Final Destination 2

Year 18, Day 290 - 10/17/26 - Movie #5,464

BEFORE: It's very sneaky, they made a bunch of movies out of a common fear that nearly everyone shares, the fear of dying. The movies play out like horror movies, but it's the horror of knowing that we're all mortal and at some point, our bodies are going to fail us, even if that failure is caused by an outside circumstance, it's still the fault in ourselves, not in the stars. Umm, or is it? Is Death caused by a feeling, thinking, outside force or is it just caused by accidents, disease and/or stupidity or recklessness? Discuss. 

The "killer" is stalking these people, but the killer is also unseen, there's no person wearing a mask or holding a chainsaw or a gun or anything, they don't even feel the need to SHOW some character like Boogie or the Grim Reaper, because the presence is all implied. Those knives didn't just drop off the counter randomly, Death did it. The car doors didn't just stop opening when the car got stuck on the train tracks, Death did it. Allegedly. Your spouse didn't replace your parachute with a fitted bedsheet, Death did it. Sure, if that makes it easier for you. 

Ali Larter carries over from "Final Destination", which itself is a bit of a spoiler, but one other actor carries over as well, he's going to dominate this last week-and-a-half of my October horror chain. For my purposes, I'm going to file these movies under "body horror" because that's really what we're talking about, that we all walk around in this fragile bag of blood and organs that's way too vulnerable to heat, cold, projectiles, punctures, fatigue and just plain old wear-and-tear, so that clock is ticking for all of us - it's just a matter of time, isn't it? 

THE PLOT: Death is stalking Kimberly Corman and multiple survivors of a deadly highway accident. 

AFTER: So there's a bit of a pattern here, every sequel maybe has one or two people who carry over from the last film, despite most of the characters being killed off in very unlikely and darn near ridiculous ways. With a little more comedy, this could have been called "Darwin Awards 2" maybe. But somebody needs to carry over, if for no other reason than to remember what happened to the people who got kicked off Flight 180, and then maybe it won't take so long for the next group of people to realize that Death is stalking them because they SHOULD have died. 

So, umm, if Death is real does that mean it's the Angel of Death, and therefore angels are real and therefore God is real? And if God is real, does God have a plan in place for all of us or not, and if he has a plan for us, isn't death part of that plan? And if we mess with the plan or we change the plan, doesn't that make God fallible, and thus a little less god-like? Am I way over-thinking this or have I just found a plothole that nobody has thought of before? While I'm at it, are our fates already determined for us, or can we change them? This film would suggest that we CAN change our fates, provided we never leave the house and never go swimming with sharks or driving fast in a car or prepare a meal using sharp knives, we should be OK, and we'll live as long as we can but then die anyway from disease or old age or just plain boredom. Wow, you really can NOT win at the Game of Life, can you? 

While I'm at it, if there is a force that is somehow the personification of "Death" that is stalking the people who were supposed to have died, what is the force that is giving the premonitions to the people before-hand, who now have the power to save lives - a few, anyway? Will the franchise be explaining this opposite force at any point, or am I just going to be left hanging here? Is this God or some more minor deity that is granting certain people the power of foresight or are they just born with this talent, it's some human skill built in to the brain that doesn't work until it needs to? I mean, we all have dream software that's hard-wired in, or perhaps our brains just need to process old information while the body rests, I'm not 100% sure that's what dreams are, but that's what we've been told over the years, right? If the brain switched off while we slept, then we'd be dead, that brain needs to keep working all the time I think, or we'd be comatose and never wake up. Right? So maybe the premonition power is an extension of our brain's ability to dream, that's a bit unclear though. 

I haven't talked much about my mother, since she passed away in May at least, on the last trip we made to North Carolina. She'd had heart trouble for years, and she'd get fluid build-up in her lungs, so maybe in her last five years she'd be in the hospital every six months or so, and then spend a few months in rehab before getting to go home - and her dementia was getting progressively worse for maybe the last three years, she could remember family trips from years ago but she had no memories of living in a nursing home for two years, or the trip down to live in my sister's house. So I never officially said goodbye, but with each trip to visit her there was maybe more of a feeling that it might be the last time I'd see her. Last October she was talking about needing to get back to her mother's house in time for dinner, and I had to remind her that her mother passed away years ago and hadn't owned that house for some time before that. 

On our last visit in May, she was mostly unresponsive, mumbling a lot and clearly in some kind of pain, then on our third night there I was up late (as usual) watching TV (of course) and my phone rang, my sister was calling. Not texting, calling - well I knew before answering that my mother was gone, that's not really a premonition, it was just reading the room. Some things you just don't put in a text. Of course I had dreams about her after, and maybe I might have had a dream about her dying before that trip, but I don't think you could count that as a premonition either, because it was fairly certain that it would happen at some point, the doctors had given her a prognosis of WEEKS at that point, instead of months. I'm just grateful I was in the same zip code when it happened, and not back in New York, my family could go directly into the memorial planning phase. 

These "Final Destination" films don't seem to ever get into the funeral phase, I mean there was a mass funeral for the students and teachers killed on Flight 180, but after that, things happened so quickly there just wasn't any time. Same goes for the sequel, we don't see a funeral for the people who died in the highway crash because they're just NPCs, the focus is on the people who did NOT get on the highway, because Kimberly had a premonition of the whole accident, in which she and her friends would all die, plus Officer Burke, plus a dozen or so other people, all in very gruesome and horrible ways. Like screaming AND on fire. Who the hell lets a truck hauling giant logs on the same highway as passenger cars, anyway? I mean, was Death so busy trying to manage the hundreds of thousands of people who die every day that he had to start killing them off in bunches? Does he have a quota or something, maybe 50 people have to die on Long Island every day and he finds that it's much more efficient to sabotage a lumber truck than to come up with 50 separate accidents, one for each person. 

Well, this is where the logic of the franchise's premise really starts to break down, because we're back where we started, aren't we? If Death has a plan that means that there IS some form of order to the universe, people are born, they live X number of years and then, well, they've just got to go, so dropping giant logs on to the highway and causing fiery crashes, mayhem and bloodshed is part of the natural order. But then one person subverted that order, and used her car to block the on-ramp, thereby saving the lives of a few dozen people, but we really only need to focus on 8 or 9 of them. There were also Kimberly's three friends in her car, but they died in a SEPARATE crash a few minutes after the first one, again it's like a punchline to a sick joke. Oh, my friends are alive! No, wait, they're dead too. 

