Friday the 13th Part III 3D (1982) – Review

In the 80s if the third installment in a franchise was being released there was about a 90% chance it would be in 3D and thus we got such classics as Jaws 3D and Amityville 3D but the true thriller killer was the installment of Friday the 13th Part III 3D, which had Jason Voorhees not only donning his signature hockey mask he was literally “Comin’ at Ya” in glorious 3D.

Once again the movie opens with not so much as a recap of the previous entry but rather an almost complete replay of its last few minutes, yet they leave out the “Jump Scare” of Jason crashing through the window because in that film he was a hairy mountain man and now he's a bald mongoloid for this sequel, and not only was this exclusion a lame attempt at covering up bad continuity it also has nothing to do with the events in this movie and somewhat pointless. After watching the “Last time on Friday the 13th” we are then introduced to our menu of soon to be victims; the group is led by Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell), her boyfriend Rick (Paul Kratka), loving couple Debbie (Tracie Savage) her boyfriend Andy (Jeffrey Rogers), a couple of stoner friends and Shelly (Larry Zerner), the film’s required prankster, a character of such odious nature you will practically cheer Jason on in the hope his death could come sooner.

 

“Hi, my name is Shelly, and I’ll call a girl a bitch for politely refusing my advances.”

And what exactly has inspired this particular pilgrimage to Crystal Lake? Via a wonderful flashback, we learn that two years ago, while out in the woods, Chris was attacked by a deformed man and the reason for her return to Crystal Lake is to confront her fears and escape that personal trauma. How she survived the attack is never explained and she claims to have simply awoken back in bed, and though the original draft had Jason rape her, which was jettisoned due to raping not really being a Jason thing, it still doesn’t explain why Jason would not only let a victim live but tuck her back in bed as well. It’s all made worse by the fact that this moment is never referenced again and poor Chris just gets to add a new trauma to replace the old one.

 

“Hey Chris, can you back up, I think a few pages of the script flew out the window.”

I know when watching a Friday the 13th film you aren’t expected to find intricate plotting or deep character development but even by slasher standards, this one is pretty thin. In the first film, we had a villain with clearly defined motivations, if a little crazy, but in the following two sequels it was all about quickly introducing the cast of soon-to-be corpses and knocking them off as quickly and as entertainingly as possible. In this outing, Jason Voorhees (Richard Brooker) seems more like an escapee from The Hills Have Eyes than anything else, a mute monster who wanders around Crystal Lake until he bumps into something to kill. Even at that, he isn’t all that good at his job as he gets his ass readily handed to him numerous times by this film’s Final Girl, one could almost make a drinking game out of how many times Jason is knocked on his ass by Chris.

 

His mother would be so embarrassed.

Stray Observations:

• Taking place a few days after the last movie none of the events in this film occur on Friday the 13th.
• We don’t so much as get Crystal Lake in this movie but something more akin to Crystal Pond.
• Wouldn’t the film have been so much better if the stoner couple had been played by Cheech and Chong?
• Crazy Ralph is replaced with a new “harbinger” one who waves around a severed eyeball while decrying that everyone is doomed. Do you think the town has a casting call for this position?
• There is an offhand comment that reveals that Debbie is pregnant, so this is the one Friday the 13th movie where Jason kills a fetus.  That's something, right?
• The motorcycle gang includes discount Pam Grier and Sid Haig.
• Meta Moment: One of the girls picks up an issue of Fangoria that has an article about make-up artist Tom Savini who was the man behind the original film’s make-up effects.
• Jason clogs the bathtub with bloody towels, causing it to overflow, does this make Jason the original Wet Bandit?
• Jason learned from his mom about proper corpse placement, either having them timed to fall out of a tree or throwing them through windows.
• After surviving an attack by a serial killer is it normal to hop in a canoe to wait for rescue? Wouldn’t walking to town be a better option?
• Chris having a nightmare/dream sequence of Mrs. Voorhees jumping out of the lake makes little to no sense as she knows nothing of Jason or his mother’s backstory.

Note: If the formula stayed true to form the next film should have been about zombie Mrs. Voorhees stalking campers.

Of course, the real star of Friday the 13th Part III is the 3D effects and boy does this film hold nothing back in that area. Director Steve Miner literally throws everything he can at the camera, from yo-yos to popcorn no prop is spared the 3D treatment, all to hopefully keep the audience distracted from his film’s lack of script and two-dimensional characters, and I will admit this does make up for many of the film’s failings as the gruesome kills are taken up a notch by the 3D effects on display. The film also gets bonus points for a heroine who really puts Jason through his paces, she even pulls a knife out of the corpse of a friend to fend of the fiend, and though this does undercut Jason’s credibility as a threat it does go towards making Chris one of the better Final Girls.

 

Trying to hang Jason is badass in anyone’s book.

Overall, aside from Jason getting his iconic hockey mask, and the very fun 3D effects, the film lacks anything else to distinguish it from the other countless “Dead Teenager” movies out there, and though Dana Kimmell may be one of the better Final Girls of the franchise her confusing backstory, which went nowhere, prevents this entry from being nothing more than another generic slasher film.

The New Mutants (2020) – Review

What if The Breakfast Club had superpowers and were trapped inside the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? This was basically the concept behind writer/director Josh Boone's foray into the X-Men universe but due to Disney's purchase of Fox, which resulted in re-shoots being cancelled and multiple delays to its eventual release, the bigger question one has to ask is "Was it worth the wait?"  Let us now take a look back at this latest X-Men movie and see if it even qualifies as a comic book adaptation let alone a good movie.

