Wes Craven got sent to diversity training after the first movie, and this time Drew Barrymore and her doomed bf are played by Jada Pinkett (Demon Knight) and Omar Epps (Dracula 2000), who get killed during the premiere of the movie Stab based on Cox’s character’s book about the events of part one. This sort of meta-spiral inevitably leads to the Cinderhella scenes in Detention.

Neve is at college now, even more traumatized than she was in the last movie, with boyfriend Derek and roomie Hallie, who will both end up in Mission to Mars after failing to survive this movie. Also not surviving: Jamie Kennedy (this is for the best, he’s much less charming here than in part one) and sorority sister Buffy, who gets a big solo scene.

Or maybe Buffy is the Drew Barrymore, I dunno:

Arquette comes to campus after the killings start, crippled from getting stabbed in the first movie, as does Cox of course, and they are cute together. Her new cameraman Joel (Duane Martin of The Faculty) quits his job before getting killed, amazing. Jamie explains the sequel rules (bigger setpieces, higher body count) and Wes leans into the clever references with Friends jokes and generic Hollywoodized scenes of his own movie in Stab (feat. Luke Wilson as Skeet Ulrich), and there’s even a play-within-the-play (Neve is playing Casandra for drama teacher David Warner), which gives us a location for the final showdown.

They’ve kept the tradition of ghostface getting beat up in every encounter, and that of ghostface being two people. Everyone thinks it’s Neve’s boyfriend again but he’s innocent, fake-tortured by frat guys to a Jon Spencer song then murdered by film student Timothy Olyphant (Dreamcatcher), the crazy Lillard-type partner of Skeet’s revenge-seeking mom Laurie Metcalf. The ending needs work – we are asked to believe that a high-stacked pile of stones in a college theater production is made of actual stones. Liev Schreiber, wrongly imprisoned for Neve’s mom’s murder before part one, just wants TV interviews and fame and cash, keeps getting overlooked because of the second wave of killings so he will presumably get fed up and become the killer in part three.

Liev found your cat:

Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)

Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.


The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)

On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes


Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)

Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.


Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)

Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.


Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)

It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.


Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)

The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.


Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)

And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…


Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)

Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?


Pearl (2022, Ti West)

Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.


Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)

Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.

A respectable and effective back-to-basics story, cutting itself free from the previous sequels by simply setting a new Chucky loose in a house full of new victims, then belatedly explaining how the various movies tie together.

Delivery of a mysterious doll, screaming ensues, and gramma is dead and the doll forgotten. Wheelchair single mom Mika (Fiona “daughter of Brad” Dourif) is joined by her horrible sister (“Mother Mortis” of the Insidious series) and her husband (a Hallmark Christmas movie actor) and the local priest (Adolfo Martinez of sci-fi rip-off The Terminators) so we’ll have more people to kill off. The priest suffers a car-accident decapitation, the babysitter is electrocuted via laptop and horrible sister is stabbed in the face. Husband thinks Mika did all this, until Chucky smashes his face with an axe. Mike decapitates the doll but that’s ineffective, and he wheelchairs her through the second-floor railing. While she’s bleeding out he explains that he was close with her late mom, and she’s the one who called the cops leading to the toy store chase at the beginning of part one. Now that we’ve established continuity we can have late-movie cameos by Jenny Tilly and the original Andy, all still alive at the end as Mika is shipped to the hospital for the criminally insane.

Funny from the start, “Practical Pictures presents” and then a titles montage of very non-practical effects. Opening death-escape setpiece is a company (called Presage, lol) retreat aboard a bus on a collapsing bridge, and based on the first death (Intern Candace impaled on a sailboat mast Flesh For Frankenstein style) I assume this was shot in 3D like the last one.

Premonition Boy is Sam – he’s a lousy salesman at the company moonlighting as a promising restaurant cook. Law & Order veteran Courtney Vance can’t prove the kid caused the bridge collapse, decides to keep tabs on things, but is in the wrong movie and can’t keep up. And then off we go: gymnast Candance flips into a catastrophe crunch and all her bones explode in front of boyfriend Peter, then horrible PJ Byrne (of a Mary Lynn Rajskub Charles Manson movie) gets his head smooshed by a Buddha during acupuncture, and Tony Todd tells the rest of them they’re doomed.

