Final Destination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RATING: 5 out of 10 boarding passes

Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directed by Casey Tebo

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

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

The Curse of Bridge Hollow

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

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

Rob Riggle carries over from "Cursed Friends". 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cursed Friends

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

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

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

Harvey Guillen carries over from "Companion". 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directed by Laura Murphy

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

RATING: 4 out of 10 baby goats

Companion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directed by Drew Hancock

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

RATING: 6 out of 10 available language options

Heretic

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

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

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

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

Sophie Thatcher carries over from "MaXXXine". 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RATING: 7 out of 10 loose wooden matches

MaXXXine

Year 18, Day 283 - 10/10/26 - Movie #5,457

BEFORE: If I'm posting late today, it's because I'm going out to a beer festival in Brooklyn, which I hope turns out to be better than the one I went to in Staten Island last month, the one that ran out of beer - and BBQ - after about an hour and a half. Really, really poor planning, I must say - or was it? I noticed that the people with VIP tickets were still being served while those of us with general admission tickets got generally screwed. Anyway, I'm hoping to make up for that today by drinking ALL the beer, and we'll see how long it takes me to find my way home and recover. We're going to find out. 

Kevin Bacon carries over from "They/Them".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "X" (Movie #4,879") and "Pearl" (Movie #4,880)

THE PLOT: In 1980's Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks L.A., a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past. 

AFTER: OK, I'm back from the beer festival, but it took me MUCH longer than it should have to get home. My usual subway train, the one I live closest to, is down for the weekend, I knew that going in, but of course I didn't know that back when I bought the ticket. So I had to figure out a combination of two buses to get to this particular place in Brooklyn, one bus I was already familiar with and the other one, not so much, but what's to know? I just needed to know where it linked up with the one I usually take to go drinking at the Navy Yard and how far it would drop me from today's event. I got there in 90 minutes, OK I was a tiny bit late, but not much - and why did it take me over two and a half hours to get home? The event ended at 4:30 pm and I didn't walk into the house until 7:15 or so. I'm pretty sure I didn't black out somewhere, I was getting more and more sober during the trip home, it's just that the damn bus has to stop every two blocks to let people out, and the subway just doesn't. That's got to be it. I did pop into a restaurant and use their restroom between buses (and it's a good thing I did) but that doesn't account for the missing hour. Then I took a two-hour nap when I got home, so really, that's the whole day gone. BUT I have tomorrow free, the NY WNBA team, the Liberty, lost the second round of the playoffs, so Sunday's shift is cancelled. I really had mixed feelings, like I wanted to root for the team but I was also kind of rooting for an extra day off. Oh well, I volunteered for that shift, so I still get points for stepping up.

Anyway, I watched "X" and "Pearl" two Octobers ago (Mia Goth's birthday is October 25, please wish her well) and at that time I debated whether I should go out of my way to watch the third film in the pseudo-series, I think it was just on HBO Max at the time, which was maybe called just "Max" at the time. But I had my chain to Christmas all figured out, and I didn't want to drop anything, so I passed on "MaXXXine". I figured as long as I circled back to it within five years, no big deal, and it only took me two - AND this film serves a purpose by getting me closer to my final destination this month, which will be the "Final Destination" movies at long last. You see that, it turns out that The Chain was playing the long game, it saved this movie for when I needed it, it's funny that way and I should trust it more. Like tonight I'm tempted to get off the path I'm on because I see how this film could link to the recent "Frankenstein" film (via Mia Goth) and the more recent "Weapons" (via Clayton Farris). But then I don't think I'd make it back to the "Final Destination" films in time, so I'm going to go with my gut and save those films for a future year, perhaps they'll link up with each other or more films in two or three years time. 

So today I'm closing the book on the "X" trilogy, where Mia Goth played a couple different characters, both Maxine and Pearl, who was the older lady in "X" and then "Pearl" went back in time to tell us her twisted killer back-story. I'm sure every actor would love to be in a series like this, where they play a few different characters and do a lot of weird stuff to show their range, it's like Michael J. Fox in "Back to the Future" and if you're lucky, you get like ONE of these in your career, unless you're Eddie Murphy, in which case you can have as many as you want. But let's focus on Maxine and Pearl. Maxine was the only survivor of that Texas adult film star massacre a few years back in 1979, and apparently she's still a person of interest, because somebody is roaming around the seedy streets of L.A. looking for her. I mean, you can watch this film without knowing what exactly went down before, but for the full effect, you really need to watch all three movies. 

