October Movie Marathon

At the beginning of the month, I posted this in a Facebook group I'm in but I should have shared it here as well. Here's a big post with where I'm at so far, but after this I'll post daily updates with each movie.

Every year, my plan is to watch a scary movie every day in October. Usually this only lasts a couple of days and I get busy and don't finish but for some reason I don't think 2020 is going to be like that. It just so happens that there are 31 movies total in the the Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween movie franchises so I'm going to make it through all three in a month. Originally I was going to watch through all three in chronological order of their release, but depending on which ones my wife wanted to watch with me

Halloween (1978)
An absolute classic. A little slow by modern standards, but still really enjoyable.

Friday the 13th (1980)
Not great, but it sets up a good story and I love that the murderer is just an old woman in a sweater.

Friday the 13th, Part II (1981)
I actually like this one better than the original. The acting is better and the characters feel more three-dimensional (for a slasher movie at least).

Halloween II (1981)
A decent sequel, but it didn't really feel necessary. The revelation that Laurie was adopted and is really Michael's sister was dumb.

Friday the 13th, Part III (1982)
Probably the worst of these so far. Shelly straight up sucks, but at least he provided the hockey mask. The biker gang was SUPER 80s. I hated them, but also loved them?

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
I enjoyed this more than I expected to, but I can see why fans of the first two were not happy when it came out originally. It could have been neat to have an anthology series, but since it was a financial failure it makes sense they gave up on it.

Friday the 13th, Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984)
Nothing about this film registered with me beyond the presence of Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman. Still, not bad compared to III. Another great ending like Halloween IV. It really could have been the final chapter and the franchise would have felt complete.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Somehow I had never seen the original in this franchise before. Both my wife and I loved it. The characters all felt like real people, even the gym teacher who kind of felt like he belonged in a John Hughes movie. It took me most of the movie to realize the boyfriend was Johnny Depp (all that hair was distracting)! This movie also has my favorite character of any of these movies so far: The mom is absolutely hilarious.

Friday the 13th, Part V: A New Beginning (1985)
The first real sequel of the series, starting with a cameo of Corey Feldman before jumping ahead to the character (Tommy) as an adult. Not as good as V, but still not terrible. They really ramped up the sex, violence, and drug use in this one, maybe to try to make it more extreme?

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy's Revenge (1985)
A decent sequel, but it would have been stronger if it was set the following year so they could have kept a couple of characters instead of some undetermined time later. I know some of them do come back for later sequels, so I have high hopes for them. This film came out less than a year after the first, and you can really feel how rushed production was.

Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Somehow, this is where the series becomes a little too ridiculous for me. Not the resurrection, but the goofy cops and the over-the-top acting. The replacement actor for Tommy was also not nearly as good as the first adult actor from V.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors (1987)
Yes! This is the sequel the original deserved. Returning characters, a plot that makes sense, Larry Fisburne, what more could I ask for? This is my favorite movie so far this month.

Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
More psychic stuff? I don't know why it bothers me so much, but I'm not a fan. The group of generally shitty teens just hanging out by the lake for a party is too similar to the last one I didn't enjoy (Part III). Without the characters seeming to have a real life beyond existing simply to be murdered, the movie doesn't feel worthwhile. And this one doesn't even have a biker gang.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - The Dream Master (1988)
A descent continuation from Dream Warriors, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. I didn't think Patricia Arquette was that great as Kristen, but the replacement actress is pretty bland. I'm glad the other actors all reprised their roles.

Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
My favorite sequel of the original timeline. Writing out Laurie was bullshit, but I assume Curtis didn't want to come back. I didn't like the idea that Laurie was related to Michael in II, and I wasn't thrilled with the link to Jamie, but the ending was fantastic. I think it would have been a cool twist to have Jamie take over as the antagonist in the same role in future movies.

Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
The claustrophobia of the boat is a nice touch, but they really toned down everything here. The sex, the violence, the profanity, the plot... We don't even make it to Manhattan until over halfway through the movie. This franchise doesn't have the same cohesive feeling as the others since (other than 4-6) none of the characters carry over from film to film.

Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
The worst sequel so far. I hate the weird psychic link between Michael and Jamie. No further comments.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
I was really excited for this one based on the title and poster alone. And while it's not nearly as boring as Jason Takes Manhattan (because it actually has a plot), it does not make good on the premise. I was expecting a full 90 minutes in hell, but we don't get anything except for some monster hands at the very end. Bullshit. The worst part is the SECRET SISTER plotline. I assume they're just copying from Halloween, but they're 12 years later, so maybe it's just bad writing on its own. I will say that the practical effects in this installment are by far the best in the series, although the lasers or whatever in the end were bad. The Freddy hand right before the credits was cool though! I wonder if it was just an Easter egg or if they planned to go straight from this to Freddy vs Jason. (Jason X was the next movie released.) When trying to find out, without success, I did find that the Freddy hand was Kane Hodder, who played Jason in this movie, and the weird knife they used to kill Jason was the same one from Evil Dead 2. I really wish we'd gotten that Freddy vs Jason vs Ash movie.

Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Better than V, but not by much. It was fun to see a young Paul Rudd, but I think it would have been a better story to have him be Billy, Jamie's friend from V than Tommy, the kid Laurie was babysitting in the original. The "thorn" cult was stupid, and it doesn't seem like this was really where they were planning to go with the man in black from V.

Jason X (2002)
The opening titles look how the entire movie Jason Goes to Hell movie should have looked, and that's the one of the only things worthy of praise in this mess of a film, along with Adrienne's death in liquid nitrogen, which had pretty good practical effects. The sets and CGI are just terrible. They look like this was a show on the WB in the late '90s, not a film released in cinemas in the early 2000s. The costumes are also laughably of the era. So many midriffs. And it's too bad to hear hockey is going to be outlawed in 2024. I'll have to get season tickets for our last few years.

Up next:
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Freddy vs. Jason (2003)
Halloween (2007) (Remake)
Friday the 13th (2009) (Remake)
Halloween II (2009)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Halloween (2018)

If I can squeeze in a few extras:
Freddy's Nightmares pilot episode "No More Mr. Nice Guy", which is a prequel to the movies (and if I can actually get a hold of it)
The Night of Samhain - A @"LastSurvivor" fanedit (and if he gets it done, but I think he's almost there)

i would never watch the remakes or friday or nightmare but would include halloween 2018.

asterixsmeagol said:

It just so happens that there are 31 movies total in the the Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween movie franchises so I'm going to make it through all three in a month. 

Click to expand...

That's pretty cool!  It's like it was meant to be lol!

There's the Friday the 13th short film Never Hike Alone you could add in there if you wanted to!  I hear it's really good.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - The Dream Child (1989)
Another decline in quality with this sequel. Even though it does continue the story of Alice from the last movie, none of the characters are engaging at all. Even the character of Freddy has become a dull caricature, and when the writers don't know what to do with him, they just have him call somebody a bitch.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
he worst movie so far this month, and that's saying something. No link to the previous films at all, terrible story, terrible effects, terrible characters, terrible acting. But worst of all, it was just boring.

I take part in the "31 Days Of Halloween" challenge every year. I always save John Carpenter's Halloween and Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II for Halloween night.

My viewing selections so far are as follows:

1. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (1)
2. Don't Go In The Woods (2)
3. Body Melt (3)
4. Hellraiser (4)
5. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (4)
6. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (4)
7. The Hunt (5)
8. Vampires Vs. The Bronx (5)
9. Doom Asylum (6)
10. Hubie Halloween (7)
11. Hocus Pocus (7)
12. Pledge Night (8)
13. The People Under The Stairs (9)
14. Fantasy Island (10)
15. Burial Ground (11)
16. Ghostbusters (12)
17. Ghostbusters 2 (12)
18. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (13)
19. Friday The 13th (1980)(14)
20. Friday The 13th Part 2 (15)
21. Friday The 13th Part 3 (15)
22. Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (16)
23. Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning (17)
24. Lucio Fulci's Zombie (18)
25. Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (18)
26. Rabid (2019)(19)
27. Escape Room (2019)(20)
28. The Monster Squad (21)
29. See No Evil (23)
30. See No Evil 2 (23)

You can also follow my challenge on my Instagram page.

Freddy vs Jason (2003)
Freddy vs Jason: Absolute trash, but I didn't even mind. The introduction of the teen fodder in the beginning was boring, but then it passed over the threshold from bad movie into good-bad movie, in the same vein as Alien vs Predator. The special effects were mostly well done practical effects, and the cinematography was surprisingly good. Plus the sheriff was played by Col Chekov from Stargate SG-1, so that was fun. I don't plan on ever watching it again, but it wasn't a bad way to spend an evening.

