The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hereditary (2018)

hereditary

This week I watched exactly one movie, Beau is Afraid the new horror film by Ari Aster. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. It isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it did take me three days to complete it. There was just only so much of it I could take in one setting. It is a film with a particular point of view, and that POV is rather unsettling.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man with intense anxiety. He is the sort of person who always imagines the absolute worst thing possible is going to happen. The film essentially stays in his point of view and so I was never sure what was real and what was just in his head. Critic Matt Singer has a very good review of the film and he explains it much better than I am.

I finished Beau is Afraid yesterday and so it is not the Friday Night Horror Movie, but watching that film made me want to return to Ari Aster’s first full-length feature film, Hereditary. And that is the FNHM.

Like Beau is Afraid, Hereditary is a strange, unsettling film and I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I connected to it much more strongly than I did with Beau.

Like so many modern horror films Hereditary is about grief. It begins with the death of a matriarch, or rather the funeral of the matriarch. She was a complicated, sometimes difficult woman as we’ll learn by listening to her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) give her eulogy. Mother and daughter had a strained relationship. The family has a long history of mental illness that ends in tragedy.

Later another terrible tragedy will strike sending the family spiraling. Annie begins having visions of the dead. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries to hold the family together but his own grief envelops him. The son, Peter (Alex Wolff) blames himself for the accident.

The film goes to unexpected and weird places, almost none of it is believable, and yet I was completely carried away by it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as to avoid spoilers but if you like horror that find a unique way to terrify then this is a movie worth checking out.

Collette gives an absolutely riveting performance. Ann Dowd shows up too as a, well, again I won’t spoil it, but she’s always worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Royal Hotel (2023)

the royal hotel

Hannah (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking in Australia. When they run out of money they go to an employment agency that specializes in finding gigs for travellers. They are sent to a remote mining town where they are employed as bartenders at a dirty, rundown pub/hotel.

It is run by a drunken bastard of a man who has clearly seen better days (a glorious Hugo Weaving), and it is patronized by a motley crew of miners who are as rowdy as they are misogynistic. They constantly harass with come-ons and sexist jokes.

Writer/director Kitty Green (along with co-writer Oscar Redding) fills The Royal Hotel with an unending sense of dread. From the moment Hannah and Liv arrive in town there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen to them.

But this isn’t a movie filled with knife-wilding maniacs or skeezy rapists, or cannibals. It is more realistic than that. The men, for the most part, seem like decent blokes – hard-working, blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges blokes for sure, but not necessarily evil men.

But that’s the thing, that’s the point the film is trying to make. A couple of young women, out-of-towers, like these girls are, will inevitably face a litany of potential dangers in a place like this. And there is no way for them to tell who is essentially harmless, and who might cause them real horror.

Hannah is the one who recognizes the potential danger they face every night, while Liv seems more oblivious. She’s willing to accept the overt sexism as a cultural difference. It is up to Hannah then, to constantly steer Liv away from danger.

One of the locals, Matty (Toby Wallace) takes a shine to Hannah. He seems nice so the girls allow him to take them to a watering hole for a swim. They have a good time and get a little drunk. That night he puts a few moves on Matty. She rebuffs. Gently at first, but he persists. She tells him straight up “no” but he pushes back. Eventually, she has to get tough and yell at him. But at that moment it isn’t clear if he will leave.

Another customer, Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is seen lingering upstairs in the hall near their room. On another night he gets aggressively rude with Matty. But he’s sweet to Liv, especially when she’s drunk. On at least a couple of times, he steers her towards his car when she’s completely loaded.

It is a slow burn of a film. There isn’t a lot of incident. Not a lot happens. For most of the film’s run time, I felt myself waiting for something to happen. Something horrible. That’s not a knock on the film at all, I found it rather exhilarating. So many horror films go running straight to the jump scares and the violence, that it was rather pleasing to watch a film so willing to take its time.

