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Friday the 13th Part VII: the New Blood (John Carl Buechler 1988) Remember the time that Evil Psychiatric Doctor tricked the Telekinetic Girl into using her powers, accidentally resurrecting Jason in the process? Remember when Jason killed some party guests or whatever? Remember when this installment added (prominently for the first time, as far as I can remember) enough beats between appearance and execution to afford several sobbing pleas for mercy, mostly from the women? Remember when Jason was "finally" "killed" by the resurrected and not at all decomposed body of someone who's been dead for years? Remember when horror films at least tried to pretend they made sense, and a villain couldn't produce, say, a tree saw, out of thin air just to execute a particularly grating "character"? Remember when all eighty eight minutes and ten seconds of this film were finally over? Yes, and fondly on the last one.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Hops a Couple of Boats, Walks Around the Docks of "New York" for a Spell, Peeks His Head in on Times Square After a Brief Subway Ride, and Then Gets Hit by Toxic Sludge and Turns Into a Mutant Child or Something (Rob Hedden 1989) Key takeaways:
+ The senior class of Lakeview High in 1989 consisted of approximately a half-dozen students
+ Word to the wise, would-be teenage seductresses: writing "stomach" where your intestines are located is the quickest way to turn-off the stuffy Biology teacher you are trying to seduce
+ In the choppy waters off Staten Island, a boat can outpace the undead by about ninety seconds
+ Rapes are made easier by injecting your victim with a syringe of Mountain Dew
+ Anatomists, take note: Heads can now be punched off

With respect to that last point, I'd love to see your reaction to Riki-Oh!

Better you than me, domino. I hope you've got some decent films set aside to take the taste away after you've finished your pus-gargling marathon!

zedz wrote:Better you than me, domino. I hope you've got some decent films set aside to take the taste away after you've finished your pus-gargling marathon!

I don't know, zedz, if you and Domino's track record is anything to go by, they'll probably turn out to be your favourite horror films.

Time to add this to your amazon queue?

I see your point, but sad experience has proven that domino and I have a much greater overlap with films we hate than with films we like.

Isn't the next one where he's a shapeshifting devil worm? I wonder if Dom will just be relieved that the series has completely and totally accepted it's insanity by that point. Any plans to tackle the Puppet Master series? Now that's some good bad times.

Part 8 is utterly terrible but I do like some of the stranger moments, such as the boyfriend whose father is the captain of the boat getting the chance to take the boat out of the harbour, but which leads to an uncomfortable 'sweet father-son bonding moment ruined' fight when he fails to remember to perform the correct maritime procedures! Or the English teacher presenting her favourite pupil with a pre-boat trip present of a gold plated nib pen which is "the one Stephen King wrote all of his novels with"!

I do feel for domino watching Jason Goes To Hell. I still have nightmares about the quality of that one!

knives about Freddy vs Jason wrote:No plot's unimportant, it's more of an action film really.

Indeed it is also more of a Ronny Yu film, with much more in common with his previous 'long dormant 80s horror-franchise' revival, Bride of Chucky, than the other films in either the Nightmare or Friday series. They even make a good double bill, and Ronny Yu is very good at providing fan service while also creating a distinctive 'megamix' of the familiar elements.

Speaking of which Bride of Chucky is a great example of a film being far more entertaining than it had any right to be! Almost all down to Jennifer Tilly, whose obvious fun in the role (listen to the riotous commentary track for evidence of this!) revitalises Brad Dourif's Chucky from just being a mean spirited doll, taking the franchise into a slightly more fruitful direction. And it also has some nice cameos from John Ritter and Kathy Najimy (aka the lady who played the jolly singing nun in Sister Act) amongst the victims along the way!

Oh yes, Yu is certainly underrated for his ability to make otherwise worthless films very fun if nothing else.

colin wrote:Speaking of which Bride of Chucky is a great example of a film being far more entertaining that it had any right to be! Almost all down to Jennifer Tilly, whose obvious fun in the role (listen to the riotous commentary track for evidence of this!) revitalises Brad Dourif's Chucky from just being a mean spirited doll, taking the franchise into a slightly more fruitful direction. And it also has some nice cameos from John Ritter and Kathy Najimy (aka the lady who played the jolly singing nun in Sister Act) amongst the victims along the way!

