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.

Rated R, sure, for a movie that is trying to out-gore the other one.  But, maybe we should consider this an R-rated movie for the most forced gratutous nudity for only a few seconds.  My goodness, this movie wanted to hit the Scream button by attaching death to vice.  There's all kinds of various drug use and language, to really get the edgy teen market going.  And, again, I cannot stress this is a movie about creating gnarly deaths.  It does that.  R.

DIRECTOR:  David R. Ellis

If I can knock this out, I will have had an incredibly productive day without actually having completed my To-Do List for the day.  And I'll admit, I'm a little scared about this blog.  I told you in my Final Destination blog that this franchise is going to be hard to write about because it is going to hit the same beats over and over again.  I can't help but think that this blog is going to sound similar to one's written by my students.  When I read their blogs, especially when they aren't feeling like writing, it tends to be a lot of "My favorite part was this.  It was cool."

Well, we all like the logging truck.  It was cool.  

The thing about the Final Destination movies is that, when people do think about them, they think about this one.  This is the one that I remember most vividly.  It might be the entry that I stopped at.  But we all remember the logging truck.  But even more than that, I tend to remember the pane of glass smooshing poor Tim (WHOSE REAL NAME IS JAMES KIRK?).  The immediate takeaway of Final Destination 2 is that the gauntlet was laid down in terms of movie making.  I'm not saying the movie is better.  The ending, I would argue, is significantly worse.  But someone, perhaps director David Ellis, discovered that the Final Destination movies are about bigger and badder magic tricks from the special effects department.  I have to imagine these movies have some kind of script going into shooting.  But my real theory is that the director and the producer sit down with a special effects team and say, "What cool set up can we create for this movie that would put the first one to shame?"  

Like, I almost refuse to believe that the apartment fire sequence was the complete creation of a scriptwriter.  It's just that so much of Final Destination, due to its Rube Goldbergian treatment of death, is fundamentally a visual story.  I can't imagine that it says, "Cut to rich kid's hand in disposal as frying pan catches fire."  Maybe it did.  I don't know.  But the stories in these things ultimately don't matter, which brings us to a conundrum.

Final Destination 2 looks better than the first Final Destination. That's the way that it seems to happen in a lot of horror franchises.  Not always.  Sometimes, studios and producers realize that you could have done a lot of the same bits on a fraction of the budget, which is what I expect coming pretty soon for the franchise.  No, I'm talking about the fact that people really responded to nature getting elaborate with her kills.  In the second one, the kills have to be even more elaborate and even more expensive.  None of this "backyard clothes line" gets caught by wind nonsense.  The most expensive looking deathtrap in the first one is the epilogue with the characters in France.   That had to be the standard for the deaths in the second one because every single setup was over the top.  When a movie has a pretty crummy story, at least there was something to be enjoyed in the showmanship of it all.  The logging truck scene was memorable for a reason. There's a reason that we all tense up behind logging trucks on the road today.  I mean, the sheer scope of those deaths was almost hilarious.  It just kept going and going.  And it felt like most of the deaths were mostly fakeouts until something seemingly mundane did a far gorier death than you imagined.  That rich kid with his hand in the disposal didn't get his hand blended off.  He didn't catch fire.  The microwave didn't explode.  The ladder fell on him once he thought he was safe.  Tim with the pigeons?  No choking to death.  No death by sleeping gas.  No drill ripping his face apart.  Random pane of glass.  It's all pretty fun.

But Final Destination 2 hits a lot of the same snags that cryptic origin movies do.  I like when the first movie doesn't tell us a lot.  I'm still always going to refer back to Predator.  We never know about the creature and we almost don't need to.  But sequels can't get away with that garbage.  They always need to give people a reason to keep coming back.  There's new information to be gleaned.  The problem is, especially with a movie like Final Destination 2, is that the movie is better without trying to wrap it up in a box.  I love Tony Todd.  I really do.  I'm bummed that he passed, but he also has an incredible body of work that his family should be proud of.  But I will say that his character doesn't make a lick of sense.

Tony Todd's mortician, named Mr. Bludworth apparently, is the most cryptic and intentionally obtuse character out there.  But what is worse is that he's entirely built on the notion of archetype --leaning almost heavily into stereotype.  He's the wise older Black man.  I don't know if I want to know more about this character.  If the future sequels continue using Tony Todd, I don't know if I want to know more about him.  Because a lot of my frustrations come from what Tony Todd contributes as a character.  