I hesitated to make this my Friday Night Horror film because, well, to be honest, the horror never really comes. It doesn’t end in a bloodbath. Not to spoil things but it does end with a bit of violence, but not in the traditional horror movie sense. There are some tonal shifts moving the film between horror, thriller, and something like a workplace-from-hell drama that the film doesn’t quite pull off. But mostly it really worked for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

knock at the cabin

A young family is vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods. Seven-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) is outside catching grasshoppers. A huge, hulking man slowly approaches. He says his name is Leonard (Dave Bautista) and despite his size, he’s gentle and kind. We’ll later learn he is an elementary teacher and we can believe that in his demeanor and actions.

But while he is being nice to Wen, engaging in her grasshopper collecting, he keeps looking over his shoulder as if something menacing is going to approach.

Moments later three people do appear. Leonard tells Wen that they are going to have to come into the cabin and that she should tell her dads.

Wen panics at this and then rushes to the cabin, and screams at her Dads – Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) to come inside and lock the door. They try to calm her down but when they see Leonard, and all his girth, standing at the door they get worried. When they see the other three carrying what appear to be makeshift weapons, they panic.

Leonard tries to explain that they need to come inside. He does so in his school teacher’s voice. The film makes great use of Bautista’s size juxtaposed against his kindly demeanor. But he also says they will force themselves in if the men don’t unlock the doors.

The doors remain locked and these strangers do force themselves in. After a brief fight, where Eric sustains a concussion, Eric and Andrew are tied up.

The strangers, which also include a nurse, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a cook Adriane (Abby Quinn), and a violent redneck Redmond (Rupert Grint) tell a strange tale about how each of them has been having visions about the end of the world. About how Eric and Andrew must make a decision – a grave decision to stop it. They must choose one member of their family to sacrifice – to kill, to murder – to stop the oncoming apocalypse.

That’s completely mad. No one would believe a few nutters barging into their house spouting that nonsense. And our heroes don’t believe it. But then the film starts to make us, and them believe.

I won’t spoil the details but the film uses the isolated setting and a few other tricks to make this scenario plausible. Director M. Night Shyamalan is an expert in creating tension out of fantastical settings and stories.

Still, I never quite bought into the premise. The thing about a film like this is that you spend all your time wondering what the film is going to do in the end. Will the apocalypse come? Or will it be averted by someone being sacrificed? Or will they sacrifice someone only to realize that the strangers were in fact crazy and nothing actually happened on the outside? Or will it have an oblique ending, will we never know if the apocalypse was real or not?

Apparently, the movie ends differently than the book, and most people seem pretty upset with the changes they made. I’ve not read the book, but the ending definitely was not satisfying. But I’m not sure it could have done anything to really satisfy. As I said, I never quite bought into what the story was selling.

Still, I quite liked the film. Shyalaman is a very good director and a master of camera placement and movement. I was enthralled with the filmmaking even when the story let me down.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

10 cloverfield lane poster

The MCU has ruined cinema in so many ways. I mean I’m a fan of many of their films but the way that they essentially steamrolled Hollywood has created numerous problems. Listen to Martin Scorsese for the details, but one of those issues was that it made every movie try to become part of its own cinematic universe.

10 Cloverfield Lane is the perfect example of this. Cloverfield was a JJ Abrams film in which…actually, you know what? I’m not going to spoil what Cloverfield was about. If you haven’t seen that film, if you haven’t even heard of it then I’m gonna let you exist in ignorance. It isn’t a bad film, but staying in the dark on that film is a very good thing when it comes to watching this one.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie that was developed on its own. It was only later when they actually moved forward into the process of making it that they decided to make it part of the Cloverfield Cinematic Universe and tacked on an ending to fit that sequence, and well, that was a dumb idea.

Anyway, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Michelle, a woman who as the film begins is running away from her fiancé. They’ve had a fight and she can’t handle it.

Out on the road, in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, she has a terrible accident that renders her unconscious. Sometime later she awakes inside a bare, cinderblock bunker. There is an IV connected to her arm and a brace connected to her leg. She’s also chained to the wall. Terrified she tries to escape, but to no avail.

