Category: Movies

31 Days of Horror: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Halloween Curse of Michael Myers

I imagine when you are creating an original horror film, you aren’t necessarily thinking about what will happen to your characters some 17 years and 5 sequels later. Certainly John Carpenter wasn’t when he made Halloween (1978). He wasn’t particularly interested in making Halloween II (1982). His villain, Michael Myers, was unknowable, pure and simply evil, as Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) calls him in the original film. He didn’t need a backstory. We didn’t need to know what made Michael Myers tick…and kill.

But sequels, especially horror sequels, have a way of trying to fill in those blanks, of explaining away every little thing that happens in the first film. Even Carpenter did a little of that in Halloween II by making Michael Myers the brother of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) – the final girl of the first and second films – and connecting him to Celtic rituals and the occult.

Horror franchises rarely have someone overseeing every film. There generally isn’t someone keeping up with the lore and guiding the mythology every step of the way. Producers, writers, and directors come and go. Carpenter basically bailed on this series after the third film. Which is how we wound up with this mess of a film. It creates a Cult of Thorn to explain why Michael Myers kills and how he is so indestructible. It is so hated that every subsequent sequel has basically pretended this film doesn’t exist.

Set six years after Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (another film that is basically ignored by all the other sequels), everyone in this film believes Michael Myers died in the fire that ended the last one. Well, almost everyone. Loomis still thinks Myers will show up sooner or later, as he always does (and he’s always right).

The town of Haddonfield, Illinois, banned all celebrations of Halloween after Myers killing spree, but there is a movement to bring it back. The kids think it is time to move on.

Relatives of Laurie Strode’s adoptive family have now moved into the old Myers house. This includes Kara (Marianne Hagan) and her young son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy (Paul Rudd in his first film role), the kid Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first film.

Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd (JC Brandy), the little girl from the last film, is now fifteen years old and pregnant. She’s kidnapped and impregnated by the Cult of Thorn for reasons I won’t spoil.

Michael Myers is, of course, not dead, but is connected to the cult. The mythology gets a bit confusing and silly, but the good news is he’s back to killing people in Haddonfield. The bad news is the kills are spectacularly ordinary.

This film is better than its reputation, but just. It brings all of the characters I just mentioned together to try and stop Michael Myers. I appreciate the attempt to tie together some of the mythology from the previous films. It makes sense that they would tie Michael Myers ‘ indestructibility to something supernatural. It reminds me a bit of what they did in the recent Crystal Lake series in explaining Jason’s inability to die. These villains are something more than human, so you have to find some way to explain that.

The Cult of Thorn is pure nonsense, and I’m glad it was dropped in subsequent films, but I at least appreciate the attempt to bring all those loose ends together.

For some reason, they often show Michael Myers in fairly bright lights. His mask looks awful. Famously, the original mask was one of William Shatner from Star Trek, painted white. But John Carpenter was smart enough to cloud Michael Myers’ face in darkness and shadows. His mask in previous films looks otherworldly. Here it just looks silly.

Donald Pleasence gives it his old, but he’s clearly an old man and tired (he would be dead a few months later). The rest of the cast does their best. This isn’t by any means a good film, but for the sixth film in a slasher series, it isn’t terrible. You could do worse with your Halloween horror viewing.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

The Conjuring Last Rites

When I wrote about The Amityville Horror at the beginning of this month, I noted that every October I try to watch every film in some horror franchise. That wasn’t 100% true. I do try to complete an entire horror franchise, but I don’t usually watch all the films within the month. What I mean is, I try to watch all of the films I haven’t seen within a certain franchise. I don’t always watch the ones I’ve already seen.

I also don’t write about them all. With The Conjuring films, I decided to watch and review them all. Even though there are only four films in this series (well, there are technically nine films within the Conjuring universe, but I decided to just concentrate on the main films), I already understand why trying to review them all was a mistake. Like all horror franchises, there is a definite diminishing of returns with each sequel.

Last Rites purports to be the final film starring Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), and it definitely feels like it’s time to put them to bed.