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)
This is the first reset of the Halloween timeline, ignoring 4-6, but it almost didn't need to be. The only real contradiction I saw was the age of Laurie's children. In 4, Jamie is be 7 in 1988, which means she was born in 1981. In H20, John is 17 in 1998, making him also born in 1981. Strangely, they still include a bit where Laurie talks about faking her death, which could be interpreted as the car accident that killed her off-screen for 4. There is also a line about Dr Loomis' death (due to Donald Pleasence's real-life death in 1995, following the primary shooting of 6). The movie does completely ignore the Thorn storyline from the previous movies, but it didn't overtly contradict anything about it as far as I could tell. It seems like with a little bit of effort writing some better exposition they could have retconned the timeline of Laurie's kids somehow to avoid the reboot, but I don't exactly know how. In any case, I actually enjoyed this movie more than any other sequel, and I liked the closed-off setting of the walled-in school. The acting was better than a lot of these other movies I've been watching recently, and the effects were all not too over-the-top and felt realistic. I really liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the opening scene; I was not expecting him to check out before the opening credits! My only gripe was Laurie not noticing that John's friend was clearly hiding something when she caught them in town (which I guess can be chalked up to her being stressed out, and maybe a little drunk), and the police/coroner's not removing Michael's mask to see who it was before bagging him up. It was an annoyance while watching this movie but...

Halloween Resurrection (2002)
...it was obviously a decision made by the writers so they could have Michael survive in case they made a sequel. Writing Laurie out of the movie in the first 15 minutes felt almost as weak as the off-screen writing out of her character in the beginning of 4. From there, it's pretty much downhill all the way. Acting takes a huge step down, although it was fun to see a very young Katee Sackhoff. I wish they'd found a way to bring Josh Hartnett back to tie the story in better with H20, but maybe it wouldn't have fit the story very well. The story was also kind of boring, and the contradictions with 4-6 become more apparent since the whole thing takes place in the Myers house that's been abandoned, leaving no room for the entire Jamie story.

asterixsmeagol said:

Halloween Resurrection (2002)
...it was obviously a decision made by the writers so they could have Michael survive in case they made a sequel. Writing Laurie out of the movie in the first 15 minutes felt almost as weak as the off-screen writing out of her character in the beginning of 4. From there, it's pretty much downhill all the way. Acting takes a huge step down, although it was fun to see a very young Katee Sackhoff. I wish they'd found a way to bring Josh Hartnett back to tie the story in better with H20, but maybe it wouldn't have fit the story very well. The story was also kind of boring, and the contradictions with 4-6 become more apparent since the whole thing takes place in the Myers house that's been abandoned, leaving no room for the entire Jamie story.

Click to expand...

Actually, now that I think about it, Busta Rhymes does admit that they staged the whole house, so maybe it wasn't actually vacant since the '70s.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)
A big shift in story for the seventh Nightmare in Elm Street movie. For those unfamiliar, this movie is set in the "real" world, and stars Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund as themselves (instead of as Nancy and Freddy), as the studio tries to put together a fictional seventh movie and Heather begins to have nightmares that spill over into the real world just like an Elm Street movie. It's an interesting premise, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the last few movies in the series. Even though Robert Englund's Freddy is the only character to appear in every movie, Langenkamp (either as Nancy or herself) is the real soul of the franchise. Without her, the other movies all felt flat.

Frantic Canadian said:

I take part in the "31 Days Of Halloween" challenge every year. I always save John Carpenter's Halloween and Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II for Halloween night.

My viewing selections so far are as follows:

1. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (1)
2. Don't Go In The Woods (2)
3. Body Melt (3)
4. Hellraiser (4)
5. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (4)
6. Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (4)
7. The Hunt (5)
8. Vampires Vs. The Bronx (5)
9. Doom Asylum (6)
10. Hubie Halloween (7)
11. Hocus Pocus (7)
12. Pledge Night (8)
13. The People Under The Stairs (9)
14. Fantasy Island (10)
15. Burial Ground (11)
16. Ghostbusters (12)
17. Ghostbusters 2 (12)
18. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (13)
19. Friday The 13th (1980)(14)
20. Friday The 13th Part 2 (15)
21. Friday The 13th Part 3 (15)
22. Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (16)
23. Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning (17)
24. Lucio Fulci's Zombie (18)
25. Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (18)
26. Rabid (2019)(19)
27. Escape Room (2019)(20)
28. The Monster Squad (21)
29. See No Evil (22)
30. See No Evil 2 (22)

You can also follow my challenge on my Instagram page.

