  As an English teacher, that's a bit blasphemous, also considering that I believe that all art should be saying something.  I'm sure that many of the King novels have a ton to say that might be deeper than what I initially gleaned.  I oddly shut my brain off for King because I find him just so gosh-darned readable.   I know that King, to some extent or another, has been influenced by Marvel Comics.  If you read his Dark Tower novels, he straight up makes in-universe Doombots villains in one of the books.  Now, I don't know what is going on in Stephen King's head when he's writing Christine.  From what I can glean, this is one of those pillars of the King canon that was probably influenced heavily by enough drugs to make King potentially forget that he wrote this.  I don't know.  That's me speculating.  I doubt that he was reading Spider-Man and thinking that he was going to write the horror version of the same allegory.

This is me trying to dig myself out of being too abstact and cryptic.  Stan Lee infamously created his characters as allegories for what his readership was potentially going through.  With Peter Parker / Spider-Man, Peter's gaining of powers is allegory for puberty.  I know, right?  The guy is a huge nerd.  He's overlooked by everyone until one day everything changes.  He notices physical changes in himself.  He can't just be pushed around anymore.  He starts making weird moral choices until he makes a big enough mistake that he has to re-evaluate his life, eventually forcing him to take up his uncle's mantra, "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." (I really hope someone calls me on that mantra so I can cite page and line of Spider-Man's canonical origin story.) 

Christine is also a metaphor for puberty.  But because it is a horror where we can't have our central figure simply will himself out of a problem, we actually get a much more in-depth breakdown of what it means to go through puberty.  Arnie is Peter Parker.  Mind you, because Stan Lee was writing for children, Peter's nicknames weren't as vulgar as Arnie's were.  When Arnie decides to buy Christine off of LeBay, it's his first real form of independence.  But in that independence, there is the companion of rebellion.  Arnie's parents initially aren't angry at the car itself, but in the fact that Arnie made a unilateral decision without consulting them.  He's the baby bird leaving the nest and it is incredibly sudden.  Coupled with that is that Arnie, in a desperate attempt to grow up on his own and quickly, pays way too much for the car.  Everyone is aware that Christine, in the way that LeBay sells her, is not even worth $50.  But Arnie needs her.  He is sick of being Arnie the child.  A car represents a major step in the coming of age story.  

And when he buys her, he loses his acne.  The character of Arnie becomes a far more confident version of himself.  In the novel, that physical transformation becomes literally LeBay, the old racist who sells him the car.  The movie just makes Arnie a handsomer, more confident version of himself, mostly from the removal of his glasses.  With the novel, that possession by LeBay is actually far more upsetting because --if we're treating this as an allegory --modeling adulthood after LeBay seems like an attempt to be anything that his parents aren't.  His parents are obsessed with education and liberal politics.  His mother wields that liberal arts education violently, causing Arnie to mirror the polar antithesis.  As much as the car scares all the people around it, it is more haunting that Arnie keeps defending the car sooner than defending the humans in his life.  If you take all the supernatural bits out of it, it is Arnie hurting the people around him because he turns his back on the things that made him innocent.  In the process of growing up to be a man, he has to destroy everything that was representative of his old life.

But now I should talk about the movie?  I mean, I got some pretty fun moments in there from an English teacher's perspective.  I don't know why John Carpenter was such a good match for this movie.  Honestly, I'm surprised that the two didn't work together more.  King infamously tends to hate adaptations of his works, especially the ones made by auteurs.  I kind of get that he doesn't like The Shining, but that's because Kubrick distanced himself from the novel quite a few times.  While Carpenter isn't bonded to the novel, a lot of the written word made its way to the screen.  The first half of the movie especially is oddly close to how the book played out.  There are moments that are rearranged for clarity, considering that two-thirds of the novel is told in first person, meaning that much of Dennis's inner thoughts would be lost when adapted to the screen.  But I really felt like I was watching a direct adaptation, which is weird considering that I feel like John Carpenter himself has such a powerful voice.

Maybe King is too close to his own work.  Carpenter did something pretty smart in his adaptation.  There are some things that I wouldn't have hated closer to the book, but I really like that the movie downplays Darnell's control over Arnie.  As much as that element works in the novel, showing Arnie's obsession with self-sabotage, it almost feels like a distraction from the relationship between Arnie and Dennis (who may be a bit cooler than I realized based on the movie).  

But the thing that would have frustrated me if I was Stephen King is the origins of Christine herself.  What I like about the book is that the silliest part of the whole mythos --a killer car --is actually more of a weapon in the hand of a ghost. Okay, that might be silly too...but I like it better.   I oddly find the notion that a car just kills people...like in the introduction to this movie.  It's coming off the assembly line and it injures one dude and kills another.  I like the notion that a real life racist bled off malice into the car.  That's a far more interesting dynamic, especially when we tie that notion that Arnie is just mirroring the adults he knows as he grows up.

Also, does Carpenter keep Dennis and Leigh apart as a couple because it makes Dennis unsympathetic?  From a film perspective, it keeps Dennis as the protagonist of the film and doesn't muddy the friendship between Arnie and Dennis.  But push-comes-to-shove, I actually really ship Dennis and Leigh as a couple.  Maybe the movie is a little rushed, but I also really get that some of these beats just don't work without an internal monologue to justify these actions.  Or you need to add another hour to the film and I don't think that would have helped it one bit.

As I close up, I do also want to stress something.  Christine works beyond its messaging. It's not scary-scary. It's scary-cool-scary.  Okay, there's barely any coherence in this, but I think that when John Carpenter is firing on all-cylanders (pun intended), he cooks.  This is additional evidence that John Carpenter had a streak going for a long time because Christine is way better than it has any right to be.