The police officer pulls Kimberly out of the way of the second crash, so he's also interfered with Death's plan. The sequel then reverts to the plot of the first film, where Death now wants to track down those 8 or 9 people who should have died in the accident and take them out, one-by-one. And one of them JUST won the lottery, too - wait, that's kind of like that Alanis Morrissette song, right? Evan Lewis, lottery winner, has one of those weird chain reaction kitchen-based deaths, where he accidentally starts a grease fire and also accidentally microwaves something metal just BEFORE he gets his hand stuck in the drain trying to retrieve a piece of jewelry. Oh, sure, he could just take his diamond watch OFF, but why would he do that? Instead he has to watch helplessly as the grease fire spreads through the whole kitchen, and by the time he gets his hand loose, it's too late to put it out, plus the fire extinguisher malfunctions, so he's forced to flee, only his windows JUST slammed shut and locked, so he has to break the glass. Anyway, he goes down the fire escape as his kitchen explodes, so he's safe - no, wait, the ladder on the fire escape is stuck, until it isn't. So much drama (and comedy) over one death, it ends up feeling like you're watching Buster Keaton in a snuff film. 

Next to go is Tim Carpenter, he and his mother survived the highway crash because Kimberly blocked the on-ramp. He's got a dentist appointment and what could possibly go wrong there? Sharp tools, drills, tanks of high-pressure anesthetic gas, it's a minefield really. Also there are pigeons who keep crashing into the dentist office windows and dying, and still Tim manages to die in a very ridiculous way that's semi-connected to all of these random things. 

At this point Kimberly decides to visit Clear Rivers, the fakely named person who survived the first film, but only because she checked herself into a mental hospital and she hasn't left since. It's a rational choice, as long as she's locked up in a padded room then Death can't get to her, and she's got one of those crazy-person vision boards about the accidents that took place one year before, pushpins connected with red yarn, which is the preferred choice of crazy people trying to prove conspiracies, for sure. Clear's advice is that Death might not be killing people in the correct order any more, but he's still going to kill everyone, eventually. I mean, she's not wrong, it may take 10 or 20 or 50 years, but Death's going to get to you eventually. Death thanks you for your patience, and someone will be with you shortly to kill you.

Eventually Clear does leave the looney bin and she takes Kimberly to see the mortician (from the first film) who tells them that "only new life can defeat Death". Umm, great, what does THAT mean? It leads them to remember the pregnant woman who was in the traffic that avoided the crash, however nobody's been in touch with her, she hasn't come to any of the survivor group meetings. Somehow they determine that the birth of her baby will create a loophole that will ruin Death's design. How? Not sure, but I think they're desperate enough to try anything at this point. 

Ugh, NITPICK POINTS abound after Officer Burke tries to find the pregnant lady with the white van seen in the footage from the day of the crash. He SHOULD be able to just look up her information based on her license plate, and he does, but he also puts out an APB on her, which is not correct procedure. The woman is arrested and held in custody, but also she is very pregnant and needs to get to the hospital, so the whole thing devolves into a giant car chase, err, van chase, and meanwhile Kimberly has another premonition of somebody driving into a lake and drowning. Does the pregnant lady drive into the lake? Does somebody else? Who is this doctor in the vision, is she a helpful doctor or is she trying to kill the baby? Everybody ends up on the same farm, where some more people are horribly injured, and for some reason I got vibes from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" here. 

By the end, nobody has driven a van into a lake, so a desperate Kimberly decides to do it herself. This is not only dumb and foolhardy, but it subverts the entire formula that the film started with, the whole idea was that somebody gets shown a vision in order to PREVENT that thing from happening, and then suddenly the rules are different and Kimberly decides that the vision is there to show her what SHOULD happen, that's cuckoo bananas in addition to being incredibly inconsistent. I mean, if you really think that's going to hide you from Death, sure, go ahead, knock yourself out, drive a van into a lake, but I want nothing to do with it. 

We're left with a complete distillation of the rules that we started with - we're left with just one rule, and that is that everybody dies. And if somebody SAVES somebody from dying, well, that just means they've got a target on their back now, and their death is going to happen ASAP, and it will be as horrible and/or ironic as possible. Now does that warrant another sequel? Yes, apparently so. Hollywood never met a premise that it couldn't beat right into the ground. 

And with that, I'm on vacation - back in a week.

Directed by David R. Ellis (director of "Cellular" and "Snakes on a Plane")

Also starring A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, David Paetkau, James Kirk, Lynda Boyd, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, T.C. Carson, Justina Machado, Tony Todd (also carrying over from "Final Destination"), Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, Shaun Sipos, Andrew Airlie, Christina Jastrzembska, Eileen Pedde, Jill Krop, Marrett Green, Don Bell, Odessa Munroe, Noel Fisher, Benita Ha, Aaron Douglas, Eric Keenleyside, Enid-Raye Adams, Fred Henderson, Veena Sood, Darcy Laurie, John R. Taylor, Alfred E. Humphreys, Chilton Crane, Klodyne Rodney, Michael S. Bolton

RATING: 4 out of 10 hook hands in a box

Final Destination

Year 18, Day 290 - 10/17/26 - Movie #5,463

BEFORE: Down to two films before I head out of town - I got two paychecks, made a credit card payment, and now I just have to pack, which I'll do in five minutes right after writing this review. There were a few ways to get HERE, so that makes watching this series, sort of...inevitable? And I think the whole film series is about inevitability, the inevitability...of DEATH. The final curtain, the big sleep, the reckoning, the end of everything, it's coming for all of us, even if we don't know when. I mean, really, would you want to know? They ran these on cable like six months ago, while I was in the prep mode for the horror chain, so yeah, why not grab them all and burn them to DVD? That just saves time down the road. And even after I get through this series, I'll still have miles to go before I sleep - assuming I can sleep after watching all these horror movies. 

Devon Sawa carries over from "Black Friday". I already figured out that there's no direct linking through this entire series, BUT if you're a horror movie fan and you know that there's SORT OF a through line here, but in order to pull it off I have to kind of toggle between two different horror franchises. Perhaps you've already guessed what I'm going to do in the final week of October, but if not, we'll sort it all out when I get back from North Carolina. 

THE PLOT: After getting a premonition about a plane crash on his school trip, Alex, a student, saves a few of his classmates. However, their situation gets complicated when death starts chasing them. 

AFTER: Well, this film is about traveling, and I'm trying not to read too much into that, when I'm about to go on a trip. Thank God we're not flying to North Carolina, I would probably consider that to be bad luck shortly after watching this movie. Alex is flying to Paris on a school trip, and suddenly he gets a premonition/dream/vision about the plane exploding, and friends and teachers and complete strangers all getting sucked out of the hole in the side of the plane, and then the whole thing exploding. But he wakes up right before take-off, and things start playing out just like they did in his dream. Two girls ask him to switch seats, he notices a broken part of his tray table, it's all happening, therefore the plane's going to explode, too. 

He panics and he gets disruptive, of course, while trying to warn everyone about the impending disaster, his friends try to calm him down and his rival tries to fight him, leading all of them to get removed from the plane. One teacher volunteers to stay behind, too, and sort out the ruckus with the airline and try to get those kids on to a later plane to France. But just then, the plane is not far away after take-off, and everyone sees it explode. Just like his dream, so umm, people now want to know HOW he knew. Sure, there would be questions, the FBI would take an interest in a teenager who had some knowledge before-hand that a plane would blow up, like did he have a hand in bringing that about, or did he hear or see anything before that might have caused it? 