Tilly is also the best part of the indescribably weird Seed of Chucky, where, playing herself, she tries to convince Redman to cast her as the Virgin Mary by seducing him.

It's also the only film after which you'll be able to say you saw a doll masturbating into a paper cup while John Waters videorecords it. Did I mention the movie was weird?

God bless the little people.

Our long national nightmare is finally over!

Jason Goes to Hell: the Final Friday (Adam Marcus 1993) Different tent, same geek show. Would be a terrible alien invasion-style story on its own, as a Friday film it's maybe a shade better than its immediate predecessor. Has one legitimately interesting gore scene involving the ingestion of a bodily organ that the film still butchers, pun intended, via inept handling on the part of the filmmakers. Lots of early nineties gloss on this garbage. For fans of sentient evil worms crawling into the vaginas of dead women only.

Jason X (James Isaac 2002) I don't know how you make "Friday the 13th in Space" with a straight face, and the answer is you don't. The film benefits from its straight-to-video tonal touch, and I warmly welcomed the change of pace and place. Somewhat surprisingly, this was one of the better entries in the series. But then again, I hate the series, so if you love Jason, this is probably bollocky wank shite.

Freddy Vs Jason (Ronny Yu 2003) Another beneficiary of low expectations, this one can barely be bothered to explain its premise, which is just as well. Though both series probably run about even on the hit-miss scale, I'd sooner volunteer for an Elm Street revisit than Camp Crystal Lake. It seemed pretty clear this was an Elm Street film with Jason support, not the other way around, and the attempts to shoehorn in the Masked One are much clumsier than those for the Gloved One. Not much else to say, is there? Well, non-villain topliner Monica Keena's Filmography on Wikipedia does helpfully include in the notes section that she "makes out with a girl" in the 2009 remake of Night of the Demons. So there's always that.

I made the mistake of Googling the series and came across some salutary blog postings that just made me depressed for those who find the Friday the 13th series the height of cinematic pleasure. The brightest spin I can put on the franchise is that I got two average slasher films, a couple diverting variations, and a whole lot of dross. Ultimately, I just don't receive any cathartic release or enjoyment from watching anonymous young people get hurt, and this above all else strikes me as the film's primary "entertainment" function. Some very good non-Friday films contain similar violence and attractive victims, but the same ingredients don't always result in the same dish. If the food sucks at a restaurant ten times, you don't go back for an eleventh visit, so I concede my complicity, but at least I can speak from an informed place about the series now.

I think the series got so popular because it is quite the opposite of horror. It's comforting. It places its viewers in a framework that repetition has made stable and familiar. Viewers can return to it, again and again, knowing that whatever the entry, whatever the variations, the same essential pattern is going to play itself out. In a way the films are a way to enjoy death, but not in the sociopathic sense of taking pleasure in individual acts of cruelty. By placing death in an unchanging framework, death becomes predictable and understandable rather than sudden and random--randomness and unpredictability being what's really terrifying. A legion of fans cling to these movies because the viewer can be one step ahead of death and destruction, to the point where they can even cheer for it and enjoy the whole ritual as it is endlessly repeated. Endless repetition takes away the fear and replaces it with laughter and cheering and the sense that everything is where it's supposed to be and so are you. Hence the film recycles character stereotypes: the stereotypes become cogs in the ritual being enacted, or part of an understandable order, to the point where it's acceptable that they are killed off because that's what's supposed to happen (as everyone has tacitly agreed that that is what will happen since that is what always happens). This stereotyping is so obvious that even the films can't stop from being aware of it, and later entries mine some winks and humour from it even as they continue to offer the ritual (stalk, slash, repeat). This is a film series whose whole basic construction is the same moment being endlessly played out: someone goes off alone and is killed. Even within an individual film the audience becomes enured to the pattern eventually and is made able to enjoy it at a bit of a remove, as an unaltering order that can be safely predicted and therefore cannot harm you.

These are a shitty bunch of films, and from a theoretical stand-point they do the exact opposite of what good horror ought to do (unsettle, undermine, ect.), but I understand why people like them, and I understand it in a way that doesn't depress me. I just can't share it because this series is so bargain basement. The Nightmare films are a step up, but in some ways more disappointing since they never live up to their endless promise.

