October is NOT over until I say it is, people. Your light reading recap continues below…
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984 Blu-Ray) – Continuing informal tradition for a series I’ve not only seen dozens of times but that is also thoroughly documented in this site’s backpages, I once again abandon a capsule review of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the franchise’s reality TV-worthy, high-wattage, early high water mark, in favor of random observations culled from this most recent viewing. Horndog mortician Axel’s last name is apparently “Barka”, which, sorry, is an in-joke or backstory to which I’m just not privy. His semi-requited crush, the otherwise sensible Nurse Morgan, is, judging by her own nametag, almost certainly an homage to actress Robbi Morgan, whose death as Annie in Part 1 kicked the whole bloody affair off in earnest. Everybody praises Jimmy’s unconventional dance moves, and rightly so, but it’s the odd Cheeto sculpture he’s idly constructing when the Doublemint Homewrecker turns her lustful gaze upon him that tags him as a true artiste. Joseph Zito’s capable direction really is more than any ‘80s slasher required or deserved, and his scene blocking, facility with soap opera, and attention to interesting detail make all the difference here. And did I hear Judie Aronson reductively call the Jarvis family’s Golden Retriever wonderdog Gordon a “handsome mutt” upon meeting him, when he is arguably the smartest, most capable member of the cast bar none? Better put some respect on his name, girl.
Hannibal (2001 Blu-Ray) – Hannibal is the direct sequel to Oscar-winning juggernaut The Silence of the Lambs for which seemingly the whole world clamored yet only a fraction actually accepted, and none unconditionally. I reside firmly in the apologist camp – I am a firebreathing evangelist for the later TV series, which appropriates huge swaths of its territory, plus the legendary Red Dragon arc – but even though I find the movie fascinating, engrossing, and, for a 131-minute simulated art piece, strangely propulsive, I recognize it is littered with flaws, Despite boasting a filmmaking pedigree at least on par with its untouchable predecessor, chief among these is the cardinal sin of not measuring up on any other level. Whereas Lambs felt at times like a work of magic, Hannibal is merely a piece of work. That shouldn’t imply, as some critics have, that the film is without merit, because nothing could be further from the truth. The power dynamics so novel in Lambs are here upended, as a transcontinental manhunt for the now-uncaged, unconventional gourmand/killer bon vivant is joined, with troubled FBI agent Clarice Starling racing a disfigured, megalomaniacal former Lecter victim hellbent on revenge. Hannibal is too fractured and episodic in nature, and a little too willing to eschew logic altogether for Grand Guignol fireworks, as in the bracing but problematic finale. There’s too much plot and alleged character development here for a single movie to bear. Still it’s stylish, unrepentently sinful, and fun above all. Some people are just impossible to impress.
Happy Death Day (2017 Blu-Ray) – It seems a little obvious to call any movie in which the protagonist relives the same day repeatedly ala Groundhog Day (even if, by her own admission, she has somehow never heard of it) “all setup with no payoff”, but if I could lodge any complaint against Happy Death Day, which repurposes the classic romantic comedy’s formula for a modern PG-13 horror audience to an otherwise shockingly successful degree, that’d be it. 4/5 of the film is an unalloyed delight, as terminally self-absorbed sorority girl Tree Gellman undergoes an involuntary regimen of incremental comeuppance as personal growth when she is caught in a time loop after an unknown assailant wearing her college’s nonsensical drooling baby mascot mask kills her on the way home from a surprise birthday party. Half the reason Happy Death Day works lies in the clever ways it differentiates between what turn out to be seventeen separate daily reruns while employing creative techniques and film grammar to immerse viewers in Tree’s unfolding ordeal/escalating nightmare. The other half is Jessica Rothe’s lead performance, a self-assured, endearing mix of charm, goofiness, and vulnerability without which the film would be dead on arrival. The answer to our Happy central mystery – who is trying to kill Tree and can she survive the night without resetting? – is undercooked and unsatisfying, full stop, but that doesn’t discount what came before. This is a one-woman show, and Tree really is something else. Little wonder everyone wanted a piece of her.
Haunt (2016 Shudder) – One of the more effective offerings in horror’s self-contained “Haunted Attraction But Real” moment of the mid-teens (see also Hell Fest, Hell House LLC, et al) is this nasty little confection, in which a loose-knit group of six relatively anonymous twenty-something partiers looking for something to do on Halloween night ventures out way past the city limits, there running afoul of perhaps the country’s least inviting DIY scare emporium. Spare and atmospheric in a decidedly Saw-like manner, in contrast to the sensory overload and frantic production design of the few professional, jumpscare-heavy assembly line houses I’ve encountered in the real world, Haunt’s completely adequate if comparatively pedestrian setup gives way – in a stunning moment in which it is immediately unclear to either audience whether a friend’s sudden, horrifying death was real or staged – to an altogether creepier, unsettled, and unsettling back half. Here the house’s employees gradually reveal both their faces and their intentions, in the process demonstrating an admirable commitment to making unwitting, uncooperative clientele suffer for their art. Who knew that murdering your own paying customers in unsavory ways within creative confines could possibly qualify as a growth industry? Keep supporting local businesses, I guess. It’s all like an overly elaborate fly zapper, just less brightly lit. While no masterpiece, Haunt digs under your skin in multiple ways both figurative and literal, and makes a chilling, resonant argument that some monsters are far scarier when their masks come off.
