BEFORE: I had to work on Halloween, because somebody had to, and most of my co-workers are in their 20's or 30's, which sure, I get it, that's the prime dating and partying time in your life, and I've been there, done that. So if there's a holiday where nobody else wants to work, I'll take that shift, even if it's the Bengali Film Festival or a Kazakhstani comedy event. I had to hang the "Sorry kids, no candy" sign outside, which was a bit of a bummer, but some adults came in costume, and I got to see plenty of costumed freaks AND geeks on the subway home. I realize I'm not supposed to take people's pictures without consent, but too bad, they're on display, they knew the risks. I got home at about 11:30 (unlike Thursday night, when I got home about 1:30 am) and I'd had enough caffeinated soda during my shift that I figured I could watch this LAST horror film for October before completely shutting down.
So, yeah, umm, even though it looks like I'm posting on November 1, please note that I did what I promised, I made it to the end of October, and I at least STARTED watching this film during the final hours of Halloween. Thank God for the extra hour of sleep I got from moving the clocks back one hour - usually I hate both ends of Daylight Savings Time, it's a ridiculous and outdated concept, but you know, I'll take the extra hour now that I'm an old man, I need to sleep at some point.
Tony Todd carries over from "Candyman 3: Day of the Dead" one last time, he's had a really good run this year, appearing in 9 films overall, two franchises, 8 horror films and one documentary. Well, he's not going to win the year, he's only in like 11th place because there were certain people who appeared in SO MANY documentaries - the late Mr. Todd is out of the running, but he'll make the year-end countdown for sure.
Here's my format breakdown for October, and today I'll have to review my November line-up and pull some DVDs to get them ready to watch - so next time I'll post the actor links that will get me to Thanksgiving. So stay tuned for that -
OCTOBER
16 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): A Perfect Getaway, The Crazies, The Black Phone, Monster Summer, Daybreakers, MaXXXine, Heretic, Companion, Final Destination, Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, The Final Destination, Final Destination 5, Candyman 3: Day of the Dead, Final Destination: Bloodlines
3 watched on Netflix: Black Phone 2, Leave the World Behind, The Curse of Bridge Hollow
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Black Friday
1 watched on Hulu: Sinister
1 watched on Hulu: Sinister
1 watched on Paramount+: Cursed Friends
2 watched on Peacock: They/Them, Candyman (1992)
24 TOTAL
THE PLOT: Plagued by a recurring violent nightmare, a college student returns home to find the one person who can break the cycle and save her family from the horrific fate that inevitably awaits them.
AFTER: Finally, FINALLY this franchise didn't just make the same movie again, they did something very different with this most recent film (from 2025) and wow, it's a breath of fresh air. I've been complaining for a week now that each film is just like the last one, only on a roller coaster, or now it's a bridge collapse, but the rest of the film plays out almost EXACTLY like the last one did, only the characters' names and the methods of their executions change from film to film. I mean, sure, if you find a formula that WORKS and each film in the series is profitable and makes more money than the last one did, by all means proceed, but don't you sort of get tired after a while of doing the same thing, again and again? I sure did in my career, I realized I was caught in a never-ending circle of producing animated features, then sending them to festivals, promoting them, failing to get distribution, then fund-raising so we could start the whole cycle over again. The time to get off that merry-go-round is when you realize that the ride doesn't GO anywhere, you're right back where you started, only you're three or seven years older now and much more tired.
That's not to say I'm not on a DIFFERENT kind of circular ride now, but at least my work now is seasonal, everything changes every six months, or each year I get to work the same festival for the same people I worked at last year, but hey, the films are new, or now there are women playing basketball instead of dudes. Right now there are still surprises to be found at both jobs, like on Friday they had me at a stadium stand I had never worked at before, and I learned that we do sell things like Veggie Crisps and Pocky and canned Starbucks cold brew. Who knew? This Grab-and-Go stand was very fancy, and my shift was fairly easy, all I had to do at the end of the night was restock the shelves and sweep the floor. Sure, I'll do that again if they'll let me. At the theater I worked two days of NewFest, then went on vacation, and since I came back they had me on a concert for a white rapper (?) named George Watsky, then a big premiere for the Amazon "Lord of the Rings" show season 3, and then a Russian (Kazakhstani?) comedy show.