Click to expand...

I just realized that the above number should be 31 because I only listed Friday The 13th (1980) once. But I actually watched it twice. I watched the theatrical cut back-to-back with the uncut version.

I've also since watched the following movies.

32. Countdown (23)
33. Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (24)
34. The Evil Dead (25)
35. Sleepaway Camp (26)
36. Sleepaway Camp 2: Unhappy Campers (26)
37. Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland (26)
38. Unmasked Part 25 (27)
39. Snoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror (28)

Halloween (2007)
I'm not opposed to reboots in general, but they need to have something new to say and I'm not sure this one does. It's certainly bloodier than any of the originals, but beyond that and the casting of some well-known actors (Malcolm McDowell, Danny Trejo, Brad Dourif, and Clint Howard) there's really nothing to see here. The movie focuses almost exclusively on Michael, but fails to make him a three-dimensional character, even with 45 minutes of backstory. All it really accomplished was boring me while I waited for Laurie to show up, which takes an additional 15 minutes after we see an adult Michael. But even when she does appear, it doesn't really improve. I'm really surprised that this movie got a sequel, and I'm assuming that it was the reason the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes were produced as well.

Halloween II (2009)
An unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary reboot full of unnecessary gore. This was the first time this month that I've considered turning off a movie, but I'm not going to give up this far in.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Better than the Halloween reboot, but still not good. Like Halloween, this movie gives more screen time to the villain, but it doesn't really add anything to the character. There's more gore in this movie than the original, but not taken to the extremes of Zombie's Halloween, which I appreciated. Still, the story is almost exactly identical to the original, just with a more modern filming style and CGI. The new effects actually make the movie less fun, because the inventive way they filmed everything in the 80s was a big part of the appeal of the movie for me.

Friday the 13th (2009)
I liked this reboot the most of the three, but that's probably because I liked the original series the least. I watched the extended cut, which was a little gorier than I would have liked, but I think that could have been fixed if I had watched the theatrical version. I'm not actually sure if this was a reboot, since they seemed to mention some of the events of the first two movies, explaining that Jason drowned his mom killed a bunch of counselors, and one girl survived. In any case, I liked how quickly the backstory was given, so that we could get into the actual movie. I also enjoyed how they set up characters in the first 20 minutes, then discarded all of them by the time the title card came on and we reset for what could have been a sequel on its own.

asterixsmeagol said:

Halloween II (2009)
An unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary reboot full of unnecessary gore. This was the first time this month that I've considered turning off a movie, but I'm not going to give up this far in.

Click to expand...

I saw this one at the theater and hated it. The director's cut is an improvement though.
 

asterixsmeagol said:

Friday the 13th (2009)
I liked this reboot the most of the three, but that's probably because I liked the original series the least. I watched the extended cut, which was a little gorier than I would have liked, but I think that could have been fixed if I had watched the theatrical version. I'm not actually sure if this was a reboot, since they seemed to mention some of the events of the first two movies, explaining that Jason drowned his mom killed a bunch of counselors, and one girl survived. In any case, I liked how quickly the backstory was given, so that we could get into the actual movie. I also enjoyed how they set up characters in the first 20 minutes, then discarded all of them by the time the title card came on and we reset for what could have been a sequel on its own.

Click to expand...

It's a reboot. And there's actually elements of the first four movies. Jason obtaining the mask because one of the characters left it lying around is from part 3 and the guy searching for his sister is from part 4.

Next year you could try a marathon movie marathon?

- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
- Run Fatboy Run
- Patriots Day
- Marathon Man
etc

TM2YC said:

Next year you could try a marathon movie marathon?

- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
- Run Fatboy Run
- Patriots Day
- Marathon Man
etc

Click to expand...

Chariots of fire
The running man
Rub Lola, run

I came in under the wire, finishing Halloween (2018) around 11:30 last night.
It was pretty good, but not my favorite sequel. Dr Loomis 2.0 felt like the kind of substitution that happens last minute when an actor is unavailable, but that obviously wasn't the case since (as noted above) Donald Pleasence died during the production of The Curse of Michael Myers. The acting and effects were all much better here than Resurrection, but I actually preferred the H20 story to this one. Still, I'm looking forward to the next two sequels to this that are planned in the next couple of years.