What Would Bryan Bertino Do?

Year: 2018

Director: Johannes Roberts

Cast: Christina Hendricks, Bailee Madison, Martin Henderson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Honestly, the most surprising thing about The Strangers: Prey at Night is the fact that the 2008 home invasion shocker The Strangers didn't get a sequel immediately. As I pointed out in my review, it's not a movie that I love, but it wholly deserves its modern classic status and those instantly iconic villain masks should have already launched a sprawling franchise that we're just starting to get sick of by this point. But here we are. It's been 10 years, and now we're at the point where we can say, "wait, really?"

The times, how they change.

In Prey at Night (which - by the way - is a title I just can't abide. Is it a pun? On what?), a family is traveling to their uncle's secluded trailer park on the way to dropping off delinquent teen daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) at a correctional boarding school. Mother Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and father Mike (Martin Henderson) have their doubts about their decision, and brother Luke (Lewis Pullman) is just along for the ride.

As you might imagine, they never make it to that school because a trio of masked strangers descend on the park with flashing knives and an aim to wipe this family off the face of the Earth.

But not before repeating as many scenes from the original as possible.

Prey at Night is one of those "is it a sequel or is it a remake?" situations, and the answer is yes. It's a sequel to The Strangers. And it's a remake of every John Carpenter movie ever made. Director Johannes Roberts made a conscious effort to channel as much of the style and substance of 80's horror as it's possible to do in 2018 (turns out, it's very possible). Prey at Night grafts the score from The Fog onto the cinematography of Halloween onto a showdown from Christine - with some Scream and Texas Chain Saw sprinkled in for flavor. Sure, 80's pastiche in modern horror is about as uncommon as people shouting "who's there?!" but injecting it into this grim franchise is especially jarring and doubly refreshing.

You won't catch me complaining about synths being liberally slathered over a movie, and though this score (by Becoming Jane composer Adrian Johnston, for some reason) is by all accounts almost note-for-note The Fog, at least that great score is finally applied to a movie that's not boring as sin. Although, I do have my breaking point. The many 80's pop needle drops - provided by the male killer's obsessive, Baby Driver-esque need to have the radio playing while perpetrating murders - just don't do anything for me (save for one major scene involving just a splash of Bonnie Tyler, who makes any scene better).

The cinematography is also slick, fog-filled candy. It might be a little too reliant on dubiously long establishing shots and sluggish zooms, but its excellent, judicious use of swooping crane shots and dashes of neon are a starling improvement from last year's Roberts' feature 47 Meters Down, which had the most painfully ugly color scheme I'd seen in over a decade.

I could swim in the colors of this movie anytime.

Love the aesthetic of Prey at Night though I do, it's still just as flawed as the original film, in strangely similar ways considering how very different the movies are as a whole. The only true liability here is the Kiwi actor Martin Henderson, who attempts to hide his accent Walking Dead-style behind a Southern drawl that only draws more attention to how out of place he is in this cast, but oh what a liability. Any scene he shares with his son loses emotional impact by the ton, as their attempts at igniting hysteria mostly just look like they're working on their Beavis and Butthead impressions.

There's also the problem that these characters are complete, eye-gouging idiots. The decisions they make rarely resemble an action any human being has taken in recorded history, and the way they're forced through a litany of horror clichés doesn't even make them particularly interesting stupid decisions.

But Prey at Night has a secret weapon. I don't know how much weight this will carry with hardcore fans of the original film, but at the very least it's is certainly less of a dour slog. The audience I was with almost immediately got swept up in rooting for the protagonists, and there are a lot of moments that elicit cheers or groans. It's a roller coaster ride that pumps up the adrenaline more than a grim boot of misery stomping into your throat over and over again.

That's definitely more my style... But it's not really a Strangers movie, ya dig? If you loved the original, you might actually want to turn back before buying a ticket. That's probably not the sphere a sequel should exist in, but it's the truth. It's fun on its own terms, and those masks are still entirely terrifying, but they're completely different, equally fine movies.

TL;DR: The Strangers: Prey at Night is a stylistic triumph, although it's just as flawed as the original - in very similar ways, which is surprising given how different it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 888
Reviews In This Series
The Strangers (Bertino, 2008)
The Strangers: Prey at Night (Roberts, 2018)

Girls Next Door

Year: 2016

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Cast: Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Zac Efron

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you may recall, the frat comedy Neighbors landed on my Top 10 list of 2014. It’s a movie that really resonated with me, what with my love of college movies and shirtless Zac Efrons. But more than that, it was a definite surprise: a genuinely funny comedy that was from the Apatow school of filmmaking yet had a hilarious woman up front and center with the man-children. That woman was, of course, Rose Byrne, who proved in neighbors what she would cement in stone and toss into the river with Spy: that she is a tremendously gifted comic talent, capable of delivering outrageous punchlines with deadpan certainty.

As you might imagine, I brought a lot of baggage to Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. I won’t say the movie completely hefted the load, but it certainly called over a bellboy to pick up a suitcase or two and help me upstairs. But enough with this needlessly elaborate metaphor! Let’s let the movie answer for itself.

Well-spoken, Neighbors 2.

In Neighbors 2, Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly Radner (Rose Byrne) are living a quiet life (literally quiet since the frat next door moved out) with their daughter. When Kelly gets pregnant, they decide to move into a bigger home, but they skimp on the escrow, meaning that they have 30 days to keep the potential buyers convinced that they’re making the right decision, or else they will end up with two homes and empty bank accounts.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen in comedy sequels, this is the exact time that a group of hard-partying sorority girls led by Shelby (Chloë Grace Moretz) decide to move in next door, frustrated by the American university system’s refusal to allow sororities to throw parties in official sorority houses. They are being mentored by Teddy (Zac Efron), the ex-frat president who is trying to find a place where he belongs now that his friends are all growing up, getting careers and fiancés and whatnot.