Mr. Bludworth has a weird relationship with Death.  Part of me really wants him to just be a dude who watches the news, explaining why he knows all of the characters' names. That would be very funny and would explain why all of his cryptic suggestions are fundamentally dumb.  I hope that the clue that he gives in Final Destination 2 doesn't carry through the series because it is incredibly frustrating.  Mr. Bludworth's advice in this one is, "Death can only be reset by new life" or something like that.  That makes no sense.  The problem in this story is that these characters have cheated death.  They all have new life.  Killing and being revived really feels like a technicality in the grand scheme of things.  And isn't the point of Death in these movies more along the line of Death being angry that she has been cheated?  Why would she be happy with being cheated again?  I mean, it is also a crime that I also know the plot of Final Destination: Bloodlines, so I know that the literal meaning couldn't work.  I was kind of hoping that Isabella's baby was going to live, but not save everyone.  I just hate how matter-of-fact that there was a clean and neat ending with Kimberly drowning herself and getting revived.  It seemed like Devon Sawa was revived a whole bunch of times.

I get it. He was only revived those times.  It's not like he died between.

But here's me trying to be positive about the movie.  Because I didn't want the baby to be the solution, the reveal that Isabella was never in the original car wreck was a fun revelation.  I also really like that Clear kind of forgot that she was being hunted by Death for a good chunk of the movie. The matter of factness of getting rid of Clear as a character made me giggle quite hard.  Like, those last few moments hit incredibly hard.  So it's not like it is all bad.

Here's my thought process about Final Destination as a whole though.  I kind of love poking holes through things, so bear with me.  Some of you might find this kind of speculation insufferable, but I am trying to document a thought process I had that I probably won't remember later.  Kimberly stops the car and blocks off the on-ramp, saving all of those people from the logging truck disaster.  (I still don't know why Death is giving certain people premonitions.  I also don't like how everyone has to be tied to the first one, because that made very little sense.)  But when Kimberly blocked the on-ramp, the logging truck disaster still happened.  (It actually seemed like it somehow happened earlier.) A bunch of people were in that accident.  But since the on-ramp hadn't merged with traffic, wouldn't new deaths be accounted for?  Like, Death is mad that there are people walking around that should not be alive.  But Death isn't weirded out that there are people who are dead that should not be dead.  The traffic should have adjusted for the lack of on-ramp traffic.

So my final (destination) takeaway from Final Destination 2?  I looks way prettier.  The deaths are more fun.  But the movie is way dumber.  Also, considering that the first entry had a baller cast, I didn't recognize many people outside of Michael Landes, who played the original Jimmy Olson on Lois & Clark.  It's fun, but it's not good.

Rated R for being a sequel to 28 Days Later.  If you've seen the Rage virus zombies in that one and how that movie is filmed in an incredibly graphic manner, you know what to expect with its sequel.  Boyle plays up the chaotic, covering the screen with gore and violence.  But add to that is the fact that, because so much time has passed since the original film, all of the zombies are now nude.  Clothes have rotted away, so there's just a lot of violent, gory nudity on screen.  This one perhaps has a slightly more forgiving view of humanity compared to the original film, but it is still upsetting.

DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle

At least I'll have a big gap in blogs between Final Destination and Final Destination 2.  I went on a tear this weekend, guys.  I originally was just going to watch 28 Years Later, but my wife was out of time so I decided to keep myself entertained while I got some chores done.  So while bagging-and-boarding comics and while folding laundry, I watched a bunch of more movies.  I never thought that horror films between horror films would be considered a palate cleanser, but it was nice to watch movies just for the sake of watching movies. 

I love Danny Boyle.  This review might get to a place that is less than flattering, so I want to put my appreciation for Danny Boyle first and foremost.  One thing that I heard is that Danny Boyle hates repeating himself.  If you look at the genres of movies that the man has made, there has been a conscious attempt to tread new ground every time.  Now, I'm pretty sure that 28 Years Later is Danny Boyle's first sequel.  I suppose there's a paradox there.  This is the first time that he's done a sequel to something he created, which is technically doing something new.  But it is also a repetition of 28 Days Later, a movie that still pretty much holds up on its own. It's not a perfect horror movie, but it is its own thing.  I would also like to stress that I saw 28 Weeks Later, a movie that I remember Boyle distancing himself from because he saw it as a bit of a cash grab.  A lot of this might be inaccurate.  I'm not basing this on the Internet.  I'm basing this on my memory which is probably inaccurate.  

