Candyman (1992)

Year 18, Day 299 - 10/26/26 - Movie #5,466

BEFORE: Well, I'm sorry if you came here today looking for "Final Destination 4", but it turns out that there IS no movie with that title - there is a fourth movie in the series, but it's not called that. (IYKYK). Surprisingly there is NO possible chain through all the Final Destination movies, so I had to improvise and mix two franchises together if I want to watch all the movies in both of them. 

Tony Todd carries over from "Final Destination 3" but they did NOT cast him in "The Final Destination", which was probably a mistake. I mean, somebody has to carry over from one movie to the next, right? RIGHT? He does return later in the series, I mean, the films take place in different cities so in the "FD" universe, one guy can't be everywhere, I get it. Or maybe Mr. Todd just wasn't available for a couple years because he was very busy or had health problems or something. Maybe they used archive footage later on, I just don't know yet. But I'm taking a detour into the "Candyman" movies to keep the chain alive, and this way I don't have to circle back here in a later year, unless they happen to make another "FD" movie. 

Either way, I'm all turned around here - but maybe it's for the best, I was getting burned out on the "Hey, it's just Final Destination again but on a different vehicle" pattern. Why, it's almost like killing off every character in your franchise's latest film is a bad idea, because then we can't come to care about those characters over time, but hey, what do I know? 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Candyman" (2021) (Movie #4,275)

THE PLOT: The Candyman, a murderous soul with a hook for a hand, is accidentally summoned to reality by a skeptic grad student researching the monster's myth. 

AFTER: The 2021 sequel film was my film to watch ON HALLOWEEN just four years ago, I had seen parts of it during the late summer of 2021 as it was playing in an AMC theater where I was working as an usher. But by the time I watched the film, I'd already quit that job and I'd been working at the theater run by the college for, well, over a year. Still, I'm going to put this one on the "Screenings I Worked At" list, it counts. That means it took four years from me saying, "Hey, maybe I should watch the original film, one of these days..." to me actually doing that. Well, it takes as long as it takes. 

So now I've gained some understanding beyond what was related in the 2021 film - Candyman was the son of a slave who became a prominent painter in the late 1800's, who fell in love with a white woman and impregnated her, leading to his death by lynch mob, although before killing him the mob amputated his hand and gave him a hook in its place - then they smeared him with honey and allowed him to be attacked by angry bees. Then they lynched him and burned his corpse in a funeral pyre, which took place on the future location of a housing project in Chicago. Now, there are a few things that don't make sense there, like if the mob was going to kill him, why did they bother to give him a hook hand? That would only be useful if he had lost his hand and was going to be around a while and needed a way to grab things. And the bee thing seems rather like a lot of work too, why not just kill the man? And then burning on top of the lynching, it all seems a bit much. I'm not saying it couldn't happen that way, the mob mentality being what it is, maybe the while people disagreed over his punishment so they just decided to hit him all with it at once, you know, to satisfy everyone. 

Helen Lyle is a graduate student of anthropology at UI Chicago, and she and her friend Bernadette are writing their thesis about the Candyman myth, and have interviewed several people who believe in the urban legend about the ghost that appears when you look in a mirror and say his name five times. It's kind of a "Beetlejuice" situation, except it's more work and the same questions apply, like how long can you pause between saying the name, like what happens if you say his name FOUR times today and then one more time tomorrow, does he show up? Or does the counter reset at midnight, like what are the rules on this? More importantly, WHY would anyone who believes the story actually say his name that many times, if they think the spirit is going to show up and kill them? Do they have a death wish, or have they just not thought this through all the way?  

NITPICK POINT: Some of the people who they've interviewed don't even have the story straight, like some people have mixed it up with the urban legend about the stoned couple that put the turkey in the crib and the baby in the oven. WTF? And you know that just never happened, so it sheds doubt on the whole "Candyman" thing from the get-go. We also see some razor blades inside Halloween candy later in the film, and BTW, that never happened either. Sure, there were people who were trying to poison kids, at one point, but specific (probably terrible) kids and they weren't just handing out dangerous candy to random kids. Still, the legend survives despite the facts not supporting it, and as a result some neighborhoods still do not participate in "trick or treat" out of an abundance of caution. While in North Carolina I saw segments on morning TV for "Trunk or Treat" events, which is when a church group or school has a closed-off party and people distribute candy from their car trunks, so kids aren't going to random houses where evil strangers are doing bad nasty things. Umm, it's fine, but if somebody was interested in handing out bad candy at a "Trunk or Treat" event they could just do that, and also the name doesn't make any sense now, because it should be "Trunk AND Treat", not OR. I thought, what the heck does somebody have against tricks, are the kids so fragile now that they can't be triggered by a little pranking, or not inventive enough to come up with a trick if they don't get a treat? What a world we live in...

