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Watched on: HBO Max

Ran: 7.52 miles, 9’29”/mile, 01:11:23 (slow recovery run)

 

Friends, sometimes you just want to watch something stupid… and I mean brick-stupid. Not necessarily bad, mind you, though in film the two often go hand in hand—and yes, there are times when you want to watch something bad. But right now I’m not talking about those times. I’m talking about when one feels a deep, unrelenting itch to see some seriously ill-conceived idiocy, if only to reaffirm the fundamental absurdity of this human experience we’ve shaped for ourselves. And at times like those, I either go see a Beckett play, or I reach for a big bowl of popcorn and the panacea that is Jason X.

 

Jason X, you see, is a film that EXCELS at being stupid. It is a masterpiece of fatuity, Michelangelo’s Pietà if Michelangelo’s whole deal had been carving beautiful statues out of huge blocks of pure dumb. It is, to put it mildly, GLORIOUS.

 

Let me break it down for you: in the original franchise continuity there had already been nine, count ‘em, NINE Friday the 13th movies, the two most recent being Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. So when resurrecting everyone’s favorite unstoppable killer for one more spree, the filmmakers asked one all-important question: once you’ve already freed Jason Voorhees from the environs of Camp Crystal Lake and sent him first to Manhattan and then, perhaps redundantly, to Hell, where can you send him next? Space. The answer is space.

 

Also, the future.

 

In space.

 

And thus, Jason X was born!

 

The story makes perfect sense: since no one’s been able to keep Jason dead, scientists at the Crystal Lake Research Facility decide to cryogenically freeze him instead. Naturally, a whole lotta people die in order to make this happen, but one of the scientists, Rowan, manages to lure Jason into a cryo chamber and start the freezing process. He stabs her through the glass just before he freezes, and some of the super-freezy cryo gas comes through the stab-hole and freezes Rowan, too. So Rowan remains stabbed and frozen outside Jason’s cryo tube for like 400 years, as apparently that’s how super-freezy cryo gas works and also no one bothered to go to the facility or follow up on any of the dozen-plus dead people, etc. because that’s totally a thing that would happen.

 

Cut to the year 2455: Earth has long been abandoned because it’s become too polluted to sustain life. Humanity’s fled this garbage heap and started a NEW garbage heap on Earth 2 (seriously, they named it that), and the only people who visit Earth Classic anymore are archaeology classes on field trips—one of which has just found Jason and Rowan still frozen, despite a dead and abandoned planet probably not having a working electrical grid to power the cryo tubes and Rowan isn’t even in one anyway BUT I DIGRESS. The students bring Jason and Rowan on board their ship, thaw out Rowan and heal her stab wound—it’s no biggie, they just routinely reattached some dude’s arm, it’s THE FUTURE after all—and then laugh at her primitive grasp of science as she warns them all that no matter how dead he may look (spoiler: he looks plenty dead, it’s gross), Jason’s about to kill them all.

 

Predictably, she’s right, and Jason goes on Baby’s First Space Rampage while Rowan tries to assist the crew and space marines with what she knows about the phenomenon that is Jason Voorhees. (Think Aliens with Rowan as Ripley.) It’s impossible to spoil the “surprise twist” since it was in the previews and ON THE DANG POSTER, so basically once Jason is cut to ribbons by the adorable ass-kicking lovebot KM-14, the ship’s nanotech rebuilds him as a sleek futuristic Jason with upgrades and, yeah. Like I may have mentioned once or twice, it’s dumb.

 

The body count is INSANE, since Jason has to tear through TWO military squadrons (one terrestrial and one in space, natch), as well as everyone else he encounters. Most of these 20-odd kills are therefore of the quick and practical variety, but Jason does manage to offer up two of the more entertaining onscreen deaths in the entire franchise, namely 1) submerging someone’s head in liquid nitrogen for a few seconds and them smashing it against the countertop, and 2) impaling someone on a giant industrial upward-pointing drill bit so that the corpse slowly rotates as gravity pulls it downward. Be warned: there’s plenty of CGI, which I guess I should consider sacrilegious in a Friday the 13th flick, but honestly it felt pretty at-home in a movie like this.

 

The low-rent Canadian cast performs admirably, the characters are mostly simple but reasonably engaging (the android being the most likable character should be a red flag, and yet it works here), and overall, transplanting Jason into space works far better than it has any right to. If you can embrace the stupidity, Jason X is super-entertaining. I mean, I was 30 when I first saw it, and it made me SO ANGRY, people. These days? I just flat-out love it. Maybe it’s because I’ve mellowed, or maybe it’s because the background radiation of stupidity on this planet has risen exponentially over the past, oh, four years or so (hmmmm…) and Jason X’s now pales in comparison.

