Jason Goes To Hell -- 1993 -- UR

Ah, part 9 of the illustrious Friday the 13th series. Will it ever, ever end? Will it ever get better? Who knows? Probably not. Friday the 13th has one single purpose: to kill off the most people in the least amount of time possible. Some relate it to the basic construction of a porn film. The plot only exists for people to find reasons to have sex. Well, in most Friday films, the plot only exists to find reasons to kill people in random and creative ways. Unfortunately for the makers of the Friday films, these creative ways are usually cut in favor of getting an R rating.

This latest installment leaves behind the pathetic attempt at creativity that was Jason Takes Manhattan and tries to move in the direction of Halloween 5 and Nightmare 6 by throwing in a family member as a method to take out the bad guy. This one throws in another twist by allowing Jason to move from body to body in search of a legitimate family member as a permanent host. It's exceptionally clever, and for that, I gotta give it some credit. But...

The cleverness ends there. From this point, we have hosts of cliches, dumb moves, and stuff that flat doesn't make sense to make it all work. The way this story kicks off and the way Jason gets his first host is his heart enticing the mortician to eat it. Yup, remember when I said "eat your heart out, Friday the 13th"? Well, here's when that happens. He chows down on that black heart and becomes Jason. It's disgusting.

So toss in hosts of dumb characters, an obligatory camp crystal lake scene that serves zero purpose but to get some kids killed and throw in some T&A, lots of exposition and secrecy to keep us hanging, and a big old house that is the Voorhees mansion complete with holes in the floor that lead straight to the basement. It's crazy some of the things they expect us to swallow in this narrative. We even get the heroine who, after defeating the bad guy only inches away, kneels next to her friend to weep over her body for a really, really long time (incidentally, this friend is the only person she wept over during the entire film, and the person was such a minor death fodder character that we barely knew her).

Without nitpicking the heck out of the film, I'll end off by saying that the premise was pretty decent, and the opening was shocking. The idea made sense though the execution faltered considerably. It was ripe with the same old stuff that hurts all the prior installments, and it doesn't even follow the same continuity. If you watched all the other ones, you might as well view this one too, but if you haven't, it's nothing too special.

Interview With A Serial Killer (White Angel) -- 1993 -- NR

I ended up with this one because while I was perusing the titles on Netflix, the synopsis listed there sounded interesting to me. Like so many titles I watch, that's all the info I had to go on. What I got was a film with some very interesting points to it, along with some really weird stuff to make it work.

Basically, we have a woman who is a writer who kills her husband one dark and stormy night, and ever since she has been unable to turn out another novel. Meanwhile, London is besieged with a serial killer the papers are calling the White Angel, due to his/her Modus Operandi of killing only blonde women dressed in white. It turns out that this writer had killed her husband and bricked him up in the wall of her house and this fact is discovered by the White Angel killer, who threatens to turn the writer in for murder unless she writes a book about the White Angel's life. It was a very nice spin for twenty minutes.

A fair job is done from there to keep the plot going, but it can hardly be said to be running at full tilt. In fact, several very strange things happen in the course of the plot that make you question its validity. The weirdest of them all is the computer that matches fingerprints. They find fingerprints of the White Angel on a weapon used in one of its murders, and this is what prompts the Angel to ask our writer girl to write the biography. This is placed into a database that checked about a print per second in a database of 100,000. So they have this computer working day and night for a month to match this print. Seriously? So no other cases come up that would require the use of this computer. Very weird.

In addition, either this killer is really dumb (which most serial killers aren't) or just blind as the writer got away with a whole lot of stuff that I doubt anyone would get away with in the presence of any other human being, especially one whose moves are being watched. A particular oddity was this safety deposit box key. It looks like the writer made an impression of this key early on, but she seemed to have to do the same thing later as well. She acquired the second impression in a really weird way and had to return it to its place is a highly unlikely fashion as well, It didn't make a lot of sense that she'd even remotely get away with that.

Anyway, our leads were fine character-wise as the writer and the killer engaged in diatribes related to their individual issues of knocking people off. It served to get insight into who they were, and the interview setting of several of these scenes served to make what would normally be blatant exposition fit into the fabric of the storyline.

In the end, it wasn't a bad film at all. It had some fairly tense moments, but these were balanced by the occasional bit of weirdness of plot or action that continued to knock the film down from good to just ok.

Amityville: A New Generation -- 1993 -- R

How far can you take an idea? Once the haunted house thing wears off, where do you go? Well, come up with haunted items. We already has "It's About Time" with the haunted clock. This time, we get a haunted mirror...oh, but the title implies a spoiler twist, doesn't it?

This guy and his woman live in a slum apartment looking forward to doing a big art show, despite the consternation of his landlord. While preparing, he is given a mirror by a homeless guy who later dies and it is found has our guy's name and address in his pocket. How weird. To make things more interesting, they rewrite the history books and now the killings weren't done by Sonny Montelli; they were done by Frank Bonner. I really don't understand why they redid it.

From a standpoint of a horror movie, it isn't really that bad. The existence of the mirror was odd, especially when no one wanted to get rid of it. And then there was the guy who wanted to sit in front of a loaded gun. I get that it created suspense, but it was kind of dumb.

The characters were decent -- really, about average for a horror flick. The plot was fair; not perfect, but at least fair. It doesn't fit the continuity of the whole series at all, but rewriting the history is the run of it. So not a bad film, but not a good one either. Mediocre at best.