Låt den rätte komma in (2008) - Tomas Alfredson

when vladimir nabokov's lolita was reissued in north america by vintage in 1989, vanity fair declared it "the only convincing love story of our century." they weren't wrong. love has long since gone the way of letters and laudanum because our emotionally bankrupt time lacks the requisite investment and interest. monogamy is the new queer (you heard it here first) and i love yous, if not outright lies we tell each other and ourselves, are confessions wielded like knives to hurt someone or get something we want, which, generally speaking, ain't worth having. so what's more convincing than a bumbling pederast with delusions of agency who throws himself at the feet and the mercy of a sadistic schoolgirl in heart-shaped sunglasses?

i believe in love like i believe in vampires: yearn though i might for sanguine youth and an immortally emo soul, i know it's bullshit beginning to end. let the right one in, however, does an amazing job of momentarily convincing me otherwise. on both counts.

love and vampires are the rightful property of 12-year-old scandies who don't know any better. and while that ignorance is far from bliss - it's fraught with domestic fissure, schoolyard violence, and a ludicrous amount of snow - oskar and eli turn everyday ugliness into such beauty that it's impossible not to believe just a little. and the kids know their canon! these vamps don't sparkle in the sunshine, and whatever thresholds this film otherwise crosses, doorways remain sacred. the gore is gorgeous, the characters compelling, and the story brings even the most cynical of audiences to its cinematic knees. tension and anxiety build while the jaded and logical parts of you that remain unconvinced remind you that this is all just wishful thinking ... the more you believe, the more obvious it becomes that everything is going to end terribly.

hold fast to yr hope.

The Crazies (2010) - Breck Eisner

newton's first law of film: the book is better than the movie. newton's second law of film: the original is better than the remake. as film is closer to grammar than physics, however, it requires exceptions to prove the rules. case in point the first: fightclub. although the film disavows the book's narrative of waste (replacing "i want to have yr abortion" with "i haven't been fucked like that since gradeschool" and ameliorating its bullshit ending with the pixies' "where is my mind"), brad pitt, ed norton, and helena bonham carter get more palahniuk than palahniuk under david fincher's direction in a near-flawless realisation of the book's potential. but i digress. i've never been able to bring myself to sit through the original, but dollars to doughnuts the crazies remake is the ridiculous exception to the second law.

hold on now, youngsters. in my far-from-humble opinion, romero made three movies: he broke cinematic ground with night of the living dead in 1968, and worked his premise through to its logical conclusion in the following decades with dawn of the dead (1978) and day of the dead (1985). anything subsequent to or divergent from his holy dead trilogy ain't worth watching. there. i said it. and if you've seen land of the dead, you know i speak gospel. so while the idea of the crazies was good, its budget was not, and the trailer makes my argument for me, thereby absolving me of having to watch it in order to know the remake is better. but again, i digress.

eisner's crazies is high-tension smalltown bioweapon black ops at its best ... all the stuff that scared you about ET when you were small, but with less sentiment and more explosions. and while the county sheriff and his lady doctor wife aren't quite as compelling as pintsize drew barrymore and the little muppet with a speak&spell, no one wants to see them get poked by crazy people with pitchforks and a hate-on for anyone sane. the infected are a scary bunch of despondent hyaena people whose laughter is as creepy as their deathstares. turns out that smalltown america is terrifying not only when inbred and texan, but also when midwestern and genetically diverse. throw in a military force who flies into town under the shadow of night, drags people from their homes, divides them into camps, and carts them away in cattle trucks, and you've a deeply unsettling zombie holocaust. if the whitecoats ever come to take me away, please god don't let them be backed by men in camo with gasmasks and AKs.

and speaking of holocausts, the lady doctor is somewhat inexplicably pregnant. not pregnant enough to be encumbered by a visible belly, nausea, or any other fetus-related debility, but pointedly pregnant presumably for the purposes of a sympathetic audience. given the relentless action and trauma of the film, however, it makes little sense that she doesn't miscarry. if that's the kind of carwash yr being born into, what multi-celled organism wouldn't mulligan? no one should be afraid of carwashes.

