Infinity Pool

Year 16, Day 300 - 10/26/24 - Movie #4,881

BEFORE: Day 300?  Where the heck did most of 2024 go?  Oh, right, movies.  Movies and TV and work and comic books and rinse and repeat.  Also North Carolina and Atlantic City and day-trips to Long Island and New York Comic-Con and maybe a beer festival or two.  But I've got 66 days to wrap this Movie Year up and somehow simultaneously that's not enough time and also way too much time. 19 movies in 66 days sounds like a cake-walk, but the really hard part is holding back for 47 of those days.  I've got to clear the weeds out of the backyard, that should kill a weekend, and we're going to North Carolina again for a whole week, that will help. I can log in some. comic books and I've made a list of streaming TV series to catch up on, so it's going to be OK.  But first let me focus on these last 6 horror movies, get through this weekend's film festival and celebrate our wedding anniversary, then maybe I can make a plan. 

Mia Goth carries over one more time from "Pearl".  I did find a way to work "MaXXXine" in but I'm holding back there, too, in favor of clearing other films from my DVR.  I think my chances of circling back to it next October are pretty good. 

THE PLOT: James and Em Foster are enjoying an all-inclusive beach vacation on the island of La Tolqa, when a fatal accident exposes the resort's perverse subculture of hedonistic tourism, reckless violence and surreal horrors. 

AFTER: Don't worry, I'm keeping track of all the super-weird movies I've watched this year, and in my year-end wrap-up I'll try to figure out which one was the weirdest, and it's not going to be easy.  A movie about a woman who finds a genie in a bottle sure seemed a bit weird at the time, but then along comes a movie where a girl can see all the imaginary friends whose humans grew up and forgot about them, and that certainly seems weirder. Then there was a weird movie about sending convicted murderers into space to see what interstellar travel does to them, but then along comes a movie about an astronaut who talks to a giant spider-shaped alien, and then there's a new definition of how weird a movie can be.  In much the same way, I watched "They Cloned Tyrone" a few months ago, and sure, that was weird, but it just can't quite compare to tonight's film on a similar subject.  

To be fair, "infinity Pool" is more like "Triangle of Sadness" meets "Midsommer" meets "They Cloned Tyrone", but then again, it's all of those things but also it's trying to be its own thing, so I shouldn't just compare one movie to the next. 

This film shows a bunch of well-off Americans and Brits on vacation at a resort, but the resort is in a poorer, backwards country of sorts - the resort is on a fenced compound and the guests are told to not leave the resort for their own protection.  So naturally some of the guests want to go out and have some fun, just a picnic on the beach and maybe a few drinks, and breaking the rules always makes things a bit more fun, right?  Well, on the way back the struggling writer who was driving hit a local man with the car and killed him, naturally the first instinct of the two couples is to cover things up, hope against hope that nobody figures out how the man died or whose car ran him down.  Yeah, good luck with that.  

The writer, James Foster, is charged with murder, and on this island the punishment is death, in fact the son of the killed man has the legal right to execute the man who killed his father.  But fear not, the local police have a solution, all they have do is clone the man, for a large fee of course, and the boy can execute the clone, thus killing a copy of the murderer, and the author can still live - only he is forced to watch the execution of his double, perhaps this way he will learn his lesson.  Umm, sure, that works for everybody I guess, except for the clone.  But then the man meets a number of tourists who have all been through this process before, and all these rich people just basically view it as a way the locals raise money for their island.  Well, they did invent and perfect (?) cloning, so maybe they deserve it?  

One tourist, however, raises the fear that the original version of him was executed, and that he might BE the clone, one with all the memories of the original, plus the vision of watching himself die, but sure, what could possibly be bad about all that?  I remember in the movie "Multiplicity" that the cloning process wasn't perfect, each clone was like a photocopy that's never going to be as sharp as the original, and if you copy the copy, well, forget it, things are bound to get foggy or cloudy or ill-defined.  

Also, you'd think that these rich tourists would learn something from watching their own executions, and you would be completely wrong there.  Instead their take-away is that they can do pretty much whatever they want on this island, commit crimes like burglary, rape, you name it, and always the solution will be to create another clone and just stand and watch as the clone is executed for their sins.  So pretty much they don't ever learn anything, except that their money can keep getting them out of trouble, as long as their bank account can cover the cloning costs.  So I wonder if this is just some giant metaphor for how the rich people are treated differently by the legal system because they can pay for the best lawyers, or something to that effect.  There's another point to be made about what the lack of punishment would then do to those rich people who can afford to pay fines or make bail or bribe someone to always get out of trouble, over time they could essentially become psychopaths.  

There's more to the story, like it gets even weirder, but that's really all you need to know to get into it.  The film was a festival success at Sundance and the Berlin International Film Festival, but was then a box office failure.  You can watch it on Hulu and judge for yourself. 

I can't believe this movie was made AFTER Mia Goth's breakthrough roles in "X" and "Pearl" because that would mean that she's older in this than she was then, and she looks younger somehow.  Well, she looks like she's both 15 and 35 here, it's a bit tough to say which. (A little research tells me she was 28 when this was filmed, and it was filmed the same year as "Pearl", which I guess is possible?)

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "13"), Cleopatra Coleman (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Jalil Lespert, Amanda Brugel (last seen in "The Calling"), John Ralston (ditto), Jeff Ricketts (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Caroline Boulton (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Dunja Sepcic, Adam Boncz, Zijad Gracic (last heard in "Cars 2"), Amar Bukvic, Alan Katic, Anita Major, Roderick Hill (last seen in "Colette"), Katalin Lábán, Kamilla Fátyol (last seen in "The Martian"), Lena Juka Stambuk, Kristóf Kovács, Romina Tonkovic, Gergely Trócsányi, Hajnalka Zsigar, Gáza Kovács, Oszkár Bócsik

RATING: 5 out of 10 buffalo sausages

Pearl

Year 16, Day 299 - 10/25/24 - Movie #4,880

BEFORE: Let's send a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Mia Goth, born October 25, 1993, who also seems to have the perfect last name for horror movies, right?  She carries over from "X" and she WILL make the year-end countdown, I've seen to that. But also I wonder how many birthday SHOUT-outs I've shouted out this year, I don't think there have been many. 

