Halloween 5 (1989)

Every long-running horror series has a quintessential installment, the one where all the cliches and tropes are firmly in place, but they haven't yet descended into baldfaced gimmickry, like making the episode "funny" or setting it in outer space. I hereby submit that Halloween 5 is the quintessential Halloween sequel, even though, no, in fact because it isn't very good. It starts with a recap of the previous movie, showing how Michael Myers survived certain death yet again, after which he stumbles into some old dude's hovel and... well, he just up and crashes there until Halloween rolls around again! That's right, Michael Myers, mad slasher, just kinda chills at this cat's pad for an entire year, and unless the guy is a fucking saint or something we have to assume that, at the very least, Michael Myers paid for his own groceries and chipped in a little bit for the utilities. Seriously, think about that for a minute. Imagine all the day-to-day shit that two roommates splitting a really small place would have to hash out, and then imagine that one of those roommates is Michael fucking Myers. Did Michael Myers put little sticky labels on his food so the old guy wouldn't eat it? Did they argue over whose turn it was to feed the parrot? (Yes, they have a parrot. A parrot!) Did one of them ever walk in on the other one jerking off? When you start thinking about the practicalities of the situation, the sheer absurdity of it completely overshadows everything else that happens in this movie, which is too bad because otherwise it hits all the Halloween notes we've come to expect. Michael Myers dons his William Shatner mask. Michael Myers lurks in the bushes and the background. Michael Myers chases one of his female relatives around with a knife. Michael Myers kills several luckless bystanders. Michael Myers' doctor rants and raves and overacts, ultimately achieving nothing. It's like a ballet, if ballet featured more brutal murders, which I think we can all agree it should. Oh, and as a bonus, this chapter also features the incomparably fine "Tina", the acme of Halloween victim-babe hotness, trumping even Nancy Loomis in her underwear, which is no mean feat:

Of all the classic slashers, only Friday the 13th Part 5 trotted out more concentrated wet dream fodder, with its double dose of "Robin" and "Violet":

Both cut down in the prime of their horny lives.
This, THIS is why serial killings should be illegal.

So while Halloween 5 won't be winning any awards (except maybe one of those stupid ones, like the Saturn Award or something), consider checking it out. Tina's legs are not to be missed, and, if nothing else, you'll never have to watch another Halloween sequel again. And won't it be nice to have that checked off your list?

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Happy Hallowe'en.

Child's Play 3 (1991)

The saddest entry in any horror franchise is the one that makes that last, floundering attempt to be scary before descending entirely into winking self-parody. The Child's Play/Chucky series (based on the execrable "My Buddy" doll, which it hilariously outlived by decades) was never very serious (or good) to begin with, and it's clearly just spinning its wheels here, but at least it's still trying to be a horror movie, instead of pummeling us with a bunch of tiresome one-liners and celebrity cameos like some sort of misguided Roseanne reunion special that doesn't even have the decency to feature both Beckys, naked, making out with each other. Not that there aren't one-liners, of course (this is a 1980s horror sequel), and the premise is fucking ridiculous (Chucky the killer doll mails himself to a military academy, where he befriends a thoroughly detestable knockoff of Webster) (yes, even more detestable than the actual Webster), but there are a couple of gruesome murders, the main chick's best friend is a hot redhead (I want her), there's not one but two scenes where Chucky is thrown into the garbage (an excellent idea deserves repeating), and, if the credits are to be believed, somewhere in this movie there's an actress named "Aimee Joy Slutske", and if she wasn't the most popular stripper working second shift at the IHOP, well, goddamn it, she deserved to be.

Aimee Joy Slutske, probably.

Unfortunately, even Aimee Joy Slutske's ostensible charms can't save this shitbasket of a movie, mainly because Chucky's intended victim is such a cloying, willfully obtuse little sneak-thief asshole that there's not a human being on Earth who will be rooting for his survival, which is kind of a problem when the entire plot hinges on rescuing him from a gruesome fate that he totally deserves. Seriously, he's the kind of kid that, when the surgeon says "We almost lost your son," his parents say "Try harder next time." If he were my child, our secret parental code word would be "hey kid, get in the van". It's a lie to say you'll never hate a small black child more because Rudy Huxtable still exists, but at least Rudy Huxtable ultimately grew up to star in porn. At least according to unattributed articles people keep posting on my Facebook feed.