My Bloody Valentine (2009) - Patrick Lussier

normally i don't dig on remakes, but this one earns its stripes, both as an update and as a stand-alone slasher. my bloody valentine version 2.009 is studiously faithful to the original. despite changes to the backstory of harry warden and the valentine's mining massacre, and a somewhat inexplicable inversion of the TJ/tom and axel characters, this story makes as much (if not more) sense than the first, and the spirit remains the same.

while the remake lacks the blood on tits of which i'm so fond, its opening is no less compelling. a scene of severed limbs and hacked up torsos strewn about a hospital cuts quickly to an eyeball on the end of a pickaxe - already awesome, but especially rad in 3D. these kills were designed for the third dimension, as is made particularly apparent when a retired police officer's jaw is impaled and the lower half comes flying at yr face. and while the pickaxe figures most prominently as the weapon of choice, there are a couple nods to the original, including an equally goretastic dryer kill.

unfortunately the fidelity of the remake isn't shared by its characters, who reflect an irritating trend in contemporary media scripting: men are cheating bastards. some truckstop douche with a loose wedding band receives a well-placed pickaxe to the skull after his nauseatingly disrespectful treatment of a ballsy blonde bombshell with a terrific rack. and axel knocks up some teenage twat whose betrayal of the sisterhood is rewarded when her lovefetus gets a pickaxe to its similarly undeveloped brains. axel himself manages to make good with wife sarah, who forgives him his trespasses and loves him 'til the end, despite the fact that she's pined over tom for the past decade - the same love-of-her-life tom she twice leaves for dead. so i stand semi-corrected: everyone's an asshole in this movie.

upon subsequent viewings, the film's foreshadowing of its twist is quite clever. tom's movements mirror those of his harry warden alter-ego without the glaring inconsistencies characteristic of, say, the french. and when everything goes 'splody in the end, i'm not sad about the potential for a sequel, though i prefer to think that tom offs axel and sarah, like, ten minutes later. cuz i hate them.

My Bloody Valentine (1981) - George Mihalka

canada gave birth to the slasher film with black christmas in 1974, but confirmed the strength of the true north's horror lineage seven years later with its sinister second-born, my bloody valentine. the pride and joy of nova scotia is canadiana at its best: maritime accents, lumberjack jackets, and sponsorship from none other than moosehead! from bottles and cans to actual neon signs advertising the fact, the green and gold abounds as these good canadian kids get their eyeballs pickaxed out. this flick has more beer-soused douchebags in plaid jackets and trucker hats than my local taphouse on a tuesday afternoon. no doot aboot it.

so pardon my jingoism when i declare my bloody valentine one of the greatest slasher flicks of all time. there's a reason that one of the greatest bands of all time took its name a couple of years later. the film literally opens with blood on tits (and a pickaxe through them), and the kills only get better. drowning in boiling hotdogs? check. death by nailgun? check. head impaled on a makeshift shower spurting blood and water? check. MBV has some of the most creative kills in the genre - the laundromat scene alone is enough to warrant its legendary status (and the extra spin-cycle footage on the special edition dvd is worth whatever you pay for it).

the characters are ridiculous. teutonic axel loses his girl and his mind in a bad case of stockholm syndrome, taking on the persona of harry warden, the lone survivor of a mining accident who offed axel's dad in a post-traumatic-stress induced fit of vengeance. his rival TJ is the strong, silent type who returns to town to claim his girl after an unexplained absence. their mutual love interest sarah is a girl of classic '70s braless proportions and possessed of a rather remarkable survival instinct. and the poor barmaid harriet gives up her chariot on the dubious promise of ten minutes alone in a mineshaft with some douche who manages to get them doubly screwed. she should've listened to TJ, who knows and recites the rules well: "no women in the mine." but can you blame them? they hail from a mining town called valentine bluffs, where every day is the worst day of the year. i'd happily take a pickaxe to the face too.

the film ends as brilliantly as it begins, with an old-timey bar ballad about the life and times of harry warden and the residents of valentine bluffs. you can practically sing along. and as far as psychokillers go: a nutjob in a gasmask with a pickaxe? yes please. beats that bagheaded retard hands down.

