Friday the 13th: A New Beginning -- 1985 -- R

One can hardly call this fifth installment a rebirth as it seemed to have been planned at the conclusion of the previous film. This one, however, takes a different direction from the previous films, and it's a refreshing take on the plot, although to achieve this, more elements are introduced that have now become very tired in the genre.

In the one, Tommy (the child from 4) is a haunted young man who is being transferred from the mental institution in which he spent his childhood to a free reign ranch design for the mentally disturbed. Trouble is that this ranch thing has normal looking and normal acting teenagers. It's good that they are all supposed to be there which helps with the natural feel of what happens, but it's weird that they're all "pretty." But like I said, it's a nice change from the "group of teenagers go to the lake and get killed" plot that we've seen four times already.

Things are fine and normal with nary a death in sight for the first act. Well, actually, let's use normal as a loose term here as we get some really bizarre characters, some screwy dialogue, and an "f" word quota for a little while. Acting is right out the window, and it seems as though this almost normal section of the movie is so far out for those in it, that they don't know what to do.

But then we get another unique move. The first real death is done by another character in the story. It isn't committed by our hockey mask wearing villain. But again, we get some weird activity from our actors as one of the ambulance drivers shows so much insenitivity, if it were rated, it would break the scales. He rips back the sheet to reveal the bloody corpse, and then laughs about it to his partner, who just looks horrified. I'd be horrified too.

So begins the bloody slaughter we've come to expect, but we get a new horror cliche that was briefly used in 4. Characters are introduced out of nowhere for the sole purpose of being killed. Yup. No intro. No backstory. Someone shows up and dies right then. It happens quite a few times. We go through several bodies before someone we've met before that scene is killed.

After the weird deaths, all the "pretty" people start dropping like flies, and that's when I started to notice the "kinder, gentler" approach that was so prevalent during this time period. A lot of the deaths aren't shown as graphically as they used to be. I noted this to a lesser extent in 4, but in 5, they love shadowing the deaths, and only showing the aftermath, where before, we'd not only get the hit, but we'd see the blade go in, come out, and spurting all over, but here we hear it, and see what it left...sometimes. I'm ok with it either way, to be honest, but I find it amusing.

Some other weird things that are starting to happen to distraction. Cars don't seem to last very long. We had two of them stall in this film to the detriment of the drivers. People see dead bodies and then walk backwards until they bump into something else. Why walk backwards? Had one walk backwards for a long ways. Sure it built some suspense, but it also made me wonder why she wouldn't walk forward. And the next time I hear, "wait here while I go explore," I think I'll save Jason the trouble of the kill.

So we get down to the girl and the kid after all the token deaths are over, and we get the big twist of the movie. Of course, I won't tell you what that is because it would spoil the big surprise. It made this one quite a bit more interesting in some ways than the other ones, and I just wish the first part of the film had been constructed better. In addition, once the surprise is out and explained, it still left a lot of holes in the plot because the reasoning wasn't all encompassing.

So, this one was a little different and in a good way. We still had a lot of tiredness throughout and razor-thin characters, but it was an improvement over a lot of what came before.

Return to Oz -- 1985 -- PG

We got this one from Netflix because we thought the kids might enjoy it. It scared the crap out of them. They didn't like the headless woman. They didn't like the Nome King. It was all very scary to them, making me, of course, kick myself for not watching it first...I mean, it says "Parental Guidance Suggested" for a reason, right. Anyway...

This is obviously a sequal to The Wizard of Oz, but don't get it confused with the 1939 musical classic, as this can be argued to be more based on the book than the movie that was nearly fifty years old at the time of its release (though we can't put it past Disney to release direct sequels to fifty year old films, can we?). Anyway, the movie musical was done by MGM, anyway, not Disney.

So we get Dorothy Gale, still remembering her tim in Oz, living in a half-finished house following the tornado that ripped up and destroyed everything. Aunt Em is concerned with Dorothy's obsession with this Oz place, and so she takes Dorothy into this psychiatric hospital in the hopes of ridding her of this fantasy. Well, Dorothy is none too pleased with having her head zapped by the doctor's new machine, so she takes off in a thunderstorm and ends up back in Oz. Once there, she finds everything to be in a shambled mess. The muchkins are gone, the yellow brick road is destroyed, and the Emerald City is completely devoid of its emeralds. She finds the tin man and lion turned to stone and the scarecrow in the custody of a creature called the Nome King who lives in the midst of the Deadly Desert. This is quickly becoming a story that shows off the sheer imagination of L. Frank Baum moreso than "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" ever hoped to.