Now that we’ve plugged the requisite “man-child who needs to learn to grow up” into the Apatowian formula, let’s get this review rolling.

Basically, the fulcrum on which Neighbors 2 is balanced is sexism: what it is, how it works, what to do if you get it. This is most likely a knee-jerk response to Ann Hornaday’s wildly misguided claim that films like Neighbors promoted misogyny, more or less directly leading to the tragic shooting at UC Santa Barbara back in 2014. Obviously, I’m not here to defend Judd Apatow’s work as un-misogynist, having leveled that complaint against the man myself, but Neighbors (a production in which Apatow held no official role) was very unfairly caught in the crossfire.

However, the film’s use of feminist themes and lessons give depth to what is otherwise a pretty standard comedy sequel plot. It allows its protagonists a new avenue in which to grow rather than undoing their previous character arcs, thus continuing their story in a satisfying, organic manner. One drawback to this approach is a rather overstuffed cast list (between the Radners, the real estate people, the frat bros, the sorority girls, and the crammed-in cameos that waste returning players like Lisa Kudrow, the population of Neighbors 2 is higher than my hometown’s), but that’s a small price to pay for an actually interesting comedy part 2.

One admirably strange side effect of this approach is that it evokes the work of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein. His films, including the famous Battleship Potemkin, have no discernible characters - focusing on the exploits of the collective rather than the individual. And such is the case here. Rather than any one character rising from the pack, it’s just an old collective vs. a young collective. This is not a compliment, but it’s too odd to be quite as frustrating as it could be.

However, the fact does remain that the sorority sisters, as the only major characters that are entirely new to the film, are given no opportunity to develop a real backstory or personality. The character moments for anyone are few and far between, but the girls really do get the short end of the stick, acting as mouthpieces for the film’s feminist themes rather than genuine, unique personalities, skating through a plot that we’ve seen a million times and thus doesn’t feel the need to go into too much detail.

Chloë Grace Moretz does manage some interesting work, ingraining her overconfident bravado with a vulnerable fear about finally being out on her own for the first time and not really understanding how the world works. But overall, her performance falls back a little too often on hers standard, shouted line readings to really assert itself.

By the way, if possible, I’d like some kind of plaque to acknowledge that I’m the first person to ever compare a Zac Efron movie to Battleship Potemkin.

I suppose that, buried beneath the dissertation on sexism, there’s a comedy movie in there somewhere, so let’s talk about it. Neighbors 2 opens with a surprisingly delightful scene that adds a fresh tag onto a totally predictable joke, breathing new life into its gross-out humor and proving that this sequel will have the exact same crude sensibility that made it such a gonzo comedy the first time around.

Obviously, the humor is a notch or so lower than the original, such is the price of sequeldom. But all things considered, Neighbors 2 is a bit of triumph, maintaining much of its comic potency thanks to Rose Byrne’s continuing excellence in the field of machete sharp comic timing and Zac Efron’s continuing willingness to poke fun at himself, adding an element of giddy darkness to his role this time around. If Dirty Grandpa didn’t hang on his filmography like a malignant lump, I might say hew was improving by the year.

There are a lot of genuine laughs in Neighbors 2, especially if your sense of humor is as sophomoric as mine tends to be in my shameful heart of hearts. Only one gag truly rankles, a bit on police racism that scrapes across the film like a jagged edge, capsizing the comedy’s tone with a whiff of too-grim hyperviolence. But other than that, neighbors is a peculiarly solid sequel, never matching its predecessor but always defeating the middling expectations of a comedy continuation.

TL;DR: Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is an excellent continuation of the original film that's a little too overstuffed to have any real characters but nevertheless funny.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1104

Reviews In This Series

Neighbors (Stoller, 2014)

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Stoller, 2016)

He's A One Stop Shop, Makes My Pulse Drop

Year: 1995

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, William O'Leary

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There's perhaps no greater indictment of the "90's horror is pure trash" school of thought than 1992's Candyman, an intense urban gothic legend that seamlessly blends Clive Barker's signature sense of the macabre with the real world dereliction of Chicago's Cabrini-Green projects. On the flip side, there is perhaps no greater example of the despicable crumminess that permeated that decade than its followup, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, which isn't actively bad, but merely reaches a pinnacle of apathy, turning one of the most unique horror properties of the decade into a bog-standard bit of supernatural hack and slash.

Candyman 2 certainly isn't as much of a waste of time as, say Saw III, its companion for my Halloween movie marathon, and it's not even a terribly dreadful film by any stretch of the imagination. It's just such a step down in quality from the almost impermeable original that it can't escape the shadow cast by that horror monolith.

And it's quite a shadow.

In this film, Candyman (Tony Todd) forgoes his old stomping grounds for another territory: New Orleans. The newest victim of his deadly seduction (although he is neither quite so deadly nor as seductive this time around) is Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowan), a schoolteacher who works with inner city youth and, in an attempt to decry the old urban legend, speaks Candyman's name five times into the mirror, inadvertently summoning him to wreak havoc on her and her family.

Her brother Ethan (William O'Leary) has recently been arrested and wrongly accused of Candyman's first kill - a pompous professor with more ponytail than common sense. And her mother Octavia (Veronica Cartwright, who - of all things - played the little girl in The Birds) is suffering from nonspecific cancer and old age despite looking not a day over ten years Kelly Rowan's senior. Hollywood is a weird place. Annie's father was killed many years ago in a murder suspiciously close to Candyman's MO and his return prompts Annie to investigate further into the myth and its roots in the city.