Then in walks a massive, hulking man. His name is Howard (John Goodman). He tells her she can’t escape, tosses her a key to her chains, and then shuts and locks the door. Eventually, he lets her out and shows her around his rather large, and fully accommodated underground bunker. He tells her a story about how he rescued her from that car wreck and brought her down there to escape…something. Something bad. An attack of some sort. He thinks it was Russians or possibly aliens but they’ve made the air poisonous. Only they survived and they are stuck down there for at least a year.

The they also includes Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) Howard’s neighbor who helped build the bunker and is a believer in the invasion story. He saw it with his own eyes. Michelle is skeptical. Howard is clearly unstable. One minute he’s a kindly, country farmer, the next he’s grabbing onto her shoulders and screaming. He built this bunker expecting something terrible and now he’s imagined it.

The screenplay wavers. There are moments when it seems as if Howard is crazy, that the outside terrors are just his imagination. And then a moment later we’ll see something that makes us believe. As the film moves forward Michelle begins to realize that the horrors inside might just be worse than the horrors outside.

It is an incredibly well-constructed, tension-filled, little horror-thriller. I love films that are set entirely inside a single setting and the bunker is a fantastic place for this movie. It is small and claustrophobic while still having enough rooms and crannies to keep things interesting. The film twists and turns in the most fascinating ways. When she first finds herself chained up in that little room we expect the worst. We expect what horror movies usually give us in those scenarios. But the film doesn’t give us that, it gives us something else.

The ending does tie itself to the Cloverfield universe and I don’t really love that, but also it is surprisingly tense. Giving us an answer to the question as to what is going on outside was always going to be a letdown, and yet again it worked for me on a beat-for-beat cellular level. I mean it was scary.

Goodman gives an absolutely fantastic performance. I wish he’d been given more opportunities like this. Winstead and Gallagher are likewise superb. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s a really good one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Deep Red (1975)

deep red poster

I’ve mentioned Dario Argento several times before on this blog. He’s one of my favorite directors – certainly my favorite horror director. He didn’t invent the Giallo, but he definitely popularized it and perfected it. Deep Red is one of, it not my actual favorite films of his and possibly the best Giallo ever made.

The plot is deceptively simple – it is a relatively straightforward murder mystery – and yet also a convoluted mess. David Hemmings stars as a jazz pianist who witnesses his downstairs neighbor get brutally murdered. He teams up with a journalist played by Daria Nicolodi and tries to figure out what happened.

I’ve seen this film at least five different times, and I’m still not sure I understand everything that happens in the film or the real motivation of the killer.

And I don’t care in the least that I don’t.

Argento was a master of style and it is on full display here. It is full of dark, bold colors (especially red) and disturbing imagery. The camera moves and slides across corridors, it is filled with extreme closeups and wondrously stylized violence.

There is a scene about halfway through the film in which a character sits in his office. The camera and the music let us know that something scary is about to happen. That the killer is there. The character knows it. We hear the killer whisper. Then something happens, I won’t spoil it here, but it is one of the most surprising and terrifying things I’ve ever witnessed at the cinema.

When my heart slows down I realize that this moment makes absolutely no logical sense, especially given who the killer turns out to be, but again I just don’t care.

The score by progressive rock band Goblin is kinetic, percussive, and heart-pounding. They wrote the scores for several other Argento films and they are all terrific. The director uses the music to great effect – stopping and starting it at crucial moments creating small, but effective adrenaline rushes.

If you are a horror fan I absolutely recommend Deep Red to you.

Like a lot of Italian productions at the time the film was shot without sync sound. All of the dialog was dubbed in post-production in both English and Italian. In previous watches I was always confused because periodically some characters would start speaking Italian without warning and then a moment later they would switch back to English. Bilingual people can, and often do this in real life, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it in this film.