The movie opens with Danielle "Dani" Moonstar (Blu Hunt), a young Cheyenne Native American, fleeing with her father (Adam Beach) from what she is led to believe was a tornado, and even though she escapes the destruction of her reservation, including the death of her father, she awakes to find herself chained to a bed in some weird hospital. Turns out that Dani is a mutant and she has been committed to this hospital until she can gain full control of her powers, and while there she will be under the constant supervision of Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga) who couldn’t be more obviously evil if she was wearing an “I love Nurse Ratchet” T-shirt, and it’s the introduction of this character that should make comic book fans quickly come to grips with the fact that this film will be playing fast and loose with the characters found within the X-Men and New Mutants books.

 

“Hello, I’ll be your chief “In Name Only” X-Men character for today.”

The movie version of Cecilia Reyes is probably the biggest departure from the source material as she was never depicted as villainous within the pages of Marvel Comics, in fact, she never even wanted to be a superhero in the first place but when captured by a Weapon X program she used her medical expertise to help out the other prisoners, which makes turning her into a supervillain here to be one of the worst cases of character assassination to date. Unfortunately, she is not the only comic book character that veers widely from the source material as most of the New Mutants that Dani meets in this facility are radically altered from the comic book persona, so who else shares Dani’s time in this cuckoo’s nest of mutant menaces?

 

Meet Illyana Rasputin, the worst teleporter in history.

In the comics, Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the younger sister of the Russian X-Men member Colossus but this familial connection is never mentioned, in fact, the very existence of the X-Men is nothing more than a throwaway reference in this movie. Known as Magik, comic book Illyana has the ability to not only teleport through space but time as well, she even ends up trapped in ancient Egypt at one point, and her powers don’t stop at teleportation as her time spent trapped in a “Limbo Dimension” allowed her to gain actual magical abilities that resulted in her becoming the sorceress supreme of her Limbo dimension – eat your heart out Doctor Strange – and she also developed eldritch armour and a magical blade that could disrupt even the most powerful magic as it passes through them. The movie version of Illyana looks very much like her comic book counterpart but it’s all surface-level stuff as the movie has no time to get into what the Limbo Dimension really is – the film certainly can’t get into the who bit of evil sorcerer Belasco kidnapping her into Limbo in the first place – but filmmakers even drop the ball when it comes to her ability to teleport. In the comics, she used this ability to teleport herself from one continent to another, even interplanetary and intergalactic distances on occasion, yet in this movie, she can’t even escape a school that is simply enclosed in a force field. Yet, the film clearly illustrates that her teleporting stems from her ability to enter Limbo in one place and then exit out at a different location, which would make keeping her locked up virtually impossible. Now, the movie could have easily had Dr. Reyes outfit her patients with some sort of mutant restraining collars, that would negate their abilities, but that would have made it harder for our cast of characters to run around displaying their powers in secret.

 

“We can’t escape because our kryptonite is supreme gullibility.”

But what of our other teen patients? Well, we have Sam “Cannonball” Guthrie (Charlie Heaton) who can “blast off” like a cannonball but his uncontrolled power resulted in him bringing down the whole mine on his father and coworkers, killing the lot of them, which is a very nasty departure from the comic book where Sam’s powers saved two people from the collapsing mine, which he did not cause, I might add. The filmmakers also, for some strange reason, left out the fact that while flying at jet speeds he is encased in an impenetrable force field that protects him from impacts, instead, we now have a dude wearing a cast and a variety of bumps and bruises because his powers are now pretty idiotic.  It's like giving a character the strength to lift ten tons but not having the bone density to support it. Next up we have Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga) aka Sunspot, who in this movie becomes superheated when stressed or excited – he badly burned his girlfriend while trying to have sex – but comic Sunspot manifested his powers against racists members of an imposing soccer team who had assaulted him, this resulted in him suddenly transforming him into a creature of solid black solar energy, and it should be noted that his girlfriend was the one person not to abandon him and not turned into a crispy corpse as depicted here. It’s also a little odd that the film doesn’t even get the look of his powers right.

 

Is this Sunspot or the Human Torch?

Up next is Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams) whose mutant powers is being able to turn into a wolf, and though the film pretty much abandoned her ability to transform into a transitional state somewhere between human and wolf, which would have had her looking more like a werewolf than the standard four-legged animal, the character of Rahne in this film is fairly close to her comic book counterpart as in both mediums we learn that she was abused by members of the clergy, unfortunately, the film leaves out that she was rescued from an angry mob by Moira Mac Taggert and later adopted by her. Maybe that will be in a sequel? Just kidding, the purchase by Disney means the chances of a sequel to this film is absolutely zero.

 

“Do you think the WB would hire us?”

There really isn’t much of a plot to Josh Boone’s version of The New Mutants but what we do get feels more like a pilot episode to a television series than it does a movie, not helped by this being the shortest X-Men movie to date at meagre 94-minutes. The basic plot of the film is that these young mutants believe that they are at this facility until they gain control of their powers and safely join the X-Men, but in actuality, this place is some kind of offshoot facility of the Essex Corporation, with flashbacks from the movie Logan to imply it’s part of the Weapon X program, and that they really being trained to become biological weapons for the bad guys. The wrinkle in the villain’s plan is that Dani’s mutant power, which is the ability to create illusions based on a person's psyche that can cause actual physical harm, is deemed to be too dangerous and that Reyes is told to collect Dani's DNA and then have her euthanized. Needless to say, that doesn’t sit well with the other new mutants and soon our scrappy band of misfits decides to set aside their differences and work together. This leads to a key problem, having only one fairly useless villain up against five mutants doesn't seem like much of a challenge. To offset this disparity in conflict Dani’s mutant ability is treated as the film's chief antagonist, with it attacking her friends by using their traumatic backstories against them, and thus Reyes could be considered to be nothing more than an incidental lame-duck villain compared to Dani’s manifested vision.

Note: Illyana is attacked by otherworldly beings called the "Smiling Men" that look like a cross between Hollowgasts from Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children and "The Gentlemen" from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush” which is fitting considering that it looks like Buffy is the only show these kids watch.

