HALLOWEEN HORROR: Hatchet 2 (2010)

Nothing cheers me up quicker - when I'm in the doldrums - than a good splatter flick and Hatchet 2 ;certainly delivers on that score.

Which is not to say it's a great movie; writer/director Adam Green's one-man campaign to the reclaim the old school slasher genre for the 21st Century has stuck so closely to the original formula that the sequel is, sadly, a pale imitation of the first.

Picking up where Hatchet left off, lone survivor Marybeth (the original's far more pleasing Tamara Feldman swapped out for Danielle Harris) heads back to New Orleans where she meets up with souvenir salesman and phony voodoo priest Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd) and gets him to organise a hunting party to return to the swamps and track down the murderous 'ghost' of Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder).

It takes a long while - a good half-hour - for the hunters to all get together, including Marybeth's uncle Bob (Tom Holland), who is possibly the single-most monotone and emotionally-stunted actor I have ever seen, before they all head back into the swamps the good stuff can begin.

It also doesn't help that Marybeth - as portrayed by Harris - isn't a particularly sympathetic or likeable character.

Everything feels more light-weight than last time, with almost no effort being made to sketch in backstories for the hunters before they get picked off by Crowley - although Green takes obvious delight in the drawn-out, buckets-of-blood-and-gore death scenes (several of which are quite inventive, while others are just plain nasty).

We do learn some more of Victor Crowley's tragic - and paranormal - origins and find out about Marybeth's family connections to Crowley, but after the long build-up, the slaughter of the not-so-innocent seems over too quickly.

Hatchet 2 is a decent extension of the Hatchet storyline, but after the tongue-in-bloody-cheek Grand Guignol of the original, I kind of expected more (and not just more gore) from the sequel.

At least Tony Todd is always good value for money and Kane Hodder turns in a surprisingly touching performance as Victor Crowley's father, Thomas, during an extended flashback.

I'm still keen to see Hatchet III at some stage, but not as excited as I was to see this movie after I saw the first.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Digging Up The Marrow (2014)

Known for horror movie series like Hatchet and Frozen, director Adam Green (playing himself) receives a wad of information in the mail from a fan who claims to have discovered real monsters.

Green decides this would be a brilliant subject for a documentary and heads out to meet the mysterious William Dekker (Twin Peaks' Ray Wise) and hopefully get a chance to see these so-called monsters.

Dekker spins him yarns about a subterranean world - accessed through holes in the ground usually found near cemeteries - called 'the Marrow', populated by an assemblage of deformed creatures.

Shot in a mock-documentary style (with swatches of 'shaky hand-held camera footage'), the film follows the childishly-excited Green and his sceptical cinematographer, and long-time collaborator, Will Barratt (also playing himself) as they interview Dekker and are then taken on a series of night-time reconnaissance missions, staking out an alleged Marrow entrance.  

Along the way, there are several cameos from known-genre figures (such as Kane Hodder, Mick Garris and Green's ex-wife Rileah Vanderbilt) who don't get what he is trying to achieve with this documentary and generally dismiss Dekker as a potentially-dangerous nutter or a con man.

This is more than a simple "what if monsters really existed?" movie, as a key element in the tale is that that question is being tackled by a horror movie director whose career is based on creating terrifying creatures.

The mockumentary is joyously incomplete, dangling plot threads that are never truly explained (such as the chronology of whatever is in Dekker's locked storeroom), but that's life. And the movie's brilliant ending justifies wholeheartedly why Green left his magnum opus unfinished.

I get why some people don't grok this. They're wrong. But I get it. Digging Up The Marrow is a slow burner, building up to its kick-in-the-teeth third act. Sure, there's a pretty terrifying jump scare about half-an-hour in, but the bulk of the film is about building atmosphere and creating a world.

I can only imagine that a lot of people - coming off the back of the Hatchet franchise - were caught off-guard by how subtle and intelligent Digging Up The Marrow is.

Thematically it owes a lot to the more-grounded tales of HP Lovecraft's oeuvre (particularly his "ghouls") and, of course, Clive Barker's Nightbreed, but the documentary style gives it a verisimilitude that is only undermined by the presence of such a recognisable actor as Ray Wise in a lead role.

