Horror Franchise Thread

[Brian Fowler]

Friday the 13th Part 2 is the FIRST movie, minus the absolute bullshit "mystery" angle that knocks off all the red herrings before ever introducing the killer, and with an actual competent job by the director at shooting the damn thing, as opposed to Cunningham's "bad first year film student" work, and then tops it off with one of the best final girl sequences ever put on film.

 

EDITED because I am an idiot.

[Brian Fowler]

Freddy feeding on fear absolutely does NOT go back to the original.  Rewatch that shit.  It's halfway through the movie before Nancy has a damn clue who Fred Krueger is, and he's killing them fine without them knowing him.  Or at, least, not in the way it works in FvJ

[Newb82]

There's a reason Steve Miner did any notable work after his FRIDAYs & Cunningham didn't.

To be fair, Ft13th II had a much larger budget because it was actually backed by Paramount when the original was made independently with shady investors and later sold to Paramount.

[Brian Fowler]

Sure, but there wouldn't be directing that good on a Friday movie again until fucking Freddy vs. Jason.

 

Despite that the fact that Miner came back for Part III.  He clearly no longer wanted to be doing that shit.

[FluffSnackwell]

 

I am completely blown away that people dislike Jason Goes to Hell this strongly.

As a movie it sucks.As a slasher sequel, it has a couple nice moments, but still sucks.I can appreciate trying to add something to the Jason mythos, but this doesn't add anything to it, it just pisses on it. Take your body-hopping and make an original movie out of it. 

That's actually the biggest goddamn insult of all when it comes to that unoriginal hunk of junk. Because somebody did indeed make that original body-hopping movie. Twice in the five years prior to Jason Goes To Hell's release; "The Hidden" (1987) and "The First Power" (1990). For the record, Goes To Hell is a more blatant rip of the former considering the bygod soul slug that transfers Jason's spirit from decaying host to fresh host is exactly the same as the alien bug in "The Hidden."   Both movies did well enough at the box office (.....fuck, "The Hidden" was even a New Line production) that the only logical conclusion is they just didn't care who realized they were blatantly ripping off these other very recent movies when it came time to squat and produce "Jason Goes To Hell."

[Curt McGirt]

The Hidden is one of those great '80s films that NOBODY talks about. It's a synthesis of The Terminator and T2 with Kyle MacLauchlan! What's not to like?

 

I'm with Fowler, Friday 2 is great. I probably go with 3 above it only out of nostalgia/entertainment value (instead of being actually good) in the lineup.

[piranesi]

The Hidden is one of those great '80s films that NOBODY talks about. It's a synthesis of The Terminator and T2 with Kyle MacLauchlan! What's not to like?

 

 

 

and Clu MOTHERFUCKING GULAGER!!!!

[Newb82]

Freddy feeding on fear absolutely does NOT go back to the original.  Rewatch that shit.  It's halfway through the movie before Nancy has a damn clue who Fred Krueger is, and he's killing them fine without them knowing him.  Or at, least, not in the way it works in FvJ

You don't have to know the name or anything about the burn victim who's trying to kill you with his homemade claw to be terrified of him. Freddy feeding on fear is the entire point of the ending. Nancy gives a speech about it and presumably "wins" by turning her back on him and not being afraid anymore. Steve Miner was all about doing FRIDAY 3-D. He was interested in the 3-D, thought it was going to be the last one, and was "itching to direct another film".

[J.T.]

 

The Hidden is one of those great '80s films that NOBODY talks about. It's a synthesis of The Terminator and T2 with Kyle MacLauchlan! What's not to like?

 

 

and Clu MOTHERFUCKING GULAGER!!!!

 

 

I am disappointed. Everyone knows that the real bonus of The Hidden is Claudia Christian's epic five minutes of screen time as Brenda the alien possessed stripper.

 

Since this is kinda NSFW,

 

 

The track playing on the radio while she is sexually murdering the guido in the lime green Caddie is Say Goodbye by Hunters & Collectors, a lost gem of 80's.  Aussie pub funk fucking rules.

 

[J.T.]

I hate to get all movie snob on ya, but most of the US horror film franchises tubed in quality after the second or third installment.  Friday the 13th and Hellraiser were entertaining up until after the third movie and then they went to shit. 

 

I agree with Jingus.  Jason X blows goats but the liquid nitrogen / face smashing kill was Jason's best work in any of the movies.

 

I hated all of the Elm Street films after the third movie, but Elm Street arguably started the trend that Saw followed and at least had the common decency to showcase new and ingenious ways to kill people even as the plot become tired and formulaic..  There were only so many creative ways that Jason could butcher people.  Freddy had control of your dreams so he had lots of leeway in his methods.

