Tag: Slasher Movies

Last House on the Left (2009) DVD Review

Posted on by Steve Biodrowski

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Remaking LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT seemed like a dubious proposition at best; the original was so much a part of its cycnical ’70s era (Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate) that transplanting it to contemporary times seemed as if it could rob the story of vital cultural context. Yet somehow the new HOUSE works better than expected, perhaps because we had come full circle to a cultural context roughly equivalent to the early ’70s (Bush, Iraq, Torturegate). Consequently, the remake seemed weirdly appropriate in the waning days of the previous administration – not an anachronisms ripped from its own time and plopped down haphazardly into a new era.
The new version of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT does not seek to replicate the grungy, semi-documentary feel of the original. It follows the basic outlines, but there are several notable variations that prevent the remake from being a clone. Some of the overt sexuality violence has been toned down, but Krug and company’s heinous assault, rape, and murder of innocent victims packs as much impact as ever, creating that rare horror film moment when the gore-hound audience, instead of shouting “Ain’t it Cool!” in approval, is shocked into dumbfounded silence. Whether it’s an improvement over the original, is hard to say, but the new HOUSE on the block stands on its own foundation.
Not everything works as well as it should. Krug’s escape from police custody is an absurd movie-moment: when his brother and his girlfriend ram the police car in which he is being escorted, Krug somehow survives without a scratch, while both officers are lethally wounded.
And in a plot point deleted from the 1972 LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, after being raped and shot, Mari Collingham (Sara Paxton) survives not only long enough to tell her parents what happened; she’s is actually well enough to recover, if her parents can get her to a hospital.* This is supposed to increase the suspense when Mari’s attackers coincidentally show up at the titular “Last House on the Left” looking for shelter in a storm, but it blurs the perfect movie logic of the original, which focused on the gruesome revenge the parents took, the events playing out like a cathartic dream of karmic payback. The resulting cat-and-mouse scenes go on longer than they should, throwing off the rhythms, so the much-awaited revenge has trouble building to a perfect climax. Consequently, the film seems almost forced to add what feels like a tacked-on gore scene in which the villainous murderer-rapist Krug (Garret Dillahunt) gets what he deserves.

DVD DETAILS

Rogue’s single-disc release of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT offers the theatrical cut and an unrated cut. Apparently this is achieved with branching technology, as both versions are on the same side of the disc, and the Menu warns that the unrated version may cause havoc with some older DVD players.
In any case, the widescreen transfer is a beauty. The soundtrack is available in English, Spanish, and French, with subtitles options for Spanish, French, and English for the hearing impaired.
The unrated cut does not differ significantly from the R-rated theatrical version, which was plenty brutal on its own terms, featuring one of the most repugnant rape scenes ever committed to celluloid. There is an additional insert close-up of Mari’s friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) being stabbed in the belly, but the overall impact of the scenes is little changed, and you won’t see anything to match the over-the-top insanity of the 1972 film. (It is interesting that the heterosexual rape scene is acceptable in a mainstream nationwide release, but  original flm’s enforced lesbianism had to be left out, along with the scene of Mari’s mother offering a blowjob to her daughter’s rapist and then biting off  his penis).
Bonus features are slim, consisting of “Deleted Scenes” and “A Look Inside.”
The deleted scenes would be more accurately described as extended scenes or alternate takes. The deleted footage is mostly minor transitional stuff, but there is one over-long suspense scene showing Krug’s son Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) sneaking in to retrieve the gun that plays a role later. There is an amusing gag-reel moment: after Mari’s parents give her the keys to the family car, the stunt drive standing in for Sara Paxton hits a tree on the way out of the driveway. There is also a very impressive shot of John Collingwood’s bloody revenge on Krug; it’s the same action seen in the finished film, but presented here in a single take, wherein the distinction between live-actor and special effect is absolutely invisible.
The “Inside Look” is a promotional film – basically the trailer with added interviews from director Dennis Illiadis and producer Wes Craven, who discusses the rational behind remaking the original (which he wrote and directed). You won’t get much insider information, but you will hear Craven and Illiadis echo the 1972 advertising campaign: “Just keep telling yourself: It’s only a movie.”
*There is also a weird moment in which both parents react to the realization that Mari has been raped – as if being nearly murdered were bad enough, but sexual violation is somehow worse.
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The New York Ripper – Blu-ray Review