For the big climax, the gang must team-up to fight up against “The Demon Bear” an entity that we learn has been following Dani and was the true reason behind her reservation being destroyed, but a vision from her father reveals that this creature is just a manifestation of her own fears and with that lovely nugget of psychobabble she is able to calm the beast and dissipates into the ether. Of course, that’s not quite how it was in the comic book as the Demon Bear was a creature created by a person known as The Adversary who captured Dani’s parents and transformed them into a demonic bear-spirit. Dani did, at first, believe her vision to have been metaphorical in nature but she did learn, eventually, that it was a flesh and blood monster. Now, the movie’s incarnation of The Demon Bear is easily the film’s strongest element and it's this conflict that allows our heroes to finally use their powers effectively, sadly, it’s a little too late.

 

That certainly is a badass inner demon.

Stray Observations:

• If you want to gain the trust of your recently acquired mutant maybe having them wake up chained to a bed in a locked room is maybe not the best way to go.
• That Cecilia Reyes is the only staff member in this facility is utterly ridiculous, and I don’t care if she has mutant force-field powers, having only one-person as the stop-gap against a group of burgeoning mutants is just asking for trouble.
• Why this facility exists in the first place makes no sense and it is never explained as to why they weren’t immediately taken to Essex to be studied and trained there in the first place.
• Illyana’s only friend in this movie is a dragon hand puppet named Lockheed, which later transforms into a real little dragon for the big final fight, but Lockheed is actually associated with the teen mutant Kitty Pryde and not Illyana.
• Rahne in the comics developed a crush on Sam Guthrie but in the film, she has a sweet lesbian relationship with Dani, which is one of the few changes that work as it was handled quite well and was rather sweet.

 

Who needs a “Demon Bear” when you have true love?

It's clear that Josh Boone was interested in making "A haunted-house movie with a bunch of hormonal teenagers" unfortunately Fox wasn’t too keen on the horrific aspects that Boone had planned, but after some less-than-great test screenings, the studio decided on a heavy amount of reshoots, based on feedback to make it scarier, sadly, the acquisition by Disney resulted in any chance of these re-shoots happening dying on the vine. What we were left with was a movie that was 90% set-up but with very little payoff, and any character development that managed to make it to the screen barely made sense within the final script.  This, of course, is only if we assume there was a final script and that Boone wasn't just making things up as he went along.

Still, could a more horror-centric version of The New Mutants have worked? Possibly, but the bigger question is “Why even base this on the Marvel Comic when you could have easily made this about any group of supernaturally gifted teenagers being held in a creepy facility?” There are barely any references to the X-Men or other Marvel properties, thus, with but a few name changes and some amped up horror elements you could have had an interesting film, alas, that was not the case and thus we have this “In Name Only” X-Men movie that doesn’t quite have the ability to stand on its own.

 

Shout out to Maisie Williams who was easily the best part of this film.

Friday the 13th Pt 2 (1981) – Review

When a low budget horror film, one created simply to cash in on the success of another, makes almost ten times its investment back it shouldn’t be considered all that shocking if the studio wanted a sequel right quick. Enter first-time director Steve Miner and the creation of one of horror’s most iconic screen villains, Jason Voorhees.

Sean S. Cunningham, who had created the original Friday the 13th film, pictured the sequel becoming the next installment of what could have become a fun anthology series, this was not to be, instead, the continuing misadventures of Camp Crystal Lake would be the setting for the foreseeable future films. The big question to the filmmakers was "Who would be the antagonist needed to knock off the next round of camp counsellors?" Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) had her head cleanly removed at the end of the previous film, and even though we got that shocking moment with a young Jason leaping out of the water at Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) it was clear that this was simply a product of her traumatized mind, Jason was not some zombie living under the surface of Crystal Lake, or was he?

 

"Later I will be resurrected by lightning, does that count?"

Cunningham himself thought the idea of Jason being the villain for the sequel was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard and actress Betsy Palmer is on record stating, “I don’t know who that guy in the hockey mask is but he’s not my son. Jason is dead and at the bottom of Crystal Lake.” Two very valid points of view and this movie doesn’t bother to explain anything about Jason or how he’s been spending his time during the last twenty-one years since presumably not drowning, which raises the big question, “If he never drown in the first place what the hell was his mom so upset about?” Or is it possible that she was such a terrible mother that he faked his own death and then hid out in the woods until she was beheaded by Alice?

 

If that’s the case having a shrine to her makes very little sense.

The movie opens with a prologue where we find sole survivor Alice Hardy living alone and recovering from her traumatic experience at Camp Crystal Lake, despite the protestations of her mother that she should come home, and sadly it turns out that maybe she should have listened to her mother because faster than you can say “Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma” she finds the decomposing head of Mrs. Voorhees in her fridge and catches an icepick to the head. This kind of pissed me off, not only is the murdering of the previous film’s Final Girl a big “Fuck you” and sure there were extenuating circumstances surround a real-life stalker that Adrienne King was dealing with, but that doesn’t excuse lazy writing. That thirteen-minute prologue poses some serious issues such as, “How did Jason know where Alice lived? How did he get there from Crystal Lake? Did he take a bus and if so did any of his fellow passengers wonder who the dude with the burlap sack over his head was?”

 

“What do you mean, exact change?”

The true-crime here is the fact that if that entire prologue had been cut it would have changed nothing, and they could have even used all that flashback footage during the campfire storytelling sequence without having to mention Alice disappearing, but instead we get a nonsensical opening to a movie that wasn’t going to make a lot of sense to anyone who had seen the previous film. Jason has to have been a figment of Alice’s imagination because if he wasn’t dead it removes the motivations of Mrs. Voorhees and completely undercuts the original film. It’s no surprise that Sean S. Cunningham, screenwriter Victor Miller and special effects legend Tom Savini decided not to return.