Anyway, Helen starts researching the "Candyman" story as it relates to the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, and since she lives in a condo building that was originally designed to be affordable housing, she happens to know that there's a hole in every apartment, behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, if you pull out the medicine cabinet you can push on the other apartments medicine cabinet and gain access to the other apartment. Regarding the murder of a woman named Ruthie Jean, Helen believes she knows how the killer got into her apartment, via the medicine cabinet hole. NITPICK POINT #2: This doesn't make much sense either, because it seems like it would be extra work to leave a medicine-cabinet-shaped hole in the bathroom walls, it wouldn't make the cost of construction much less, in fact it might even be MORE expensive to leave this hole between apartments, building a totally solid wall would (I think) be cheaper and faster and make the building stronger, but what do I know? 

But Helen and Bernadette visit the murder site and sure enough, there's a hole behind the medicine cabinet that leads to a secret vacant apartment. NITPICK POINT #3: And in both buildings, the other apartment just happens to be vacant? That strains credulity just a little more, like are the condos not selling well in her building? Do they not need every single apartment in the Cabrini-Green project to be full?  While there, they also meet a resident there, Anne-Marie, who is not a junkie, not a prostitute, she's just trying to raise her baby boy in safety. 

After learning the full Candyman story from a very pompous professor, Helen comes back to the projects and meets Jake, a young boy, who tells her that "Candyman" assaulted a young boy in a nearby public bathroom, and everyone knows not to go in there, or Candyman will get them. So, naturally Helen checks it out - remember this is a woman who was told the consequences of saying "Candyman" in the mirror five times, and she did it anyway. Inside the very disgusting men's room she meets a local thug who slashes her with a hook, but it's not the REAL ghost Candyman, just a local dealer who probably sells his drugs there and doesn't like strange white women coming around. When she recovers, Helen is able to identify the thug for the police and then she's free to continue her odd quest to meet the ghost Candyman, for some reason. 

When she is visited in a parking garage by the ghostly one, he says things like "Be my victim" and he sort of hypnotizes or enthralls her, and she blacks out. When she comes to, she's covered in blood and she's in Anne-Marie's apartment, along with the head of Anne-Marie's dog. She (for some reason) picks up the cleaver and gets her fingerprints on it, and then has to fight a hysterical Anne-Marie to escape - but the police arrive and find her holding the weapon and covered in blood. Anne-Marie's infant son is missing, taken away by the Candyman, but Helen is charged with several crimes. She can't say where the baby is, because she doesn't know, and honestly it's not clear if she killed the dog or Candyman did. 

Her husband and lawyer get her released on bail (thanks to white privilege) and she desperately wants proof that the Candyman exists and did the bad thing - so, yup, you guessed it, she says his name in the mirror five times AGAIN. Very, very stupid, because he shows up again and this time he kills Bernadette, who was just coming by to check on Helen. Once again, Helen is covered in blood and is found holding the murder weapon. Like, OK, one time is maybe an accident, twice is not an accident - so it's possible that Helen is a serial killer and has imagined the Candyman coming to her and making her black out. She is committed to a psychiatric hospital and when the doctor asks her to tell him what happened in her apartment, she decides it's best to summon Candyman YET AGAIN so the doctor can see first-hand. Yeah, well, that's it for the doctor, another mysterious stabbing death but Helen escapes again and is on the run. By all means, keep digging that hole deeper and deeper...

She shows up at her apartment and surprise, surprise, her husband Trevor is now living with one of his grad students, and they're re-painting the apartment to be Pepto-Bismol pink. Yuch. What's it been, Trevor, a whole month? There's just no way he wasn't already sleeping with the student and cheating on Helen, he absolutely was. What a piece of garbage, but honestly Helen should have known, because she started sleeping with him when SHE was one of his students, right? He did it once, he'll do it again. Helen returns to the projects and gains access to the secret apartment again, but this time she follows the holes in the walls through more secret apartments and she discovers Candyman's lair, also there's a mural on the walls that shows Candyman's origin story, and the woman he was in love with looks an awful lot like her. So, is she the reincarnated lost love of the slave's son? It's unclear, but the mural does seem to point that way. 