Posted on by Drew Fitzpatrick

A film that fulfills both the positive and pejorative definitions of “sleaze,” Lucio Fulci’s THE NEW YORK RIPPER arrived – believe it or not – on Blu-Ray last week courtesy of the 21st century keepers of the exploitation flame, Blue Underground. The disc easily outstrips all previous foreign and domestic editions of the disc, and should be an essential purchase for fans of both the wildly uneven filmmaker and European exploitation of the ’70s and ’80s in general – for all others, here be dragons. The film is obscenely violent, sexually degrading, and bitterly misogynistic, but it has problems as well.
The story follows NYPD Detective Williams (featuring another staple of the genre, the slumming British thespian, personified here by Jack Hedley) as he tracks a serial killer who is brutally slashing women across Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry to a live sex show on 42nd St, all while speaking in a high pitched, duck-like voice. Williams reluctantly accepts the aid of a Columbia University psychiatrist, Dr. Davis (Paolo Malco) to help form a profile of the ripper, just as the maniac takes to calling Williams both at the station and at the home of his hooker/girlfriend, Kitty (Daniela Doria.) When young Fay Majors (the gorgeous Almanta Keller) survives a nighttime assault, she describes the killer as having a deformed hand – the very same man who was also at the scene of the sex show murder on the ‘duce (Renato Rossini, here billed as Howard Ross, an Italian exploitation fixture whose Tony Musante-looking mug and steely gaze can also be found in WEREWOLF WOMAN and THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE.) Once the man is identified as Mickey Scellenda – a two-bit punk with a history of sexual assault and an apartment literally filled with drugs and porn – he becomes the prime suspect; the pleas of Dr. Davis, who doesn’t believe that Scellenda fits his profile, are not enough to convince he police that they’ve got the wrong man, especially after Scellenda attacks Fay in her home during the abscence of her physician boyfriend Peter (Andrea Occhipinti, billed here as Andrew Painter, who went on to work with Fulci again in 1983’s CONQUEST only to learn what real on-screen humiliation means the next year in John Derek’s snore fest ode to wife Bo, BOLERO).
Glanced at objectively, THE NEW YORK RIPPER is a careless mess of a thriller. While the film nominally carries on the tradition of the Italian giallo, a genre whose name comes from the lurid yellow covers that graced the crime and thriller paperbacks on which the films drew their inspiration, it’s also very abusive of the genre’s founding principles, throwing the trace elements of grace and logic out the window in favor of a tour of humanity’s gutter. While there were certainly great giallos being made featuring strong elements of violence and sex (see Sergio Martino’s TORSO) they were made with a degree of care and artistry that is wholly missing here. Fulci earned his paycheck aboring on Italian fart comedies and nondescript westerns before a creative spark and the script for DON”T TORTURE A DUCKING arrived simultaneously in 1972 producing a taught suspense yarn containing actual eroticism rather than simply copious amounts of T&A. Fulci’s real breakthrough would come in 1979 with the vivid, gut-munching undead epic, ZOMBI. What began as a DAWN OF THE DEAD rip off morphed into an outright horror classic, with Fulci exhibiting a firm control of his Technovision frame, and boasting an uneasy, dread-fueled pace and the outrageous gore effects of longtime Fulci collaborator Gino De Rossi.
Fulci found himself the toast of the exploitation world and struck while the iron was still hot with the New England-gothic infused CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. In between those two came THE BEYOND, probably the director’s finest hour in any artistic sense, mixing his familiar doses of sexuality and violence but bolstered with a haunting, ethereal quality that seemed to indicate the beginning of an exciting new phase of his career.
THE NEW YORK RIPPER certainly signaled a new era for Fulci, but after the release of four noteworthy films, this effort felt like the work of a desperate magician whose hand had reached into the sticky bottom of the tricks bag. The film is artless, ugly, deeply cynical, and it proudly displays a misogynistic attitude that is utterly breathtaking. At the head of the pack of WTF moments is the head scratching decision to have the killer taunt his victims and the police with a grade-school Donald Duck impression that is neither scary nor funny and nearly takes the mickey out of the otherwise effective murder sequences (even if there is a justification revealed late in the film.)
And good Lord, what sequences! De Rossi’s makeup team worked overtime to devise what have to be among the most grisly onscreen deaths ever seen, from the business end of a broken whisky bottle delivered angrily to a sex performer’s privates to an agonizingly slow razor blade death (featuring one ultra-disturbing shot of the actress staring in horror directly into the camera, almost as if she were pleading with Fulci to stop the scene).
 That nearly all the film’s violent deaths are reserved for women is nothing new in the annals of horror history, but accusations of Fulci’s reported dislike of women can find no easier purchase than this film. Whether it’s the pathologist reporting that one victim had a knife “rammed up her joy trail” (thank you Dr. Giggles!) or the profoundly unappealing Det. Williams’ casually degrading treatment of both his own girlfriend and the husband of a ripper victim who was murdered during a motel room tryst. We’re not the least bit surprised to see a cop in a Fulci film flinch at the notion of an open marriage, but watching Williams strongly imply that she got just what she deserved while her grieving husband is on the verge of tears always catches us off guard.
Anyone even remotely familiar with genre conventions will know whom to instantly rule out as a suspect, as well as spot the real killer about ten seconds after they appear onscreen. Still, there is lip service paid to the notion of a ‘who done it’ – enough to keep the picture at least technically in giallo territory. But in Fulci’s world, unlikely coincidence reigns as the supreme story element; the mysterious man with the deformed hand appears at the scene of so many sexual assaults in the greater metropolitan area that you wonder why the police don’t simply follow him around! A search of his apartment (located in the Same Chelsea building that contained at least one of the area’s notorious S&M leather bars – you half-expect him to run into Al Pacino while shooting CRUISING) turns up a king’s ransom in pornographic magazines, shots of oiled bodybuilders, at least a dozen syringes, a penis-shaped hash pipe, and the coup de grace, a theatrical poster-sized print of himself – naked – pressed up against a giant image of Marilyn Monroe.
However, it’s these very outrageous elements that confirm the film’s status as a cult favorite (not for nothing is the screenplay credit buried halfway through the end crawl). There’s a scent of rapidly fading glory that permeates RIPPER and informs our appreciation almost 30 years later. Fulci (who cameos as a vague NYPD authority figure) was still regarded as an exciting filmmaker on a rapid rise up the exploitation food chain, but post-RIPPER his career nosedived into a mix of embarrassing trash that would make Jess Franco take an Alan Smithee credit (SODOM’S GHOST) or sad, faint echoes of prior glories (VOICES FROM BEYOND.)
One pleasure that does grow stronger in retrospect is the unprecedented tour of the fleshpits and grindhouses in and around 42nd St. THE NEW YORK RIPPER’s Manhattan has changed quite a bit since Italian directors like Fulci and Enzo Castellari scuttled about the island, using its natural grime and urban decay as gratis art and set decoration. It’s also hard not to get a little wistful at the numerous shots of the World Trade Center towers, reminding us of how often filmmakers used them as a means of instantly fixing a location. We’re still trying to figure out exactly where Det. Williams’ apartment actually is, with its distinctive circular fire escape (poor Hedley seems like he’s on the verge of cardiac arrest after climbing to the top floor), and those familiar with Greenwich Village will note that Peter and Fay’s apartment is located in the bucolic Grove Court, making for a surprisingly good match with the Rome-shot interiors. Of course, the city has changed quite a bit since then (a fact lovingly documented on a new extra on the new Blu-Ray edition) and how amazing is it that a loose team of Italian exploitation artisans would wind up as the prime chroniclers of New York’s bleakest 20th century period?
Very few low budget European films of this vintage were shot with live sound, particularly those with the sort of extensive location filming that THE NEW YORK RIPPER showcases. The bigger British and American stars were almost always contracted to provide their own voices during the dubbing process (as Richard Johnson had done in Fulci’s ZOMBI a few years earlier), but apparently Jack Hedley was not considered a big enough star to make it worth going outside the usual pool of voice over talent. Hedley’s résumé consisted largely of small roles in large productions (he appears in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA as the reporter outside St Paul’s and a has a featured role in the Bond picture FOR YOUR EYES ONLY), and it’s unlikely that schlepping permit-less around New York for Lucio Fulci did much for his subsequent career. It doesn’t help that ‘Detective Williams’ is one of the most unlikeable protagonists in eurosleaze history (a huge statement), whose character building moments consists mostly of stress smoking and calling his prostitute girlfriend a “stupid bitch”. Much better is Paolo Malco – a minor genre staple in the early ’80s who already appeared for Fulci the previous year in HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and for Sergio Martino in SCORPION WITH TWO TAILS – whose Columbia professor is far more sympathetic (even though Fulci tries to pull the rug out from under him as well by showing him secretly buying gay porn mags from a newsstand – a hateful no-no in the director’s oddly Catholic world view).
Blue Underground presents THE NEW YORK RIPPER in a staggering 1080p image on the newest edition to their Blu-Ray catalog. Long consigned to the domain of fuzzy VHS bootlegs, the film was previously available domestically on a non-anamorphic (and out of print) DVD edition from Anchor Bay, which presented the uncut version in the US for the first time. The amount of detail revealed here will be a revelation to fans, occasionally even revealing some EFX makeup inconsistencies that had always escaped us. The image might be a bit too bright at times, though this could also be due to flat lighting playing havoc with inexpensive Technovision lenses. The negative also has instances of dirt that show up just often enough to remind you what a miracle it is that this nearly 30-year-old, low-budget Italian offering has no business looking as good as it does here.
As if the image upgrade wasn’t enough reason to quack like a duck, there are two new featurettes (presented in HD, no less.) Aside from the aforementioned “NYC Locations Then and Now short,” there is also a brief interview with actress Zora Kerova, who played the female half of the couple performing the live sex show.