I still stand by the series. It has some bad movies, but the original is a pretty great treatise on punishing the youth of the world for actually having the gumption to be sexually free. The Final Chapter is just an all around great movie, all about myth building and the destruction of said myth. Part VI is a lot of cheesy fun. The other entries range from terrible to pretty good, but it's nowhere near the completely terrible franchise that this thread is making it out to be.

Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)

This is the Vietnam war PTSD film, a little similar to Blue Sunshine in that it is tackling the legacy of 60s drug experimentation, though in this case organisational rather than personal experimentation. While it is not exactly difficult to see the big reveal of the film coming, that is not too big of a problem!:

Spoiler

Angel Heart covered the same territory of slow dawning awareness and a need to understand what is happening even if it means the end of your alternate life. And of course later on The Sixth Sense and Lynch's films went into the same areas

The Biblical imagery (there's some blatant Pietà imagery in the icecubes in the bathtub scene!), names of the characters, various quotes ("I don't know you from Adam", "Hallelujah!", etc) and angels and demons themes are extremely overwrought , but this is one of those 'all or nothing' films where it makes sense to go all out on such material, changing from the Vietnam setting into a literal 'war between the tribes' as colleagues become the enemy and every journey has the potential to fluidly transition into a nightmare.

There is a depressively suicidal pall hanging over the entire film, as if surviving and returning from a war is worse than actually dying in it.

Spoiler

Does this therefore make the film about coming to terms with and letting go of the past, metaphorically letting your traumas die on the operating table in Vietnam; or is it actually a literal setting of the clock back in order to die in an alternate reality never having to face returning from war traumatised, angry and mentally or physically disabled?

The 'contemporary' locations are full of problematic bureaucratic organisations (lawyers, the post office, the hospitals, even the transport authorities appear to be working against the hero! Presumably these are all standing in for the bigger bureaucracy of the Army) even before the literal demons turn up! A purgatory as literalised by a landscape of a pre-Guiliani cleaned up New York, with decayed subways, roads concreted into corridors offering no avenue of escape, musty offices and hospital wards and almost bombed-out, rubble strewn abandoned factory locations, creating a feeling as if the war, if not still going on somewhere, has long since destroyed anything worth returning to.

This is also carried through in the element of Jacob's personal life, in which Jacob before going to Vietnam had a loving wife and three children and afterwards is divorced with one of his children dead and living with a highly sexual (often portrayed as demonic in the hallucinations) woman called Jezzie (short for Jezebel). It feels like an interesting call back to Lyne's previous film, Fatal Attraction, which put into opposition a loving family against a single, sexual demon-woman (apparently Jacob's Ladder did originally climax with a scene of having to fight off a demonic version of Jezzie), although in this case the loving family is also standing in for an impossible return to a sense of pre-war innocence. It is obviously a problematic and reductive idea but in a film creating a lot of religiously-inflected dichotomies pairing one 'good' element off against its 'evil' counterpart, this idea fits - or at least does not feel as if it is making such a controversial blanket statement about such matters as demonising Glenn Close's bunny-boiling single woman in the superficially realistic Fatal Attraction did!

Definitely one of the more interesting mainstream examples of fantasies and reality melting together, with a lot of the demonic imagery having been influential in later films (particularly that House on Haunted Hill remake, if I remember correctly). And the tormented main character in The Machinist owes a lot to it as well!

domino harvey wrote:Freddy Vs Jason (Ronny Yu 2003) Another beneficiary of low expectations, this one can barely be bothered to explain its premise, which is just as well. Though both series probably run about even on the hit-miss scale, I'd sooner volunteer for an Elm Street revisit than Camp Crystal Lake. It seemed pretty clear this was an Elm Street film with Jason support, not the other way around, and the attempts to shoehorn in the Masked One are much clumsier than those for the Gloved One. Not much else to say, is there? Well, non-villain topliner Monica Keena's Filmography on Wikipedia does helpfully include in the notes section that she "makes out with a girl" in the 2009 remake of Night of the Demons. So there's always that.