The residents of the project have been building a big bonfire outside, you know, for Halloween night, as you do. Candyman decides to hide the baby in the woodpile to turn that into another funeral pyre, but it's also unclear what he's trying to accomplish by doing that. He puts Helen in the pile as well, does he think that killing Helen will reunite them in the afterlife? Best guess? But Helen uses her last bit of strength to try and save the baby, even if she doesn't survive. The ending would seem to suggest that she became a vengeful spirit much like Candyman did, and this way maybe Trevor gets what's coming to him. I mean, sure, but we kind of got there the really hard way, didn't we? 

It's a horror story, it's a film about racial inequality and class warfare, cheating husbands and professors who sleep with their students, and then of course you've got the evil spirit who is also somehow a bunch of bees walking around in a human costume. So yeah, it's about a lot of things that don't really coalesce into one coherent storyline, that's for sure. But it's so far out there you kind of have to reward it for getting somewhere and also kind of everywhere. There's also a bunch of Philip Glass music, which, sure, was very popular at the time for reasons. 

The doctor at the psychiatric hospital was played by Stanley DeSantis, who I never met but I did have some business dealings with. He had a side-hustle which was a graphic design company that made t-shirts and the animator I worked for hired him to make two of his cartoon strips into t-shirt designs, and we ordered, I don't know, 30 or 40 of each one in various sizes and sold them at Comic-Cons and online. But when we needed to make more t-shirts, we could not get in touch with him because he had died in 2005 and we never got the masters back from him in order to make more t-shirts from another company. 

Directed by Bernard Rose (writer of "Candyman" (2021))

Also starring Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Her Smell"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "The Divergent Series: Allegiant"), Vanessa E. Williams (last seen in "Imagine That"), Kasi Lemmons (last seen in "Vampire's Kiss"), DeJuan Guy, Marianna Elliott, Ted Raimi (last heard in "18 1/2"), Ria Pavla, Lisa Ann Poggi (last seen in "Honeymoon in Vegas"), Adam Philipson, Eric Edwards (last seen in "Blade"), Carolyn Lowery, Barbara Alston, Sarina C. Grant (last seen in "Coma"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Bernard Rose, Terrence Riggins (last seen in "What's Love Got to Do with It"), Gilbert Lewis (last seen in "Don Juan DeMarco"), Rusty Schwimmer (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Baxter Harris (last seen in "Species II"), John Rensenhouse, Mika, Stanley DeSantis (last seen in "Fools Rush In"), Diane Peterson (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Michael Laren (last seen in "Trust Me"), Michelle Blackwell

RATING: 6 out of 10 non-functioning toilets (seems about right)

Final Destination 3

Year 18, Day 298 - 10/25/26 - Movie #5,465

BEFORE: OK, I am back from vacation in North Carolina - not-so-funny story, I was very paranoid about watching "Final Destination 2", a film that starts with a horrible highway accident, just before going on a long drive on several highways. I mean, if you believe in premonitions and superstitions, you might just want to avoid the first film in this series before traveling on an airplane, or, as we established, also avoid listening to John Denver music before a flight. By extension, maybe don't watch the second film just before a long-distance drive. 

Anyway, there was an accident on I-95, just north of Petersburg, VA, but fortunately it was on the other side of the highway, northbound, and two cars flipped over, but nobody was hurt. Well, I figured that was the end of the "curse" until we continued a little further and found ourselves driving behind a truck with a bunch of logs on it - and that's what caused the accident in "Final Destination 2". I hadn't told my wife about watching that movie, but I did tell her I was a bit uncomfortable driving behind the truck, and she felt the same way. I said, "Do whatever you have to do, slow down, speed up, pull over, but this is not where I want to be." And I think we pulled into a rest stop at a Wawa or something, but we for sure got out from behind the logging truck. 

The rest of the trip went well (see below, though) and I celebrated a birthday down in North Carolina, we went out for Chinese Buffet the day before and my sister ordered in a nice meal on the day itself, plus chocolate cake and some chocolate stout I had just bought. And I got to hang out with my father for a few days, we worked on some jigsaw puzzles, I'm much faster than him but I slow my roll when we're working on a puzzle together. My sister said my visit lifted his spirits, he hasn't been doing so well since my mother passed, but he perked up a bit while we were there. 

Anyway, Tony Todd (or at least the voice of Tony Todd) carries over from "Final Destination 2". 

THE PLOT: Wendy Christensen and a group of teens who escaped a fatal roller-coaster accident face a bloody date with Death. 