The Score: All This and Halloween II – Interview with composer Tyler Bates

Posted on by Randall Larson

In his last few scores, composer Tyler Bates has watched the WATCHMEN and observed THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, spent a DAY OF THE DEAD and survived DOOMSDAY, but as potent – and as diverse – as those scores were, it’s been his work for Rob Zombie that continue to be his edgiest, evincing the most severe sound design and the most potently frightening musical attitudes. Currently, this aggressive approach is audible in HALLOWEEN II, which opens nationwide today.

Bates first hooked up with the head-banging rocker-cum-director in 2005, when he scored Zombie’s second feature, The Devil’s Rejects, a follow-up to 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses, which Zombie had scored himself along with producer Scott Humphrey. Bates’ had scored a little more than two dozen films since moving to Los Angeles from Chicago, where he had grown up writing, recording, and playing in local rock bands. Most of his soundtrack work was TV-movie fare, a couple of forgettable sci-fi- spoofs like Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) and Roger Corman’s Alien Avengers (1996), but when his powerful score for Zach Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) came out of the blue like a furious, rampaging dead thing, Rod Zombie took notice. He brought Bates in to score Devil’s Rejects, asking for music that reflected “bleakness.” Bates provided just that, with an array of ambient sounds and layered sonic textures that gave the film a clear sense of malformed naturalness.

“I wanted it to feel like you were underneath a car muffler, because you feel so dirty when you watch the film, because of the visuals,” Bates said. “I wanted the music to reflect some of that.”

Bates continued to provide music macabre for movies malevolent, scoring Slither for James Gunn and See No Evil for Gregory Dark (both 2006), not to mention rejoining Zach Snyder for his epic incarnation of Frank Miller’s 300 (2006), and then found himself in Rod Zombie territory once again. First, he scored the Zombie-directed fake trailer, Werewolf Women of the SS, included in the Tarantino-Rodriguez double feature, Grindhouse, and then he scored Zombie’s pointed remake of John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 slasher film, Halloween.

In revisiting Halloween and its unique piano-and-synth score, which Carpenter had composed and performed himself for the original film (and many of its sequels, later assisted by synthesist Alan Howarth), Bates paid tribute to the original by arranging a version of the Carpenther theme in the darker aesthetic in which Zombie had crafted his remake.

“We would definitely respect John Carpenter’s original score,” Bates said as he was embarking on his score for Halloween. “I’m not really too interested of making it orchestral, but I would imagine you could expect a similar graininess to that of Devil’s Rejects, but a different timbre, ultimately. I create sounds for each movie, besides the few synths that I have. I like to make as many of the sounds from abstract sources as possible for each specific movie. We’ll see where it goes, but it’s definitely going to be kind of grimy and organic. I think that going back and trying to maybe [rework] it in a unique way that’s still within the same parameters John Carpenter had at the time are what makes that music work. He didn’t have all the bells and whistles available to him, and probably not all the skills of today’s film composers, so I think getting as much into that mindset is going to be necessary to make the music pay off, and give people the intense experience that they had when they saw first film.”

Bates’ music for Zombie’s Halloween, released in 2007, was a potent mix of organic and synthetic musical disturbia, effectively washing the film in an undertone of continual unease.

“It was difficult trying to adapt the classic John Carpenter themes into the context of Rob’s filmmaking style,” said Bates. “The nature of those classic themes works really well with an inhuman and sometimes robotic ‘bogeyman’ type character, but in Rob’s films Michael Myers is humanized, which calls for a broader musical palate than the design of the original film. I reworked John Carpenter’s classic theme for Rob’s initial presentation to the studio when he decided to do the first of the two movies, which came together pretty naturally, but when I actually began scoring to picture, the two did not coexist very naturally.”

Tyler Bates’s latest score finds him joining forces with both Rob Zombie and Michael Myers again, on the director’s re-imagining of Halloween II. The film picks up where Zombie’s Halloween left off, and focuses on the struggles of Laurie Strode (played by Scout Taylor-Compton) and killer Michael Myers (played by Tyler Mane). Bates’ score gives due cognizance to the classic John Carpenter theme from the original film, but quickly dispenses with it and delves headlong into even darker and very distressing musical landscapes.

“In the new film we decided to do more of our own thing instead of being reliant on the classic themes as much as the first film. This enabled me to really expand the sonic and melodic scope of the film. I think the end result is a movie that really feels like a Rob Zombie film through and through.”

The new score is thick with dissonance and disharmony, occupying a territory of unusual percussive electronic effects, heavy chords of synth and horn, and multiple processed effects that wash the film in nightmarish tonality that is thoroughly disquieting.

“Like each of my projects, I try to expand the sonic palate on each of Rob’s films,” said Bates. “In this case, my primary goal was to create new ways of sonically unsettling an audience. I approached this score with the knowledge that we would be more reliant on original motifs as opposed to the classic Halloween themes, so it freed me up melodically, and also provided the opportunity to implement different rhythms that aren’t particularly characteristic of the classic themes we all associate with Michael Myers.”

The Halloween II score is viciously bleak, with barely a respite existing within its omnipresent relentlessness. Bates characterized Michael Myers and his unstoppable presence through that aggressive, driving ruthlessness.