In the process she finds out that she should have just rented a DVD of Candyman, because pretty much the same thing happens, but with more baldly telegraphed jump scares. I swear, a body can't open a closet or stare out a window in this world without a hand slowly reaching for them or a mysterious figure appearing in the distance.

It's like living in Quentin Tarantino's guest house.

The film's best decision was to set Candyman's psychological torment against the backdrop of the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations, which automatically provide a depraved, jangling environment for the horror to take place. It's no match for the original's waking nightmare of Cabrini-Green, but the atmosphere is there. Heck, that carnival even made moments of The Last Exorcism Part II look good, and if that dog wasn't dead on arrival, then I will hang up my blogger's sash and retire from the business forever.

This ambience is vital because it does much to paint over the film's bargain basement production values. This isn't necessarily a slight (I've seen films that are metric tons more soul-crushing than this), but the blood looks a little stagey and the interior design lacks oomph. The locations are like porn sets - just furnished enough to maintain realism but too sparse to entirely separate you from the fiction.

Farewell to the Flesh's best element - the return of Phillip Glass's marvelous score - doesn't help much with hiding this fact. The lush orchestral arrangements contrast with the film's overall aesthetic and highlight just how insidiously plain the entire affair ends up being. Again, this is an average film rather than a bad one, but the music provides a earthquake of pomp and circumstance that cracks open the bitter divide in quality between this film and the first.

An actual photo of the studio heads getting Tony Todd to sign his contract for two sequels.

Besides the Mardi Gras festivities, the best contribution the film has to offer to the Candyman canon is a healthy dose of weirdness, which never seems to receive as much credit for saving average films as it should. The sheer strangeness of some moments (including the implacably persistent narration by a sassy Cajun DJ - Champion Dialogue: "My belly is a mountain of love stuffed with oysters.") offsets most of the film's rough patches with delectable goofy charm.

Whether it's a prostitute dressed like Cleopatra licking snow cone syrup off the arm of a Hawaiian ice vendor/voodoo king, an underprivileged kid being told to go get help and returning with a gaggle of more underprivileged kids instead of the cops, or a Candyman survivor hanging a mirror above her child's bed, Farewell to the Flesh is full of truly bonkers decision-making, one of my personal favorite elements a film can have.

The acting is all-around wobbly, but results in some terrific bad-good moments (the frightened mountain lion yowl that erupts from Rowan's throat is unforgettable), and the half-hearted stabs at some sort of discourse on class disparity are at least commendable for trying to achieve anything beyond the surface level. All in all, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (Which, now that I think about it, should definitely have been called Farewell 2 the Flesh. This was the 90's, it should have been a moral obligation) isn't a total waste of time, but is only recommendable to fans of the original.

TL;DR: Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh is a watered down copy of the original, but is just strange enough to make a name for itself.

Rating: 4/10

Body Count: 7

1. Phillip Purcell is stabbed with a hook in a bathroom.
2. Paul is hooked and split up the abdomen.
3. Mr. Tarrant is hooked in a flashback.
4. Honore Thibideaux is attacked by bees.
5. Detective Ray is hooked in the interrogation room.
6. Ethan is shot by the police.
7. Octavia is hooked through the back.Word Count: 1012

Reviews In This Series

Candyman (Rose, 1992)
Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh (Condon, 1995)
Candyman 3: Day of the Dead (Meyer, 1999)

Delta Theta Die

Year: 1992

Director: Jim Wynorski

Cast: Robyn Harris, Melissa Moore, Stacia Zhivago

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

90's horror often gets a bad rap, despite enduring successes like Scream, The Blair Witch Project, Silence of the Lambs, and The Sixth Sense. But if there's any year that most fully exemplifies the post-apocalyptic bleakness that many associate with that period, it's 1990 (the year this film was produced, though it wouldn't receive its ignominious direct-to-video release until two years later). '89 was the year that the subgenre died its most unambiguous death (like supernatural killers and comic book characters alike, slashers would soon return from the grave afresh, but at the time it seemed like an outright impossibility), but slashers kept plugging along, unaware, dying off one by one in the following years much like their typical slate of victims. Even the strongest franchise icons petered out well before Scream's 1996 debut.

But where there's a will there's a way. And where there's a hormonal teenage audience there's Jim Wynorski. Perhaps best known for his terrifically campy Chopping Mall in 1986, Wynorski quickly found refuge in exploitation cinema in the waning light of the 80's. The discovery that altered his career rivals even Einstein's in cultural significance: Teenage boys will pay money to see boobs no matter how crappy your movie is.

So this is where we find him at the turn of the decade. At the helm of a sequel to a film that had no earthly reason to be revived, 1986's Sorority House Massacre, which, if you remember, was already an alarmingly shoddy piece of work buoyed only on the strength of one gut-splittingly hilarious dress-up montage.

The 80's are very important to me.

Sorority House Massacre II is a cash-in plain and simple, such a desperate little dirt grub that it was willing to rake in even the infinitesimal amount that could be garnered from following a film that was hardly a smash at the box office. Written in a week and filmed in probably less, SHM II is a triumph of slasher depravity. With a bucket of karo syrup, enough softcore actresses to fill out five lace nighties, and an empty house ready to go, Wynorski set out to make hisself a movie.

The plot goes like this. Five members of an unnamed sorority set out to spruce up a house in which a man murdered his family several years ago. These nubile young ladies are Jessica (Melissa Moore), a leggy blonde who is dating a guy named Eddie (Mike Elliott), who only appears in one scene when he drives the girls up to the house and yet receives an inordinate amount of fanfare in the credits; Janey (Dana Bentley), a mischievous type with a bob so large and thick it could only have been harvested from the Sheddings Bin at a Cher concert; Linda (Robyn Harris), an Australian girl who is marginally smarter than the rest; and Suzanne (Barbii) and Kimberly (Stacia Zhivago), two sets of breasts with women reluctantly attached.