In all of my reviews, I’ve talked about the real-life Warrens. I’ve called them charlatans. And they were. They made up stories about hauntings and possessions and presented them as truth. It is unclear if the families supposedly investigated by the Warrens were in on the scam or not. It seems likely that many of them truly thought they were being haunted, and the Warrens took advantage of that, wrote a book about it, and cashed the checks. But there were also allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse.

The Warrens were not good people. While watching the first movie in this series, you can kind of overlook that. There is a sort of tacit agreement that you are watching a movie. It isn’t real. It has ghosts, after all. It helps that it is a very good movie.

But each subsequent film works on beautifying the Warrens. It portrays them as loving, kind Christians out to help these poor people beset by demons out of the kindness of their hearts and at great personal peril. That makes the films more and more difficult to take. It is harder to separate who they really were and how they are portrayed on screen. Also, the filmmaking gets increasingly worse.

Last Rites begins with the Warrens’ first case. They are faced with, um, a haunted mirror. Yeah, these films deal in haunted objects; they make a big deal out of the Warrens’ museum of the occult. They made a whole film series out of a haunted doll. But at least that thing looks scary (the real Annabell looks like a Raggedy Anne doll, which is just hilarious). A mirror is, well, it’s just a mirror.

Anyway, the demon mirror forces a very pregnant Loraine into labor. Their baby comes out stillborn, but a little fervent prayer brings her to life. Flash forward a couple of decades, and the Warrens are taking a break from ghost busting due to Ed’s bad ticker. That daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is all grown up and engaged to Tony (Ben Hardy).

Meanwhile, the Smurl family has somehow wound up with that demon mirror, and it’s causing all sorts of horror in their household. Naturally, the Warrens get drawn into the case. This time, they bring their daughter and her fiancé. That brings an extra layer of family into the mix.

James Wan directed the first two Conjuring films, and he has a kinetic energy that makes the scares truly terrifying and an adept ability to make the character stuff work. This film is directed by Michael Chaves, and he’s not nearly as good.

The script does him no favors. It relies far too heavily on the relationship between the Warrens and, as I’ve already stated, I can no longer separate what I know about the real family and this fictional one. The stuff with the Smurl family isn’t all that interesting or scary. A mirror just isn’t intrinsically frightening (although they did a pretty good job of making one scary in Oculus). There is also a really fake-looking ghost with an axe and an old lady ghost with some terrible makeup.

The film does a lot of that thing where a horror movie will set up a scene like it’s preparing you for a jump scare, and then it will be something mundane, only to really throw the scare at you a moment later. That sort of thing has become tedious on its best days, and here you get it far too many times.

With a runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes, it is entirely too long. This is mostly due to this being the last film and them needing to wrap some things up for the Warrens. I was ready to turn the thing off way before then and say goodbye to the whole franchise.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring – The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

The Conjuring The Devil Made Me Do It

The first two Conjuring films followed a pattern. They began with Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) on a case. It won’t be the case that consumes the rest of the film, and they don’t actually show us much of it. But it does show us a bit of who the Warrens are and what they are about. It also sets up the villains for some side-quels.

Then we’ll shift to the family who will be haunted for the rest of the film. For half the film, it will cut back and forth between the Warrens doing their thing and the haunted family getting increasingly haunted.

There isn’t anything special about that setup, but it worked. It helped develop our characters and slowly ramped up the hauntings. For this, the third film in the franchise, they switched things up a bit. It does begin with the Warrens on a case. A young boy has been possessed; the Warrens are doing their best to free the child from the demon. Things go haywire. The demon nearly kills Ed. He has a heart attack.

But just as things are getting truly terrifying, a man named Arne (Ruairi O’Connor), who is the boyfriend of the possessed boy’s sister, demands that the demon leave the boy alone and enter him. It does, and things return to normal. For a while. But then Arne kills his landlord. At his trial, he pleads not guilty due to possession.

The formula has changed. The opening case isn’t tangentially related to our main plot; it is the main plot. In addition to that, whereas in the first two films we spend a great deal of time with the family as the haunting ramps up, this film is about a guy in prison. We get a few spooky scenes in the prison, but mostly this is the Warrens’ film.

