2p26 October Horror Challenge #42: "Scream 4"

I've always said that I'd like to scream for better than scream three and scream too and I do although it has its flaws and its things that make it difficult to watch at a times It's a little cringe let's be honest The opening sequence is great The character of Jill is kind of a b**** to Sydney just because Sydney is the cousin who went through the original murders doesn't mean you have a right to treat her like crap although when all is revealed in the end I guess it makes sense that some of the people act the way they do I don't know He makes the characters unlikable but I really liked the character of Kirby and I like that Sydney is virtually unkillable as the killer said "What are you fucking Michael Myers or something?" It's funny but it works and I did like the movie I liked how dark it was Now I'm watching the fifth movie and I appreciate how the fourth brought the story back without seeming like it was just retreading old ground trying to ring the buffalo's neck to get pennies from heaven I don't know It just seems like horror movies have to have sequels and they said Scream was going to be a trilogy and then of course we all know it is an increasingly inappropriately named trilogy because it's not trilogy they keep making sequels Now they're working on a seventh one so we'll see what happens with that I suppose but I do enjoy the back story behind the Killer in scream for more than I expected to. basically it's a litmus test if you like stock and slash movies you'll probably like scream for so you should check it out but if these aren't the kind of movies you like this movie is more of the same and it's not something that will appeal to you so give it a pass for my money I appreciate it and I definitely enjoyed watching it so I guess I say I recommend it onto screen 5.

2025 October Horror Challenge #41: "Scream 3"

remember when I said that sequels to movies have a tendency to be bigger and throw more crap at you at the screen and tend to be louder and more obnoxious and everything's bigger There's more kills There's more twisted backstory there's more bad acting There's more explosions? Well I'm sure some of you were thinking There's no explosions in the Scream movies. I said before you this day scream three where a house just blew up because they put an explosion in the movie because they wanted to make it bigger and that's what they did. This movie tries to go back to the past and rewrite history that was done so well in the first one and they just fail miserably and I it makes me sad The only thing that I like about this movie is watching Courtney Cox and David arquette hug each other because I know that they fell in love doing these movies and that makes me happy cuz I think it's sweet. Everything else about this movie irritates me There's too many characters there's too much of a twisted backstory only certain people should be allowed to write plots this twisty. Harlan colbin is allowed to write plots this twisty because he is proven time and again that he can handle juggling this many twists without sounding like he's pulling things out of his butt You on the other hand writers of Scream 3 are not allowed to handle this many plot twists because you do not possess the skills to make it seem like you are not pulling everything out of your butt and throwing it at the screen and hoping that some of it sticks It's insulting. So I just don't vibe with this movie the way I did with the original. And I know this because I watched this movie along with Scream 2 Back when I was a freshman in college and I watched them and gave them a chance because I had loved the original scream and I wanted to see what the sequels did with the story and how they added to the story. And it was a fun night I got to hang out with friends and we ordered pizza and we watched movies and we watched Scream 2 and Scream 3 and the movie sucked but it was fun hanging out with my friends So the movie is remind me of good times but they really get under my skin and piss me off when I try to watch them now because I know so much about horror movies and I know that they could have been good Not all sequels are bad I have seen some good sequels. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D is what the 7th Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie or the 6th and it's good I like it better than all of the other sequels reimaginings and remakes by far by several orders of magnitude the sequel to Candyman Candyman 2 farewell to the flesh isn't as good as the original but it is good it's worth watching it's worth buying and owning. These movies aren't worth buying and owning They're worth staring at with anger and derision and your face because they're just going to take everything that worked in the first movie and shit all over it. That's really all I have to say about Scream 3 at one point I think that I did enjoy it better than Scream 2 I told everyone that scream too was my least favorite but the more I watch them the more Scream 3 irritates me and the more I appreciate Scream 2 because while it is not a good movie for a lot of reasons it's not as insulting to my intelligence as the third movie. Do yourself a favor and skip this one. EDIT: okay, I admit it, I was a jerk when I wrote this review. Once most of the cast is dead and all the secrets start coming out finally for real the movie doesn't get as bad as it was it gets better and I understand why I did like it the first time that I saw it I always forget that it gets better after the first half of the movie So I would say that Scream wanted two and three are worth watching if nothing else so that you can have a basis of knowledge for scream for when scream for comes along because Scream 4 is a movie that I actually enjoy and I like the story and I would want to know the story from the three original films before watching Scream for so I would know what everyone was talking about in that movie Scream 4 is a movie that I actually enjoy and I like the story and I would want to know the story from the three original films before watching Scream for so I would know what everyone was talking about in that movie So give it a chance It's not as bad as I said it was It's not as bad as the critics said it was It's just a little ridiculous in the beginning and for the first maybe hour of the movie after that it gets better. give it a chance if you want There are some good scenes that come near the end and if nothing else seeing Sydney get chased through the house by a killer is fun for me at least as a fan of slasher movies so I like watching stock and slash movies like this and I appreciate what this movie has to give me and what it gives to the horror genre as a whole even though it gives a huge pile of crap There's gold buried in the crap if you want to dig and I generally want to date because that's what I do in October I watch a lot of horror movies and I dig for gold and sometimes I find it.

