The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Funhouse (1981)

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In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower.

From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.

Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.

With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.

That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.

It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival.

Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.

Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.

One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse.

Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again. It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another.

It is a film best left with your brain checked out. Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks. Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.

But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason X (2001)

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There comes a time when a horror fan has to admit that the Friday the 13th films aren’t very good. I grew up in the 1980s, otherwise known as ground zero for slasher films. I loved the Friday the 13th films. Jason Voorhees is one of the greatest, most iconic villains of horror.

The reality is I never watched the full, uncut versions. I always watched them on the USA Network and TBS, or some other basic cable network where they were edited for television. Basic cable was different back then; they had to cut out the harder swear words, the nudity, and the more blood-soaked violence. I think I liked those films in part because my pubescent brain filled in those edited parts. I imagined what happened when the screen cut to something different.

I didn’t watch the uncut versions until I was in college. I gotta admit I was a little disappointed by them. What I had imagined was so much more gnarly and titillating than what was actually shown.

But also by that point I was fully into my film snob cinephilia. I was discovering the films of Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. I had realized that films could be more than entertainment. That horror could be more than just fun kills and naked flesh. I was starting to turn my nose up at films like the Friday the 13th franchise.

I went to see Jason X in the cinema when it came out in 2001. I was a full-on film snob by then, but I was also feeling some nostalgia for the films of my youth. I was hoping for some dumb fun, and maybe a little self aware humor like the Scream film (the third of which had come out the year before.) What I got was dumb, but it sure wasn’t fun, and while there were some jokes, they weren’t the self-referential kind.

I have not watched this film since that first viewing. But I own it on DVD. I’m still a horror nerd after all, and I own the first 8 films via a nice boxed set (which I reviewed, and you can read about at Cinema Sentries), so I just had to own the remaining films in some way.

And now, since it is Friday the 13th, I figured I’d give it a watch.

It begins in the Crystal Lake Research Facility, something that never existed in the other films. It seems to be designed solely to hold Jason and nothing else. At least judging by how empty the rest of the facility is. Even though this film acknowledges that Jason is an unstoppable killing machine, they’ve left him in an unguarded, very large room. He is chained up and hanging from the ceiling, but why he wouldn’t be locked in a cell is unexplained. Why there aren’t numerous guards all around him is also unexplained. There is one kid, and he does at least have a gun, but that’s it.

The kid places a blanket over Jason’s head (the better for us and incoming soldiers to not be able to see who exactly is under the blanket in the coming moments). Rowan LaFontaine (Lexa Doig), the head of the research facility, has plans to cryogenically freeze Jason so that some future generation can deal with him. But before that happens, some dumb soldiers enter the room and demand his release. They are led by Dr. Aloysius Wimmer (David Cronenberg, who was apparently excited to be in a Friday the 13th film and rewrote all of his dialogue), who hopes to figure out how Jason is unable to die.

Jason, of course, has already killed that boy from (and placed him in the chains and under the blanket) and wreaks havoc on the soldiers. He chases Rowan in the room with the freezing chamber, and she manages to shoot and push him into it. But just as he’s freezing, he pushes his machete (yes, for some reason these people kept his machete within grabbing distance of the supervillain) through the chamber door, stabbing Rowan and filling the room with freezing fog.

Despite all this carnage inside what one assumes is a famous and very expensive science facility, apparently no one bothered to come in and clean up. Or do anything at all. For the film, flash forwards to the year 2455, and both Jason and Rowan are exactly where they fell, still frozen.

A group of randy scientists and jokey soldiers find them and take them to their ship. The Earth has long been abandoned due to massive pollution, but these guys like to visit once in a while and salvage what they can for resale.

They use their special futuristic microrobots to fix and heal Rowan, but figure Jason is too far gone to be saved. Naturally, he comes back to life once he thaws out. Lots of killing ensues.

Some of it is pretty cool; a lot of it is pretty bad.

While some of the scientists are studying Jason, and letting Rowan know she’s now in the future. Others go off to have sex. Because this is a Friday the 13th movie, and you can’t have one of those without sexy teens doing what sexy teens do.