You would think that if Danny Boyle, a guy who prides himself on doing new things, came back to a franchise, especially one that he swore not to do sequels to, there would have to be a special reason.  It's not that 28 Years Later is bad.  There are things that I don't like about it and I'm going to be talking about that.  But the bigger issue is that I don't really see the point of this movie.  Maybe I'm too much obsessed with the "Why is this movie made?" question as opposed to just accepting that some things are out there as entertainment.  It's just that, the first movie hit hard.  One of the things about zombie films is that, even more than the bulk of genre storytelling out there, they are perfect environments to make commentary on the human condition.  It's why The Walking Dead was such a success.  One of the things about zombies is that characters aren't really allowed to get comfortable.  When people are always looking for shelter and survival, their true natures come out.  (Look at the Hierarchy of Needs!)  With the first film, Boyle used the landscape that he created to talk about the patriarchy and rape culture, coupled with how racism and sexism were forever linked.  What does 28 Years Later say?  Honestly, not much.

Part of what weirds me out about this movie is that Alex Garland is usually the champ of writing movies with a purpose.  This is more of a story about "How would things look like if technology hadn't advanced and we just got used to zombies at the gate?"  That's fun, but it isn't really engaging.  Also, for Garland, this script feels real loosey-goosey.  Here's a problem I had with it.  About every twenty minutes in the movie, I kept saying, "Oh, this is the plot."  I mean, the plot eventually was that Spike needed to get his mom to a doctor and, in the process, learned what it meant to lose one's parents.  But it takes a long time for the movie to make that choice.  For a lot of the film, I was thinking that this was a movie about breaking the rules to find someone who ran away.  Then I thought it was about how kids learn that their parents are just adults who might suck more than we thought they did.  Then it ended up being about the value of isolation.  And none of these ideas are really well explored because the stupid setting kept taking control of the movie.  Every time we got to something deep, like the notion that a baby can be born of a zombie, the movie forgot to let us breathe in that idea.  

Yeah, 28 Days Later is an absolutely rad zombie movie.  That's probably what it is remembered for.  I don't want to take away from that.  Let cool stuff be cool.  But when watching 28 Days Later, I was struck by how aggressively political the movie was.  This movie touches on some politics, mostly with its juxtaposition of war images with the people trying to survive.  But I'll be honest with you, I don't know if that imagery ever says anything except that violence exists in everybody.  The movie has this attitude of "This next thing happened."  Sometimes, the zombies are really smart and it is hard to move a foot ahead.  But when the movie, for the sake of pacing, needs the film to progress beyond action horror set pieces, everything kind of gets to be just fine.  Like, Spike is still way out there with a baby.  Do you understand that if I pitched a story about how a young boy has to travel across miles of zombieland with a newborn baby who is hungry and zombies are attracted to sound, how insane that story would have been? That's a movie in itself and it's frustrating that the film never capitalized on that.

And here's the kicker!  That wasn't the part that bothered me.  There are a couple of things that bother me about 28 Years Later.  The first is the hierarchy of zombies.  One thing that always pulls me out of survival horror games is the fact that video games tend to categorize their zombies.  It's not bad enough that zombies are scary because they will overwhelm you with their numbers.  The game developers always feel the need to make "more challenging zombies."  With the case of 28 Years Later, we have the Alphas.  Apparently, there's something in the Rage Virus that affects some people differently, giving them enhanced intellect coupled with a steroid like effect of an Olympian athlete.  That's...dumb?  I'm really sorry.  Like, I know that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost don't like Rage zombies because they run, but this Alphas thing is beyond the pale.  It also doesn't make sense that Dr. Kelson doesn't just kill the Alphas when he has the chance.  I mean, there's a scene where Kelson is being attacked with the baby in a hole and it looks like he's done for.  Luckily, Spike is quick enough to sedate the Alpha again.  Maybe the movie doesn't want to push its luck saying that Alphas are dimes a dozen.  I don't know.

But that doesn't mean that the movie is all bad.  First and foremost, Danny Boyle has a way with atmosphere.  Golly, these movies are upsetting.  They are genuinely very scary to the point that I was nervous that anyone was going to walk in and see the most upsetting thing that they would have seen at any moment.  He makes good movies and 28 Years Later looks great.  But even more than all that, I love Jodie Comer.  Golly, that woman can act and I love her interaction with Alfie Williams, who plays Spike.  If there's one really great addition to this movie, that comes from the struggle of a mother who is losing her grasp on reality with a child who cares for her above all things. That stuff is great.  

It also kills me that this in no way feels like a standalone film.  Danny Boyle breaks his own rule to film a movie and that movie needs a sequel to explain a lot of the first film?  I honestly thought that the upcoming movie was actually a spin-off.  Then I discovered it was its own beast?  It's hard to critique a movie that feels incredibly incomplete.  We know that Spike is out there and there's all these Jimmy Saviles running around doing flips.  I'm not quite sure what that's all about.  But I'm trying to treat this as a film in itself and I don't know if that's really true.  