“Rob really wanted to imbue this movie with an underlying emotional current,” he said. “There is quite of bit of ‘head space’ music in this film, which is where the emphasis on emotion is most apparent.”

In working with Rob Zombie on this film, Bates was brought in earlier than usual and actually began scoring immediately when footage was available during filming.

“Rob and I had a lengthy discussion about the movie before production began,” said Bates. “The music process started with working up the new version of ‘Love Hurts,’ which is in the end credits crawl. It served as an inspiration piece for Rob. The editor Glenn Garland, sent cut footage to me during principal photography, and I wrote music for every scene that came my way.”

By the time Rob was done filming, the new music served as the temp score for the entire film, said Bates.

“From there, Rob experimented with placing various cues in different spots of the film, then sending me a new cut of the movie to show me exactly how the music worked in the context of scenes I had not scene to that point. This was an unusual process for us, but Rob wanted to edit the film on the east coast for a change of scenery. I continued to work on music as the film took shape, then Rob and I finally got together to finalize the cues in the film.”

In crafting his sound design, Bates has put together an interesting array of textures, sound fragments, percussive tonalities (indeed), and grating sonic intensity. The score is completely captivating in its method of crafting scary music and upping the ante of fear in the film.

“The most challenging aspect for me is to do better than the last one,” said Bates. “I don’t think that is a challenge necessary to overcome. Some degree of dissatisfaction with your previous projects is a healthy motivational tool for doing your best work.”

Halloween II soundtrack by Tyler Bates
Unlike the Hip-O records soundtrack CD currently for sale, the digitally distributed Abattoir album (above) consists entirely of music by Tyler Bates

Bates’ first Halloween score was never released as a soundtrack album (two cues, including his reworking of the Carpenter theme, were included on the Hip-O records soundtrack album). The currently available soundtrack CDs for Halloween II feature only one cut by Bates (the rest of the tracks being pre-existing songs); fortunately, an entire album of his music marks the debut of his new label imprint, Abattoir Recordings, which is digitally distributed by E1 Music. A physical CD release with previously unreleased music will follow later with the DVD release of the film.

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All the Boys Love Mandy Lane – Horror Film Review

Posted on by Deborah Louise Robinson

Lost in distribution limbo, this slasher film is entertaining but not the holy grail promised by early reviews.

Director Jonathon Levine’s ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, starring Amber Heard (ALPHA DOGS), earned some enthusiastic buzz when it screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006 (Scott Weinberg called it the first “thinking man’s slasher film”), but that hasn’t helped the independent film find its way to American audiences. ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE was released over a year ago in the UK, but despite distribution deals with a couple of American companies, horror fans in the U.S. are still waiting for so much as a Region 1 DVD; most recently, a theatrical release announced for this Friday was abandoned by Senator Distribution. Fans have been told they’re missing out on seeing the ‘best modern slasher flick since SCREAM’ (according to Cinematical’s James Rocchi), but does ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE live up to the hype?
Mandy Lane is every teenage boy’s fantasy. She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, she’s innocent, and she’s unattainable. So when Mandy and her best friend Emmet [Michael Welch, better known for his part as Bella’s faithful friend Mike Newton in Twilight] are invited to a pool party (well actually, Mandy is invited and insists that Emmet tags along), all the boys are hoping to score. School jock Dylan, desperate to get into Mandy’s pants, is egged on by Emmet to impress Mandy by jumping off the roof into the pool. Predictably it ends in tragedy, and that’s the last we see of Dylan.
Nine months later, Mandy is still the object of every boy’s desire and all they can talk about is getting ‘first dibs’. Here, the movie is slow to heat up, spending some time setting up the characters. Nice guy Bird (Edwin Hodge), Party Animal Red (Aaron Himelstein), wannabe playboy Jake (Luke Grimes), the obligatory slut Marlin (Melissa Price) and bitchy Chloe (Whitney Able) create the archetypal group of horror movie teenagers. The only character missing here is the comedy sidekick. Most good horror movies have an element of fun, and it is here that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is lacking, and because of this, it appears at times, as if the film is taking itself a little too seriously.

Mandy Lane (Amber Heard) - object of every boy's affection

The group celebrate the end of junior year, by heading off for a few days of madness and mayhem at Red’s ranch. Surprisingly, innocent, virginal beauty Mandy is happy to head off into the middle of nowhere with her rebellious group of friends. It quickly becomes apparent that she not only has to fight off all three boys, who are trying to charm her into bed (some with more finesse than others), but there is also a killer on the loose.
The killings here are not particularly inventive, though there are one or two cringe-worthy deaths. It’s a shame that whilst introducing the characters early on, the writer didn’t create at least some good qualities as it would have made me care more about them dying. At no point did I feel the terror that these teenagers were experiencing, and this was because the victims were taken so quickly that there was not enough time to build the suspense. Older movies in this genre, notably the Friday the 13th series build the tension by having the maniac chasing his victims, whilst they bumble around stumbling over the bodies of his previous kills. As All the Boys Love Mandy Lane borrows heavily from its predecessors, it’s a shame it didn’t borrow more of this tension.
Handsome, mysterious ranch hand, Garth (Anson Mount) is the first to fall under suspicion….because he has a gun. Of course, we all know it isn’t going to be that obvious, but the real killer is revealed surprisingly early on in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. That doesn’t mean we won’t get a surprise twist at the end though.
There’s nothing particularly new or extraordinary about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. It’s another slasher movie, with a group of teenagers heading off into the middle of nowhere. Drink, drugs, and sex follow, and as any horror fan knows when you mix those ingredients together, things can only end badly. This film does, however, spend some time focusing on the hang-ups of today’s teenagers, who have issues with pecker size, body fat, and even pube length (I kid you not!). It’s reasonably well acted, and once it got going, it did keep me watching.
The photography has a grainy bleached-out look to some of the scenes, lending an up-to-date feel and helps to give the illusion that we have not seen this all before. Compared to others in this genre, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane does not deserve to be ranked as highly as the classics, but it has certainly earned a place in any horror connoisseurs DVD collection, if only for that twist……
ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE (2006). Directed by Jonathan Leviine. Written by Jacob Forman. Cast: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able, Michael Welch, Edwin Hodge, Aarn Himelstein, Luke Grimes, Melissa Price, Adam Powell.
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"All the Boys Love Mandy Lane" back on the shelf

