Level Two

Again, thanks to Freddy in Space for the inspiration to to this challenge. On with the next questions!

11. Most Ditzy [sic - this is from Twitter, sorry] Character: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt)

The girl who somehow survives both I Know What You Did Last Summer and the insipid I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. During the course of the two films, Julie spends her time running full speed down the wrong track after red herrings, refusing to get out of the way when a killer is after her, and once even manages to get herself locked in a tanning bed. In fact, the entire plot of the second film is based on the fact the she doesn't know the capital of Brazil.

12. Favorite Horror Movie From the Past Year: You're Next (2013)

In my rave review for You're Next, I talked about the butt-kicking Australian lead, the whip smart dialogue, and the pitch perfect balance of terrifying and hilarious. This is all still true.

13. Best Impalement: Final Destination 3 (2006)

Just when it seems like everything is safe and a girl is saved from accidental lynching, a flag pole is sent launching straight through somebody's abdomen. The clincher? The flag says "Liberty or Death." God, I love these movies.

14. Killer Who Has the Best Weapon: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)

No need for a second thought on this one. I barely needed a first thought. Freddy Krueger's razor glove (designed by Wes Craven to emulate the common fear of animal claws) is one of the most creative and terrifying inventions of the horror genre. I have so much to say about A Nightmare on Elm Street, but you guys are just gonna have to wait on that. We've got a big day planned.

15. A Horror-Love Story: Cold Prey (2006)

The beautiful Jannicke (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) is hesitant to move in with her boyfriend for fear of moving things too fast. The awkward and single Morten Tobias (Rolf Kristian Larsen) has been nursing a crush on her for quite some time. When their snowboarding group gets attacked by a deranged mountain man, the truths come out, but unfortunately Morten Tobias doesn't live long enough to see his dream realized. One of the only times my heart has been broken by a slasher film.

16. Best Throat Slicing: V/H/S 2 (2013)

Another one that I have previously talked about. In the segment "Safe Haven," directed by Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, a documentary crew visits the compound of a cult on what happens to be their Armageddon day. Things don't quite go as planned and the throat slitting is one of the most visceral and exciting gore effects in the entire film, which is chock full of bizarre and off-putting sights.

17. Favorite Sequel to a Horror: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

I love this film, and the whole Prom Night gang. While the original was a fairly run-of-the-mill slasher flick (although it did feature Leslie Nielsen and Jamie Lee Curtis and seven minutes of disco dancing), its sequel is an absolutely nutso balls-to-the-wall post-Nightmare on Elm Street special effects extravaganza that owes just as much to Carrie as it does to Freddy Krueger.

18. Best Horror Movie in the Woods: The Burning (1981)

I know I'm snubbing my beloved Friday the 13th series, but even I know they're bad movies.

With special effects by Tom Savini and a raft massacre scene that landed it on the Video Nasties list in the UK, The Burning is a surefire slasher classic. The first time I saw this film was at a midnight movie in LA with Shannon. I was expecting to show her first dumb slasher movie. I was disappointed. This movie is fantastic.

19. An Actor You Enjoyed to Watch Get Murdered: Michelle Trachtenberg

I. HATE. DAWN. SUMMERS.

The remake of Black Christmas was a dream come true.

20. Most Attractive Horror Movie Killer - Adam Carr (David Boreanaz)

Sorry about spoilers but mmmmmmmm....

I'm pretty sure David Boreanaz is an actual undead vampire because he has aged maybe three months since Buffy started in 1997. 

Valentine is an absolutely fabulous movie because of how much it sucks. Despite coming out after Scream and Buffy, two genre-bending self aware horror genre tentpoles, this film is still just a straightforward slasher flick, which I have a lot of respect for despite the stigma that comes attached to that.

Word Count: 746
Reviews in This Series
Horror Lover Challenge Part 1 (August 16, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 2 (August 25, 2013)
Horror Lover Challenge Part 3 (August 28, 2013)

New Decade. New Rules.

Any good horror fan knows the rules for how to survive a horror movie. Do you know the rules?

As outlined by Randy Meeks in Scream:

1. DO NOT have sex.
2. DO NOT drink or do drugs.
3. DO NOT say "I'll be right back."

These are the golden rules that will one day be embroidered on my modest but accommodating home's decorative throw pillows. However, there is a lot of ground that they don't cover. Yes, following these rules will help you get out alive, but in a cast of 12 to 15 nubile teens, only one or two of you will survive. The golden rules give you a step up, but in order to beat out the competition you need these

10 Ignored Rules For Surviving a Horror Movie

1. DO NOT hide.

Where It Could Have Helped: Friday the 13th, The Purge, The Prowler

I know it seems counterintuitive, and this one does have some exceptions. If the killer is in the room with you and absolutely will murder you to death if you reveal yourself, by all means stay hidden. Just hope he gives up quickly and moves on.

