the groundhog day project

A little reenactment to get the ball rolling with Freddy vs. Jason . I was watching a YouTube video from GoodBadFlicks earlier, notes on the movie Cabin in the Woods , and he argues (rather aptly) that the old ones who watch over the “ritual” therein... (“Mrs. Voorhees” should be more helpful with her directions. She tells Jason to go to “Elm Street” but doesn’t tell him what city or even what state. It’s a bit of a walk from New Jersey to Ohio. He might need some snacks, or an extra machete for the road.) ...represent we in the audience, watching the same ritual of death over and over and over again. The ending of that movie is us destroying the whole setup to start over. In that video, he suggests that the more recent remakes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street were not the way to go; we need new ideas. Really, I’m not sure that the basic slasher setup isn’t doable indefinitely; a killer stalking a series of victims—that’s a plotline a lot of different sets of deta...

Jason Voorhees in chains, his hair a frizzy (grey?) mess. Nice start—would have been even cooler if they didn’t have the onscreen descriptions of where we are and why he’s there. It’s not a crawl, but on a Red Letter Media “ Best of the Worst “ video this week, they were talking about how film crawls usually set the world badly, give too much information and/or information you just don’t need. Any audience going to see Jason X would have been quite likely to know who Jason is, and we’d figure out what was going on. A little more showing us, a little less telling us. By the way, I link this movie to Hellraiser: Bloodline in my memory, as if they came out around the same time—a couple horror movies set in space (I also connect them both to the bit in Halloween 5 when they talk about Michael Myers in space.) —but they were 6 years apart, Jason X being the later of the two. (Shuttle looks like a wingnut.) Saw Hellraiser: Bloodline at a test screening, if I recall correctly. Mi...

So, the opening sequence to Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday — —possibly my favorite thing in any of these slasher films. This is what happens if one of these preternatural killers actually existed, actually kept coming back and coming back and racking up the kills; the government would step in and a) try to capture and exploit him and failing that, b) kill him and kill him some more. It’s like my “We will stab it until it dies.” They shoot him until he dies. I really want to see that death of Freddy scene with the goofy fish demons played along side the heart eating and possession of the coroner in this film. The former is laughable, fairly deliberately. The latter, just by its sound effects alone, is far darker and scarier. And, the visual effects are many times better. Only two years later. This opening almost makes up for the downward direction of the Nightmare series. And, proves my point that the Friday the 13th series is the better one. Better probably than the Hallow...

It’s like this... We live in claustrophobia, the land of steel & concrete. Trapped by dark waters. There is no escape. Nor do we want it. We’ve come to thrive on it and each other. You can’t get the adrenaline pumpin’ without the terror, good people... I love this town. A few shots of New York City (and it’s stand-in locations in Vancouver, then cut to Crystal Lake. No campers in this movie, though. A couple high school graduates on a boat on the lake and then we leave the lake, and even leave New Jersey. Jim tells Suzi about the murders around Crystal Lake, and ends amazingly... “And every now and then, the murders start up again.” Beat “Forget about it, Suzi. They’re just stories.” Proceeds to disappear, then shows up in a hockey mask (a conveniently scarred in the forehead mask, I would add—Jason’s injury from the end of The Final Chapter , not the break by the eye socket, though) and stabs her with a trick knife. Jason shows up once they’re back in bed, dons the new mask—...

It’s daytime, hardly good for horror films, especially slasher films. They tend to take place in the dark exteriors (e.g. Friday the 13th ), or in badly-lit interiors (e.g. Halloween II ). Even when we know what’s in the dark—Michael, Jason, Freddy—it is scarier when we can’t quite see it, can’t quite gauge the moment or angle of attack. The unknown outweighs no matter how much detail is known. We fill in the gaps, we make it worse. But, circumstance leaves me blogging from my office today, where even if I turned out the lights, would be rather bright because of the big window. And, there may be interruptions; even though I have no office hours right now, other TAs with whom I share the office may be in and out, and students may be by. But, in the meantime… Friday the 13th Part VII – The New Blood . As the movie gets going—with a nice narrative setup—an interesting flashback is necessary. I found today some old reviews by Siskel and Ebert of Friday the 13th Part 2 and the origina...

