Freddy Krueger is so much different in the first Nightmare on Elm Street than he is in the rest of the series. He's much darker and scarier. I love the wisecracking Freddy, but as a force of evil, the original shows him at his most convincing. Definitely my favorite of the Big Three of slasher series, although I like Halloween a lot too. I could never get into Friday the 13th.

It's too boring to be good-bad though. Not to mention the characters are so dull and stereotypical they belong in a porno.

A Nightmare of Elm Street - Good. Not something I particularly love but it's good.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 - Better in my opinion. Less serious, more kooky fun.
Dream Warriors - Equally as rewatchable, quotable and entertaining as 2.
Dream Master - Apart from a few scenes it feels like a boring, dull and weak tv movie with characters that are the meat equivalent of SPAM. Freddy Officially becomes the "Do The Bartman" era Bart Simpson of horror. Oh YAH, what a laugh riot that Freddy is.
Dream Child - SHITE. Member when ANOES was a soap opera with MAD TV-esque kills that resembled the worst of Freddy's Nightmares?
Freddy's Dead - SHITE. Member when he put on the power glove, wow, how hip and with it.
New Nightmare - (can't really include this because it's a different beast altogether but) I enjoyed it because Freddy is back to being serious, but the meta - movie-within-movie kinda gets old and the finale is weak.

Get the impression from virtually everyone this would've been better left as an idea Miller had, certainly not a blu-ray purchase at all.

Original Halloween actually comes across as pretty tame by today's slasher standards. It's still a very well-made movie of course, great soundtrack, but there's hardly any blood or gore or anything that we've come to expect from the genre. Some people might say that makes it more realistic and more scary, but I would've liked to see a little more blood here and there.

They probably would have gotten an X for showing proper blood spray in 1978.

Yeah, ratings are a bitch. It was a product of its time.

Part 8 has a few good-bad moments, but overall the movie is just a boring slog with completely uninteresting characters, mediocre kills, and possibly the most confusing ending in horror history. An almost totally hollow shell of a movie. I still maintain that Jason X is a quintessential good-bad movie, feeling like a way better unintentional satire of slasher flicks than most intentional satires.



Part of the fun of Halloween in a modern sense is that it didn't need really explicit, graphic imagery in order to scare the viewer. The movie did that almost entirely through the atmosphere, acting, and musical score. The violence was an incredibly small part, almost insignificant, element of that movie's success. Even the more immediate hangers-on like Friday the 13th upped the gore by a considerable margin. A large number of slasher and horror flicks post-Halloween and Friday the 13th used gore as a crutch because the actual movies themselves weren't any good, a trend that continues to this very day, but Halloween was different for the reasons I stated earlier.

Yeah, I understand that. Donald Pleasance is the MVP of that movie, an actual real actor, really selling Michael Myers as this force of murderous evil. Still though, while I appreciate the technical brilliance of Halloween, for me it just lacks a certain pizzazz to make me really love it as much as I love other early Carpenter movies.

I can see that. Halloween is probably his most understated movie.

I will put forth the notion that, even though Halloween introduced the general thematic structure of a slasher movie (start off with a bang, then simmer down for most of the rest of the movie, sprinkling loud moments throughout act 2 before going batshit crazy for the final act), Friday the 13th is the movie that put spawned the actual template that every slasher flick that came afterwards for over a decade copied, if only because of its much heavier emphasis on gory set pieces. Friday the 13th isn't really a movie about suspense, despite its origins as a Halloween cash-in; It wants to be, and it does have its fair share of suspenseful scenes and scenarios, but that movie really is just primarily about watching teenagers die in excitingly gruesome ways. It made slasher movies all about the violence, only Friday actually made sure to give you characters that you (at least sort of) gave a shit about, something almost all the other slasher movies of the 80s and early 90s failed to do. Characters you can invest in spell out the difference between something like Sleepaway Camp and something like Prom Night.

Oh, and by the way, FUCK I Know What You Did Last Summer. The laziest fucking slasher movie I've ever seen in my life. It's like if Scream was played 100% straight, taking all the tropes of slasher cinema and putting them together in the most uninteresting way possible.

Well, it doesn't hinge on its twist. The whole thing works fine as a good thriller movie, with a normal ending. The "twist" is really just a little coda to provide some further context to the film. It's still a good movie (in my opinion, of course) with or without it.