Heart Eyes (2025 Netflix) – Tone can be a tricky thing for filmmakers to master, especially in a genre whose customers might sometimes rightly feel they’ve seen everything before. That’s why horror films in particular tend to pick a lane and stay there, and also why undercalibrated or unintentional tonal shifts within can seem not just jarring but occasionally disqualifying. Not content with keeping a single plate aloft, Heart Eyes deftly melds all-out slasher carnage with faux-adversarial romantic comedy, skimping on neither, transitioning from the latter to the former via an escalating procession of laugh-out-loud surprises, then easing back into interpersonal concerns whenever the action lulls. The trick is that, even though Heart Eyes is billed as horror, and moves with savage intent when appropriate, director Josh Ruben never implies a strong preference for one ingredient over the other. He also avoids investing excess time in a convoluted origin story for the infamous Heart Eyes Killer, who has spent successive Valentine’s Days hunting metropolitan couples out of seasonal spite, reserving that instead for put-upon advertising executive Ally and box-checking Jay, the meet cute consultant brought in to salvage her disastrous latest pitch. This is the equivalent of juggling a Whitman’s sampler, a rubber chicken, and a running, bloodspattered chainsaw without breaking a sweat. One doubts that first bloodthirsty preview crowd came into Heart Eyes expecting to also watch two yuppies fall in love, but the titular killer, however dedicated, is such a vicious tunnel-visionary that it’s difficult to remain neutral. Assuming they survive, of course.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025 Netflix) – It takes a village to raise a child. It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent Fritters. And it takes wondrous variety to create a year in horror the likes of 2025. Along with numerous fierce new visions from ascendant filmmakers, one always expects sequels aplenty, whether highly anticipated or the polar opposite. Against all odds, even 2025’s worst offenders largely avoided the embarrassment that should’ve been theirs by right. The new I Know What You Did Last Summer’s misleading moniker grudgingly makes a modicum of sense, no matter how little excuse to exist the movie retains. Legitimately “28 Years Later” (rim shot!), we for some reason return to Southport, North Carolina to follow another group of telegenic graduating seniors whose indiscriminate partying leads to the cover-up of a tragic accident. The wages of those sins resurface one year later in the guise of a mad slasher bent on revenge. Since every aspect of Summer is copycat in nature, any attendant intrigue can’t help but be muted, despite a couple of cute narrative wrinkles, extra bloody murders, a surprisingly appealing co-lead in Madelyn Cline, and the mentoring presence of original rampage survivors Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr. By its strangely plausible end, Somebody Knows What Five New Brats Did Last Summer does somehow make it out alive, having felt like maybe half the waste it probably should’ve. Don’t make this kind of mercenary movie if you don’t want even positive criticisms to read like backhanded compliments.
It Follows (2014 Blu-Ray) – In many ways the ultimate slow burn stalker movie, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows appeared alongside arthouse chillers like Get Out and The Babadook at the vanguard of a new surge in prestige horror that has borne searing, paradigm-shifting fruit for a decade now and counting. Despite the potency of its basic premise – wherein the consequences of workaday teen sex manifest not as disease or unwanted pregnancy but, rather, an implacable human assassin, a chameleonic guided missile on a direct if deliberate path, visible only to the target – if released today, it might have been an afterthought. Maika Monroe stars in her breakout role as Jay, an ordinary suburban high schooler with a tight coed circle of friends and mysterious new boyfriend, who is chloroformed in a desolate parking garage mid-afterglow and awakens tied to a wheelchair as her now-former beau, by way of explaining the terrifying new peril that has swallowed up her life, points out an expressionless figure advancing toward her. A few moments get up close and personal, but It Follows largely proceeds as Halloween might’ve had night never fallen and Michael Myers just pursued Laurie its entire length, supercharging Jay’s paranoia and forcing viewers to pay unnatural attention to the negative space in almost every frame. That’s an observation not a criticism, and valid since It Follows wears myriad Halloween influences on its sleeve, and is all the more effective for the effort. If you’re going to crib, you might as well borrow from the best.