Pulling out my Arrow Vidoe Blu-ray tonight I discovered why. They edited out several scenes (and snippets of scenes) for the exported cut of the film (which presumably means the copies sent to English-speaking countries) and thus they did not record English language tracks for those scenes. Or if they did the English tracks were lost at some point. Those scenes have since been added back into the English language version of the film but there are no English language audio for the new scenes. In some ways this adds to the already disjointedness of the film.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Haunting In Venice (2023)

a haunting in venice poster

I follow a lot of film critics and culture writers on various social media platforms. Most of them like to periodically complain about the state of the movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has created a seismic change in movies, and more specifically the way movies are shown in theaters. Or rather how many movies are no longer shown in theaters.

The MCU has made billions upon billions of dollars. Their method of interconnecting their films into one giant universe (and making piles of cash in the process) has made every other studio chase those billions. In doing so they are no longer satisfied with smaller movies, where they can only make millions of dollars instead of billions, virtually erasing mid-budget films in the process.

These film critics complain and complain about how adult-oriented dramas, mysteries, and romances simply don’t exist at the movies anymore. They wax nostalgic about times in the past, two or three decades ago, when they could go to the movies and watch something that wasn’t based upon a comic book or a part of a larger franchise.

Yet, when those types of films do get made and do get shown in the theaters, these same critics tend to pan them and encourage others not to go see them.

Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot films are a good example of this. Based upon the novels of Agatha Christie, Branaugh has directed and starred in three films in which he plays the famous Belgian detective. I won’t claim that they are great films by any stretch, but they aren’t big-budget superhero films either. They are well-told mysteries with terrific casts and are made for adults. In a word they are exactly the sort of films that these types of critics complain don’t get made anymore. Yet when the movies come out, those same critics do nothing but grouse about them.

And that’s enough grousing from me. The latest Poirot film is probably the best one. As the title implies there is a supernatural element to it, and while it isn’t a straight horror it certainly contains elements of horror and that means I get to talk about it tonight. It also means that my daughter is having a sleepover and me and the wife had a much-needed date night and this is as close to horror as she’d let me get.

Hercule Poirot has retired into seclusion in Venice, Italy. There has been too much death and misery in his life and he simply cannot stand to tackle another mystery.

When his friend, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a novelist who writes thinly veiled Poirot mysteries, invites him to a seance he at first declines but her friendship wins him over.

The seance takes place on Halloween night in an old, decaying palazzo. It is being held by Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) who hopes to speak to her daughter who mysteriously killed herself in the palazzo one year prior. Also at the seance are an assortment of interesting people all of whom have a connection to Rowena and her daughter and, it will be found out, had a reason to murder her.

Poirot quickly exposes the psychic (Michelle Yeoh) as a fraud and is ready to leave, but when the psychic is murdered and someone tries to drown him in an apple bobbing bowl, he locks everyone inside the palazzo and finds himself once again back on a case.

This one is based on a much less famous book (Hallowe’en Party) than the other two films (Murder on the Orient Express & Death on the Nile). Apparently, it’s quite loosely based as well, which allows it to surprise you with its story rather than retell one that is quite familiar to casual fans.

The palazzo is reminiscent of all those gothic castles in those old haunted house movies that I love so much. It allows for plenty of creepy, atmospheric shots down long corridors, and shadowy rooms. The film has a lot of fun toying with whether or not the supernatural aspects are real or not, making it great fun to watch.

Kenneth Branagh clearly enjoys himself playing the famous detective and he’s become quite good at it. He’ll never replace David Suchet (who played Poirot in the long-running British television series) but he’s still quite entertaining. I love that he’s able to make these lavish adaptations with large, wonderful, casts. I hope he gets to make a dozen more.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The First Power (1990)

the first power

A crazy, satanic serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles. Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) is on the case. Or rather he’s chilling at home when a psychic (Tracy Griffith) calls him up and tells him where the killer’s next victim is going to occur. But she makes him promise that he won’t kill the killer nor will he allow him to get the death penalty.

Our hero gets the killer but he reneges on the deal to not let him get the death penalty. After he gets the gas chamber Detective Logan starts seeing horrific images and hearing the killer’s voice in his head.

