.

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: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.37 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:09:39 (slow recovery run)

 

Rule Number 1: always be wary of films with more than one director. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, like some of the Wachowski sisters’ movies, and also anything directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont—don’t bother arguing with me because that is a HILL I WILL HAPPILY DIE ON. But generally speaking, a movie having multiple directors is a red flag that might indicate a lack of focus or authorial voice. And that’s why I wish I’d done my due diligence before watching You Can’t Kill Stephen King.

 

What can I say? I was in a rush to choose, I was in the mood for something a little lighthearted and goofy after the dreadalanche that was Are We Not Cats, and YCKSK seemed like it might hit the spot. I expected a self-aware spoof that parodied the tropes of the genre and specifically brought horror icon Stephen King into the mix to set it apart in a pretty crowded space. (I should clarify: I thought King and his work would feature heavily in the plot. I don’t mean I expected the actual factual Stephen King to appear in this movie; he does not, although that would have been nifty, and might have been a saving grace if done well.)

 

While I like Stephen King, most people wouldn’t consider me a fan. I’ve read maybe a half-dozen of his novels, a few of his short story collections, and his excellent book on writing. I’ve watched, and mostly enjoyed, a bunch of movies adapted from his stuff. But I’m definitely not one of those people who have memorized every detail of the man’s life and enormous body of work—which is in some sense a bummer, since those are likely the only people to get much out of the slogfest that is YCKSK.

 

It begins with mild promise, setting itself up as the expected spoof: there’s an underwear-clad co-ed running screaming through the woods until she takes a shovel to the face, Looney-Tunes-style instead of horror-flick-style. After the title card, the characters are introduced with onscreen captions revealing their horror stereotypes, such as “shell-shocked Iraq veteran” and “creepy virgin” and “attention whore.” These six friends are driving to a lake in Maine for some speedboating and cavorting in bikinis, but Ronnie—the aforementioned creepy virgin—is only tagging along because he’s stalking his personal hero Stephen King, who he’s heard lives at the lake they’re visiting.

 

However, the townspeople are transparently anxious to convince them that Mr. King doesn’t live there after all. And after an interminable wakeboarding montage (what is with all the wakeboarding I’ve been seeing in horror movies lately? Jeez, at least in the Friday the 13th remake it was topless), “token black friend” Lamont gets his throat slit while refueling the minivan at a gas station. The local cops inform the rest of the group that Lamont was killed by a wolf, but they have their doubts—especially when Lamont’s severed head shows up on a stake outside their window and they start getting picked off one by one. Monroe notices that the murders all resemble deaths in Stephen King stories, so they hatch a plan to catch the killer by exploiting that fact.

 

It’s not much of a plot, but YCKSK has some positive qualities, to be sure. For one thing, for an indie flick that didn’t have studio cash to burn, it looks better than you’d expect, and kudos to the cinematographer, because a couple of the shots were downright gorgeous. The cast, too, turned in performances that weren’t exactly Oscar-caliber, but they were slightly better than I usually see in movies of this pay grade.

 

Unfortunately, that’s about all I can list in the asset column. YCKSK isn’t remotely scary, and only barely even tries to be funny after the first 15 minutes. (When it does try, it rarely succeeds.) That’s one of the things that’s so off-putting: for a movie that sets itself up as a comedy, it’s all over the map, tonally speaking. Once the first body hits the ground, YCKSK goes full slasher-whodunit and contains less humor than a lot of straight-up horror movies sprinkle in as comic relief… but there sure is a lot of heavy drama about “Iraq veteran” Monroe’s PTSD and the strain it puts on his relationship with Lori, the on-again-off-again love of his life. The movie couldn’t make up its mind whether it should be a comedy, a horror movie, or a romance drama. Gee, it’s almost like it had three different directors or something.

 

Add to that the fact that Ronnie edges out Jar Jar Binks near the top of my Most Annoying Movie Characters list and that the film spends an hour building up to the shocking revelation which is ALREADY IN THE DANG TITLE, and, well, maybe give this one a miss. The possible exception might be if, unlike me, you happen to be a slavering Stephen King devotee. You may well enjoy spotting the zillion little references to his books, but even the casual King fan will pretty much just say, “oh, the mom and son in the diner are named Wendy and Danny like in The Shining, neat” and leave it at that. Use your judgement.

