My Bloody Valentine (1981 original)

It happened once, it happened twice.  Cancel the dance, or it'll happen thrice. - Valentine heart poem

Happy Valentine's Day!  The past few years, I've been wanting to review this one, but I just never got around to it.  Either I was still somewhat burned out from the previous October run, couldn't find the movie itself to review, or else just let it slip past.  Well, this year I decided to sit down, rewatch the film and crank this review out.  I hope you enjoy it!

The film takes place in the mining town of Valentine Bluffs.  For the past twenty years, the town has avoided holding the annual Valentine's Day dance they had originally had.  The reason for this avoidance is Harry Warden (Peter Cowper).  One Valentine's Day, he and four other miners were trapped in a methane explosion-induced cave-in when their two mine supervisors decided to leave early for the dance.  After they finally got dug in after six weeks, they found Harry, the only one left, completely insane.  The next year, he took his revenge on the two supervisors and vowed to continue killing if the dances continued.

In the present day, our group of miners consists of T.J. (Paul Kelman), Axel (Neil Affleck), Hollis (Keith Knight) and others are looking forward to the renewed dance along with their assorted girlfriends.  T.J. and Axel are old friends, feuding somewhat over the same girl, Sarah (Lori Hallier).  But, with the dance coming in a matter of days, the deaths start up again and the sheriff and mayor start to wonder if Harry Warden's back again.

When this film was first released, it had a good 9 minutes or so of footage cut out for content, due to blood and gore.  When Lionsgate got the rights to make the 2009 remake, they also were able to rerelease the original with all of the gore reinstated.  The working title of the film was The Secret, an apt name as the director and producers wanted to keep as much of it secret as possible.

My thoughts: This was a pretty good film.  It's one of the several horror films that came out in 1981 (so many I was able to cover a whole week's worth of them a couple years ago and still have plenty left over!).  The special effects were great, the acting wasn't too bad for the type of film and time period and the suspense was high.  The film keeps you guessing on who the killer really is, one of my favorite types of films.

I give the film a 5 out of 5.  A good story, a lot of suspense and some good makeup effects all add up to a perfect score in my book.  I hope you had a good Valentine's Day, faithful readers, enjoy yourselves and have a good rest of the weekend.  Until next time, this is Red Hawk signing out!

Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981)

I told the others, they didn't believe me. You're all doomed. You're all doomed. - Crazy Ralph

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone!  Since I missed out on posting this review last October, I'll be bringing it to you now.  When the first Friday the 13th proved particularly successful, the studio decided to make a sequel.  Originally intended to focus on other Friday the 13th superstitions, when the jump scare at the end of the first proved highly popular, they decided to refocus their efforts on what they knew would work: Jason Voorhees.  And so, they resurrected the little guy, aged him up and sent him in against a whole new crop of camp counselors.

After a rundown of events from the end of the first film, it picks up two months after with the survivor living on her own and appearing to be stalked (a parallel to what happened to the actual actress, who quit acting for over 20 years after this film).  After this opening scene, we start to meet the main characters for this film, a group training to be camp counselors.  It's five years after the events of the first film, and the owner of the training camp, Paul (John Furey), is opening the first business on the lake.  The locals are upset that someone's operating near Crystal Lake again.  Crazy Ralph is up to his old tricks again.  And what's the large figure stalking the counselors in the trees?

This movie was fun.  The kills, while not as inventive as what was to come, were still pretty good.  We get machetes to the face, a double spearing, and a really amazing wheelchair stunt (that seemed a bit cut short, maybe for the rating).  The special effects were good, make-up was great, there was just one problem.  When Jason's unmasked, he has a nice, full head of red hair.  In every other film in the series, Jason has very little to no hair, but for some reason, they decided to give him a full head in this one.  Between this one and the third, Jason loses that full head of hair, even though it takes place within hours of this one.

My thoughts: It was an interesting follow-up to the first film, and a worthy successor, but not the best in the series.  This wasn't my first full Friday the 13th film (that was part 6), but I did like it.

I give the film a 4 out of 5.  Sorry for the delay in posting, but at least I got it posted up within time.  Soon, I'll have the original My Bloody Valentine up and posted, after two or three years of delay.  Happy Friday the 13th, Happy Valentine's Day and this is Red Hawk signing out!

A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

Mommy?  Why can't Jesse wake up like everybody else? - Angela

So, we come to the first of what would have been last October's big finale trilogy.  I like to finish the month's articles with a look at the big three franchises, a tradition I started with my original site.  Today, we'll be looking at the second installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street film series, Freddy's Revenge.

Did you ever notice how there's usually at least one film early in a series that doesn't quite fit in with the others that come after it?  Usually, this will be the second or third film.  Puppet Master 2 didn't quite fit with the earlier film, or later established canon.  Halloween III: Season of the Witch was an effort on John Carpenter's part to move away from using the Shape again by basing the series off of different aspects of Halloween (it didn't work).  We'll look at the oddness of Friday the 13th: Part 2 tomorrow.  And so, we have this film, the oddball of the Nightmare series.