 

Whatever the reason, I will happily watch Jason X on a loop until what’s left of my brain withers and dies. If you decide to join me, keep an eye peeled for a David Cronenberg cameo, and enjoy your last chance to see Kane Hodder behind the hockey mask.

 

Watched on: SYFY

Ran: 7.15 miles, 9’13”/mile, 01:05:58 (recovery run)

 

For now, at least, I’m blessed with an embarrassment of riches in that I have access to plenty of top streaming services, so between Shudder, Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Showtime, and STARZ, I’m not exactly having a tough time finding stuff to watch. (Which is not to say that I don’t regularly feel the pain of missing out on Hulu and Disney+ exclusives, but MAN that’s a first-world problem if ever there was one.) Nonetheless, sometimes it’s nice to remind ourselves that if we only focus on the big guys, we can miss out on some real gems—like tonight’s little surprise, You Might Be the Killer. Right now it’s only available on SYFY, despite the fact that it isn’t about a sharkcentric weather event or any of your variously-enormous crocodilids vs. robo-any-other-vaguely-fierce-creatures.

 

YMBtK is another entry in an ever-lengthening line of meta-slashers that followed Scream, arguably the first horror movie that was set in a universe in which anyone had ever actually, y’know, seen a horror movie. This one is an homage in particular to Friday the 13th and similar camp slashers from the 1980s: we’ve got a masked killer with a big honkin’ blade, a bunch of camp counselors getting offed in inventive ways, and even an onscreen body count in a very ’80s typeface with an aged film effect. And just like in Scream, characters’ knowledge of how scary movies work is key to them navigating and surviving the scary movie they currently inhabit. The key difference in You Might Be the Killer is that the protagonist, uh, might be the killer. Actually, no, he’s TOTALLY the killer, and that’s not really a spoiler; the movie stops being a whodunit pretty much right after the main characters are established and instead becomes a howdoIstopdoingit, which is way more entertaining.

 

Literally the first scene has Our Hero Sam fleeing and panicked, desperately wiping the gore off his face and trying to smile calmly so he can unlock his phone with face recognition, and that is sort of emblematic of the whole movie right there: a smart chuckle in a bloodbath. He’s calling his best friend Chuck, who works at the mother of all comic shops and just happens to be an expert on horror movies. He informs her that there’s a masked maniac slaughtering all the counselors, and together they work out pretty quickly through a series of flashbacks that Sam is committing the murders himself while under the influence of a cursed mask carved from an evil tree. (Yeah, it’s a whole thing.) Chuck tries to talk Sam through finding a way to break the curse while also not killing anyone else and yet still avoiding the time-honored fate of all masked camp maniacs: death at the hands of the chaste and innocent Final Girl.

 

I have to say, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did. YMBtK’s conceit of “what if the protagonist turns out to be the killer but he doesn’t know it, lol” (reportedly it originated from a Twitter thread) seems pretty thin to carry a feature-length movie, but some smart humor, a couple of likable characters, and a clear love of the source material are the Hamburger Helper that stretches it into a meal. There’s more graphic violence that I expected from a SYFY flick and it’s pretty well done, as befits a love letter to its 1980s forerunners.

 

Given the film’s central conflict of man-vs.-himself-plus-evil-mask, decent acting is crucial to the film’s success, and I’m happy to report that the performances are strong where they need to be. Fran Kranz (Topher from Doll House! And, uh, Stoner Marty from The Cabin in the Woods) is superb as Sam, a nice guy completely out of his element, who is simultaneously disarmingly nerdy, panic-stricken, and genuinely remorseful about splitting people’s heads open while cursed. And even twenty years after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if you put Alyson Hannigan in something, I’ll happily watch it, even if all she does is read the phone book out loud… or, more to the point, talk on the phone for an hour and a half while closing up a comic book shop. That said, she doesn’t phone it in (get it?) as Chuck, Sam’s semi-blasé Oracle/Guy in the Chair. Brittany Hall and Jenna Harvey are both solid as potential final girls Imani and Jamie, respectively. And while he’s mostly just a running gag, Bryan Price is surprisingly memorable as Steve the Kayak King.

 

YMBtK is flawed, no question, but more in design than in execution. Sam and Chuck are by far the two most engaging characters with the most important relationship, the best chemistry, and some terrific subtext—but they can never share the screen together because their entire interaction is via phone calls. Meanwhile, almost everyone else is a one-dimensional character at best and a meat prop at worst, but that’s the thing about ’80s slashers: you gotta have machete fodder. The story’s conceit more or less requires that it be pieced together in non-chronological flashbacks, and the mental work required to follow it is a bit at odds with the whole let’s-have-fun vibe—but to be frank, even if you’re not 100% following the plot, you’re still going to enjoy yourself.

