Showing posts with label Joseph Zito. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Zito. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

You've Seen This Before

Film: The Prowler
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

I’m not a huge fan of the slasher subgenre. I mean, I recognize that there are some classics that are worth watching, but slashers are at least potentially the most brain-dead part of the genre. All you need to make a slasher is a backstory to give you a maniac and a series of dumb teenagers (usually) to walk in front of the blade. Slashers don’t get points for cool camera work or for interesting plots. The only thing that distinguishes one slasher from the next is the amount of blood and the inventiveness of the kills. Yes, there are exceptions. The Prowler is absolutely not one of those exceptions.

We’re going to start with the tragic backstory that leads us to the twisted murderer. In the waning days of World War II, a young woman named Rosemary sends a Dear John letter to her unnamed boyfriend. A few months later, Rosemary is out with her new boyfriend at a college dance when the two of them are murdered with a sharpened pitchfork. We get to see that the killer was dressed in full WWII military regalia. We also get to see that the killer leaves behind a single rose, almost certainly for Rosemary. It would seem that anyone with half a brain would suspect Rosemary’s jilted boyfriend, but evidently that never happens (and we’re not told his identity) and the murder is somehow unsolved.

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Ten Days of Terror!: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Films: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

If I told you that I was looking forward to watching the fourth Friday the 13th movie, called Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, you'd likely think I was lying. A big part of that lack of desire comes directly from the fact that I know it was nothing like the final chapter of the series. There are some really well-done slasher movies, of course, and the original in this series is a classic for a lot of reasons. The second one introduces Jason Voorhees as the killer and the third introduces his now-iconic hockey mask. What the hell could the fourth one offer?

The answer to that is a hell of a lot of dead teenagers. I mean, that was expected given the nature of the series and the placement of this one in the series. There’s going to be a lot of dead kids by the end of it, mostly killed with a variety of bladed weapons. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is going to follow the standard “plot” structure of the series. We’ll get a couple of initial kills from Jason, we’ll set up all of the cannon fodder (and the final girl), we’ll have some gratuitous nudity for a bit, the kids will more or less pair off for sex, and Jason will kill them for their sins.