Now, regarding "Maxxxine", the new sequel to "X", I've looked for a way to shoehorn this film in at the last minute - I had no idea this film would be streaming so soon, it's already on HBO Max and it caught me off guard.  I've checked with the ruling committee, and their hands are tied, I'd already filed the paperwork certifying my movie path to Christmas, so really, at this point, my hands are tied.  I'll file an appeal, sure there's a process, but this film just came on the scene far too late.  I can't drop anything from the remaining twenty films of the year  - well, I could, but that would mean that something I was going to clear off my DVR is not going to get cleared, like I could delay "Speed Racer" again but I've already pushed it back twice, maybe three times.  It's either "Maxxxine" or "Speed Racer", really.  Most everything else will cause a break in the linking if I delete it.  

Or "How It Ends" - if the committee were to approve the addition of "Maxxxine" at the last second, I could shift some things around in these last days of October, and cut from "Ready or Not" to "Freaky" in a switcheroo and drop "How It Ends", but again, that's a desperate play, and then THAT movie may never get watched.  Bottom line, "Maxxine" links to a number of other horror films on the list, and I've got a good chance of circling back to it next October, because it's got some name actors in it, like Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito, who appear in other horror films too.  So that's that, "Pearl" is in and "Maxxxine" is out, at least for not.  The third film in this weird little trilogy just arrived too late for me to work it in.  

Well, I could do it but then I'd be unhappy about what I'd have to cut to make that possible.  Sorry, Ti West. Sorry, Mia Goth.  If this were March or April I'd add another film and stay up late watching a double feature, but it's not, it's late October and both Halloween and Christmas are coming, I have a schedule to maintain.  "Maxxxine" is going to be fine, fingers crossed that this choice may end up helping me connect a full month of horror films in 2025.  Or 2026.

Meanwhile, this Halloween is UNDER a week away. It's time to start separating out the Reese's peanut butter cups from the Almond Joys, if you know what I mean. Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfingers, either. 

THE PLOT: In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm. 

AFTER: Well, sure, I got what I wanted, this movie dug deeper into the back-story of Pearl, aka the farmer's wife, and she was pretty messed up in "X".  But how did she get that way?  And where did the car in the pond come from?  And are there really alligators in Texas?  More to the point, WTF?  I mean, WT-actual-F was up with Pearl?  It's worth pointing out that every old person you see was young once, and probably made a few mistakes, and those mistakes over the years made them who they are.

Well, this film comes very close to explaining that nothing was really Pearl's fault.  Life was not kind to Pearl, the film starts out in 1918 when she just couldn't get a break.  Her husband was off fighting in World War I and she had no idea if was going to come home or not.  At some point he stopped writing letters home, and well, that's not a good sign.  Also there was some kind of pandemic going on, that would be the Spanish flu - so people were dying both at home and abroad, about 50 million people worldwide died from the flu.  Pearl was told repeatedly to cover her face, but she was young, carefree, and she just wanted to ride her bike and feel the wind.  Relatable to today's audiences, some of whom refused to wear a mask during the COVID years despite all the medical evidence saying it was the proper thing to do.  To be fair, even Dr. Fauci and W.H.O. got the mask thing wrong for a while, because in 2020 they were telling us to not go outside without a mask on, but once we were home, it was OK to take the mask off if we were home with our family.  This was almost 100% backwards, because a year later people were dining outside without masks and being encouraged to go outside where they were LESS likely to get COVID, however it was possible for someone in your family to go to work or school, catch COVID and bring it home to infect their whole family.  So the mask policy got reversed upon further reflection, or maybe it should have been like that all along.  I guess maybe the rules had to change once people started going back to work, and the bottom line is, kids are nothing but germ factories that will infect you, so my advice is to stay away from your own kids, or better yet, don't have any in the first place. 

Oh, right, back to Pearl.  She lived on her parents' farm while her husband was off at war, and her father was paralyzed or brain-dead or something, perhaps from the flu or maybe it was polio or something else, there was a lot of bad diseases back then.  And her mother was a mean taskmaster who made Pearl do chores on the farm AND also take care of her father, feeding him and bathing him and you know, changing his dirty drawers.  The family was of German descent, and man, I found this all too familiar, having been raised by a German grandmother. I used to think my grandmother was demanding and negative and frugal because she'd lived through the Depression, but yeah, also part of that was because she was German. I feel your pain, Pearl, you just want to go out to the movies and have fun with your friends, and someday you're going to be working in the theater or making movies, but not if your German mother has anything to say about it.  Been there. 

Pearl finds comfort in the arms of the movie theater's projectionist, who lets her in for free so she won't get in trouble by spending her mother's change, and also wants to show her movies of nekkid people dancing around after the crowd goes home.  Damn, Pearl was right there when porn got invented, only nobody back then was able to charge money for it. Don't worry, one day they'll figure it out.  Pearl gets so worked up she has sex with a scarecrow on the way home, but then realizes having sex with the projectionist is a much better idea.  

It's good that Pearl has an outlet for her hostility, it's just a little odd, though, that the outlet is killing farm animals and feeding them to her pet alligator Theda, named after Theda Bara. Normally farm life does involve slaughtering animals, but you kind of get the feeling that Pearl does it just for fun.  Hollywood movies kind of glorified farm life, with little mention of the down-sides, namely the hard labor and all the killing.  Don't get too attached to those animals, OK?  Even in "The Wizard of Oz" there's not much about farm life, maybe a few minutes before Dorothy gets whisked off to the land of fairies and munchkins by a tornado, and so I doubt that she ever had to kill a pig or a cow.  But what do you suppose the effect of farm life might be on a teenage girl?  Maybe it's not such a large leap from killing chickens and geese to killing people. 

