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.

31 Days of Horror: Black Christmas (2006)

black christmas

Black Christmas (1974) is a seminal film in the horror genre. It is considered one of the earliest (if not the earliest) slasher films, and it still stands as one of the best. It highly influenced John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) which became the Big slasher film, inspiring countless others over the next decade.

It makes perfect sense then that they would remake it in 2006 (I’m actually surprised it took them that long – they remade it again in 2019 as part of what is now being called the “Black Christmas Series”.)

I typically stay away from horror remakes (I say with a straight face after having just sat through two remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), especially remakes of slasher films as they tend to be rather terrible. But this one has a great cast including Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Andrea Martin so I gave it a go.

It has been far too long since I have seen the original to do any kind of plot comparison, but I think the basics are the same. A group of sorority girls are systematically killed by a deranged killer in their sorority house.

I do remember that in the original the girls keep getting obscene phone calls on their landline and that creates tension every time the phone rings. In this version, they get phone calls but they are less obscene and more like someone screaming at them in an incomprehensible voice. This being 2006 everyone has cell phones and caller ID. The killer keeps stealing his victim’s phones to make the calls confusing everyone.

The characters in this one are all kind of obnoxious. They are either catty, or drunks, or sullen and angry. None of them are particularly likable and so I didn’t really mind when they got killed off.

The biggest problem with the film is that they spend a whole lot of time with the killer’s back story. Nobody in the history of slasher movies has ever cared about a killer’s back story. Who cares if his mommy was mean to him, or his daddy was an abusive drunk? Just let the guy be a psycho and let him kill everybody in interesting ways.

The kills, frankly, aren’t that interesting either. They are gruesome and bloody, but not particularly inventive. I mean when one character gives another one a glass unicorn for Christmas, you know how that’s gonna end up. But maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff.

Stick to the original kids, it is much more fun.

As an aside, I have to say that I work in construction in the house building industry. I now notice goofy movie things involving construction scenes or just the ways houses exist in movies. In this one, the killer does a lot of crawling in between walls and underneath floorboards. Nobody builds spaces between walls big enough for a person to crawl through. It would be a waste of space and money.

There is a scene here in which the killer is underneath the bathroom floor spying on a woman taking a shower. He’s cut through the very thin plywood and lifts up each piece of tile. That’s not how that works. The wood has to be thick in order to support the weight of everything on top of it, including people walking around. Tiles are stuck to the floor, otherwise, they would get kicked around, broken, and lost.

Sorry, that stuff just drives me crazy anymore.

31 Days of Horror: Thirteen Women (1932)

thirteen women

As it turns out the trivia surrounding Thirteen Women is more interesting than the actual movie. Due to some copious editing, two actresses’ roles were completely removed from the film leaving only 11 women on the screen. The book is apparently more lurid. One character begins the story as a virgin owing to her great beauty scaring all potential suitors off. Later she becomes a lesbian after the wife of her doctor seduces her. She then starves herself to death after being placed in a sanitorium due to her heartache over her lover abandoning her. That character (in a decidedly toned down part) was played by Peg Entwistle who famously killed herself not long after shooting this film, by jumping off of the “H” in the Hollywood sign.

The movie doesn’t live up to that hype. Not many movies could.

Thirteen sorority sisters all write to a psychic who sends them their futures via horoscope in a letter. All of their horoscopes predict doom. Soon after the girls begin dying, many from suicide. Suspicion falls upon the swami (C. Henry Gordon), but he’s secretly being controlled by another woman. I won’t spoil who she is or what her motives are but it hardly matters.

A lot of Pre-Code films are problematic in their depictions of…well just about everybody, and Thirteen Women is no different. The very white Myrna Loy plays a half-English/half-Javanese woman whom the film depicts sympathetically right before giving her mystic oriental powers.

Irene Dunne plays the hero and Ricardo Cortez plays the detective. Naturally, a romance develops between them.

It is a film that I wish had gone a little further in its Pre-Code possibilities. The descriptions of the book make it sound even more problematic than the film, but at least it sounds fun. The film tones it down so much there isn’t much to enjoy.

31 Days of Horror: The Invasion (2007)

the invasion As I noted yesterday, there have been four adaptations of the Body Snatchers story – in 1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007, that’s roughly about once every twenty years. We are just about due for a new one, though the 2007 version did so poorly I expect we won’t get one. It is interesting to think about what new spins they could put on the story.

