Thomas Shablesky suggested this film for this all request Horror Comedy Week. I’ve known him since he was a little kid, literally. His brother and I were best friends, often watching Phantasm 2 over and over again, as well as Blood Sucking Freaks. I’m sure we warped his brain a little. He’s directed a few films of his own since then (and grown up around 20 or so years)!
Despite being killed off in the original, everyone from the first Scary Movie came back for this one. It’s the last one in the series for Marlon and Shawn Wayans, and director Keenen Ivory Wayans. The Wayans would eventually go on to produce A Haunted House.
Kennan Ivory Wayans watched over a hundred movies just to get ready for this movie. It starts with a parody of The Exorcist that originally had Marlon Brando in it, who completed one day of filming before he left due to being sick. He got to keep a million just for that day. He was replaced by James Woods, who made $1 million dollars for just four days of work. You know who almost did that part? Charlton Heston and even former President Bill Clinton.
This sequence has Megan Voorhees (Natasha Lyonne!) becomes possessed by the spirit of Hugh Kane (Richard Moll, who has to be in every 80’s horror movie). She even pees on the floor for an extended period, which is funny in the 2000’s where it was scary in the 1970’s. Woods is joined by Andy Richter as a second priest and they end up shooting Megan.
Everyone from the first movie is joined by Tori Spelling as a new character as they take a class in the paranormal from Professor Oldman (Tim Curry) and his paraplegic assistant Dwight Hartman (David Cross). According to Tori Spelling, she had a lead role, but after refusing to do a topless scene, Dimension Studios cut her out of more than half the movie. This seems kind of like BS, as this film doesn’t have any other nudity, but when the Weinsteins are involved, who can say.
They end up going to Hell House (it’s actually Wayne Manor from the Batman TV show) to do research, the home of Hanson the caretaker (Chris Elliot!). At this point, the movie descends into sight gags and gross-out humor, as you’d expect. There’s a cat fistfight, sex with ghosts, Howard Stern star Beetlejuice inside someone’s skull, a wheelchair fight and more. Your mileage will vary here as to whether you find this humorous or not. If you’ve seen The Haunting, you know most of this movie.
Loosely based on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel, the Hughes Brothers were criticized by Moore for replacing his “gruff” version of Frederick Abberline with an “absinthe-swilling dandy.” They should have been ready for that — Moore hasn’t enjoyed a single adaption of his work.
Here, the directors of Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and The Book of Eli go to Whitechapel to tell the story of who Jack the Ripper very well may have been.
Mary Kelly (Heather Graham) and her friends are all London prostitutes who must avoid violence whle trying to make a living with their bodies. When one of their friends, Ann Crook, is taken after her rich boyfriend returns, they learn that they are being hunted down and mutilated one by one. Soon, Whitechapel Police Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp) is on the case, guided by psychic visions that he abates with opium.
His theory — which his partner Sergeant Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane) doesn’t quite understand — is that the Ripper is a highly educated medical professional. After meeting with Sir William Gull (Ian Holm), the physician to the Royal Family, Abberline starts to see that there is a dark conspiracy behind everything, particularly the influence of the Freemasons.
The truth is that Gull is the killer, taking out the witnesses to painter Albert Sickert’s forbidden marriage and child with Crook. The bigger secret is that Sickert is Prince Albert, grandson of reigning Queen Victoria, and their daughter is a royal heir.
I don’t want to give away much more — I’ve already said so much — but nothing ends well, to say the least. While not as deep as Moore and Campbell’s graphic novel, this film has an interesting visual style and really depicts the squalor of London in the time of the Ripper. I really liked the way the opium visions and murderous messages were presented here. There’s really no reason for the Elephant Man to show up or the main characters’ romance, though. It all feels somewhat thrown in.
As of late, director Ernest Dickerson has worked on plenty of TV, like The Walking Dead, Dexter, The Man in the High Castle and The Wire. But around here, he’s better known for his movies Juice and Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. He also worked on the first two seasons of Tales from the Dark Side, giving him a great eye for horror. Throw in Snoop Dogg as a demon from the past of a neighborhood and it looks like we have a movie!
Way back in 1979, Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg) was a numbers runner, but also a respected and loved protector of his community. That all changes when he’s betrayed by drug dealer Eddie Mack (Ricky Harris, who was many of the skit voices on Snoop’s albums) and bad cop Lupovich, who also forced Jimmy’s friends Jeremiah and Shotgun — as well as his girl Pearl (Pam Grier!) — to be complicit in his death by stabbing him and burying him inside a building. Soon, the neighborhood dies around Jimmy Bones.