Pearl gets the chance to audition for a dance troupe that's going to tour the state, and she sees this as her ticket off the boring family farm.  But her mother refuses to allow her to attend the audition, so they argue about it, and meanwhile her mother's dress catches fire and well, let's just say that clothes were more flammable back then, and also nobody had invented "Stop, drop and roll" just yet.  Sure, it's an accident but Pearl starts to realize that she'll be free to do whatever she wants with her life if she could just kill all of the people who are standing in her way - including her sister-in-law, Mitsy, who was selected for the dance troupe over Pearl just because she was blonde and the type they were looking for.  No, it couldn't POSSIBLY be that Pearl was only an average dancer, could it?  But you can see the reasoning here, if Pearl just kills Mitsy, well then there'll be an open spot on the dance troupe again, right? 

Well, the good news is that Pearl's husband, Howard, eventually does come home from the War.  Only he comes home to a very different Pearl from the one he left behind.  She's been through some stuff, she's killed some animals and perhaps a few people, creating something of a dilemma, perhaps.  I guess there's a lesson there, you let your daughter go to the movies by herself ONE TIME and before you know it, she's an unhinged serial killer.  Sure, it could happen, films came along and changed everybody, suddenly boring old reality wasn't good enough for people who all wanted to be rich and famous, like the actors and the characters they portrayed.  

Also starring David Corenswet, Tandi Wright (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Matthew Sunderland (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Amelia Reid, Lauren Stewart, Todd Rippon, Grace Acheson, Gabe McDonnell, Shaman Theron

RATING: 6 out of 10 bales of hay

X

Year 16, Day 298 - 10/24/24 - Movie #4,879

BEFORE: Well, it looks like I'm going to wrap up this Movie Year with only three trips out to movie theaters, having seen "Deadpool & Wolverine", "Hangdog" and "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" the way nature intended.  I'm fine with that, really what choice do I have?  I won't be able to get to the third "Venom" movie, or "Kraven the Hunter" or "Moana 2" or - you know what, there's a bunch of 2024 movies I'm just not going to be able to fit in, but that's OK.  Everything ends up streaming after a month now, so I'll just deal with it all then.  I put the rest of the 2024 chain together with some movies that have been on the list for a long time, and right now that's got to take priority. 

Jenna Ortega carries over one more time from "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", which was partially set on Halloween, with trick-or-treaters and everything.  It's too bad I couldn't put that film on October 31, but I was just a week off. 

THE PLOT: In 1979 a group of filmmakers set out to make an adult film in a rural Texas town, but when their reclusive elderly hosts catch them in the act, the crew find themselves fighting for their lives. 

AFTER: I put this on the list about six months ago, maybe, when it was running on premium cable along with its sequel (prequel?) which I'll get to tomorrow.  I'm always on the lookout for films that can pair together on DVDs that run on the premium channels that allow me to dub movies to DVD (not all of them do, thanks for nothing HBO/Cinemax).  I honestly did not know at the time whether I'd be able to get to them this October, or next October or possibly never.  It wasn't until mid-August that I had to start thinking about the October chain, and that's when I realized the chain I had planned wasn't going to work, thanks to a non-link halfway through.  OK, clear the dry erase board and start again, see if we can salvage maybe half of the chain that's still legit and link a couple of mini-chains together to make it through the month. 

I don't recall ever watching so many slasher films before, the kind where there's not much logic or sense to it all, it's just killing after killing as if the higher the body count, the greater the thrill.  But these are empty calories, people, it's like eating cotton candy, sure there's a dopamine release in your brain and maybe an insulin release in your pancreas, but at what cost?  No slasher film has ever really elevated the genre, and maybe "Scream" was the first series that even considered there might be a "why" to it all, or at least a set of rules that dictated what the appropriate actions and re-actions to mass slaughter might be. 

So I have been subjecting myself to repeated trauma and jump-scares, and so far I can't pinpoint any adverse reactions, so it's possible I may have become somewhat inured to all the killings, because no nightmares (so far) this year that involve the Ghostface or giant sea monsters or zombies or Forever Purgers or even Godzilla fighting King Kong.  I wonder why that is, but if you could peek inside my brain you might understand that my nightmares these days involve either event planning and having things go horribly wrong or bumping into my ex-wife at a film festival. Just me?  With just 11 days to go until the Presidential Election, I would also wonder right now whether it's even possible to come up with anything scarier than THAT for most Americans.  The most common nightmare right now probably concerns oversleeping on November 5 or someone going to the polls and suddenly realizing that they forgot their pants. 

But this film concerns an adult film crew going on location in Texas to shoot a porno titled "The Farmer's Daughter", which is a great title for a liltle film-within-the-film, and there was at least one similarly-title R-rated film in the real world, "The Farmer's Daughters" from 1976, and also an X-rated film with the same title from 1986 - and of course Ron Jeremy was in it. But back to the fictional film made in 1979, and from the opening scene of "X" with a Texas sheriff and deputy investigating a crime scene with several bodies, maybe there's a reason why that porn film never got finished.  Somebody went on a rampage or killing spree - damn, isn't that always the way during horror month? 

The makers of this little indie x-rated film made a few mistakes, perhaps, including renting the boarding house on this out-of-the-way farm without telling the owner of the farm what would be taking place there.  Filming permit?  Who needs one out in the middle of nowhere?  Even though Wayne slips old Howard a few extra bucks, Howard decides he doesn't like these city folk very much, they're dishonest and probably up to no good.  But Howard's wife Pearl is fascinated by the film crew, especially Maxine, who is somehow a dead ringer for her younger self.  It's a neat trick here, just get the modern-day young actress to pose in costumes to make the old-timey photographs, and then there's just the matter of making her look really old, so she can play both Maxine and Pearl.  Filming the scenes with both characters must have been a challenge, but you can do a lot with stand-ins to make it appear that one character played by Mia Goth is interacting with the other one. 