Although as noted in the Never Sleep Again documentary on the Nightmare on Elm Street series, which touched briefly on Freddy Vs Jason, Freddy actually only manages to kill one person in the entire film, making Jason the winner in pure body count terms! (That corn field massacre scene was particularly well done, I thought) Though I also agree that this film obviously sees Freddy as the true evil villain, with Jason instead the dumb mass mudering henchman who unfortunately crosses his master by unthinkingly stealing all of the kills for himself (I like to think of their relationship in this film as being in the Doctor Frankenstein/Igor vein!)

But this again is the problem with 'Versus' films, since while neither of them can definitively win or lose, one of the pair has to take on some slightly iffy 'heroic' characteristics to help out the otherwise totally powerless humans, as in Alien Vs Predator where the Aliens are obviously heartlessly purely evil badasses while the Predators are slightly-less-evil killers with a moral code.

The Deep ('77)
Peter Yates cash in on Jaws (right down to slightly less drunk Robert Shaw) is a perfect example of his be great at something while missing the boat entirely style. The film in story is not a horror film at all. It opens with a little scare, but basically it's an other crime film. Beyond the Jaws connection though it absolutely succeeds at the genre through atmosphere. It feels nothing like the crime or mystery film it is, but rather is pure heightened terror. The suspense and feeling of death that pervades every frame is almost never given reason, but that's just Yates doing what he does best. It probably helps that these characters seem to be in search of that plot and actively rebelling against the treasure hunt nature of the story. They'd rather be facing the ghosts of the deep than the gangsters on land even if either option probably means doom. Of course later in the game the script attempts to consolidate that difference in tone a little, but while the added strangeness does make things all the more harrowing it just transplants the story into an other non-horror scheme.

I am still reeling from The Innocents!

It will probably end up at #1 on my list.

That'll make at least two lists its topping, then. The Innocents is not just my favorite horror movie, but one of my favorite films ever. A truly elegant, and truly scary, piece of work.

colinr0380 wrote:Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990)

I was reasonably impressed by this film, but like a lot of films that start out trying to bewilder and unnerve (which this does very well for a while), it gets drastically less interesting and more timid as it progresses towards its resolution. And yeah, the 'clues' about What's Really Going On are way overstated, but you have to roll with that. Definitely worth checking out.

I've also seen:

The Entity - I watched this primarily because Outer Space was locked in on my list and I felt obliged to find out where it came from. Plus I'd heard it was an above average horror film from the period and that Barbara Hershey was great in it.

Well, big ticks on all of those fronts, and I was really surprised by how effective the film was. Stylistically, everything it does is pretty obvious and familiar, and if you'd asked me how much spooky mileage you could get out of scary music, ominous silence and canted angles, I sure wouldn't have guessed "this much." But it's all in how it's done, and Furie has a great sense of suspense as well as a knack for twisting it into terror.

And that's where the film really succeeds for me: it's genuinely frightening, more than once. I think I wrote back at the start of this project that my list of great horror films would probably have little in common with my list of films that are actually scary. So many 'horror movies' rely on rote shocks (buses, from the ridiculous to the sublime) or, latterly, visceral repulsion, but very few rise to the level of existential disturbance that makes a film really frighten me. For instance, I don't think I'll end up with any film on my list as frankly terrifying as Family Life, but I haven't (yet) classified that as a horror movie.

So what works about The Entity that makes it hit home on that primal level? I think it's because, at base, and despite the plot of the film, the horror is not supernatural in nature. It's really just a very lightly coded film about domestic violence, and specifically domestic rape.

Spoiler

We have an intelligent, competent and independent woman whose life is turned upside down because she's being raped and assaulted, repeatedly and with incredible violence, within the home. They search for intruders, but there are none. The people she tells can't really believe it's happening, some of them think she's asking for it, and the strategies she develops (maybe she should just play along?) have the desperation of a battered wife. In one of the strongest scenes, the key to the shock and shame of the assault isn't that she's been knocked across the room and raped on the sofa, but that all of this is happening in front of her children.

Hershey seems to get this completely, and plays an incredible range of emotions and responses without ever turning her character into a hysterical (and, typically, very, very stupid) horror-movie victim. At one point, you can see a shift when it becomes less important to her for the abuse to stop than it does for it to be corroborated.