But if the killer is unconscious, in a known location, or just ploddingly slow as killers are wont to be, Speedy Gonzales your way outta there. Haul your sweet little hiney as fast as possible and don't look back. Killers are usually tied to a location and there's a certain distance you reach where you'll be out of the woods (in some cases literally). Hiding just prolongs potential facetime with your pursuer and you don't want that.

If you're staying still, he will eventually find you. If you try to emerge from your hiding place, he already did find you. If you're a receding cloud of dust in the distance, there's nothing he can do.


2. ALWAYS have your keys on you.

Where It Could Have Helped: Halloween, Slumber Party Massacre II, I Know What You Did Last Summer

You can't drive a car or open a locked door without the key. It's a simple concept, really. But when you're scrambling away from a twirling drill, you tend to forget about things other than RUN! If your keys are hung up on a hook or lying on the kitchen table, they are of no use to you and the killer has ample time to catch up with you - time you could be using to get the heck out of there.


3. DO NOT lean up against doorways.

Where It Could Have Helped: Hatchet III, Scream 4, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, [REC]

The killer has likely already proven that he has superhuman strength, either by crushing your jock friend's skull or generally tossing your pals around like basketballs. Yes, it's great if you manage to get a locked door between you and your assailant, but his strength has not miraculously gone away. With a sturdy enough weapon (and the weapon is always sturdy enough), they can punch through that door like it's cellophane, gutting you in the process. So even if you need a rest, do it in the middle of the room. For Pete's sake.


4. ALWAYS break the glass.

Where It Could Have Helped: I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween

If the killer has you backed up against a glass door that is locked, wedged shut, or otherwise inaccessible, smash the bajeezus out of that glass like you're at a Jewish wedding and scamper away. That's the beauty of doors made out of breakable material. Grit your teeth and grab a chair or throw a couple front kicks and you're home free.


5. DO NOT drop your weapon.

Where It Could Have Helped: Friday the 13th Part 2, Halloween

I'm looking at you, Laurie Strode. Once the killer appears to be vanquished, hold onto that knife you got. Especially don't drop it next to his lifeless form and limp away. That's a good way to land yourself in a sequel, missie.


6. ALWAYS move.

Where It Could Have Helped: Cold Prey 2, Friday the 13th Part 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer

A killer is advancing on you with a knife. Do you A) duck and bolt or B) stand there and scream? If you answered B, congratulations! You're dead. Just like countless others before you.

I know shock can be paralyzing but if you just sit there and take it, you have absolutely zero chance of surviving unless somebody else is standing behind the killer toting a shotgun. And even then, you're living on borrowed time and likely to die a couple scenes later anyway.


7. DO NOT open the door immediately after the killer vanishes.

Where It Could Have Helped: Scream 4, too many others to name or even remember

So you've listened to me and you find yourself behind a locked door that you're wisely not leaning up against. The pounding stops and you hear footsteps heading down the hall. The coast is clear, right? Wrong. The killer is lying in wait and he will slash your throat the second you peep your little chickadee head out there. Wait. Wait forever. Wait until the Final Girl destroys him or until you see him outside your window. Only then can you know that doorway is safe for passage.


8. DO NOT be an autopsy technician.

Where It Could Have Helped: Hatchet III, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

I'm sorry for any aspiring morgue workers out there, but if you're living in a horror movie chances are you're going to come across a camp counselor massacre or two. And along with the pile of teen corpses will come an inexplicably massive shape on a gurney. This is the killer. Killing is his job, and he won't let death stop him from ripping you in half at your workstation.


9. ALWAYS double tap.

Where It Could Have Helped: Halloween, Scream, Cold Prey 2, Hellbent

Now, unless you're dealing with some sort of supernatural being like Freddy Krueger, your average serial killer is not indestructible, merely very resilient. At some point (especially if you're dealing with Ghostface, who seems to be particularly inept), you may get the killer unconscious on the ground after dealing a particularly heavy blow, or even shooting/stabbing him in a prime location. Whatever you do, don't you dare walk away. Kick him in the throat. Shoot him twenty times in the head. Cut him into pieces and burn the pieces. Cryogenically freeze the pieces and send them to Mars. Do whatever you need to do, but I guarantee you he isn't dead until you take the necessary steps.


10. DO NOT survive the first movie of a franchise.

Where It Could Have Helped: Friday the 13th Part 2, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Halloween: Resurrection, Alien 3, Final Destination 2

If these rules helped you, congratulations! But you'd better hope your movie bombs at the box office. Because if you wind up in the middle of a franchise... well, good luck to ya. You're a prime target for revenge, bloody accidents, and cash-in cameos.