The director of "The Farmer's Daughter" wants to make a porno that's, you know, classy, a cut above that's still x-rated but with great cinematography, and really, back then people didn't put too much into the production design or the narrative of x-rated films, story-wise if you had one or two good ideas, or anything beyond "now THESE two people have sex" you were maybe ahead of the game. "Deep Throat" was a mega-hit in the early 1970's and the story literally made no sense, the lead female had a clitoris in her throat, which, umm, is not a thing that happens.  I remember also there was a series called "Taboo" where the only plot was that everybody was having sex with somebody they weren't supposed to have sex with, like family members. I think that started the "incest" or "step-" genre of porn.  Then I think there was one about female swimmers who needed to get a boost of protein right before every swim meet - really, they were all over-thinking things, if you just want to show people giving BJ's, just do that, you don't need to create this whole back-story as a motivation.  

But the mistake that RJ, the director, makes - other than trusting Wayne to rent the location - is to bring along his own girlfriend, Lorraine, to work the boom mic and the slate.  Lorraine listens to the cast of "The Farmer's Daughter" talk about how porn empowers women, and now that the sexual revolution has come, women should be free to love whomever they want, and have multiple partners and not be controlled by any one man, so Lorraine decides she wants to be in the movie, too, and have a sex scene with the professional actor, Jackson.  RJ is against it, but he just can't have it both ways, preaching about sexual freedom for every woman EXCEPT his own girlfriend.  So now there's a pissed-off director who wants to quit the project and drive off in the truck, leaving the rest of the crew behind.

Before RJ can drive off, he's confronted by a very horny Pearl, the very old farmer's wife.  RJ just isn't into sex with older women, so he rebuffs her, and that became his last mistake. Pearl has all this sexual energy built up because her husband has a weak heart, so she maybe hasn't had sex for years.  All that energy has to go somewhere, so she turns into a killing machine, jealous of all the youngsters who are able to have sex - what a weird twist on the "Friday the 13th" trope of the killer who hates promiscuous teens.  Or maybe she just has dementia, or there's another reason for her killing spree, it's not all that clear.  But one by one, the film cast and crew are taken down by pitchforks or shotguns, and the kindly old farming couple turns out to have a very dark agenda. 

There are a lot of unexplained things here, but perhaps tomorrow's prequel film will shed some light on those details - or they're just red herrings.  But clearly there's more story to be told, and now there's even a THIRD film in this series that just popped up on HBO Max, I'll have to either postpone it because I don't have a slot for it OR try to work it in, but that would mean I'll have to drop another film somewhere, which I'm not sure I want to do.  The problem is that if I don't work it in now, I don't know if I'll be able to circle back to it next year or the year after that.  So it's decision time again - what else can I drop, if anything?  Maybe I just can't. 

Also starring Mia Goth (last seen in "High Life"), Brittany Snow (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "The Ring"), Owen Campbell (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Stephen Ure (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), James Gaylyn (last seen in "The Meg"), Simon Prast, Matthew J. Saville, Geoff Dolan, Bryony Skillington (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken fingers

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Year 16, Day 297 - 10/23/24 - Movie #4,878 - VIEWED ON 9/14/24

BEFORE: The movie theater where I work part-time screened this film back in September, and I wasn't working the shift, so I had the opportunity to come in on my day off and watch the film for free.  I really had to think about it, because even though it fit RIGHT into my programming this year, there was also the opportunity to NOT watch it,  and save it for next October, when it could help me make connections to films like "Daybreakers" and Disney's recent remake of "The Haunted Mansion".  It was a difficult decision, because I haven't blocked out next year's chain, obviously, and sure, I could do whatever I can now to make connections easier next time around BUT also the flip-side of that is, I can't see the big picture, so there's a possibility that I could save it for 2025 and then NOT be able to link to it, for any number of random reasons. You can't eat your cake and have it too, so I opted to watch the film THIS year and review it THIS year because that would be a definite for-sure slam dunk, and the future, despite our best efforts, is always uncertain.  So Jenna Ortega carries over again from "Scream VI". 

I asked my wife if she wanted to join me, because nobody I work with has ever met my wife, so probably half of them are convinced that she might be fictional. But it turns out she has NEVER seen the original "Beetlejuice" film, so I guess there would be little point in taking her to see the sequel. Well, she could just WATCH the original, it must be streaming on one of the services we subscribe to.  But whatever, I invited my friend Victoria, who dressed up as Beetlejuice for the occasion. I appreciate the extra effort. 

But I can remember a time when movie studios put out their scariest movies in October, because of the Halloween hype, and then those films would disappear for a while and maybe get released one year later on DVD (then BluRay) to tie in with Halloween a second time.  Or maybe the film would premiere on premium cable or On Demand the next time that pumpkins were being carved and kids were trick-or-treating, right?  Now it's a whole new world thanks to streaming, and so movies like this are now released in theatres in September so they can be On Demand or streaming in October of the SAME YEAR.  Man, you kids today don't know how lucky you have things, when I was a teenager if you wanted to see a new movie you had to drive somewhere, either the theater or the Blockbuster Video, but you just get every movie you want on your phones, don't you?  Or you download them from a web torrent like it's not even a thing.  Even with a VHS rental, though, I was still too scared to rent most horror movies.  But I'm sure I have "Beetlejuice" somewhere on VHS or DVD, or both. 

THE PLOT: After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside-down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife. 

AFTER: Tim Burton is one of those directors who gets a free pass from me, in the same vein as George Lucas or Wes Anderson, and while I may not love everything these filmmakers put out, I WILL watch them and also champion their right to create whatever they want however they want to do it.  There's a history there, and it gets amplified when I realize that I have, either by accident or design, seen every Tim Burton-directed feature. "Big Eyes", "Dark Shadows", "Sleepy Hollow", "Ed Wood" and "Mars Attacks!"  My personal favorite at one time was "Big Fish" and I may have had some issues with him digressing from the source material when he made "Alice in Wonderland".  So there's one more reason to watch "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" now and not break the streak by leaving it unwatched. 

So if he decides that 36 is the right number of years to pass before putting out a sequel, then I'm not inclined to disagree.  It's his baby, he can do whatever he wants with it. And I think it's genius that the film is not called "Beetlejuice 2", because how boring is that?  Why not force everyone to say the name twice, and then they're all 2/3 of the way towards summoning the demon himself.  Is he a demon, though?  Or just a ghost?  Are there ghost/demons, as we kind of saw in "The Ring" and "Night House", or is this all just a case of screenwriters realizing that ghosts by themselves are not scary enough, being intangible and just trapped souls after all.  OK, none of it is for reals so we might as well say there are ghost/demons, and OK maybe there are vampire/werewolves or mummy/witches while we're at it.  Who cares? 