This final (?) film in the series is set in 1985, during the real-life killings of the Night Stalker, and honestly it's a bit unclear at times whether the stalker seen in this film is the SAME Night Stalker that was in the real-life news, or a different one. I mean, the ending here makes it kind of clear that there were two people, and one was specifically looking for Maxine Mink, for reasons. I'm just saying that there are a lot of killings in this film, and they don't break down exactly which ones were done by the Night Stalker and which were done by the Maxine Stalker. Anyway, Maxine's friends who are also strippers and/or porn stars keep trying to get her to join them at a party somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, there's a rich guy in from out of town who's paying girls a lot of money, but then some of them start turning up missing, or dead and dumped in a very nice cemetery with Satanic symbols carved into them. 

This couldn't have come at a worse time, Maxine has just landed a role in a REAL (non-porn) movie - OK, it's a horror movie but those are good too, a lot of actors got their break from being in horror movies. Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta and that Bacon fellow too, I think. So Maxine is not going to let some stalker killing her friends ruin her chances of becoming a household name. Yeah, umm, sorry, but you can't really expect to be a household name after doing x-rated films, unless you're Sylvester Stallone I guess. But other people like Marilyn Chambers and Ron Jeremy could only go so far. (Side note, with NY Comic Con going on right now, today could be the anniversary of the time we had a real porn star signing stuff in our booth, it was Julia Ann. She got a lot of attention and drew a bunch of people to come see our DVDs.)

The stalker leaves behind a VHS tape which contains the "Farmer's Daughters" film that Maxine and her now-dead friends were trying to make six years before, as if somebody's trying to blackmail her or link her to those murders. A private investigator then contacts her in person and tells her to be at a specific address that night, or her past will be revealed to everyone. But rather than go to that address, Maxine contacts her agent, who steps in and makes sure that private investigator meets an untimely end in a car crusher. Very "Grand Theft Auto". But all of this is still making her late for work on "Puritan II" and disappointing that film's director, who's threatening to replace her in the role. 

So she decides to resolve things over the weekend, she eventually DOES go to that address, with a couple of cops following her, and well, no spoilers. This film doesn't have that many secrets left and I'm not going to blow them here. But all in all, this is kind of weak sauce compared with what went down in "X" and to a lesser extent, "Pearl". Diminishing returns on sequels, I suppose, or perhaps someone was just running out of story and trying to extend what didn't need to be extended. The director initially teased that there would be a fourth film, but has since changed his plans. Well, we do have to prioritize, and "Smile 3" is maybe a little bit more important, don't you think? 

Nice cameo from the "Psycho" house, though, it's good to see a Hitchcock reference these days. There's also a house here that appeared in the movie "Body Double". 

Directed by Ti West (director of "X" and "Pearl")

Also starring Mia Goth (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Elizabeth Debicki (last heard in "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway"), Moses Sumney (last seen in "Creed"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Unstoppable"), Halsey (last heard in "Sing 2"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Mank"), Giancarlo Esposito (last seen in "The Electric State"), Simon Prast (last seen in "X"), Sophie Thatcher (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Uli Latukefu (last seen in "Next Goal Wins"), Chloe Farnworth (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Deborah Geffner (last seen in "Southside with You"), Ned Vaughn (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Larry Fessenden (last heard in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Toby Huss (last seen in "Sword of Trust"), Charley Rowan McCain, Daniel Lench, Brad Swanick, Susan Pingleton (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Zachary Mooren (last seen in "Cat Person"), Marcus Lavoi (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Taylor Kowalski (last seen in "The Secret Life of Bees"), Pegah Rashti, Alison Wonderland, Kristin Carey (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Cecilia Kim, Clayton Farris, Chelsea Brea, Vera Myers (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Meredith VanCuyk, Allen Waiserman 

and archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Reggie"), Tipper Gore and Dee Snider. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 religious protestors