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel

Friday the 13th: Part XI? Part XII? personally, i like Jason Π, because aesthetically it fits somewhere between parts III and IV. but i'm wrong, because it's not a fucking jason movie.

jason voorhees is not a hostage-taking international crimin-allstar with OCD; he's an angry retarded person with mommy issues fuelled by frustration and unmitigated violence. he's a shitty popcorn version of michael meyers, stomping around in the slasher spotlight instead of slinking through the shadows that came to define a genre ... not a Shape, but still a force with which to be reckoned. whether a retard, zombie, mutant, or psychotic simpleton in a hockey mask, jason's mindless, unrelenting killer instinct is iconic, which makes this film's jason straight-up blasphemous. granted, he's always had a penchant for pretty girls complicated by a raging hate-on for teen sex and drug use, but jason doesn't stalk and kidnap people - he kills them and throws them out of windows. and he sure as hell doesn't have a paramilitary bunker rigged with perimeter breach notifications. maybe if he did the rest of the series would be rewatchable.

so why are we defending a franchise we like to hate so hard? because it's a vacuous pop-cultural appropriation of both my childhood and my twenties. the reboot takes all of the superficial trappings of the '80s slasher and resequences them for an aught audience with open wallets for clever mash-ups of their gradeschool and college grad steez. fuck you michael bay - you know your target market.

the aforementioned throwback to parts III and IV stands. goodlooking outsider is in search of his missing hot sister, encounters hostility from the locals, douchebaggery from his peers. sex, drugs, murder, and mayhem ensue. too bad the best part of the movie is over before the opening credits begin. it's 1980, mrs voorhees lacks a head, and a group of jackasses and cockteases with plastic tits go camping at crystal lake. the kills that follow are fantastic! girl strapped into a sleepingbag strung up over the campfire? yes please! flash forward to present day, run opening credits, and prepare to be bored for the next hour and a half. but keep an eye open for the various shoutouts to previous films strewn about the bunker set: the wheelchair from part II, the RV from part VI ... jason's black ops crime lab apparently doubles as a murder museum where he hoards souveniers from earlier killing sprees.

in a complete departure from franchise form, this installment demands character investment, but unfortunately, it's entirely without return. it stars the biggest douche in the universe, and you spend the entire time waiting for him to get his just desserts, but instead he gets to fuck this girl with the most amazing tits i've ever seen on film while his super cute girlfriend whines at him outside the door. she's stupid, so you kinda want her to die too, and while no one wants to see such magnificent breasts go to waste, the other girl's clearly a manipulative whore who deserves whatever's coming. but somewhere along the line crystal lake went to whitecastle and picked up an asian stoner kid who's so fucking awesome you just want him to turn his bong into some kind of psycho-killer escape pod, but alas, everyone dies horribly predictable deaths.

then there's the soundtrack. 'tis a blessing, perhaps, not to have to sit through another manfredini masturbatory opus. that shit is awful, but it's also classic, and i'm a classicist. props for night ranger's "sister christian" (next year's "don't stop believin'" - just wait for it), but stars? really? these douches don't listen to arts & crafts.

and while the ending, of course, leaves plenty of room for a revamped sequel, by this time we've had more than enough. bye-bye camp crystal lake, we're heading back to haddonfield. with a stopover in texas.