Lydia Deetz of course is an adult now, and the host of a supernatural talk show called "Ghost House", where she pretends to visit haunted houses and see ghosts.  (Really?  Not "Ghost of the Town" or "Ghost to Ghost" or "Talk Show Ghost"?  I got a million of 'em. "Saturday Evening Ghost"?).  But then she sees a hallucination of Beetlejuice, the ghost/demon who haunted her parents' house when she was a teen, who tried to make her his child bride.

Lydia and her daughter, Astrid, travel back to the old family home in Connecticut after the death of Lydia's father, Charles.  Charles was played by an actor in the original film who got cancelled years ago for sex offender charges, so killing off his character was necessary, and here in the sequel his character either appears in animated form, or without his head and part of his torso after death by shark attack.  Lydia's boyfriend/producer makes the bold move of proposing to her while on this funeral trip, for a Halloween wedding, and Astrid also meets a local boy who seems to have a similar disdain for the holiday, so they decide to spend it together. 

Charles (minus his head) turns up in an afterlife waiting room, as seen in the first film, and also in the afterlife we see that Beetlejuice has worked his way up to middle management, supervising a whole office of those shrunken-head ghosts who are all named Bob for some reason.  An dead actor and now ghost-detective, Wolf Jackson, informs Beetlejuice that his former wife has escaped her captivity (several separated boxes each containing a body part) and is now draining souls of the dead while searching for Beetlejuice himself.  So at some point we do get an origin story for Mr. Juice, who learned after marrying a very beautiful woman at the time of the Black Plague that she was a cult leader who poisoned him on their wedding night as part of her immortality ritual. However, when he realized he was dying he managed to cut her up into pieces as his final act. Well, that's romance for you. 

Astrid manages to figure out that her new boyfriend Jeremy is also a ghost, the big clue was that he never leaves that house or yard.  Jeremy says he needs her to travel with him to the afterlife to help him regain his life, and as a bonus she will be able to see her father's spirit.  Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there?  But Lydia appears on the scene after they depart and figures out that Jeremy should not be trusted, and also by the way he may have killed his parents years ago, perhaps that's why he can't move on to the afterlife.  Lydia makes a deal to marry Beetlejuice if he'll bring her to the afterlife to save Astrid.  Meanwhile ghost detective Wolf Jackson learns that real people have somehow entered the afterlife, and he vows to put a stop to it.  

Jeremy's plan was to trade Astrid's life for his soul, so he could get a second chance at life.  He takes Astrid to the "Soul Train" which will take her to the Great Beyond, but her dead father's spirit sees her and knows she doesn't belong there, so he takes them to Saturn's moon, which is where those sandworms from the first film apparently live. And after condemning Jeremy to Hell, Astrid's father shows his wife and daughter how to get back from the Upside-Down.  Also meanwhile, Lydia's mother, Delia gets bitten by the snakes she rented for her husband's funeral, so she ends up down in the afterlife too.  Well, we're really killing off the legacy characters this week, aren't we?  

Finally there's a big showdown in the church during the planned Halloween wedding, but of course Beetlejuice shows up to claim Lydia for himself.  Well, she did sign a contract, and marriage is a contract.  But Beetlejuice's ex also finally catches up with him at the church, and so does Wolf Jackson. And who knew that the cake mentioned in the song "MacArthur Park" with its great green icing melting down was, in fact, a wedding cake?  I sure didn't.  The bad characters get eaten by a sandworm, the good characters move on with their lives, and Beetlejuice is returned to the diorama in the attic for another 36 years, when the next sequel gets released, and I can imagine what the title of that film is going to be.  

There's just a lot of scurrying around frantically in this film, and it seems like everyone who's in the afterlife is trying to get back to the living world, and then everyone in the living world either dies or is trying to get to the afterlife some other way.  So the plot is always firing in six directions at a time, and I wonder why nobody can learn to just be happy where they ARE, would that be too much to ask.  No, god damn it, I just HAVE to get to the afterlife somehow.  OK, now I desperately need to get back!  Make up your damn minds, please. 

Look, it makes some kind of sense, during our lives we keep wanting new things, we get bored with eating the same things over and over so we're always looking for better restaurants that serve new things.  You can't just watch the same 10 movies over and over again, even if they are your favorites, you end up always trying to find something better, and come on, the only real way to find stuff is volume, volume, volume.  New jobs, new friends, new experiences, we're all on a quest for more, and what if that doesn't end when we die?  

Honestly, we've been told for thousands of years what heaven is like, you get your wings and your white robe and you somehow know how to play the harp, and you get to see your dead relatives again, and, umm, that's it?  Man, that sounds like a very boring way to spend eternity.  Or you get thrown into the lake of hellfire and get punished for your sins and I suppose that's even worse.  But absolutely ZERO of the people who told you what the afterlife is like had ANY first-hand experience, think about that for a second, somebody just made a bunch of stuff up and everybody else believed it, which is just stupid. 

Perhaps there's nothing after we die, but according to this film, there is an afterlife, and you go to a giant administration building with never-ending corridors and incompetent staff and you spend a couple eons in a waiting room that never calls your number. Believable.  Then if you're lucky and you can work something out, maybe you get a job working in the building and become part of the incompetent staff, but at least you get a lot of breaks.  And then once you put in your 3,000 years or so processing the newbies you can retire and board the Soul Train and finally move on to some kind of more positive restful experience. I'm surprisingly OK with this scenario. 

The film is still a lot of fun, and when you consider that I just watched four slasher films, fun is really what I'm missing right now - essentially this is like a live-action cartoon, and it doesn't take itself too serioulsy.  Unfortunately I think I'm back to form on scary movies full of gore tomorrow. 