The leader of the ship is a greedy professor who hopes to sell Jason to the highest bidder (he’s still pretty well known in the future, and rich weirdos would like to have his corpse.). And if that doesn’t clue us in to how skeevy he is, there is another scene where he talks one of his students into having (kinky) sex with him – he dresses up in women’s lingerie, she twists his nipple (which by 2001 standars is extra wild!) in order for her to get a good grade.

There is also an android named KM-14 (Lisa Ryder). And if all of this is starting to sound like an Aliens riff to you, you are not alone. This film was conceived because the Freddy vs. Jason film was locked in development hell over rights issues, and they wanted to have some Jason film out to keep fans interest up. They hired Todd Farmer to write the film, despite him having zero credits to his name. After some thought, he figured the only thing they could do to the character was send him into space and riff on the Alien films.

But back to the kills. Most of them are fairly standard stuff – Jason hacking folks to pieces with his machete. (Poorly rendered) CGI allowed for them to do things like hack heads and arms off without too much blood and guts, or cut a guy basically in half. One lady has her head stuck in a bowl of liquid nitrogen, and then Jason cracks it like glass. One guy gets tossed onto a massive mining drill, and we watch him slowly slide around and round to the bottom (causing another character to say, when asked how the guy was doing, “He’s screwed”)

Yeah, there are a lot of jokes like that. One-liners coming after someone gets killed. They are more like the kind of thing you get in action movies from the 1980s than ironic in-jokes from a post-Scream world. At one point, to distract Jason, they use a holographic simulator to project a version of Camp Crystal Lake to him. Out come a couple of scantily clad girls who look him in the eye and say something like, “We love having casual sex.”

Jason eventually gets destroyed, but those fancy nanobots have a mind of their own, and they put him back together, but this time they add a bunch of Terminator-esque robot parts and create an Uber Jason.

This is a bad movie. Probably the worst in the franchise. But you know what? I’m not mad I watched it. All the Jason movies are bad, but there is a certain level of fun in them. If you can turn your brain off before it begins and revert to some dumb teenaged version of yourself, you might find yourself entertained.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Scream 7 (2026)

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I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”

I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.

There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.

Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.

The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films.

Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox. Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.

I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.

The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.

Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).

Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film. Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).

There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film. There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.).

They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it. Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.

Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3).

But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Heart Eyes (2025)

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I was about halfway through Heart Eyes before I realized that it was directed by the same guy who made Werewolves Within (2021), Josh Ruben. I quite liked that movie. It was smart and funny and clever about the way it played with its genre. Heart Eyes isn’t nearly as clever, and it winks a little too hard at the audience, like it is constantly letting the audience know that it knows it’s just a movie.

The genre it’s playing with is the slasher genre, and that’s a genre that’s had more than its fair share of meta commentary. The Scream films have pretty well bled that well dry. I’m being a little too harsh; there are parts of Heart Eyes that I really enjoyed, and the parts I didn’t like as much were still well made and entertaining.

A serial killer has been terrorizing lovers across the United States every Valentine’s Day for the last several years. This year he’s moved to Seattle, where we find our heroes Ally McCabe (Olivia Holt) and Jay Simmons (Mason Gooding.) She works in advertising and has just completed a campaign for a jewelry company where she spoofs the lives and bloody deaths of various doomed couples like Bonnie and Clyde. The boss lady previously approved it but now hates it because she feels it is in bad taste considering the Heart Eyes Killer has come to their town. She hires Jay to come in and fix things.

They go to dinner to talk about the new campaign. Things don’t go well, he leaves, and she chases him down to apologize. Outside she sees her ex-boyfriend with a new girl. In an attempt to make him jealous, Ally gives Jay a big kiss on the lips. The Heart Eyes Killer sees this, thinks they are true lovers, and spends the rest of the movie trying to kill them.

There are some very funny moments when the two of them try to convince the killer that they aren’t in love and that he should go kill someone else. Eventually Jordana Brewster shows up as a detective trying to solve the murders. When a ring shows up at one of the crime scenes with the initials JS on it, she starts to think Jay Simmons just might be her man.