In 2001, four enterprising teens — some of them the children of the people who killed Jimmy — open a hip hop club in the building where Jimmy’s body rests. Well, rest isn’t the right term. Soon, he’s back, bringing Hell with him as he takes the lives of each of the men who destroyed everything he held dear.
The best parts of this movie are the talking heads of the people Bones has killed, as well as Pam Grier. She’s always dependable and pretty fun here, both in her 1979 role and the 2001 version, who has become a fortune teller.
There are some great shots of Snoop slowly walking his way out of Hell to come back to our reality. As long as you aren’t expecting anything, then you’ll probably enjoy this. Snoop’s exactly the kind of actor you’d expect him to be — he’s having fun making his own version of J.D.’s Revenge and getting to make out with Pam Grier. We should all be so lucky.
Valentine is a post-Scream slasher that feels closer to a giallo than an American slasher at times, with elaborate death sequences and a masked killer who wears the face of Cupid. It’s packed with the hottest actors of the early 2000’s and directed by Australian Jamie Blanks, who also made Urban Legend and remade Long Weekend in 2008.
The movie starts at a St. Valentine’s Day dance in 1988. Jeremy Melton, the school geek, asks four different girls to dance. Three of them — Shelley, Lily and Paige — instantly reject him while Kate at least gives him a break and says, “Maybe later.”
He finally hooks up with Dorothy, an overweight girl, and they make out in the bleachers. A bully finds them and everyone starts to laugh at the two of them until she claims that he is raping her. This removes Jeremy from school and their lives.
One by one, these girls are stalked and killed. Shelley is now Katherine Heigl and a UCLA med student. After getting a Valentine in her locker, a killer in a trench coat and Cupid mask stalks her and slices her throat. As she dies, his nose begins to bleed. I’m assuming that the people who made this hoped that none of us had ever seen Alone in the Dark.
At her funeral, Kate (Marley Shelton, Grindhouse), Lily (Jessica Cauffiel, Legally Blonde), Paige (Denise Richards), and Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw, daughter of Kate) are questioned by the police. They all get the same Valentines, like the one Dorothy gets that goes so far as to say, “Roses are red, Violets are blue, They’ll need dental records to identify you.” She’s no longer heavy and is part of the in crowd, with a boyfriend named Campbell — who may or may not be a con artist but is definitely a giallo-style red herring.
Lily gets chocolates, but they’re filled with maggots. And at the exhibit of Lily’s boyfriend Max (Johnny Whitworth, AJ from Empire Records), Lily is chased by the killer through the exhibits until she is shot multiple times with arrows — ala the real Saint Valentine — and falls to her death inside a dumpster.
They all realize that the initials on the cars are JM, which means that the killer could be Jeremy Melton. Dorothy admits her lie that sent Jeremy to reform school. It’s at this point that the lead cop, Detective Leon Vaughn (Fulvio Cecere, whose movie 350 Days is all about the life of a pro wrestler) hits on Paige and she strongly rebuffs him.
Kate’s neighbor breaks into her apartment as he has been stealing her panties and is killed with an iron. And as Dorothy plans a huge party, Campbell is killed with an ax. Her friends all assume that he has simply dumped her as she’s still the fat girl in their eyes. Of course, if she listened to Ruthie, Campbell’s crazy ex, she’d know the truth. But she gets brutally killed at the party in a kill that’s reminiscent of Deep Red.
At the party itself, Paige is electrocuted in a hot tub and the power cuts out. Dorothy and Kate begin to argue over who the killer’s identity, with Kate saying that its the mysterious Campbell, while Dorothy accuses Adam (David Boreanaz of TV’s Angel), Kate’s alcoholic ne’er do well boyfriend. They then learn that Lily never made it to California and that she may be dead. After a call from Detective Vaughn, they start to investigate further. As they worry about their safety, they try to call him back but get no answer. Suddenly, they hear a ringtone and follow the sound of it until they find his severed head outside the house.
Kate is absolutely convinced that Adam is Jeremy and runs back inside the house to find him waiting for her. He asks her to dance, but she gets freaked out and runs from him — right into the corpses of Paige and Ruthie. That’s when the Cupid killer runs right into her but is shot by Adam. The mask falls off to reveal Dorothy.
Adam finds it in his heart to forgive Kate, explaining how if you have enough childhood trauma, like how Dorothy dealt with the abuse of being overweight, that anger can stay with you and cause violence. They wait for the police to arrive as he embraces her, telling her that he always loved her. She closes her eyes and we notice that his nose has begun to bleed.