 

“You’re doomed! You’re all doomed!”

There isn’t much of a plot to Friday the 13th Pt 2 as director Steve Minor and screenwriter Ron Kurz seemed to be following a horror movie algorithm to ensure their film was as big a hit as its predecessor and, apparently, intelligent storytelling wasn’t part of that algorithm. We have Paul Holt (John Furey) opening a school for camp counsellors that is located across from the infamous “Camp Blood” and he is ably assisted by Ginny Fields (Amy Steel) who he is also having an affair with, and while all the various camp counsellors frolic and play a dark cloud falls across the camp, a cloud in the form of a machete-wielding Jason Voorhees (Warrington Gillette), who proceeds to murder the counsellors for no discernable reason. In the first film, Mrs. Voorhees had a logical if twisted motivation for her killings, that of preventing the camp from opening and kids like her son being endangered, but Jason has no such motivation and is more akin to Michael Myers from Halloween, and emotionless killing machine. The first film was made to cash in on John Carpenter’s film yet the reveal of the mother being the killer was a nice twist, but then in the sequel, we get a mute Jason hacking apart random teenager, which basically turned this film into more of a clone of Halloween than the original was.

 

“Have any of you guys seen Donald Pleasance around?”

Stray Observations:

• When the first six-minutes of a ninety-six-minute movie consist mostly of flashbacks from the original film you know there must still budget issues.
• Not only is the date Friday the 13th never mentioned but the killings also take place over two days.
• This sequel takes place at a school for camp counsellors, is that even a thing?
• The camp’s resident prankster surprisingly survives this film, in fact, the last we see of him he was looking for an after-hours bar.
• Jason murdering Crazy Ralph has me wondering "Was he tired of the old coot warning off potential victims away?"
• We see over a dozen counselors attending this “school” but Jason barely manages to kill a handful.  Talk about a slacker.
• Ginny breaks one of the “Final Girl” rules by having sex.
• A camp counsellor in a wheelchair seems like a strange case of affirmative action for an 80s film, but it did illustrate that Jason doesn’t discriminate when it comes to victims.

 

I’m assuming Jason was a huge fan of the film Kiss of Death.

As an antagonist, the Jason in Friday the 13th Pt 2 is far from the hulking unstoppable killing machine that would become in later films because here he’s taken out by a kick to the balls and even falls off a chair while trying to kill Ginny, which certainly takes away some of that imposing factor he so tries to implement, but speaking of the final girl, she is easily one of the more interesting ones to appear in the series. Ginny is shown to be quite an intelligent woman as we see he beat her boyfriend at chess and uses her knowledge of child psychology to mess with Jason’s head and this was something not seen too often in this franchise. If Friday the 13th Pt 2 is guilty of anything it's in not trusting the audience to want something new, which resulted in a script that made little to no sense and provided us with a killer who was slightly more threatening than Mr. Rogers.

 Note: The film tried to replicate the jump scare ending from the original film, by having Jason burst through the window to grab Ginny, but then the film fades to white and eventually reveals that Ginny is fine, being wheeled into an ambulance, but we have no idea what happened to her boyfriend Paul or to Jason. If it was Steve Miner’s intention to confuse and piss off a viewer consider this a success.

Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985) – Review

Dinosaurs have been brought into the modern world by a variety of different ways, such as atomic testing waking them up from a long slumber or genetic tinkering creating a theme park full of flesh and bloodthirsty monsters, but it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World that first introduced the idea of prehistoric beasts colliding with humanity, and that film could be considered the grandfather of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend an 80s entry where we were supposed to believe that dinosaurs were just wandering around Africa with no one the wiser.

Released by Disney Studios in 1985, under their mature label Touchstone Pictures, the movie's premise hinges on the idea that dinosaurs are currently roaming around Africa, now, I know that sounds fairly ridiculous, and it is, but it's also based on the actual work of cryptozoologists Roy Mackal who went to Africa in search of the Mokele-mbembe, a creature described as being similar to a long-necked sauropod. Basically, he was looking for a dinosaur in Africa.  Mackal also believed in the Loch Ness Monster so that puts his beliefs in a proper frame of reference, and though he had a doctorate in biology he had no training that would qualify him to undertake competent research on exotic animals. So what we have here is an interesting subject for a movie, a leading figure in a field that at best could be called "pseudoscience" and who is travelling into the Congo to prove his wack-a-doo theories to the world, but that’s not the movie we got, instead, we have an evil paleontologist named Dr. Eric Kiviat (Patrick McGoohan) who murders anyone who stands between him and his chance at capturing a living brontosaurus.

 

You simply do not cross Patrick McGoohan.

While the character of Dr. Eric Kiviat was loosely based on Dr. Roy Mackal this movie isn’t really about him, what we have instead is paleontologist Dr. Susan Matthews-Loomis (Sean Young) and her sports-writer husband George Loomis (William Katt), who put his own career on hold to join his wife in Africa, as she assists Kiviat in looking for dinosaur bones. When Susan finds a bone that she believes to be from a sauropod Kiviat quickly dismisses it as being from a giraffe, in the most condescending way possible, but it actually is a dinosaur bone and his dismissal is all about hiding his true agenda, which is to find a living dinosaur, and he can’t have his student stealing his thunder. This rather callous dismissal leads to Susan running off on her own when she hears of villagers getting sick from eating meat from an unknown animal – because why wouldn’t a paleontologist be called in to treat food poisoning – and you get three guesses as to what kind of animal it was and the first two don’t count.

 

A living dinosaur or a Disney theme park attraction, you be the judge.