2025 October Horror Challenge #40 "Scream 2"

So, the self-aware horror movie that has balls to say what we're all thinking, that most of the time sequels suck, now has a sequel. interesting. I think we all know that as a general rule sequels are not as good as the original movies. That's just the way things are. With a few noted exceptions, sequels have a tendency to be louder bigger and more explosive than the original, but that does not translate into being better they take what worked in the first movie and try to cram more and more and more of it down our throats until we get sick of it and throw up and that is not a good formula for creating a good movie. So I see scream to doing that from the beginning of the movie. though the opening scene in the theater works, it's not as effective for me at least as the opening sequence of the original film because the opening sequence of the original film was really creepy whereas the opening so we can coins of this film was exactly what I like to say about pretty much every other sequel second verse same as the first but a little bit louder and a little bit worse. That's what happens, and it sucks that everything that made the first movie special has a tendency to get trampled in the second movie. So here comes Scream 2, and it is a lot louder a lot bigger and yeah it is a lot worse than the original screen. I just don't like Scream 2 I try to appreciate it for what it is and there are moments that I appreciate Like I love watching Sarah Michelle gellar on screen in any role that she plays she's great and I like watching her get stalked by the killer and watching her fight back and seeing what happens No I'm not going to tell you what happens because I don't spoil movies in my reviews but it just seems like everything in this movie is too much It the music's too loud there's too many fights there's too many kills and I never thought I would say that I watched a movie called Dead alive where a bunch of zombies get killed with a lawn mower and that's probably about as many people killed in that one scene as there are in the entire movie scream too and that is a lot of deaths and it's not too many for that screen so I don't know why the deaths in this movie would be too many but it just seems like the movie tries to throw everything at us hoping that something will stick and it would do better for itself just to sit back for a minute and give us time to breathe. One thing I noticed about this movie that never really struck me before the way it strikes me now is how Jada pinkett Smith's character in the beginning of the movie talks about how horror movies are disproportionately white They don't have a lot of women of color in them and that's something that I noticed of course being horror movie fan that I am but it's not something that really bothered me until about 10 years ago when it just started to be too much because I know that black people tell scary stories too. They do I've heard them most of the ghost stories that I learned were from black and brown people So I know that they have scary stories too Why don't they ever appear in horror movies? typically my answer is that they're smarter than the white people and they leave 5 minutes into the movie because they're far more intelligent than able to see that something evil is going on and that answer does carry some weight but it's not a good enough answer for why there are so many white people in these movies It's not fair to joke and brush off a question like that without giving it some thought and analysis so I started to analyze it and think a little more deeply about it and I'm glad now that we have a resurgence of speculative fiction and horror and dark fantasy stories written by authors of color and I'm glad that we have movies with diverse casts now in horror movies more than we did before at least It's not like hey look this movie has one black guy in it the way it used to be back in the '80s and the '90s so things are getting better I guess It's just a slow process Time marches on and it will continue to take time. I'm hoping that as far as the Scream movie is go I enjoy watching the rest of the sequels better than I enjoy watching the second one because I'm drowning watching the second one wishing that it was over with so I could watch the third and get it over with because if I remember correctly I didn't like the third one either So we'll just have to see what happens but as far as horror movie sequels go Scream 2 Mrs out on a lot of the suspense of the original by being too much. It's the annoying little kid that tries to get attention by banging pots and pans and pushing things off shelves and throwing books until the parents explode and scream because any attention is better than no attention if you know what I mean? And I just don't vibe with this movie the way I do with the original so I don't like it but I will watch it I make sacrifices for Halloween horror month.