Posted on by Steve Biodrowski

ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE seems doomed never to play in U.S. theatres. The Weinstein Brothers bought this slasher film after it earned positive buzz on the festival circuit in 2006, but theydid nothing with it.Then Senator Distribution, a new company aquired the rights and announced a release back in 2008, which never materialized. Entertainment Weekly then revealed that July 17, 20o9 was the new target, but now that has been abandoned as well.
Get the Big Picture has the story: after THE INFORMERS flopped, Senator Films were strapped for cash and couldn’t raise additional money to release their remaining slate of films. This leaves ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE once again in limbo.
Meanwhile, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE is already available on DVD in England.
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Friday the 13th (2009) – "Killer Cut" Blu-ray Review

Posted on by Drew Fitzpatrick

It’s a testament to the outrageous lengths that New Line Pictures had taken the FRIDAY THE 13TH series after acquiring the rights to the Jason character from Paramount, that there was nowhere to go but back to the beginning. JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY transformed the summer camp-lurking mass murderer into a non-corporeal life form that takes possession of various bodies via a dark, viscous fluid. JASON X found Jason, unable to be executed using conventional means, being awoken from cryogenic stasis 500 years in the future by students on a science expedition from humanity’s new home, Earth 2. And the self explanatory JASON VS. FREDDY had New Line showcasing their two top in-house horror icons in a battle royale with each other, in a largely successful attempt to renew interest in both sagging franchises. Jason had long since become a bit of a joke, little more than a delivery platform for the creative output of makeup FX designers. It hadn’t mattered for a long time whether or not he had motivation for killing, or even if he was actually human; screenwriters twisted the legend like Silly Putty in order to suit the latest outrageous adventure.
In 2003, the same year that the case of Jason vs. Freddy was heard in cinemas, Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company released its debut effort – a commercial-slick remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The company’s unofficial mission statement has it dredging up our ’70s horror heritage and purchasing remake rights whenever available, and as unappealing as this sounded, their Chainsaw remake wasn’t all that bad. While the young cast seemed like little more than a bunch of WB starlets filling up their summer hiatus (though we enjoy leering at Jessica Biel as much as the next fella) and it had to stoop to gore and extended scenes of torture to move its audience where the original relied on atmosphere and inference, original cinematographer Daniel Pearl returned to beautifully ease his sun-blasted, 16mm classic into the 21st Century tent of Michael Bay World, and whoever thought of bringing in R. Lee Ermey (whose character was a relatively new invention) deserves major praise.  A string of less successful remakes followed: a grim version of The Hitcher and a deadly dull Amityville Horror remake, wasting a too-young Ryan Reynolds in a role that he could have hit out of the park a few years down the road, were universally panned but smartly marketed (even the ultra-dopey Chainsaw prequel made a profit.)
It was probably inevitable that Platinum Dunes would set its sights on Friday the 13th as a remake-friendly project; for better or worse, it’s got one of the most iconic killers in horror film history and enormous name recognition, and the various films in the series are also notable for having little or no plot, and, frankly, when it was bad (and it was bad pretty often) it circled the nadir of modern horror. This all to say that we approached the recent remake – helmed by Marcus Nispel, late of Platinum Dunes’ Texas Chainsaw reboot – with as open a mind as is possible.

What’s good?

Unfortunately, one common factor in the Friday cannon is pretty bland cinematography. Things got more interesting once the series shifted to New Line (particularly Ronny Yu’s beautiful shot Freddy vs. Jason) but there’s something wrong when even the spaceship-set Jason X is shot as blandly as a Sci-Fi original series. Nispel made his bones in the commercial & music video world where his work is rightfully acclaimed. His Friday the 13th is richly colored, with deep forest hues creating a nicely creepy atmosphere.
We also liked the approach that the screenwriters took when it came to which aspects of the series would be carried over; we get some of the creepy, mongoloid Jason from the first film (though only in the “Killer Cut”, but more on that later). We get some of the canvas bag-wearing Jason from Part II (the most frightening, in our opinion) and, of course, the ubiquitous hockey mask.
Nispel is also quite good at creating suspenseful set-pieces, particularly a very disturbing kill early on involving a sleeping bag and a bear trap. We also liked the opening gambit involving what can best be described as a decoy group of hikers, which leads us to…
What’s not so good? (Spoilers ahoy)
The film opens on a group of kids who unknowingly tread onto Jason’s turf while looking for a magical forest of marijuana (not kidding.) It is a bit shocking when nearly the entire group is killed off after 20 minutes and we get the title card, which was a nice touch.
The problem is that the second group – gathered for a weekend party at the luxury cabin of ultra douche bag, Trent (Travis Van Winkle) – is far less interesting than the first group. Stopping off for supplies, they meet Clay (Jared Padalecki, from the WB’s Supernatural) who’s searching for his missing sister, Whitney (Amanda Righetti) who had been among the first group. Also along for the weekend are fun-loving Nolan (a Mathew McConaughey lookalike), his girlfriend Chelsea (Willa Ford), the slutty Bree (Julianna Guill) and, for the sake of racial diversity, Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta) and Chewie (Aaron Yoo).
The inclusion of the latter two perfectly represents the fatuous notion behind too many studio decisions, which allow marketing reports to trump realistic casting decisions. And, though this might fall under the ‘personal preference’ column, we strongly disliked the notion of underground tunnels running beneath Crystal Lake. Now, maybe we missed the scene where the existence of these was explained, but unless there was a large precious mineral find in the Crystal Lake area, their presence seems highly suspect. Its obvious purpose was to give Jason’s seemingly miraculous comings and goings a practical explanation, but it doesn’t do much for Jason’s mythic status to imagine him carefully scaling up and down decades-old mining company ladders (and come to think of it, wouldn’t this just take up more time than less?) It also allows for a dungeon of sorts in which Jason can keep Whitney captive – an odd, unusual plot point that simply does not fit in the Friday world. This dubious machination comes courtesy of director Nispel, for whom its inclusion was the only requirement in screenplay submissions.
There are doubtlessly fans who love the notion of Jason setting the sort of elaborate booby traps that would make Wile E. Coyote jealous, but we always felt that his presence was most terrifying when he was just a garden variety, mass-murdering backwoods mongoloid without an ACME charge account.