So the takeaway is that I want to like this movie more than I do.  I don't dislike it, so maybe that's a win?

Not rated because it is a Shudder Original, but it has the trappings of most conventional horror.  I'm pretty sure that this would get an R for gore alone.  There is a decent amount of language, some of it more intense than others.  But this is a commentary on the normalization of violence.  While there are definitely elements that are exaggerated for the sake of making a horror movie scary, the more upsetting violence are the grounded elements.  Again, I'm going to be writing this warning for a lot of the movies that I watch during the month of October, so just be aware of gore and violence.  Not rated.

DIRECTOR: Bomani J. Story

Do you realize how dumb I'm being right now?  Every day, some time during that day, I will make a list of all the things that I want to get done. Sometimes that list is written on a chalkboard, making it almost a contract.  Today, I knew it was going to be crazy.  I've been with the kids all weekend.  I love them to death, but it's been fairly standard to hear someone shouting for "Dad" about every few mintues.  I don't know why I thought that I would get time to hit some of the passion projects that I want to get done.  But I've been watching horror movies at night because my wife is out of town and I wanted to get laundry done.  So I started stacking up these movies that need to get blogged before I enter a very stressful week at work.  Don't worry.  If I actually do get this uploaded on Sunday night, be aware that I still have 28 Years Later to write about.

I have wanted to watch this one for a while.  Yes, you people who want to put me in a box, I did want to watch it because of the title.  I don't think I've made it even remotely a secret that I think that all art should be political because all art is already political by default.  I think the best thing that has happened to genre storytelling in the last decade is Jordan Peele's Get Out reminding us that genre storytelling should almost be accusatory.  With the wealth of now challenging horror films out there, with a title like The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, it should have been right up my alley.  I'm not saying that it was bad.  This is an incredible functional horror movie that does some things very right.  I'm not attacking it from that front.  I'm just not sure that this movie is as cohesive and it almost needs to be.

Part of my frustration with the film is that it is applying the Frankenstein allegory for today.  If Victor Frankenstein lived in the projects during 2023, what would that look like?  Okay, I'm in for that.  For a guy who has taught Frankenstein for years (I should make it clear that I taught it when I taught sophomores, which I no longer do), I don't necessarily love every element of the story.  But the Frankenstein mythos has outgrown Mary Shelley's novel's roots.  It's actually become something of its own creation...pun intended.  But the one thing that all the many interpretations of Frankenstein have tried to at least make known is that the real monster of the story should be the doctor, not the creature. 

I'm not saying that The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster doesn't try to do that.  There's a line towards the end that really tried selling that more than the action of the piece does.  It's not that I don't feel sympathy for Chris for the majority of the movie.  I just don't think that there's much to damn Vicaria, who seems to be the heroic protagonist for the majority of the movie, despite the fact that everyone accuses her of desecrating graves...which is a valid accusation thrown her way.  

The thing about the novel is that, despite being an epistolary novel, we spend a lot of time with the creature.  That's what makes the story compelling.  As much as Victor is dictating the events that led him to go out onto that ice, the really interesting story is that the creature is self-defined.  He is reborn as tabula rasa, shunned by his creator and becoming his own moral compass.  So what if that moral compass is vengeful and violent.  He becomes this thing, divorced from his parent and angry as heck.  That's not Chris in this story.  We actually know too little about Chris because The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is about Vicaria from start to finish.  If anything, Vicaria's tale is a better epistolary film because we can only know (for the most part) what is going on from Vicaria's perspective.  That's kind of annoying because it makes Vicaria almost flawless.  She's blackmailed by a drug dealer into doing morally grey things, but that is only because she is protecting the people around her.

And the problem lies in one thing that should seem pretty innocuous.  If Shelley's Frankenstein is an accusation of irresponsible science attempting to replace God, Vicaria's motive for trying to bring back life is incredibly sympathetic.  She keeps losing people in her life to gang and police violence.  She sees death as a disease and she chooses her brother Chris as her subject to reanimate.  Yes, she sees this as scientific conquest.  But the reason that she chose Chris is because she misses her brother.  Because she has an intimate relationship with Chris, it's not that she just raised anyone. She wants to see her brother again.  