2024 October Horror Challenge #39 "Scream"

I have a big announcement for you all. "Scream" is a good movie. I know, I know. next I'll be announcing to you that water is wet right? But I think it's an important announcement because sometimes I forget it. There was so much hype surrounding the movie Scream when it came out that what sometimes gets buried in the midst of all the crap is that it's actually not a bad little horror movie. I mean, sure it's dated, but it's dated for the mid-90s which is the Aaron which I was a teenager, so it's dated for my youth and it brings back some fairly good memories of time spent watching the movie with my mom and one of my best friends and I don't have very many good memories with my mom so I do treasure that. What happened was my friend saw the movie and recommended it to us, and my mom doesn't normally watch horror movies but she agreed to watch Scream with us so we all watched it together and my mom actually got into it by the end of the movie it was a little too gory for her but she was intrigued so she watched it with us and guessed who the killer was right along with us and she was wrong. I remember the first time we watched it she thought the killer was Sydney's dad, and I thought the killer was Gail weathers, which is funny to me now because when I watch the movie now, it's glaringly obvious to me what is going on and the identity of the killer and all of that but at the time that I saw it I was only 15 so cut me some slack I was young, and I hadn't seen many horror movies. Now I've seen so many that scream sometimes gets lost in the shuffle but it was one of my first horror movies so I should definitely appreciate it for that if nothing else. The story of Scream is pretty well known by this point. It's about a small town where some high school students are brutally slaughtered in the beginning of the movie and we get to watch The killer call and torment them and then stalk them and kill them on screen in pretty violent ways for my mom to be watching because she just doesn't like gore so you can imagine that the Gore in this movie was a lot for her. honestly it's not that gory but it is kind of sadistic the way they torment the victims on the phone, before they go in for the kill and that is something that I appreciate. Like I always say, I like my slashers mean spirited. What I mean by that, is that I like to see murder portrayed as something sadistic and evil when it's calculated like this because that's what murder really is you have to be a callous human being to take another human being's life in such a way and I like to see things portrayed on screen the way they are in life. I don't necessarily like to see violence that is sanitized for public consumption, and I don't like to see killers who kill their victims cleanly because that's not what murder is like in real life you would trip over the coffee table knock over a plant make a mess while you were trying to stalk your victim through the house and this movie shows that kind of thing the killers actually look human so I vibe with that kind of portrayal. I'm not going to spoil what happens in the movie even though most of us know all of the twists and turns of this movie pretty inside out. at this point the movie has been around for almost 30 years! Think about that; 30 years. What the hell have we been doing for 30 years? where did 30 years go It doesn't seem like it's been 30 years and yet it has I guess it's true what my friend always says about time Time is like toilet paper the closer it gets to the end the faster it goes so now that I'm a little older time seems to be flying by me and I see these big gaps and I look back and blink and it seems like years have passed and it's surreal but I appreciate anything that can hearken back to my younger years and made me see them in a positive light because I had a lot of tragedy and trauma and my younger years and the monsters and horror movies, the fake monsters that I saw on screen and read about in books, helped me deal with the real monsters that I had to deal with in life. So I needed an outlet and these movie is provided in outlet and scream showed me that you could fight back against a killer You could fight back against the evil and possibly win. which to me is an important lesson. I like the characterization that I missed when I was younger now when I'm watching the movie it's hard for me to miss how the characters of billions do really did look like they were in a relationship. I mean come on they were two seconds away from kissing every time they were together on screen It's a little ridiculous but it's not something that I would have noticed when I was a kid it went right over my head but it's something that I noticed now and I appreciate it now because it added to the story that they had chemistry between them. And I appreciate seeing the character of Dewey the cop and Gail weathers the reporter being real people with real lives and real problems and real attraction to each other that just kind of built organically from their interactions with each other. Even though I know that it ended badly, I know that Courtney Cox and David arquette were married so they met on the side of the movie and fell in love and it makes their scenes cuter and it makes their scenes ring truer for me knowing that this happened so that is another reason for me to enjoy this movie. The movie's not perfect. It's a little ridiculous how Sydney takes so long to figure things out because I was watching the movie so you can say I was stupid for not figuring it out but she was right there in the middle of everything and she didn't figure it out either So I think I should get a pass if you give her a pass for not figuring it out. I definitely appreciate the sadistic nature of the violence, the rebelling against authority that I see the teenagers doing this movie, which comes to a head when the principal is murdered graphically on screen. I'm sure that scene was satisfying for a lot of people who hated their principles in high school. Mine wasn't so bad so I wouldn't have wanted to stab her but I know some people who might have at least had a cathartic reaction to seeing a high school principle be stabbed on screen so that helps the movie ring true as well. overall I have to say that the movie works. The tongue in cheek sarcastic dark humor and the awareness of the culture in which the movie was released is something that a lot of movies tried to copy after scream came out to mixed results obviously most of the time it produced lower quality films but Scream was special because it rose above its flaws to become a cultural phenomenon so it's well worth checking out now even if you've seen it before and appreciating it for what it is and for what it did for horror movies and for horror culture. You can't go into a Halloween section of a store without seeing those ghost face masks now and that's a testament to the ongoing popularity of the screen franchise. So check this movie out and see where it all started and where all that popularity came from and give it a chance if you've never seen it before because even though it isn't perfect, it's a good little slasher and that's exactly what it's supposed to be and that's what I love it for.