BLU-RAY DETAILS – THE KILLER CUT

New Line’s Blu-Ray is quite lovely to look at, featuring deep, inky blacks that really bring out the woodsy atmosphere. The color scheme is a bit more muted than some might expect, but that was clearly the intent of the original cinematography and reproduced faithfully here.
There’s a 9 minute difference between the theatrical version and the “Killer Cut” on DVD and Blu-Ray. It appears to be mostly a matter of scene extensions, with several gorier kills (particularly the aforementioned sleeping bag scene) and quite a bit of added nudity, which significantly extends the screen time of Julianna Guill and her breasts. There are also a few isolated moments with Jason, including a shot of him sharpening his machete that was included in the trailer but dropped from the theatrical cut, and a few glimpses of him witnessing the beheading of his mother in the opening scene, which reenacts the conclusion of the original film. (Sharp-eyed fane of Deep Space Nine will recognize Nana Visitor as Mrs. Voorhees.) The makeup on young Jason in this scene is kind of silly, and it was probably a smart cut.
The disc also features 3 additional scenes, including an alternate version of the moment where Jason first finds his hockey mask that is demonstrably better than what wound up in the film.
The Rebirth of Jason Voorhees discusses the work that went into the redesign of Jason for 2009, including clothing, makeup and masks.
Exclusive to Blu-Ray are Hacking Back/Slashing Forward, which is little more than the cast and crew talking about how much love and respect they have for the original film, along with a collection of seven mini-featurettes on the death scenes.
Making up for the absence of an audio commentary is something called a Terror Trivia Track which runs concurrently with the film.
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Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives – Deluxe Edition DVD Review

Posted on by Drew Fitzpatrick

Smarting by the anemic box office and angrily negative fan reaction to FRIDAY THE 13TH PART V: A NEW BEGINNING, Paramount brought in writer-director Tom McLoughlin (whose only previous directorial experience was the well regarded ONE DARK NIGHT back in 1983) to revive the franchise. McLoughlin – under studio directive to bring Jason back to life – decided to use humor to smooth over the more ludicrous plot machinations, and his comic sensibilities were thankfully more graceful than his predecessor’s had been. As with previous entries, production began almost before the previous film had exited theaters, and FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART VI: JASON LIVES! was released in August of 1986. The sequel picks up with teenage Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews, so memorable alongside James Karen in the previous year’s RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) and fellow asylum inmate Allen (Ron Palillo, TV’s Horshack, in what would sadly be his highest profile role post-KOTTER) on a breakneck graveyard run to once and for all purge Jason from his dreams. This plays out almost identically to the opening of the previous FRIDAY THE 13TH – though instead of ghoulish pranks, Tommy and Allen set out to burn Jason’s corpse to cinders. What follows gives a fair indication of the type of humor that McLoughlin offers, as the attempt to put Jason down for good has the exact opposite effect: a steel pole gets lodged in the torso of the lifeless, desiccated body – which is brought back to life Frankenstein-style by a bolt of lightning. After Allen gets a hole punched through his chest by the newly animated killer, Tommy flees, his unfinished task a heroically epic fail. The prologue finishes up with an optical shot through the eye of the hockey mask, with Jason stalking across the frame, then stopping to throw a machete at the camera in a takeoff of the James Bond opening that elicited wild applause from the audience with whom we saw the film.
Tommy makes a fruitless attempt to warn the local authorities in the form of Sheriff Garris (an appropriately gruff David Kagen), who winds up throwing Tommy in jail after he makes a grab for a shotgun. Having renamed itself Forest Green in an effort to distance itself from its most infamous son, Crystal Lake – understandably – doesn’t lay out the welcome mat for Tommy; he does, however, find a believer in the Sheriff’s daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke), who just happens to be one of the counselors at yet another summer camp operating off the lake (how do they get insurance?)
Director McLoughlin showcases a few humorous moments of the all-too-rare “laughing with” variety, as Jason goes after a pre-Ghost Tony Goldwin and the director’s wife, Nancy. Jason blocks the path of their rather unintimidating Volkswagen, and after Tony’s unsuccessful attempt to threaten him with a fist-sized handgun, Nancy tries offering him her wallet – cut to final shot of an Amex card floating in a blood-soaked puddle.
McLoughlin is careful never to let the humor drift off into outright satire – probably harder than it sounds when you’re talking about a Part VI of anything – but he’s also aware that given the triteness of the setup it’s probably the only way to squeeze out a halfway entertaining movie. Even if the sequence wherein Jason kills a bunch of corporate executives on a survivalist weekend plays too broadly for comfort, McLoughlin’s heart is in the right place.
With the help from Megan, Tommy escapes from the jail and heads to the place he know Jason can’t resist – a summer camp. McLoughlin does take a risk here; previous films in the series have only shown camps getting ready to open, but here we see Jason actually menacing a little girl in her bunk, and the series dips its toe into palpably uncomfortable waters for several moments (though some of that tension is relieved by a snoozing camper with a copy of “No Exit” open on their chest.)
Being a Paramount film, nothing too horrible happens (though at the risk of a spoiler, let’s say that one character bends over backwards in a more than figurative sense.) However, the MPAA once again had at the film, dulling the impact of nearly every kill. Being the final film in the unofficial Tommy Jarvis trilogy of IV, V, and VI, the showdown leaves Final Girl Megan without much to do, as Tommy lures Jason back to the very lake where he drowned as a boy, leading to a fiery – if not quite final – confrontation.
Far superior to its dreadful predecessor, Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives is the last decent film in the series made at Paramount. The ill-conceived A New Blood introduced a Final Girl with telekinetic abilities, thus ripping off two movies instead of just one, and the aberration that was Jason Takes Manhattan featured a High School graduation party on a cruise to NYC that doesn’t reach the titular city until the conclusion for some hastily filmed Times Square shots (the Pilgrims got to Manhattan quicker.)
While not all the humor in Jason Lives works, at least the failed bits don’t up-end the whole show. The only major complaint is the shift in location shooting to Georgia; while the California locations of III, IV, and V stood out like a bloody machete from the effective Northeast setting of the first two films, Georgia always looks like Georgia.
Paramount has understandably decided to make this film the last of the series to get special edition treatment, possibly because they have run out of installments of Lost Tales of Camp Blood, the 6th (and we hope, final) of which is included here. The film has also been cleaned up a bit since its last release, with a much better looking image than the copy found on the box set.
The best extra is the commentary with Tommy McLoughlin, editor Bruce Green, and writer Vinnie Guastaferro. McLoughlin is a horror enthusiast (who directed several episodes of the Friday the 13th syndicated series); he still relishes his shot at making a Friday the 13th film (he still has Jason’s gravestone in his yard) and he leads an informative and fun chat that makes it hard to switch hack over to the film soundtrack. (We actually had the opportunity to meet McLoughlin shortly after this film, while he was shooting Date with an Angel at the de Laurentiis studios in North Carolina and can confirm that he really is that nice.)
As for the remaining bonus features:

  • The making-of piece, Jason Lives: The Making of Friday the 13th Part VI is interesting, but features a lot of overlap with the commentary.
  • Slashed Scenes is another tribute to the MPAA, featuring complete versions of the edited kills, though the workprint quality is wobbly.
  • Meeting Mr. Voorhees describes McLoughlin’s unfilmed ending that would have shown Jason’s never-discussed father visiting his grave.
  • The mocumentary The Crystal Lake Massacres Revisited Part III doesn’t offend; neither is it worth much of your time (particularly for the third time.)
  • The nearly apologetic theatrical trailer is also included.