That changes far too much of the story.  It's admirable what she's doing.  If anything, we're rooting for Vicaria to gain her freedom so she can take care of her brother.  When Chris starts murdering, it's not out of vengeance for a world that has rejected him.  It's because there's a monster inside of him.  Vicaria's speech at the end of the film says that Chris isn't Chris, but rather a monster defined by his environment.  I don't really see that.  Vicaria initially embraces Chris (an improvement over what Victor does upon the Creature's reanimation.  I never really knew why Victor Frankenstein feared his own creation upon its rising considering that's what he was working for that.  You'd think that he would be able to steel himself against that given that he was working on that project for ages).  It's actually really weird that she fears Chris as time progresses.  The second time she sees him, she's terrified of him, which doesn't really make a ton of sense considering both Vicaria's characterization coupled with the fact that she didn't see Chris as a monster.  Also, Chris's dad never saw him as a monster, and Chris just murders the heck out of him.

Maybe the movie had too much time to realize that it had to be scary and that the original Frankenstein isn't so much terrifying as it is fascinating.  There are a bunch of moments in the film that seem like Shudder put pressure on this movie to be scary.  Let's have the conversation about Jada.  Jada is the spookiest thing in the movie.  The things that Chris does is upsetting.  A man getting a machete to the clavicle is upsetting.  But Jada is straight up spooky.  She keeps saying these things mirroring the little girl from Poltergeist.  Like, it's cool and super spooky.  But do you know what else it is?  Absurd.  It's like Jada became aware that she was in a horror movie, so she starts acting all spooky.  I get it, kids can be scary in horror movies.  But she just does these things that have nothing to do with the fact that Chris is out there, ripping people up.

And let's get to the elephant in the room.  I wanted this movie to be a commentary for 2023...even thought it is 2025.  The movie gets political.  There are some phenomenal things said about police violence, the whitewashing of history, and the importance of education.  But none of those things really are important to the main story.  This movie took a story and decided to skin the present day in an inherently political climate.  It named the movie The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster.  But I'll be honest with you.  Vicaria isn't exactly that angry of a Black girl.  She has her moments.  I want to make a comparison between Vicaria and another angry Black girl, also in a streaming original: Riri Williams.  

I loved Ironheart.  I like the comics.  I like the show.  I don't want these stories in competition, but I can't help but make the comparison, mainly because they are both about teenage Black girls in STEM situations where they aren't really supported by the world while White characters are encouraged to advance.  What I liked about Ironheart is that it took the Tony Stark mythos, a story about White privilege, and showed what happens when a Black girl tries to do the same thing.  The entire show is about how she has to cut corners and challenge her own moral codes just so she can be an unrecognized genius.  Now, apply the same story to The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and you kind of don't get a commentary about how a Black girl is any different from Victor Frankenstein, except that she gets more screen time and has a more sympathetic reason for doing this.  

I don't want the movie to justify its political existence by telling me its politics.  I want the movie to show me its politics.  It does it sometimes, in brief flashes. But the reality of the whole thing is that it felt like it wanted to blend Frankenstein and The Wire.  And I believe that there is a version of this story that could really turn heads.  I just don't think we are challenged enough because the movie seemed to write itself off as a Shudder Original. 

It's good...not great.

Rated R for the most immediate unnecessary nudity you've ever seen in a movie.  While the movie really gets the R for the death and dismemberment that comes with movies of this ilk, there are all these excuses to do some raunchy stuff.  Like, the movie is a fundamentally unsexy conceit.  But the movie decided to really try to shoehorn some horndog stuff in there, making it all the more uncomfortable as I hate-finished the movie.  There's also some language and kids with guns.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Don Coscarelli

I have half a memory stuck in the back of my brain.  I went to a very conservative college, but I still really dug horror movies.  I don't know how I got a copy of Phantasm, considering that streaming wasn't a thing yet.  Maybe there was some kind of "On Demand" option with our cable box.  Long story even longer, I remember trying to convince people to watch Phantasm at my conservative Catholic university, thinking that this movie couldn't be that offensive.  Start up the film?  Immediate sex scene that only focused on a topless woman.  Yeah, we shut that one off pretty quick.  I did manage to pull a fast one though and convinced the theatre department to do a public screening of Night of the Living Dead.  Yeah, I wonder why my wife questions my choices.

I never did finish Phantasm.  But my wife was out of town and I wanted a movie that I knew that she wouldn't be all that interested in.  The same philosophy that went into wanting to show classmates this movie back in my old college days hit me today.  Phantasm was always one franchise that I felt like I never had an excuse to watch, despite the fact that it isn't a completely unknown horror franchise.  Even more so, I loved Bubba Ho Tep. Now, before I start lambasting Phantasm by stating that it is barely a movie, I really would like to stress that I am older and my tastes are very different from my college days. Those were the days that I swore that Moulin Rouge! was the greatest film ever made and I would watch shlock horror all the time.  