That said, the film does step down several levels towards the ordinary in the second half, when explanatory mumbo-jumbo and special effects (some cheesy, some pretty good) take over - though these sections still manage to present interesting and unusual takes on standard tropes (notably the role of the rational scientist hero) - but the film manages to pull back at the very end and return agency to Hershey's character while suggesting that this kind of abuse is not something you can just 'get over.'

Even with the slight deflation of the second half (could the studio not see that Hershey's performance was the best special effect money could buy? Those early attacks, where it's basically just an actress throwing herself around a room, are far more frightening than any amount of cosmic lightning or unlikely Goldbergian deathtraps) this is a very effective film and will probably make my list. It's worth seeing for Hershey alone.

knives wrote:The Deep ('77)
Peter Yates cash in on Jaws (right down to slightly less drunk Robert Shaw) is a perfect example of his be great at something while missing the boat entirely style. The film in story is not a horror film at all. It opens with a little scare, but basically it's an other crime film. Beyond the Jaws connection though it absolutely succeeds at the genre through atmosphere. It feels nothing like the crime or mystery film it is, but rather is pure heightened terror. The suspense and feeling of death that pervades every frame is almost never given reason, but that's just Yates doing what he does best. It probably helps that these characters seem to be in search of that plot and actively rebelling against the treasure hunt nature of the story. They'd rather be facing the ghosts of the deep than the gangsters on land even if either option probably means doom. Of course later in the game the script attempts to consolidate that difference in tone a little, but while the added strangeness does make things all the more harrowing it just transplants the story into an other non-horror scheme.

There was a strange spate of semi-horror pictures following Jaws which The Deep fits into. The Deep is perhaps one of the better ones, especially when compared to ludicrous entries such as Orca - Killer Whale or the Italian Killer Fish. (Of course we all know that the best entry in this genre, apart from Jaws, is Joe Dante's Piranha!)

Once again I have to praise those excellent 42nd Street Forever trailer compilations from Synapse for alerting me to some amazing looking films in this genre, from Killer Fish to the Franco Nero-starring Shark Hunter! Plus a trailer for the Cornel Wilde film Shark's Treasure made in 1975, which feels like it could have provided some of the inspiration for The Deep.

LQ on The Innocents wrote:That'll make at least two lists its topping, then. The Innocents is not just my favorite horror movie, but one of my favorite films ever. A truly elegant, and truly scary, piece of work.

The Innocents is excellent, the best of all versions of The Turn of the Screw. When Mark Kermode was doing his review of The Woman In Black last week he kept bringing up The Haunting in comparison, a film which I love, but The Innocents would have been a far more appropriate film to compare it with! Though that would perhaps have shown up The Woman In Black too much!

This is perhaps a warning more than a recommendation but since we are on the subject I thought that it might be worth bringing up that film which decided to show the events leading up to those in The Turn of the Screw. The Nightcomers is not really a great film, suffering the problems that all prequels suffer from of the audience already knowing the ending (and this is not exactly a horror film, more a soft core S&M one), but it is interesting to see Marlon Brando in this kind of material (especially in the unorthodox pairing he makes with Thora Hird!) and the film itself could (very charitably) be bracketed with something like the Wide Sargasso Sea in the way it is, rather unnecessarily, mining an evocative backstory from a beloved classic.

zedz wrote:The Entity - I watched this primarily because Outer Space was locked in on my list and I felt obliged to find out where it came from. Plus I'd heard it was an above average horror film from the period and that Barbara Hershey was great in it.

Thanks for alerting me to Outer Space zedz, I'd heard about it before but your mention of it inspired me to track it down.

colinr0380 wrote:Thanks for alerting me to Outer Space zedz, I'd heard about it before but your mention of it inspired me to track it down.

Serious warning: don't watch Outer Space if you're prone to seizures.

zedz wrote:Better you than me, domino. I hope you've got some decent films set aside to take the taste away after you've finished your pus-gargling marathon!