 

(Incidentally, a corollary to Rule Number 1: if two of the directors are also the lead actors, hoooo boy.)

 

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.64 miles, 8’52”/mile, 01:07:45 (recovery run)

 

Here’s a thing about me: I’m a sucker for a heist movie. Or rather, I’m a sucker for an unusual heist movie; considering I’ve never even seen Ocean’s Eleven (either of them), it’d be a stretch to say I was a connoisseur of the genre. But I loved Ocean’s 8, I got a real kick out of Now You See Me, I’m always up for another Inception screening despite its logical flaws, A Fish Called Wanda will always occupy a special place in my heart, and I got super excited when the second half of Happy Death Day 2U pretty much turned into a sci-fi heist. So the premise of Monster Party was more than enough to hook me.

 

To wit: Casper, Iris, and Dodge (already, those names; you son of a bitch, I’m in) are three young ne’er-do-wells who pretty competently pull off small-potatoes B&Es, thanks in part to Casper’s facility with electronic alarm systems and Iris’s ability to improvise. The only problem is, Casper’s dad has a gambling problem, which has turned into a massive debt problem, which has turned into a finger-cut-off-and-dead-by-Sunday problem—so Casper needs ten large in a hurry and raiding a few more middle-class houses ain’t gonna cut it.

 

Iris, though, has an in: she’s serving at a catered party this weekend, at a real upscale house she’s worked before. She gets Casper and Dodge in the door as two more servers in hopes that Casper will find a safe he can crack. He does, but there’s just one problem: this joint is wired to the hilt with the utmost in electronic security, and when the plan goes awry due to the… proclivities of the host’s son, the house seals itself up and our team is trapped inside. That would be bad enough in the best circumstances, but this party they’re trying to heist? Turns out it’s a meeting of recovering serial killers. Being locked in with fresh meat has the twelve-steppers all falling off the wagon, and hilarity ensues. Oh, wait, did I say hilarity? I meant disembowelment. Disembowelment ensues.

 

Once the movie moves from its heist phase into all-out gore territory, things go way over the top—there are samurai swords and neon green chainsaws and a deformed slay-crazy brother hidden away in the basement, all playing out against the backdrop of a failed murder-addict rehab program. While part of me wonders how Monster Party might have turned out had it taken itself more seriously, I can’t fault the decision to go all-out camp; at times the movie feels like the slightly button-down bastard offspring of House of 1,000 Corpses and Crank, which, coming from me, isn’t a criticism. The pace is suitably manic and the soundtrack is killer.

 

I would say the cast handles themselves fine, although some of the killer guests might be too nuts even for this flick. Virginia Gardner as Iris is the standout, and I didn’t even recognize Robin Tunney as murder-mom Roxanne (I have problems with faces—it’s a brain thing), but she did a great job portraying a woman trying to hold onto her “sobriety” while her family slips back into their old killing ways. Most of the gore is done well and the kills are suitably crazed. Also note that Monster Party doesn’t do the typical horror film thing of opening with some red meat for the gorehounds before settling into the exposition, so if you watch this with someone who doesn’t know much about it, they’ll be pretty dang surprised by the sharp left turn from Heistville into Slasher Heights.

 

The downsides are few: uneven tone (some scenes feel “obligatory horror”-y or even imported from other movies), a slightly wooden protagonist, and a somewhat disappointing ending. It’s one of those movies you think will go one of two ways, either of which would be a predictable letdown; instead it goes a third by attempting to channel Tarantino, and, regrettably, not all that well. But horror movies aren’t exactly known for their strong narrative conclusions, so you may find the denouement less irksome than I did.

 

Overall, I doubt that Monster Party will ever be considered a modern horror classic or anything, but it’s some good disposable fun with a nice premise and competent execution. Just don’t expect much more than that and enjoy the ride. 

 

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.05 miles, 9’08”/mile, 01:13:36 (long recovery run)

 

What to choose for an election night run? I mean, I suppose I couldn’t have opted for anything scarier than the election coverage itself, but I had resolved not to watch because I knew no winner would be declared on the night of, and I didn’t need the extra stress. So I went looking for a movie to watch, and I was in the mood for something familiar. After all, the last thing I wanted on election night was a big scary surprise.