 

I blame idiot slasher fans for the untimely demise and poor critical reception for Halloween; Season of the Witch.  People always hate on Hollywood for not coming up with new ideas, but here was John Carpenter and Debra Hall trying to expand the scope of their story and all people wanted was the same slasher formula.

 

I think the only horror franchises that have maintained quality and consistantly freaked me out are the Living Dead movies and the shorts and feature length material that makes up the Ju-On story.  I give some passing acceptance to the Final Destination movies.  I thought the swerve of the last movie of the franchise

 

turning out to be the fucking prequel to the first movie

 

was a nice touch.

[Newb82]

HALLOWEEN III is a terrible movie, and it has nothing to do with it not having Michael in it.

[J.T.]

HALLOWEEN III is a terrible movie, and it has nothing to do with it not having Michael in it.

 

I have to respectfully disagree.  It was a great concept with questionable execution.  The fact that Cochran's intended victims were children and not the usual cardboard cutout teens representing eartly vices that have been in ever slasher movie we've ever seen made this particular installment far more interesting than the lesser Halloween sequels.

 

It makes me sad to think about how great of a series that Halloween might have been if the anthology format had succeeded.

 

The poor reception of H3 just makes me hate the fans of things that I am a fan of.  They wanted more Michael Myers even though he'd had his eyes shot out by Loomis (retconned to graze wounds IIRC) and set on fire in H2. 

 

That's when you couldn't tell the difference between Myers and Jason Vorhees, since they both got that magical regenerative ability and super strength that you get after you go insane.  At least F13 went over the edge and turned Jason into a Zombie to explain the Wolverine healing factor. 

 

Has an institution contributed more to the demonization of the mentally ill than Hollwood has?

 

I suppose that's why one of my favorite slasher movies is Happy Birthday To Me.  The crazy killer doesn't get super powers after going crazy, but the killer is still ruthless and slathering bloggo out of its gourd batshit insane.

[Brian Fowler]

The Hidden is one of those great '80s films that NOBODY talks about. It's a synthesis of The Terminator and T2 with Kyle MacLauchlan! What's not to like?

 

I'm with Fowler, Friday 2 is great. I probably go with 3 above it only out of nostalgia/entertainment value (instead of being actually good) in the lineup.

 

 

I can't get past the absurd levels of racism in part 3.  It's just...  damn.

 

 

Freddy feeding on fear absolutely does NOT go back to the original.  Rewatch that shit.  It's halfway through the movie before Nancy has a damn clue who Fred Krueger is, and he's killing them fine without them knowing him.  Or at, least, not in the way it works in FvJ

You don't have to know the name or anything about the burn victim who's trying to kill you with his homemade claw to be terrified of him.Freddy feeding on fear is the entire point of the ending. Nancy gives a speech about it and presumably "wins" by turning her back on him and not being afraid anymore.

 

 

In A Nightmare on Elm Street, none of the kids know who Freddy is, and he kills them anyway.  In Freddy vs. Jason, it states that Freddy has no power because the kids don't remember him.  How is that not a complete contradiction?

[Newb82]

You have a point there.

[Newb82]

There is really no way to make a coherent, linear timeline out of the NIGHTMARE series without removing NEW NIGHTMARE (since if it's cannon, it's the only movie that "really happened"), then FREDDY'S DEAD and/or FREDDY VS JASON.

FD is supposed to take place in the early-00's, and the whole town is decimated, with their being no children. If Freddy is dead and his curse on Springwood lifted at the end of FD, then Springwood still needs time to repopulate and rebuild, which would mean FVJ couldn't take place for at least another ten years or so. But if Freddy's dead and all the Springwood children are dead, how does his "disease" spread? Even if he somehow comes back, the cycle that took place in the first six movies still needs time to at least partially happen again, which pushes the FVJ start date back even further.

[Newb82]

Michael had ridiculous characteristics from the first movie. Dude learns how to drive by silently sitting and staring out a window, then shrugs off six slugs at the end of it.

H3 did have a potentially interesting idea. It's the poor execution that made it a shitty movie.

There was an idea to make the FRIDAY THE 13TH series an anthology too after the first one, but the shady investors demanded that Jason be in PART II.

[Newb82]

Speaking of FREDDY'S DEAD, does anyone know the name of the song that plays as the now-amnesiac John Doe leaves Springwood?

[J.T.]

Michael had ridiculous characteristics from the first movie. Dude learns how to drive by silently sitting and staring out a window, then shrugs off six slugs at the end of it.

 

The fact that Michael could drive was fucking great and I loved that Carpenter never explained why.  There was far more to Myers than met the eye.

 

Psycho killers shrugging off bullets is a slasher staple.  You can accept it because it is what it is and that's how killers are in these sorts of movies, but Carpenter made it a point to show Myers being blinded after being shot DIRECTLY IN THE EYES~!  And then the fucking hospital blows up and Myers is turned into a walking Roman Candle

 

That was Carpenter giving us his "Okay, I am killing this guy off for good because I am telling this story," moment, but Myers returns anyway in H4 because slasher fans demanded it and the result was dumb.