With smartphones and social media, one could easily make a connection between staring blankly into your phone and being an alien pod person.

The 2007 version entitled The Invasion is the worst adaptation of the four. Body Snatchers wasn’t great but at least it had a point of view. It was trying to say something interesting. The Invasion does nothing new and feels rather generic. It runs like a standard 2000s thriller.

Ok, it does do a few things slightly different from the other adaptations but none of them are particularly interesting. The alien spores are attached to a space shuttle that explodes high in the atmosphere scattering its parts (and with it the aliens) across the globe. In this version, the spores do not turn into pods that transform into clones of individual humans, but when ingested it changes each person in some fundamental biological way.

Nicole Kidman is Carol a psychologist whose patients are some of the first to recognize something strange is going on. People who have been infected by the aliens (and in this version, the invasion is very much like a viral infection) get a sticky substance on their skin when they are first infected but it doesn’t completely take control until they fall into R.E.M sleep.

Carol gets infected and so much of the drama comes from her trying to stay awake. She also has to find her boy because they got separated before she realized what was going on.

For that part, it isn’t a bad little thriller. There are some exciting action-oriented scenes but as a Body Snatcher adaptation, it doesn’t work at all.

The strength of this story comes from the paranoia of finding out the people surrounding you, sometimes the people you love have become aliens. The two most modern adaptations don’t seem to understand that. They substitute cheap thrills for something deeper and more threatening.

With three other adaptations to choose from, this sone is completely skippable.

31 Days of Horror: Body Snatchers (1993)

body snatchers

In 1954 Jack Finney published a book entitled The Body Snatchers about a small town in California being invaded by alien seeds that transform into pods that then perfectly duplicate humans while they are sleeping. They duplicate everything down to the memories, but they have no emotions. The real people, meanwhile, turn to dust.

The book was turned into a low-budget B-noir in 1956 called Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It keeps the small-town setting and emphasizes how it is nearly impossible to know who has been turned and who hasn’t. Phillip Kaufman remade it in 1978. He kept the new name moved the setting to San Francisco and turned it into a terrific paranoid thriller.

Abel Ferrara remade it in 1993. He changed the name back to Body Snatchers and moved the setting to a military base.

I don’t know what it is about this story that’s made it be adapted so often (they remade it again in 2007, I’ll probably be talking about that one in a few days) except that the idea of being turned into an emotionless pod people somehow continue to resonate. Doctor Who does something similar with their Cybermen.

In this version, an EPA agent Steve Malone (Terry Kinney) is sent to a military base for some routine tests on the effects of the base on the local environment. He takes with him his wife Carol (Meg Tilley) and teenaged daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar).

The plot is basically the same as the other films. The family starts to notice a strangeness in some of the people, and then they realize aliens are taking over and attempt to escape with their lives.

What’s interesting at this point is what’s different between the films. Setting this one at a military base sets up some interesting ideas about conformity since soldiers are supposed to obey orders without question and the pod people interact with each other as one unit. But the film never does a lot with the idea.

This film mostly follows Marti while the other two follow adult men which gives it a different perspective. This film mostly tosses out the paranoia of the other two films brought on by the characters not being able to tell who has been turned and who hasn’t. Instead, it makes the entire thing much more action-packed. This really loses what makes the earlier films so great.

There are some gnarly effects in this one. When the humans sleep the pods sling out this gross looking tentacles that slip into their orificaces and presumably extract what they need. Meg Tilley’s role as the mother is a small one but she’s quite good in it. She’s the first in the family to be turned and she’s wonderfully effective playing the emotionless alien.

But in the end, there is no real reason for this film to exist. The previous films are quite good. They are also different enough from one another to make an interesting double feature. This one doesn’t have enough to say to make its existence necessary.

31 Days of Horror: The Night Stalker (1972)

the night stalker

While I was attending university I didn’t watch a lot of TV. I didn’t even own a TV until my senior year (and that wasn’t mine, but my roommates). I went to the movies every weekend, but I just wasn’t interested in whatever was going on in television at the time.

Because of this, I missed a lot of seminal shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Luckily I have a wife who is a nerd and she’s turned me on to such things.