Alice Hardy. Clear Rivers. Ellen Ripley. Nancy Thompson. None of them lived to see their final movie*. Heck, Laurie Strode died twice.

Pray your movie sucks.

*resurrections notwithstanding
Word Count: 1237

All We Are Is Dust In The Wind

Year: 2011
Director: Steven Quale
Cast: Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Sibling bonding: complete.

Because Lauren is awesome and lets me torment her, we got to watch the (current) final entry in the Final Destination series last night. After last time, virtually anything would have been a welcome presence on our TV screens, but luckily enough this film was solid as a rock. Specifically, a hurtling concrete slab.

It starts simple enough. A group of randy young workers hop on a bus to an office retreat. They throw around their share of "even if it kills me"s and 180 references until Sam (D'Agosto) has a terrible premonition of the bridge they're on collapsing into the river, taking most of them with it. And the film already throws a new wrench into the works. This premonition is the most involved of the entire series. Clocking in at about five minutes, a lot of time is spent on the victims and their attempts to escape. Not to mention the lovely Molly (Bell) actually survives the premonition.

That cone is symbolic of something, I'm sure.

Sam wakes up, screams for everybody to get off the bus, and eight of them do. The inevitable investigation begins. I mean, wouldn't you check out the kid who screamed the bridge was going to collapse thirty seconds before 80 people plunged to their demise?

That's just called having a brain stem.

Anyway, it turns out it was just the wind (It's never just the wind) and the charges are dropped. Same old, same old. This exact scenario happened in the original film. But. The detective is still suspicious and decides to do some snooping around.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, this is the first Final Destination film to have a legitimate B-plot, and that is something worth celebrating.

I think I'll spring for some of that laser eye surgery, myself.

Anyway, there's 8 survivors. Sam and his ex-(ish)girlfriend Molly, Peter (Fisher) and his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta) the young factory foreman, and Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood) who thinks this is an appropriate outfit to wear to work...

Also there's the lone adult, Dennis (David Koechner, who plays Todd Packer on The Office - the company in FD5 is a paper company. This is weird.) and Isaac (P. J. Byrne), who is the title character of my upcoming children's book The Douchiest Douche.

Do I need to say they all begin to die in mysterious Rube Goldbergian ways, usually aided and abetted by water leaks, loose screws, and their lucky charms? No.

Author's Note: The characters that are killed because of their lucky charms are my favorite. These movies have such a dark theme: "Your God has no power here."

Anyway, the gore isn't super convincing (partially because this movie was filmed in 3D and my DVD was not rendered that way), but it's a big step up from The Final Destination and it's nice and splattery. Likewise, this is the one film that doesn't need the gore as a crutch. I was practically almost as interested in the goings on outside of the death scenes as I was in the gore shots.

This film, with its frequent twists on a scenario that has not been strayed from even a smidge for four whole movies, its stressful and even more complex pre-kill sequences, a fight scene (and a good one at that), and Tony Todd turning in his fourth hammy performance as the omniscient coronor, Vincent Pricing it to high heaven, comes very close to being an actual good film outside of the splatter genre. No wonder this is the only Final Destination film to get a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (Although it's by the skin of its teeth - if they dropped one percent lower, they'd be toast).

There's even a structural joke! That's right! This film plays with the idea of intrinsically being a movie. Isaac goes to a spa to get acupuncture (It ends well! Just kidding!). He can't understand his Chinese massage therapist and asks if she comes with subtitles. Next time she speaks, subtitles appear on the bottom of the screen. It might seem stupid and obvious, but that is (no joke) Arrested Development level humor, and this movie isn't even trying to be a comedy. I squirmed with nerdy pleasure.

This is a film that has absolutely no right to be anything more than another milquetoast clone of the original, but it approaches its core concept with deft skill that is leaps and bounds beyond any of its predecessors which, despite their high concept and hearty fanbase, are pretty much just run of the mill slashers.

If anyone could make this film good, the Candyman can.

TL;DR: Final Destination 5 is way better than it has any right to be. The first actually good movie in the franchise.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This DVD? Why do I even have this section anymore? I liked this movie. Borrow it from me.

Word Count: 850

Reviews In This Series

The Final Destination (Ellis, 2009)

Final Destination 5 (Quale, 2011)

Penultimate Destination

Year: 2009
Director: David R. Ellis
Cast: Bobby Campo, Nick Zano, Krista Allen
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

As part of a continuing sibling bonding series with my super cool sister, late last night we watched the fourth entry in what is easily the most high concept and low class slasher franchise there is.

This is a film that is so hard up for audience that it has to pretend that it's something else. "The" Final Destination. I've said it before and I'll say it again: your franchise has really gone down the tubes when you stop numbering them.