As an adventure film Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend is an interesting animal, as it does bring the viewer to some rather beautiful locations, but much of the comedy surrounding the “wacky natives” is dubious at best, and as good as Patrick McGoohan is at playing outright villainy he is undermined by the fact that he’s facing off against the likes of Sean Young and William Katt, who are likable enough but are so far out of their league it’s not even funny. At one point in the story, after Kiviat’s army of goons have killed the male brontosaurus and captured the female, our two bumbling heroes try and free the mother brontosaurus in broad daylight, and this goes about as well as can be expected and these two idiots are quickly captured.

 

Sure, why would anyone post guards on such a valuable prize?

Much of the film consists of Susan and George running around the jungle, either trying to escape with the baby brontosaur they’ve sort of adopted or taking a break for moments of light comedy, and it’s this blend of comedy and action that just doesn’t work as at no time do we really feel that our heroes are in peril. Even when they are captured we know they will escape because they are equipped with the best plot armour Disney writers could buy. When Susan and George aren’t dodging bullets fired at them by African soldiers, who clearly went to the Stormtrooper School of Missing Things, we get bizarre “fish out of water” comedy that really doesn’t work considering that these two have apparently been living in the field for the past six months, so their stupidity makes little to no sense. Worse is the fact that George seems more interested in getting laid by his wife, even when she isn’t in the mood, rather than in the dinosaur baby they are supposed to be protecting.

 

Question: Who would make out in a jungle with a baby brontosaurus watching?

Stray Observations:

• How do you get nudity in your family film? Why, you simply set your movie in Africa and have the native women walk around topless.
• Evil Dr. Eric Kiviat takes the drugged brontosaurus female but leaves the dead male behind. This makes no sense as a dead specimen is just as valuable and allows you to do a full necropsy without having to harm the living one.
• Upon seeing the mother captured and the dad brutally killed Susan is pretty quick to decide to get the baby brontosaurus back to civilization so that they get credit for the discovery and not Kiviat, which is pretty cold thinking considering she’s supposed to be one of our protagonists.
• One minute Kiviat is all “We don’t take prisoners” and is quite fine with the killing of George and Susan but then later when the two are captured again he keeps them alive to help find Baby, despite him having their tracking device and not needing them at all. Plot armour engaged!
• The character of Nigel, Eric’s assistant, is easily the most sympathetic character in the film and he truly seems to care more for the safety of the dinosaurs than our heroes do, yet the film casually kills him off as if he had it coming.
• A brontosaurus running as fast as a speeding pick-up truck is pretty damn ridiculous.

 

“Could I see your license?”

There are some genuinely funny moments in Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, and William Katt and Sean Young have fine chemistry together and Patrick McGoohan is a delight to watch as he chews up the scenery as the film’s resident baddie, unfortunately when it comes to the other key element - ie the dinosaurs themselves - the film really drops the ball. This film was released is a decade before computer generated imagery would be able bring Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs so startling to life so one would have assumed that Disney would have employed the classic stop-motion technique that had been a standard method since almost the dawn of cinema, but you’d be wrong, instead, they decided to go with the full-scale animatronic puppets or the man-in-a-suit technique, and to say this provided viewers with less than convincing action would be a vast understatement.

 

Disney’s Jungle Cruise has better animatronics than this.

Overall, Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend is a fairly forgettable entry from the folks over at Disney, which is a shame as the subject matter could have led to an interesting movie, such as tackling the life of Dr. Roy Mackal and his goofy belief in dinosaurs living in Darkest Africa, but what we ended up with was your garden variety matinee monster movie that didn’t really provide all that much in the way of dino-action. This movie is a hard one to recommend to anyone other than fans of dinosaurs movies, but even then, there are many better examples to spend your time viewing rather than this rather tired attempt.

Question: For a species to survive doesn’t it have to have a rather sizable breeding population, and being brontosaurs are not the smallest creatures in the world how could anyone believe these creatures were roaming around Africa without anyone noticing them?

Friday the 13th (1980) – Review

“Halloween is making a shit-ton of money, let’s rip it off” and with those immortal words from producer/director Sean S. Cunningham to screenwriter Victor Miller, a horror franchise was born, of course, it was never intended to be a franchise and though Jason and his iconic hockey mask were a few years away – and just in time for the 3D boom  – the first Friday the 13th movie still works quite well and has truly stood the test of time.

When released back in 1980 the original Friday the 13th may not have been the first slasher film to hit cinemas but it is often considered the true launch of the 80s “Dead Teenager” genre, and even though Bob Clark's  Black Ch Christmas and John Carpenter's Halloween had got a jump on the genre in the preceding decade it was the trip to Camp Crystal Lake that really set the tone for many of the films to follow. Upon viewing Halloween it's clear that Victor Miller left with two takeaways; a prior evil and having sex results in death, and with the addition of a perfect “Campfire Story” motif for this outing he had himself a great little horror story. Now, one of the key differences between Halloween and Friday the 13th is that Michael Myers was given no clear motivation for his becoming a murderer, he was just evil incarnate, as if some switch had been pulled that set him off on his killing spree, while in Friday the 13th there was a clear inciting incident with the death of little Jason, which caused the grief-stricken mother (Betsy Palmer) to have a psychotic break

 

“Here’s Johnny.”

The story structure of Friday the 13th is pretty much that of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None” only instead of it taking place on a small isolated island it’s out in the woods of New Jersey. We get an economic introduction to our cast of characters before the film proceeds to then knock them off one by one; we have the camp’s owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), whose early interactions with camp counsellor Alice (Adrienne King) could have landed him in court for sexual harassment – lucky for him he got murdered before that could happen – and then we have Annie (Robbi Morgan) the camp’s cook, who doesn't quite make it to Camp Crystal Lake as she is the first one to be brutally murdered.

 

Horror Survivor Tip #1: Do not run into the woods to escape a killer, whoever is chasing you will somehow end up in front of you.