Wise is superb, wholly convincing as the shady and driven Dekker, and I understand why Green cast him - to stress that this is 'make-believe' and not an attempt at a Blair Witch-style hoax. Yet I can't help but wonder how the film would have been received if Green had gone down that route with an unknown actor as Dekker.

In reality, Digging Up The Marrow came about because of a fortuitous confluence of events in Green's life. First, he received a highly detailed package of notes from a fan claiming to be the real story of Green's creation, Victor Crowley (from the Hatchet series).

Later the film director met artist Alex Pardee who gave him a booklet of illustrations for his exhibition Digging Up The Marrow that told the story of detective William Dekker commissioning him to draw creatures he'd encountered in his investigations of the Marrow.

Sweet Revenge (2025)

Sweet Revenge, officially released today on YouTube, is the first live-action appearance - now all the legal wrangling has, hopefully, been ironed out - of the 'new' Jason Voorhees (the unstoppable killer from the Friday The 13th franchise).

Much brouhaha was made of the fact that this 13-minute short is sponsored by a cider company, but, to be honest, the product placement is minimal and subtle. Had I not read about it before hand, I wouldn't have noticed the label on the bottle Ally Ioannides carries around for a minute or so.

It so happens that Ioannides is probably the best thing about this "vignette", her Eve morphing into an interesting twist on the classic Final Girl trope.

Otherwise, Sweet Revenge pretty much retreads classic Friday The 13th territory in a very condensed format.

My good friend Justin 'Pun' Isaac put it best in his review: "...it boiled down the classic slasher formula and just cut out the filler".

Eve and her fiancé Kyle (Toussaint Morrison), and a couple of friends, appear to have AirBnB-ed a holiday cottage from pervy Harold (Chris Carlson), unaware that it's on the site of the former Camp Crystal Lake... the primary hunting ground of the supernatural slasher Jason Voorhees (Schuyler White).

As everyone is settling in, Eve takes a canoe out on the lake in broad daylight - only to be dragged under the water, seemingly by Jason. Inexplicably when she surfaces it's now night time, and Jason has started butchering people.

Why didn't Jason kill Eve when he dragged her under the water? Just how long did she hold her breath? Perhaps Eve did die and is now a deadite zombie? Who knows? 

While I have no issue with Jason's hockey mask design (which seems to be a hot button topic in the online community), the first thing that struck me when the masked killer appeared was how thin and scrawny he appeared. Stuntman Schuyler White is no Kane Hodder, that's for sure.

Written and directed by Wrong Turn's Mike P Nelson, there's a smattering of gore in Sweet Revenge, although the bulk of the kills occur off screen, and a healthy amount of 'strong language' for something thought to be a drinks' advertisement.

With minimal time to fit in an expansive story, Eve is the only character that changes and develops, which makes me hope that she has some future role to play in the resurrected franchise.

However, what, if anything, this short film has to do with the grander Jason mythology going forward, I can't even imagine. Will we see Eve again in an upcoming movie? And if so will it replay her origin story as well?

• Sweet Revenge can be viewed here on YouTube.

Jason X (2001)

And so we come to the end of the Friday the 13th canon with the chapter I have seen the most times, Jason X.

A savage slice of solid pulp sci-fi served with a soupçon of satire.

In the early 21st Century, Jason (Kane Hodder) has been captured (presumably some time after his return in Freddy vs Jason) and is being held at a specially constructed Crystal Lake research centre, where project leader Rowan (Andromeda's Lexa Doig) has been investigating ways to permanently execute the mass-murdering zombie.

Eventually, she realises the only course of action is to cryofreeze him, but then interdepartmental shenanigans - and a misguided desire to monetise Jason's supernatural regnenerative abilities - leads to the monster's escape.

This ends up with both Jason and Rowan being accidentally frozen... and then forgotten about.

Jump ahead to the year 2455, and a student field trip to the wastelands of the dead Earth comes across the two frozen bodies.

Bringing them back to their ship, The Grendel, for study, the researchers use nanotechnology to bring Rowan back... unfortunately, at the same time, they also accidentally reawaken Jason.

It maybe the future, but teens are still horny and that's motivation enough for Jason to start hacking away again.

