Story: Hatchet II retells and reconfigures Victor Crowley’s origin story, which seems fitting given the recasting of MaryBeth (the first film’s Final Girl) and the way its chief inspiration, the Friday the 13th series, would reinvent Jason Voorhees with each sequel. The main plotline is a double-edged revenge story (for MaryBeth and Victor) which is…
Hatchet is generally described as a horror-comedy, but the qualifier doesn’t quite fit. It’s not exactly horror – Hatchet is hardly trying to scare its audience – but its jokes are mostly in-jokes, references or cameos that will put a grin on horror fans’ faces without really being funny. This is a horror film made…
Halloween may not been the first masked killer movie (arriving four years after Leatherface), but the implacable Michael Myers’ shadow stretches long across the genre; establishing many significant tropes (the killer is invulnerable until he is unmasked. A perfunctory backstory that doesn’t disguise how the masked man – it’s always a man – stands in…
I came to The Exorcist III on Isaac (of Isaacs Picture Conclusions)’s recommendation, expecting a B-movie. The film is awash with B-movie characteristics: the script is a hodge-podge of supernatural and serial killer clichés, with a climax that feels tacked-on because it is (the studio demanded the film end with an exorcism, and you can…
Watching Prometheus upon release, it was hard not to sympathise with scientist Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). Having spent years hoping to find the “Engineers” who brought about the genesis of mankind and left cryptic messages painted on cave walls, he found himself filled with existential despair, upon finding only their corpses. I walked out of…
At least there’s one lesson to be learned from the amorphous blob of mediocrity that is Exorcist II, a woefully disappointing sequel: this is the kind of film that doesn’t get made anymore. Not so much the half-assed sequel thing – there are plenty of those – but the advent of the internet means that…
If you’re looking for a definition of “Cronenbergian,” The Brood isn’t a bad place to start. It’s deliberately paced, pairing operatic grandeur with restrained domesticity. It prominently features Cronenberg’s early obsessions of science fiction, horror and body horror, interwoven with more conventional problems; as Cronenberg uses genre conventions to comment on the emotional damage dealt…
Horror sequels make a habit of ramping things up to the point of ridiculousness: compare the simplicity of Wrong Turn to the excess of its sequel, or how Prom Night shifts from a garden-variety slasher to a supernatural romp. The Collection is a sequel to the almost-plausible The Collector, which began by carefully establishing character…
Manhunter has much to recommend it; as the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’s books, it hasn’t had the same cultural impact of the superior Silence of the Lambs, but it benefits from Harris’s richly considered world, falling somewhere between fantasy and realism. Even without knowledge of Harris’s canon, the characters feel fully-developed, even in minor…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an immensely influential film; ever since that steel door swung closed, Leatherface’s hulking descendants have descended upon foolhardy teenagers venturing into the woods and cabins and campsites therein. If only its influence were more widely felt in modern horror, though! It’s a rare slasher that can boast sound design that…
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