Hey, by pure chance I did!

the Hideous Sun Demon (Robert Clarke 1959) The danger of watching those fun trailers on the 42nd Street Forever compilations is that you get tempted by films like this. But with great risk comes great reward. Far from the goofy atomic age thriller it's made out to be, this is a fantastic small-scale success, one that works for the same reason the best cheapie noirs work: a feel for budgetary limitations, extensive and intelligent use of location shooting, and a sense of the novel. The premise alone is crackerjack: flipping the norms of the genre, here's a monster that only strikes in the daylight, as the atomic worker protagonist has been exposed to dangerous radiation levels which transform him into a monster when exposed to the rays of the sun. But outside of the unforgettable image of him beating up a dog (!), the man-monster isn't really much of a harm to anyone, which makes his trajectory all the sadder. Features heroic work on the part of co-writer/director/star Clarke maintaining eye contact during his scenes with Nan Peterson.

the Walking Dead (Michael Curtiz 1936) A mixtape of a handful of genres that somehow all gel into a wonderful concoction. Is it a gangster pic? Proto-noir? Thriller? Social problem pic? Straight-up horror? All this and more! The sadness of the film, of Karloff's existence, and his profound "angel of death" effect on those responsible for his downfall resonate deeper than expected.

the Uninvited (the Guard Brothers, 2009) I was lucky in that I went into this film knowing absolutely nothing other than that it was some sort of horror movie starring Elizabeth Banks and David Strathairn and despite both being actors on my radar, I'd somehow never heard of it before. Even going in blind, I could tell by the film's construction that it was leading to some sort of last-minute thriller movie revelation, but I must admit to my delight that the film's intent and eventual resonance is so much more clever and tragic than I'd figured. It's a curious film, not at all flashy or loud or cut for idiots like much populist horror. Interestingly, here's a film that shows how important something like the second unit can be to a film's tone (even the insert shots have an eerie glossiness). Loneliness, dread, and distrust thrives within the gorgeous lakehouse setting, and everything is given the art house sheen of aesthetic beauty in framing, set design, and especially wardrobe, but at service of a prickly construction that eschews the narrative ambiguity of art films. And yet I see it's a film that was derided upon release, probably because it was sold to the wrong audience-- the film is deliberate and patient, two words that don't describe teenagers looking for date night entertainment. And cineaste purists who've seen the South Korean source material presumably prefer their original on principle (the Googling of which could very likely spoil many of this film's surprises anyway). And so here's this overlooked little masterpiece, and what of it?

Phenomena (Dario Argento 1985) Despite being pretty cool on Suspiria, I've acquired the lion's share of the Arrow Argentos and this one piqued my interest enough to go first. Though I see Argento still struggles with guiding his actors (presumably due to some sort of language barrier, one hopes), I thought this film did a superior job of marrying its various creative elements into a series of increasingly disorienting and novel stimuli, with the plot clicking all of its parts together for a guiltily satisfying conclusion. Some legitimately disturbing images, including Jennifer Connelly taking a dip in the least-appealing cesspool ever, contribute greatly to feel of the film, a film which threatens to devolve into cheesy nonsense several times before Argento's sure visual acumen guides it back onto some sort of track. One of the best soundtracks I've heard in a while, too-- I let the Blu-ray menu play for a little bit afterwards just to enjoy it some more, haha.

the Innocents (Jack Clayton 1961) Everyone's favorite horror movie, apparently! Though I can't quite share the extremes of the enthusiasm, I did mostly enjoy this gothic "ghost story," if it can even be called that. At the risk of heresy, I thought Kerr, who I generally like, was pitched a bit to high here, tipping the ambiguity too far against her. But it's all grand theatrics while it lasts, and yes, the cinematography is tops.

I agree on The Innocents. Was afraid to speak up considering all of the love. Also to Argento I think we're in the same field as him so I heartily recommend Deep Red and Inferno next as they've got in spades all of the bits you've stated an enjoyment of (though Phenomena certainly has the best of these scores). My personal favorite is Opera, but I suspect I'm insane on that one so while I'll recommend it I can't guarantee like with the other two that you'll get a kick out of it. Also avoid his other opera film like the plague. Don't say you haven't been warned if you do decide to watch.

Interesting take on The Uninvited, as I found the original Korean film to be a bit of a mess. Thanks for the recommendation!