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Redheads! Contact me! I'm on the Facebook!

American Horror House (2012)

A clear riff on American Horror Story, a show that, at the time, hadn't yet descended into irredeemable, two-headed stupidity, this is yet another sorority house horror about bitchy, ugly sorority girls who are terrorized by several killer ghosts (including then-Florida governor Rick Scott) (trust me, it's the least of his evils), the victims of a mad slasher who's still creeping around, adding to their ranks. The kills are plentiful, gory, and stupid; it's about as scary as nuking a burrito; and the acting is on par with someone in a coma. Also, what is with the broad playing the violin instructor? How does someone who acts in sub-rent horror movies even afford that much plastic surgery? (Then again, she obviously got the budget package, so never mind.) Pretty much the sole bright spot is the main chick, primarily because she walks around in her underwear for an extended period of time:

This shot makes the movie look way better than it actually is.

One asshole even manages to flub the movie's best line ("Life's a bitch and so are you!")! It's a total crash & burn on every level, and bad even when compared to other sorority house movies. When you can't even live up to the lofty standards of something that usually has "National Lampoon's" appended to the title, you really need to pack up your fake blood and your underwear chicks and just go the fuck home.

Actually, feel free to leave one of those underwear chicks with me. I'll take either one of the blondes.

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The Goonies 'R' Not Good Enough

Spielberg: "So here's the basic idea: it's like Indiana Jones, but for kids. We'll cast Rudy, Short Round, the dirty Corey, and some fat-ass as the core group (I know some of those references refer to movies that haven't even been produced yet, just bear with me here), plus an older kid so parents don't freak out, and a couple of teenage chicks for the dads to ogle. We'll make one just straight-up pants-wetting hot, and her friend more stealth-hot. So these kids are all gonna have to move soon because, I dunno, some nonsense. Maybe because of eminent domain, or... the local country club is expanding! That's it: asshole rich people. Like Caddyshack. So they decide to have one final adventure together after they find a map to pirate treasure that just happens to be hidden in the main kid's attic, except it turns out the map and the pirates and the treasure are real. Lots of people have tried to find it, but none of them were plucky kids with no frame of reference for finding the treasure or any experience whatsoever, so of course our kids are the ones who figure it all out. First though, they have to get past these crooks, who are camped out right over the treasure site. The crooks catch them snooping around, but after they watch one crook torment his mutant, deformed, retarded brother by singing to him in Italian, the crooks forget why they grabbed the kids in the first place and just let them go. The kids sneak back in to look for the treasure, but... Wait, you know what? The crooks should catch one of the kids. We'll make it the fat one. Fat kids don't run so fast. So anyway, they catch the fat kid but the other kids make it into this underground labyrinth that's like Indiana Jones meets, oh, I dunno? Dungeons & Dragons? Kids still like that shit, right? I put it in E.T. so they must. When shit starts to get heavy some of the kids balk and want to escape, and in one part I think it would be great if they bang on some pipes in an attempt to summon help and the pipes are connected to the very country club that's running the kids out. Then one of the country club toilets could explode in a geyser of water and put the head of the guy who's sitting on it comically through the ceiling! And hey, maybe it's even someone who was a jerk to the kids earlier! Classic! Regardless, our main kid delivers a big pep talk so everyone decides to forge ahead after all and despite several deathtraps -- like Indy, again -- they finally find the treasure. Wow! But then the crooks find them and it looks like all is lost until the mutant shows up and saves the day! Why? Well, he previously bonded with the fat kid over candy because -- ha ha! -- that kid is just so fat, right? Anyway, we'll throw in an octopus attack (if it doesn't work we can always edit it out, while failing to edit out later dialogue referring to it), some mild racism, maybe have a scene where the hot chick tongues down one of the younger kids... What's that called? Pedo-something? I'll look it up. At any rate, in the end there's lots of special effects and maybe something falls down and it seems like they've lost the treasure forever, but then they didn't and everyone's home is saved even though that really doesn't make any sense when you consider even a tiny percentage of the legal issues that would ensue. Oh, and at the very end the pirate ship lifts anchor and sails dramatically away because, fuck it, ghosts. Or the power of magic. Some bullshit. What do you think?"