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Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) – Deluxe Edition DVD Review

Posted on by Drew Fitzpatrick

We’ll give Paramount the benefit of the doubt that they truly intended to end the FRIDAY THE 13TH series with young Tommy Jarvis chopping Jason Voorhees into a million pieces at the conclusion of FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER. Screenwriter Barry Cohen was given explicit instructions to make sure that the form of Jason’s exit wouldn’t leave any doubt that this was indeed the end of the line, even if  the final shot lingers ominously on the face of a traumatized Tommy, suggesting a possible alternate route – just in case. It turned out that “just in case” happened less than a year later when Paramount came to its fiduciary senses and commissioned a 5th installment of the franchise after THE FINAL CHAPTER raked in sixteen times its own meager budget. Danny Steinmann, coming off the nasty Linda Blair revenge-themed programmer SAVAGE STREETS in 1984, moved into the director’s chair. FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART V: A NEW BEGINNING has since become a bit of a pariah among fans because the screenwriters – looking for a way to get themselves out of the narrative dead end that THE FINAL CHAPTER had boxed them into – gave the sequel a twist ending that (while it makes more sense than most other films of the franchise) is handled so poorly by Steinmann that it utterly overshadows the show’s few virtues.
Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning opens with a dream sequence in which young Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman returning for a cameo) watches a pair of grave robbers unwittingly revive Jason. He wakes from the nightmare as a teenager (played as a near-mute by John Shepherd) riding in the back of a bus on route to the Pinehurst halfway house for troubled teens (presumably, Tommy has been under state care since hacking Jason to pieces as a child.) As Tommy is shown the facility, we meet the heroically under-written cast of characters, a group of teens whose only real trouble seems to be a tendency towards petulance. ‘Always eating fat kid’ battles ‘walkman wearing, robot-dancing punk girl’ and ‘crazed axe-wielding loner’ for our attention until the arrival of neighbors Ethel Hubbard and son Junior straight from a Hee Haw parody of Mother’s Day.
It was at this point in the series that you could feel the producers, screenwriters and directors just throw up their collective hands and say “Hell, nobody takes this crap seriously – so why are we sweating it?” From this point on, the already limited characterization dropped down to almost nil. With no human beings to feel any sympathy with, audiences began to actually embrace Jason – often the only character with a defined agenda. We clearly remember our crowd at a showing of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood cheering loudly for Jason’s brand of faceless mayhem and nothing else.
Anyway, Ethel’s complaints about the kids at the shelter getting into trouble on their property soon prove legitimate as fat kid Joey (Dominick Brascia, complete with melting chocolate bar screwed tightly in his pudgy little hand) pesters dangerous loner Vic (Mark Venturini) once too often and gets an axe buried right in his skull in broad daylight. People who remember nothing else about the film remember this moment – the one bright splash on an otherwise dull, ugly canvas. It’s at this point that the film begins setting up its twist ending, so if you haven’t seen the film and want to remain “surprised,” skip the next paragraph.
When the ambulance crew arrives to pick up fat kid Joey, paramedic Roy Burns (Dick Wieand) begins to have a fit of apoplexy at the sight of fat kid Joey’s body. Watching Wieand’s face contort recalls third-tier silent movie acting at its most histrionic. At the crime scene of the next two victims – a pair of leatherboys that arrived at Crystal Lake via Rydell High – Wieand has a similar outburst that etches into the very celluloid itself “I’m the killer!!!” and of course, he is. That’s right – it’s not Jason. Excluding his cameo in Tommy’s dream, A New Beginning marks the only film in the series where Jason is utterly MIA, racking up zero real-world kills to the chagrin of fans.
There’s an attempt to cast the specter of guilt on Tommy himself, real estate paid for at the conclusion of the previous film and spread more thickly here, but we simply know that it’s not him. Once “Jason” has hacked through the majority of the cast, we’re left with Shavar Ross, last seen making an ill-fated trip to a local bike shop with Arnold Drummond, Final Girl Pam (an unmemorable Melanie Kinnaman) and Tommy, who saves both of them by pushing the hockey masked killer onto a grouping of sharp farm-type implements. The mask is removed, revealing not the malformed inbred son of Pamela Voorhees, but the most obvious suspect since Raymond Burr in Rear Window. We’d love to tell you that A New Beginning is better than its reputation – to tell you that the efforts of the production not to cheat the finality of the previous film’s conclusion, but we simply can’t.
Even by the muted standards of low budget horror, the film is an unforgivably crass, ugly experience, devoid of suspense, and, thanks to the MPAA’s blood vendetta against the franchise, bereft of any interesting kills (after the broad daylight demise of fat kid Joey, of course.) Director Steinmann’s idea of humor can be found glued to the gutter, begging for scraps of uncomfortable laughter from the lowest possible denominator. Fans of the series – and of horror in general – are right to vilify it.

DVD DETAILS

Whatever its faults, Paramount has given Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning an excellent presentation on their Deluxe Edition DVD, released june 16. No one with the film fresh in their mind will be surprised at Director Steinmann’s demeanor on the commentary track; sounding near-inebriated, he jokes his way through the film offering little decent information. Joining him is Shavar Ross, who offers the only interesting stories about the production, and a “superfan” moderator, who has probably chosen to champion the film precisely to crowbar himself into this sort of situation (mission accomplished, we thought, you can stop pretending to like this turd.)

  • We also have the fifth (!) installment of the fan-made Lost Tales from Camp Blood, pointless as ever, but at least this time it’s more interesting than the feature.
  • The Crystal Lake Massacres Revisited Part II offers another bit of news magazine-style mocumentary, examining Jason’s murder spree as an actual news story.
  • New Beginnings: The Making of Friday the 13th – A New Beginning is the laboriously titled documentary on the production, offering a far better look at the process than the commentary does.