Friday the 13th: The Franchise (1980-2009)

i grew up on slasher flicks, and this is the series on which i cut my cinematic teeth. memoirs of a misspent youth aside, suffice to say that not a calendar friday the 13th passed without me and a handful of reluctant friends commemorating the event with a jason marathon. nostalgia being what it is, my heart has always belonged to jason voorhees. i count myself among the camp crystal lake alumni, and as such, everything i know about horror films begins and ends at the bottom of that lake. too bad that’s where most of it belongs. i've always suspected i wasted my childhood; upon rewatching this franchise - film by film, start to finish, in preparation for this year's installment - now i'm certain.

while friday the 13th established most of the rules for the modern slasher film, the series provides almost none of the content. it lacks the genuine terror of the halloween movies, the grittiness of the texas chainsaw massacres, the ingenuity of the various holiday slashers (black christmas, my bloody valentine, april fool's day, etc), and the gender-bending bizarreness of the sleepaway camp films. even the nightmare on elm street series, which i scorned as a child for being too unrealistic to be properly frightening, is at least uncanny at its core. though one of the quintessential slasher franchises, friday the 13th lacks something fundamental to the genre: horror. the plot is repetitively predictable; the characters are neither compelling enough to save nor obnoxious enough to need killing; the kills themselves are tragically short on blood; the nudity is lacklustre; manfredini's grandiose score serves as a didactic laugh-track (especially when compared with carpenter's minimalist yet terrifying halloween theme); and both the writing and acting are abysmal, even by '80s horror film standards. i'm sorry, but this shit is borderline unwatchable.

which isn't to say there aren't moments of gratification. there's something awesome about watching someone get tossed out a window and land in a shower of glass in every film (by part IV we were cheering out loud), and it's amusing to observe the static equilibrium of the chuck taylors worn by nearly every character from the '50s through '90s. and there’s a reason that this series became the gold standard for the rules of the slasher universe: watching teenagers get hacked apart with a machete for using illicit drugs and engaging in premarital sex is satisfying on a very basic north american puritanical level. it's admittedly kinda fun that even fri-13 virgins are able to discern who will live and who will die within moments of being introduced to a character. and though no actor’s reappearance is as anticipated as jamie lee curtis's in the halloween movies, it’s nice to see a familiar face distorted in agonizing pain. there are even a couple of kills for which yr thankful - the classic decapitation scene from the original film being the most memorable - and some (though not enough) sexy violence of the blood on tits variety. but mostly, these movies are really really bad. and they just get progressively worse.

Part I (1980) - Sean S Cunningham
the film's opening kills start the franchise appropriately with its 1950s origin story: two horny teens are so busy trying to get out of their white chucks and into one another's camp-issued shorts that they don't notice a psycho-killer come at them with a knife ... not unlike when they failed to notice a retarded kid drowning in the lake. flash forward to 1979, where the shorts are shorter but the teens just as horny. audiences are initially pretty stoked when annoying annie gets a knife to the throat, but things are pretty tame until brenda gets axed and her corpse tossed through a window, and bill turns up riddled with arrows after an ill-advised check on the archery range. our first fri-13 heroine, alice two-shoes, goes head to head with that vindictive bitch mrs. voorhees and eventually cuts off her head with a machete, which becomes jason's weapon of choice for the rest of the series. it's up for debate whether the best thing about the original camp slasher is mrs. v's slow-motion decapitation, or that it features kevin bacon in his first ever film role. kevin fucking bacon.
body count: 9

Part II (1981) - Steve Miner
... in which jason is a bagheaded retard. alice two-shoes is ice-picked at the opening credits and replaced with ginny, who's cute as a button and sharp as a tack. and despite the burlap sack over his head, jason proves a formidable foe who kills without regard for race, creed, gender, or physical ability. even the dude in the wheelchair gets it ... in the face! the deaths in part II get points for effort - killing two kids with one stab is both efficient and entertaining - but the film nevertheless lacks sufficient amounts of blood. ginny uses her child psychology skillz (this smarty-pants goes to college) to momentarily outwit jason at the alter of his dead mother's severed head and stab him with the machete, which buys her enough time to run for the fucking hills. but her brains are clearly damanged and she hangs around long enough to get attacked once more when jason jumps at her through a window. ginny wakes up in an ambulance wondering where her boyfriend's at, which is funny because so were the film's producers. john furey bailed before the film wrapped.
bodycount: 11 (12 if you count furey's disappearance)

