Movie Scum

Written by: PBF Dr. Crews was a bit of a douche bag, wasn’t he? I mean, he wanted to exploit Tina’s powers, he gets her mother killed. I was quite happy when he died. But that was pretty exciting. Tina did a pretty good job fighting Jason. I mean, not before a dozen people were killed. But it was exciting to see him get set on fire, electrocuted, fall into a basement, have a roof collapse on him. All of this does nothing of course because JASON IS A ZOMBIE AND NEEDS TO BE SHOT IN THE HEAD. Despite of this, Tina does what she meant to do at the beginning of the oddly titled sequel and uses her powers to raise her dad from the lake, who pulls Jason back under, which again, according to some book Tommy read in part VI, is the only way to kill him (as long as there are no blondes walking around firing off telekinesis all willy nilly). Then our heroes wake up in the morning and are carted off by an ambulance. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t fathom that Jason can come back after

To my recollection, Scream 3 was the first R-rated movie I “legally” saw in theaters once I was of age. Perhaps that is why I had so many fond memories of it even though the troubled production and distinct lack of the main character had given others a critical leg to stand on. I figured I would like Scream 2 more this time around but the end result was about the same. Would my Scream 3 memories fare any better? Well, yes and no. By 1999, writer Kevin Williamson had been involved with several Scream-ish productions as well as launching the pinnacle of teen angst, Dawson’s Creek. Thus he was either too busy to return or was burnt out from young adult affairs. Likewise, Neve Campbell was reportedly difficult to nail down for this installment, agreeing to it only with a reduced schedule (and thus reduced screentime). Since the rest of the important cast and crew returned, we have what seems to be a Scream movie, but doesn’t really feel like a Scream movie. The first lampooned h

Written by: PBF Hooray, Jason’s back! In Jason lives, the Forest Green (formerly Crystal Lake) Sheriff was convinced that Tommy was killing people to fabricate a story that Jason was alive. Little did he know that he was alive. I am sure he was convinced of this when Jason folded him in half like he was closing a suitcase. So now that Jason is the undead, how could Tommy and his new lady friend Megan, stop him? Shoot him in the head? Nope. Chop him up as he has done to others so many times? No. During the massacre, Tommy had time to buy, or check out from the local library, some books on the occult. From these, he gleans that the solution is to return Jason to the site of his death; the lake. They do this (thankfully before Jason kills any of the little children campers) and chain him to a boulder so that he is stuck under water. Jason “drowns” and the kids are saved! Hooray! At the very end, as we see Jason floating underwater, he opens his eyes and glares at us right before the c

Written by: PBF Wow, what a mind fuck that last picture was! It wasn’t Jason at all! In case you skipped that one (as you should), allow me to fill you in on the events of A New Beginning. As Tommy is “recovering” at Pinehurst, a halfway house type place that employs a similar set of rules as Pablo Escobar’s self built prison, the townsfolk are being murdered by an unknown killer. The killer makes his way to Pinehurst to kill all the people there as well. We finally get to see who it is, and it’s Jason! Right? No? Well, let’s see. He is wearing a hockey mask like Jason. But it has blue on it rather than red. Did he get a new one from a sporting good store? He certainly has the same M.O. as Jason. Killing everyone and having a special distaste for teenagers. But alas, it is not Jason. Tommy gets the better of him and kills him. His mask comes off and we see that it is Roy, one of the ambulance guys. Quite a shock, as every time Roy was on camera, he had the goofy facial expressions,

Written by: PBF Catfish caught a lot of flack for being a fake documentary, an allegation the filmmakers deny. Whether or not it is real, is irrelevant. If it is, great. If not, then it was an excellent choice by the filmmakers to shoot it in the style of a documentary. Brothers Nev and Ariel Schulman, as well as Henry Joost share an office in New York. They are photographers and filmmakers (Henry and Ariel directed this film). One of Nev’s photographs is published and he then receives a painting of it from Abby, an 8 year old girl from Michigan. This leads to a “friendship” via Facebook. Eventually, Rev also becomes Facebook friends with her mother Angela and father Vince, as well as her sister Megan and brother Alex. Soon he speaks to Angela and Megan on the phone and begins a sort of romantic relationship with Megan. She sends him songs, they exchange messages and phone calls. An out of town assignment (and some chicanery) lead the 3 to travel to Michigan to pay visit Megan a

It is notable that for the duration of the Saw series , production company Lionsgate was able to keep banging out a new movie in the series less than a year apart with only two major duds out of seven. After the success of the first Scream , Dimension Films surely was quick to retain writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven for a follow-up that incidentally is set two years after the first. If real time had followed the story time, Scream 2 potentially could have been the best of the series but it comes off feeling rushed. Scream 2 does have the distinction of being one of a select few movies where the sequel mostly measures up to the first, albeit in different ways. In fact, some notable people (either Siskel or Ebert*) found this movie more likable than the first. The first film of course was packed with references to horror films throughout but Williamson takes the story of the survivors from the last story and interjects it with clever reminders of why this movie sh