The psychic shows up in person to let him know that the killer’s soul is now inhabiting the bodies of others and the killings will continue until they can stop them.

It is Noirvember and as I noted in today’s Daily Bootleg Post I’m gonna be busy watching a bunch of kung-fu movies over the next week or two. It is also Friday and I’m definitely not giving up my Friday Night Horror Movie. So, I was trying to find a way to blend those two things together.

Theoretically, that’s pretty easy to do. Film noir is hard to define and thus the definition is actually pretty flexible. Neo-noir is even more flexible. Both tend to involve crime, often murder. Sometimes serial murder. Horror films generally involve some murder and sometimes those murders are wrapped up in a murder mystery. A little Googling turned up a list of noir/horror hybrids and that’s how I discovered The First Power.

I wanna say I’ve seen this movie before but none of it rang any memory bells and I haven’t logged in on Letterboxd, so who knows. I definitely remember it coming out and wanting to see it.

It isn’t great. I love me some Lou Diamond Phillips. This film comes at the tail end of his first wave of popularity and it doesn’t work that well as a star vehicle for him. The script is pretty hokey, and it doesn’t lean hard enough on the whole satanic angle.

The killer carves pentagrams into his victims and they do bring a nun in at some point, but he’s never really involved in anything demonic. Most of it takes place in the city in broad daylight which is just weird for a horror movie about the occult. There are some scenes in dark warehouses and down in the bowels of the city’s water drainage. It does some nice things with light and shadow in those moments, but they don’t last.

The film posits that the killer’s soul is possessing various other people but it doesn’t really do much with that concept. Mostly we see him in the original body (played by Jeff Kober), but sometimes we see him in the body of whoever he’s possessing. But there are no scares involved in that. There is never any mystery of who he is possessing.

There are a few good, nut-ball moments like when a homeless woman floats in the air, or when the killer jumps off a ten-story roof and survives, or the fact that Los Angeles apparently has a giant boiling cauldron of flammable liquid in the bowels of their water drainage system, but mostly this is a by-the-numbers early 1990s horror/thriller.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man

A very conservative and deeply Christian police Sergeant receives a letter stating that a young girl has gone missing from a small, remote island off the coast of Scotland. He travels there by himself and discovers a strange pagan community where the children are taught about the phallic symbolization of the May Pole, where teenagers dance naked around a fire, and adults openly fornicate in a park in the evening.

The Sergeant, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is utterly shocked by all of this, but he’s a dutiful police officer and stays until he gets to the bottom of things. Not only are the villagers engaged in a litany of sins, but they are utterly unhelpful to his investigation. At first, they claim they have never seen the girl in their lives, but then it changes to how she was on the island but died tragically, and then…well it is best not to spoil things.

The Wicker Man has become a cult favorite and one of the premier films in the subgenre known as Folk Horror. It is also a truly strange little film. It is almost a musical as the villagers often break into goofy little folk songs and dance about (often naked). There is a very real sense of dread flooding the film. The camera is often tilted at odd angles making everything just slightly off. The villagers are ever so strange and are led by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee is one of his most interesting performances) who seems to take glee in making the Police Sergeant feel out of sorts.

There is a scene in which a woman puts a frog inside a child’s mouth to help her with a sore throat. A shop owner has a bottle full of foreskins. Britt Ekland plays the pretty daughter of the pub proprietor and at one point she sings a silly song whilst dancing in her room stark naked as an attempt to seduce the Sergeant. She beats wildly on his wall while he, soaked in sweat attempts to resist.

It is all a bit off-putting at first, but if you can roll with what it’s doing it is a rollicking good time. Not at all scary in the traditional sense, but it creates a wonderful sort of mood.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

jason goes to hell

The thing about growing up in the late 1980s is that you didn’t have every film ever made available to you at the click of a button. In the early ’80s, you didn’t even have rental stores that you could drive to and pick up at least some of the films in existence. But by the time I was a teenager, we at least had those rental stores, and I visited them often. But until I got a driver’s license in 1990 I was at the mercy of what my parents would let me rent, and they did not let me rent R-rated horror films. At least Mom didn’t (Dad sometimes did when Mom was out of town).