(By the way, the plane here is a Boeing, but this was years before the company developed a reputation for either making shoddy planes or not performing the proper upkeep on them, I think it was a few years ago that Boeing planes were breaking down and crashing on the regular, I know I didn't take a plane anywhere for a few years, my wife was already very afraid to fly places, though she's been known to make exceptions if we're on our way to a cruise or Vegas. To be specific, there was a run of Boeing crashes in 2018-2019, then there was like a 20-month suspension of the 737 Max, then the pandemic happened, and hardly anyone was flying anywhere for a while.)

There were seven people who left the plane, and after the memorial services for the other students and teachers, strange accidents start happening to those seven people. Alex's best friend, Tod, slips on a puddle of water in his bathroom and falls into the tub, with a clothes line wrapped around his neck, strangling him. While this accident is ruled a suicide, we the audience know that it was an accident - and when Alex and the others sneak into the funeral home to prove it, they meet the weird creepy mortician who tips them off that by surviving, they have disrupted Death's plan and for balance to be achieved, the people who were meant to die in the plane explosion are not fated to die very soon. The survivors get together at a cafe to exchange information, and they argue over the unlikeliness of this, to the point where one leaves quickly and is run over by a speeding bus. 

(This has become, over time, a very quick and easy and nearly comic way to get rid of a character fast, just have a bus run them down, and you can even do that quite cheaply with special effects, no need to even show us a body or blood or anything gross, just have that blur of a bus go by, and you have one less character to write dialogue for. It's almost become like the punchline to a joke now.)

Alex spends way too much time watching the news, researching the details of the plane explosion, and learning how it happened, at least from a scientific angle. He somehow learns that the survivors are dying in the same order they WOULD have died in, had they remained in their seats and if the scene he caused hadn't gotten them ejected from the plane. This quickly devolves into a guessing game of what the "rules" are for this, and much debate over what they should do next. Hey, I'm all for never leaving the house again, I mean your social life will be in the crapper because there's no zoom calls or online gaming yet, but hey, at least you'll be alive. But Alex determines that the teacher, Ms. Lewton, is next on the list to die, so he races over to her house, only to find that she's been killed in a bizarre chain-reaction incident in her own kitchen, she was drinking vodka from a broken mug and some spilled on to her computer monitor, which made it short-circuit and explode. The shrapnel cut her, then while she was trying to clean herself up, she slipped on the spilled alcohol while her whole kitchen caught on fire, and then finally a set of kitchen knives got knocked on to her. No, wait, finally her whole house blew up, so yeah, Death really really wanted her to die, it looks like, and pulled out every trick to make it happen. Really, one of these things is an accident, but ALL of them seems malicious. The way that the oven exploded, causing the chair to tip over and push the knife into her chest seemed a bit too much like a deadly Rube Goldberg device, though. 

The survivors learn that if they interfere with the weird accidents, like if Alex gets there in time to save someone, the "curse" then skips that person and moves on to the next survivor in the original intended death order. Football star Carter parks his car on the train tracks to prove the theory wrong, and, well, bad idea because all of a sudden he can't start the car or open the locked doors or even break the windows to get out. But Alex intervenes and pulls him from the car, saving his life for the second time. So Carter is safe for now, but the car is wrecked, then the passing train kicks up a piece of shrapnel from the ground that decapitates Billy, who was next on the list. Alex manages to save Clear in a similar fashion, and when they believe that the danger has passed, one year later Alex and Clear and Carter all finally make it to Paris, believing that they are free from the curse. Ah, but they find they could be very much mistaken. 

Now, over time, the life expectancy of everything is zero - so you really can't prove that there is a malicious entity trying to kill these teenagers, but for the sake of the story, it's what the movie wants you to believe. We've had similar "curses" in pop culture, like so many people from the movies "Poltergeist" and "Superman" died in tragic ways that people used to say that those movies were almost certainly cursed. There were four actors from the 1982 movie "Poltergeist" who died within a few years of the movie being released - Dominique Dunne, Julian Beck, Will Sampson, and Heather O'Rourke all passed away by 1988. But you can't really say that they died BECAUSE they were in that movie, or that it's not just a run of bad luck, health problems being unpredictable as they are, and one was a victim of domestic violence. Besides, the film's two biggest stars, JoBeth Williams and Craig T. Nelson, are still alive. Another cast member died in 2009, but that was at least 11 years after the others. Who decides how long the "curse" lasts and when someone's death is just a coincidence? 

I say, if you're looking at coincidences, there's a bunch of John Denver music played in this film, and you hear "Rocky Mountain High" being played in the airport before the students board the plane, and then the song is played later in the film as well. It's notable because John Denver also died in a plane crash, so if there is such a thing as "luck", then maybe it's bad luck to hear a John Denver song before getting on a plane? I mean, who can say, why take the chance and tempt fate by indulging in John Denver music, and if you really have to, make sure it's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and not that other song. I mean, people who work in theaters are superstitious about saying the word "MacBeth" behind the scenes, they tend to say "The Scottish Play" instead, maybe "Rocky Mountain High" is something like that? Or maybe it really was John Denver who killed these people, not Boeing or Death. Just a thought. 

I had an experience once where I was late getting to the airport and I missed a flight to Portland, Oregon. I stupidly took the bus, which got stuck on the Long Island Expressway. I did arrive in time to watch them close the plane doors and take off, and I had to take a later flight. I kind of consoled myself by thinking, "Hey, what if I missed that flight and that plane ends up crashing?" That would mean the situation wasn't all that bad, I was going to get to the conference in Portland a day late, but at least I'd still be alive. So there's always two ways to look at everything, right?  But if you're afraid to fly on airplanes, maybe this film will confirm everything you believe about the danger of that. 

But then again, even if you manage to escape the certain death of a plane crash, that means that by interfering with Death's plan, the so-called natural order of things, you're now being targeted for death via some unusual or unlikely or ridiculous method. Now you can't leave the house, you can't go skydiving or snowboarding or even cross the street, because you'll die for sure one of these days. I think we can all be significantly scared by the prospect that we're all going to die one day, yet still we don't really want to go out of our way to over-protect ourselves to make sure that TODAY is not that day. We (most of us, anyway) want to live our lives free and without fear, and tell ourselves that we're going to live a very long time and die peacefully in our sleep, surrounded by loved ones. Well, you keep hoping and keep believing that if it gets you through the day. Still, you may want to be a LITTLE more careful on a daily basis, OK? 

NITPICK POINT: I thought the captions were wrong when it kept referring to one of the characters by the name "Clear". I was sure that somebody was misspelling "Claire" because who the hell is named "Clear"? "Clear Rivers" is the absolute fakest name of a character I've ever heard. This really messes with my ability to suspend disbelief. "CLEAR"? It makes no sense. 

