Graduation Day (1981)

Except for the fact Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't appear, this 1981 slasher follows the 80s teen slasher formula exactly — it could even be Scream -1 — opening on an initial tragedy at Woodsboro, I mean, Midvale High School that sets into motion a grisly series of killings of the members of the school's track-and-field team, and about the only thing that sets Graduation Day apart from the long line of identical others is a rocking film clip at the one-hour mark — Felony's Gangster Rock — which injects new energy — not a lot, but new — into the final thirty-minute lead-up to the clumsy reveal of The Fisherman, I mean, Ghostface, I mean...

★★☆☆☆

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Scream 4

The kill count at ten minutes is five, halfway through it is seven, and overall, thirteen - not bad for an hour and forty minutes - so number four in the meta-horror series really drives the knife in for slasher fans, but even in an exercise this tongue-in-cheek - and it succeeds in being funny a number of times - it can be frustrating sitting through the idiocy on display: remember, Ghostface is a serial killer who has well and truly put a dent in the population of Woodsboro High on three previous occasions, yet in the midst of spree number four, as the body count rises, these teens hold parties, get drunk, wander outside into the dark woods, and play astonishingly tone-deaf "Ghostface" pranks on each other, making it more than a little tiresome waiting out the Scooby-Doo unmasking at the end.

★★★☆☆

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Scream VI (2023)

Just brutally violent, not scary, this sequel to 2022's "rerequel" Scream and the meta-horror series' sixth entry riffs on the idea that Scream is now a mega-franchise with the momentum to continue even without its legacy characters, so Courteney Cox's investigative reporter Gale Weathers (here, again) and other long-timers are apparently at risk of being killed off - it isn't a big point of difference, and other standard elements, like the opening set-piece, are tired, but the mystery elements of Scream VI and a neat sequence on a New York City subway train keep the bloodletting intermittently interesting.

★★★☆☆

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Dangerous Animals (2025)

As if to demonstrate the abyssmal depths to which film has sunk, this serial killer thriller and creature-feature mash-up, about an Australian serial killer who feeds foreign tourists to sharks, is built up around its thirty-minute-mark spectacle of a woman being torn to pieces by a shark, and nothing else matters:, the plot, very possibly spat out by Chatgpt, starts with a thoroughly unclever and utterly unrewarding opening sequence, then features disappearing bodies, plastic shiv neck injuries and knife wounds that are shaken off and disappear, plot lurches that defy logic, and a lot of repetitive catch-and-escape, catch-and-escape sequences - Tom and Jerry cartoons are more entertaining and efficient - and chaining the film industry to its watery grave forever at the bottom of the ocean is the fact mind-numbed audiences have given this prosaic nonsense an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

★★☆☆☆

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

The world-building and mythologising reign over plot, logic, and sense in this sixth (has it really only been six?) Final Destination movie, which plays like a cartoon series - it's glossy, wonkily computer-generated in parts, and the deaths are separate mini-episodes - and it is hard to care about the family members being picked off one-by-one by Death given noone in it cares either, and anyway, the characters are always secondary to the attempts here at a origin story and attempt at a reboot, often cornball - the holed-up Death-whispering grandma doesn't belong in the series, and the death-by-peanut allergy is a low point.

★★★☆☆

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MaXXXine (2024)

I was confused how this third movie fitted with the previous two, confused who was who, and confused how exactly the message here fits with what came before - something like: since Hitchcock's 'Psycho' Hollywood stardom for women has required them to have sex or be murdered - but as this Hitchcock homage set in the 80s kicked into its 'Body Double' denouement with 80s electric guitar slides accompanying an outrageous shoot-out under the Hollywood sign, the one thing I did know was how much of a good time I was having!

★★★★☆

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Blair Witch (2016)

This is simply more shaky, badly filmed home-style footage of young, would-be investigative documentarians screaming and huffing and puffing for 90 minutes in the woods while any development of the story about some sort of witch-cursed woodland is perpetually interrupted by irritating handicam malfunctions, clichéd, glitchy torches, dull drone battery problems, tangential scenes of body horror, and irrelevant camp dangers.

★★☆☆☆

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House of Wax (2005)

There's some innovation in the endscenes as our heroes, feet sinking into stairs, run around a house literally made of (melting) wax but otherwise this is a mediocre teen slasher, just an episode of "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" but with a backstory that tries to justify a patently ridiculous contrivance: the story takes place in a long-lost small American town made entirely of wax.

★★☆☆☆

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Bloodmoon (1990)

For the first three-quarters of this ugly, lamentably plotted slasher, no one in the movie even knows for sure that anything is wrong: two or three high schoolers disappear but their absences are shrugged off as runaways, which means a long plod for audiences who must endure woefully scripted school dances, waterhole picnics, and the like waiting for the characters to catch up with what the opening scene established - that someone is killing students with a barbed wire garotte in the nearby woods - and when the killer is finally revealed, the plot, the town's collective obliviousness, and the ignorance of one townsperson in particular (given the celestial and historical circumstances of the crimes) ceases to make any sense at all.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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Terror Train (1980)

Three years after a (really revolting) med student prank, a group of students gather for a New Year's Eve party aboard a steam train, and as the train shoots through the night, it turns out one of those on board is picking the others off one by bloody one....and the passenger we sympathise with, not so involved in that prank and striving to stay alive while all her besties end up sliced and diced is -- no, not a starey young David Copperfield who appears as a magician without a Working With Children check, hired to be the onboard entertainment - but Jamie Lee Curtis, adding her 80s-horror clout to this effective slasher with several truly chilling moments.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter opened his original 1978 movie with a single first-person-perspective shot that shows the young Michael Myers' passage around, into and through his family home, telling viewers in just four minutes as much as they are to learn across any of Carpenter's movies about the masked crazy and his motive for killing his older sister, but in this, director Rob Zombie's 2007 remake, that opening scene is extrapolated into a not uninteresting but probably unnecessary hour of backstory that thoroughly unmasks the masked killer; then, the movie becomes a faithful remake of the 1979 original with Malcolm McDowell effective in Donald Pleasence's role of Doctor Samuel Loomis, the psychiatrist who treats Michael Myers in a sanatorium, becomes close to him, and is the only one convinced, after his break out from the asylum, that Michael is heading back to Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak more destruction.