This year marks 30 years since The X-Files first premiered and so my wife wanted to start rewatching it. I haven’t watched it in over a decade so it has been fun going through it again.

I was recently reminded that one of the great inspirations for The X-Files was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It started out as a TV movie from 1972 entitled The Night Stalker, which was followed by a sequel in 1973 entitled The Night Strangler, and then a television series that ran from 1974-1975 which was entitled Kolchak: The Night Stalker. They tried to revitalize it in 2005 but it was cancelled after ten episodes.

I watched The Night Stalker a few nights ago and I will most likely be watching the others (well, probably not the remake) in the near future.

Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a reporter who has been fired from nearly every major newspaper in the country. He’s a good reporter, but he has a loose and sarcastic mouth that gets him into trouble. He’s currently working at a low-rent paper in Las Vegas, where he is asked to cover some recent murders in which the victim’s bodies have all been drained of blood.

He eventually comes to believe that the killer is a vampire and collects enough evidence to prove this. But he is thwarted at every turn by the police, the politicians, and even his own boss.

You can see already how this influenced The X-Files, though McGavin’s performance and the overall low-fi vibe of the show seems more in line with the funny episodes of The X-Files than the serious ones. I’ll be interested in seeing how the sequel and the series fare.

It is very much an early 1970s TV movie. The budget was clearly very limited – there is hardly any set design, or lighting design, or any design of any kind. The violence is mostly off-screen. There are a few tussles and quite a few cops shooting blanks at the killer (they don’t even bother with squibs), but nothing particularly visually interesting. The plot plays pretty fast and loose with anything close to how things would actually go. Even though the police and politicians hate Kolchak they keep inviting them to their private meetings to discuss the case and then ask everyone to keep quiet about it. As if a reporter, especially one as nutty as Kolchack, will keep quiet about a serial killer.

I did enjoy that it was shot in Las Vegas and there are a lot of exterior scenes. I love getting glimpses of a city from years gone by. Every time they drove by the Stardust Casino I wondered if Lefty Rosenthal (portrayed by Robert DeNiro in Casino) was there.

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed it. McGavin is a lot of fun to watch and it all plays out with this goofy kind of joy to it.

31 Days of Horror: Talk To Me (2022)

talk to me poster

A group of teenagers come across an embalmed hand. When you hold the hand and say “Talk to Me” you will see a spirit. If you then utter “I Let You In” you will be possessed by same spirit. The teenagers use this magic to make viral TikTok videos.

Mia (Sophie Wilde), a 17-year-old who is still grieving over her mother’s death two years prior. She died after taking too many sleeping pills and it is unclear as to whether this was accidental or suicide. Her relationship with her father has become strained so she spends most of her time at her friend Jade’s (Alexandra Jensen) house.

Mia is considered a bit weird by the popular girls and this is starting to strain her relationship with Jade. This is perhaps why Mia eagerly volunteers to use the hand at a party they attend.

There are rules regarding the hand. There are always rules with these things. You cannot be possessed for more than 90 seconds or the spirits they will remain in this world. Naturally, the rule gets broken and things get bad.

Talk to Me was directed by Danny and Michael Phillipou better known as the YouTube channel RackaRacka which is known for its horror/comedy videos. This was their first feature-length film. I haven’t watched any of those YouTube videos but you can see the influence of those types of videos on the film. The camera often moves in big swoops, the editing is quick, and when we peak into the supernatural the look is stylish.

It is a very entertaining film with some good scares and a lot of style. Sophie Wilde is terrific and I hope she has a long, storied career. I’m just not sure there is much to the film beyond its entertainment value. Mia is clearly still deeply wounded by her mother’s death, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, other than periodically have her mom appear to her as a vision. It has some fun with the idea that these kids are dabbling in the supernatural, taking huge risks with evil all for social media clicks, but again it doesn’t really know what it wants to say about all of that.

Plotwise it is a mix of Flatliners and a Monkey’s Paw story, which is fine in and of itself, I just wish there was something more to it than surface horror.

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

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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.

31 Days of Horror: Doctor X (1932)

doctor x poster

So, I watched and reviewed a movie entitled The Return of Doctor X the other day. As far as I can tell it is not in any way a sequel to this film entitled Doctor X. It seems to be one of those things where one movie was popular and so they decided to make a new film and give it a similar title as a type of cash-in. Or at least the hope of a cash-in, whereupon people who enjoyed the first film might see the second film based on the title alone.