They find a totem underneath the possessed kid’s house. That’s the sign of a devil-worshipping cult. The film then becomes a mystery. The Warrens try to figure out who put the totem there and what for.

All of this throws the balance off. What made the first two films work so well is that you got to know these characters. Not just the Warrens but the other families too. That made us care about their spiritual plight. We don’t get that with Arne or the rest of the family.

We’ve already spent two films with the Warrens. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well. Wilson and Farmiga are good actors, and they make the Warrens come alive. The central theme of these films is how their love for each other transcends all of the horror. But the more I watch these films, the more the real Warrens slip into my mind, and they were charlatans. That keeps tainting my feelings toward the films. Keeping the focus on them doesn’t help matters.

Neither does this satanic cult story. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t all that interesting either. There are some decent scares throughout, but it doesn’t build the tension like the other films did. And thus it becomes just another standard horror film without anything that makes it stand out.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuirng 2

I often lie in bed at night thinking about a movie I just watched. I’ll think about the things I want to say about it and mentally compose a review. Normally, the next day I’ll sit down and actually write that review. Every now and again, I’ll wake up thinking that I actually did write the review instead of just thinking about it. This is one such occasion. I would have sworn I wrote and posted a review to The Conjuring 2, but no such luck. It has now been a couple of weeks since I watched the movie, so my memory of it has faded a bit. Normally, I’d just let it go and not write a review, but I made a promise that I’d review all the Conjuring films this scary season, so here goes (being that it is October 24 and I haven’t watched the two other films in the main series, I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to keep the promise, but I’ll try).

The first time I watched this sequel, I was disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as scary as the first one, and the family being haunted wasn’t nearly as interesting or well developed. But on this watch, my appreciation grew.

Plot-wise, this film is very similar to the first one. It begins with a story that is mostly unrelated to the main plot. This one begins with the haunting at Amityville. That’s an interesting choice, for before these films, the Warrens were best known for participating in The Amityville Horror. But that story has been told a couple of times before, and in truth, the Warrens didn’t show up until after the Lutz family had split. So here we get just a bit of a séance and indications that the horrors of that house are some of the most intense the Warrens have ever dealt with (that will be a recurring theme with these films, every story is the most crazy story they ever experienced.) Also, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) gets a vision of an evil nun.

Later, Ed (Patrick Wilson) will get some visions of that same nun and will paint a horrifying picture of her (one that he’ll hang in his office for some reason).  The Nun will, of course, be the antagonist of a series of sidequal films.  We’ll see more of her in the Warrens’ part of this film before they meet up with our family.

That family is the Hodgsons, led by Peggy (Frances O’Connor ) and her four children. They live near London in a rundown house. The oldest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe), plays with an Ouija board and accidentally summons a demon.  We get the same sort of jump scares as in the first one, though they amp them up a bit here. There are a variety of demons at play in this one, including an old man, The Crooked Man, and something else. Like most sequels, everything gets jacked up a bit.

But this time I found the slower parts with the Hodgson family to be good. They are a kind, working-class family just trying to get by. The father left some time ago, and Peggy is struggling to keep everything afloat. There are some nice character moments with the children and we get a real sense of who they are as a family before all hell breaks loose. I was less enthused about what the Warrens are up to at home. The nun stuff has some good scares, but isn’t all that interesting (and definitely doesn’t make me want to watch those films). And I’m already growing tired of them wrestling with whether or not they should continue this line of work. Here, Lorraine has visions of Ed being killed, and so she doesn’t want to take the case, but of course they take the case because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. I don’t need that constant drama.

Once the two families get together, the scares get crazy. But like the first film, they are dolled out slowly at first. The two families get to know each other. WE once again see how kind and loving the Warrens are. Ed will help fix a leaking pipe, etc. All of that stuff works for me. I like the smaller scene and the smaller horror. Once things reach a fever pitch it starts to fell like so many other horror movies at the end.

It isn’t quite as good as the first film, but I’m still on board with this franchise.