There are plenty of red herrings along the way, like Dorothy’s cherub necklace that could point to her as the killer. And then there’s the fact that that necklace really belonged to Ruthie. But after that gets dealt with, it’s pretty obvious who our killer is.
I liked how each of the murders ends up corresponding to the horrible things that the girls said to Jeremy at the dance, like Paige’s claim that she’d “rather be boiled alive” actually ends up happening.
It’s also refreshing that the women in this, by and large, are aware of how men try to use them and respond in modern ways, such as Paige shutting down the main detective.
Valentine isn’t the best movie you’ll watch, but you can get it for $3 at most streaming sites and for around $2 or less at most used DVD stores. That’s a decent enough price to spend — it goes down as easily as a Valentine’s chocolate but won’t stay with you much longer than a summer fling.
In 1990, Universal Studios bought the rights to Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park before it was even published. The idea of dinosaurs being cloned and brought into our modern world just works.
Starting with 1993’s Jurassic Park and across several follow-ups, including 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World 3, announced for 2021, people can’t seem to get enough of these movies. Sure, they’re all about the same thing — you can’t stop dinosaurs from being dinosaurs — but for some reason, people just keep coming back to see these movies.
Steven Spielberg first learned of the novel while working on the pitch for the TV series ER with Crichton. To even get the rights, Universal had to pay $1.5 million and a substantial percentage of the gross to the writer, a fee that he would not negotiate on. Even better, he got $500,000 just to adapt his own book for the screen. They were hungry for a hit and after the film did well, even hungrier for sequels. Well, they got them.
Jurassic Park (1993)
John Hammond (Richard Attenborough, Magic) and his company InGen have figured out how to clone dinosaurs from DNA trapped in blood trapped in bugs trapped in amber. This science is inherently bullshit, but if that’s going to stop you from watching these films, you better just quit now.
He’s created a theme park called Jurassic Park on Isla Nublar that’s packed with several of his cloned dinosaurs. Never mind that one of the raptors has already killed a highly trained handler. The park’s investors demand that dinosaur experts visit the park and certify its safety.
How are there dinosaur experts that know how real live dinosaurs would behave? I mean, putting giant monsters around humans who act like people in a theme park? How can that go wrong? I’m not a dinosaur expert by any means, but I can sit here and tell you that this is amongst the dumbest ideas ever concocted.
Those experts are chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, who doesn’t just come from Pittsburgh but comes from our neighborhood), paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill, Possession) and paleobotanist Dr. Elliw Sattler (Laura Dern, Wild at Heart).
Everyone is amazed to see real live dinosaurs, which would have to be a dream come true. I mean, once I realized that all the dinosaurs were dead, I didn’t want to be an archaeologist any longer.
That’s when they learn that every dinosaur is female and the park is using select breeding. But Malcolm believes that nature will always find a way to thrive. Spoiler warning: it does, because they used frog DNA to fill in the gaps and frogs will switch gender to keep breeding. I love that they have scientists smart enough to handle creating living creatures from ancient DNA, but they aren’t smart enough to realize that things like this happen. I blame B.D. Wong’s Dr. Henry Wu, who will go on to make every more monumental boners in the series. In fact, he fucks up so much that they are forced to make him a bad guy to explain just how much one man can screw things up.
You know what would be a great idea? To bring kids around these uncontrollable killing machines. That’s exactly why Hammond’s grandkids, Lex and Tim, are flown in. The first trip through the park goes bad, with most of the dinosaurs not showing up, other than a sick triceratops. A tropical storm is on the horizon, so everyone heads back to the base. Hammond is upset, but Samuel Jackson’s Ray Arnold character says that things could have gone worse. Yeah, no shit it could have gone worse. You built a death trap thrill ride in a place with the worst storms on Earth and let your pre-teen grandkids romp around in it.
Meanwhile, Newman from Seinfeld has sold out Hammond and has messed up all of the parks security systems so that he can steal dinosaur embryos and put them in a shaving cream can. Yes, Michael Crichton got paid $2 million dollars for that. Don’t worry — a dilophosaurus sprays Newman, something it never could do, and eats him. He leaves behind chaos, with a T. Rex breaking through its fence and attacking everyone, including eating a lawyer while he takes a fearful dump.