This film cost only $23 million to make (in year 2000 dollars) and grossed over $112 million worldwide. That's the kind of success that creates a sequel, or in this case, a whole bunch of sequels. I've got time for one of them before we have to drive down South tomorrow. 

Directed by James Wong (producer of "Black Christmas")

Also starring Ali Larter (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Kerr Smith, Kristen Cloke (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Daniel Roebuck (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London"), Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Riff Raff"), Chad E. Donella (last seen in "Knox Goes Away"), Seann William Scott (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Tony Todd (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Big Fat Liar"), Brendan Fehr (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Forbes Angus (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Lisa Marie Caruk (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Christine Chatelain (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Barbara Tyson (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Robert Wisden (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), P. Lynn Johnson (last seen in "An Unfinished Life"), Larry Gilman, Mark Holden, Marrett Green (last seen in "I, Robot"), Fred Keating (last seen in "Shooter"), John Hainsworth, Nicole Robert (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Kristina Matisic, Dustin Brooks, Alessandro Juliani (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Leslie McMichael, Natasha Morley, Troy Yorke. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 boarding passes

Black Friday

Year 18, Day 289 - 10/16/26 - Movie #5,462

BEFORE: This could be the fastest month in human history - didn't it JUST start a few days ago with October 1 and now, somehow, the month is half over? WTF, where did October go, I'm about to go away for a week and when I come back there will be just a few days left!  Time is moving faster, it's the only possible explanation. I realize I watched 15 films now, so there's just 9 left, and I need to get two more watched after tonight before we head down South. 

But this film has the word "Friday" in the title, so I'm kind of forced to delay the review until Friday, to post this on Thursday doesn't seem right. Come on, I watched TWO "Freaky Friday" movies in January on a Friday and I watched the documentary "Sunday Best" on a Sunday. You have to learn to read these signs from the universe... So even if I have to watch TWO films tomorrow on Saturday, I'm delaying this review until Friday, because there you go. It's what The Chain wants me to do...

Mark Steger carries over from "The Curse of Bridge Hollow".  

THE PLOT: A group of toy story employees must protect each other from a horde of parasite-infected shoppers. 

AFTER: I know, I know, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, and it's when some people start (and/or finish) their Christmas shopping, so I'm either a month early or two months early, but this is still a horror movie at the end of the day, so I'm watching it in October. Really, I'm at the intersection of Halloween and Thanksgiving tonight, plus an alien invasion to boot - but we did go into a couple of dollar stores recently, and decorations and housewares representing ALL THREE fall-idays are currently being sold. You can call that "The Nightmare Before Christmas" or you can call it "All Hallow's Christmas Eve", or some variation on Chrismukkuh that works in Halloween and Thanksgiving. However you celebrate - but if you live in Canada, I think Thanksgiving comes earlier, like between Octoberfest and Halloween. Just saying. 

And Christmas IS a horror-filled time, if you work in retail. That's kind of the point here as nobody who works for the "We Love Toys" store is psyched about Black Friday, in fact most of them aren't psyched about ANY aspect of their lives. If you work there, it apparently mean something has gone wrong in your life - you're divorced, you only see your kids every other weekend, or you're too young to have a better career, or you're too OLD to have a better career. Or maybe your life just took a bad turn at some point, it happens, drugs or alcohol or prison time may have been involved, but you're here now, working at a toy store, so that's your lot in life, at least for the time being. 

But if you think things can't get any worse, man, you're like WAY off. How about mysterious objects falling from the sky? How about people being turned into goo piles after coming in contact with those objects? Worse, some people are being turned into mindless killers who have alien-like faces and make horrible growls and clicking noises. This has bits of "The Crazies" with bits of "The Thing" worked in. I mean, yeah, sure, aliens are real, that's kind of great except their pods or whatever are turning humans into something non-human that wants to un-alive all the other people in the store. And as with last night's film, it takes WAY TOO LONG for people to figure out exactly what is happening and how it came about. News reports are sketchy, but apparently this is taking place in other stores and malls across the area. So it's a bit hard to say if this is a true invasion or if this was just something that fell out of a visiting UFO and it's not just alien, it's "alien" to us, in that we don't understand what it is or how it works. 

Naturally, the store manager refuses to shut the place down and/or evacuate the store, he's got a directive from corporate to make as much money as possible on Black Friday, hence the store opening at midnight with deals that have attracted shoppers from all over. But then the alien pods landed, and it's almost as if leaving your Thanksgiving celebration to get in line for the Black Friday deals at your local toy store or mall or whatever is a terrible, ill-advised idea.  Yeah, well, it kind of is, even before the pods landed. 

After some initial disbelief - and writing up Chris, who fought back against a customer who was trying to eat him, but come on, Chris, that's not how we treat our customers at We Love Toys, now is it? We covered this in the training session, you can NOT kill the customers, even if they try to kill you first. EVEN if they try to infect you with the alien virus and turn you into a subservient half-alien creature who just wants to gather, gather more stuff. We're here to sell to the aliens, too, CHRIS, their money (if they use money) or their space credits is perfectly acceptable, we can ask them at the register how they want to pay for all the stuff they broke.

About that, yeah, umm, what ARE the zombie alien space mutants doing, exactly? They're gathering a bunch of stuff together, or maybe it's their formerly human bodies, who can say? Either way they're creating a big purplish-pinkish glowing bio-mass that seems to hypnotize or calm other zombie alien space mutants and bring them all closer together. Well, that just can't be good, whatever they're building or forming or coalescing into. Look, in a very short time this movie tries to be a horror movie, a Thanksgiving movie, an alien invasion movie, a gore-fest, an action film, an us-against-them paranoia flick and a locked-room character study. It's a lot to try and accomplish in a very tight window of time, it's like somebody ran a focus group and determined that people won't watch a horror film that's longer than 90 minutes, but we can still get this done and be home in time to start planning our own holiday meal. 

Well, if you do work retail you probably have a rotating cast of co-workers of your own, and new people are always joining "the team" and other people are always leaving when they retire or quit or get a better gig, that's just the way of things. If you just imagine that those people got turned by the zombie aliens or eaten or killed or they joined the collective biomass, you kind of end up with this film. And let's face it, the people that you spend so many work-hours with kind of are your family, even with work-related issues and such you may get along with them better than you do with your actual family. So you can relate, right? Just imagine a sign at your job that says "It's been 00 days since our last alien invasion." and you get this fun (?) little B-movie. 

My apologies have to go out to Bruce Campbell, I've been planning a marathon of his horror films (and as you may imagine, there are quite a few) for quite some time. The way the chain worked out this year, I just couldn't work them all in, maybe if I weren't going on vacation, I could have done more, but as it stands it's just this ONE film. If I included the "Evil Dead" films and "Army of Darkness" and "Bubba Ho-Tep" and "From Dusk to Dawn 2" and other works by Sam Raimi, it wouldn't put me in a place where I could get where I need to be for my own Thanksgiving this year. So I don't think he'll be making the year-end countdown this year after just "Black Friday" and "Serving Sara", but he is a horror legend and I promise to get around to more of his films one of these Octobers, maybe next year. 