 

The Friday NIght Horror Movie: I, Madman (1989)

I Madman (1989)

Virginia Clayton (Jenny Wright) is an aspiring actress who works at a used bookstore. She likes horror novels, and one night she scares herself while reading an obscure book by the deceased author Malcolm Brand. She calls her detective boyfriend, Richard (Clayton Rohner), over to comfort her and have a little sexy time. While the book did scare her, she liked it and attempts to find the only other book Brand wrote, I Madman. She has no luck finding it for herself, but one night it shows up on her doorstep.

The book is about a crazed man who decides the best way to express his passion for the woman he loves is to cut off his ears, nose, and lips. When she rejects him, he begins murdering people to get those body parts back. His first victim is an actress whom he stalks, murders, and cuts her hair off.

Back in reality, a woman in Virginia’s acting class has been brutally murdered; her hair was cut off. Virginia becomes obsessed with the book and believes the killer to be its author. He has come back to life and is enacting the murders he wrote about. She begins seeing him on the street. She thinks he believes she is the girl from the book that he was obsessed with.

Meanwhile, more folks are getting killed and facially mutilated just like in the book. When she witnesses one murder that happens across the street from her apartment, she calls the police. She tells her boyfriend everything. At first, they are excited to have a witness, but when she starts talking about characters jumping out of a book, they think she’s crazy. The film plays it close to the vest for a while as to whether or not she is crazy, or if this madman has come to life.

I’ve watched quite a few dumb horror movies lately. Movies that felt like the filmmakers were searching for a quick buck rather than any sort of artistic vision. Movies that give the audience some gore and boobs and call it a day. That might have caused me to rate this one a little higher than it perhaps deserves. I really appreciated that I, Madman was actually trying to make an interesting movie. It put in an effort.

I do, genuinely, think it is a good movie. Director Tibor Takács, fresh off making his cult classic The Gate, infuses the film with a wonderful sense of dread. We spend a lot of time in Virginia’s (really quite spacious) apartment, lit with nothing but lamps, giving it a cavernous feel full of shadows. He blends fiction with reality, creating an eerie dreamscape. Jenny Wright is quite good as Virginia, giving her an innocent quality that makes her feel quite vulnerable.

It isn’t a perfect film. The ending is a little silly, and Takács falls back on some of the special effects he used in The Gate. But I came to this knowing absolutely nothing about it, and I came away more than pleasantly surprised.

 

31 Days of Horror: Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th

I’ve talked before about how I grew up in the 1980s watching slashers. Though I watched all the horror movies I could get my hands on it was the Friday the 13th series that really did it for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch them in the theater, and my parents certainly wouldn’t rent them for me so I had to watch them on basic cable. Luckily, those films were played pretty regularly. Every Friday the 13th the USA network would play two or three of them, and other stations would randomly put them on for their late-night viewings.

As such, I watched them both edited and out of order. I really don’t know if I saw them all as a teenager. I know I watched the one where Corey Feldman shaves his head, the third one with the terrible 3-D effects, and Jason Takes Manhattan. I think I saw the first one at some point, but I feel like cable stations didn’t play that one all that often, as Jason isn’t actually in it and he became the main attraction.

I remember watching Scream in college, and when Drew Barrymore answered the killer’s question about who the main bad guy in Friday the 13th was, I answered “Jason Voorhees” along with her and was surprised when that was the wrong answer. I can’t remember now if I then remembered it was his mother in the first film that was the killer, or if it came as a surprise because I had not yet seen the film. I definitely watched it soon after.

A good ten years later, not long after I got married, Wal-Mart was selling the films as DVDs for five bucks a piece. I bought the first three, with plans on watching them and then buying the others later. I remember watching the first film and thinking it was really bad. By that point I had discovered the horror films of the Italians and Japanese and watched a whole lot of other horror films. Slashers seemed kind of old hat by then. Boring and derivative. I was also a bit more of a cinephile, and so Friday the 13th just seemed like an excuse to show tits and blood on screen and little else.

Another couple of decades have passed, and I find myself back to being able to enjoy them (I reviewed the first eight films over at Cinema Sentries). With a new Peacock series, Crystal Lake, which brings us the backstory of Jason and Mrs. Voorhees, I decided to revisit the first film.