Also starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "The Flash"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Justin Theroux (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp" (2019)), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Mafia Mamma"), Arthur Conti, Nick Kellington (last seen in "First Kill"), Santiago Cabrera (last seen in "What Happened to Monday"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Lift"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "Migration"), Sami Slimane, Amy Nuttall, Mark Heenehan, Liv Spencer, Skylar Park, Matt Lyons, Jane Leaney (last seen in "Dolittle"), David Ayres, Sophie Holland (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Walles Hamonde (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Rebecca O'Mara, Adam Speers, Daryl Kwan, Caroline Lawrie, Philip Philmar (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Stephen K. Amos, Sean Verre, Noah Mendes, Juliana Yazbeck (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit"), Bea Svistunenko, Filipe Cates, Alex Michael Stoll, Rupi Lai, Georgina Beedle, Stefano Marchetti, James Fisher, Olivia Valentine, Gianni Calchetti, Chloe Driver and the voice of Charlie Hopkinton.

RATING: 7 out of 10 tiny houses in the attic diorama

Scream VI

Year 16, Day 296 - 10/22/24 - Movie #4,877

BEFORE: Trying to get back into my rhythm after Comic-Con.  You know, staying up way too late, oversleeping, getting to work late, barely making it through the day, dinner and one hour of TV with my wife, writing the blog, repeat.  Or working 9 to 10 hours at the theater for a festival, not having dinner with my wife but grabbing fast food, falling behind on TV, writing the blog and then watching the next movie. Toggle between those until the end of the year.  What does it say about me when "get up in the morning, be at work by 9, put in 8 hours, go home" is the unusual setting?  Isn't that how most people live their lives?  

I take comfort in that I sort of found my tribe, where the most important thing is getting the movie made or making sure the screening goes OK, everything else, including a personal life, has to come second to that.  If I just keep making sure that I take enough time for myself, to celebrate holidays, go drive somewhere for a week now and then, then I might keep my sanity, but you know, nothing's for certain in this world and my whole life could change overnight, you just never know. Right now I just want to get to November and then maybe have some time to think about the nature of things. 

Jenna Ortega carries over from "Scream" (2022) and so do a bunch of other actors. Tonight I'm also updating my life-list of actors and other famous people I've seen in real life, as I saw two more "Star Wars" actors in the flesh, Mads Mikkelsen at NYCC signing autographs and Samuel L. Jackson at the theater speaking after a screening of "The Piano Lesson".  I already have both of their autographs in the collection, but now I've also seen them in the wild. Other notable people I saw at NY Comic-Con include comic legends Al Milgrom and Jim Steranko, author Timothy Zahn, actors Kyle MacLachlan and Phil LaMarr, and wrestlers Rikishi and Booker T. 

THE PLOT: The survivors of the Ghostface killings leave Woodsboro behind and start a fresh chapter in New York City. 

AFTER: In the final film (so far) of the "Scream" franchise (unless they make more) four of the characters leave Woodsboro (which could be in California or North Carolina, not sure) and move to Manhattan, which could be an homage to the "Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan" or possibly to "The Muppets Take Manhattan". At some point in a franchise's history, everyone still alive has to go to New York, it seems. I think that poem on the Statue of Liberty says something about "Give me your tired, your poorly-written characters, your huddled actors yearning to breathe free."

But sure enough, they're menaced by another Ghostface Killer - this makes sense, because I hear he does a lot of work with the Wu-Tang Clan, which is based in Staten Island. Or am I confusing him with someone else? 

Again, as with last night's film, there's a lot that happened here that I failed to pick up on.  The film starts with an attractive woman getting stood up for a date, and then when her date calls her and leads her into an alley (never a good idea) we realize that she's been both catfished AND tricked by Ghostface, but there's more to the story here, she's a university professor who was disliked by one of her students that she gave a failing grade to.  Well, sure, that's an action that merits being killed?  Two students at Blackmore University are getting some practice in killing people, because they really want to kill Sam and Tara Carpenter, who were in the previous film and have now moved to NYC so Tara can attend Blackmore, along with twins Mindy and Chad (also introduced in the previous "Scream" film).  

But the two students playing the Ghostface game get killed by another Ghostface, so the true villain will remain a mystery throughout today's film, as per usual.  And just for fun (and because they can) the series also brings back a character who "died" in "Scream 4", it seems she was popular with the fans and so, just like that, she was only "mostly dead" and is now alive again and an FBI agent to boot.  Gale Weathers is also back again, but this franchise seems to be doing now what "Star Wars" did in Episodes 7 through 9, which is sacrifice the "Legacy" characters, one per movie.  As long as their deaths are meaningful and well-played, the fans seem to be OK with this.  But these are all like comic-book deaths, meaning that the next writer can just undo them, or claim they faked their own deaths for whatever reason, because it's a reality that can bend to the screenwriter's will. 

Honestly this is all just more murder porn, just like my last five films and if I'm being honest, I'm quite sick of it.  I have nine more films to go in October and I'm afraid that at least three of them will be in the same style.  I'm just going to try to muddle through as best as I can, but I take no pleasure in watching 20-plus people die in a movie, no matter how original the killings are - and here they're not, it's all just stabby-stabby-stab.  How about mix it up once in a while, like a good old-fashioned explosion, or push somebody off a skyscraper?  

Two things kind of stand out here, though, that make this one just a "cut" above - one is that it shows our hero characters taking the subway right around Halloween, and SO many people are dressed as famous movie psychos, there seems to be an average of three Ghostfaces on every subway car, and then our Core Four gets separated into two pairs on TWO subway cars, each of which has so many costumed killers that they don't know which of them (if any) are the real one. Yeah, I've been on that Halloween subway ride home before, after working events on October 31, and it can be very jarring. Cartoonish ghosts and witches are one thing, but people walking around dressed like Jason or Freddie Kruger, well if the costumes are TOO good you might think there's a real chainsaw or blade-wielding maniac on your subway ride.  Umm, thanks, but I'll just wait for the next train.  