This sets up the basic action of every movie that will follow this one: raptors chase everyone, kids are put in danger and a man that is the worst parent type ever learns to love those children. Along the way, anyone that’s been trained to deal with these creatures gets torn asunder.
In the end, the T. Rex eats the raptors and everyone leaves the island. In the real world, lawsuits would decimate InGen, but this is the world of Crichton and Spielberg. They’re coming back. You know it. I know it. They know it.
My favorite parts of this film are when Sam Neill treats children with utter contempt, including dressing down a rotund tween and explaining how a raptor would tear him into pieces and leave his intestines in the dirt. It’s heartwarming. I also love that William Hurt was offered this role and turned it down, refusing to even read the script.
The special effects in this film blew minds when it came out 25 years ago and they still look good today. You can poke some holes in the CGI but this was groundbreaking special effects back then.
As for me, I was very much in the art school of film when this came out, sure that Spielberg had sold out the promise of early 1970’s Hollywood as he embraced the blockbuster. Watching it years later with the benefit of old man hindsight, it’s a decent summer film, a rollercoaster ride that demands that you probably shouldn’t think about too much, packed with great effects and fun characters.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
There’s another island. Isla Sorna is where the dinosaurs were raised and also where a rich little girl wanders into a compsognathus attack. From this opening, you know that you’re in for a much darker ride. It’s one of those movies where kindly Spielberg decides that he should have made Night Skies instead of E.T. and indulges all the meanness he has festering inside upon his characters.
John Hammond’s nephew, Peter Ludlow is trying to use the island to fix the losses that Jurassic Park incurred. The old man has taken a dramatic change of heart, realizing that he should have never tried to open a theme park all those years ago and that these dinosaurs need to be protected. If you’re kind of taken aback by all of the character flip-flops here, buckle up. You know — because guys in their seventies suddenly stop being capitalists and suddenly start caring for the common man, like Peter on the road to Damascus. It can happen.
Ian Malcolm is the only one that comes back, save for cameos from his grandchildren. Turns out that Julianne Moore is in this, playing Ian’s girlfriend Dr. Sarah Harding, and that she’s already on the island. For the last four years, Ian has been discredited and disbarred for speaking out on Jurassic Park. The last thing he wants to do is go back, but to save the girl he loves, he has to.
Ian joins the team of equipment guy Eddie Carr and documentarian Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn), as well as his daughter Kelly who has stowed away. Just as they catch up with Dr. Sarah, a whole new InGen squad shows up, made up of mercs and hunters. Chief amongst them are Pete Postlethwaite as Roland Tembo, a big game hunter who dreams of bagging a T. Rex, Fargo‘s Peter Stormare as Dieter Stark and Dr. Robert Burke, a dinosaur expert played by Thomas F. Duffy (the demeted Charles Wilson from Death Wish 2!).
Tembo’s plan is to tie up a baby T. Rex and use it to lure in the mother or father. And InGen wants to get as many dinosaurs as possible so they can open a new Jurassic Park in San Diego. None of these ideas are good and they blow up in everyone’s face.
There’s a great moment in here where all of Malcolm’s team’s vehicles plunge off a cliff and some nifty action pieces, but it all feels rather disjointed. By the time everyone teams up and gets off the island, I was kind of hoping the film was over, only to learn there was so much more movie left. It’s a very late 90’s style of blockbuster — give it more running time and more story versus more thinking.
At the end, the dinosaurs are placed in an animal preserve free from human interference. Hammond steals Malcolm’s line, saying that “Life will find a way.”
Spielberg eventually said that he didn’t enjoy making this film. It kind of shows. He stated, “I beat myself up… growing more and more impatient with myself… It made me wistful about doing a talking picture because sometimes I got the feeling I was just making this big silent-roar movie… I found myself saying, ‘Is that all there is? It’s not enough for me.'”
That said, the movie did big numbers, so of course, it was time for another one. This time, Joe Johnson (Captain America: The First Avenger and The Rocketeer) would direct.
Jurassic Park 3 (2001)
The first film in the series to not be based on a Crichton book or directed by Spielberg, who saw the films as “a big Advil headache.”
I hate watched this movie, to be perfectly honest. Why would anyone go near this park? Why would anyone be dumb enough to parasail with pterodactyls? That’s what we call thinning the herd. Come on, people.
It all starts when Ben Hildebrand takes his girlfriend’s kid, Eric Kirby, parasailing with the dinosaurs, as mentioned above. However, they are pulled toward Isla Sorna and Eric’s parents, Paul and Amanda (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni) con Dr. Alan Grant into coming back to the island.
