Stab Me Baby One More Time: ’90s Teen Slasher Revival Sequels
226. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)
227. Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000)
228. I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)
For a while at the end of the ’80s, slashers kinda faded out of the limelight after enjoying massive popularity earlier in the decade. But with the success of Scream, a deluge of new slashers came pouring in with a fresh batch of teens to be slaughtered by various masked menaces, so many that I never bothered to watch a lot of them coming out. Which brings me to this particular group of flicks, all sequels to slashers that were released in the wake of Scream.
First up is I Still Know What You Did Last Summer which brings back some of the cast from the previous film (although Freddie Prinze Jr. must’ve been making another movie at the same cuz he’s basically not in the movie for large chunks of it until the end). In addition to Jennifer Love Hewitt coming back for more hook hand action, we also get a really annoying early Jack Black role as a rastafarian white guy. It easily ranks as one of his top five most obnoxious roles he’s done (which is saying a lot). Oh also the plot is stupid, implausible and unnecessary.
So Urban Legends: Final Cut is kind of its own thing. Honestly you could watch it without even watching the first one. I do tend to have a weakness for movies about making movies and meta-commentary (yea, I know it’s a well-worn trope at this point and I don’t care), so despite some dodgy plotting (a twin brother? seriously?) and annoying characters, there was still things about this one that entertained me. It’s not great but it was mildly better than the previous movie….and the next one….
Which brings me to I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer which is a a dog turd lit on fire and covered in patchuli and McDonald’s special sauce. Basically, it’s not good. Red flag #1: It came out EIGHT years after the previous sequel and features none of the same cast and crew. Red flag #2: It looks like some direct-to-video trash that Troma would fart out on a weekend. Red flag #3: The phrase “I Know What You Did Last Summer” is said by multiple different characters without a trace of irony throughout the entire movie. Also the franchise decides to go the Friday the 13th Part 6 route and take the hook-handed fisherman into straight up supernatural territory. This garbage heap honestly makes the previous two movies almost look good.
Out of the Funny Papers and Into Your Nightmares: Horror Based on Comic Books
229. The New Mutants (2020)
230. Hellboy (2019)
231. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2010)
When people think about comic book movies, the Batmans and Avengers of the world are what they immediately jump to. But comics as a whole is a very wide, rich medium with a huge variety of different styles of storytelling. One particular genre that adapts well to the highly visual medium is horror. From the Lovecraftian psychedelic strangeness of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing to the dark, flurry of murky violence in 30 Days of Night, there are excellent examples of horror done well in comics. So it feels only natural that some of those make it to the big screen.
Strangely enough, one comic that has never really had a horror element to it is The New Mutants, but the premise of this particular origin story certainly does lend itself to a horror film. Set in a hospital for young mutants who may not have control of their powers, we are introduced to, among others, Dani, a confused girl who may have latent powers that manifest others’ most deep-rooted fears as reality. The movie does struggle with tone at times though. At certain points, it seems to want to play in the greater space of the Marvel Universe (and with its troubled production history and being caught in the crosshairs of the Disney/Fox merger it wouldn’t surprise me if they waffled over whether to include it in the MCU or not). I think it does a pretty good job of building out Dani and Rahne as romantic couple but several of the others, especially Sunspot for instance, are relegated to more one-dimensional portrayals. Also while it shows that it is capable of genuinely creepy horror imagery like the smiley men, its final act is more of the big action set-piece variety that you’re more likely to see in a more typical superhero comic book movie. All that to say, it’s not awful but I think it certainly could’ve been better.
Not surprisingly, that’s a statement I’d apply to the next film, the newest version of Hellboy from Dog Soldiers and Game of Thrones director Neil Marshall. Marshall definitely knows his way around a well-choreographed, hyper violent action scene and those are some of the best parts of the movie when you can just turn your brain off and watch people explode into geysers of blood. Also I think Harbor is fine as Hellboy although less endearing than Ron Perlman’s version. What’s missing here I think is the sense of “team” from the comics and from Del Toro’s version of the character. If you read a lot of the comics, you know at his core Hellboy is just a softy, but you really only see brief flashes of that in this one, mostly toward the end. Otherwise the movie is basically one kinetic action sequence after another interspersed with wise-cracking exposition (which honestly is actually something the movie gets right in its adaptation of the source). Overall, I think your enjoyment of this one is going to be based on lower your expectations. If you can do that, you may have fun with it.
Not surprisingly, that’s a statement I’d apply to the next film (see what I did there?), Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. This one was slammed pretty hard on its initial release for whatever reason. The story line is kind of a mess and it is coming in as a new interpretation of a character previously adapted by Michele Soavi as Dellamorte Dellamore. While I think Rupert Everett captured more of that exasperated tone of the original character from the comics, Brandon Routh isn’t bad really although certainly more quippy than I’d prefer. The movie is occasionally amusing and mildly entertaining. So if you can look past the superior prior version and some story and dialogue problems, you might like this one.
Howling with Laughter: Werewolf Comedy
232. Big Bad Wolf (2006)
233. Curse of the Queerwolf (1988)
234. The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
The horror comedy Big Bad Wolf in some ways reminded me a little of Fright Night (although definitely not as good). Basically a teen suspects his new slick, sleazy step-dad of being a werewolf and recruits help to prove he’s right. The movie doesn’t really even attempt much mystery but instead plays up the one-liners and gore more. It almost feels at times a little like Freddie Krueger the way the werewolf cracks jokes while killing people. Overall, it’s not a great movie, but there’s enough here to bring something a little different to folks wanting a werewolf movie with a humor streak in it.
Curse of the Queerwolf... I mean… Uh… This is probably the single most tacky, un-PC movie in regards to the LGBTQ+ community. There’s no way in hell this movie would fly nowadays. It honestly feels like something straight out of Troma Studios, although from what I can tell, Troma wasn’t involved. Instead it’s helmed by Mark Pirro, director of “classics” like A Polish Vampire in Burbank and Deathrow Gameshow. This one falls into the same bucket as films like Retardead and Monsturd. You can pretty much tell from the title exactly what it’s about.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow is the kind of movie that makes you want to feel the frustration and anxiety of Jim Cummings’ police officer character who is charged with investigating a series of incredibly vicious murders that appear to be animal attacks but some suspect may be something more. He can feel his life crumbling around him as the townspeople grow more and more discontented with the lack of results from the cops as well as his father’s poor health, his daughter’s promiscuous activities that could endanger her, his struggle with alcoholism, his ex-wife’s foul attitude toward him…. I mean shit… When I think about how it all piles up, his fairly extreme reactions to everything going on actually seem about right. Anyway while this is sort of a comedy, it also doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the crimes and the desperation and anger expressed by the lead. I think it’s a tenuous line to tow but it does it admirably.
KIDDIE KORNER!
235. Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular (2003)
Geez, this was some ugly ass CGI animation. Also I don’t know why they made the top-hat wearing skeleton in this so ludicrously flamboyant. I thought this one was pretty annoying and my kids didn’t seem to really care about it. My daughter exclaimed when it first came on “It’s a witch!” and then almost immediately got bored. C’est la vie…