Another key element of this movie is the introduction of “The Harbinger” the character who will warn our cast of characters to "Get out!" while the getting’s good. In this case, it’s Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) who exclaims to all to hear that anyone who goes to Crystal Lake will die, “You're doomed! You're all doomed!” and for one simple reason “It's got a death curse!” Even a kindly truck driver (Rex Everhart) tries to steer Annie away from the camp, providing us with some necessary exposition about the camp’s history, needless to say, such advice is rarely heeded and soon the bodies are stacking up like cordwood.

 

Horror Survivor Tip #2: Avoid going to the washroom by yourself, just ask Marion Crane, it’s never a good idea.

Rounding out the cast of victims is Camp Crystal Lake’s counsellors Jack Burrell (Kevin Bacon), Bill Brown (Harry Crosby), Marcie Cunningham (Jeannine Taylor), Brenda Jones (Laurie Bartram) and resident prankster Ned Rubenstein (Mark Nelson ) who are all given just enough screen time to allow us to either root for their survival or cheer for their demise – we’re looking at you Ned – and Miller’s economic screenplay does this beautifully in what otherwise could have been a simple paint-by-numbers procedure.

 

Horror Survivor Tip #3: Do not be the resident prankster as your chance of living drops almost to zero.

Stray Observations:

• In the prologue only two kids are murdered by Mrs. Voorhees but twenty-one years later she tries to knock off the entire staff of Camp Crystal Lake, which is some serious escalation.
• A motorcycle cop arrives at the camp looking for Crazy Ralph, but what would he have done if he’d found him? Was he planning on Ralph “Riding Bitch” all the way back to the station?
• An actual snake is chopped to pieces, in a rather brutal fashion on-screen moment, which will always be a serious demerit towards this entry.
• I’d love to know how “Strip Monopoly” works because if you pay rent in clothes instead of money you’d be naked pretty damn fast, and are certain items of clothing worth more than others?
• Alice breaks the “Final Girl” rule by drinking and smoking pot.
• If you look closely enough you’ll notice that all the kills are performed by a male stand-in and not Betsy Palmer.
• For a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Voorhees is pretty good at moving bodies around; she nails Bill’s body to a door with arrows, throws Brenda’s through a window and hangs Steve Christie’s corpse from a tree.

 

She must take Pilates or something to have that much upper body strength.

This film may have been birthed out of the popularity of John Carpenter’s Halloween but it also owes a considerable debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The character of Mrs. Voorhees is a schizophrenic who hears and often speaks with the voice of her dead child and thus she is basically the flipside of Norman Bates, we’re just lucky she doesn’t decide to dress up like an eleven-year-old boy, but another key ingredient borrowed from Psycho would be that of Harry Manfredini’s fantastic score. When on things of the music of Friday the 13th the first thing that comes to mind is the iconic “Ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma” that is heard while the killer’s POV is tracking the latest victim, but when the film reaches its third act finale the shrieking violin chords of Bernard Herman’s Psycho score pretty much takes over, a theft that Manfredini is more than happy to admit. And to be fair, if you’re going to steal you might as well steal from the best.

 

“We all go a little crazy sometimes.”

Of course, one cannot talk of Friday the 13th without mentioning its true star, Tom Savini, even though Betsy Palmer was the only real marketable actor in the cast it was Tom Savini, hot off George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, who made Friday the 13th truly memorable. When one sits down to a “Dead Teenager Movie” the plot and cast of characters are quite secondary to the creative kills that will be presented, and in this area, Savini is a legend. In an era long before computer effects, Savini managed to pull together some truly amazing effects but what should be noted is that in this first film of the series the kills are fairly restrained, so restrained that when it had to be edited for television broadcast only a few seconds had to be trimmed, and it's a testament to both Savini and Cunningham in providing kills that aren't just mounds of blood and gore, instead, they are quick moments that cause an instant visceral reaction which will remain with the viewer long after the moment has passed.

 

Tom Savini brings home the Bacon.

Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th has often been accused of being misogynist but that is quite unfair and that cloud that hangs over the film is mostly due to the many entries that followed, the kills in this first movie were fairly democratic – hell, it’s the males who get some of the more violent kills in this film – and when the killer is revealed to be a woman it also takes the wind out of any attempt at making a “Male Gaze” criticism. Is Friday the 13th a horror masterpiece? Certainly not, Cunningham was attempting to make a quick and cheap commercial film and any artistic merit was a secondary by-product of this goal, but one must admit that even all these years later one must admit it was a well-crafted little film, executed with excellent workmanship and pride. Friday the 13th may not have re-invented the wheel when it came to the slasher genre but it did add the racing stripes.

Note: The jump scare of Jason coming out of the lake and attacking Alice was a blatant attempt at copying the jump scare from the end of Brian De Palma’s Carrie, funny enough, it was so effective it pretty much cemented the franchise to follow, the same thing cannot be said of Carrie.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) – Review

 Before we go any further let's get one thing straight, in this movie neither Abbott nor Costello meets Frankenstein as it’s the monster they actually meet and not the infamous doctor who bears the name. There, is everyone satisfied? That kind of thing may win you points at pub trivia but not here, so let us have no further discussion on that point, but what we will discuss is the accomplishment of this particular Abbott and Costello feature, one that if not responsible for the idea of a shared universe it did manage to produce one of the best examples of it.

Cross-overs in comic books have existed since almost the very beginning of the medium but in the world of film, not so much, franchises were not known for having a character from one franchise meeting up with another – Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes was not teaming up with George Sanders' The Saint – while today’s audiences are now pretty much inundated with the concept but trust me, this was not the norm, yet back in the early 40s over at Universal Studios, home of the classic Universal Monsters, they did the unheard of and pitted Frankenstein’s monster against Lon Chaney’s The Wolfman, in a film aptly titled Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. This team-up was a huge success and eventually led to the crossover to end all crossovers and the release of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a film that not only included both Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman but it had Dracula as well.

