David Vining's Blog, page 75

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Yeah, do the double take. I loved this movie. Thank you, beckoningchasm. Without you, I probably would have never discovered the absolute joys of the sixth entry in the Friday the 13th franchise.

Allow me to let you in on a dirty secret: the Friday the 13th franchise is dumb trash. It’s most entertaining when it finds ways to be funny. I imagine there’s a way to do a serious work of introspection around the character of Jason that would be highly compelling, but it wouldn’t mesh well with...

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Well, it’s still better than the first three, at least. The fifth entry in the franchise fully embraces the schlock that it is, using more TnA, getting more inventive with the kills, and leaning more heavily into side-characters for comedy to drive individual sequences. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this edges into horror-comedy with the amount of comedic work throughout. Much like The Final Chapter, though, it can’t rise above the fact that it’s still a dumb entry in a dumb franchis...

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Finally, someone knows that this whole thing is stupid and boring, so there’s an effort to make it less stupid and boring. It just took until the fourth film in the franchise, the one they titled the “final” one, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. It’s still ultimately kind of just stupid, but at least it’s not a miserable experience along the way.

From the opening, using only footage of the first three films, it’s obvious that Joseph Zito and his writer Barney Cohen have a better idea of...

Friday the 13th Part III

Steve Miner returns to make another incredibly boring entry in this drudgery of a slasher franchise, but this time it’s got minor 3-D effects. Huzzah. Really, just one more of the same thing, I can’t get angry at these films. They’re too incompetent and dull, but mostly dull. At least we get the origin of Jason’s mask, I guess.

Chris (Dana Kimmell) is due to go to her childhood home near Camp Crystal Lake with some friends. Now, there’s something kind of confusing from the get go on this ...

Friday the 13th Part 2

I take it back. When I went through these a few years ago, I don’t think I made it past the second one. I don’t think I ever got to the third. These movies are trash. They don’t work as horror. They don’t work as thriller. They don’t really work at all. What they do is provide some mild TnA on the way towards a handful of kills of wavering quality. Essentially a retread of the basic elements of the first film with only the barest of efforts to have some kind of connecting story, Friday the 1...

Friday the 13th (1980)

An explicit attempt to piggy back off the success of John Carpenter‘s Halloween by Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven‘s first producer, Friday the 13th has some interesting bits, especially in its first half, but Cunningham ultimately doesn’t have enough ideas or inclination to delve into character to make the back half interesting beyond the occasional kill, highlighting the quality makeup work by Tom Savini. It’s first half is more intriguing than I remember, and it’s back half is about as bor...

The Friday the 13th Franchise: A Statement of Purpose

So, last year I went through the last of the major horror franchises of the 80s: A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I was given the challenge by beckoningchasm (I’m pretty sure he was using reverse psychology on me, but I’m gonna do it anyway!), so here we are.

I tried to get through these movies a few years ago, and I just stopped about a third of the way through the third one. I was struggling to call what I was looking at a movie at all, and I just figured it wasn’t worth my time. Well, I ...

Crystal Embers – A Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway Crystal Embers by David Vining

Giveaway ends October 29, 2023.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveawayhttps://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/widget/375575

Another giveaway.

Get my book, which Steven McEvoy called a masterpiece, for free by entering thi...

John Huston: The Definitive Ranking

I’m going to be honest, I found John Huston’s body of work as a director to be frustrating. His highest highs are very high indeed, but his lows are really low. And, in addition, there’s a whole lot in the milquetoast middle that seems to be missing something, some key ingredient, that could have elevated the film around it. Huston went on record late in life that he’d take directing jobs just because they were set in places that he wanted to travel to (it’s hard to imagine what else would h...

The Dead

John Huston’s final film is an ode to his adoptive home by adapting one of the greatest works of the English language written by James Joyce, and filmed entirely in America. Give him a break, he was near death, but he did send the second unit to get some footage in Ireland. He also ended up creating, from his son Tony Huston’s sole screenplay credit, one of his best films as his final goodbye to the world of cinema that he had operated in for nearly fifty years.

Kate (Helena Carroll), Jul...