Twice we’ve been left with endings implying Tommy may have turned bad, that he might even take up the homicidal mantle left vacant with the death of Jason Voorhees. A New Beginning even tries (but not particularly well) to implicate Tommy in the deaths therein, but here, as Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives begins, Tommy is maybe a bit eccentric, possibly insane, but he’s still the good guy. On the IMDb boards, a guy was suggesting that Jason was just a man prior to his resurrection here. Jason Goes to Hell suggests otherwise, but at this point in the series, it might be debatable. Since three people have now played Tommy Jarvis, I wanted to look at the timeline of these films, but first a comment: Jason, in the title sequence to this entry in the series has essentially become horror’s James Bond. Since he still remains the most prolific slasher, and at this time had the most films in his franchise, the comparison is apt. The James Bond films would be one of the few franchi...

I haven’t seen A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge in quite a while. I can’t remember if it manages to do what the first one did in regards to the usual Final Girl setup, a la Carol J. Clover (1988, 1992)—that is, not have her (Does this one even have a Final Girl? The opening dream sequence suggests a male lead.) not grab some phallic weapon and fight back. The first A Nightmare on Elm Street show us a lot of clocks— this one has already show a couple and it’s only 12 minutes in. The flow of time, or rather the altered flow of time is important to these movies because of the nature of dreams. But, there’s also a notable juxtaposition between the editing of film altering time and the fluid nature of dreams distorting time. If the former is done right, we don’t notice it because it helps draw us in and keep us captivated by the action. The latter may, after the fact, be revealed as very distortive, but during the dream it seems quite normal. Pinedo (1996) suggests that th...

Today was not as long as yesterday. Haven't watched today's movie yet, either. It's Friday the 13th: A New Beginning . (By the way, the stuff I would have included had I not become eminently susceptible to attack from Freddy Krueger (assuming I was in Springwood, Ohio, not Lake Oswego, Oregon)--I will throw some of that into this blog tomorrow, when I watch A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge . I kinda wish I'd at least had a dream about Freddy Krueger since I was starting to fall asleep before the movie ended last night. But no, instead I manage a couple sentences with a couple typos, a sad little excuse for a blog entry.) I wanted to talk about genre since, with A Nightmare on Elm Street last night, I got into the second third of this "month" of slasher films. Nowell (2011) provides an elaborate description of what makes a slasher film a slasher film. First, I rather like Nowell's definition for what genre is: At its core, film ge...

Opening credits that scream 3D and music that seems more suited to the 70s than 1982—that’s the beginning of Friday the 13th Part III . And, this couple at the store remind me—not in their behavior but in there sort of unnecessaryness—of the old couple at the beginning of Halloween II . I guess these movies borrow from each other, back-and-forth. Lame 3D bits make this movie quite silly; guy has a wood pole, so what does he have to do for a moment? Point it at the camera. There’s a snake so of course it has to come at the camera. I kinda wanted Harold to get killed there after checking behind like 9 curtains and doors before finally, there was Jason with a cleaver. 3D warning: rat has to crawl toward the camera. 3D warning: baseball bat that has absolutely nothing to do with anything also has to be sticking out toward the camera. This is the kind of gimmicky crap that makes 3D look pointless. 3D warning: offer the audience a joint. I really don’t like the makers of this film ri...

Back into my comfort zone. Friday the 13th Part 2 was, I think, the first Friday the 13th I bought for my VHS collection of the entire series in my 20s, so I’ve seen this one a lot. I really should buy a DVD set of these things—assuming a boxset exists. I haven’t even checked. How sad is that? Jason is a very nice killer, taking the kettle off the burner like that. I mean, sure, he stuck a screwdriver into Alice’s face first, but does that really make him a bad guy? She did kill his mother, after all. Crazy Ralph is back. They really should have had that same guy stick around for every one of these films. Even though he dies in this one. I suppose, since this sequel comes before Halloween ‘s or Texas Chain Saw Massacre ‘s, not to mention before the first Nightmare on Elm Street , this is where the slasher subgenre really gets going. Leatherface may have survived outright, Michael Myers may have survived his wound swell enough to get up and leave, but Jason is the first real ...