It is amazing how slow this film is to get started. We do get a kill in the first ten minutes – a flashback to 1957 sits with a happy sing-along at Camp Crystal Lake; a horny couple slips off to get sexy, only to wind up murdered. Then we move back to the present. The camp was closed a few years back when a young boy drowned, but now they plan to reopen it. Annie (Robbi Morgan), the camp’s new cook, is hitchhiking her way to camp. She comes into the nearby town and asks around about how to get there. She’s met with stares and mean glares. She shouldn’t go to “Camp Blood,” they say. A crazy man warns her that she’ll die if she does. Eventually, a trucker agrees to take her close to the camp. On the way, he warns her of the camp’s terrible past. He drops her off at a crossroads where she’s picked up by an unknown person in a Jeep. She gets herself dead.

But then we go a long time before another murder happens. We meet the rest of the counselors. They do some work around the camp. They swim in the lake and generally clown around. Some of them (including a young Kevin Bacon) get sexy with each other, while others play strip Monopoly. It is all fairly tame and rather silly. It is kind of a hang-out movie for a while.

Then the killings begin proper. None of them are particularly memorable. There are some cut throats and a pretty gruesome arrow through the neck, but the later films will do a much better job of bringing the kills. The reveal that it is Jason’s mother (Betsy Palmer) who is the killer comes out of left field. Jason is barely mentioned in the film. There are a couple of lines explaining how the counselors weren’t very attentive, and Jason drowned accidentally, but the film doesn’t make a big deal out of it. His mother is barely mentioned at all. Then, all of a sudden, there she is as the killer. It’s funny, too, because she’s an older-looking, middle-aged woman with short hair and a church lady sweater. She looks nothing like a killer. But Palmer’s unhinged performance absolutely sells it.

It is curious to realize that this film launched a massive horror franchise. It’s not a bad film; I find myself quite liking it (though I can’t really remove all the nostalgia from my mind while watching it now). But I can’t say that it is better or more interesting than any number of other slashers that came out at the same time. We don’t even get Jason in a hockey mask in this one (Jason wouldn’t really show up until the next film, and it would take the third one before the hockey mask shows up.)

But it made a lot of money and spawned sequels, and here I am talking about it some forty years later.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II

I have always thought that John Carpenter directed Halloween II. Up until today, I would have told you that he didn’t want to direct it, but after the massive success of the first one, he was told by the studio, the producers, or some such higher-up that they were going to make a sequel with or without him, and he decided it would be best if it was with him.

Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and the second part I guess I just made up. It is true that Carpenter didn’t really want there to be a sequel, had no interest in making one, but was pressured into making it. But he was never given an ultimatum, and he never agreed to direct. That job fell to Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter did write the script, along with the original film’s co-writer Debra Hill. He was also a producer and, depending on who you believe, Carpenter either came in during the filming stage and directed a few scenes himself, or had a large hand in post-production, adding in some extra violence and gore.

It is easy to see why I believed this was a John Carpenter film. His name is featured prominently in the credits (I guess I always overlook the Directed By card), he did write and produce this one (he basically completely bowed out of all the other films featuring Michael Myers after this – he did produce Halloween III, but Myers isn’t in that one), and this looks and feels like a John Carpenter film. That feeling is helped by the plot of this one taking place immediately after the original one; it stars most of the same cast and utilizes the same cinematographer, and Rosenthal has stated he intentionally mimicked Carpenter’s style in the first film.

This one gets a lot of hate in certain corners of the internet (and I now wonder if that isn’t because it was helmed by Rosenthal and not Carpenter), but I unabashedly love it. True, it isn’t as good as the first one, but it looks fantastic, has some great deaths, and the hospital setting is terrific.

It really does begin just as the original ends. Actually, it begins a couple of minutes into the ending of the first one. We revisit Michael Myers getting “killed” by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), but from a slightly different perspective. Then we watch him walk away.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to the hospital with some cuts and bruises and a pretty banged-up leg. Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a whole lot of screen time in this film. She’ll spend the first half of it basically lying in a hospital bed. She gets plenty of action in the back half, though. But first, we’ll spend time with various nurses and staff members of the hospital. They will mostly become cannon fodder for Michael Myers.

