The Friday Night Horror Movie: Maniac (2012)

maniac poster

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)

happy death day poster

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)

the last matinee poster

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.

31 Days of Horror: A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

a nightmare on elm street 4K UHD

I recently upgraded to a 4K UHD Blu-ray player. I was pretty late coming to this upgrade. Honestly, I was pretty late buying a Blu-ray player. For someone who claims to be a physical media enthusiast, I just don’t care that much about video and audio quality in my movies.

That’s not entirely true, if you gave me the choice between playing a badly degraded copy of a film and a newly restored Ultra High Definition version of the same film I’d go with the quality. But I’m not going to not watch a film simply because the video quality might not be the best that is available.

If I’m being honest, though, I’ll likely not purchase a great many 4K UHD discs, unless they are on sale for a very good price. I still buy DVDs because I’m a cheap bastard.

If I might be honest again, I only bought a UHD player because I review physical media for Cinema Sentries and increasingly it is 4K UHD discs that are available.

That is, perhaps, a strange way to introduce my review of the new 4K UHD release of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It is a very good film, a great horror film and it has never looked better. Every time I watch these UHD discs I am duly impressed with the quality of the video.

Getting to see Freddy Krueger and his nightmare-induced kills is a fantastic way to further my Halloween Season viewings. You can read my full review here.

Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (2013)

friday

I’m on record as loving a good slasher movie. I grew up in the 1980s and slashers were all the rage. I didn’t actually watch any of them in theatres and rarely saw any in their unedited forms on VHS. Mostly, I watched them on late-night, basic cable television. Which was probably the best way for my pubescent self to have seen them. With some of the sex and violence edited out for TV, my hormone-addled mind filled in the blanks with things far more sexy and gruesome than any of the films could possibly have produced.

I actually remember later in life watching some of those films and being disappointed with how little I had missed.

Friday the 13th and its many, many sequels are not good movies. They aren’t even particularly interesting slash flicks. But there is something about them that has excited horror hounds, including myself for decades.

This documentary covers everything you’d ever want to know about the franchise. It interviews nearly everyone involved in any of the films (or the television series) and breaks them all down into the minutest of details. For seven hours it does this. That’s more Jason Vorhees than anyone can handle.

Except me, apparently. I watched the entire thing and wrote a review about it. You can read that review here.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: X-Ray (1981)

poster

It wouldn’t be the Awesome ’80s in April without at least one dumb slasher. You may not believe this when I tell you, but I’ve actually grown rather particular when it comes to watching dumb slashers. I no longer have the patience for low-budget, dumb slashers if they are poorly made or have no sense of style.

I have this thing on my streaming service device that lets me browse through every movie ever made. I can sort by genre, or the year it was made. I can browse by actor or popularity, etc. It gives me a brief synopsis, and details on who stars in the film and even connects to YouTube to let me view the film’s trailer.

Tonight I sorted by year, clicked on 1981, and then went looking for horror films. I skipped past the big ones, the popular films, the ones I’ve seen already – films like The Evil Dead, Halloween II, and Scanners. I found a couple of films that looked interesting but when I watched the trailer I could see they were cheaply made and looked bad.

Finally, I landed on X-Ray (also known as the superior title of Hospital Massacre). It looked like a dumb slasher flick, but the trailer indicated it was well-lit and had a sense of style so I found a copy and hit Play.

The plot is simple. Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) stops by the hospital to get some test results. She can’t find her doctor and is detained by another one. Everyone who looks at her test results and x-rays makes disturbing faces as if she’s ready to die right then and there, but they won’t tell her anything. She’s forced to take more tests and stay overnight. It is Kafka-esque in its absurdity. Also, a crazed killer is on the loose.

When she arrives at the hospital no one seems to know where her doctor is. She’s told to look for her on the eighth floor. The elevator takes her to the ninth floor where she’s met by some creepy dudes in masks who say that the construction on that floor is making the air toxic. On her way back down the elevator gets stuck.

Her doctor isn’t in her office. A friendly medical student directs her to another doctor who looks over her test results and frowns. She’ll have to stay and take more tests he says. He makes her strip down and does a full examination of her body. He takes some blood.

The blood sample comes back and the doctor makes more frowny faces. He talks to the nurses in hushed tones. Over and over Susan asks what’s going on, is there something wrong? But the hospital staff won’t tell her anything. Just that she needs to stay overnight for observation. She’s put in a room with half a dozen other women, all of whom leer at her and openly discuss how she must be dying.

Meanwhile, the psycho killer is brutally stabbing anyone who gets in his way. It was he who switched her lab results and x-rays to indicate she was terribly sick. It was he who killed her original doctor.

In the opening scene, which amounts to a flashback we see young Susan making fun of a young boy who gave her a Valentine’s Day card (naturally this film takes place on a Holiday as Halloween and Friday the 13th had proven to be very popular and profitable). So we know who the killer is and what his motivation is, though we aren’t supposed to be able to figure out which adult in the hospital he is (it isn’t actually that difficult to guess.)