 

“Wait a minute, you’re much too hairy to be Dracula?”

The movie follows the misadventures of Chick Young (Bud Abbott) and Wilbur Grey (Lou Costello), two baggage clerks who find themselves mishandling two crates which had just arrived from Europe and were to be delivered to McDougal's House Of Horrors, but the clumsiness of Wilbur so enrages Mr. McDougal (Frank Ferguson ) that he insists that the boys deliver them to his museum so that his insurance agent can inspect them to ensure they have not been damaged. Needless to say, things don’t go too well for Wilbur and before you can “Transylvania 6-5000” the poor bumbling coward is face to face with both Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s Monster.

 

Is this Dracula or Ed Wood’s chiropractor?

McDougal isn’t the only interested party when it comes to these two particular monsters as Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) - aka The Wolf Man - has tracked the legendary monsters all the way from Europe, and he even tried to call and warn Wilbur about the crates but an untimely transformation into the Wolf Man put a kibosh on that.  Talbot is adamant that Dracula’s evil plans have to be foiled, but what exactly is the Prince of Darkness planning? Turns out Dracula has no intention of making the same mistake that Victor Frankenstein made, by putting an abnormal brain in the body of a re-animated giant, instead, he plans to replace the Monster's brutish brain with a more pliable one, such as the one that Wilbur is currently using.

 

I wonder if his HMO covers brain surgery.

Dracula is aided by Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert), a brilliant surgeon who fled Europe under a dark cloud, and she is also the film’s femme fatale as it’s her job to seduce and lure poor Wilbur into Dracula’s clutches and onto the operating table. But she isn’t the only one with sights set on our tubby protagonist as Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph), an undercover investigator for the insurance company, feigns love for Wilbur in the hopes that he would lead her to the presumably stolen exhibits. A good portion of the comedy stems from these two gorgeous women fawning over Wilbur, much to Chick’s chagrin as he simply can’t understand the attraction these women have for his idiot partner, but an even larger portion of the comedy is provided by Wilbur repeatedly witnesses horrifying goings-on and Chick arriving too late to see anything.

Note: The moving candle routine was original used in the Abbott and Costello comedy Hold That Ghost only updated here to be sliding across Dracula’s coffin.

Stray Observations:

• If McDougal was so worried about Wilbur’s clumsiness why would he want him involved any further with the delivery?
• Werewolf movies constantly get the moon wrong and this film is no different, Lawrence Talbot transforms into the Wolf Man on four consecutive nights despite the fact that the moon is only full once during the cycle of its phases.
• I’m not sure how serious a threat the Wolf Man can be considered when he seems to have problems stalking chubby Wilbur across a small hotel room and is even unsuccessful in the woods.
• Frankenstein’s monster is notoriously known for his fear of fire, so what’s with him calmly walking into the flames of a burning dock at the end of this film?
• But the biggest question raised by this film, "Are the residents of Florida aware that there is a gothic castle off the coast?"

 

This place would make for an amazing Disney attraction.

As was the case with many of the Abbot and Costello comedies a logical plot wasn’t as important as the verbal banter and slapstick between the two leads, and questions like “Why was Lawrence Talbot on the trail of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster?” or “What exactly did Dracula want with the monster in the first place?” are completely unimportant.  Now, I’m sure an eight-foot-tall creature with Lou Costello’s brain would have some uses but I’d love to hear the particular details of Dracula's plan.

 

I wonder if Dracula was interested in having a vaudeville act.

There is no denying the fact that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of the best examples of blending horror with laughs and though the film sports very little in the way of true scares for a modern audience, to the point where some fans of the Universal Monsters accused the film of harming these classic icons of horror, and with Lon Chaney’s The Wolf Man becoming the butt of much of the humour there is some credence to that claim, yet no one can dispute the manic fun the film produces in its 82-minute running time. This is a high energy comedy and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were both at the top of their game for this production, despite neither one of them wanting to make it, and thus not only will this film go down in history as one of their best outings but also as one of the best monster mash-ups to date.

 

 Note: In 2017 Universal Pictures attempted to start a shared universe with an updated roster of their classic monsters but it died on the vine after the failure of Tom Cruises The Mummy.  I do wonder that if it had succeeded what modern comedy team would have eventually faced off against them.

Ghost Ship (2012) – Review

 

Dark Castle Entertainment’s first two releases were remakes of William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts – which is where the studio took its name from – and though both of those films garnered fairly good reviews for their third outing they decided to go with an original story and moved the horror out onto the high seas with Ghost Ship.

When one thinks of aquatic horror films like Jaws and Deep Rising come readily to mind but Dark Castle Entertainment's Ghost Ship is a closer cousin to the 80s film Death Ship, where George Kennedy and company board a haunted Nazi torture ship, and with Ghost Ship we have a movie that is basically a “Haunted House” on water.  The basic plot surrounds a crew of ocean salvagers getting wind of a particular lucrative salvage job from a stranger at a bar named Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) and despite the mysterious nature of the job the crew can’t pass up this possible huge payday, that things go wrong almost immediately is pretty much expected. The crew of the Arctic Warrior consists of gruff Captain Murphy (Gabriel Byrne), his second in command Epps (Julianna Margulies ), soon to be married Greer (Isaiah Washington), the crew’s mechanic Santos (Alex Dimitriades), and the prerequisite comedy team of Dodge (Ron Eldard), and Munder (Karl Urban), but don’t expect too much character development from this group as the quick “And Then There Were None” aspect of this particular horror movie does not allow itself for such luxuries.

 

“We’re the comedy relief, they wouldn’t kill us off, would they?”