We learn early on that Dr. Grant screwed things up with Dr. Sattler and that she’s married to someone else. He’s a man alone, back on digs with an assistant that barely listens to him, Billy Brennan.
All the Kirbys say they want to do is fly over the island. However, the mercs on board knock out Grant and then it’s time to find Eric, who is actually the most resourceful of everyone.
Seriously, this movie felt like it went on forever, as they walked over the same ground trod upon by the other films. That said — the scene where Dr. Grant has the dream on the plane and the raptor talks to him? I could watch that over and over again.
There’s also a scene where everyone has to dig through dinosaur shit to find a satellite phone. That’s a first for the series and really the high point of this entire movie.
Jurassic World (2015)
14 years later and we have another sequel, planned as part of a trilogy. Set 22 years after the first movie, the theme park has now been open for ten years, but when a newly cloned dinosaur breaks loose everything comes full circle.
Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, Lady in the Water), the park’s operations manager, has brought her nephews to the park. She’s too busy to keep an eye on them as the pterodactyl shit hits the fan. There’s also her boyfriend, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, Guardians of the Galaxy), who has been able to train the velociraptors.
Meanwhile, there’s an InGen security asshole (as always), this time played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who wants to use those dinosaurs for military use.
Then there’s that big bad indominus rex, which uses DNA from all sorts of horrifying beasts instead of frogs, like raptors. Who made this thing? Our old friend Dr. Henry Wu.
The best part of this film is the end and I don’t mean that in a mean way. I loved how the original T. Rex comes back and all of the dinosaurs have reclaimed their island, having defeated the new beast. There’s even a gigantic mosasaurus that gets a crowd-pleasing moment right before the conclusion.
I love that one of the plans for this movie was to prove that humans descended from dinosaurs. That sounds like more my kind of movie. However, the last Jurassic Park film may be the best. Until the new one comes out this week. And of course, I’ll be there, ready to wade through the brontosaurus shit.
Becca hates this movie. When I asked her for her review, the words stupid, boring and dumb were used. I asked why and she replied, “It’s just horrible.” Me? I loved it. As Paula Abdul sang, “Opposites attract.” Also, much like that song, I hate cigarettes and Becca likes to smoke!
All four generations of Katakuris live on a house built over a garbage dump near Mt. Fuji. It’s not much to write home about, but they dream of calling it the White Lover’s Inn, a bed and breakfast that will serve the visitors that the road that runs nearby is sure to bring.
Finally, after much waiting, a TV personality shows up and the family is overjoyed. Yet he soon kills himself and they find his naked body. So they do what any family would do: they bury it and move on. A second guest, a sumo wrestler, dies having sex with his underage girlfriend.
In fact, every guest they get dies, whether by accident or murder or suicide. And the backyard is filling up!
Oh yeah — there’s also a con man in love with the youngest daughter, the police investigating all these murders and an active volcano.
Takashi Miike (Dead or Alive, Blade of the Immortal, Visitor Q) has directed everything from light-hearted children’s films to movies so controversial governments have stepped in to block them. Here, he creates a musical that combines Japanese pop, karaoke and traditional musicals to make one of the most legitimately bonkers films I’ve ever watched. The film can quickly turn into flashbacks or claymation at a moment’s notice, sometimes multiple times within the same scene.
The leader of the Katakuris, Masao, is played by Kenji Sawada, who was a crossover pop star at the end of the 1960’s. He was nicknamed Julie for his love of Julie Andrews. He’s one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and even had Barry Gibb write songs for him!
Shizue’s boyfriend, the sailor who claims to be a British relative of Queen Elizabeth, is played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, who was known as Japan’s king of rock, even recording with Booker T & the M.G.’s. His funeral, dubbed The Aoyama Rock n’ Roll Show, drew 42,000 mourners.
The father, Jinpei, is Tetsurō Tamba, who was Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice. And Naoto Takenaka, who plays a reporter, is the Japanese voice of Batman and Nick Fury.
This is a movie that demands to be experienced. From animated fairies ending up in people’s soup to heroic dogs that surf through lava, this is a demented version of The Sound of Music. Check out the trailer and see if it strikes your fancy, then you can watch this on Shudder. If you hate it, you can share your feelings with Becca.
With Freddy vs. Jason stuck in development hell (what, no one just wanted to make money?), New Line didn’t want people to forget Jason. So they sent him into the future. They sent him into virtual reality. And they sent him into space.