I won’t spoil it, but fairly early on it is easy to figure out who really might be involved.

One of the difficulties of a film like this for me is that the slasher genre has been done to death. There aren’t really any more clever ways to kill a person. Heart Eyes tries, even in its own knowing way, but never does anything all that clever or interesting. There is a nice set piece set inside a drive-in theater that is both funny and exciting.

The film also has that super slick look that so many modern horror films have. Cameras have become so cheap and so good at their jobs that you don’t necessarily need the tech and the lighting you once needed. That’s not a bad thing, but sometimes modern horror films wind up a little too glossy for my tastes.

But overall this is a perfectly enjoyable film, and I’m very much looking forward to watching what Josh Ruben makes next.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

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This is going to be a slight cheat. Obviously, I write a lot of movie reviews for Cinema Sentries. I do it for fun; I don’t get paid for it (I do get free Blu-rays, which is nice.) I’m not sure if I’d want to be in the cultural critic business right now; those folks are having a tough time of it. I’m also happy I don’t have anyone demanding I watch certain things. I review the things I request. I try to keep my requests down to a steady pace, but sometimes I go a little overboard, and I wind up with a stack of Blu-rays sitting on my desk, and that can be overwhelming.

That’s happening to me right now. I have a Blu-ray in front of me that I just watched but need to review. I’ve got another one I’ll hopefully watch later tonight. I have a six-film boxed set of Errol Flynn movies and another boxed set of all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

That’s a lot of movies to watch and review. The Nightmare set is actually on the bottom of the pile, but since tonight is Friday and I always do a horror movie on Fridays, I thought I’d bump the first Nightmare on Elm Street up and kill two birds with one stone.

That also means I won’t be digging too deep into it because I’ll want to save all my best thoughts for the official review.

What I will say is that I love this movie. I grew up in the 1980s, and so slashers are my horror movie sweet spot, and this is one of my all-time favorites. Freddy Kreuger is a horror icon, and this is where he started. In later films he’d become a wise-cracking goof (admittedly a goof that will kill you in the end, but still a goof), but here he’s absolutely terrifying.

It was a stroke of genius having him kill inside of dreams, as that allows the film to eschew the laws of physics and reality. Anything goes, and the film makes good use of that. The imagery here is absolutely iconic. From the wall that turns elastic to the claws reaching up from the bathtub or the stairway steps turning to goo, to Freddy’s outstretched arms, the film is simply loaded with memorable shots. There is a wonderful tactile quality to the film and its use of practical effects. Sometimes that means you can see the filmmaking behind it – you can tell that the goo inside those steps is oatmeal, and when Freddy falls down the stairs, you can see the mattress he lands on—but I much prefer that to the CGI garbage so many modern films rely on.

So, yeah, I love this movie. I will have more to say about it and all of its sequels in a week or so. Look right here in these pages for that link when it comes out.

Funny story, just now as I’m about to post this I have a premonition to do a search of my site for this film, just in case I’d written about it before. I couldn’t remember writing about it, but I write a lot of stuff so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick search.

Friends I wrote a full review of the film (and its release in UHD) just over a year ago!

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Freaky (2020)

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“What if Freaky Friday, but a slasher?” – some guy in a pitch meeting, probably.

Christopher Landon directed the two Happy Death Day movies, which were basically Groundhog Day, but a slasher, and they are both quite good. So is Freaky, which handles the mashup of comedy and horror with aplomb.

Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is an unpopular and constantly bullied teenager (despite being very pretty, relatively stylish, funny, smart, and plays the school mascot at football games) who is still mourning the death of her father one year ago.

After a game, her (alcoholic) mother “forgets” to pick her up (she’s passed out in a drunken stupor), leaving Millie alone after dark. She’s attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with an ancient Aztec knife. This causes a body swap, and now Millie must stab the butcher with that same knife by midnight or the body swap will be permanent.