 

Lucky for me, then, that Shudder had just added Urban Legend to its library! Just seeing the title bathed me in a wave of nostalgia; Urban Legend, together with The Faculty, was one of the first DVDs I ever bought. It was yet another of the late-’90s glut of teen-scream slashers spawned from the success of Scream, but this one distinguished itself with a gimmick practically custom-written for me: all the grisly murders contained within were modeled after various (duh) urban legends. Urban legends and movie horror? Get out of town! If they’d added in some skateboarding, a punk band, and a Buffy cast member or three, it might have been my favoritest movie ever.

 

Instead, Urban Legend is a pretty but flawed little gem regrettably devoid of punk, skateboarding, or anyone moonlighting from the Scooby Gang, but that’s not to say the cast doesn’t boast a stellar list of ’90s teen-heartthrob talent. We’ve got Tara “American Pie” Reid! Jared “Worst Joker” Leto! Joshua “Dawson’s Pacey” Jackson! Even Rebecca “Noxzema Girl” Gayheart! And that’s not all: horror fans will also appreciate Robert “Freddy” Englund as the enigmatic and ominous Professor Wexler, and the inimitable Brad “Chucky” Dourif in an uncredited appearance as the stuttering gas station attendant.

 

The star of the show, however, is Alicia “Cybill’s… Daughter, I Guess? I Never Saw That Show” Witt as Natalie, a student at New Hampshire’s Pendleton University. It was a simpler time; a time when college kids had pagers instead of cell phones, you could (should the need arise) track down a killer by looking at who had last signed the little check-out card in the back of a library book, and your manic depressive roommate found her campus hookups by hogging your dorm room’s landline to dial in to the Goth 4 Goth message boards. Unfortunately, there’s a ripple of unease in this idyllic oasis of academia, because people have suddenly started going missing and/or dead.

 

The kicker is that the action seems strangely centered on Natalie, as again and again she sees her fellow students lured into scenarios mirroring those of famous urban legends before they’re killed by a live-action version of Kenny from South Park. Seriously, the killer is wearing a parka with the hood up, so you get the same plot contrivance as in the previous year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer with the rain slickers: Natalie can’t spot the real killer, because everybody wears the same winter parka. Have I mentioned that it’s not winter? Eh, whatever.

 

Anyway, Natalie gets the feeling that Axe-Wielding Kenny is somehow related to a shocking secret from her bad-girl past—but maybe it’s just Professor Wexler instead, who teaches a class on urban folklore and has an unrelated shocking secret of his own. Or is her imagination running away with her? Perhaps Damon didn’t die in front of her eyes and is just playing a prank on her for rejecting his advances. Maybe her roommate did commit suicide by slashing her wrists in bed, somehow writing a clear sentence on the wall in her own blood before dying (which wouldn’t explain her strangulation bruises, but sssshhhh, we’re not talking about that). Does it all have anything to do with the anniversary of a dorm massacre that no one will acknowledge ever happened?

 

If you’re getting the sense that Urban Legend features a convoluted, nonsensical plot, you’re not wrong. I don’t want to go into detail here, but as intriguing as the idea of urban legend-themed murders might be, the way they come off in the movie would make them impossible to plan and execute with any level of confidence. Heck, literally the first murder that starts off the movie could only have happened the way it did by accident—and without the unplannable occurrence, it wouldn’t have matched an urban legend at all.

 

What I’m saying is that Urban Legend’s plot has enough holes to serve as a decent makeshift colander, and unless you’re making spaghetti and have woefully underprepared, that’s a shortcoming, to be sure. But for me, anyway, the story is engaging enough that I can just sort of surf its dream logic; everything seems to make enough sense until I wake up and start thinking about it. Even so, it feels about 10 minutes too long, and it was made in the late ’90s so you better BELIEVE there’s a sassy Black security guard. But what can I say? When the credits roll, I always feel I had a good time.

 

I dunno, maybe it’s just because my own higher-education career was so woefully devoid of urban legend-themed murders. I probably should have gone to a liberal arts college.