After attempting to contact the man's spirit with a Ouija board (they do exactly zero work on the house during the course of the film - but with so many showers to take, tequila shots to drink, and shoulders to massage lovingly, can you blame them?), they begin to die one by one. Is it the ghost of Old Man Hockstedter? Or is it the creepy neighbor Orville Ketchum (Peter Spellos), who eats raw meat out of a bucket and likes to breathe loudly onto things?

Alright, I'm warning you now. I ask you humbly to please not take out your rage and anger on my blog or upon my person, but... I am going to spoil Sorority House Massacre II. The ghost did it.

Parker Bros. strikes again.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Sorority House Massacre II is that there is a distinct lack of sex. I know that's not usually a concern during in-depth analysis of cinema, but here it is certainly a curiosity. This is a film that performs the dazzling feat of displaying all five main characters' breasts in a span of less than three minutes, yet doesn't include a single male character that sticks around long enough for them to bang. In fact, it's almost distinctly asexual, its preferred mode of exploitation being watching a group of "pretty" girls going through the motions of a routine horror picture, but without the added protection of clothes.

For the entire second half of the film, the entire cast prances around the house in bras and underwear - or, in Janey's case, a gossamer jumpsuit so tight you can see her endocrine system.

Her body is so constricted, all the extra mass had to go to her hair.

In this regard, if you can overlook the sleaziness of objectification, the film is actually quite charming in its sheer desperation to titillate. The only survivor of the previous massacre is now a stripper and we are forced to sit through her entire dance before she gets a chance to speak. Girls flash one another as punchlines to jokes. A staircase is placed exactly right so we can see each girl's butt as she flounces into the attic. And - my personal favorite - when the girls realize they're in danger, dialogue along these lines occurs.

Vixen #1: "Oh no! We left our clothes upstairs!"

Vixen #2: "There's no time! We'll have to go without them!" 

They then proceed to do absolutely no escaping because it's raining outside and Wynorski certainly isn't paying them enough for that.

An actual photo of the SHM II casting call.

Overwhelming tawdriness aside, the film has absolutely nothing else to recommend it, at least from a technical standpoint. From a good-bad movie standpoint, however, it's almost inimitable. Each element of the film's mise-en-scène is crappy to a hilarious degree, though perhaps not an eminently watchable one. Let me explain the full spectrum of crapiness that penetrates Sorority House Massacre II to its very core with a quick breakdown.

• Sound Design: Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the dialogue track for the film was recorded over the phone on a stormy night. Every character sounds tinny and about a mile away from the screen. And the foley work ranges from eminently unimpressive to cartoonishly absurd. My favorite moments are when the rambunctious sound effects collide with the gaudy exploitation to create such sterling moments as a girl soaping up her butt in the shower with the sound of someone wiping a squeaky window with a rag, or a stripper (yes, there are two distinct striptease moments that take place away from the main action) rubbing her breasts on a pole with the sound of two balloons squeaking together.
• Gore: I think it's perhaps too much to ask of the film that it have its gore game together, but typically a slasher film is a showcase for the best FX artists and breasts in the business. The breasts here are so rampant that they form a massive conglomerate that dominates the film, eliminating the need for great gore to tantalize the already sated ideal audience. So what we're stuck with is an endless series of girls getting stabbed with a hook in silhouette. At least there's enough ineptitude to keep the less boob-concerned audience members going - notably the obvious shadow of a ketchup bottle squirting the blood onto the wall.
• Acting: I won't spend too much time taking potshots. It's not like the performers were hired for their talent or asked to perform at any level beyond arching their backs and saying the words on the page. But as Robyn Harris gets going, she illuminates the screen like a firework with a spastic, volcanic display of over-the-top camp. She's like a marionette of Eva Longoria with the strings cut, flopping wildly around the screen with manic intensity and perfect hair.

Pictured here, left, in a more sedate moment.

At least Sorority House Massacre II makes spasmodic attempts at humor, like in the house's address (6934 Langdon) or a series of funny newspaper headlines. It tries just hard enough to be funny that the more embarrassing elements (Orville uses a cop's gun to shoot a villain while he's still holding it; a fight scene plays more like an improv troupe pretending to sword fight) could conceivably be explained away by "oh, it's a parody." I don't buy this for one Karo syrup-soaked second, but it's a genius insurance policy.

Because the movie is far too cheap to even attempt to reach an average level of cinematic quality. This fact is belied both by the run time (of the 77 advertised minutes, 6 of them are credits) and, well, the rest of the film. A flashback of Old Man Hockstedter killing his family is just recycled footage from The Slumber Party Massacre with the names and situations changed. The facts that it's not even the same house, any person with enough love for slashers to watch this piece of crap has already seen SPM, and that they pretend two clearly different actresses are one girl are brutally ignored in favor of getting in more kills as swiftly and cheaply as possible. Nevermind that there's already a Sorority House Massacre to pull footage from. No, that's just what they'd be expecting us to do.

I haven't even mentioned the nonsensical cop subplot, which brings us to the aforementioned strip club in search of answers about the potential killer. What tipped these cops off about the new danger five years later and why they aren't actually going to the house to help the girls remains a mystery. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to preserve ambiguity and ignite the imaginations of young home audiences, preparing them for the unknowns they will soon face in their own post-high school careers. 

Or perhaps the movie is just a piece of crap.

Sorority House Massacre II is a piece of crap.

Seacrest out.

Killer: Hokstedter's Ghost in Jessica's (Melissa Moore) body

Final Girl: Linda (Robyn Harris)

Best Kill: Jessica's death - getting stabbed in the neck - is the best both because it is an actual gore sequence and the fact that she sprays enough blood to fill a tub.

Scariest Moment: There are actresses for whom this film was their only option to have a career.