I've also encountered this at NY Comic-Con, you might think you're willing to accept turning the corner and bumping into an authentic-looking Pennywise clown, but you know what, it's OK if you're not.  Some people's costumes are just a little TOO good. And a couple years ago I saw a Jason character in a hockey mask doing nothing but standing against a wall, looking menacing, and he didn't even have to move, he was scary enough just standing still, because that's exactly what the REAL Jason would do. (Yes, I know he's not real, but you know what I mean.)

Of course, one of the Ghostface characters on the subway is the real one, because where else would you hide a book, if not in a library?  And so one of our core characters gets stabbed and NOBODY on this NYC subway train does anything to help, not at first anyway.  Yeah, that tracks. 

Another location in this film is a closed movie theater - and I'm sure there are tons of abandoned properties in NYC right now due to the pandemic.  A closed movie theater is a pretty creepy place, there's one a block away from the theater where I work that's been closed for almost a year, and I sure wouldn't want to go inside it - and I worked there thirty-five years ago as an usher.  Hell, sometimes I'm doing my final walk-through in the very not-closed theater where i work now, and I'll be 99% sure that all the guests are gone, but hey, you never know if some crazy killer snuck in with the crowd and stayed behind, and is just waiting for the manager to come turn off the lights before he strikes, right?  

So I'm willing to cut this one a little slack, for correctly depicting how scary NYC and thus my everyday life can be. I would prefer to not have to leave my house on Halloween, but I usually have to work one job or the other, unless the holiday falls on a Sunday or something. I've also seen so many fake weapons at Comic-Cons that I might not even react if I saw someone with real weapons on the street, and that also worries me a little.  I'm not going to say any more about the story or the identity of the killer or killers, because really, that's the one trick the movie has, and they really draw it out to tease you.  

NITPICK POINT: Who keeps a full-size ladder in a NYC apartment?  OK, maybe he was having some work done, but even then, you don't need a two-story ladder for that, probably just a stepladder.  

Also starring Courteney Cox, Melissa Barrera, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Skeet Ulrich (all 5 carrying over from "Scream" (2022)), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "Stoker"), Jack Champion (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Josh Segarra (last seen in "Overboard" (2018), Liana Liberato, Devyn Nekoda, Hayden Panettiere (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Samara Weaving (last seen in "Babylon"), Matthew Giuffrida, Andre Anthony, Henry Czerny (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Thomas Cadrot (last seen in "Star Trek Beyond"), Barry Morgan (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Chanel Mings, Erika Prevost, Jesse Camacho (last seen in "Rapture-Palooza"), Jenna Wheeler-Hughes (last seen in "Mr. Nobody"), Justin Johnson, Jason Cavalier (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Thom Newell, with a cameo from Akiva Schaffer (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), archive footage of Jack Quaid (also last seen in "Scream" (2022)) and the voice of Roger L. Jackson (ditto)

RATING: 5 out of 10 frat boys in togas (didn't this trend die in the 1990's?)

Scream (2022)

Year 16, Day 295 - 10/21/24 - Movie #4,876

BEFORE: I'm back, though I didn't really go anywhere - but I'm back from three days at New York Comic-Con. It was going to be FOUR days at New York Comic-Con, but I asked a co-worker to cover the booth on the last day, because I was physically beat after three, and also the fourth day was my birthday.  So I gave myself the day off, because I can do that.  Anything fun that was there at NYCC I basically did on the first three days, but honestly, there's not that much there for me anymore because I'm now a person in his mid-fifties, and I'm not in the target market for much of anything any more, even when I walked around the main sales floor on the convention center, I didn't see much that interested me, and I saw a lot of things that I just plain didn't understand.  Like why is there a stand that sells FUDGE, and another one that sells ramen soup?  What do either of those things have to do with comic books or sci-fi?  What's with the giant pile of pop culture "mystery boxes", like who would buy some box without knowing exactly what's inside?  Minecraft, VR, comic books I've never heard of, really I just wanted to work my booth and sell animation art & DVDs, because those are things I understand, and then go home, get some sleep and do it again.

Anyway, it's over, I survived, my boss made some money which is probably already spent because he's so far in debt, and so I'm right back where I started, wondering how long the studio can possibly stay in business if our expenses every month are larger than the money coming in. But I've lived for three years now thinking the studio will close in two months, and so far I've been wrong, still I feel that one of these days, I'm going to be right. I know from watching reality shows about restaurants that this is not a working business plan, ideally you need to take in more income than expenses, that's like Economics 101.  So we'll see.

Kyle Gallner carries over from "Jennifer's Body"

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Scream 4" (Movie #3,962)

THE PLOT: 25 years after a streak of brutal murders shocked the quiet town of Woodsboro, a new killer dons the Ghostface mask and begins targeting a group of teenagers to resurrect secrets from the town's deadly past. 

AFTER: Yes, it was just three years ago that I watched the first four "Scream" movies, which means that technically tonight's film SHOULD be called "Scream 5", but there's that pesky marketing department working overtime again, someone thinks that people will NOT go to see a movie with a number in the title, because if they haven't seen the first four films, they're going to be completely out of the loop regarding what came before.  They're not wrong, exactly, but the number in the title WOULD be helpful to distinguish this movie from the 1996 original, which has, umm, EXACTLY the same title as this one. The "Halloween" franchise kind of did the same thing, they just re-booted the story in the middle with a numberless title that was therefore the same as the first film in the franchise.  It's not like people need a calculator or an abacus to keep track of the "Scream" movies, though, there were only four before, you could literally count them on one hand UNLESS you think Americans are so stupid that they're not aware this is a sequel, in which case they're kind of tricking people to come aboard the fifth film as if it's the first, which really isn't fair because of the considerable back-story knowledge required here. 

Eh, kids today (and I can say that because I'm old now) don't even go to the movies, they just watch everything on their phones, so therefore I'm thinking this film was mis-marketed to the teens and the young viewers new to the franchise when they SHOULD have targeted the people who watched Scream 1 to 4, because those people are adults now, some of them might have pretty good incomes and some might even still go out to the movies once in a while.  But no, you do you, target the youth market and see how far that gets you when people can know go to Wikipedia and see the WHOLE PLOT before the watch the film, and some of the younger generation actually PREFER spoilers, which is another thing I'll never understand. I want to watch EVERY movie as cold as possible, ideally going in knowing NOTHING about what's to come, because what is a movie without a few surprises?  A very boring affair, indeed. 