AFTER: No lie, the other big thing we did down in North Carolina was to attend the N.C. State Fair, it's a really big deal down there, my sister lives near Raleigh, and that's where the fair grounds are. So I was JUST at a big fair, four days ago, and now this "Final Destination 3" movie starts off at a fair with a defective roller coaster? Well, the saving grace here is that I didn't go on any of the rides at the fair, like many other people, I was there for the food. I saw at least a hundred posts on Instagram about "Here's Everything I Ate at the NC State Fair", sure, like anybody else would care about what YOU ate, who gives a crap, why are you wasting everyone's time with a list, in the end it's not important at all, hardly worth talking about. 

So, here's a list of what I ate at the NC State Fair: a crab rangoon egg roll, a "Yam & Ham" sweet potato biscuit with country ham, a couple of my wife's nachos, an order of loaded "Mega Tater Tots" with ham, cheese, chives inside and hot honey and bacon on top, a deep-fried Scotch egg, and a deep-fried apple hand pie with cinnamon ice cream, then we got giant donuts to go, mine was a PB&J, with peanuts and peanut butter outside and raspberry jelly inside. I took a pass on a few items when the lines were too long, most notably I skipped the crab empanadas and the "Boss Hog", which was pork belly burnt ends served over fries with white BBQ sauce. We didn't end up eating the donuts until yesterday morning, when we had our first pit stop on the 2-day drive home. All the food was great, and a lot of planning went into deciding WHAT to eat, and the night before working out a path through the fair to get all of those things, with a minimal amount of excess walking. This was a "surgical strike" on the fair, sure we spent some time indoors at the arena checking out the sampling stations (Cheerwine and ice cream) but after four hours, we'd eaten our fill and we were headed OUT of the fair, and since it was late afternoon there was a big crowd coming in after work or school, so we avoided all of that. It was still fairly busy on a Wednesday afternoon, but I'd rather go then instead of a Friday or Saturday or the day when everyone can bring in 6 cans of food in exchange for a ticket, those days would be like wall-to-wall people. 

Again, we did NOT go on any rides - my wife's not into roller coasters but she has stood by while I've gone on the Cyclone or the one at the New York New York casino in Las Vegas. Well, tonight's film would seem to justify her distaste for thrill rides - because if you never go on one, then you'll never be involved in an accident on a fairground ride. Well, we love that North Carolina State Fair, but there were 5 people injured on a ride there back in 2013, and then there was a malfunction on a ride last year, some people got stuck up in the air for a while but nobody was injured. It's really the same reason I don't go swimming at the beach, as long as I don't I've got like a zero percent chance of being eaten by a shark. And I think I'd be a tasty snack for one, considering how much BBQ and fair foods I eat. 

So this film ends up about the wisdom of NOT going on a roller coaster, as high-schooler Wendy has a premonition of an accident, and she watches all of her friends die and then herself, in much the same way Alex saw the plane explosion in the first film and Kimberly saw the giant highway pile-up in the second film. They have these visions of the future for a reason, because after they get over being scared shitless they can take action, get off the plane or don't get on the highway, or, yeah, umm, get off the roller coaster in a panicked state, I'm sure the amusement park staff just LOVE it when that happens. Once Wendy realizes that her premonition isn't just regular fear leaving her body, it's definitely coming true, she tries to tell everyone that the track is broken and the electronics of the ride have not been maintained, and for her effort she is merely thrown out of the ride. But she did manage to convince a few other people, and Kevin, her seatmate, started a fight with Lewis, the football star, and then a bunch of other people were made to leave the ride as well. Those people were mad at first about not getting to ride the coaster, but their feelings turned to relief when pieces of their friends started to rain down from the coaster. 

I'm sorry, but the real loser here is Jason, Wendy's boyfriend, who just HAD to sit up in front on the coaster, and even before Wendy's premonition, when she expressed that she was nervous about the ride and wanted to sit in the back, Jason still took the front seat and sent Kevin back to look after Wendy. This is terrible boyfriend behavior, if your girlfriend is anxious or nervous, you ride with her, duh, not just because it's the chivalrous thing to do, but if she's scared she's going to want to grab on to somebody, and Jason really should have made sure that was HIM and not Kevin. Just saying. Wendy, you're better off without him, because he didn't really care about you. Oh, sure, he asked to be let off the ride but only AFTER Wendy was removed and the ride had already started moving, and that's some really weak sauce, bro. 

I'm just three movies into this franchise, and already the pattern is nearly exactly the same, the survivors research accounts of premonitions and they learn about Flight 180 from the first movie (which was six years ago at this point, in both movie time and IRL) and it doesn't take long for them to figure out that Death is stalking them even if they can't see it coming, but it's coming for them. So it's JUST the first movie again, but on a roller coaster this time, just like the second movie was just the first movie, but on a highway instead of a plane. There's a bit at the end of tonight's film that takes place on the NYC subway, so we're knocking off both trains and roller coasters tonight, where will the NEXT film take place, on a boat?