2025 October Horror Challenge #38 "Friday the 13th"

Man I love this movie. It's funny because this is one of those movies that Stephen King rags on really badly and his book dance macabre which is his overview of the horror genre that he published in the '80s and he talks about why this movie doesn't have any brains and why it's just stock and slash and doesn't have any heart and soul and for a while I agreed with that but I don't know The more I watch this movie the more I like it I think you could make the argument that some of the later films in the Friday the 13th series our mindless stock and slash movies not that there's anything wrong with that but this one actually has some plot going for it It's got some surprises It doesn't surprise me because I've seen billions of horror movies but it has twists to it and they're kind of cool. I like how you generally just assume that the killer was male so when the killer and someone the ending comes and the killer is revealed It is kind of a surprise I would like to watch this movie now not knowing what happened and see if I could guess the ending maybe I've seen too many movies now and I would guess the ending but I'd like to try it sometime because when I watch this movie with people who haven't seen it They like it too and they get to the end and they say wow that's creepy that killer is messed up and I say yes I agree and I'm not going to give away who the killer is in this review even though we all know who it is because you know let's pretend we don't for a minute let's pretend that none of us have seen this movie before and a new movie called Friday the 13th has come out and it's in theaters and it's a horror movie and we should all go see it and maybe if we come into it with that mindset people would enjoy it more I don't know It's just a thought but I appreciate what this movie tries to do it's very loose remake of Mario bavas Bay of blood I recognize that right away when I saw it because I'm obsessed with Italian horror movies so I saw the similarities. remake might be a nice way of putting it when rip off would fit better, but I still like this movie so it's fine with me I don't mind if movies ripping each other off as long as they make good movies out of it I'm okay with that. Plus we all know that the twist at the end interests me because I have deep seated mommy issues so this movie is one of those that touches on touchy subjects and I'll probably always appreciate it for that It's a good little slasher and it holds up pretty well now It's not that bad It's not a movie that I liked when I was younger that I'm embarrassed to admit that I like now. for my money, this is a pretty good movie and I enjoy revisiting it every chance I get so I was happy to watch it again this year.

2025 October Horror Challenge #37 "Terrifier 3"

I saw this movie in theaters last year last October and I loved it then too so I was happy to get a chance to revisit it for the challenge this year. It's gory and nasty and disgusting and icky and really really gross and there's some spiritual hoo haha wash that reads a little bit silly though I don't mind it as much now as I did when I first saw the movie because I've made my peace with it and I want to see what happens and the fourth movie and I know the fourth movie is going to continue the hoo ha ha wash so I have to accept that if I'm going to continue experiencing the story so I don't mind it. When I first saw terrifier 2 I thought it was stupid but I don't really know what my problem was with that movie I rewatched it and I must have had a stick up my butt because there's nothing really wrong with Terrifier 2 It's just a little silly sometimes. Part 3 is the best of the bunch for me, though, and i have high hopes for part 4.

2025 October Horror Challenge #36 "Black Phone"

The Black Phone is based on a story by author Joe Hill — who, as many of you may know, is the son of Stephen King. I grew up reading Stephen King’s novels and seeing his dedications to his children Naomi, Joe, and Owen. Because of that, I’ve always had a hard time being objective when it comes to anything related to Stephen King. In an interview once, King mentioned that Joe writes “exactly the way I write.” I always thought that was an odd statement — and honestly, I never really agreed. Joe Hill is an incredibly talented writer (I loved Horns and have heard great things about his other books), but his voice feels distinct from his father’s. And that’s a good thing. Horror doesn’t have to sound the same to be powerful. Writers like Edward Lee and Frank Peretti, for example, couldn’t be more different — yet both are amazing in their own ways. When I say I struggle to be objective about Stephen King, it’s because his work quite literally saved my life. If it weren’t for something I read in his novel Rose Madder, I don’t think I would be here today. That book gave me the courage to leave an abusive home. King wrote a truth I already knew deep down but had never dared to say: if I stayed, I was going to die. His words helped me understand that I had to choose life — to “get busy living or get busy dying,” as he famously wrote elsewhere. That’s why Stephen King will always be my favorite writer — not just because of his stories, but because he gave me the language to survive. So when he said Joe Hill writes just like he does, I couldn’t quite believe it. I’d been searching for a Joe Hill story that connected with me the way King’s work does, but I hadn’t found one — until The Black Phone. When I first saw the movie, I didn’t even realize it was based on a Joe Hill story. I just knew it was a new horror film starring Ethan Hawke, and of course, I had to watch it. And wow — it blew me away. Afterward, I found out Joe Hill had written the original story, so I read it, and it felt like finding a missing piece of a puzzle I’d given up on years ago. This movie gets me — the same way King’s books always have — and I love it for that. I don’t want to spoil anything, because I went into it knowing absolutely nothing, and I think that’s the best way to experience it. Don’t read the plot description, don’t look up spoilers — just watch it unfold. It’s chilling, emotional, and unexpectedly moving. There’s a sequel coming out soon, and while part of me is nervous they might not capture the same magic, I’m still excited to see it. The Black Phone has become one of my favorite modern horror films, and I can’t recommend it enough.