Agreed on both accounts. Not to mention a really crap music score.

That's debatable. Some could argue Halloween is a far too simplistic story and there's no real motivation behind Michael Myers apart from being "evil" which is a tale as old as the bible. There seems to be a more promising psychological angle that's never explored with Jamie Lee Curtis' character (where her friends/classmates don't see Michael yet she does). And without it's distinct music score the movie is pretty boring with pretentiously long scenes with far too minimal cuts. Can the movie work without it's score, probably not?

My bias is clear here since I think Texas Chainsaw Massacre is better than Halloween in pretty much every way (more interesting antagonist(s), better kills, more striking visuals, more intense finale), but even giving Halloween credit for establishing a blueprint seems debatable to me given that TCM came out a few years earlier. Although we don't actually see Leatherface kill anybody at the beginning, we see the results of his gang's work in the exhumed corpse art project. Then, in both Halloween and TCM (I guess I should use spoilers)

The music in the early Friday movies was so good. By the time we got to the New Line movies, though, it just got laughably bad, much like those movies (I forgot to mention Jason Goes to Hell as another hilariously stupid movie. The story is absolutely fucking ludicrous, and the movie is primarily saved by the some of the best gore effects ever put to film. I'd put the melting scene up there with anything from The Thing.).



You could indeed argue that Halloween is much too simple a story in its original incarnation, but that's a prime example of less being more, both in relation to the original series and the remake series. To expand on the latter a bit, Rob Zombie's remake is a similarly prime example of how to completely misunderstand what made a character work and almost completely send the story crumbling at the foundation. Yeah, the general story still somewhat works even when you add a backstory to Michael Myers, but it's nowhere near as effective. The general critical analysis, one that I obviously share, is that Halloween is a much more effective tale when Michael's motivation is that he doesn't have any real motivation; he just is this malevolent force of murderous nature. The first major misstep the original series took was making Laurie Michael's sister, as it gave him something of a motivation and simultaneously depleted much of the mystique surrounding him.

Yet another example of the lost potential of any hypothetical Halloween sequels is missing the psychological aspect you mentioned. There's a "Run the Series" article from A/V Club that critiques the entire Halloween series (I highly suggest reading it as it's a fascinating breakdown of the series, what made the good parts work, and why the bad parts are so fucking bad), and near the end the author posits a theory about an understated theme of the later Halloween movies being the severe traumatic effects on the protagonists. I'll quote that part here:



If the sequels had actually focused on that element of the characters more, as opposed to simply rehashing the story beats of the first movie but watered down and with unnecessary gore, then some of those movies might have actually been worth something. That's the main reason why H20 works better than any of the other Michael-centric sequels; it's something of a character study of Laurie Strode and how she's come to cope with being Michael Myers' sister & surviving the massacre at Haddonfield 20 years earlier.

And then Resurrection fucks it all up. Fuck Halloween Resurrection. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, and the first I can recall being genuinely angry at for both its content and for simply existing in the first place.



I think the line of succession can certainly be drawn from TCM to Halloween to Friday the 13th. TCM was the progenitor of the genre, laying much of the groundwork for what slasher movies would become. Halloween featured the same general template as TCM (with some variations, as you noted), plus a cinematographic style heavily influenced by Black Christmas, and became the most successful independent movie ever made at the time, directly leading into Friday the 13th, a movie that copied more from Halloween in terms of filming style and tone, but also included heavy elements of giallo cinema such as constant tracking shots from the killer's POV, never revealing the killer until near the end (as opposed to TCM and Halloween), and actually showing the ultra violent, gory content onscreen at all times (a move owed to both the giallo influences and the exploitation background of Sean S. Cunningham), unlike much of either Halloween or TCM. Friday became a massive success, and that directly lead to stuff like Prom Night, The Burning, and Sleepaway Camp, among countless other throughout the next 15 years before Scream came along and completely reshaped what being a slasher movie was all about (for better or worse).

Yeah, I mean the Blu-Ray release is two discs, with the theatrical release on one disc (exactly the same as the previous version) and a second disc with just this version. I think it's like $25, so if you don't already own the movie and wanna buy it I think this would be worth getting just so you can watch it both ways. I get that same impression though - if the movie had been intentionally filmed in black and white in the first place, then maybe that'd be different, but several scenes make obvious, intentional and necessary use of color, so those scenes basically just suck in this version. The part with the green in The Citadel as I mentioned, the part where the old biker ladies point out Furiosa's piercing eyes (omg they're gray just like everyone else's eyes!), the colored smoke fireworks, etc.