Yeah, old me doesn't like this.  Part of me really wanted to like this.  In my mind, there are mythical horror movies made on shoestring budgets filled with heart that made up for lack of budgets.  Maybe it's the Sam Raimi origin story applied to all of these horror movies that don't really earn those kinds of reputations.  Based on what I read on the Phantasm Wikipedia article (I needed to know both what I watched and what happens in the sequels so I can potentially spare myself the misery of hate watching an entire franchise), maybe Don Coscarelli and Sam Raimi share a lot of the same DNA.  From what I understand, there were a billion cuts of this movie that were attempted to be sold to distributors before the version that we ultimately got with this cut.  A lot of that makes sense.  The movie has a really hard time finding a unifying identity.

I need to put a hard break in what I am writing right now.  There's a bunch of stuff that needs to be said right here.  Let's imagine a world where Don Coscarelli is an auteur right out of the gate.  He knows the message he wants to tell and he knows that he's going to have to have his first movie break a lot of rules to say that message.  The Phantasm that I watched wanted me to believe that the events of this movie are Mike's dream, processing the death of his brother Jody.  I mean, I'm shorthanding what is ultimately meant to be an ambiguous ending considering that the Tall Man appears in Mike's mirror and captures him.  Okay, that's the best ending that can come out of a mess of a movie because it explains why the movie is so disjointed.  So much of the story can be written off as "Kid has weird dreams."  

But I absolutely refuse to believe that Coscarelli made a movie mimicking the chaos storytelling of dreamland.  One of the key things that I tell my student writers and is one of the most challenging pieces of advice that I have to force myself to listen to is that "writing is ultimately in rewriting."  First drafts are fundamental to the process.  But sometimes you need to throw the whole thing away and learn from your mistakes.  My students often don't listen to me when I tell them that they need to start from scratch, treating the rough draft as a learning experience.  A lot of their writing reads like Phantasm.  Phantasm has a lot of core stuff wrong about it.  It knows it wants to be spooky.  They got a really creepy dude.  They had a visual effects guy who is more than functional.  They have someone scoring the thing who knows how to make the whole thing creepy.  I love it. These are important.  What the movie doesn't have is an understanding of both plot and characterization.

Let's first break down the characterization in this movie because I cannot tell you why these characters are acting the way that they do.  The movie starts off almost in medias res.  A major character, to these people, has been murdered.  We don't really understand it.  We don't get to see the investigation into Tommy's death.  Instead, we're catapulted to the funeral, where Jody, one of our protagonists, seems put out by being at a funeral.  From the fact that Mike is always spying on Jody and always mad at Jody for leaving, we have to assume that Jody leaves a lot?  We don't really get a concrete dynamic between these people because a lot of Jody's character can be written as "cool guy archetype."  For the first time ever, the archetype isn't helping. 

It's also like the characters kind of just fell into a horror movie.  These evil monsters almost start the film as a version of the Munsters, but without the self-awareness.  The Tall Man is a mortician who can deadlift a coffin with a body inside of it one handed.  He's doing nothing to hide that behavior.  It's almost like he's welcoming people to investigate the cemetary because he has nothing better to do.  Usually, the supernatural have a purpose to their haunting.  But everything in Phantasm reads like these ghouls have nothing better to do than to simply mess with Mike and Jody.  There's an explanation later about why The Tall Man and the dwarves are attacking folks, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. There's a weird white room and an invisible door to another dimension.  As a guy who consumes a lot of media, my only response to all of that explanation what "What?"

Do you understand the amount of willpower it takes for me to not hate watch these other movies just so I can understand the lore of a movie I did not care for?  You may find that easy.  I am almost put off by it.  You'll know if I have succeeded in ignoring the sequels if you find no more Phantasm blogs.  (I mean, there are only five movies and they are made almost a decade apart.  I could do it, if only to see if Coscarelli becomes a better filmmaker.) 

I was talking about how I find Evil Dead guerilla filmmaking charming.  Phantasm isn't charming.  I know that Coscarelli has a handful of sets.  He's got the characters' house.  He's got the mausoleum. That's really about it.  Also, he likes to steal scenes from the novel Dune with the "Fear is the mindkiller" pain box.  So almost the entire movie is Mike and/or Jody have a bad feeling about the creatures at the cemetary.  They argue for a few minutes about whether or not Mike should go to the cemetary.  One or both of them go to the cemetary, fight off some kind of oogie-boogie and then they run home, question whether or not they saw what they clearly just fought off, and then repeat all of that over again.  Honestly, this movie had no real ending.  It ended because it told us that it was over.  But any one of the sequences at the cemetary could have been the final confrontation between Mike and the Tall Man.