But the film quickly follows kid pic formula with Dorothy getting together a large number of friends during her journey. Friends that cause more trouble than they're worth in most cases, but somehow serve to help her in her journey to get what she wants in total deference to whatever they may need. Frankly, I'd like to see a "friend" in these kid flicks be more about himself than the person involved (actually, Hoggle in Labyrinth comes to mind there). But here, they're all about Dorothy and helping her retrieve the Scarecrow.

The plot is decent, and I have to say the changeable heads of Mombi are actually rather clever, despite its freakiness. I think some of the plot happens way too easily. For instance, Dorothy willingly goes with Mombi even though they narrowly escape these Wheeler things who don't enter Mombi's place. Exactly how would that imply that Mombi is a good person? When the Gump falls apart, it is nothing short of coincidence that they are right over the Nome King's mountain. It is also interesting that Mombi has an underground path straight to the Nome King's mountain as well. In addition, some may recall that it took Dorothy a long time to reach the Emerld City the first time around, and yet now, she makes it in no time at all. Mombi also makes the journey from the City to the Mountain fiarly quickly as well. And then the way Tik-tok is "rescued" tops the list of unlikely plot coicidences.

Add a fair amount of dialogue cheese and you have a film that does well in creating a fantastic world, but only mediocre in making it believable. We are interested in Dorothy's journey through this world, but then snicker at the ridiculous mishaps they came up with to "complicate" the journey. So it's an overall mixed bag of a film that tries to be fantastic, but only succeeds in being ok. It's not bad, mind you, but just ok.

The Hill Haves Eye Part 2 -- 1985 -- R

Wow, oh wow. And I don't mean that in a good way. Mr. Craven, what were you thinking? You're so much better than this. How, after something like this film's predecessor and then A Nightmare on Elm Street, did he think something like this was any good at all?

Basically, this film occurs eight years after the original and involves a group of motorcycle racers cutting across the desert in their bus to make up an hour because (and yeah, this is the reason) they read in the paper on the bus that daylight savings time ended last night, and nobody set their clocks forward so they have to make up the hour or they'll be disqualified. No, seriously, that's the reason.

As luck would have it, they failed to put enough gas in the bus to reach their destination and so they run out near a compound of some kind in the middle of the desert. The leader of this group was the brother from the first movie, and as such, he didn't want to go near the desert, even though the race was not on the bomb range itself. So he had a few flashbacks to remind us of who he was, and stayed home. Smart guy.

Also returning from the first movie is Beast, the dog, who has his own flashback. Hey, stop laughing. I'm not making this up. We also get Ruby, the wild girl from the first movie, who is now civilized and hanging with these motorcycle kids. How coincidental that she finds herself back in the desert she grew up in, eh?

Anyway, the biggest problem this movie has is inconsistency in its characters. They have certain skills when they need to have them, and don't when it would hinder the plot; kind of like some superhero movies. Phenomenal cosmic powers...when convenient. Take Ruby, for example. She grew up in the desert, and it is stated at one point that she knows every inch of it. Then why doesn't she know about this ranch compound? Why didn't she stop them from going in to begin with?

Take our blind girl who has sharp hearing and a strong sense of smell. She senses things when convenient, and completely fails to when it's not. She walks into one room with the carcass of an animal hanging from the ceiling and doesn't react at all. So that wouldn't smell pretty funky? And even more so to someone with an overdeveloped sense?

Beyond that, you have your normal range of horror movie actions. Characters do really, really stupid things to get themselves killed. We had one pair take a wide open path through the desert to chase one of the baddies who swiped one of their bikes, and then took a completely different path back through claustrophobic canyons. What was wrong with the wide open spaces? Why chase the freak who stole the bike? What will that accomplish?

Overall, it was a bit silly beginning to end with every action over serving to service the plot or get someone killed. And while in most cases that's a good thing (i.e. no extraneous stuff), in this case, most of them made no logical sense. This one guy's girl runs off, so he chases her...in the bus. WHAAAAT???

It's not as bad as Scary Movie 2, however. I mean, if there's one redeeming factor here, it's that there were no extraneous actions. Everything that happened served some kind of purpose, but it all still amounted to a movie that was a waste of time. Some films are good ideas that were poorly executed. This one is a bad idea that only got worse.

Surely Wes Craven didn't write and direct this movie. Surely not. Surely not.