Wendy also took a lot of pictures for the school yearbook, which seems a bit weird because usually the yearbook is supposed to be full of the kids AT SCHOOL, OK maybe in the high-school play or on the football field, but why would the yearbook print photos of the students going to a fair or amusement park? They would do that on their own time, unless this was some kind of organized class trip, but I don't think that it is. It's important to the plot that Wendy got pictures of all the people who were being stalked after the accident, because that gave her clues about how each one might die - but it's still hard to believe she would take photos of them at the fair for the yearbook. Sorry, screenwriter, this makes no sense, please try again. Also, it really strains credulity to say that the photos "predicted" their cause of death. Like the thinnest of clues are used here to predict the future, like if the photo was over-exposed somehow that means the person is going to burn up or die in an explosion. You know, sometimes a bad photo is just a bad photo. 

Also, NITPICK POINT, who's to say who would have died in what order aboard the roller coaster accident, especially for the people who were kicked off the ride? Since they didn't die, what evidence is there to suggest the order in which they WOULD HAVE DIED if they stayed on board the ride? And now Death is making sure to kill them in exactly that order, because the Grim Reaper has OCD or something? It's hard to believe these people would get so caught up in finding the logical order in a very illogical thing, which is being stalked by Death and killed because somehow surviving an accident is a thing that needs to be rectified ASAP. Somewhere there are people who have brushes with death or they survive accidents and then they live for 20, 30, 50 more years, it's been known to happen. Now we're being told that if you survive an accident or you miss that doomed flight or you overslept on 9/11, well, that's it, the clock is ticking for you because Death is right around the corner, he's got a new plan for you. 

The fear that emanates from this franchise is all about the lack of control, finding out that your death could come at any time, and even knowing about it coming may not allow you to prevent it. It's going to be a random signpost falling on you, or a nail gun at work that falls on you (or you fall on it) and you'll have no say in the matter. BUT that's real life, every day, at any point you could trip and fall in the shower or your house could have an electrical short or you could die in a bizarre gardening accident, and if you're a thrill-seeker it's even worse, your parachute might not open or you could realize too late that your bungee cord is not connected on the other end. Well, sometimes Death doesn't even need to try that hard.  

We celebrate the attempts to defeat Death here, even if they end up being fruitless. Well, we all have to go sometime, and you can't just sit around in your house all day and go nowhere. That's my plan for the next couple of days, after cheating death by surviving all that deep-fried food at the fair AND a bunch of Carolina BBQ a few days later. However, I will have to go back to work this week, and I'm scheduled to fly back down to NC a few days before Thanksgiving to watch my father for a few days while my sister's family works at the Macy's parade. I don't really feel comfortable being in charge of another person for 4 days, but there will be home health aides to assist me, so there's that. And I get a free turkey dinner (or something) out of it - I cashed in a bunch of SkyMiles so it won't really be costing me a lot to make that trip. But first I've got to get there, finish my October films and then a reduced number of November ones. 

Directed by James Wong (director of "Final Destination")

Also starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Crystal Lowe (ditto), Ryan Merriman (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Kris Lemche (last seen in "In Time"), Alexz Johnson, Sam Easton, Jesse Moss (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"), Gina Holden (last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Texas Battle (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Chelan Simmons (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Amanda Crew (last seen in "She's the Man"), Maggie Ma, Ecstasia Sanders (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Jody Racicot (also last seen in "Black Christmas"), Patrick Gallagher (last heard in "The Tiger's Apprentice"), Dylan Basu, Alberto Ghisi (also last seen in "She's the Man"), Stuart Cowan (ditto), Harris Allan, Alexander Kalugin (last seen in "Miracle"), Nels Lennarson (last seen in "Horns"), Jacob Rupp, R. David Stephens, Andrew Francis (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Cory Monteith, Grahame Andrews (last seen in "The 6th Day"), Tony Morelli, Nesta Chapman, Dustin Milligan (also last seen in "The Butterfly Effect 2"), Jim Shield (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Lou Bollo, Colby Johannson, Keith Dallas (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Michael Stewart, Victor Ayala, Agam Darshi (last seen in "Colossal"), Dylan Basile, Matt Ellis (last seen in "Rememory"), Che Aimee Dorval, Jackie Jenkins Jr. (last seen in "The Lovebirds"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 charms on Julie's "good luck" bracelet

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