You can guess what happens next.

Todd Farmer's script, directed by James Isaac, wears its Alien influences on its sleeve, with Jason substituting for that franchise's iconic xenomorphs.

The Grendel has its own cadre of marines, led by Spartacus's Peter Mensah, bargain basement clones of the beloved characters from Aliens, and their hunt for Jason through the bowels of the ship (while the civilians listen in, from relative safety) is an obvious homage (rip-off?) of the sequence in Aliens where the colonial marines first meet the xenomorphs in the tunnels under the colony on LV-426.

It's then left to the civilians - and their android (Andromeda's Lisa Ryder) to escape Jason's machete long enough for the ship to reach safety.

Unfortunately, just when they think they've got him beat, he gets a new lease of life - an upgrade - thanks to the same nanotechnology that brought Rowan back.

Also, the hull of the Grendel is deteriorating and is likely to collapse before the rescue ship Tiamat can reach them.

Silly, thrilling, and inventive, for me Jason X is a perfect example of how you keep a long-running franchise alive.

Through out-of-the-box thinking that takes the overarching narrative in a totally unexpected direction, yet remains true to its core principles, Farmer and Isaac have created a genuinely unique blend of old school slasher and pulp sci-fi.

Sure, it's obviously not the first blending of sci-fi and horror tropes, but as an extension of a franchise like Friday the 13th, it's inspired.

I would have loved to have seen a sequel to this where Jason vents his wrath on the horny teens of Earth Two, but sadly it was not to be.

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Taking a leaf out the previous year's A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the Friday the 13th franchise is reinvigorated with an injection of psychic mayhem in Part VII: The New Blood.

After an atmospheric pre-credits exposition and recaps (narrated by Walt Gorney aka Crazy Ralph from the first two Friday The 13th movies) that focuses mainly on Jason Lives, we're introduced to a young Tina Shephard (Jennifer Banko) who accidentally drowns her abusive father (John Otrin) in Crystal Lake, when her nascent psychic powers run out of control.

I can't help thinking that young Tina is somehow a nod to Tia in the original Witch Mountain movies, but maybe that's just me.

Anyway, years later, an older Tina (Lar Park-Lincoln) and her mother (Susan Blu), are persuaded to return to their summer home by Crystal Lake (the whole renaming exercise from Jason Lives! appears to have been abandoned), by her personal mental health physician, the rather creepy Dr Crews (Terry Kiser).

He's trying to capitalise on her psychic powers, by pushing her to the edge of her wits and convincing her that her 'prophetic visions' are just delusions.

Co-incidentally, the neighbouring house is being used by a group of horny teens (including boob-flashing scream queen Elizabeth Kaitan) to host a surprise birthday party for one of their number (the actual surprise is that he never makes it!).

Railing against Dr Crews rather "in-your-face" therapy, Tina's psycho-kinetic powers end up releasing Jason from his bondage on the lake bed, and the killer rises from the waters, complete with tattered clothes and rib cage showing.

This was horror legend Kane Hodder's first stint behind the hockey mask and he definitely brings a certain character and manner to Jason Voorhees that may have been absent in the earlier films.

It's not that previous iterations of the franchise's antagonist were lacking anything, it's just that Hodder undeniably makes this role his own.

As he starts butchering anyone he finds "on his front lawn", we may think that it fortunate for Jason that one of his first kills was using a large machete to chop wood.

But in the end the slasher doesn't use his trademark weapon that much, instead relying on the many and varied domestic and forestry implements he finds laying around.

Of perverse note, The New Blood was the first of the films where Jason bludgeoned someone to death in a sleeping bag, smashing them against a tree (a scene extrapolated on in my favourite entry in the franchise, the sci-fi Jason X).

One thing I've realised not only do most of Jason's kills lack the finesse - and dark irony - of, say, Freddy Krueger's (being mostly brute force delivered to meat sacks) they're also actually not as gruesome as I either imagined or remembered them to be.

It's all in the suggestive way they are shot, being a combination of tense build-up and then - sometimes, but not always - seeing the gruesome aftermath.