Part III (1982) - Steve Miner
this installment was intended to end the series, as evidenced by its complete lack of anything worth watching until the last half hour of the movie. it takes place in a barn instead of at camp, which is bullshit. it also features a leather- and bandana-clad multi-racial biker gang that terrorizes the town and irreparably damages the annoying fat kid's self-esteem. and despite jason's evolving creativity when it comes to offing promiscuous teens - the shower kill is a dude, someone is knifed through the underside of a hammock, another dude gets a well-deserved machete to the balls for thinking walking on his hands down a hallway is a good method of personal transportation - the only moment of real consequence in this film is when jason finally finds the signature hockey mask. there's also a strategically placed self-referential copy of the savini issue of fangoria, which is nice for those of us nerdy enough to notice. oh, and it was released in 3D, making the scene in which jason squeezes a kid's head until one of his eyeballs pops out a lot more awesome than it has any right to be.
bodycount: 13

The Final Chapter (1984) - Joseph Zito
if only it were true! the final chapter is the best fri-13 by far. how could it not be? it stars corey feldman and crispin glover! (and you thought kevin bacon was as good as it could get). crispin glover's character jimmy is creepy in that way only crispin glover can't help but be. he spends the majority of his screen-time agonizing over the probability he's a "dead fuck," which, you know, becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. after jimmy manages to seduce one of the twins with his amazing dance prowess, he receives a corkscrew to the hand and a machete to the face. part IV reminds us that in order to stay alive in the slasher universe, thou shalt not: fornicate (you might get a spear-gun to the balls); consume illicit substances (especially whilst watching olde tyme pornography); venture forth into strange lands to investigate mysterious noises (even if yr armed); or be fat (as evidenced by the overweight hitch-hiker's devastatingly horrific "squeezed banana" death). however, all of this is largely beside the point, because the point of part IV is corey fucking feldman. though tommy's obviously not the strongest kid in the sandbox - he's too attached to various apron strings and the weird-ass horror masks he makes in his spare time to play sports or talk to girls - this kid is hardcore! he plays little brother for most of the film, then goes apeshit at the end and delivers his sister from jason by repeatedly stabbing him with a machete while screaming "DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!" like a 9-year-old freaking out on refined sugar and angel dust. the demonic look in his eye at the end of the movie suggests an imminent case of stockholm syndrome and the inevitability of yet another sequel.
bodycount: 13

A New Beginning (1985) - Danny Steinmann
part V was a bad idea, start to finish. it's so awful jason isn't even in it. a new beginning starts several years after its prequel with tommy, not yet recovered from the childhood trauma of having his family attacked by a psycho-killer in a hockey mask, living in a half-way house for troubled teens. the killing begins, and each of the kids at the half-way house is offed less creatively than the last. we're so bored that the highlight of the movie is when yet another annoying fat kid, this one addicted to chocolate bars, gets axed for being annoying, fat, and full of chocolate. oddly, while the kills are sleep-inducing at best, the cast of peripheral characters in part V are somewhat more entertaining than in the previous films. there's a spunky black kid who has an awesome older brother who lives in a van with his superfreak girlfriend and gets killed in an outhouse made of tin after he gives his brother a burrito, and a very angry hillbilly woman whose son gets decapitated riding around on his dirtbike while she's making some kind of shitty stew. but this break in style does nothing to revive the franchise, nor does it make the film's 92-minute runtime anything more than a waste of time. and much to everyone's total lack of surprise, the reason this movie's so boring is because the psycho-killer in the hockey mask isn't jason! (which we all knew already because jason's mask has red detailing and this one has blue). and it isn't tommy either, which is stupid because why else would you bother to bring back the character? instead, this snooze-fest of a massacre is brought to us by some townie paramedic who happens to be the father of the fat kid whose death is the only thing worth watching in this whole film.
bodycount: 19 (+3 in a dream/hallucination sequence)

Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) - Tom McLoughlin
jason is restored to action when his rotting corpse is exhumed by tommy (that's right, they bring him back for a third time, and he's played by yet another actor because continuity of character matters to tom mcloughlin about as much as continuity of plot), who stabs jason through the chest with a section of wrought-iron fence, which serves as a well-placed conductor for some well-timed lightening. now jason's a zombie. worst. ret-con. ever. tommy is put in jail for being a crazy person and is mercilessly tormented by the sherriff's cocktease daughter, who for some reason is all hot for tommy's stories about "camp blood." jason gets up to his regular antics (including slaughtering a group of business douches on some team-building paintball retreat), mayhem ensues, and the movie ends in a ring of fire with jason in chains at the bottom of the lake. next movie plz.
bodycount: 17

Part VII: The New Blood (1988) - John Carl Buechler
finally we have kane hodder playing jason. things are looking up, right? not so much. our heroine tina is a talented young woman with latent telekenetic powers that only manifest themselves when the men in her life are being assholes. the first time it happened, she accidentally on purpose killed her alcoholic abusive father, and now she's being provoked and exploited by her evil shrink, who secludes her in a cabin at crystal lake - the site of her father's death - in order to "study" her powers. in a moment of panic, tina's telekenesis breaks the chains that restrain jason, thereby loosing him on the entire camp. part VII might have been more aptly subtitled "jason vs carrie," and if the writers had developed that plotline more fully, perhaps this movie would have been watchable. but it wasn't, they didn't, and them's the breaks for diligent audiences like ourselves. so instead we sit through another hour of painfully awful acting and dialogue punctuated intermittently with laughable kills. no one but us is taking this seriously anymore. none of this movie matters until jason and tina-carrie go head to head, then it's retard strengh vs teen-angst-fuelled telekenesis. tina goes all dark phoenix and throws everything she's got at jason, including vines, tree-roots, the entire floor of a house ... she even manages to raise her dead father from the bottom of the lake (cpt rocket finds this satisfying because he hates these movies and at this point he can at least pretend he's watching x-men). her super-powers are of course no match for jason, but tina's zombie dad comes to the rescue and drags him back into the lake. seriously.
bodycount: 16 (+1 in a dream)

Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) - Rob Hedden
lightening strikes again! or power lines, in this case ... power lines that happen to be attached to jason's body at the bottom of crystal lake. zombified once more, jason wakes up and utters his first ever non-grunt sound: he laughs. evilly. underwater. and just when audiences were starting to think that retard strength and apparent immortality weren't enough, sorcerer jason casts the rarely used "land be gone" spell to alter geography so he can catch a boat from crystal lake to new york. despite its amazing travel capabilities, however, this boat just doesn't cut it for jason. he has standards, after all. so he takes a good hard look at another motherfucking boat and jumps ship to ruin the graduation party of a bunch of coked-out teens from jersey. this is cpt rocket's favourite film in the series cuz he's hard for this girl in a leather jacket who plays a shitty guitar solo in the engine room of the boat like she's in the crow or whatever. dead bodies abound so the kids abandon ship and escape to new york city in a lifeboat, while jason swims alongside like he's a fucking dolphin. once they hit shore, the kids are immediately mugged, and some girl gets drugged by thugs. jason is apparently intimidated by the big apple, cuz he ignores everyone from nyc and only chases the kids from jersey. one douche tries to channel cassius clay and attempts to punch jason to death by hitting the only armoured part of his body approximately 70 times (cpt rocket counted). jason gets as bored as we are and punches him back, which decapitates the dude and sends his head flying into an open dumpster. in a moment of unprecedented premeditation, jason then locates and climbs into the dumpster so he can retrieve the head and carry it around for a while until he has the opportunity to put it in the front seat of a police car to scare the shit out of the kids who get into it. jason hits times square and kicks a ghetto blaster, which understandably pisses off the gang to whom it belongs and they're all switchblades and tough words until jason pulls off his mask as if to say "dudes, i'm from jersey. and mentally challenged." so the gang backs off because they don't kill retards, or ugly people. then toxic waste turns jason into a child and he's left for dead in the sewer. i'm not even kidding.
bodycount: 25