 

Bottom line: it’s a joyful romp, especially if you happen to join me in the Venn overlap between a fondness for ’80s slasher flicks and a love of Joss Whedon TV shows. I don’t expect it to become a venerated classic or anything, but I’d certainly see it again sometime. And I’d DEFINITELY see the sequel the ending jokingly teases.

 

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.33 miles, 8’56”/mile, 01:05:28 (recovery run)

 

So for the first time since the pandemic hit, I actually ran outside two nights in a row. Imagine that! Partly I did it because the weather was cooperating (yayyyyy fall!), and partly it was because I was experiencing that delicious paradoxical mix of cabin-fever claustrophobia and empty-nest loneliness that is 110% my life these days. But mostly, if I’m honest, it’s because the West Coast is on fire and so many people don’t have the option to run outside, because the outdoor air is akin to what comes out of the tailpipe of a poorly-tuned 1971 Ford Pinto. Seems a shame not to breathe the air while I have some.

 

Two nights of real running on real pavement took their toll on my very real skeleton, however, and so a gentle recovery run on the treadmill while snuggled up to the ever-reliable boob tube was in order. But what to watch? Well, sometimes you just want the big-budget Hollywood version of horror, the big names and E-ticket effects that are maybe just a little too slick to really be scary, but you admire the effort, anyway. Or at least the expense. So I cued up Silent Hill, a perfect choice because it’s a video game adaptation with CGI effects galore. It’s two, two, TWO new-millennium trends for the price of one!

 

Full disclosure: I haven’t played the game Silent Hill, since I never had a system that would run it, so I can’t speak to the film’s qualities as an adaptation. As a movie in its own right, though, I enjoyed it. The plot is a little… extra, though it starts out simply enough: Rose’s adopted daughter Sharon keeps almost hurting herself while sleepwalking, and frequently screams “SILENT HILL!!” when being awoken. Rose discovers that there is a ghost town named Silent Hill and decides to take Sharon there to see if they can figure out what’s causing this dangerous behavior. Silent Hill has had a perpetual coal fire burning beneath it for the past 30 years, so the roads don’t go there anymore, but Rose finds the old turnoff from the highway and crosses the bridge into town. She swerves to avoid a child in the road and crashes into an embankment; when she comes to, Sharon is gone, there’s a creepy fog everywhere, ashes are falling from the sky, and Rose sets off in hopes of finding Sharon—and some answers.

 

Of course, that’s when messed-up things start happening, like getting attacked by dozens of weird grey humanoid thingies, and occasionally spotting a little girl who isn’t Sharon but sure looks like her, and talking to a homeless woman who seems to think Rose’s locket has a picture of her own missing daughter in it. Soon enough, Cybill the Ass-Kicking Bike Cop catches up, and, after fighting off an armless grey acid-spitting nightmare, eventually teams up with Sharon, who has herself been following clues and has pulled a key out of a corpse’s mouth, been accosted by miners, and run from a swarm of enormous cockroaches with teeny human faces. (There’s a lot going on. It’s almost like everything’s happening in a video game or something.)

 

Anyway, LONG story short(er), they fend off attacks from a huge pyramid-headed guy with a Japanese Video Game Sword (you know, the ones bigger than people?), follow more clues to the town’s hotel, and wind up meeting up with the witch-burning religious kooks who have been around since before the town was founded. They send Rose into the basement, which is full of nasty things but also the key to the whole mystery of Sharon’s origin and odd behavior. And wouldn’t you know it? The cult is still up to their witch-burnin’ ways, and it’s up to Rose to save Sharon and just maybe visit vengeance upon the flock in an orgy of airborne carnage straight out of Hellraiser.

 

So yeah, it’s a lot, but I did enjoy the low-key puzzle aspect of it all, and the story kept me engaged. Silent Hill is not without its flaws, however. Some plot points seem forced, such as Rose speeding away from the cops when she hasn’t yet broken any law; Sharon’s sleepwalking issues have been going on for years, so what’s so urgent that she’ll attempt to evade the police in a high-speed chase to get to the town RIGHT NOW? And the movie is over two hours long, so some of the interminably long sequences of Rose exploring the town felt unnecessary, as did nearly the entire subplot of Rose’s husband Chris trying (unsuccessfully) to track down his wife and child or solve the mystery of Silent Hill—what exposition we get out of that could easily be delivered in a less tortuous manner.