Written by: PBF Wow. That last film was exciting, wasn’t it? We got to see Crispin Glover dance. We met the Jarvis family, who live in Crystal Lake. I guess the Jarvis family is like the really old couple from disaster films that refuse to leave their town no matter what danger might threaten them. We met Rob, the hunk that breezed into town to avenge his sister’s death. Most importantly, we saw twelve-year-old Tommy Jarvis give himself an incredibly bad haircut and then hack Jason up with a machete. At the end of the film, as he embraces his sister, he looks at the camera and give us a look that may imply that he is now mentally disturbed, and may possibly hack someone else up. Although I don’t think Tommy would snap that quickly after the events of the film, I did like the cliffhanger implication that Tommy might kill as well. Also, Jason must be dead. He has to be. I mean, Tommy was like Vince with that Slap-Chop, minus that headset. I think I did hear Tommy say, “You’re gonna l

When I first saw Scream in theaters with my dad almost fifteen years ago, I did not care for it. I can’t really say why but the first viewing did nothing for me; I didn’t hate it but I was mostly just ambivalent towards it. Later that year, Digger had a copy on VHS which I watched again and fell in love. Here was a horror movie that was not afraid to pull punches, was not bogged down in some ridiculous backstory (see the Halloween entry from the prior year), and had a sharp wit to it. Since then, Scream has been in constant rotation of the movies I randomly watch. Mainstream horror in the mid-90s was not in a very good state. I’m sure there were plenty of indie or straight-to-video releases of whatever installment the Hellraiser or Puppet Master series were on but all of the big franchises were either completely finished or creatively drained. Scream came along to fill the void in a way that is still astonishing that it hadn’t been done before (at least not to the same degree of

Written by: PBF The last chapter in our bloody journey ended rather poorly. Chris, who had come back to her father’s cabin 2 years after being attacked in the woods, had survived the latest bloodbath. After seeing Jason’s face, she realized the he was the one that attacked her. Chris not only hung the now hockey mask wearing murderer, but put an axe in his head. In an obvious dream sequence homage to the ending of part 1, Mrs. Voorhees jumps out of the lake and attacks Chris (I say obvious as Mrs. Voorhees had her head cut off, yet it is attached to her body here). We then see Chris, laughing hysterically, obviously now mentally disturbed, being taken away by the cops, who for some reason refuse to slash and burn the entire Crystal Lake area to prevent future killings. The Final Chapter opens with the police cleaning up the carnage from part III. Jason’s body is taken to the morgue. Now, as I mentioned above, Jason was hung and then had an axe hit him, and stuck, in the head. For

I was not able to attend the midnight showing of Insidious on its opening weekend like I had planned so instead I watched the veritable classic, Poltergeist . The comparison between the two films is obvious. Both involve a middle-class family with kids in a house where one child goes “missing” and random, weird happenings occur which a middle-aged blonde woman is called in to investigate. Both attempt to be scary as hell also. The difference is that Poltergeist was scary to the 80s crowd where it seems tame nowadays. Insidious is expertly made and harsh enough to make a seasoned horror fan like myself sit up, pay attention, and think about cowering behind the empty theater seat beside me.

Written by: PBF Previously at Crystal Lake, eight people had been killed in highly entertaining ways by a man wearing a sack on his head with one eye hole in it. It is clear that this person is Jason, the boy who everyone thought had drowned. Now he is all grown up. In trying to escape, Ginny runs across Jason’s shack in the woods. Inside, she finds the head of Mrs. Voorhees, surrounded by candles, as well as the body of Alice. There is a scuffle between her, Jason and Paul and Jason takes a machete to the shoulder (the obvious place you would chop someone if you wanted to kill them. I mean fuck, there is a severed head in the room, did that not give you any ideas?). As Paul and Ginny are back at the cabin recovering from the attack, an unmasked Jason leaps through the window and grabs Ginny. His hair is wild and unfettered. His face is deformed. He is quite ghastly. The next scene is during the day and Ginny is being placed in the back of an ambulance. This scene leaves us unsure

Written by: PBF So in the last installment, we saw everyone but Alice get killed by an unknown murderer. Alice runs outside and finds a woman who identifies herself as Mrs. Voorhees, an old friend of the Christys. Alice feverishly informs her of how everyone is dead. Mrs. Voorhees says that she is not afraid and goes in to investigate. After seeing one of the bodies, she tells the story of how Jason drowned due to the negligence of the counselors. Mrs. Voorhees was in fact working that day as a cook. She then drops the bomb; Jason was her son. Her niceness then morphs into psychosis as she repeats, “Kill her, Mommy!” and exclaims that Alice let her only son drown. At this point, it is obvious that she has been killing everyone. There is a chase and some biting, and they both end up at the lake. Alice cuts Mrs. Voorhees’s head off with a machete. She gets in a canoe, rows out to the middle of the lake and falls asleep. In the morning, the police find her and as they are calling her