The package is rounded out with the original theatrical trailer, and the disc comes with the same lenticular slipcase as Friday the 13th Parts IV and VI.
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Sorority Row – Watch the Trailer

Posted on by Steve Biodrowski

This trailer for the remake of 1983’s HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW suggests I KNOW WHA T YOU DID LAST SUMMER almost as much as the official source material, but that’s okay because HOUSE was a competent but not particularly outstanding example of ’80s slasher horror. Whatever the lineage, the new SORORITY ROW looks like a lot of fun.
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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter – DVD Review

Posted on by Drew Fitzpatrick

Is it possible that this film is so old that there’s no longer any snarky fun to be had making fun of its title? It was certainly possible that in 1984 Paramount Pictures was growing awfully tired of being known as the “Slasher Studio” with titles like the FRIDAY THE 13TH  series, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, and APRIL FOOL’S DAY, giving the venerable studio bad press among powerful critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who railed against the the violence and supposed misogyny. The problem was that the films were all solid earners on thrifty investments, and studios are notoriously gun shy about killing golden geese. But once Paramount’s fortunes began to rise with a series of successful Eddie Murphy comedies and a string of blockbusters like FOOTLOOSE, FLASHDANCE, (and RAIDERS OF THE something or other) the studio must have felt that they could afford to cut the slasher films loose. Screenwriter Barney Cohen was tasked with killing Jason Voorhees (a job that no fictional character had thus far been capable of) and PROWLER director Joseph Zito was brought on board to send him off with style. An unusually capable cast was assembled, including then-heartthrob Peter Barton (THE POWERS OF MATTHEW STAR, anyone? Anyone?), future star Crispin Glover, future child-star catastrophe Corey Feldman, and everyone’s favorite LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN, Lawrence Monoson, all of whom contributed towards giving the film a feeling of professionalism and legitimacy that the series would never see again while the franchise was at Paramount.
As with the previous entry, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter picks up right where the previous film left off, with an apparently dead Jason lying on the floor of the barn at Higgin’s Haven. With the characters unaware of Jason’s medical condition, which prevents death, his body is brought to the county morgue where he promptly slaughters the attendant (Police Academy’s Bruce Mahler as the show’s only truly obnoxious character) and a nurse before heading back to Crystal Lake. Meanwhile, a group of teens (who apparently don’t listen to the news on the car radio) are headed out to the lake for a weekend getaway in a rented house, situated right across from the Jarvis home, with young Tommy (Feldman) teenage sister and future ‘Final Girl’, Trish (Kimberly Beck)living with their mom (Joan Freeman.) On their way home, the Jarvis’ meet would-be camper, Rob (Erich Anderson) who has returned to Crystal Lake for revenge against Jason for killing his sister years earlier (apparently she was the bottom half of Friday the 13th Part II’s notorious Twitch of the Death Nerve-inspired spear kill.) The arrival of twins Tina and Teri (Camilla & Carey More) completes the victim roster and we’re off to the races, with director Zito bringing a polished execution that the series hadn’t seen before or since.
Zito’s instincts for performance allowed someone like Glover to improvise moments like his stupendously insane dance; and had the series actually ended with this film it would be quite well remembered today. Of course, the spine of any Friday the 13th film is the kills, and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapterhas some of the series’ most visceral deaths, displaying the same nasty edge to the violence that Zito brought to The Prowler and the crazy violent Chuck Norris vehicle, Missing in Action. The slaughter scenes here have more weight to them simply because we care more about the performers (one very impressive kill is implied by shadow play against the side of the house during a rain storm and nicely demonstrates creativity trumping gore.)
Besides the always entertaining Glover, a pre-Goonies Feldman is also very good as the monster-mask wearing, Zaxxon-playing Tommy Jarvis – a familiar character to many of us who were too young to see this film when it first came out, but snuck in anyway. Anyone who wonders why he was such a popular child star need only watch the scene where he peeps on a pair of naked teens from his bedroom across the way; the kid nearly always made something out of nothing. And while Kimberly Beck is a bit bland as final girl, Trish, and the phrase “dead fuck” isn’t nearly as funny as screenwriter Barney Cohen seems to have thought it would be, this would be the last time that pointing out the deficiencies of a Friday the 13th film would take up so little space.

DVD DETAILS

It’s a shame that Paramount didn’t deem the film deserving of a Blu-Ray release (yet), but the new Special Edition DVD looks quite nice. Though inflation would drive the budgets of future installments up, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter seems practically epic when compared to the poverty row entries still to come, and the DVD’s image reflects the higher production standards.
To make up for the lack of commentaries on the last 2 Friday the 13th films, there are actually 2 tracks included here, the first featuring Zito, Cohen, and editor Joel Goodman, none of whom are under the impression that the film is anything more substantial than it is, but are rightfully proud of what they were able to achieve. The second is a fan track featuring directors Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2) and Adam Green (the woefully under-appreciated Hatchet), which is actually quite fun. They’re both smart, savvy guys who grew up on the same horror feed as the rest of us, and they have a legitimate and heartfelt affection for Zito and the film.
As for the bonus features:

  • Buckle up for the 4th installment of the increasingly irritating Lost Tales from Camp Blood (see our reviews for the previous films for an explanation that we’re getting too tired and embittered to re-write.)
  • The Crystal Lake Massacres Revisited Part 1 is a mock Investigative Reports-style documentary on Jason’s killing spree that is fun for a few minutes, but we ran out of steam long before it was even half over.
  • A more substantial extra is the documentary, Jason’s Unlucky Day: 25 Years After Friday, a brief but informative piece on the making of the film, featuring Zito, Cohen, SFX artist Tom Savini (who returned to the series for the first (and last) time since the original) and star Beck.
  • Jimmy’s Dead Fuck Dance Moves is an unedited take of Glover’s hysterical dance, where you can see other actors straining to keep straight faces.
  • The Lost Endingis exactly that, presented without production audio but with commentary by Zito and Beck.
  • Longtime fans will likely be most excited by Slashed Scenes, a 15min collection of alternate takes that offers the best look yet at the unedited murder sequences.

The only disappointments are that the show didn’t qualify for a HD release and that not all the extras from the previously released box set have been ported over (this really ought to be step 1 when studios double-dip on releases), so purists should hold onto their old discs. Otherwise Paramount has done an admirable job with this release. Highly recommended.
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