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) - Adam Marcus
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
the final friday? would that it were. everyone in this movie is stupid. someone actually checks a pulse for breathing, presumably because that's way more accurate than checking the respiratory system for a heartbeat. (why are we still watching these?) jason, once more an adult, gets blown up, and the coroner attending him consumes his still-beating heart, thus contracting the psycho-killer cannibal-possession virus. the tent-scene - in which a generously endowed young woman is delivered from her ineffectual attempts to orgasm by repeatedly impaling herself on her less-than-enthusiastic lover when jason slices her stem to stern with a machete - is the best kill since mrs. voorhees lost her head. and if we are to believe the visual shoutout to the necronomicon from evil dead, this jason lives in the same neighbourhood as ash williams. and speaking of badass motherfuckers, enter creighton duke, whose main interests in life involve breaking fingers and hoarding information about jason voorhees. jason has become more calculating, or at least less retarded - he shaves some cop's face before turning the blades on him (cpt rocket thinks this is probably because jason hates moustaches because mrs. voorhees married some douche who had one who used to beat him a lot when he was a kid or something, but really he's trying to make this movie more interesting than it actually is). but it must have something to do with family, because apparently jason had a sister who wasn't retarded and she had a daughter who had a daughter who is somehow the last zion or whatever and must be protected by spells or enchanted machetes or some other nonsense completely unrelated to everything else in the jasonverse. jason gets fucked up and somehow turns into a worm-fetus, so he crawls into his dead sister's vag in order to become jason proper again, but with a gross melty body. then the movie turns into an '80s fantasy metal music video when an enchanted dagger transforms into a magic jewelled sword that happens to be the only thing able to kill jason, for reals this time. jason gets stabbed through the heart and sucked into the netherworld, leaving behind only his hockey mask. but then - *gasp* - freddy krueger's hand grabs hold of it and brings it back into hell so we can all hold our breath for 11 years hoping that movie never gets made.
bodycount: 22 on-screen, plus at least 6 implied

Jason X (2001) - James Issac
aka: jason in space. this movie is even billed as both horror and science fiction. anyway, it's 2010 and jason is no longer in hell because he's been captured by the government and cryogenically frozen because the aforementioned retard-strength and apparent immortality make execution impossible. flash forward to 2455, when a team of researchers discover the body and think that bringing jason back to their spacecraft and thawing him is a really good idea. nanotech solves the problem of regeneration and turns jason into a robozombie programmed to hate everything. he wakes up and immediately kills a sexy intern by sticking her head in cryogenic fluid and smashing it on a table. best kill ever. jason then runs around the ship killing everyone else he runs into until the researchers try to trap him in the holodeck by simulating a lakeside camp for horny teens circa 1980, but he knows fake tits when he sees them so he kills a bunch of real people instead ... by hurling the ship into a spacestation. kay-em 14, the requisite hot robot girl of any sci-fi worth its salt, goes all matrix on jason's ass and hurts him real good, but then he's revived by a broken computer. one survivor finds his balls and tries to destroy jason forever by riding his full-metal-body through space on a suicide mission into earth 2. however, jason's body fails to incinerate on his fall through the atmosphere, and he lands ... in a lake ... by two horny teenagers.
bodycount: 21 on-screen (including the suicide), over 200 credited, plus a spacestation