 

Crazy gives you super powers and crazy and lying in bed in a coma allows you to grow your eyes back.  We'd have been better off allowing John to tell his own stories rather than forcing him to repeat the same one over and over again.

 

F13 had the good taste to say, "Okay, we put a machete through this guy's skull.  If he recovers from that kind of death dealing wound, we'll look like idiots.  LETS MAKE JASON VORHEES A ZOMBIE~!"  The outrageous originality is what makes Jason Lives my second favorite film of the franchise after Part III.

[Brian Fowler]

I've soured on Part VI over the years.  I just don't like the lightly comedic touch.

 

Also, timeline is easy:  Freddy's Dead takes place sometime in the future.  Freddy vs. Jason is before it, and now that the last ditch "steal their dreams" plan failed to save the teenagers, and Jason helped murder a shit-ton of them, the town is doomed!  They're all doomed.

 

You want to play continuity games, well, here comes Friday the 13th!  Jason was cremated!  Here's his body!  We changed the town's name!  It's Crystal Lake again!  It's a tiny little camp!  It's a big lake with a camp on one side, and another camp ground on the other!  It's a fucking community with a gigantic shoreline!  The lake connects to the ocean!

[J.T.]

Oh, Dear Lord, if there is one thing I will never accuse horror films of, it's continuity.  I think that geographically, Camp Crystal Lake lies on the West Coast somewhere between British Columbia and Chile.  Probably not in Central America because it is obviously too humid.

 

Oh, and you smart towns folks renamed the town from Crystal Lake to Forrest Green, but that still leaves the actual fucking lake itself with the name Crystal Lake, right? 

 

And you renamed the town yet you still have a standard horror movie old crazy person that knows the town's dirty secret to replace the previous standard horror movie old crazy person that got garroted with barbed wire in an earlier film.

[Newb82]

FREDDY'S DEAD takes place in 2001 (came out in 1991 + "ten years from now").

Ft13th has no continutiy whatsoever. Fuck, 2-4 are supposed to take place on successive days. Think about that.

Watching HALLOWEEN H20 and I can already see why Williamson's career flamed out like it did.

"They never found his body" is the absolute laziest hand wave to the questin "How the fuck is he still alive?".

Oh, and while I've always loved him driving from Illinois to California on a single tank of gas. I just realized watching this again that he supposedly does it in a single day. Before nightfall in California. Even with the time difference that's some bullshit.

The guy who played Charlie is one...unfortunate looking fellow. I'm surprised he got cast. Less surprised he hassn't been in anything notable since.

[Curt McGirt]

I don't see the racism in Friday 3. Yeah, two of the bikers are black, but they ride with a white dude. They're also assholes in general thus making them perfect victims.

 

EDIT: does it make it sexist because one of the bikers is black AND female? C'mon.

[Reggie20x6]

I've only seen the original once, so I might have forgotten, but what does Friday the 13th have to do with 'Friday the 13th'? The only thing I can come up with is that Jason was born on June 13th, 1946, which was... a Thursday.

 

His Wikia page is awesome, with sub-headings such as: "Life before mass killing sprees," and "Prelude to mass killing sprees."

 

http://fridaythe13th.wikia.com/wiki/Jason_Voorhees

[J.T.]

I don't ask slasher movies to be terribly logical, but F13 Part 2 really baffles me.

 

I thought it was great that a killer actually got to murder a survivor girl for once, but Holy Shit, did Alice fucking live twenty minutes away from the camp where she was nearly killed no less than three times? 

 

Jason bumps Alice off right in her own neighborhood and then apparently walks back with her corpse and his mother's head undetected just in time to murder a new set of counselors. If I were Alice, I'd have moved clear accross the country, or maybe even left the Untied States.

[Newb82]

I've only seen the original once, so I might have forgotten, but what does Friday the 13th have to do with 'Friday the 13th'? The only thing I can come up with is that Jason was born on June 13th, 1946, which was... a Thursday. His Wikia page is awesome, with sub-headings such as: "Life before mass killing sprees," and "Prelude to mass killing sprees." http://fridaythe13th.wikia.com/wiki/Jason_Voorhees

In-movie answer: The original takes place on Friday, June 13th, 1980 (there's a plate that reads, IIRC, "Friday the 13th: Present Day" or something like that when we first see Annie). 6/13/80 was a real Friday the 13th.JASON LIVES has a character mention that it's a Friday the 13th.Real answer: Sean Cunningham thought it was a great title for a movie and even put an ad in Variety that asked for investors with the title and the graphic before he had any idea what the movie would be about.