The real star of this movie is the ghost ship itself and the set designers went all out in fashioning incredibly spooky environs for our “Red Shirts” to wander through, from the SS Antonia Graza’s gorgeous interiors during its glorious heyday of the 60s to its current decrepit state as a rusted out and waterlogged tomb full of ghosts and decaying corpses. I especially loved the way the cinematographer used the dappled light effect of reflected water to create the illusion that this boat was not only out to sea but in danger of sinking at any moment, sadly, the amazing sets weren’t quite enough to overcome the bipolar nature of the story. The original script of this movie was to be more along the lines of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with the crew of the Arctic Warrior murdering each other off so that the sole survivor would walk away with all the loot aboard the Antonia Grazza, but after the events of 9/11 the studio decided against a film that focused on the worst aspects of humanity and thus the movie switched gears and made the threat more supernatural in nature.

 

“Come play with me, Danny.”

Even though the movie is titled Ghost Ship there aren’t all that many ghosts for our heroes to encounter. The key spectre is that of a little girl named Katie (Emily Browning ), who kind of works like a nine-year-old version of Virgil from Dante’s Inferno as she tries to help Epps uncover the mystery of The Antonia Graza, but aside from her all we really have ghost-wise is the ship’s lounge singer (Francesca Rettondini) who lures Greer to his death but more in the manner of the mythological sirens rather than that of your average ghost. The death of Greer is a key piece of evidence as to where the film fails, as we are given no real-time with these characters to get to know them and thus it makes no sense that Greer, who states that he is getting married in a few weeks, would be lured to his death via the offer of sex.

  Note: The script tried to justify his attempted adultery by him stating “Can't cheat on your fiancée with a dead girl, right? “but not only does this make him a bigger asshole but an idiot as well.

The interesting thing about the Antonia Grazais that it’s not so much a ghost ship as it is a supernatural equivalent of a pitcher plant, with the mysterious Ferriman luring people to their death with the promises of riches, but unbeknownst to his victims, Ferriman is actually the demonic spirit of a deceased sinner who had been tasked by the Devil with provoking people to sin, then killing them and bringing their souls to Hell. What is not made clear is what happens to those killed who weren’t sinners? We learn that Ferriman masterminded the murder of the crew and passengers, by somehow convincing some of the crew into slaughtering everyone else via poisoning, machine-gun fire, or as depicted in the film’s amazing opening sequence by cutting them in half by a high-tension steel cable, but aren’t most of those people simply victims? Why are those spirits trapped alongside those of their greed filled murderers? It’s alluded that Katie was able to work against Ferriman’s wishes because she was an unmarked soul, but as she seems to be the only ghost able to do so one must ask the question, “What kind of ship was this little girl travelling on if she was the only good soul on board?”

 

Was the Antonia Graza a floating pleasure palace of debauchery?

Katie explains to Epps that, “We are all trapped here, my shipmates and I, even the ones who are not marked and when the boat is full, when he has all the souls he needs and he’s filled his quota we will all be ferried” but if he can ferry across souls that aren’t marked by sin what’s the purpose of luring people aboard through greed?

It’s clear that the greed aspect was a holdover from an earlier draft of the script, before it got the supernatural overhaul, and thus we are left with a movie that has mythology with bigger holes than this particular sinking ship sports.  Then again, who needs stuff like "character development" and "proper plotting" when you have cool moments of gore on hand?

 

This stuff will really hook fans of good gore?

Stray Observations:

• The opening title sequence does a nice job of keeping viewers off guard with its use of nice romantic music, and even the title card Ghost Ship is in the hot pink graphics of what you’d expect from a romantic comedy.
• Murphy’s understanding of Maritime Law is flat out wrong, it is not a case of “finders, keepers” and most salvage crews are hired by the original owners of the ship or the country the ship originated from and they would then be offered a percentage of the haul.
• When Murphy tells his crew the story of the Mary Celeste he nearly gets all of the facts about its disappearance, travel, and recovery wrong.  Did the writers not have access to Wikipedia?
• At one point Murphy states that because the Italians could not compete in speed with the ships of the British or Americans they built their ships to be extremely big and luxurious, but this is completely wrong, since the 1940s, Italian ocean liners were known, precisely, for their speed as well as for their luxury.  Clearly Google was also beyond the reach of this film's writers.
• We get a scene where food someone is eating suddenly turns into maggots which is clearly a nod/rip-off of either Poltergeist or The Lost Boys.
• The name Ferriman is a mythological nod to Charon, the boatman who ferries souls of the dead across the River Styx to Hades.   At least one of the writers apparently cracked a book.
• Cruising around the Bering Sea doesn’t seem like a very lucrative place to pick up souls, Ferriman would have been better off in the Bermuda Triangle.
• The corrupted crew of Antonia Graza pull out an array of full-automatic weapons to slaughter the crew, but where did these guns come from? Was this ship a pleasure ship/gun-running operation?
• Captain Murphy is a recovering alcoholic, which the spirits use to drive him mad, so basically he’s intended to be Jack Torrance from The Shining.

 

They should have simply called the ship the S.S Overlook.

I can sympathize with the problems director Steve Beck must have had in dealing with the studio’s mandated script changes – going from a human drama to supernatural carnage is a big shift – but he still must take some of the fall for creating a horror film with not a lot in the actual scares department, sure, we do get some fantastic set pieces and the atmospheric design of the ship is excellent but there is no real sense of dread and much of that comes from not caring if any of our cast of characters make it off the ship alive.

Ghost Ship was Beck’s last time in the director’s chair and that is a shame because he did fine with Thi13en Ghosts and if given a more thought-out script this could have been another hit. Overall, there are certainly worse horror films than Ghost Ship, thousands actually, not to mention the fact that we certainly don’t have enough sea-going ghost stories out there, so I can still recommend this to fans of the genre.

Note: It should be pointed out that the opening sequence, where everyone is sliced in half by that high-tension cable, is almost worth the price admission.