When Susan realizes a killer is on the loose she tries to tell the doctors and the nurses but they don’t believe her. They give her a sedative and tie her down. There is a feminist reading of this film where Susan is being treated like every woman everywhere – always being controlled by the men around her, never, ever listened to. I’m not sure the film is smart enough to have pulled that off on purpose but that reading mostly works.

It is well-lit. The Cinematography isn’t deserving of any awards but it looks good. A part of me always scoffs when films like this have hospitals lit by lamps and pin lights instead of the huge fluorescent real hospitals use, but it’s stylish and looks nice on the screen. Director Boaz Davidson has a sense of style, and there are several striking images. My favorite is when the killer holds a sheet up in front of him and is brightly lit from behind. It makes no sense plot wise but it sure looks cool.

The story is nonsense. The killer’s motivations are dumb even for this type of movie. His method of gaslighting her makes no logical sense since his ultimate plan is to just kill her. Etc., and so forth. It is a dumb slasher. But like I say it has some style and it looks good (and it does have some depth if you want to read it that way) and sometimes that’s what you want on a Friday night.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) didn’t invent the slasher genre. It has its roots in the Italian Giallo and films like Black Christmas (1974) came out earlier and contain all the elements of the genre. But Halloween really set the template for what slavers would become, and its immense popularity meant that it would be copied over and over again throughout the next decade.

It remains the greatest slasher ever made and is a truly great horror film. Much of this comes down to Carpenter’s economic direction. In just over 90 minutes he tells a complete story without an ounce of fat. It isn’t that the film is nonstop thrills either. There is a lot of exposition, we spend a lot of time just hanging out with the characters. But Carpenter makes them count. He lets us get to know the characters, especially Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a career-defining role), which allows us to actually care for them when the horror comes.

As Doctor Loomis (a wonderful Donald Pleasence) constantly lets us know Michael Myers is evil personified. The film doesn’t provide a back story. We don’t learn anything about who he is or why he kills. We don’t need to know.

Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween is a terrible film. It takes all that makes Carpenter’s film great and chucks it out the window, then stomps on it with its dirty boots.

A good half of the film is filling in Michael Myers’s back story (played by Daeg Faerch as a ten-year-old boy and Tyler Mane as an adult). His mom is a stripper, her boyfriend is an alcoholic, abusive cripple. He’s bullied at school. Etc., etc., and so forth. It is all basic, boilerplate reasons for becoming a psychopath.

Here he doesn’t just kill his older sister as a child, but his entire family (excluding his baby sister, of course). We then spend a bunch of time with him at the mental institution where Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) tries to cure him. Or at least show him some kindness. Or at least talk to him. His mom visits every week, but Michael shrinks back into himself. He stops talking but continues to make little paper masks to put over his face and hide his true self from the world.

None of this is very interesting and it is all superfluous. Again, we don’t need to know why Michael Myers is a killer. Trying to give him human reasons for being who he is takes away the horror of who he was in the original.

When we finally arrive at Halloween night in the present (where the original film spends most of its time) I’d stop being interested in what this film was trying to do. Unfortunately, I had to keep watching for another hour.

Scout Taylor-Compton plays Lauri Strode in this version and all apologies to the actress, but she is not good. Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed the character as kind and good (it literally began the trope that the Final Girl in these films would be virtuous and a virgin), but also tough, a fighter. She’s innocent, but not naive or weak. Taylor-Compton turns her into a mostly whiny brat. Her girlfriends are even more obnoxious.

In the original, the teens do a bit of drinking and sexing, but Carpenter’s camera never leers at them. Zombie’s camera is nothing but leers. It lingers on the sex scenes, is zooms in on the nudity. There is a rape scene early on in the asylum that is as gross as it is gratuitous. The violence is more visceral as well, and not in a good way. I love horror movies and I’ve seen more than my fair share of gore and gratuitous sex. Maybe I’m just getting older, but so much of this film just felt like way too much.

I first watched this film in 2008 while living in Shanghai, China. In those days you could buy bootleg DVDs super cheap. There were literally guys on the street corners with boxes full of them. As soon as a film came out in the States we would get flooded with copies (usually cam copies where folks literally filmed the movie inside the theater). Sometimes we’d get weird cuts of films. After watching Halloween over there I was looking up reviews and realized I had seen a different cut than everyone else.

Apparently, there are three different versions of the film. There is a theatrical cut, a director’s cut, and an original version that was sent to test audiences. That last version didn’t do very well so they added some scenes and cut some things out. At a guess, I’d say what I originally saw was that first version. But I really don’t remember.

I believe what I watched tonight was the Director’s Cut. Whatever I watched, it was bad. Really bad. Just terrible actually.

I only watched it because the only film in the entire franchise I’ve never seen is the sequel to this. I was hoping to watch it on Halloween night. I guess I still will, but now I’m not looking forward to it.

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.

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.