I loved R-rated horror movies but until that plastic license was in my hand I mostly had to watch edited versions that ran on basic cable. I loved the Friday the 13th series at a young age, but I didn’t actually watch an unedited version until I went to college (by the time I did get a driver’s license and could rent those films, slashers were on their way out and I had gotten into films like Evil Dead II (1987) and Re-Animator (1985).

The USA network always ran at least a couple of Friday the 13th movies late on Friday nights whenever the calendar matched the titles. But they were pretty random in terms of which films they’d decide to play. The point I’m belaboring to make is that while I did genuinely love the Friday the 13th movies growing up I never watched them unedited or in order. Because the plots are so similar I was never really sure which films I had seen and which ones I hadn’t.

I know I did watch Jason X (2002) and Freddy vs Jason (2003) in the theater, but the films before that are all jumbled together. A couple of years ago I received, watched, and reviewed the first eight films (which were all released by Paramount, after that, they sold the rights to New Line Cinema) in a Blu-ray set for Cinema Sentries. So, I’ve definitely seen all of those.

And now we finally arrive at the ninth film in the series, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Had you asked me if I had seen this film before tonight I would have told you that I had. I always assume I’ve seen them all, even if I have never verified that in any way. Since today is Friday the 13th I knew I wanted to watch one of the films and a quick look at Letterboxd indicated that I had, in fact, never seen this one. I still kind of assumed that I had and had neglected to log it, but I decided to give it a watch anyway just to check that box.

Generally speaking, this film is hated by fans. The main reason is that Jason is hardly in it. But that’s not really true. The plot of this film is that Jason is not a hulking, machete-wielding monster in a ski mask but an evil entity whose soul can pass from one body to the next. So, in fact, Jason is all over this movie, just not in the shape he usually comes in. Obviously, some fans want the hulking monster in a ski mask. But to me, Jason is one of the most boring entities in horror. He has no personality. He’s literally just a hulking mass in a ski mask. Even his back story is lame (he was bullied as a kid and died due to neglectful camp counselors). Allowing actors of various shapes and sizes to become Jason is kind of interesting.

Admittedly, building that kind of complicated mythology nine films into a franchise (when that ability had never been mentioned before) is a bit ridiculous, but this franchise bypassed ridiculous several films prior.

Don’t get me wrong, this film is dumb. But I quite liked it. There were two reasons for this:

My expectations were low. Really low.
I was really in the mood for it. It is Friday the 13th after all.

The whole Jason can transfer his soul into different bodies isn’t exactly original and they don’t do anything all that interesting with it, but at least it is different.

The film acknowledges the in-film infamy of Jason Voorhees. It begins with an undercover FBI agent going to Camp Crystal Lake and taking a shower (because as we all know, girls taking a shower are catnip to Jason). When he does show up the girl slips away and lures Jason to a trap where various agents shoot the living crap out of him and blow him to smithereens. Besides being a fun scene this indicates that Jason was a big enough threat to create such a trap.

Immediately afterward, there is a national news report discussing his death and recognizing the dozens of kills he chalked up over many years. I found it interesting that the films are finally acknowledging that a killer like Jason would draw massive attention.

Steven Williams plays a bounty hunter who agrees to hunt down Jason and kill him for a large sum of cash. He’s always enjoyable to watch and it’s a fun idea to have someone hunting Jason instead of Jason always doing the hunting.

Erin Gray plays the half-sister of Jason. I can’t remember if it is ever acknowledged that Jason has siblings, but I was happy to see Erin Gray showing up. Strangely, she isn’t the Final Girl which was disappointing.

Ok, I’ve just written nearly 1,000 words on a film that is admittedly bad, so I’ll wrap this up. If you are a fan of the series and haven’t seen this one based on its terrible reputation, I recommend you give it a try. It is dumb, and it doesn’t really pull off the new things it is trying to do, but at least it’s trying something new. That’s worth something.