Jason X (2001)
In 2010 — 9 years in the future! — Jason is captured by the U.S. government but can’t be killed, so government scientist Rowan LaFontaine decides to place the killer is suspended animation. Of course, a bunch of soldiers screws the whole thing up and Jason kills everyone in his path before he stabs Rowan and freezing both of them.
445 years later, Earth is ruined so everyone moves to Earth 2. So why not send some students back to the old Earth on a field trip? Why not send their professor and an android, too? While exploring the Crystal Lake facility where Jason was experimented on? And why not put the still frozen bodies of Jason and Rowan on the Grendel, their ship? Nothing bad can happen, right?
Well, it turns out that Jason is dead and his body could be worth plenty. The Professor calls his money man, Dieter Perez (Robert A. Silverman, who has been in five Cronenberg* movies and the two episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series that he directed, too) and they discuss how Jason’s body could be worth something to collectors. Luckily — or maybe not — they bring Rowan back to life.
Of course, kids keep having sex around Jason, which brings the maniac back to life. He wipes out nearly everyone on the ship, including all of the soldiers that are on board. He even takes out an entire space station!
The teens upgrade their android, KM-14, who wipes out Jason. Or so everyone thinks — a medical station brings him back as Uber Jason, filled with cybernetics so powerful that he can punch the android’s head off. Not even a holographic simulation or a shuttle crash can slow him down! It takes flying him through re-entry and burning him up to take him out.
That said — two teens see his mask land on Earth 2, so he could always come back. He can come back, right?
This was written by Todd Farmer (Drive Angry, the remake of My Bloody Valentine) and directed by James Isaac (House 3). I have a real weakness for this film as it really goes places none of the others did. It’s the Abbott and Costello school of running out of ideas and just doing something completely off the wall.
*Cronenberg shows up in a cameo as Dr. Wimmer, too!
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Finally, after years of development stops and starts, arguably the two biggest horror icons of the 1980s would fight. Helmed by The Bride with White Hairdirector Ronny Yu, this would be the last film in both villain’s series before they were rebooted.
Freddy is stuck in Hell, powerless because the children of Springwood have forgotten about him. He disguises himself as Pamela Vorhees and sends a message to Jason, begging him to kill the teens he can no longer reach.
The adults cover it up, just as they have for years. They don’t want Freddy ever coming back, so they even send his victims to a sanitarium and give them Hypnocil to suppress their dreams. Freddy starts coming back with each kill, but then he realizes that Jason cannot be contained and that his mayhem will only cost him victims.
Our protagonists try to pull Freddy from the dream world into our world, but Freddy catches Jason in his dream world, using his fear over drowning to defeat him. At the last moment, Jason actually saves everyone by returning to our world.
By the end, Freddy is decapitated and Jason is dead. Or is he? Of course, he raises from the lake, holding his machete and Freddy’s head as the bastard son of a thousand maniacs winks to the audience.
Sadly, Kane Hodder was replaced by the even larger Ken Kirzinger. The director wanted a bigger, bulkier Jason. Oh well. Also, Kelly Rowland from Destiny’s Child is in this.
While sequels were planned (rumored battles were to include Ash from Evil Dead, Pinhead from Hellraiser and Michael Myers from Halloween), nothing ever happened. There was a comic series that did this — more on that later.
The movie figures out a nice way to connect the characters, but they went even further in the original script. One idea was that Freddy either raped or had a consensual sexual encounter with Jason’s mother, and as a result, was Jason’s dad. Or maybe Freddy had worked at Camp Crystal Lake and was the reason behind Jason’s death. These ideas felt too contrived and were dropped.
There was nowhere else to go after this movie. It was time for a reboot.
Friday the 13th (2009)
Marcus Nispel directed the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003, so why shouldn’t he get a shot at Jason? This film is more than just a remake of the first film. It’s really a bit of the first four all in one.
We watch Jason as he watches his mother get killed by a camp counselor. Thirty years later, he kills every single teen who has comes to Crystal Lake looking for marijuana, except for Whitney, who reminds him of his mother.
Weeks later, some rich kids come to stay at a fancy cabin. They’re all fodder, too. Only Clay, Whitney’s brother, can save her. Finally, Whitney acts like Jason’s mother and stabs him, but he comes back at the end, rising from the lake.
This is a slick, CGI animated take on the Jason mythos. I’m more into the Savini school of gore, so there’s a lot of this that didn’t work for me. It’s not a horrible film by any means. But it’s not the best of the series. And while it did well at the box office, it was also the end of the series.
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