I want to talk about vacation for a minute tonight, not the most recent one, but a couple from the past, because they relate to tonight's film. Sometimes on vacation I have had experiences where I feel like maybe I want to avoid disasters, I won't say I had a "premonition" like the ones seen in the "Final Destination" movies, but like the characters in tonight's film, my mother trained me to see injury and disaster everywhere, to make sure I remained safe at all times. To some extent this is the main function of a parent, to imagine what could harm their child and then try to prevent that. From kitchen accidents to not allowing me to play sports, Mom was just trying to be a good Mom, and make sure I didn't die before she did. So I remember being at the Grand Canyon, and making sure I didn't step too close to the edge. I remember being in Vegas and when we couldn't get tickets for the Stratosphere, which is that really tall structure with the rides on top, I figured it was probably for the best. And when I visited the CN Tower in Toronto, there was a section of the floor that was plexiglass, and you could stand on it and look down. Umm, no way dog, that's not for me, I don't care if the plexiglass is three feet thick, I'm not taking the chance because I had a big lunch. With my luck, I feel like that will be the day that the screws come loose and I plunge to my death.
Yes, I am afraid of heights, but I did once visit the observation deck of the old World Trade Center, and I've been to the top of the Empire State building. We rode that giant ferris wheel in Las Vegas, and I've been on roller coasters and such, but the whole time, I'm on high alert. So I don't live in a tall building, just a two-story house. I've been on several cruises, and looking over the side of the ship gives me the creeps, so I just don't do that. High bridges, high buildings, I deal with it as best as I can, but honestly if I fell off of something high, as I fell to my death, I'd probably be thinking, "Yeah, this seems about right, THIS is why I was afraid of heights for so long." and I'd probably be at peace with it. But skydiving, bungee jumping, anything like that, it's not for me.
So the FINAL "Final Destination" film flashes back to a time in the 1960's when a very high observation tower opened, similar to the Space Needle or the CN Tower, called the Sky View. We see the whole disaster first, believing that it's the premonition of this woman named Iris, only to find out that it's really a dream that a college student is having. And Iris wasn't able to save anyone, or so it appears, and unlike the other films, we're left with just all of the death and mayhem and destruction, and nobody stops it. Well, who would have thought that finishing the construction of the tower five months early was a bad idea? Similarly, who signed off on the thick dance floor made of glass, that people would be jumping and stomping and running around on? And then all the added weight of the restaurant, the customers, the food, the waiters and chefs, not to mention the BAND and the back-up singers and the grand piano, for Chrissakes. Like who determined how much weight this observation tower could hold, and how did they do it? Like with bridges I know they keep driving heavier and heavier trucks over it and then when it collapses, they know what the weight limit is, so then they just rebuild the bridge and post the sign saying, "Maximum 200 tons" or whatever, but how does that work for towers?
Anyway, as you might imagine, the Sky View tower is a terrible idea and it was built wrong or constructed poorly or maybe it was built for Death's amusement, creating all kinds of horrible ways for people to die - they could fall to their deaths, they could get cut up by the broken glass, they could hit a beam on the way down and turn into a giant bloodstain, or they could have a falling grand piano turn them into a human Flat Stanley. So many good choices, and the film ends up showing all of them to us - EXCEPT maybe the urban legend about throwing a penny off a very high tower and the gravity causing that coin to kill someone after it reaches maximum velocity. Sure, they hint about that here, and a kid DOES throw a penny off the tower, but it has entirely different and much more fatal results than the legend usually suggests. I mean, why kill one person with a penny when you can kill several hundred?
Stefani wakes up from this nightmare, and it's one she's been having for months. Her college grades are starting to suffer because she can't sleep, and she may lose her academic scholarship if she can't keep her GPA up. So she returns home to check in with her family, after remembering that she has a grandmother named Iris who she has never met. Her father, Marty, is against Stefani tracking down her maternal grandmother because of past behavior, Iris apparently DID prevent the SkyView Tower disaster and saved hundreds of lives, BUT as we all know now, that's just going to piss off Death, and he'll be coming around on clean-up duty to kill all of the survivors in horrible and outlandish ways. Stefani's family does NOT believe this, though, they regard Iris and Stefani's absent mother, Darlene, as insane crackpots who wrote many many letters to their family members with their suggestions on how to stay safe and avoid all of the things that are trying to kill them.