Directed by Casey Tebo

Also starring Devon Sawa (last seen in "Gasoline Alley"), Ivana Baquero (last seen in "Pan's Labyrinth"), Ryan Lee (last seen in "Shorts"), Stevie Peck, Michael Jai White (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Serving Sara"), Louie Kurtzman, Celeste Oliva (last seen in "American Fiction"), Ellen Colton (last seen in "The Company Men"), Cindy Lentol (ditto), Peg Holzemer (last seen in "Gone Baby Gone"), Andria Blackman (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Mike Murphy, Christopher Mikael (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Stanley Bruno, Lonnie Farmer (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Ripley Thibeault, Matea Thibeault, Bates Wilder (also last seen in "American Fiction"), Randy Jay Burrell (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy") and the voice of Seth Green (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force").

RATING: 6 out of 10 Dour Dennis dolls that were recalled and you can NOT sell them, OK, Chris? They're a fire hazard (thank God). I'm not quite sure where they were going with this gag though...

The Curse of Bridge Hollow

Year 18, Day 287 - 10/14/26 - Movie #5,461

BEFORE: We're trick-or-treating again tonight, the Chain wants to get that out of the way because there are scarier movies to come, I assume. Tonight we're in the town of Bridge Hollow (rather than, umm, Sherman Oaks?) and we've got another oddly assembled cast of comedy people, musicians and that girl who played a little sister in "Stranger Things". Well, she's a teenager now, as if I didn't already feel very old. 

Rob Riggle carries over from "Cursed Friends". 

THE PLOT: A teenage girl, who accidentally releases an ancient and michievous spirit on Halloween which causes decorations to come to life and wreak havoc, must team up with the last person she'd want to in order to save her town - her father!

AFTER: Yeah, we're still kind of at the amateur level of scariness here, I'm getting definite "Goosebumps" vibes off of this one, though it's not officially connected to that horror book franchise in any way. But the big attraction in those books and movies is often something inanimate coming to life and in this case, it's Halloween decorations. Which is only a problem if you've just moved to a town that takes decorating super-seriously, like one house has a whole tableau of slow-moving zombies from "The Walking Dead" and another has a whole football team's worth of skeletons with shoulder pads in the the front yard. 

For teenager Sydney Gordon, it's almost enough to make her glad her family has moved out of Brooklyn (and to, umm, where, exactly?) where she was never allowed to celebrate Halloween, because being on the science club was more important - and for some reason, she can't do both. Her father is a man of science, a science teacher to be exact, and it takes him way too long, practically the whole movie, for him to believe in magic and demons and inanimate objects coming to life, despite him witnessing it again and again. But the young members of her school's Paranormal Society inform Sydney that her family is moving into a haunted house, and that leads Sydney to go and check out the attic, where she finds a treasure chest with a jack o'lantern-like object in it, which she lights in an act of defiance against her father because she's determined to join in the Halloween fun. 

All this really gets her is grounded, with the added bonus of the magic lantern somehow bringing a plastic vampire bat decoration to life, which flies away and spreads the "animagic" to the other decorations in town. When they investigate the origin of the lantern, it brings them to a nursing home where the granddaughter of the woman who died in their house still lives, and that elderly woman tells them about Stingy Jack, who once was seeking a soul from Earth to take his place in the afterlife, but fortunately Madam Hawthorne was a witch or a spell caster of some kind, and she was able to banish him back to the afterlife. Thank God everybody knows not to light his lantern, because then that would be really bad. Whoopsie. The next thing you know, the giant spider decoration on top of the nursing home would be turning into a real live giant spider that would attack everyone. 

By some wild coincidence, the school principal turns out to be a collector of occult objects, and just happened to purchase an antique spellbook lately, which, imagine that, happens to contain the banishment spell they need - what ARE the odds against that? They get the spell, however that football team full of skeletons attacks at the exact same time, and the spell book gets kicked into the fireplace. Now they're going to have to conduct a seance to speak to Madam Hawthorne so she can tell them the spell. Well, at least there's a work-around. Thank God nobody's going to put a giant scary jack o'lantern head from the pumpkin carving contest on top of a Stingy Jack statue, man, that would be REALLY bad if that decoration were also to come to life, just like every other decoration in town. Oh, wait...

Yes, this is very far-fetched. Yes, every turn of events is telegraphed quite amateurishly. But it's a movie for KIDS, I think, and kids aren't really masters of subtlety after all, they kind of need everything spelled out for them, even the spells. You can pretty much guess the rest, Stingy Jack re-animates himself in the giant pumpkin-headed statue, he attacks the ONE person that both Sydney and her father care about the most in order to use her soul to take his place in the afterlife, so he can take over the whole world using Halloween decorations. If only the man of science can find it inside himself to believe in magic, to believe in spell casting over science, then we might just have a chance to counter-act all this madness in town. 

I JUST recorded all of the "Scary Movie" movies (umm, except the most recent one) and damn, this would have been a great opportunity (OK, maybe not "great", but at least an opportunity) to work them in, with Marlon Wayans carrying over. The Wayans Brothers started that franchise and then lost it for a while, but then got it back, and there IS a through-line through all those movies. However, I'm committed to the "Final Destination" films this year, so I just can't work those in this Movie Year. I'll have to keep them on the list and try to get to them in a future Shocktober, the chain has other plans and I have to let them happen. 

Directed by Jeff Wadlow (director of "True Memoirs of an International Assassin" and "Fantasy Island")

Also starring Marlon Wayans (last seen in "Respect"), Priah Ferguson (last seen in "The Oath"), Kelly Rowland (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues"), Lauren Lapkus (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Nia Vardalos (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Abi Monterey, Holly J. Barrett, Myles Perez, Helen Slayton-Hughes (last seen in "Moxie"), Dougie Dawson, Pfeiffer Yaeger, William Finn Carmichael, Jonathan Kite, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "G20"), Kay Hall, David A. Cooper (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Dave Sheridan (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Keil Oakley Zepernick, Nickolas Wolf (last seen in "Landscape with Invisible Hand"), Mark Steger (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Gordon Tarpley (also carrying over from "Cursed Friends"), Steven I. Dillard (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Phoenix Jd Gabe, Ralphael Lester, BobbyD Souris, Chris Williams (also last seen in "Respect"), Sam Zheng (last seen in "Jerry & Marge Go Large")

RATING: 5 out of 10 sugar-free and dairy-free and gluten-free bakery treats. 

Cursed Friends

Year 18, Day 286 - 10/13/26 - Movie #5,460

BEFORE: I'm suddenly at the crossroads of horror and comedy, because this made it onto the horror list based on the title, but now I'm looking at the cast and realizing that this was a movie made for TV, and it aired on Comedy Central once in 2022 and then never aired again. Well, it's been living on Paramount Plus, because Paramount owns Comedy Central after all. It doesn't look all that great, but we'll see, it's about a curse at least so I've got something to hang my hat on. 