No one involved in the first film was involved in the second one. And while the plots are in the same ball field as one another, there isn’t any lap over in terms of characters or anything else other than a bunch of murders being solved, in part, by a news reporter.

A series of brutal murders have been committed in New York City over the last several months. They always occur during the full moon, and the bodies have been cannibalized.

Ace reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is on the case. The police have learned that each victim has been killed by a highly specialized scalpel. One that only exists in one place in the city – Doctor Xavier’s (Lionel Atwill) institution. They figure one of Xavier’s scientists must be responsible.

The scientists are all mad and perfectly suited for these murders – one of them is fascinated by cannibalism, another by how the moon affects our psyches, another fetishized voyeurism, and the other is a grouchy paralytic (and thus could not have possibly committed the crimes…or could he?)

The good Doctor X is worried that if the police rush in and start questioning everybody it will ruin the institute’s reputation. He asks to be able to run his own investigation and surprisingly they agree. He does an early version of a lie detector test, hooking everybody up to some gadgets that monitor their heart rate and then he stages the murder scene. The first test finds no answers but does cause a blackout inside of which someone else is murdered.

Doctor X has a daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray) who mainly exists to give exposition and to be the love interest for Lee Taylor. He mainly exists for comic relief. He mostly plays it too big and too broad to be funny, but there are a couple of good bits including one in which he’s locked inside a closet with a skeleton.

The whole film is goofy, and a lot of fun. The sets are amazing, especially the testing arena. Michael Curtiz directed and he keeps things moving at a clip and makes it all visually interesting. It was shot in a two-tone color format which gives the whole thing an other-wordly feel. Made in 1932 it is a Pre-Code film and while not particularly scandalous when viewed with today’s eyes at the time a film dealing with murder and cannibalism (it also includes a brothel and talk of rape) was quite a thing.

The comedy often takes you out of the horror/mystery elements and none of it gels very well, but mostly it is a fairly forgettable, but rather enjoyable little film.

31 Days of Horror: The Secret of the Blue Room (1933)

blue room

The Criterion Channel is hosting several horror films made before the Production Code was rigidly enforced starting in 1934 – calling it Pre-Code Horror.

Pre-Code films are fascinating in part because it sounds so tantalizing. Films made before the Code got away with a lot and they can be shocking to someone who watches a lot of films made under the scrutiny of the Code. But it isn’t like these films were employing hard-core nudity and extreme violence. They were still under the preview of the cultural morals of the time.

The Secret of the Blue Room is not particularly scandalous at all. The most worrisome moment in the entire film is when a young lady kisses her father and three suitors full on the mouth, but that seems more like an old-fashioned cultural moment than anything actually scandalous.

The woman, Irene von Helldorf (Gloria Stuart) is celebrating her twenty-first birthday with her father, Robert (Lionel Atwill), her suitor Thomas (William Janney), and two other dudes who’d like to get with her, Walter (Paul Lucas) and Frank (Onslow Stevens). For some reason, they celebrate the birthday at the stroke of midnight and then tell the story of the blue room.

It is a locked-up room inside the Helldorf’s mansion. Years ago three people on separate occasions died inside the room at exactly 1 in the AM. Men being men they all decide that they will each successively sleep in the room to prove their manliness to Irine and probably win her heart.

The first one disappears without a trace, the second is shot dead and Irene is attacked in the room one morning by a mysterious man. Somehow, through all of this, none of them think to do something logical like call the police. Or search the house for the strange man. Or systematically go through the room looking for secret entrances, or try to understand the mystery.

Eventually, they do report things to the police and an investigation of sorts does occur. None of it is particularly interesting, but it isn’t grown-worthy either. I find a lot of really old films have this effect on me. It is like watching a television series from my youth. I recognize that it’s not really all that good, but it is a pleasant enough way to spend an hour of your time (The Secret of the Blue Room clocks in at 66 minutes.)

It is a remake of a German film from 1932 and it was remade two additional times, once in 1938 and again in 1944. Which just goes to show that Hollywood was cannibalizing itself long before its current trend of only making films with existing IP.