Whoa...whoa whoa whoa, hold the fuck up...

...don't you dare insult anything by Carpenter. Not even Ghosts of Mars or Vampires. You have to earn that right after this shit.


There's no lack of intention about it. I caught this on Syfy not long ago (guess what day?!), and Jason X is riddled with sight gags and overt humor. Soldier gets tossed onto the auger drill and slowly twists down it, killing them more and more, and what does his partner say when she finds the body? "He's screwed." Yeah, total joke, and it was in on it the whole time.

One of the Encore channels had a brief Child's Play marathon, so I caught the first after not seeing it fully since...damn, I think that was high school, so at least 12-13 years. The build to Andy's mom realizing there weren't any batteries in the doll is one of those perfect examples of horror, from the batteries falling out of the box up to when the doll asks if she wants to play. It's incredible how Mancini teased the idea that Andy was committing the murders pretty steadily until we see the doll in full motion, and I all but forgot about the voodoo doll scene. Bride and the second movie will always be my favorites, but this brought all those childhood nightmares back.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice - While not the worst out there, it was pretty bad. I enjoyed individual parts of it quite well, and visually and atmospherically it had some interesting things going on. But damn if it didn't feel like the Never Ending Movie... fuck, this was long.

And there was just so much crammed in, so much story and differing plotlines, that it barely felt like a cohesive movie at all - my friend and I thought it felt like two or three different films crammed together. It sucked how much of this was just setting up stuff for future movies, too - just focus on THIS movie. There were a lot of real WTF moments, too (the "Martha" stuff, Lex Luthor in general...).

Character-wise, it just didn't work - both Batman and Superman had the same beef with one another and yet they were both basically doing the same thing, recklessly endangering others. They should have been much more different than this, and it would have provided more conflict and been a more interesting movie. They were basically the same person here.

Both Affleck and Cavill did good in their roles... Cavill was much better here than in Man of Steel. Amy Adams as Lois Lane is still terrible though, not for her acting but because the character just fucking sucks in these movies.

Overall, had some good stuff in it, but I wouldn't be in a rush to watch this one again.

I highly recommend watching Curse of Chucky if you haven't already. Easily the only other Child's Play movie on the level of the first one, and they actually managed to make Chucky scary again after over a decade of Freddy Kruger-esq watering down.

I've seen it. The most amazing part was they cast Brad Dourif's daughter as the lead and nepotism worked as she carried the movie just fine. It's startling how much she looks like her old man, though. Creepy, even.

I watched Catfish last night. Being fairly active on a few online forums - and through which having dealt with a bizarre case that'd rival what I saw on the movie... it hit pretty close to home haha. As with many others, I'm very skeptical of the movie's validity/truth, but it was entertaining and gets you thinking I suppose.

Thank you, good sir.

I finally watched Shin Gojira and liked what I saw. Here is my detailed review: http://kluseba.eklablog.com/a-more-cont ... a128167966

Since I have watched a couple of other 2016 movies I hadn't seen before, it turned out that 2016 wasn't such a bad cinematic year after all if one knew where to look for good movies. Here's my updated Top 20:

1. The Wailing

2. Passengers

3. Train to Busan

4. A Monster Calls

5. Hacksaw Ridge

6. Chasse-Galerie

7. Arrival

8. Don't Breathe

9. Godzilla Resurgence

10. Allied

11. Call of Heroes

12. Yoga Hosers

13. The Purge: Election Year

14. The Magnificent Seven

15. Now You See Me 2

16. Jason Bourne

17. The Age of Shadows

18. The Girl on the Train

19. The Forest

20. Underworld: Blood Wars

Curse of Chucky wasn't bad. Not sure if Bride of Chucky holds up as I haven't seen it since 2000.

Yeah H20 gets a lot of hate which I call the Scream (1997) effect and it has some dumb jumpscares, but at least it really focused on Laurie Strode as a character, the negative effect she has on everyone she cared about, having to leave her life behind and fake her death to start completely new and somewhere safe, having a dark past while trying to raise and protect her only son, etc.