If I'm late posting tonight, well, it's my wife's birthday and we're going out to dinner, her favorite steakhouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My birthday is still a week away and we'll be in North Carolina, so I'll get to choose the restaurant then. I'm fine with a Chinese buffet but we'll see. 

Harvey Guillen carries over from "Companion". 

THE PLOT: Four friends wake up on Halloween and realize the predict-your-future game they played in 2002 is coming true in disturbing ways. They must band together to help each other escape the wild fates that have turned their lives upside down. 

AFTER: Sure, this isn't an obvious horror film, like there are no monsters or demons or killer camp counselors, it's a comedy, even though it's not that outright funny. Well, it aired on the COMEDY Channel, didn't it? Yeah, umm, don't forget to make sure your comedy is funny, please take my advice, I know what I'm talking about. 

The four friends (OK, three friends and one girl's brother) who hung out in junior high get back together after 20 years apart. Erica's been living in New York City, but she just got a design job for a West Coast company and if she can go full-time she may move back to her hometown - so it's a great time to get back together with Mikayla and Andy, and her brother Josh is squatting in the family home, so anyway, the Core Three (plus Josh) are back together. And they find an old game/book that they used to play, called "M.A.S.H." which stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House - you write down a bunch of choices for yourself in the future, like where you're going to live, who you'll be married to, what your job will be, etc. and then the game eliminates all of the choices but one, and supposedly that's your future. (We used to do something similar when I was a kid, with those folded up pieces of paper with numbers on them, maybe you know what I'm talking about.)

The flashback shows how Erica got the book while trick-or-treating, instead of candy, from that house with the weird-looking lady who maybe was also the author of the book, Stacy Friendship, who maybe also was a witch or a conjurer or a gypsy, all that is a bit unclear. But after they re-discover the M.A.S.H. book and see what their future predicted for them, they wake up the next day and find those situations coming true - like Erica's fate was to become a plumber, and she finds she accidentally packed the wrong Halloween costume, not Princess Peach but Mario, who is a plumber. Mikayla's listing said she would be married to Joey Fatone from N'Sync, and that same day guess who comes into the sandwich shop and flirts with her? Andy's fate was to be married to one of their male teachers, which I'm assuming was a bit odd at the time since he hadn't come out yet, but now seems very prophetic, and sure enough, Mr. Knight is still in town and they keep bumping into him. So the "curse" seems to be that everything that was predicted by the book is (sort of) coming true, or a least becoming a possibility. 

Again, it's not outright scary, if anything what scares these adult friends is the fact that maybe they suddenly have no control over their lives, they've done OK for themselves so far in their careers and relationships (well, except for Josh) and to suddenly be under the influence of whatever random dice roll or selection process decided their fate years ago in a Mad Libs-style book, well, sure, that can be a bit frightening. You thought you were making good choices for yourself, and now it turns out that none of that matters, the curse says your life has to be a different way now, if the book said you would hold the record for longest fingernails, well, guess what, that's your life now. 

What's a little weird is that they've kind of imposed the "Groundhog Day" rules over this little class reunion, like no matter what Bill Murray tried, he couldn't stop February 2 from starting over again, not until he truly changed inside or had the perfect day in Punxsutawney, PA or whatever. These four learn from another of the book's victims, however, that the poem inside the book demands a sacrifice, one of them is going to have to kill one of their fated spouses in order to break the curse. (They try going to see Mikayla's psychic, Shamrock, to break the curse, but he's pretty useless and also a con artist, of course.). This information is given to them by Lizzie Lennox, who's serving time in an asylum for committing a murder because a book told her to. But she claims that she broke the curse and now her best friend, Nikki Evans, is not a monster truck driver with triplets - except that he actually is, and he claims that there's no escaping the fate that the book has chosen for you. Just learn to live with it, that's the best you can do. 

The bad news here is that this film is woefully inconsistent, like it's firing in all different directions at once where the rules of curses are applied. Like does it even count as a curse if you don't mind having super-long fingernails and being in a relationship with Joey Fatone? Maybe there's a downside to that, but then if there is, please show it to us!  A lot of the dialogue feels like it was improvised, and the characters also can't keep their own stories straight, like Andy is an overweight fitness instructor in L.A., and how does that even work?  And he's obviously gay, but he's also terrified of being gay? This isn't the 1970's, it's very accepted these days, but I guess he has to learn to accept himself. Also do these "friends" even like each other? Because it's often hard to tell, they insult each other all the time and they bear 20-year old grudges, and that's not really a fun look. 

Also, did reality really change (twice) or did the four friends all have the same dream? This is very unclear, but they do fall asleep together and wake up together, so you know, it's possible. Hell, even "The Wizard of Oz" couldn't decide if Dorothy really went to Oz or if the whole trip was just in her imagination - I would have voted for it all being a dream, if not for the "Wicked" movie, so umm, thanks for that? But, good news, this is a film that takes place ON HALLOWEEN, like there are Halloween parties all over town that are important to the plot and Mikayla takes her daughter trick-or-treating. Well, there are TWO Halloweens in the film, one from 20 years ago when the friends get the book, and the one in the current day. So great, we're right on track except for the fact that Halloween is still 18 days away. Well, how was I supposed to know? 

Directed by Laura Murphy

Also starring Jessica Lowe (last seen in "Desperados"), Nicole Byer (last heard in "The Twits"), Andrew Lewis Caldwell (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), James Austin Johnson (last seen in "Lorne"), Kathy Griffin (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Nikki Glaser (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Nicole Richie (last seen in "Summer Camp"), Layla Mohammadi, Sterling Sulieman (last seen in "In Time"), Jon Gabrus (last seen in "Bombshell"), Joey Fatone (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Ken Marino (last seen in "For a Good Time, Call..."), Will Arnett (last heard in "Paul Anka: His Way"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "Big Miracle"), Madeleine Guilbot, Kennedi Butler, Oscar Daniel Reyez, Teddy Gatewood, Colter Lee, Kim Griffin, Aaron Eisenberg, Ari Loeb (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Ruha Taslimi, Lela Hoffmeister, Alison Rich (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Dan Black (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), David Banks, Tanner Swagger (last seen in "Your Place or Mine"), Cayden Romero, Gordon Tarpley (last seen in "Army of the Dead"),

RATING: 4 out of 10 baby goats

Companion

Year 18, Day 285 - 10/12/26 - Movie #5,459

BEFORE: After this I'm halfway through the horror chain for this year - this makes 12 out of 24. But how many horror films have I watched since I started this crazy project/habit? If this is Year 18 that means 17 years have gone before, a quick estimate of 30 films per year would make 510, which seems like a lot. The real number is probably less, because there were some years early on where I skipped the genre entirely, I wasn't really ready to get into it. And then in more recent times I've cut the number down because of vacations taken in October, combined with an inability to form a Shock Block that's more than 25 films long. 