In this case however, the title (accidentally) conveys additional meaning about the nature of the film. This film is so poorly made and so divorced from the rest of the series that it acts as somewhat of a palate cleanser preparing one for the rigors of Final Destination 5 (the only FD movie to receive a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

Director David R. Ellis returns to helm his second entry in the series (after Final Destination 2, which was actually quite good), and whatever creative spark he once had has obviously long been stamped out. The director's workmanlike attitude behind the camera betrays his years of experience as a stuntman.

The rest of the movie doesn't feel much better. The dialogue sounds more like a spec script that the writers pumped full of cliches to frame the story thinking "we'll fill that in with actual human-sounding dialogue later" and then eventually having it slip their minds. The gore wouldn't feel out of place in a SyFy original movie, and the actors' characterizations are as inert as their inevitably lifeless corpses.

I doubt that I can find room in my heart to call this a "redeeming quality," but there's one part where the filmmakers didn't skimp. The Final Destination gets a lot of mileage out of being unashamedly devoted to showing naked flesh. Especially common is shirtless men, which is rather unusual for a slasher movie (which these films like to pretend they aren't but it's an inescapable part of their DNA).

There seems to be little regard paid to the actual demographics of the film (teen boys who want to see blood and guts and boobs and butts). Although there is a lengthy topless sex scene full of mammaries bouncing all over the place, the film would much rather lovingly stroke the sculpted abs of its male characters, even while they're in the process of getting their insides sucked out by a pool filter.

Side note: Watching this movie in 2010 is 100% responsible for my love of baseball shirts.

Just to drive the point in (and amuse myself), I'm going to scatter shirtless shots throughout the rest of this article to *ahem* exemplify how they are utilized in the film.

Fun Fact: This film was the first Final Destination film to actually be shot in the US (the rest were filmed in Canada). Perhaps this is why the rest of the film feels so overwhelmingly low budget. I've already mentioned the embarrassing gore effects, which are clearly some sort of Walmart brand CGI, but there's also the matter of casting.

Most FD films have some at least marginally famous actor hiding in the wings: An Ali Larter, a Seann William Scott, a Tony Todd. Heck, Devon Sawa was famous for like 45 seconds in the 90's. This movie features not a single person you've seen in any other film in your life, I guarantee it. In that way, it is reminiscent of some of the worst of the worst slasher movies of the 80's, full of nameless actors buried away by time. However, this is 2009. A brief moment of silence for the fizzling careers of these poor young men and women.

Oh no, it seems like I've forgotten to recap the plot at all. Let me rectify that: Race track. Moving on.

Mmmmm, race track.

I've been pretty harsh on this film, but there is some charm buried underneath the crust of bird droppings and dried blood. One scene in particular stands out that plays with our expectations based on years of watching these films. A woman in a beauty parlor is surrounded by a truly astounding array of broken machinery, slippery puddles, shoddy wiring, and the like. It seems like death is setting up an absurdly complex Rube Goldberg death trap, but after a few false alarms, the death is actually quite simple and abrupt. This isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it is the one time that the film feels playful and alive.

Another fun thing about the movie is that you can play the Heavyhanded Symbolism Game. I prefer the point-and-shout method, but it can be made into a drinking game if one is so inclined. Look for references to:

• The number 180 (the flight number from the original movie)
• McKinley (the high school/town from FD3)
• Clear Rivers (Ali Larter's character from the first two films)
• Lucky charms being instrumental in death
• Any reference to death, the devil, or fate (Destiny Towing, Salon Dante, race car 666, the coffee shop "Death by Caffeine.")

This is where the movie feels most at home in its franchise, as all these movies are chock full of foreshadowing and callbacks, kind of like an episode of Arrested Development except with less wit and more intestines.

Unfortunately, this film is so eager to hearken back to the old days that it forgets about the present. Side characters are lovingly given one character trait and no name (credits titles include "Mechanic," "Racist," "Racist's Wife," and, my personal favorite, "MILF."), and the film is egregiously short. In an already truncated 82 minute running time, a good six minutes of that are dedicated to the credits.

It's a surprise that a sequel ever got made for this heap of garbage, but if these are the dues we must pay to get a Final Destination film that 61% of critics actually liked, I will gladly pay them.

Body Count: 11 (The most of any film in the series, but it feels like much much less)
TL;DR: The film is cheap, tawdry, and goreless. It also lacks a sense of fun and acts more like a moving walkway by which you can access the next film in the franchise.
Rating: 4/10
Should I spend money on this DVD? There is a movie pack available of the first four FD films, which is totally worth it. But there is a special circle of Hell designated for individuals who bought this DVD standalone.
Word Count: 1101

Reviews In This Series

The Final Destination (Ellis, 2009)

Final Destination 5 (Quale, 2011)