Weirdest Moment: Orville pulls the key to the basement out of his underwear.

Champion Dialogue: "No one puts a finger on my diviner."

Body Count: 8; including three kills repurposed from Slumber Party Massacre and not including Orville Ketchum, who is stabbed repeatedly, strangled with a chain, has his neck snapped, is shoved into a toilet, and shot multiple times before being possessed by a ghost.

1. Coach Jana is gutted with a drill (SPM).
2. Kim AKA "Cecily" is stabbed in the gut with a drill (SPM).
3. Diane is impaled with a drill (SPM).
4. Janey is hooked in silhouette.
5. Suzanne is hooked in silhouette.
6. Kimberly is killed offscreen.
7. Jessica is knifed in the neck.
8. Linda is shot to death. 

TL;DR: Sorority House Massacre II is not good at all, but genuinely hilarious in its straightforward chintzy depravity.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1867
Reviews In This Series
Sorority House Massacre (Frank, 1986)
Sorority House Massacre II (Wynorski, 1992)

Purge, Actually

Year: 2014

Director: James DeMonaco

Cast: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Purge is a special franchise for Popcorn Culture. The hyper-political hypo-budget Blumhouse production was the first movie ever reviewed on the pages of this here blog and this rushed-into-production sequel marks it as the first franchise to ever be covered here in totum as it is released. I am looking forward to continuing on for many more years to follow other blossoming horror franchises as they appear (Oculus, I'm looking at you). 

This is a special moment for me personally, considering my love for bloated franchise fare. Nothing pleases me more than desperate horror series - the backflips and contortions of plot that they commit for the sake of continuity never cease to delight me. But I've missed out on all the notable examples. Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th were unfortunately produced before I existed. And I got into Saw and Paranormal Activity too late to follow them from the beginning.

So we have The Purge, a franchise with the potential to be either very promising or very disheartening and I don't know which to be more excited for. But for the moment we are facing The Purge: Anarchy, a sequel that is by no means perfect, but improves upon the original film in every single way, and that's literally all we can ask of it.

That and ham-fisted political allegory.

The beauty of The Purge as a franchise is that there are an almost limitless number of genres that can be explored while remaining utterly faithful to the central conceit. Where the first was a clunky home invasion pic, Anarchy is tense survival horror. The concept is so elastic, future installments could be slashers, mafia yarns, torture porn, rape-revenge, anthology, action-adventure, or even bullet-peppered romance. It's brilliant, really, and whatever qualms one may have with the Purge concept itself, it's undeniably capable of producing years' worth of popcorn horror cinema.

I mean, that's all it really is when it comes down to it. The politics are brave and the world-building is capable, but the Purge franchise is first and foremost a fuel-soaked summer blockbuster, tense quasi-horror with a sense of action movie fun about it.

The story immediately announces its scope (the first film had a massive opening weekend but dropped hard like a Skrillex song thanks to terrible word of mouth regarding its lack of interest in the concept) with three distinct storylines that will eventually intertwine. 

The first, and most consistent, is the story of Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul), two women struggling to make a life in LA. When their apartment complex in the projects is attacked during Purge Night (which I guess I haven't totally covered in this synopsis - this is a twelve hour period every year where all crime, including murder, is legal - this supposedly cuts crime rates during the rest of the year and is treated as a a national holiday by the New Founding Fathers), they become the targets for a mysteriously dedicated group of killers.

Also in attendance is the unnamed (or so I think - the IMDb synopsis would disagree with me, but I'm not about to start anything with mep1019. He comments on more slasher message boards than I do) Sergeant (Frank Grillo, who is an inspiration to us all at a very hunky 51 years old), a dark and mysterious man who is armed to the teeth with both weaponry and a woefully obvious backstory that narcissistically positions itself as a late film reveal.

The third storyline is that of Shane (Zach Gilford of Devil's Due) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez, his real life wife), a married couple going through a separation who are caught outside during the Purge due to circumstances outside of their control. The people who are in control, though, are patiently hunting them across the streets of LA.

With a face like that, I'D chase him all around LA too. (This is not a screenshot from the film, though I dearly wish it was.)

So these three disparate groups end up coming together for what is essentially a feature length tour of the world of the Purge. It's riddled with flaws, there's no doubt about that, but the picture it paints is a wonderful extension of the one only briefly glimpsed in the original film. The most important element of this franchise is the world-building and the Purge itself is tremendously well-integrated into the production design and dialogue. There is never any doubt that this is a world that has lived with the Purge for years and a country of people who may have different reactions to it, but accept its presence as an annual occurrence.

Where it begins to go wrong is at the story level and especially the performance level. The main group is largely adequate and Grillo and Ejogo provide a solid core for the film (we do lose Grillo a bit toward the end - he's much better as a mysterious badass than the shift he experiences in the third act), but many of the secondary characters just plain aren't up to snuff. Especially egregious is Michael K. Williams as Carmelo, the leader of a resistance faction. He is saddled with the worst of the "let's explain the film's politics in terms that a third grade mollusk could understand" dialogue and as such never comes off as anything more than a dollar store Samuel L. Jackson knock-off.

The dialogue claims many victims throughout the film, perhaps more so than the Purge itself. Thanks to the intricacies of the concept, it never needs to rise above the level of adequate to still be a thrilling movie, but some of the more pernicious examples bore straight into your brain and shatter the "suspension of disbelief" lobe. I won't belabor my point and list these examples, especially because many of them are at least bad-good enough to get a good laugh. But this is a film where people emerge from a car for the sole purpose of demanding a car from somebody else, so you know there's gonna be some issues here.

Sexy issues.