A quick search by genre on IMDB's Advanced Search page tells me the number is more like 373, however I have a feeling that's a bit short because I've counted some films as horror films that the IMDB doesn't, they have this category called "psychological thriller" for films that aren't exactly about demons or monsters, films like "A Perfect Getaway" or tonight's film would not count as a horror film on IMDB, but I'll drop it in there. So possibly it's a bit closer to 400 films, which is pretty respectable, considering I didn't much care for horror films when I started this.

Sophie Thatcher carries over again from "Heretic", that film's going to be hard to beat. 

THE PLOT: A weekend getaway with friends at a remote cabin turns into chaos after it's revealed that one of the guests is not what they seem. 

AFTER: We're going to have to talk about A.I. now, or S.I. or whatever we'll be calling it a year from now. It's nothing new as a topic, we just figured through the 1980's and 1990's that in the future, there will be robots. Nobody saw drones coming back then, or mobile units that would deliver our food, and we imagined flying cars, not self-driving cars, but whatever. Really, "South Park" nailed it when they had Cartman pretend to be a robot named Awesom-O and adults kept asking him if he was a "pleasure robot".  The time between humans inventing something and then wondering if they can sleep with it gets shorter and shorter, so yeah, at some point we'll be. combining the Real Dolls with robotics and it won't be perfect, not at first anyway - the only question really is "How soon?"

There are clues from the start that this woman is a robot, she's got an uncanny insight into the weather, speaks many languages and says things like "I just wasn't built that way" even if she's mostly unaware that she is a robot, (or an artificial human, or maybe "synthetic individual" will be in fashion when the time comes). Honestly, I was aiming for the "M3GAN" movie and I kind of missed, I got here first. That other one's harder to link to and I don't imagine the sequel will make it any easier. Iris is programmed to love Josh, and she's programmed with a generic meet-cute memory of how they first encountered each other at the grocery store. As we learned in last night's film, when you remember something you're really basing your memory on the last time you thought of that event, not the actual event itself, but perhaps it's a different story if the memory is a file on your internal hard drive. 

There's no year mentioned here, of course, because nobody knows when this technology will be viable, to allow a robot into your home and it cooks for you, does whatever you want (yeah, even THAT) and it showers and dresses itself and believes itself to be human. Over time, it may become self-aware enough to figure out its identity from the clues in the situationship, but it depends on how high you set its intelligence meter. If you want to have intellectual conversations about Tolstoy novels and Bergman films, set the dial all the way up to 100%, but then your "F-bot" might be smart enough to realize it's a robot. Whoopsie, but you can reset it to factory defaults just by holding your thumb behind its right ear for five seconds. Either way, you've got a companion droid that is imprinted on you and you alone, it's not going to cheat on you (umm, unless you want it to, you sick freak) and you can make it do all the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping - if you're basic and stuck in those outdated gender roles. 

You can then go about your business and work late and take time for yourself and not have to worry about your companion, they'll be there for you when you need them, and if you're tired or just want to be alone, you can just say, "Go to sleep" and they'll shut down for a while. You know, it's probably best to keep them on a normal human-like shutdown cycle, it helps their battery life if they recharge on a daily basis. 

Josh has "modded" his F-bot, though, sure that's what some people do with their cell phones or computers, but if you're not careful, you could damage the device that way. What Josh did was remove the part of her programming that prevented her from harming humans (through action or inaction), and really that was Rule #1 of robotics, according to Isaac Asimov. Rule #2 was obeying orders from humans UNLESS doing so interfered with Rule #1 and Rule #3 was self-preservation, unless that interfered with Rules 1 & 2. It's important to mention this as we stand on the cusp of the A.I. revolution, and people are randomly making claims that A.I. can "kill everyone" within a certain number of years. THIS is why the industry needs safeguards, as eventually people are going to get tired of just using A.I. to make fake porn and we get more closer to wanting to have actual sex with robots. 

Once the safeguards are gone, Iris finds herself in a situation where someone else at the lake house wants to, umm, make use of her talents, and she does not exactly know how to react, she knows that she only wants to be with Josh, so attention from someone else is technically sexual assault, and she defends herself, accidentally un-aliving someone, as the kids say these days on the interwebs. No spoilers beyond this point because I think some of the plot twists are pretty good here, and I'm not going to give them away. But the character remains sympathetic here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that somebody messed with her programming. 

Iris, now aware that she is an artificial being, manages to get Josh's phone in order to use the app to increase her intelligence, now at least she may be able to think her way out of this, rather than be collected by the robot manufacturers and decommissioned or re-programmed. She determines that if she can make it to Josh's self-driving car, she can get home or drive somewhere else and start a new life for herself, only it's just not going to be easy with Josh and others trying to stop her, as part of a larger scheme. 

I mean, there's a lot to think about here - we've come a long way since "The Terminator" (there are some obvious visual references here to "Terminator 2") and also a long way from "Ex Machina" - I don't know if we're ever going to get HERE, because films set in the future often act as cautionary tales, and thus they maybe prevent the events depicted from happening. I guess we'll all find out together. 

Directed by Drew Hancock

Also starring Jack Quaid (last seen in "Novocaine"), Lukas Gage (last seen in "Smile 2"), Megan Suri (last seen in "72 Hours"), Harvey Guillen (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "Jurassic World: Rebirth"), Jaboukie Young-White (last heard in "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken"), Matt McCarthy (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Marc Menchaca (last seen in "The Creator"), Woody Fu, and the voice of Ashley Lambert (last heard in "The Bad Guys 2").

RATING: 6 out of 10 available language options

Heretic

Year 18, Day 284 - 10/11/26 - Movie #5,458

BEFORE: Well, I greatly enjoyed my extra day off today, courtesy of the WNBA. No Liberty game today because the Atlanta Dream swept the best-of-five playoff round, instead I got to go to Long Island with my wife where she bought cigarettes, then we did some shopping and had a nice lunch at Texas Roadhouse. I've still got three shifts at the theater before we go out of town for a week, and we've got her birthday this week, I'm hoping to do a focus group to raise a little extra cash, and tomorrow's one of those former holidays that's fallen out of favor. 

I'm getting a little worried because the President is talking about doing away with daylight savings time, and I have said in the past that I would support any candidate who would take that position, so now I'm wondering if I have to become a Trump supporter to avoid being called a hypocrite. I think my only possible out here is the fact that he's not suggesting we do it for any logical reason, like the fact that it doesn't save energy or lives, he just wants to scrap it because it's too hard for him to change the clocks twice a year, or he's tired of paying people to do that for him and he's too dumb to figure it out. Another possible out is that he's talking about just keeping DST in place all year round, rather than switching back to Standard Time and staying there, which would make more sense. 