Resurrection was just stupid and a huge cop out. Big Brother was the "in" thing and Busta Rhymes was popular so a shitshow ensued. It was the most convoluted/convenient explanation as to the ending of H20, it was Jigsaw level retardation, and Laurie dies in the most pathetic way because fuck anybody that liked Halloween.

Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky are pretty funny movies in their own rights, but they aren't Child's Play movies. The only thing about those movies that's even remotely related to Child's Play is Chucky, and even then they gave him the Freddy Krueger treatment and made him a snarky wise ass. Brad Dourif absolutely pulls it off, but it's still a far cry from the Chucky of the first three movies.

Yeah as much as I dislike Child's Play 3 at least it felt part of a distinct trilogy. He was actually kind of scary in those movies versus the one liner stitched-up goofball in the two "Of" films you mentioned.

That's not to say those two movies aren't any good though; as said, they're good black comedies. They were so lucky that they got Brad Dourif a decade prior, because literally nobody else could pull that character off without coming off as a total doofus.

My favorite scene in Curse of Chucky was actually a callback to the "...of Chucky" movies, when It's a wonderfully tense, creepy scene, and the jump scare is excellent, unexpected, and 100% earned. It was also the moment in the movie where you realize that this is not a remake or a reboot, but a sequel to Child's Play. I liked that a lot. It could have been so easy to reboot that franchise, as has been the case for seemingly every 80s horror series over the past 15 or so years, but they doubled down and made a new movie in the original series, and it works greatly at resetting the tone back to straight horror, redefining Chucky as even more twisted than he was in the previous serious movies, and fitting in with the pre-existing storyline of Child's Play 1-3 and even the "...of Chucky" movies. Basically, it works in every possible way, and is the best movie it could have possibly been as a result.

There were three factors keeping me away from initially seeing Curse of Chucky.
- It appeared much like a reboot from the trailers/marketing
- It was set in a "spooky house"
- CGI Chucky/Chucky's Design

The CGI was thankfully very minimal. The characters made me forget how cliche the setting was, and yes it was very much was a sequel to Child's Play.

The first is the only straight up horror flick in the entire series, with its sequels increasing the dark humor considerably until Bride being mostly a gory comedy made the most sense. They keep the same character, premise, and continuity, so it's canon (especially since it's referenced in Curse).

Responses to things in the last page or so.

-Jason X is indeed rad. Actually one of my favourite Friday flicks. Oodles of fun and great kills. Only thing about it that sucks is mecha Jason. Mecha Jason looks like shit.
-Child's Play 1-2 and Curse of Chucky are rad.
-Don't even hate on Carpenter's Vampires. That movie is super underrated and James Woods is great in it.

Jason X has this scene:



which is the pinnacle of horror deaths.

Vampires is fucking righteous, James Woods is so amazing.



ALSO ALSO HUGE NEWS BIG NEWS. Two of my favorite B horror franchises are now rebooted on Blu-Ray - Phantasm and Wishmaster - so GO OUT AND PRE-ORDER BECAUSE OF AMAZING SCENES AND B MOVIE EFFECTS.

Vampires is a fun flick in its own right, but once the actual plot gets rolling hard and the exposition is over it can be quite a chore. I love Carpenter for his subdued direction that contrasts his often incredible concepts (Prince of Darkness gets by on this alone), but his action scenes typically bore the hell out of me (Escape From NY and Big Trouble in Little China make it worse since they're done so perfectly). Vampires is a mixed bag and would've been better served if the team from the beginning were in it throughout, slowly getting taken down one by one.

On the "top of 2016" trend, I have to go with my gut instincts here.

1. Hardcore Henry
Grindcore put to film. Never dull, rarely redundant, and it makes excellent use of the gimmick by providing some of the most intense action scenes I've ever seen. It also has the best use of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" outside of Shaun of the Dead.

2. Green Room
After this, I realized that Jeremy Saulnier's first feature was Murder Party, which I loved ("fuck this scene, everybody dies"). Patrick Stewart needs to play more villains, it's a shame Anton Yelchin passed away, and the raw brutality of the violence is matched by the lack of exploitation surrounding it.

3. The Purge: Election Year
This isn't my favorite of the series (Anarchy gets that nod from me), but Frank Grillo deserves as much love as he can get. The punk rock politics on display are worth it alone as it pulls no punches, decrying the very concept that makes these movies marketable, and yet it taunts the viewer into cheering on the violence. "Party in the USA" is going to be an iconic scene for years.