Myers will spend that first half of the film wandering around the town of Haddonfield, randomly killing folks. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) will do a poor job of hunting him down. Eventually, Myers will hear someone say something about how Laurie was sent to the hospital, and he’ll head that way. It all leads to a long showdown between Laurie, Loomis, and Michael Myers.

The stuff in the town is fine. There are some good kills, and it helps build tension to the hospital showdown. Pleasence plays Loomis even more hysterically than he does in the first. Having shot the man multiple times at the end of the first film, he’s now more sure than ever that Michael Myers is not human but something like a demon.

The hospital stuff is well done, if a little silly at times. One of the nurses, after getting yelled at for being late, decides to slip off with a boy to the lower decks, where there is some kind of therapeutic hot tub where she gets sexy (and dead). It always drives me a little crazy when hospital lights are turned off or dimmed. Sure, you can turn your room lights off, but hospitals are notoriously bright. They have to be. Doctors, nurses, and staff can’t function if they can’t see. But yeah, it makes the movie a lot moodier.

Those long hallways are used effectively, and Michael Myers still has a way of popping into a scene seemingly out of nowhere. I’d argue that Halloween is not only one of the greatest horror movies, but is a great movie on its own merits. Halloween II is a great slasher, but not a particularly good movie.

Still, I love it so.

31 Days of Horror: Sweet Sixteen (1982)

Sweet Sixteen

At the heart of this relatively obscure, early 1980s slasher is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell), a teenager and daughter of the town’s sheriff (Bo Hopkins). She’s bright, outgoing, and a bit of a detective herself. When Sheriff Burke comes across a murder scene, she is with him. But she doesn’t recoil from it; she’s enthralled. She gives her Dad ideas on how to best investigate. He calls her Nancy Drew and tries to keep her away from the gore.

The scenes with her are delightful. I could watch a whole movie of her and her dad solving crimes in this small town. But this isn’t a fun little mystery movie; this is a slasher horror, so of course we don’t stick with those two.

It is Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) who is our protagonist. She’s the fifteen-year-old who thinks of herself as much older and wiser than the kid she really is. She’s also new to town; her father has moved her there for some kind of Native American archeological dig. And she’s a big flirt. The film begins with her walking to the seedier side of town, talking a boy into giving her a ride home, and almost immediately making out with him.

The thing is, every boy she flirts with gets himself brutally killed. Naturally, she becomes a suspect. But Sheriff Burke is a good cop. He’s not going to arrest a 15-year-old girl right before her Sweet Sixteen birthday. Bo Hopkins has such a natural screen presence. I immediately like him, and he plays the Sheriff with real warmth.

There is a lot of typical 1980s slasher nonsense in this film. We get a skinny dip in the local pond, a bit of sexing, some blood-soaked gore, and a whole lot of racism. The film tries to be on the right side of history for that last part. There is a native American character, Jason (Don Shanks). He is repeatedly harassed by some local rednecks. The film clearly depicts them as racist, but it still seems to delight in those scenes. He’s also a little too stereotypical for my tastes.

Most of the men in this film, including some of the “good guys,” do an awful lot of leering at Melissa. Jason practically wags his tongue at her.

If you can overlook those things (and admittedly it is quite a lot to overlook), there is a pretty good film underneath. Seriously, I would have loved a whole series of films with the Sheriff and his daughter solving crimes.

Friday the 13th 8-Movie Collection

Friday the 13th 8 Movie Collection Blu

For many years, I wrote for Cinema Sentries and never posted any sort of links to those reviews on this site. In those days, The Midnight Cafe was music only; I figured movie reviews would only muddy the waters. That has changed, of course, many times over, but I’ve still not linked to all my Cinema Sentries reviews.

I try to keep up with the new stuff, and sometimes I go back to the earliest reviews and systematically try to link to them. Or I start at the end and do the same. But there is still a surprising amount of stuff in the middle that I haven’t got to.

This boxed set of Friday the 13th movies, for example. I wrote this in August of 2021. Which seems like forever ago. You can read my review here.