I know what you're thinking, it doesn't matter, because he can't run for President again - I firmly believe that he WILL, despite what the Constitution says. And anyway, Presidents are allowed 10 years in office, not 8, which is a codicil in place to help anyone who was a Vice President who became President when someone else died - they can have up to two years after ascending and then serve two full terms. So I think Trump WILL run again, and Michael Bloomberg has already shown him how to do it. Bloomberg was the mayor of NYC for two terms, and then ran a third time, which should have been illegal due to term limits, but he changed his party to Independent, as if that made him a different person or something, and then ran again and won again. Nobody stopped him, nobody sued him, there was no class-action taken against him, and so Trump could easily pull the same trick. By the time the courts settled everything, he'd be midway through his third term. It could happen - now THAT's nightmare fuel. 

Sophie Thatcher carries over from "MaXXXine". 

THE PLOT: Two young Mormon women are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of a strange man. 

AFTER: This is a very clever film, all in all. It kind of serves as both a horror film and a treatise on comparative religion, which kind of is the biggest casualty here. After a pair of Mormon women visit a man who says he is possibly interested in converting, they end up debating with him over the finer points of religious theory, and then realize they are essentially trapped in his house, with no means of escape. The front door is locked, and the man, Mr. Reed, says it's on a timer, much like a bank vault, and it can't be opened. Furthermore, there is metal in the walls which prevents their cell phones from working, and one presumes that the house is also sound-proofed and such. Uh oh, this is starting to seem a bit like "The Black Phone". 

Sisters Barnes and Preston are welcome to leave if they want, at some point they've figured out that pretty much everything Reed has said is a lie, like he said his wife was in the other room but she's very shy, and she's made them some delicious blueberry pie - but now they're assuming that there's no wife (which means they broke their Mormon rules by entering a house with no woman in it) and even worse, there's probably not any pie, either. Reed suggests they leave via the back door of the house, only they'd have to work their way through several rooms and hallways, and God only knows what might be back there. This guy might have a sacrificial altar or a torture chamber back there, or worse. 

But no, it's just a library, and there are in fact two doors in back, but they'll have to choose the right one, and listen to another speech about the true meaning of religion. Yep, that really sounds worse, why couldn't it have been a torture chamber? Reed already knows a great deal about the Book of Mormon, in fact he seems to have studied ALL of the world's religions, allegedly in his search for the best one. But I think something funny happens when you study all of the religions, you might come to the conclusion that they're all false, which sure, seems likely, or even weirder, maybe they're all true. Maybe gods draw their power from believers, so maybe Yahweh and Jesus and Buddha and Satan are all in competition with each other to see who can get the most followers. But that's crazy, right? Anyway if you discount one religion as bunk you kind of have to discount all of them, it's the simplest answer, Occam's Razor, there is no God. The universe came about naturally and science explains the stars and the planets and life exists on Earth only because we're a certain distance from the sun and it developed over millions of years and stopped developing once we had television. Devolution NOW!

Ah, but it's not that simple. After an explanation about the "iterations" of religion that uses both the board game Monopoly and the song "Creep" by Radiohead as touchpoints, Reed offers the women two choices - one door marked "Belief" and one marked "Disbelief". Note that neither one is labeled "Exit". If they believe in religion they should choose accordingly, and if they're willing to admit their religion is bogus, they should choose the other door. Yeah, I pretty much picked up early on the fact that neither door was going to lead them outside. This guy is either a genius or a madman, or possibly both, and he's got a bunch of tunnels in his house that we haven't seen since the Minotaur's maze in ancient Crete, or possibly the passages seen in the film "Barbarian". Why do the stairs lead DOWN? Oh, because he lives at the top of a hill. Sure, and if you believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus walked on water, I suppose you'll believe anything. 

It's also worth pointing out that if you don't believe in any of the religions, then you also don't believe in sin, and under those parameters, what evil would someone be capable of doing? There would really be no limit under those conditions, and that's kind of what we're dealing with here. Such a person would kill these women, or rape them, or keep them locked up for his own amusement. Geez, and he seemed like such a nice guy at first, too, but that's kind of the point. What evils lurk in the hearts of man? Only the Shadow knows...and this guy. I don't want to give away too much here, because this really needs to be experienced, but in a way it reminds me of "The Menu" or "Opus" or "The Black Phone" in that one really unhinged person is running the show, however he wants, and all the other people can do is play along and hope to find a way out, choose their moment or whatever. As long as that person has his audience, someone to hear his views on the world and what a messed-up place it is, not to mention that everything you think you know about life and death and the afterlife is probably wrong. 

Or is it? Some of the events that follow would seem to suggest that there IS something beyond death, only it's also very possible that it's just another deception, a magic trick of sorts. Which is all that religion really is, in the end, it's not even a magic trick, it's a belief in magic tricks that somebody did thousands of years ago, like appear to die and get resurrected, or appear to turn water into wine or appear to make a blind man see. And then somebody came along and said, "Wow, that was a really good magic trick, I should write that one down because I think we can build a religion around that, and sell people the promise of eternal life while we take their money." Come on, deep down you know it's true. And I say this as someone raised Catholic, I was an altar boy and my father was a deacon and my mother was the church organist. But at some point I decided to think for myself and see that the religion was based on the story of the magic tricks. 

To believe that there is no God, other than the one humans created in their stories, yeah, it's truly terrifying. It means that maybe there's nothing after this world, you die and that's it, you're done and there will be things you never got to accomplish and quite possible the world will forget about you unless you did something really spectacular or extraordinary. But that's also very liberating, I mean you can still pray if you want and wish for good things to happen to you or to other people, just bear in mind that nobody is listening and it has no effect on changing reality. It might make you feel good to hope for good things, but it's probably more effective to try and make good things happen yourself. And there's an upside, if there's no God then there's no Satan, no demons or vengeful angels or an eternity of burning in hell or being bored in heaven. Then there are no monsters except savage animals, terrible people and the ones in our imagination. 

There is one other possibility, which this film also raises, if only for a few minutes - that the world is a simulation or some kind of advanced computer program that we're all living in, "Matrix"-style. Then if we die in this reality, we're out of the program and we still exist somewhere larger, and that's our true form. Well, either we find a glitch in the matrix and prove that our reality isn't really real, or we just keep on going and we'll find out at the end whether there's anything else. The saving grace is that if there's nothing else, we won't be aware of it, we'll be blissfully unaware. Sorry to harsh your mellow but still feel free to check out the film, it's got some good ideas in it. A lot of bad nasty stuff too, but you know, some good ideas. This is probably the type of film you get after the "Saw" franchise makes a jillion dollars, but I haven't seen those films yet, I've been avoiding them. 

Directed by Scott Beck (director of "65") & Bryan Woods (ditto)

Also starring Hugh Grant (last seen in "Paddington in Peru"), Chloe East (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Elle Young (last seen in "A Score to Settle"), Julie Lynn Mortensen, Haylie Hansen, Elle McKinnon (last seen in "Wonder"), Hanna Huffman, Anesha Bailey (last seen in "The Interview"), Miguel Castillo, Stephanie Lavigne, Wendy Gorling,

RATING: 7 out of 10 loose wooden matches