The specific plot elements of this film are pretty dumb. But the film doesn’t take them seriously. The joy of it is watching Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton play each other. Vaughn is especially a lot of fun. He gets a lot of mileage as a middle-aged man sporting a tall, bulky frame playing a small teenage girl.

Millie has a couple of sidekicks (played by Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich) who provide a lot of banter and comic relief (some of which works, some of it doesn’t). The kills are clever and surprisingly brutal.

But really, the reason to watch this is Vaughn having a ton of fun and Newton getting to act like a brutish psycho killer in the body of a teenager.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: The Initiation (1984)

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The Initiation feels like two different slashers thrown together in a way that does disservice to them both. The first part is a bit of a cliche but it is fun to watch. The other part is also a cliche but it is not fun, a bit of a mess and a kind of a slog.

College girl Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is pledging a sorority and for Hell Night her and her fellow pledges have been tasked with breaking into her father’s enormous department store and stealing the security guard’s clothes.

She’s also been having this terrible recurring nightmare about a strange man being burned alive in her childhood home. Unrelated to her story (or is it? – it definitely is) a man with a burned face breaking out of an insane asylum and starts killing people.

She gets cozy with graduate assistant Peter (James Read) of the psychology department who specializes in dreams. This is the part that’s a slow. He’ll analyze her dream and investigate her past and realize the connection between the dreams and the murders. But as an audience we figure that stuff out pretty quickly so the whole mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t mysterious at all.

The fun part of the film is the group of girls going to the department store and being killed off one by one. The deaths aren’t all that inventive and I’m being generous with the word “fun” here, but it is more more enjoyable to watch than the psychology nonsense.

As a certified horror fan and slasher enthusiast this is very much in my wheelhouse. I love films where characters are trapped in an en closed, but large space and have to face off against something horrible. This certainly doesn’t do anything new with it, and half the plot is a bit of a chore, but there is enough there to satisfy your hard core horror nerds.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Maniac (2012)

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Maniac has the feel of one of those gritty, nihilistic 1970s horror films. Which, in a way, it kind of is. It is a remake of a gritty horror film made in 1980. It stars Elijah Wood as Frank Zitto a serial killer who murders and scalps women. He owns a mannequin restoration shop and he takes the scalps back home, places them on the mannequins then talks to them like they are still alive.

The film is shot entirely from Frank’s point of view and I hate that gimmick. I’ve seen it in several other films and it always grows tiresome very quickly. In old films like Lady in the Lake (1947) and Dark Passage (1947) its use is cumbersome because cameras were so large movement was quite limited.

It is slightly better here mostly because cameras have gotten smaller allowing for easier movement and CGI allowed them to manipulate the images to create more interesting shots. But it is still a gimmick and a bad one at that. There is one scene where Frank is stabbing a woman and the camera moves away, and we see the action from a third-person point of view. It is an interesting moment because we realize that this is still Frank’s point of view. He feels trapped inside his body and he kills to escape. When he kills he literally (and visually in the case of the film) escapes from his body.

But the film doesn’t really do much else with that idea. There are some flashbacks (still filmed through his point of view) where we learn his mother was a prostitute and she often made him watch her have sex with her Johns. That made him a killer, I guess.

One day a kind young woman takes pictures of the mannequins he has on display at the front of his shop. She’s Anna (Nora Arnezeder) and she’s an artist. She’s got a show coming up and thinks his vintage mannequins will be perfect for it. They form a friendship and the question becomes whether she’ll save him or he’ll kill her.

Within the first few minutes of this film, as soon as I realized it was going to be completely shot from his POV I started hating this film. It didn’t help that it goes to some pretty dark places. Because so much of it is seen through the killer’s eyes we get into his headspace. We see him killing. There was a time when I would have loved the transgressiveness of that, but now I just find it depressing.

There are moments in the film where it lightens up and becomes interesting. Most of these are when Anna is on screen. Nora Arnezeder is quite good and her character’s relationship with Frank is an interesting one. She certainly lights up the screen giving what is mostly a dark, dreary movie some buoyancy. It was enough to make me like the film, but not enough to make me really enjoy it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Happy Death Day (2017)

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Groundhog Day meets Scream is a good way to describe Happy Death Day. With maybe a touch of Heathers and Clueless. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it has a great lead performance by Jessica Rothe and I thought it was a lot of fun.

Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up from a night of partying with a hangover and no idea where she is. There is a boy who says his name is Carter (Israel Broussard) but she doesn’t know who he is. Since she’s in his dorm, sleeping in his bed and she’s not wearing any pants she figures she must have slept with him, but she doesn’t remember that either.

He is polite, if perhaps a bit embarrassed by this ordeal (we’ll find out later he did not sleep with her and he does become a romantic interest), but she wants nothing to do with him. She is, in a word, a bitch. A mean girl. She’s rude to everyone. We’ll discover later it is her birthday and the anniversary of her mother’s death and her meanness is in part a way for her to distance herself from her grief. But like her namesake, she needs to grow up.

Her walk of shame takes her across the campus commons. There she will cross paths with a number of memorable things – a weird goth dude stares at her, an eager woman tries to get her to sign a petition, a car alarm goes off, and some sprinklers spray a couple of picnickers. Etc. These are the types of things that will alert her to the fact that she’s reliving the same day over and over again.

The film nearly winks at the audience during this scene. We know what kind of film we’re getting into. It knows we know and welcomes us with a smile.

She’ll then meet our cast of characters who will become suspects in her murder. There’s the sorority Queen Bee, the put-upon roommate, the married doctor she’s sleeping with, etc. Then on her way to a party that evening, someone wearing a weird baby mask (the school’s mascot is apparently a baby!?) stabs her to death.

Bam. She wakes back up in Carter’s room, reliving the same day all over again. Getting murdered no matter what she does. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first film to put its character into a time loop, but it is probably the best and it is certainly the most popular. Many films have taken that premise and installed it into different genres. Slashers tend to be rather cookie-cutter in similarity so it makes perfect sense to apply the Groundhog Day scenario to it.

One of the interesting additions to the story is how her violent deaths begin taking a toll on her body. She’s stabbed numerous times and they begin to leave internal scars even as her life continues to recycle each day.

Happy Death Day relies more on the murder mystery angle than the horror. It isn’t particularly scary and the violence is decidedly PG-13. But it has fun with its premise and Jessica Rothe is wonderful. She nails the bitchiness, the pathos, and ultimately the warmth of the character.

There is a sequel and I sort-of wrote a little bit about it here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Last Matinee (2020)

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In an old movie theater in Uraguay, a group of horror movie archetypes watch a low-budget horror movie whilst a black-gloved killer slashes them in incredibly gory ways.

The Last Matinee takes its influences from such art-house films as Goodbye Dragon Inn and Cinema Paradisio and the stylish Gialli of guys like Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

It looks great. Director Maximiliano Contenti and cinematographer Benjamín Silva make great use of the cinema’s lighting. The movie screen glows on the audience’s faces, while an usher beams his flashlight across the room. In other spaces, neon signs and popcorn machines add ambient light. The camera moves fluidly across these interesting closed spaces.

The main set consists of the movie auditorium. It is an old theater with a huge seating space and a large balcony. It is the kind of theater I wish still existed instead of the generic multi-plexes we’ve had for decades. In addition to this is the projection room, a dirty old bathroom, and lots of long hallways. The film makes great use of its single-setting.

Once it gets going it is great fun with the killer getting in some gruesome kills with stylish gore. But boy does it ever take its time getting there. It is a good hour before anything happens. Until then we spend time developing the characters.

The characters are your basic slasher film stock characters. There is the horny couple, the little kid, the old man, the punk teens, and our nice final girl.

I appreciate that the film fleshes these characters out a bit. I’ve seen slashers where the characters were nothing but cannon, er knife fodder, and that gets boring. If we don’t care about the characters just a little bit then the film becomes nothing but an exercise in gore effects.

But here we spend a little too much time developing them only to watch them get slashed and stabbed before the credits roll. Those early scenes have style, but not much else. But once the killer lets loose in that last half hour it turns into something quite fun.