Also, what is Reggie's relationship to these people?  One of the cuts of the movie had clearly had the plan to make the Tall Man and his minions vulnerable to sonic vibrations and, because Reggie played music, that music was going to take them down.  But that seemed really downplayed.  I kind of felt like Coscarelli had access to an old ice cream truck and a uniform, so they had Reggie show up for more scenes than what made any amount of sense.  (Also, all those people lived?  Why didn't the Tall Man kill all those people?) 

The movie is really bad, guys.  I wanted to like it.  That sphere was pretty cool, but this is a movie that depends on spooky imagery as opposed to any kind of actual storytelling.  It felt like a local haunted house that didn't have a narrative, but just wanted to scare you with scary looking things.  I really hope that I'm not bored enough to shotgun this franchise because I still haven't decided which horror movie I'm going to watch while folding laundry.

Rated R, because this franchise is all about finding the gnarliest ways to kill off characters.  Rather than necessarily scare, the goal is for "gross".  It's not quite body horror because often, the deaths are fairly quick.  It is, however, quite upsetting.  I would also like to add that this movie decides to have its protagonist look at an inapprpriate magazine, absolutely deflating the romance of a scene.  Couple that with drinking, swearing, and other things that horror movies aimed at teens get up to, this is a well-deserved R rating.

DIRECTOR:  James Wong

I'm so stupid for doing this.  Honestly, this might be the dumbest undertaking that I've had yet when it comes to this blog.  Usually, during October, I try to knock out an entire franchise of a horror movie.  When I saw that all the Final Destination movies were dropped on HBO Max, I thought, "That'd probably be a good time."  That's not the mistake I made.  I'm fairly convinced that I'm going to have a good time knocking these movies out, especially considering that I am not doing Saw again.  

But the big problem is...these movies are the same movie over and over again.  While there may be similarities between films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise or the Friday the 13th movies, there at least are respective plots that are more heavily emphasized between films.  As far as I remember, the only difference between most of the Final Destination movies is the actual deaths.  Heck, I can get even more frustrated than simply the fact that these are six movies where I have to write six essays, all fundamentally about the same thing.  To make matters worse, these movies are barely movies.  

That sounds like I hate what I'm watching.  I haven't gotten there yet.  I'm sure a couple movies in, I'm going to get incredibly frustrated with the fact that I'm not being challenged in any meaningful way.  But the bigger issue is that this is almost a fictionalized version of Faces of Death.  For those who didn't grow up in the exact era that I did, Faces of Death was something that was whispered about in the more sketchy horror communities.  These were VHS tapes that were passed around that claimed (sometimes falsely; sometimes not) to be filmed and recorded moments of people being killed on camera.  It was always something that I found too barbaric and inhuman to ever land on my radar.  Instead, Final Destination offered a softer version of this.  Instead of watching real people die real deaths, they presented "what cool ways could we have our characters die that you know are fake.  Ultimately, what this did in my head was give special effects artists challenges to up the ante from what previous movies had offered.  After all, the thing that we all remember from Final Destination 2 is the logging truck. The fact that I see memes today saying that people won't drive behind one of these trucks is a testament to the challenge that these special effects artists ascribed to.

So the masochistic challenge that I'm responsible is attempting to write blog entries with the hope of finding some nugget to explore per blog.  I don't think I'm going to win.  Honestly, I won't feel bad for even the most devoted reader of the blog on bouncing somewhere later down the line.  This blog has always been something as a hobby for me more than something that would ever garner me readership.  (Although, if I gained readership, I wouldn't hate that either.) For all I know, I'm going to have this great epiphany movie-to-movie and have something new to say each time.  Heck, for all I realize, these movies might have something different to say between films, although I'm not exactly placing bets on that idea. 

I love that Final Destination was made in the year 2000.  I don't know if a year could ever encapsulate a specific feeling when it came to horror movies.  This is during the glory days of New Line Cinema.  New Line, from today's perspective, is just the house of Lord of the Rings.  That's not a bad place to be.  But in 2000, so many movies started with the New Line Cinema logo.  New Line was, in some ways, the alternative to Dimension Films and their very millennial-centric brand of horror.  I won't lie.  This is my favorite era of horror.  Part of that probably comes from nostalgia.  I discovered horror in this era and couldn't get enough of --what was then --contemporary horror.  Looking back on this movie 25 years later, I can't believe what a time capsule the first Final Destination was.  