Hotgirl Who Is Useless Without Her Glasses opts for lasik, oh no, gets her eye burned out AND falls out the window. It’s always more than one thing – they go through hell, not a simple lawnmower rock to the head. Newbie factory supervisor Arlen (of a Friday the 13th remake) “kills” disgruntled union man Brent (The Damned Thing), possibly saving his own ass, as the kids are re-figuring out the death-plot everyone figured out in previous movies. Then shithead boss Koechner (Run Ronnie Run, Piranha 3DD) catches a simple wrench to the head, ok.

When your job is to watch people mock you on video:

When your horror movie is anti-union:

Peter with the dead girlfriend decides to kill everyone, they thwart his plan at Sam’s restaurant kitchen (a place full of intriguingly dangerous implements), the cop gets in the way and dies, and now the weird death-logic they’ve devised (or invented) means the final couple (Sam is TV’s Harvey Dent, Emma of Frozen) gets to live natural lives and move to Paris together – but the movie is a sneak prequel as they board the flight with the kids from part one.

Quale worked on Titanic and The Abyss, the writer did some ill-advised remakes then hit the big time with Arrival, and I’m all caught up on Final Destinations until (potentially) next year.

They’re done with sequel numbering, but I’m not – it’s part five. A few years ago I watched four and a half of these in a month, but as much as these movies repeat themselves, it’s better to put a year or two between them. Opening titles sex scene with our survivors from part four, hell yeah, but things are amiss – Alice almost gets showered to death, and has a backstory vision of Freddy’s birth story (a nun assaulted by an asylum full of maniacs). Freddy always “dies” convincingly then comes back inexplicably in the next one, and the gimmick here is he can visit Alice while she’s awake through the dreams of her unborn child.

Prince of Darkness this ain’t:

Alice has four friends with diverse interests, ideal for getting murdered in character-appropriate ways in the first half of a 90-minute movie. Generic Saved by the Bell-lookin’ Boyfriend Dan gets beat up by his self-driving car then Tetsuo-the-Iron-Man‘d by a Freddycycle… anorexic model Greta gets force-fed… Mark gets Take On Me-d into his comics… star diver Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter of Popcorn and Miracle Mile) actually lives, releasing the momma nun’s spirit (she’d been sitting long-dead in some abandoned church), then Alice’s baby uses vomit-attack on Freddy, who once again loses/frees the souls of dead high schoolers.

It’s slightly less goofy than the previous one, but no better. Has Freddy always called every woman bitch? Final showdown where Alice rescues her baby from Freddy on Escher-stairs feels like a Labyrinth ripoff. Hopkins had a good 1990s career, including Judgment Night. The writer did House III the same year, and was a member of Sparks. Rosenbaum raved: “zero-degree filmmaking … flaccid editing.”

You can tell a movie has no prestige when its blu-ray extras are just music videos by The Fat Boys and Whodini. The former is from Mondo director Harvey Keith, opens with a very awkward sketch, making me doubt my memories of the Fat Boys’ great acting talent in Disorderlies. The three then run around a very well-dilapidated movie house pursued by Freddy. Good use of movie clips in the song, and Englund gets to rap. The Whodini is a much better song, has twin dancing Freddies on a staircase, and the band wisely doesn’t go inside the horror house, just dances on the porch.

The stupidest, goofiest entry, thanks to the full line of disciples and family members from parts one through four being together for the first time – and also the most shootiest and explosionest. This time they’re fighting sea pirates, led by Elder Paco (a Yes Madam spinoff), Junior Stephen (Hard Boiled), and Elaine (The Bride with White Hair), and fortunately Katy didn’t watch this one (the pirates have an entire crate full of the severed fingers of their victims). It’s not as exciting as it sounds.

The gang:

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.


Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.