One last grievance is the special effects, which generally settle in as the film gets going, but occasionally look like somebody forgot to render them. An early gunshot wound in particular would feel more at home in an arcade game from 1997. But presumably much of the SFX budget got suctioned off into the multitude of sets and actors and empty cityscapes that The Purge: Anarchy requires and I can't bring myself to complain about that being the priority,

Because it really does its job well of allowing the film to be a rough, tense ride through a city of violence with a harrowing sense of urgency. Widening the scope truly was the answer to improving The Purge and with that done, it can (hopefully) open the floodgates to some legitimately marvelous filmmaking later in the franchise (If The Purge 3 isn't announced within the next week, I will eat my foot).

And it's not like this film isn't already an improvement at the technical level. Although Anarchy and the first film were both directed by James DeMonaco, he really gets into a groove this time. Where the last film's editing and sense of geography was wildly chimerical, here we always have a sense of who is where and why we should be worried about them. The action finale could have been staged better, but for the most part the locations make sense and provide an exciting 100 minutes of adrenaline-fueled entertainment.

Taken by itself, this film probably won't be remembered as a classic of the form over a decade from now, but it's a sequel that did its job - pushing and prodding the original story into something more expansive and vastly improved.

TL;DR: The Purge: Anarchy is a great sequel that surpasses the original film with an expanded scope and more excitement.

Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say yes. It definitely beats the other big blockbuster this weekend. I'd pick a tense LA action film over watching Cameron Diaz's mummy seduce Jason Segel any day.
Word Count: 1379
Reviews In This Series
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016)
The First Purge (McMurray, 2018)

Armed Blobbery

Year: 1972

Director: Larry Hagman

Cast: Robert Walker Jr., Gwynne Gilford, Richard Stahl

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: GP

Let's get this out of the way: I love the Blob. But Beware! The Blob is a balls to the wall just plain terrible movie with almost no redeeming qualities. The sort of thing that was made for a miniscule budget because just about anything could make a couple bucks in those days.

All this can be exemplified by one anecdote: Director Larry Hagman (famous for playing J. R. in the hit TV show Dallas) was next door neighbors with the original film's director. After commenting that he'd never actually seen it, they screened the director's personal copy of the film and Hagman decided he wanted a Blob of his own.

This was a TV actor, mind you. Not an actual director.

And that's how we ended up with a Blob movie that somehow manages to out-cheese the opening credits of the original which, remember, contained this song. In what seems to be a straightfaced presentation with no intentional camp value, the opening credits (accompanied by a song that sounds like an ice cream truck on PCP) are... Well, just look for yourself.

Did you see a cat lying in a meadow? So did I. And so did every single person working on the film, none of whom evidently considered that maybe their horror film about an amorphous blob devouring a small town shouldn't open with a kitten lying in a meadow.

The 70's, man.

Anyway, when last we left our Blob, he had been frozen solid by Steve McQueen and his band of fire extinguishers and airlifted to the Arctic. The film opens with a First Twelve Minutes Couple that would be downright slashery if the genre had actually been invented yet, the male half of which (Godfrey Cambridge) has just returned from laying pipe at the North Pole (?). His pipe laying supervisors allowed him to bring back a sample of a mysterious substance they found which he now keeps in his freezer like a regular person.

Guess what happens next.

The Blob (you guessed it) defrosts and resumes his ravenous beasting ways, devouring the man, his wife (Marlene Clark), and their adorable kitten (who actually was a character in the film, which surprised me to no end). 

Champion Dialogue #1: "You are a total dingaling."

I'm just gonna throw those in there from time to time.

The Blob goes on to devour hippies, bowling alley patrons, a weirdly sexual barber, and bumbling comic relief cops and blaxploitation characters that apparently migrated from the set of Foxy Brown Goes to the Movies. All on sets that look like bad pornos with their thin walls, shallow lighting, and unmistakable aura of having once been a gymnasium.

Most of the time, the Blob is played by a pink gel held in front of the bottom half of the camera (although in the shots where is actually has to move, it does so a sight better than the original film - the only compliment you'll hear me giving in this review) and for the first time the idea that having a Blob as a main villain is fundamentally unscary hit me like a ton of bricks.

It has all the makings of a cult classic: kittens, bad actors, kooky setpieces, a silly monster. If only it wasn't so stupefyingly boring. Oh it has its moments, but for most of the running time, I just sat there slack jawed, daring myself not to fall asleep.

Champion Dialogue #2: "Is that motivation for you? Does that activate your glands?"

Maybe the kitten represents the fragility of youth when faced with a complex and unknowable world.

The film is comprised of nothing but bad 70's haircuts and narrative problems. Not the least of which is that in the opening scene, The Blob is playing on TV. Is this a news report? Is there an actual movie of The Blob, meaning that it's fictional? In that case, how did it get to the Arctic? These are all questions the filmmakers don't care to answer, if they're even aware of them in the slightest.

Technical problems abound as well. Permeated by the ever classic juddering camera that is a favorite of low budget horror pictures, this one also gets a remarkably unsophisticated zoom that looks like a toddler was chewing on the camera.

Champion Dialogue #3: "I don't cut hair. I sculpt it. You want a hair sculpt?"

And then there are the points where you just have to throw your hands in the air and say "Why am I watching a hippie get a haircut?" Or cringe into yourself when a girl holding a birthday cake looks directly into the camera and shouts "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" and then walks over to the actual birthday boy who is somewhere behind her.

It's really easy to see why nobody ever talks about this film.

Champion Dialogue #4: "Hey, let's go to your place and get an avocado sandwich, huh?"

It's resolutely unfunny despite the massive spate of comic relief characters. It's xenophobic. It's homophobic. It's hippiephobic. And it has absolutely no reason to exist.