4. I Am Not A Serial Killer
Truth be told, this is the best made film in my top 5, but it lacks the gut-punching attention grabbing moments of those above it, though it does so intentionally. This may be Christopher Lloyd's greatest performance of his career, not the most memorable but the pound-for-pound greatest, and lead Max Records delivers on the sociopath level in much the same way as Christian Bale owned the hell out of Patrick Bateman.

5. The Invitation
I was dismissive initially, all too willing to point out the bland secondary characters and the rushed finale, but this is a movie that improves the more that I think about it. Handling grief is a necessary life lesson, one that nobody can truly prepare you for, and this showing the dissolution of relationships due to grief and the potentially dangerous ways of handling it...it's a must-see. Period.

I usually do a yearly list of the best and worst movies of the year, but I basically know my top five already.

1. The Family Fang
Not seen many others talk about this, but I found it extremely affecting and the nuanced character development made it such a strange, singular thing for me that nothing else really captured the same feeling all year. A soulful, oddball portrayal of family dysfunction and a frank discussion of art. Complex in ways it doesn't initially seem.

2. Swiss Army Man
A weird and beautiful movie that takes banal, gross-out, juvenile humor and uses it to tell a larger story that ends up a very poignant message about coming to terms with one's life, a reckoning, etc.

3. Nocturnal Animals
There was nothing else like this all year. A sparse, eerie, minimalist film that told much of its story through illusions and flashbacks. This said volumes between the lines, and was one of the more complex films all year.

4. Hell Or High Water
Simply the most entertaining, pure fun movie I saw all year, a complete joy to watch with excellent acting, fun characters and a propulsive, exciting robbery/crime/action/western tale. Love it.

5. Arrival
Dark and strange and slow, but wholly compelling due to its visuals and the creeping tendrils of the story not quite coming together that you want to see resolved - which they do at the end. Masterful.

Other ones I loved:

The Killing Joke
Captain Fantastic
Imperium
Don't Think Twice
The Witch
Jackie
A Monster Calls

Mecha Jason and Carrie Anne Moss robot was LExx level shit. Not to mention the tagline "Evil Gets An Upgrade.." - *insert Patrick Picard facepalm jpeg*
Yep. Agreed with that.
James Woods is legit great in everything. Even the immensely boring Salvador. My favourite recommendations for James Woods filcks are Cop (1988), Videodrome (A Stonecold Classic) The Hard Way (1991), Killer: A Journal of Murder (1988), and if you want something unintentionally funny The Boost (1988) delivers "Oh myan, these downers, are really gettin' to me". That being said he's done like 137 movies so I haven't seen everything.

I remembering seeing Jason X on tv a long time ago and I remember it being stupidly fun

Has anyone seen La La Land yet? I watched it last night, and even if i hate musicals this wasn't too bad. But if this is the contender for best movie at the oscars (it got 14 nominations), then it must have been a bad year for movies. Granted i haven't seen any of the other nominees.

It has been an amazing year for movies. La La Land is just the super safe Academy Award pick that usually happens every year. Like The Artist except even more safe.

Just the word, 'musicals', puts me off...

I saw Assassin's Creed last week, which was ridiculous, but an easy roller coaster of bullshit to fill the time on a cold afternoon.

I thought that Emily Blunt in, The Girl On the Train, was pretty good.

Michael 'Fucking' Bay made a disgusting remake. It was absolutely terrible. Bay just took out all of the originals interesting ideas. Wes Craven did the substance, was interested in subtext, and he was a moral film maker.

The central idea is that the kids are in danger because they have been lied to by their parents, and what Kruger is, is the manifestation of the sins of the fathers coming back to haunt them.

What does Bay do: Yeah! He's got a big fucking claw and he kills them all. Yeah! He kills them in their sleep, and sometimes he can kill them in real life.

Bay fucks the backstory, which was completely wrong. They lose all of the surrealism, and generally make a bigs ear of it with one shitty slasher set piece after another.

Fuck off!, Michael Bay

Blaming the producer for a movie you don't like is completely nonsensical. Producers have very minimal creative input, their role is to finance and organize the logistics of the production. Blame the writers and the director, not the producer.

I'd like to put some money down right now that "Moonlight" wins best picture. Haven't seen it but I know how the Academy likes to pick 'em.

I'll, finally, watch this at home.