Freddy vs Jason (2003) - Ronny Yu
(produced by Sean S Cunningham)
who the fuck thought this was a good idea? no one, for a long time (development was, well, hell), but after 11 years we all knew we had it coming. mostly this is a nightmare film, and cpt rocket and i both hate freddy so hard we're sympathetic to jason and spend the whole movie waiting for him to lay the smack down. the film begins with freddy raising jason from the hell whence he put him so as to get back at the kids who are no longer afraid of bad dreams. these kids are so not afraid of anything anymore that they throw a rave in a local cornfield, where jason gets his frag on and kills the shit out of a bunch of them. now they're scared again, and wow, do we not care. a weird date-rape dream-sequence thing happens where freddy, jason, and some teenaged douche fight over who gets to fuck/kill an unconscious girl full of ghb. i hate everything right now and for the rest of the movie until the kids get smart and arrange for a showdown. they work some dream-mojo and head to crystal lake, where freddy and jason finally go at it and jason cuts off freddy's hand and impales him with it ftw.
freddy's bodycount: 1
jason's bodycount: 24 (if you count freddy)

Friday the 13th (2009) - Marcus Nispel
(produced by Michael Bay)
not a fucking jason movie. detailed assessment of the reboot's trespasses against the franchise forthcoming.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974) - Bo Arne Vibenius

Swedish rape revenge at its best. I'm starting to worry that this blog is becoming a little too focused on the genre. If you are going to watch this flick, watch it in poorly dubbed English and preferably in the harder-to-find porno cut. Also titled They Call Her One-Eye, this is for the most part on the satisfying side of the rape revenge genre.

Thriller gets going in the classiest of ways: child molestation. Kind of. In a touch of artfulness, the girl is picked up by a grody old old man, who then starts spewing black bile from his grody old mouth. Awesome, right? The poor little girl, Frigga, grows up mute, traumatized, but loved by her simple farming parents who send her to the big city for a special doctor's appointment. Of course, she misses the bus and accepts a ride from a pimp-like dude in a sports car, just driving around the countryside all pimp-like. You know where this is going. After a light dinner and tons of booze, Frigga wakes up the prisoner of The Douchiest Man in Sweden. Now addicted to heroin (natch), young simple Frigga is forced into a life of prostitution, where she is awarded a "fix" for good behaviour. Mmm....total trash!

Thriller gets its points by never backing down. The film is extreme for its time, but this shit stands up 35 years later. Watching Frigga try to escape in vain while her pimp slowly drives behind her until she just passes out is some hard shit. The real cadaver used for the eye gouging. The ridiculously unnecessary hardcore fuck scenes (and accompanying money shot). The gross dude in the tiger underpants. Terrifying. Fuck it, let's have her own parents commit suicide. Scenes of Frigga slowly and silently planning her revenge against not only her pimp but her johns as well build slowly to the end we all know is coming. Her interactions with her instructors offer a welcome break from the black hole that is her life. Action sequences are all slow-mo, I suspect to cover the poor choreography as much as for any stylistic purpose. But it works. This little girl is gonna kill both hired thugs AND cops? In a warehouse fight?! Fucking slo-mo that shit and I will believe it.

The film builds to one of the most satisfying final kills I've ever seen. Frigga isn't blinded by rage, but cold and calculated, exact. It's a bit chilling and so perfect. Thriller is far from a perfect film, however. At times, it's laughably bad. I mean, she gets a day off every week to do whatever she wants? How about gun lessons? Driving lessons? Fucking martial arts lessons? OKAY. And she doesn't bail because of the heroin? Like you can't find that shit elsewhere? Fucking eye patches that match different outfits? I love it, though. I love it all. A million fucking points.