Studio: "Yeah. That sounds great, Steven. Let's maybe have someone else direct this one, okay?"

Above: The real reason this movie is so fondly remembered.

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Die Hard 3: Try Harder (The Novelization)

Die Hard 3 is one of cinema’s biggest piles of shit (Disagree? You’re wrong.), which is hardly surprising since it didn’t even start out as a Die Hard movie. See, the original plan was for Part 3 to feature terrorists seizing a cruise ship, only to run afoul of a vacationing Die Hard, and by all indications ("all indications" being the sentence I just wrote) it would’ve been awesome. Unfortunately, some assholes went and made the movie Under Siege, which was basically the same thing, so naturally they dropped that idea because Hollywood would never release two movies with a remarkably similar premise all but simultaneously. Instead, they took some random script nobody could be bothered with up to that point, cut/pasted Die Hard’s name into it, and shot that, completely ignoring the fact that the script in question was criminally retarded. I mean, come the fuck on - the big gimmick is that the bad guy baffles the entire NYC police force with riddles we all learned in grade school. Cops may be a lot of things (slack-asses, corrupt, thugs), but they aren’t stupid. It’s like laziness and hackwork had a baby, and then it shit all over you while you were holding it. Die Hard with an Anus does feature one brilliant scene though: the jaw-dropping bit where Die Hard is walking through Harlem wearing a sandwich board and it’s suddenly revealed that the sandwich board says "I hate niggers". So how does the novelization handle this tense yet hilarious scene? By bitching out and having the sign read "I hate everybody".

What. The. FUCK???

Look, I get it. As an African American myself (hey, as far as you know), I hate the N word too. And if that’s your beef, fine, have the sign say "I hate black people" or something. But don’t set the whole thing up and then punk out entirely at the last second, especially when you have no problem using racial slurs against white people just a few sentences later. Fucking hypocrite. Seriously, how swollen does your vagina have to be to turn you into such a sniveling, PC cunt? (Oh, and don’t try to pretend you changed this scene to protect the reader from "spoilers". If someone didn’t want a movie spoiled for them, they wouldn’t be reading the goddamned novelization.)

And it’s not like the writing gets any better as the story progresses. At one point Die Hard yells "Bomb!" and we’re told nobody is impressed because they’re jaded New Yorkers. Then, 23 pages later, he yells "Bomb!" again (it’s a different bomb) and everyone panics because "This was New York. Anything was possible." Does the author really think that we aren’t going to remember what he said just a few pages ago? How dumb does he think we are? Fuck you, asshole.

So this book licks bung, but it may still be of interest to some people, because like a lot of movie novelizations it contains scenes that weren’t included in the final version of the film, including the original ending where Die Hard and the main bad guy play Russian roulette with a rocket launcher. (This ending is incredibly stupid, by the way.) For my money though, the guy who wrote this ("D. Chiel", obviously a made-up name. Or part of one, anyway.) should stick to subjects he’s more familiar with. Maybe he could write a book called "Cry Hard".

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The Chair (2007)

Wow, the chickie-poo in this movie is a real cutie, and... is she on meds? Why, yes, yes she is. I think I'm in love. And it's a good thing she is so damn adorable, because this really is a movie about a house that's haunted by a goddamned chair. The first half hour or so is pretty spooky though, and I like how they made the main chick more curious than frightened, which at least gives her a plausible reason to keep hanging around the place. Eventually she gets possessed, and for a while the story grinds to a halt because all she does after this is stare out the window and eat cat food. She's like a hotter version of my grandmother. Finally she icepicks her ex-boyfriend in the noggin, and then she uses the aforementioned chair, which she's Rube Goldberged into some sort of unnecessarily-complicated torture device, to give her sister and some annoying little kid the business. The end is pretty stupid (How dumb is this kid? Why doesn't anybody call the cops? And that guy who shows up at the end, whose ass did he fall out of?), but overall it's totally worth catching just for the main chick; I can't remember the last time I crushed on an actress this hard. She's the type of girl who looks better lounging around in sweats than most women look in a $1000 cocktail dress. Especially my last wife, because when I found out she dropped a cool grand on one lousy cocktail dress her accessories ended up being two black eyes and a necklace made out of her own teeth.

For the last time, I promise not to put it
 on YouTube. Just take your clothes off.

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