The Friday Night Movie(s): Totally Killer (2023) & The Final Girls (2015)

image host

I’ve talked many times about growing up in the 1980s and my undying love of slasher movies. Now, we are all reasonable people here so I can admit that slasher movies are also really, really dumb. The plots are derivative, the acting is lousy, the writing is bad, and the direction is usually bland, and uninventive. But there is still a bad-movie charm to most of them, and some of them at least have found ways to inventively kill their awful characters.

Anyone who has watched a few slashers (or has seen a film in the Scream franchise) knows that there are rules. The number one rule in all slashers is that the one person to survive, the hero who will kill the killer will be a good girl. This “final girl” will usually not do drugs or get drunk and she will always be a virgin. To have sex in a slasher movie is to die.

Slashers were made on the cheap and were designed to make a quick buck before disappearing and being forgotten. Like a lot of low-budget genre films, they were filled with gratuitous sex, nudity, and violence. That makes them more than a little problematic for today’s audiences.

For tonight’s Friday Night Horror film, I watched two recent movies that attempt to modernize the slasher while still trying to hold onto its roots. The results are decidedly mixed.

Totally Killer is a recent Amazon Prime release from Blumhouse Studios. Like a lot of Blumhouse pictures, it is well made, and quite a bit of fun, but also soulless and without a true directorial voice.

Kiernan Shipka stars as Jamie a teenager who has lived under the over-protective thumb of her mother (Julie Bowen) who survived the Sweet 16 killer when she was a teen. Three of her friends were not so lucky.

Through a series of events too silly to explain Jamie finds herself time-travelled to 1987 where she then tries to stop the killings from ever happening.

Jamie spends much of her time in the 1980s gasping at the racism, casual homophobia, complete lack of security, and the endless smoking/drunk driving. As someone who grew up in the ’80s I recognize that yeah, all of that totally existed, but maybe wasn’t that grotesque. I mean the homophobia was rampant, and there was a kid in my high school who showed up in full KKK regalia, but the dangers of smoking were known and I remember plenty of lectures about drunk driving (including multiple presentations from M.A.D.D.)

It is a fun film. Shipka is terrific, as is Olivia Holt as her teenaged mom. The gags are good, the kills are entertaining (if a bit bloodless) but it also feels very much like it was made by a committee. Almost all of the Blumhouse films I’ve watched feel this way. It is as if Jason Blum has created a database of every horror film ever made, broken down the details of each film into categories, and then sorted by box office receipts.

Totally Killer is like if you fed the scripts of Back to the Future and Scream into an AI bot and had it write you a movie based upon them. It seems funny to say that a slasher homage has no directorial voice, but I just wish the filmmakers had something more to say, or at least a more creative way to say it.

The Final Girls stars Taissa Farmiga as Max. Her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) starred in a Friday the 13th-esque slasher called Camp Bloodbath. When a fire is started at a retro screening of that film Max and her friends tear through the movie screen to escape and find themselves stuck inside the movie.

It is much more clever than Totally Killer, finding fun ways to both skewer the tropes of the slasher genre, while still keeping things exciting and well within its confines. It is very meta in that the main characters all know they are in a movie, know its tropes, and try to subvert them.

While watching both films I kept thinking about Stranger Things, the Netflix series. While not perfect, that series understands the 1980s – its horror movies, Stephen King, John Carpenter, etc. – deep down in its bones. It has found a way to create something new and interesting while still being steeped in nostalgia.

Totally Killer and The Finals Girls both feel like they were made by people who have a casual knowledge of slasher films. Like maybe they’ve seen a few of them (and most of the Scream franchise) and have subscribed to a slasher subreddit, but those films aren’t part of their DNA. They are films that have fun (and are fun to watch) with the tropes of the genre but don’t necessarily love them.

If you are a fan of the genre, even casually, I think you could have fun watching these films. But keep your expectations low.