These aren't the mindless torture porn of later years' horror, but following in the footsteps of well-crafted horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And a recurring trope I've slowly picked up on is that every Friday The 13th - after the first, I believe - appears to feature people being thrown through windows: either in through a ground floor one or out of a first floor (or higher) one.

If I was still studying film at university, I'm sure I could come up with some deep meaning for this imagery, but, as it stands, it's just one of those cool, repeated shots that you start to anticipate as new episodes of the franchise drop.

As with Jason Lives, The New Blood is another solid entry in the series that tries to elevate the central conceit beyond "slasher targets horny teens" by expanding its paranormal elements while still keeping the film rooted in its central mythology.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

I won't bore you rambling on about my long-term affinity for this messy franchise - since writing my university dissertation (in part) on the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre - but when a spiffy new Blu-Ray edition of Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III was announced I was 98 percent sure I hadn't actually seen this particular entry.

Trouble is there seem to be so many sequels and reboots it's difficult to remember which are connected to which, and which of those I've actually watched.

For instance, the most recent offering was 2022's Texas Chainsaw Massacre from Netflix which was a direct sequel to the original and brought back a key "victim" from that movie.

However, 1990's Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (not to be confused with 2017's Leatherface) immediately declares itself a continuation of the original story (conveniently sidestepping and forgetting the deranged slapstickery of Texas Chainsaw Massacre II) with its opening text that declares the character who appears in the Netflix sequel to actually have died in 1977!

TCM III isn't just a sequel, it's really a retelling of the original story, just in a more condensed form.

Bickering student couple Ryan (William Butler) and Michelle (Kate Hodge) are on a roadtrip from California to Florida when they pull into a Last Chance Gas Station, in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and encounter its sleazy owner, Alfredo (Tom Everett).

While filling up the car and using the facilities, the couple also meet a hitchhiker called Tex (The Lord of The Rings' Aragorn himself Viggo Mortensen in an early appearance).

Although Ryan won't give him a lift, he does listen to Tex's talk of a shortcut down a road that isn't on their map.

A fight erupts at the gas station between Alfredo and Tex and, as the young couple flee, they believe they see Tex getting blasted with a shotgun.

To escape the clutches of the perverted gas station attendant they take Tex's shortcut, but end up lost and in the dark... and being chased by a mysterious, giant four-wheel drive truck that forces them off the road.

In the ensuing chaos, they have their first encounter with Leatherface (R.A. Mihailoff), and end up running into 'weekend warrior' Benny (Dawn of The Dead's iconic Ken Foree), who was heading into the mountains for a "survivalist camp".

Leatherface captures Ryan, while Michelle discovers a large house that she hopes will offer her sanctuary and/or a way to contact the authorities.

Of course, she's clearly never seen a horror movie... because this is the home of Leatherface's creepy, cannibalistic family!

Honestly, there isn't really much to Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. It's only 85-minutes long and retreads a lot of familiar ground, but it's also a helluva lot of gonzo fun.

Directed by Jeff Burr and written by David J Schow, there's a surprising attention to detail that I really appreciated - such as Leatherface wearing a leg brace (after he injured himself swinging his chainsaw at the end of the original movie) and the little girl (Jennifer Banko) naming her dolly Sally (after the Final Girl in the original movie, Sally Hardesty).

The legend Kane Hodder (best known for his turns as Jason Voorhees in the Friday The 13th franchise) was stunt co-ordinator on TCMIII and, apparently, even doubled for R.A. Mihailoff as Leatherface.

The film tries to emulate the suggested violence of the original by having the most brutal moments occur off camera, but TCM III comes up short on atmosphere because the grit and grim of Tobe Hooper's classic are replaced here by an air of cheapness.

Yet while Leatherface himself seems a bit bargain-basement, there's no escaping the fact that this is a small-scale rollickin' adventure that thematically, with its frequent reliance on a nearby swamp, foreshadows Adam Green's Hatchet series of slasher movies.

The addition of Ken Foree's Benny adds an interesting dynamic, as he's able to bring some genuine firepower to a chainsaw fight, even if the film's heavy-handed plotting does feel obliged to stick to the obligatory Final Girl trope.

And, no, it turns out I definitely hadn't seen Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III before. But I'm glad I have now.