 

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 8’54”/mile, 01:04:34 (recovery run)

 

Oh boy, what do I do with He’s Out There? I doubt I ever would have thought to watch it at all, except it happened to be on Pluto TV’s horror channel while I was doing other things and I got sucked in after missing the first twenty minutes. So I checked, and Amazon Prime had it available, which meant not only could I see it from the beginning during my nightly run, but I could also watch it without being interrupted by commercials urging me to “climb aboard the Trump train” every seven minutes. (The movie’s plenty scary enough already, thank you very much.) But I have a polar ambivalence about how to rate it, because while He’s Out There does a whole bunch of stuff badly, it does a few key things very, very well.

 

On its face, He’s Out There appears to be yet another generic slasher film with yet another masked maniac preying on yet another helpless group of victims stranded in the woods. This time the prey are Laura and her two young daughters Kayla and Maddie, who have gone up to their lake house for one last late-season weekend away; Laura’s husband Shawn will be driving up alone after his business meeting, and expects to arrive later that night. The gate is unlocked for Laura by a local named Owen (we are never told his full name, but I suspect it’s “Owen Exposition”), who casually mentions that the house’s previous owners had a kid who vanished in the woods, and they took it real hard so they sold the place and moved away.

 

It’s not long before creepy stuff starts happening. The kids find a secret tea party in the woods, Maddie winds up poisoned and vomiting, there are scary noises and an unknown presence in the house, and pretty soon Laura sees a masked guy waving from the driveway. Shawn still hasn’t arrived, and Laura needs to get Maddie to a doctor, but of course Masked Guy has disabled the car (in a more exciting manner than usual, I might add), so the terrified family tries to hole up and wait for Dad to show up and save the day. You can probably guess how that turns out, so it’s up to Laura and the kids to survive until morning.

 

Like I said, there’s a lot to dislike about He’s Out There beyond the generic title. Its undersaturated palette jives with my personal aesthetic, but it makes the film look like it wants to be a Zack Snyder movie. Its plot relies on numerous conveniences of the laziest slasher writing—the psychic killer, the teleporting killer, Owen Exposition, the Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Is Immediately Eviscerated, the Other Guy Showing Up to Save You Who Immediately Has His Arms Ripped Off, etc.—and also has more holes in it than a camp counselor on Saturday the 14th, especially in the last 15 minutes or so. And yet, despite relying heavily on slasher tropes, the movie doesn’t really succeed as a traditional slasher, because how high of a body count can you rack up when there are only six characters total? (Well, seven, if you count a store clerk with a single line who is nowhere near the action.)

 

Some people are also going to be irked that we never learn the killer’s whole backstory or motivation, but I think I’m mostly okay with that; it’s less satisfying narratively but probably more effective from a horror perspective. I mean, Black Christmas is a classic BECAUSE we never get the whole deal on the killer, not in spite of it. But I honestly don’t know how to feel about the killer in He’s Out There going the Michael Myers “silent but deadly” route for the entire first part of the movie and then suddenly getting an extended monologue in the third reel. It’s like seeing Jason Voorhees suddenly burst into a lesser-known Cole Porter song about heads on sticks.

 

Here’s the main thing, though: He’s Out There actually scared me. If you’re the right sort of viewer, it digs into some pretty raw nerves: kids being hurt because you failed to protect them, kids being terrorized while you’re powerless to help them, kids witnessing the brutal death of their parents. Most of the credit should probably go to the performers, because Yvonne Strahovski really nails it as the mom who has to lie to her kids and tell them everything’s going to be okay when she knows nothing will ever be okay again. And real-life sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky are perfect as Kayla and Maddie; their behaviors and reactions to the horrors befalling them are so authentic it burns.

 

I should mention that a lot of viewers seem to have a problem with the girls being “annoying,” but take it from the full-time primary caregiver of a daughter since her birth: those kids are just acting like actual kids. And my experience is not limited to parenthood, either; I was also an in-class kindergarten helper and a Girl Scout Leader from Brownies up through 8th grade, and our Brownie troop of two dozen girls at one point included THREE sets of twins. So yeah, I think I have a pretty well-informed opinion when I say that the sisters in He’s Out There acted pretty much exactly as I think most sisters that age would behave in their unbearable situation, and it’s tough to watch in exactly the way it should be.

 

So there you go: if you’re looking for a by-the-numbers slasher flick with a lot of gore and body parts piled to the heavens, this isn’t the movie for you. Likewise, if you dislike kids or find them irritating, you’re going to find He’s Out There both formulaic AND annoying. But if you’re a parent, or you like kids, or you have enough empathy to imagine what it would be like to be, say, seven years old and rely on your parents for safety and security only to sense their own mortal terror or witness their helpless demise at the hands of the Bogeyman, well… pleasant nightmares.