★★★☆☆

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Black Christmas (2019)

I like what they've done here in this clever remake of the 1974 horror, taking the original movie with its classic story of women beseiged from inside, not outside, a safehaven (a sorority house) and injecting into the story a metoo generation commentary, a context that was discernable in the original movie but not wholly intricated into the plot like it is here; but while I think the remake makes a strong and important and relevant point and makes it well about the privilege boys hold, handed to them in pretty much supernatural fashion from their white male forebears, the glossiness and smarts and the beautiful teens as well as the unrestrained finale that elicits a momentary yee-haw but then doubt and dismay at the derailment of such strong feminist commentary, render the movie a mere glossy teen slasher with good intentions, not a horror classic.

★★★☆☆

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Black Christmas (aka 'Stranger In The House') (1974)

This 1974 movie starring Margot Kidder continues a long tradition of suspense movies about women (usually one, but here a whole sorority houseful) threatened by - but safe inside from - a lunatic, eventually realising the danger comes from inside, not outside, the safehaven (The Spiral Staircase, When A Stranger Calls, for example) and it is an exceptionally effective, intelligent horror thriller: well-acted, with a large number of characters all fleshed-out and strong; rich in detail, and with some good humour which helps make, by comparison, the last twenty minutes especially deranged and terrifying!

★★★★★

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Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter preempts the first- and third-person perspective sandbox video games with his original Halloween, a 1978 movie in which the camera hangs back behind the residents of Haddonfield and follows them as they wander in and out of homes and up and down streets, like we are watching Carpenter's playthrough of Silent Hill, starting in the opening scene with Michael as a child in Halloween costume navigating a circuitous path into a home to start his long career of killing; then, fifteen years later, we follow Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie as she wanders around the township with student books in hand, friends in tow, unaware that murderous Michael, now 21, has escaped an asylum and is himself wandering around with a camera hanging just behind his shoulder - the net effect, not just dread for the minute all this peaceful ambling turns murderous and chaotic, is a sense by movie's end you have almost revealed the whole map of the township.

★★★☆☆

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Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

Those roman numerals in the titles count up the episodes, in case you thought it was a daftness factor inexorably ratcheting up, a reasonable mistake given things are dafter than ever in this eighth installment - as daft as the acting is bad (try to decide which death scene is the most lethargic) - with a resurrected-from-his-Camp Lake Crystal-grave Jason Voorhees - sodden, moldy, mute and ridiculous, not scary -  plodding around a NY-bound ship (it sometimes resembles the Love Boat but at other times looks like a weather-beaten paddle steamer), killing one-by-one a group of high schoolers who are on as unlikely a cruise as you are ever likely to see - 'unlikely' because it is a school group with a supervising teacher but the students on board nonetheless participate in full-gear boxing matches; they take saunas; they honeytrap their Principal and film it with the canera equipment they've brought with them on the trip; they pack in their luggage electric guitars so they can jam in the boiler room; and other really really daft things-to-do while they wait, like the bored audience, for Jason to, well, not so much 'strike' as 'lumber heavily, tiredly in'.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Like most third movies, Halloween III is the one that opts for unrestrained series-perpetuating exposition over simply doling out another episode and here not only do we not get another simple "Michael Myers comes home" episode, the masked killer does not even feature in a departure from the slasher horror series that, with its pair of investigators heading into a toy factory to find it full of brainwashed henchmen and a diabolical secret (mass production of Halloween masks with brainwashing microchips in them!) is more suited to an episode of 70s TV series "The Avengers" with slasher fans being told suddenly that Halloween is not just a calendar event but a pagan backstory.

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween II (1981)

You can nearly map the township of Haddonfield given the way the camera in Halloween II, like a before-its-time third-person sandbox computer game, follows behind people - the asylum escapee, masked lunatic Michael Myers, for example, or Donald Pleasence's psychiatrist (in not-so-hot pursuit of his patient) or random Haddonfield trick-or-treaters (including a very unfortunate someone who makes the mistake of way too quickly uptaking the latest halloween costume trend) - and as the camera follows these people around, around them the everyday of the town is revealed, its mundaneness in stark contrast with the serial killer's steady, bloody, inexplicable pursuit of Laurie which continues here immediately where the original movie left off: Laurie is taken to hospital after her climactic confrontation with Michael in number one (Jamie Lee Curtis pleads with doctors and nurses, "Don't put me to sleep," and then gets an injection that sends her to sleep for the whole movie); then there comes the beginning of an explanation for Michael Myers' pursuit of Laurie and the reason for his, um, resilience.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

With his scrubbing brush bristles for hair and comical way of Where's Wally-ing himself into every other scene, sometimes darting past in a sportscar, sometimes idling nearby in a green lorry and other times turning up in his grey overalls to stare through gates and windows, Michael Myers, the original movie's six-year-old-now-twenty-six-year-old serial killer, is an object of absurdity, not horror, in this retcon that has, for fans, the pleasing aesthetic of the original Halloween and the crowdpleasing reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now living as a boarding school teacher with a new identity, but is otherwise a movie that is over before it starts, blessedly short but a mere breath of a slasher movie with an overabundance of barely developed characters.

★★☆☆☆

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