Now, "Scream" was the movie that broke the rules, back in the day, and it did that by letting us all know that there ARE rules to horror movies.  The teens who have sex, well, they're going to die.  Anyone who says "I'll be right back..."?  Well, let's just say they're not coming right back.  They're going to die, too.  And the token black guy in an otherwise white cast?  He'll be fine, just kidding, he's already dead, he just doesn't know it yet. Also the calls are coming from inside the house, the killer's standing right behind you, and also the identity of the killer is the person you least expect, unless you're expecting it to be that person because that's so unlikely, in which case it's somebody else.  Right?  

But after four films of pointing out all the tropes and situations common to all slasher films, the "Scream" franchise soon found it had to keep getting more outlandish about the killers' identities just to keep things fresh, and so the franchise that changed everything eventually found that it had to change, too, in order to stay relevant.  Some character could be the hero of one film and then maybe the villain in the next, because wow, nobody's going to see THAT coming unless by "nobody" you mean "everybody".  Twists and turns are one thing, but the "Scream" movies really took things to the next level, way back in the day.  Now I can't tell if the characters are following the same pattern of living (and dying) as if they KNOW they're in a horror movie, or the filmmakers were trying to make things feel NEW again by relying on the old standards once again.  As a result I now can't tell if the franchise is reverting back to those old tropes in a ground-breaking way, or if they're just falling back on what worked before because the previous film just took things a bit too far, and they went so far out that they started to come back in again.  

It's hard to say if any new ground was broken here, because they brought in a whole new cast of twenty-somethings to play high-school students, but it's the SAME premise, that one (or maybe two) of them are dressing up in the Ghostface outfit and killing their classmates.  (Look, if you really want to be prom king or queen, there are easier ways than killing all your competition.). This time a girl named Tara gets THE phone call from the killer, who first pretends to be somebody from her mother's therapy group, and man, he stays on the phone a good long time before revealing that he wants to play a trivia game about the "Stab" movie franchise, and if she gets an answer wrong, he kills her best friend, or more likely, that's a bluff and he's actually waiting outside, not at her friend's house. 

Tara survives the attack, though, and shortly after that, her big sister Samantha (Sam) comes back to town to visit her in the hospital, and we learn that Sam is the biological daughter of Billy Loomis (from the first film) and she has visions of her father talking to her - really, I'm sure that's fine, unless her father's murderous intentions somehow got inherited.  A few more teens are called on the phone and lose both movie trivia AND their lives, and then it's time to check in with the veterans from the first few films, like Dewey Riley and author Gale Weathers, to see if they can help stop the new Ghostface Killer, whoever it may be.  Dewey and Gale used to be married but are now divorced (just like the actor and actress who play them) but it doesn't really matter because one has a two-picture deal and the other doesn't, if you catch my meaning.  

Sidney Prescott, who was targeted by different killers in 3 out of the 4 previous movies, also comes back after going to college and working as a crisis counselor, and really, I'd imagine that after four attempts on her life maybe she wouldn't be so eager to come back to Woodsboro, but really, what do I know about it?  Sidney and Gale follow the at-risk teens back to a house that just happens to be the site of the original "Scream" killings, a few years ago, which were the inspiration for the "Stab" franchise, the fictional movie-within-the-movie.  It turns out that somebody new has taken on the Ghostface Killer costume and started killing people JUST so there will a new and/or better addition to the "Stab" movie series, which has become very lame and predictable over time.  Look, I'm not saying the same thing happened to the "Scream" franchise, but when you point a finger at someone, you've also got three fingers pointing back at yourself, just saying.  

Killing people in the name of "This will make a great book" or "This will make a great movie" doesn't really seem like a good look here. Instead of having REAL reasons to kill the other people in town that somebody hates, they instead chose to focus on quantity over quality, essentially giving the "Stab" film filmmakers more inspiration for their next film, or for Gale's next book, but this seems more than a little misguided, but I guess you have to kill a lot of people in bulk these days if you're desperate for attention.  But come on, if you want there to be a better horror movie then by all means, go ahead and WRITE ONE instead of just killing a bunch of your neighbors and classmates then waiting for someone to call and turn that into a movie.  There are other, easier ways to achieve this too, just I don't know, maybe go to film school and graudate with honors and then bounce around from one writing gig to another for ten years until you finally get the chance to direct - OK, yeah, I can maybe see how killing five people could be seen as something of a shortcut there. 

Maybe that's the moral here, if you want a better horror movie, WRITE one, don't live one. Any questions?  Me, I think there's probably a market for the idea I just had, a horror movie called "Jump Scare".  It's just 90 minutes of tense moments, punctuated by horrible creatures or killers suddenly popping into view, and really, nothing else happens, because nothing else NEEDS to happen.  

Also starring Neve Campbell (last seen in "Scream 4"), Courteney Cox (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop", David Arquette (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Melissa Barrera (last seen in "In the Heights"), Jack Quaid (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Mikey Madison (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Jenna Ortega (last seen in "Iron Man 3"), Dylan Minnette (last seen in "Let Me In"), Jasmin Savoy Brown (last seen in "Laggies"), Mason Gooding (last seen in "Booksmart"), Sonia Ammar, Marley Shelton (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Skeet Ulrich (last seen in "Scream" (1998)), Chester Tam (last seen in "Hot Rod"), Reggie Conquest, Heather Matarazzo (last heard in "Wish"), Brooke Barnhill, Stephen West-Rogers (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Milli M. (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Christopher Speed, Chelsea Rebecca, James A. Janisse, 

with the voices of Roger L. Jackson (last heard in "Scream 4"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Adam Brody (also carrying over from "Jennifer's Body"), Jamie Kennedy (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "She's All That"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Sly") and archive footage of Scott Foley (last seen in "Scream 3"), Joshua Jackson (last seen in "Scream 2")

RATING: 3 out of 10 family connections to past victims