 

I feel it’s also worth mentioning that Radha Mitchell, who plays Rose, spends a lot of time running in this flick, and I wish I had her speed and form. (And she was running in BOOTS, for Pete’s sake.) On the fright front, Silent Hill does indeed have some genuinely scary moments—the Freaky Nurse-Things™ leap immediately to mind, and maybe the tortured-to-death janitor hauling himself out of the bathroom stall and creeping around while still bound up in barbed wire. Oh, and this movie has probably the single most effective CGI “watch someone’s whole skin get torn off her body in one fell swoop” effect I’ve ever seen, so, there’s that. Although, in hindsight, given the state of the West Coast, the scariest part might well be the fires that never stop burning and the constant rain of ashes from the sky…

 

Silent Hill is an enjoyable couple of hours packed to the brim with STUFF, and I suspect you won’t enjoy it as much if you’re not paying attention, so save it for a night when you want a story to follow. If you were disappointed by the dozen-or-so OTHER video game movies of the 2000s, this one just might work for you.

Movie: Random Acts of Violence (2020), directed by Jay Baruchel

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.33 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:07:29 (light run, weights day)

 

It’s Maniac Monday! No, I don’t know if that’s going to become a thing around here, but I did notice that I hadn’t watched a slasher flick in a while, so I went huntin’ for something to remedy that situation. Random Acts of Violence just came out like a week ago, and it didn’t disappoint. Well, it didn’t disappoint me, anyway; some fans of the original graphic novel aren’t super-happy with this cinematic adaptation, but I’ve not read the comic, so I can only judge the film as a standalone work—and on its own, I hold RAoV to be a more-than-competent entry in the field.

 

The movie’s plot is spare enough to hang well on the bones of a trim 80-minute runtime: Todd is a Canadian indie comic writer and artist whose successful anti-hero Slasherman is inspired by the real-life (in RAoV, not REAL real-life) I-90 Killer, a serial killer who abducted and murdered dozens but was never caught. Slasherman’s run is winding to a close, but Todd can’t come up with a fitting ending. He and his wife Kathy, who is herself working on a book about the I-90 Killer’s victims, hop in a car with Ezra the publisher and Aurora the assistant and set out on a road trip south, across the border and through the killing fields for inspiration, on the way to Todd’s comic convention. (And yes, the Canadians do comment along the lines of “look out, they have guns down here.”) Along the way, people start turning up brutally murdered—in ways taken straight from the pages of Todd’s comic. The violence gets closer the farther they get from home… and the killer keeps calling Todd right before the deaths. Will Todd live long enough to find his ending?

 

Let me say straight out, RAoV takes a while to get there (because there’s, y’know, an actual story with characters happening), but it is most definitely graphic and gory and bloody; it checks all those boxes. Where it falls down a little on the Slasher Rubric o’ Greatness™ is perhaps in its killer, who is not especially catchy or interesting, but I suspect that’s by design. Thematically speaking, he needs to be dull. See, RAoV is unusual in that it raises the sort of questions that fans of the genre have heard all too often from critics: does exposure to this sort of violent material make someone more likely to commit acts of violence? Todd was inspired by the I-90 Killer to create Slasherman; has someone else been inspired by Slasherman to recreate his fictional murders in real life? How complicit is Todd, then, in these new murders? And what is RAoV saying when it raises these issues—and then entertains us with the exact sort of graphic material it’s questioning?

 

Maybe it’s just a throwaway pose, or an empty and cynical attempt to cash in on controversy, but I don’t think so. There’s some real substance when Todd and Kathy are arguing about his potential glorification of the original killer versus her alleged attempt to tell the victims’ stories. Listen to her voice when she tells Todd that these murders “came from [his] head.” And the film works up to an interesting revelation about the I-90 Killer’s motivations and retirement that I won’t spoil here, but suffice it to say that I think RAoV has real things to say on the subject, even if, by the end, it can’t quite make up its mind. That seems to irk a lot of viewers who disliked the movie, but hey—if you’re a fan of horror movies and you HAVE made up your mind, I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Keep questioning, folks. It keeps you spry.

 

So if you’re a slasher fan who’s only in it for a double-digit body count and fake blood best measured in hogsheads (that’s 52ish gallons, apparently? It’s not like you gotta be super-precise at these volumes, is my point), then maybe RAoV isn’t your cup of suspiciously-red tea. But if you fancy a bit more backstory and character development than what’s in your garden-variety ’80s-era slasher, plus maybe a little social commentary and food for thought, RAoV has you covered and still has gore to spare. It’s just that you might wind up thinking about why you’re watching that gore in the first place.