Stefani reads the letters and tracks down her grandmother, who lives in a fortified cabin with all kinds of security measures to keep anyone from entering, which could accidentally somehow lead to Death coming in and killing her. And apparently he's been trying for decades, but Iris has remained on high alert and has succeeded so far - however, now she's got cancer so it seems that time is finally running out, of course the cancer could be considered natural causes compared to all the deaths we've seen in previous movies. And as we saw with Clear Rivers, you can live for years if you act like a shut-in and keep the world out, but then, really, what kind of a life is that? So Iris prepares to hand over all of her notes to Stefani, passing the torch because she thinks Stefani will be a believer. In doing so, Iris has to leave the cabin to give her the book, and WHOOPS, the weather vane arrow falls off the roof and now she's dead. Well, at least she saw it coming. For 50 years.
I guess maybe that's the point, because if you spend your days and nights being on high alert, always ALWAYS avoiding any activity that can lead to your death, then you might miss out on life. Ferris Bueller once told us that "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." But if you slow down as much as Iris did, you could miss just about everything. This is a good thing to bring up on Halloween, because when I was a kid, that was maybe the one day each year where I was NOT under constant supervision, I could walk around the neighborhood wearing a mask, because in my town, everybody kind of knew everybody, and I could accept candy from strangers. Sure, what's the harm, a few needles in my circus peanuts? Nobody eats those, anyway. We know now that the risk of tainted candy was ALWAYS exaggerated, it never happened, except in one case where somebody was trying to hurt their own kid and blame it on the "neighbors". Anyway All Souls Day was a church holiday or something, so my parents couldn't take me trick or treating even if they wanted to, which they didn't. Later as a teen I got into a bit of trouble because I couldn't beg for candy any more, but I could go out in a costume and do other things.
These days, helicopter parenting is the norm - "You want me to bring my kid to a STRANGER'S house and let them eat something that a stranger TOUCHED? Not without hand sanitizer, an x-ray machine and a list of known sexual offenders in my neighborhood!" It's gotten so bad that we had just TWO trick-or-treaters this year - oh, well, more candy for me I guess, I did buy a whole bag of it. And the new trend is "trunk or treat", which I've already discussed here, it's a church or HA event where people park their cars in a circle and parents give out pre-screened candy (I assume) from their cars. And also I assume there are no blinking lights, no loud noises and everything is covered in soft fur or bubble-wrap, because god forbid that little Noah or Madisyn touch anything sharp, hard, or too cold. Jesus Christmas, we're raising a whole generation of super-sensitive entitled children who will grow up to become reclusive anti-social adults who will die if they eat anything with tree nuts or made in a factory where tree nuts were.
Oh, yeah, the final "Final Destination" film - there's one character with a peanut allergy and his brother gets the bright idea to feed him peanut butter cups while they're in a hospital so that he will "die" or perhaps just flatline from his severe peanut allergy and rather than use his epipen, they'll just have the handy doctors bring him back to life, and that will be a great work-around for Death's curse, since he "died" for a few minutes, Death will just move on and leave the rest of the family alone. Well, it's a great idea on paper, but let's just say it doesn't really work out the way they planned it. So we've got to update the list again, don't ever go to a hospital because there are a lot of things there that can kill you, like, say an MRI machine. I know, I know, modern medicine says they've got all the bugs worked out, but they didn't count on some idiot bringing a metal wheelchair into the room with the giant magnet.
Let's see, what else, don't have a garden party in the yard with a trampoline, gas BBQ grill, shards of glass that can fall into your drink, and a randomly-activated lawnmower with no kill switch. Really, in this movie, any switch on a machine is a "kill switch". Never get a nose ring if you work in a tattoo shop, I'm down with that, I think nose rings are disgusting and ridiculous, now they're also deadly. Watch out for random soccer balls, sanitation trucks, and big, dangerous RVs that can flip over into large puddles and leave you drowning when you can't unfasten the seat belt. Weather vanes, elevators, escalators, cars, trains and speeding buses, I think we've just about covered everything that can kill you over the last six "Final Destination" films.