I mean, this is a pre-9/11 movie about a plane explosion.  This is a timeline that doesn't really exist.  Most of our pre-9/11 narratives are people who dress up fancy, smoke on the plane, and experience almost nothing at the airport.  The closest other movie that I can find to this specific moment in time is Home Alone.  But this is a story about the fear of planes.  Alex's entire characterization hangs on the notion that he could be imagining all of this.  So we have this "See something, say something" attitude wired through the film and 9/11 hasn't happened yet.  It's odd to think that this story could exist before 9/11 and would actually work better post-9/11.  It's like all of these pieces were in place for America's narrative to be that airplanes are the most dangerous place you could possibly be. 

But even beyond the moment that shaped America for the 21st Century, the DNA of this film screams 2000.  When I saw those opening credits, it was both a Who's Who of my childhood coupled with a bit of "Whatever happened to them?"  The most shocking of these was Sean William Scott, who plays the most reserved part he might ever play.  I really like Sean William Scott.  I can't say that I'm a fan, but the dude brought a certain energy to a lot of the roles he performed.  Watching him play what might be characterized as cannon fodder for death is a weird moment.  My mind goes to the same place as seeing Christian Slater in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  There's just something very startling about seeing that kind of role.  But between Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, and Daniel Roebuck, it's really weird knowing that this was the 2000s All Star Game.  The funny thing about it all is that there's also a very specific performance style that has aged poorly.  I don't think I could advertise Final Destination as a great movie, even if I had loved it, simply by the weak-energy performances that we get with this film.  My apologies to Devon Sawa.  As normal, I don't like crapping on performances because someone worked on that role hard.  Also, I Googled it and I'm the only person who thinks that Sawa is weak in that role.  But I think it might be the product of its day as opposed to anything that Sawa is doing fundamentally wrong.

The odd thing about Final Destination is that I'm almost confused about who Death is as a character.  I have to call Death an unseen character in these movies because Death has a personality.  But despite that personality, there are things that just don't make sense to me. Maybe future movies will enlighten me about who Death is.  The central conceit is that Death has a plan.  If you can see the plan, you can delay your own demise.  Okay, I can live with that.  For one, Death is incredibly petty.  Part of it comes from the fact that Death comes for us all and that plan is important to the framing of the universe.  Okay.  But these rules are a bit silly.  Death has to kill in the order that people would have died in the original timeline.  It seems like that is kind of arbitrary.  Like, if a survivor got incredibly reckless and died out of order, fearing that there would be a more painful death down the line, would that affect how things worked?  I mean, Carter almost teases that.  

But even beyond that, what about how Death is killing people?  The obvious question is "Why not let people die of natural causes?"  Like, why not just stop someone's heart?  An aneurysm would solve a lot of problems?  It feels like Death is mugging for the camera with these movies, forcing these elaborate Rube-Goldberg styled deathtraps.  That's why people start escaping is because these deaths have to be incredibly elaborate.  But that also spirals into some questions?  Tod's death straight up confuses me.  Besides the fact that the toilet leaks gel, not water (maybe a cleaning product in the basin?), Death cleans up after itself.  If Death is not someone to be messed with, why hide the crime?  I had a conversation with Henson about it.  The movie really wanted Alex to be on his back foot, running away from the FBI who are investigating Alex and his relationships to these new deaths.  But Death has no reason to really frame Alex.  I'm really trying, but the notion that Alex is always playing with a disadvantage.  But it wouldn't actually affect the movie because it would take a minute to figure out how Death worked.  Honestly, Alex isn't even privy to the notion of "Death has a design" until he meets Tony Todd's mortician.  That whole, "On the run from Johnny Law" is fun, but we don't really need a mistaken suicide from Tod to explain any of that.  It seems like a hat on a hat that is never really explained.

What's really weird about this franchise is that a lot of the hobbling that this franchise does comes from a fun tag at the end.  Why I never really got into these movies beyond either parts 2 or 3 comes from the fact that we know that Death is inescapable.  The fact that there's no hope for these characters is kind of defeatist.  I mean, it secures a universal theme about how Death gets us all in the end.  But if you are rooting for characters to make it out of the horror movie, that tag that it all circles back means that there really isn't any hope for the characters at all.  It kind of makes a movie...not a movie?  It's just survive for a few minutes long. The movie just ends when it ends.  There's no real structure because nothing they do really matters.  

But that might be something to discuss next time.