 

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.58 miles, 8’36”/mile, 01:05:17 (recovery run)

 

This past weekend I was interviewed about a project I worked on wayyyyyy back in 1997, so I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood for tonight’s recovery run. Accordingly, I cued up that bygone year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, set the treadmill to a slow lope, and pressed play… and immediately proceeded to LOSE MY EVERLOVIN’ MIND, because somehow I had completely repressed the knowledge that this movie kicks off with a crappy nu-metal cover of “Summer Breeze.” Seriously. If I didn’t already know this movie ain’t half bad, I’d have to buckle myself in for a ’90s-Style Sucktacular.

 

No, honestly, it’s really not bad! I mean yeah, it’s almost painfully ’90s, with the requisite soundtrack of ironic cover songs and a cast of the A-list heartthrobs that dominated the teen-flick renaissance of the era. And granted, the ill-fitting undergarments and interestingly-chosen camera angles lead me to think of it as I Know What Your Cleavage Did Last Summer, while the script by Kevin Williamson is pretty much just a feature-length horror episode of Dawson’s Eek. But let’s be honest, here: an awful lot of horror succeeds in spite of (or sometimes because of) being stuffed to the gullet with camp and/or cringe. So let’s dive in, shall we?

 

For the uninitiated, IKWYDLS is about four impossibly attractive “teens” (seriously, one of them is a literal beauty queen who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, go figure) who get drunk while celebrating their charmed lives. But then, WHOOPSY-DAISY, they run over some guy and decide the only way to keep from destroying their impossibly bright futures with a manslaughter charge is to dump the body in the ocean and tell no one. Fast-forward to one year later, they’re all back in town for the summer, their impossibly bright futures have all been derailed by guilt, and now on top of that they’re receiving little anonymous love notes implying that the writer is, shall we say, aware of activities in which they partook during the warmer months of the prior year. The icing on the cake is that now they’re also being stalked, harassed, and eventually targeted for murder by a revenge-crazed Gorton’s Fisherman.

 

So much for the setup. The way it plays out is pretty familiar territory for anyone who saw Scream or any of the zillion Hollywood teen horror flicks that its box-office success inspired: IKWYDLS is basically a Scooby Doo mystery (starring not one, but TWO future Mystery Machine occupants) with some scares and some occasionally grisly deaths. Main character (and main cleavage) Julie leads her friends on a chase to discover more about the man they killed, in hopes that they can discover who might be coming after them. Where it differs a bit from the standard teen slasher is that the killer isn’t killing THEM off—at least, not right away. He’s mostly hitting them with cars and putting them in the hospital, or hiding in their bedrooms and cutting off some of their hair while they sleep. Sure, he kills an acquaintance or two just to show he means business, but you really don’t start to see the conspirators adding to the body count until maybe two-thirds in. It’s mostly an exercise in paranoia and turning friends against one another, and it works pretty well.

 

That’s not to say it’s even remotely perfect: the cast is strong, and Williamson is generally no slouch as a writer, but the characters here are written to type (I assume because this is “genre fiction”), so everyone’s got to cleave to a pretty thin stereotype. The plot also relies a lot on the trope of the omnipotent secret killer, what with bodies disappearing without a trace in a matter of seconds, and the bad guy seemingly teleporting at his convenience to suit the jump scare. And the disguise of the killer is both laughably unscary and a major plot crutch. (Really, Kevin Williamson? During a July 4th parade in North Carolina, in the middle of a sunny afternoon with temperatures in the mid-90s, there are gonna be SEVERAL people wearing rain slickers and hats so we don’t know which one is the killer? Really?) Also the cat-and-mouse chases are oddly dull, and the ending is completely ’80s-style horror generic.

 

And yet, I can’t talk myself out of liking IKWYDLS at least a little. Watch it as a nostalgia trip, watch it to see a bunch of teen stars yell at each other about something other than who’s going to be prom queen, watch it for the throwaway Dawson’s Creek references and the one time it gets kinda real about how most impossibly bright futures look a good deal dimmer a year after high school graduation. Don’t worry—the “Summer Breeze” cover is over pretty quickly.