After a nightmare of Freddy Krueger stalking him and a pair of girls on a school bus, our protagonist, Jesse (Mark Patton) wakes up screaming as his parents and sister eat breakfast.  Seems the family just moved into Nancy's house from the first film (which was empty for five years!).  At school, he runs afoul of, then later befriends, tough guy Grady (Robert Rusler).  But at night, he keeps dreaming of Freddy who, instead of trying to kill him, asks him to help him kill others.  Jesse's obviously not on board with the idea, but will Freddy give him the option to say no?

So, this film has Freddy killing people differently from how he did in the previous film, as well as the rest of the films to come: rather than striking in their dreams, he uses Jesse as a conduit to manifest in the real world.  From what I read online, the script started as a standalone film not connected to the first Nightmare on Elm Street, but New Line waned a quick sequel so they changed things to put Freddy in.  Wes Craven bowed out because he wanted the first film to stand alone.  They also almost lost Robert Englund due to a pay dispute, but the replacement for him, seen in the shower sequence, didn't bring any life to the character.

My thoughts on the film: while different from the others, and sort of a black sheep with some fans, I did like this one.  There was some suspense built up, and the mind games Freddy plays with Jesse's girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers), are up there with some of the stuff he pulled with Nancy.  However, in my opinion, Freddy works best in dreams and the next film brings him back to his roots, and also introduces the more wacky, fun-loving, sadistic Freddy we're used to.

I give this movie a 3 out of 5.  Good acting, great special and make-up effects, but overall, just too different from the others for my taste.  Tune in tomorrow for my coverage of Friday the 13th, Part 2, where we get to see, as Horror Hound magazine called it, Jason's "fashionable head bag".  Until then, this is Red Hawk signing out!

House of Wax (2005)

It is wax, like... literally. - Wade, regarding the museum in town's unique construction

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this, my friends.  I intended to review this back in October along with the other wax films, but other things got in the way.  But, I'm back now, and as promised, I'm continuing the wax museum motif with 2005's Tourist Trap... er, I mean House of Wax remake!  Like many other films, I saw this one before I saw the originals, so it was a new experience for me.  Of course, the film, in essence, doesn't share as much with its named predecessors as it does my previous review, but we'll get to that shortly!

After a flashback to a pair of brothers who we don't see as babies, one a good little boy, the other apparently a bit of a hellion, we meet our main characters in the present day: Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and her boyfriend, Wade (Jared Padalecki) and brother, Nick (Chad Michael Murray); Paige (Paris Hilton) and her boyfriend, Blake (Robert Ri'chard), not to be confused with the really close brother and sister team from the second season of The Amazing Race; and friend and avid cameraman, Dalton (Jon Abrahams).  The motley group is heading to a major football game in New Orleans, and along the way, take a detour that leaves them in the middle of nowhere, where they run afoul of someone in a pickup.  The next morning, Nick's car's fan belt has broken, so he and Carly hitch a ride with a weird guy who picks up roadkill for a living (Damon Herriman) who takes them to a weird town that seems abandoned.  That's never a recipe for disaster, right?  Right!?

When this film came out, one of the big draws for it was that it was Paris Hilton's first motion picture.  She'd been known for her series, The Simple Life, where she and friend Nicole Richie got away from their rich girl roots and took up different jobs.  Due to the show, Hilton got a reputation for being a bit of an idiot because of their antics.  She did really well in this film with the screen time she's given, but the movie belongs to Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray, as well as Brian Van Holt.

The set design was good, the town the players are stuck in looking like something out of the 1950s.  The house itself dominates every scene it's in.  As the film quote mentions, the place is made out of wax, walls, floors, everything, which leads to an amazing digital scene later on.  The special effects are amazing, too, besides the digital scene I mentioned, we get a sliced face and, of course, the flowing hot wax (some of it's probably real, of course, but I don't know if all of it was).

Originally entitled Wax House, Baby, after a crew member thought the House of Wax name was unavailable, the film was retitled to House of Wax after the naming rights were guaranteed secured.  However, the film itself actually bears more or a resemblance to Tourist Trap than to the Vincent Price film (or The Mystery of the Wax Museum that preceded that).  Both this and Tourist Trap feature a group of friends who get sidetracked to an out of the way tourist attraction where they're picked off one by one.  Both films also feature a set of brothers making life miserable for our protagonists.  They also both feature victims being turned into part of the attraction.

So, what were my thoughts on the film?  I enjoyed it.  I liked the plot of the film, the acting was good (yes, even from the much-maligned Paris Hilton), the suspense was up there and we got some good jump scenes, as well.  All in all, I give the film a 4 out of 5.  So, while I still had three more movies to cover on the Week of Wax, I'll be skipping to the end of the original October coverage.  With Friday the 13th coming up, I'll be bringing you my review of Friday the 13th Part 2 for that day.  We'll also have a break in the fact that Valentine's Day and President's Day both coming up, I'll have something special for the weekend, too.  Until then, take care of yourselves, and this is Red Hawk signing out!