Notes from the Abyss

Yeeeeah, I've been lousy about this blog concept. I do have bullet points, though!

• I finally have a solid book concept and a title to go with it. I don't want to get into more details until I have an outline and a few chapters hammered out, but I'm extremely excited about where this is going. Right now I'm looking at how I can reorganize the editorial structure at Classic-Horror.com so that I can take a six-month sorta-sabbatical to write the damned thing.
  
• I've seen Star Trek three times now and I'm going for a fourth tonight. In part, it's because my brain is just geeking out about all the little intricacies of J.J. Abrams' brave new Trek universe, but mostly it's because I have a couple of friends who geek out even harder -- physically flailing with joy -- while they watch. It's one of those things that makes being a film fan so rewarding.
• My girlfriend and I have been working through the entire run of Supernatural -- we're two-thirds of the way through Season 4 right now -- and it's amusing as hell. She absolutely adores the brotherly interactions of the Winchester boys and the overall story arc, but she's very easily grossed out by gore and horrible death -- two things that SPN has in surprising abundance for a network television series. Sometimes she'll make me rewatch an episode in the same night just so she can relive some of the banter between Sam and Dean. Other times I'll have to shield her from monsters opening a maw of disgusting fangs or a particularly expressive arterial spray.
• The new Friday the 13th is a rather listless exercise in brutality, one that actually makes me pine for the days when Jason Voorhees was more into the quick, creative, over-the-top kill. I never wanted to use the verb "pine" and the name "Jason Voorhees" in the same sentence, but here we are. I was actually describing Jason Lives in faintly glowing terms to my mother because the new version put me off so much. Look for a review over at Classic-Horror in the next week.
• I cannot stop watching the last four minutes of the Glee pilot. It's like crack on iTunes.
• I'm working on a new horror-themed fanvid, this time related to the Hammer era. I'll probably post it online sometime in late August.
• I still haven't seen Drag Me to Hell and it's killing me a little inside.

Finally, Classic-Horror.com's Tenth Birthday celebration begins on Monday, June 15th with a brand-new design, some new site features, and more!

The Great Unwatched: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)

Part of: Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan Box Set

Director: Tom McLoughlin

Runtime: 86 minutes

I'll admit, I had fully intended to get some work done while this played. However, I couldn't ever seem to find a decent time to stop watching and pick up my laptop. McLoughlin seems to get the appeal behind Jason Voorhees. Not the appeal behind the Friday the 13th films, mind you, which have a very generic sort of draw in that, up to this point, they'd been fairly rote killfests.

No, McLoughlin gets Jason as an urban mythological figure, a modern antihero. He's the beefy guy that the action hero goes up against in the film's longest fight scene, the one that seems to shrug off all direct physical assaults, often with a look of "oh please stop annoying me with your fists." The kind of guy who's usually only be defeated through ingenuity and sneakiness, except now he's in a movie where those two traits are in short supply and there's no Chuck Norris to send him back where he came from. McLoughlin essentially took what Jason had come to represent within the pop cultural zeitgeist and made it canon -- what was once a seemingly unstoppable killer became an utterly unstoppable killer, thanks to a borrowed plot element from Ghost of Frankenstein and a helpful dose of inexplicable zombiedom. Then he stirred in a winking self-knowledge of both Jason's new icon status (the James Bond pastiche right before the title) and the horror genre in general (the "Karloff's" store).

It's a surprisingly entertaining film -- more entertaining than it has any right to be, given that its the sixth film in a generally mediocre series. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks -- or at least give the old tricks a little more shine and sparkle.

Worth the Purchase: Yup.

Stats: 9/400 movies watched in seven days.
Currently Projected Completion Date: January 1, 2010
Completion Date Goal: February 25, 2010

The Great Unwatched: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Part of: Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan box set

Director: Danny Steinmann

Runtime: 92 minutes

I think I'm beginning to see the appeal behind the slasher genre. It's not that the films are particularly noteworthy in and of themselves so much as they're comforting. For your money, you get a fairly strict structure (kids do stupid things, maniac kills them) that challenges filmmakers to make the required parts more and more outrageous in order to maintain audience attention. If you ignore the plot (typically idiotic) and character "development" (rudimentary and telegraphed), you can focus on the real draw: creative special effects. The 1980s were like a buffet of proof-of-concepts of better ways to fake killing somebody.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning boasts the highest "kill count" of the series; some are very inventive and others are rote. Most of the effects involved are well-executed, but there are a few instances here and there where they get ridiculously cheesy (the most unconvincing throat slitting in cinema, for instance). The movie really doesn't suffer for the fact that the rampaging psycho is a Jason Voorhees copycat and not the "real" Crystal Lake killer. Personally, I don't understand the vitriol directed at this entry. It's not really any better or worse than its immediate predecessor, The Final Chapter (how's that for a misnomer?). If you want a bunch of people playing pretendy-fun-dead, some amount of gore, and the standard quota of naked breasts for an R-rated film from the mid-1980s, the fifth Friday film isn't a terrible way to go.

Worth the purchase: Worth seeing at least once, but I probably should've just Netflixed it.

Stats: 2/403 movies watched in 3 days
Projection for Completion: October 21, 2010
Goal for Completion: February 25, 2010