Meanwhile, those of us who have suffered through ALL of the "Final Destination" films are finally rewarded here when they give the mystery coroner, mortician and expert about cheating Death a a name - Tony Todd's character. His name is William John Bludworth, or "JB" and this film also shows his origin story - what do you know, he also was the survivor of a disaster and he was originally supposed to die, so I guess that means he knows a few things about being stalked by Death, and maybe also how to avoid it. In two separate movies he suggests to the doomed survivors that they each kill someone and therefore be granted extra life beyond their expiration date, but we're not sure if JB himself ever killed anyone to extend his own life - but just like Iris, eventually cancer catches up with JB after he's watched all of his friends die over the years. The actor himself had cancer so it's a case of art imitating life, perhaps.
Before I go, and we close the horror movie vault for the next 11 months, I'll make my "elevator pitch" for the next "Final Destination" movie, if they make another one. They haven't done one on a boat yet, so why not set the next film on a cruise ship? There are plenty of things on a big ocean liner that can kill you, and I happen to know that each cruise ship has a morgue, since they usually cater to an older crowd, the chances are good that somebody will die during any cruise, even if from natural causes. And the accident with the premonition could take place on any island destination, we went to Curacao, for example, and we visited some caves that escaped slaves used to hide in, and I got extremely claustrophobic and bowed out of the tour, thinking that the cave might have been there for hundreds of years, but maybe that was the day there would be a cave-in, or I would get stuck in a narrow passage and they'd have to jackhammer me out, which would cause a cave-in. Well, that didn't happen, but I stand by my decision to leave the cave, when you get that feeling, you've just got to split.
Before that, the ship visited Aruba, and we visited a butterfly farm, there was a joke sign that read, "Beware of Attack Butterfly" - but what if that were real, what if you could die while visiting a butterfly farm? I can think of many more things on Caribbean islands that could kill you - it could be an earthquake, or a mudslide, a flood caused by a hurricane, etc. Also on the ship there's drowning in a swimming pool, falling into the ocean, getting weighed down by an anchor, or even eating too much at the buffet. Something could go wrong in the kitchen, or during a stage show, or a statue or an ice sculpture could fall on somebody. On two cruises, our ship sailed right under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and it seemed like it was a tight fit - maybe somebody's head could be knocked off by the ship sailing under a bridge, if they climbed up higher than the top deck somehow. Or there's always death by chocolate fountain on Dessert Night, I've really got a ton of ideas here. And best of all, once people from the tour group were back on the ship, there really would be nowhere for them to go, they'd be stuck there while Death picked them off, one by one. So come on, let's make "Final Destination: Last Port of Call" happen, what do you say? Or do you prefer "Final Destination: Uncharted Waters"? "Final Destination: All Aboard"? Hollywood, let me know what you think, my idea is for sale.
Directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein
Also starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones (last seen in "Wind River"), Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore (last seen in "The Black Phone 2"), Alex Zahara (last seen in "Horns"), April Telek (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Tinpo Lee (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Brec Bassinger, Gabrielle Rose (last seen in "Maudie"), Max Lloyd-Jones (last seen in "Woman of the Hour"), Matty Finochio (ditto), Brenna Llewellyn, Natasha Burnett (last seen in "The Mountain Between Us"), Jayden Oniah, Mark Brandon (last seen in "The Show"), Yvette Ferguson, Garfield Wilson (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), Justin Stone, Bernard Cuffling (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Travis Turner, Noah Bromley, Ardy Ramezani, Panou (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Robbie Segulam, Megan Hui (last seen in "The Gambler"), Janelle Beadall, Kwesi Ameyaw (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Troy Mclaughlin, Kim Kondrashoff (last seen in "Stakeout"), Nikolai Witschl (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Jeanie Cloutier, Ethel Pitchford, Sophia Chapdelaine, Luke Alfred Bateman, Shawn C. Orr (last seen in "The Smashing Machine")
RATING: 6 out of 10 giant Jenga pieces