It is redeemed somewhat by the more ridiculous scenes in the way that syphilis is redeemed by having a funny name. These are such unforgettable moments as the time a chicken lays an egg into the Blob or the weird obsession the leading man has with avocado sandwiches. Or the fact that one of the supporting characters is dressed as a gorilla literally the entire time.

So it's not a total bust like, say, an adaptation of The Notebook where every character is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (which, actually, I'd pay to see), but dear God does it try awfully hard to be the worst film I've ever seen.

Also, this is the only film in the franchise to say the word "blob" aloud and it absolutely does not earn it.

Champion Dialogue # 5: "I like bacon."

This is what happens to your brain when you watch this movie.

TL;DR: Beware! The Blob is a disgrace to the grand name of Blob, but has some miniscule campy value.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1039

Reviews In This Series

The Blob (Yeaworth Jr./Doughton Jr, 1958)

Beware! The Blob (Hagman, 1972)

The Blob (Russell, 1988)

Census Bloodbath: Second Thoughts

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.
For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Amy Steel, John Furey, Betsy Palmer

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And we have arrived at Jason's first starring vehicle! What a pleasure it is going to be to see this hockey masked buffoon get his time in the limelight!

Wait, what?

Yeah, you got me. The hockey mask doesn't come into play until Part 3, making this another Friday the 13th with a misinformed reputation. Perhaps this is a good time for me to mention how improperly memory has treated this series. You know how all Friday the 13th movies go, right? Ask anyone. Jason Voorhees in a hockey mask kills camp counselors at Crystal Lake.

This combination does not happen one single time in the entire 12 movie franchise. Sorry to burst your bubble. This is getting a little technical, but here's the deal. To start off, camp counselors die in only three of the films (Parts 1, 2, and 6). In the first, as we've already discussed, the killer was his mother. In the second (which we'll approach in more detail very shortly), he has no mask and also they're not even at Crystal Lake. Part 6 is the closest (he has the mask and he mows down counselors) but guess what? The camp has been renamed to Camp Forest Green.

I know that one's a technicality, but isn't that weird to think about?

Nothing anybody knows about this series is even remotely true.

Anyway, that's all in the future. Right now it's 1981. We have Jason in a bag, the hockey mask has never existed and as a matter of fact neither has adult Jason.

The film tries to smooth that narrative wrinkle (having him die as a child in the first film rather complicated sequel opportunities) by saying it only seemed like he drowned and that he saw his mother get beheaded that fateful night and vowed revenge on her killer and any others who intrude upon his territory. Apparently he never saw fit to approach her before then and give her a quick heads up that, you know, he was still alive. Whatever. He was busy. I get it.

So now he's all growed up and the movie opens two months after the original. Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) is trying to put her life together but is still haunted by nightmares (that take the form of five minutes of footage from the last movie crudely grafted onto shots of her not only failing to act but failing to be convincingly asleep).

She is run through a conveyor belt of horror standards as she gets a mysterious phone call where there's nobody on the other line, hears noises, takes the world's fastest shower, and has a cat thrown at her from offscreen by a PA.

Unfortunately her time is up and as she goes to get some milk for her tea, she gets a rather nasty surprise in her fridge, followed by a nasty surprise in her temple (an ice pick).

So that's what head cheese is.

Now it's five years later, her body was never found, and the shore of Crystal Lake is being used for the first time since the campground was condemned after the original murders.

Paul Holt (John Furey) has opened up a counselor training camp not far from the blackened ruins of Camp Blood. The events of half a decade ago have faded in memory and Jason has been reduced to nothing but a campfire story. 

As training begins, a heaping platter of Meat is laid before us in unprecedented amounts. First we meet the obvious analogues for Jack, Marcie, and Ned from the original. There's Jeff (Bill Randolph), the horndog and something of a Walmart brand Brad Pitt; his girlfriend Sandra (Marta Kober) who is adventurous and pushy; and Ted (Stu Charno) the prankster. Apparently the writers couldn't be bothered to even try to hide the fact that he is transparently Ned, just in a different body.

Thus begins the well-worn Friday the 13th standby of "exactly the same, only different." It only serves to underscore the fact that the individual characters don't matter. All that anyone cares about are the infinite variations in the ways that they screw and the ways that they die (Sometimes at the same time. More on that later).

Also on the crew are Terry (Kirsten Baker), who I took to calling "Slutty McSlutNipples" in my notes because of how clear her exact purpose in the script was; 

She gives the franchise its first full frontal! And has some gleefully sleazy innuendos that make me love her.

Scott (Russell Todd, who we'll revisit in Chopping Mall), the stud bucket who relentlessly pursues Terry like a five-year-old, stealing her clothes when she goes skinny dipping and hitting her with rocks from a sling shot; Mark (Tom McBride), a wheelchair-bound counselor with enormous arms; Vickie (Lauren-Marie Taylor, who we'll also see again in Girls Nite Out if I ever get my hands on the DVD), a clean cut girl who can't help but notice said enormous arms; and Ginny (Amy Steel, also of April Fool's Day and my fantasy dinner parties), Paul's girlfriend and all around spunky queen doing awesome things all over the place like cutting firewood with a chainsaw, winning at chess, and running the fastest (foreshadowing!).

There's also some random extra counselors with no lines, but some of them are ethnic and break stereotypes by not actually dying.

Also a Rock in a Puddle that is onscreen more times than the black counselor.

Not exactly a paradise of diversity.

Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) also makes a brief reappearance to spout more prophecies of doom only to become the first victim of Jason's rampage. And because the movie needed to have more kills to spice things up before the real bloodbath begins.

The first act is breezy and fun as we settle in with the characters. Much like the first film, there's not much plot of import, but it's just enjoyable to watch these teens have a good time. We learn that Slutty McSlutNipples' dog is named Muffin, which is the best thing ever. Jeff and Sandra expand the narrative universe a bit by exploring the condemned Camp Blood which is so dilapidated it might as well be made of cardboard (That was a joke. It is made of carboard).