Lucky (2020 Shudder) – Some concepts are simply more interesting on paper. A feature-length extended metaphor for the myriad trials inherent in being a woman, Lucky presents the strange case of May Ryer (Brea Grant, who also wrote the screenplay), a feminist self-help author who inexplicably finds herself the target of an enigmatic, determined (if not always particularly competent) masked killer. Night after night, and, once that novelty has worn off, day after day, the spindly, nattily dressed, knife-wielding figure materializes in May’s front yard, or, eventually, inside her house directly, and she is forced to fend him off anew – often “killing” him in the process only for him to immediately vanish – then explain and re-explain the situation to incredulous local law enforcement. There’s irony thick enough for a five-year-old to process in the idea that a woman whose career was built on preaching relentless self-reliance should, as her husband abandons her and other allies fall by the wayside, finally have to endure such a frustrating gauntlet alone, and the fact that she is patronized or underserved by authority figures every step of the way soon becomes the whole point. Lucky never tries to convince viewers it is an accurate representation of any reality – it is fairly awash in dream logic throughout – but it also never quite finds a way to make the stakes feel important, the action feel dangerous, or transform May’s ongoing, perhaps eternal, struggle into either an arc, a parable, or a trip worth taking.
The Menu (2022 Paramount Plus) – I’m not sure who qualifies as the target audience for Mark Mylod’s The Menu, a razor-sharp if often confounding satire of gourmet culture run amok, or if, indeed, it even has one, but I know without reservation that I am not among them. There are myriad reasons to refuse this dinner invitation. Food for me has always been about the eating, not necessarily the savoring, and hardly ever the “experiencing”. My eyes seldom prove larger than my stomach, though both sensibly recoil at this scenario, in which eleven gushing high society tastemakers plus an audience-surrogate twelfth wheel indulge in an exclusive, indescribably opulent, existentially challenging nine-course meal on the remote private island of an enigmatic, quite possibly insane, Bond villain-worthy celebrity chef and his cultlike retinue of kitchen staff. Each new course reveals its own surprises, and our guestlist grasps its unfolding predicament gradually. Though my aesthetic disgust never quite crossed over into authentic horror the way Mylod surely intended, a certain dread fascination did take hold. I came into The Menu reflexively resistant, never more than during its comparatively innocuous beginnings, where, regaled by her insufferably rapt food snob date Nicholas Hoult (holy unbearable typecasting, Lex Luthor!) and surveying the alien scenery of the mythic Chef Slowik’s (Ralph Fiennes, adding to his impressive resume of onscreen villainy) ultra-brutalist restaurant and adjoining compound, the presciently unimpressed Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy, intrepid and relatable) mutters, “We have reached the base camp of Mount Bullsh*t.” She, and we, truly have no idea.
Night of the Reaper (2025 Shudder) – Things go bump in the night to great effect in the Shudder original Night of the Reaper, as what begins as a standard-issue suburban slasher stalks babysitter flick turns and turns again, alternately reinforcing and subverting expectations before finally upending them entirely, evolving over an economic but well-appointed runtime into something exceedingly rare for the genre, a story where the characters are actually far more interesting than the killer and the audience is well and truly invested in their lives, not just their fates. The film follows parallel tracks from the guts to the outskirts of a small town still reeling from a series of unsolved murders, presenting on one hand the local sheriff, shaken awake by the arrival of a mysterious videotape that features hands-on crime footage apparently shot by the killer him or herself, and on the other an overachieving college student reluctantly returned home who is pressed into babysitting his old soul eight-year-old on a particularly fraught and spooky night. The suspense is dialed-in and enveloping throughout, as director Brendan Christensen expertly balances the unseen with the explicit, retro vibes with modern pyrotechnics, anchored by three exceptional central performances. I’ll tread lightly on specifics in the interest of preserving both Reaper’s secrets and the motivations from which they spring, except to say that the ongoing, never-ending Scream franchise, to which this qualifies as a worthy stealth successor, hasn’t operated with such clarity of purpose, deadly logic, and virtuosic facility with the horror playbook since the late ‘90s.
Pet Sematary (1989 Blu-Ray) – Stephen King is a campfire storyteller without peer in my lifetime. Even in a bibliography front-loaded with 5-star bangers, his Pet Sematary stands apart, and survives its journey to the silver screen without sacrificing any of the withering emotional impact that distinguished it even amongst such cutthroat intramural competition. After four decades in publication, the basic story of a grieving rural family doctor compelled to consider supernatural measures with an unspeakable price to resurrect his dead child should be familiar to any fan of author or genre, but Pet Sematary is to me that rare exception where knowing what is yet to happen does little to dilute its attendant horror, instead often amplifying it. Some movie viewers still can’t see past the King-penned screenplay’s heavy hand, or the dusting of ‘80s cheese that flavors the proceedings, though I’m noting signs online that an overdue popular reappraisal may be underway. Disregard logic when watching Pet Sematary, and instead consider numerous images that linger in the pit of your stomach: of the innocent toddler wandering into the drivepath of an oncoming truck; of little Ellie’s wayward cat with his blood-matted fur and glowing eyes; of the spectre of Rachel’s lost sister, locked away in the back room like a dirty secret; of a tiny hand first gripping Daddy’s scalpel, and of that same scalpel later slicing an unlucky Achilles tendon; of those fateful midnight visits to the burial ground beyond the thorny brush, and of what, not who, came back each time.
darkadaptedeye 