film

Just like the last one, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter picks up immediately after the end of the previous film. With Jason finally having been stopped (spoilers) his corpse has been taken to the local hospital morgue while the police sort out what happened. As you might’ve guessed he’s not actually dead and, also just like the last movie, he murders a couple of non-plot-related characters before peacing out to go hunt down some more teens. The first thing I noticed about this one is that the production seems much more scaled up than any of the previous films. […]Read more »

I thought I was beginning to figure the Friday the 13th franchise out. Upon starting Friday the 13th Part III I was greeted with a familiar recap of the last bit of the previous film, just as it had done in turn with the first film. You can’t expect people to remember what happened in a movie a whopping 15 months ago, can you? Then something happened. The opening credits began to roll. But they were different. They extruded out at the screen, one at a time, as if displaying some kind of cheap parlor trick. Oh god. I get […]Read more »

Friday the 13th Part 2 picks up not long after the ending of the first film. After a lengthy recap of the events that conclude Part 1, Alice (Adrienne King), the sole survivor of Pamela Voorhees’ bloodbath, is recuperating at home when she is brutally murdered by another unseen attacker. Almost immediately, the single remaining loose thread is tied up. The film then jumps forward to five years in the future and another group of counselors is assembling to attend a training camp at a different campground on the same Crystal Lake, a stone’s throw from the site of the […]Read more »

Being cooped up in quarantine during a viral pandemic will make you consider some crazy ways to entertain yourself. For example, seeing that this year is the 40th (!) anniversary of the original Friday the 13th film, and knowing that I have for the most part had the entire franchise in my blind spot (except Jason X for some awful reason), I have taken it upon myself to make the trip through all 12 films, including the 2009 remake and Freddy vs Jason, and share my thoughts as a newcomer to the Cult of Jason. I am excited, but I […]Read more »

Initially set to release in September of 2019, The Hunt is a dark comedy/thriller that, due to its violent premise, was shelved after a rash of mass shootings in the United States and later released in March of 2020. As if the conflict between real-world events and fictionalized violence wasn’t enough, the film also drew the attention of President Trump for its politically-charged satirization of the divide between the liberal and conservative population of the United States. Based purely on the film’s marketing, the president claimed the film’s purpose is to “inflame and cause chaos.” While the film actually plays […]Read more »

Nearly three-quarters of a century before the Marvel’s Cinematic Universe would put into motion a long-term interconnected series of films, Universal Pictures would assemble a shared universe of their own centering on horror and science-fiction characters. This continuity of films that would later be known as Universal’s “Classic Monsters” includes Dracula, The Mummy, and Frankenstein, among others, and has been in recent years targeted for a series of reboots. The most recent attempt, known as the Dark Universe, kicked off with Dracula Untold and the 2017 iteration of The Mummy. The former went to lengths to establish the brand, even […]Read more »