There is some great use of foreshadowing in this sequence as well, the subtlety of which is balanced out by the bluntness of the expository dialogue. Ginny is a Child Psychology major, a character trait that is introduced with all of the grace of a first time writer who is also a boxing champion. Paul literally says "Why don't you use some of that child psychology you're majoring in?"

This guy.

When half the counselors leave to spend a night out on the town, things start to get hairy.

The counselors that chose to stay behind fall into the typical patterns of Friday the 13th teenagerhood, drinking, smoking, banging, and dying. Although the gore scenes are positively modest in comparison to the original (the MPAA had begun its first of a series of crackdowns on the slasher genre), what is shown is gleefully wicked.

Jeff and Sandra are speared mid-coitus in a bald ripoff of Twitch of the Death Nerve (one of the franchise's favorite victims) that nonetheless is shocking and fun, Vickie sits immobile in fear and watches Jason approach her for about ten seconds with a big knife and thus earning her a spot in my Ten Modern Horror Rules list, and Jason proves once and for all that he is an equal opportunity serial killer.

What a nice guy.

Slutty McSlutNipples goes skinny dipping alone because she's a brave queen. The clincher? Earlier that evening when she decided to stick around and look for her dog she said "I think I'll stay too, Muffin may show." This is seriously my favorite thing that has ever happened. Call me sleazy if you want, but exploitation cinema has never gotten more clever and cheesy and wonderful than that very line. Perfection.

Sooner or later, Ginny is the only one left and boy is she ready. She knees Jason in the crotch, attacks him with a chainsaw, and although she makes the fatal error of failing to double tap, she utilizes her child psychology knowledge to placate Jason by pretending to be his mother.

Jason is macheted by a miraculously alive Paul, and the two limp off into what I would call the most bizarre shock ending ever if I hadn't already seen the next film in the series. Everything is fine, but the door creaks open to reveal... Muffin!

Then Jason bursts through the window.

Then it was all a dream.

Then Paul has vanished.

I don't know anything about what happened here and I don't care about spoiling it because it's so outrageously hackneyed and stupid and sequelly. At least we got the genuinely frightening and cool Final Girl sequence beforehand.

In this gif, Jason is played by Warrington Gillette. Contrary to what he claims, he did not play Jason in any of the other scenes. Boo Warrington Gillette.

Overall, Friday the 13th Part 2 is tremendously fun if less shocking and grubbily powerful than the original. The script is strong enough to shoulder some of the burden left by the diluted gore effects and Amy Steel gives a layered performance as Ginny even if the other actors leave something to be desired. 

You know what? No they don't. I'm too jaded to desire good acting from these things. At least Amy is flawless.

Steve Miner (who was an associate producer on the original film) directs like he actually has a brain, and the movie benefits greatly from it. His scenes of darkness hide objects just enough to render them scary instead of just obscuring everything in sight. He also utilizes some basic deep focus cinematography that frame foreground and background objects in ways that relate to one another. Not exactly rocket science, but it shows more effort than the utterly workmanlike Sean S. Cunningham.

Ginny doesn't like hacks.

Friday the 13th Part 2 has nothing on the campy joy of later entries, but it's a solidly made and occasionally scary slasher film in the Crystal Lake saga (my unofficial name for the first four films before things got weird).

One more thing before I go (I know, I know. I'm almost done.). I mentioned earlier that the mantra of the franchise is "exactly the same, only different" which is perhaps a little unfair. Each Friday the 13th film is comprised of a million little details that are radically different from any other film in the franchise that lend it texture.

This film is no different as our expectations are subverted left and right.

The most obvious example is that Ted the prankster somehow survives the ordeal. Who could have seen that coming? He's happily ensconced in a bar booth miles away during the bloodbath. I already mentioned that the ethnic counselors survive, but that's worth mentioning again and again in an 80's horror film.

Also the clean cut prude looking girl turns out to be the horniest of them all (choice dialogue: "I only need your fingers." "Let's play for position.") and Ginny pretty clearly gets it on with Paul, ripping the Final Girl standard off its hinges.

And my favorite pairing. Slutty McSlutNipples never has sex and the studbucket strikes out. Take a look at him on your way out and don't tell me you're not surprised.

Slingshot. There's a joke in there somewhere.

Killer: Jason Voorhees (Steve Dash), and what a pleasure it is to be writing those words.

Final Girl: Ginny Field (Amy Steel)

Best Kill: Coitus interruptus 

Sign of the Times: Vickie's "sexy outfit" is a bulky sweater with geometric shapes.

Scariest Moment: Jason rips his pitchfork through the canvas roof of Ginny's car.

Weirdest Moment: It is shown that Ginny wears a bra. Take a close look, it's the last one you'll ever see in a Friday the 13th film.

Champion Dialogue: "This place is starting to look like a Burger King."

Body Count: 10; I included Paul even though nobody actually knows what happened to him. Also a dog maybe. The ending is really inconsistent.

1. Alice is stabbed in the temple with an ice pick.
2. Crazy Ralph is strangled to death with barbed wire.
3. The Cop gets the back of a hammer in his skull.
4. Scott's throat is slit with a machete.
5. Terry is killed offscreen.
6. Mark gets a machete in the face, then rolls down a flight of stairs.
7. Jeff is impaled with a spear while boning Sandra.
8. Sandra is impaled with a spear while boning Jeff.
9. Vickie is stabbed in the chest.
10. Paul mysteriously vanishes. 

TL;DR: Friday the 13th Part 2 is more technically proficient than its predecessor but can't fully recapture the grubby magic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 2174

Reviews In This Series

Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)

Friday the 13th Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)