HALLOWEEN HORROR: Hatchet (2007)

Before he made Sexy Nightmare Slayers, Adam Green first became a big name in geeky households through his wonderfully OTT homage to old school slasher horror, Hatchet.

A simple set-up sees a gaggle of potential victims stranded at night in the Louisiana swamps when their "ghost tour" boat runs aground.

Lost, cold and wet they soon discover they are not alone and that the area's mythical bogeyman, Victor Crowley (Kane 'Jason Voorhees' Hodder), is after their blood.

Taking the best of the supernatural slasher genre and blending in some almost Scooby Doo-like humour - along with the requisite quotient of boobs and blood - Green drowns his audience in Grand Guignol levels of gore and mutilation that are so far fetched as to be shockingly humorous.

As much a comedy as a horror film, Hatchet is pure entertainment for horror groupies. It has no deep message or hidden subtext; it just aims to shock and amuse in equal measure by balancing each moment of graphic violence with a cheesy joke, witty one-liner or amusing pratfall.

Emphasising the movie's role as a loving, but light-hearted, homage to movies like Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The 13th, Halloween, Candyman etc we are teased with all too brief cameos by the iconic Tony Todd and Robert Englund.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer fans (well, the males anyway) will also be delighted to know that Mercedes McNab (aka Harmony Kendall) not only has a large role in this as aspiring softcore porn actress Misty, but also spends at least a third of her time on camera topless.

Yes, it's that sort of film!

There's not enough originality in the personality of Victor Crowley - a Jason Voorhees-like mutant child bullied by his peers then accidentally set alight during a Halloween prank (viz. The Burning), who comes back "from the dead" (Freddy et al) with the powers of superhuman strength and indestructibility (Jason again) and a desire for revenge against mankind - but I don't think that's the point.

For me Green is simply trying to reclaim the genre, take it back to a halcyon age - but with a 21st Century budget and effects - to prevent its continued Twilightification. He's making "horror" truly "horrible" again, reclaiming the genre prerogative of  making the antagonist the audience draw, but without sinking to the sickening depths of the torture porn sub-genre.

Even the ending, while by no means original, is still perfectly in-keeping with the old school vibe of the piece... and obviously left the barn door open for Hatchet 2!

HALLOWEEN HORROR: It Follows (2014)

What joy to find an original horror film, one that is not a creatively-bankrupt sequel, tired 'found footage' or "based" on some bullshit 'true story'.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell's It Follows is a beautifully languid take on the familiar slasher film trope of "avoid teenage sex", turning it on its head and giving it a retro-modern style, thanks to its Detroit locations and fantastic score by Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace).

The closest touchstone I can conjure is the idea of the original Nightmare On Elm Street but as directed by David Lynch.

Carefree Jay (Maika Monroe) is a 19-year-old girl dating the seemingly-normal Hugh (Jake Weary), but after they have sex for the first time things turn weird.

Hugh kidnaps Jay to an abandoned parking garage and explains to her he has infected her with a supernatural STD... she is now cursed to be forever followed by an unrelenting, slow-walking, shape-changing creature (that only those infected with this curse can see) that will methodically hunt her down unless she can pass the curse on to someone else.

However, once "It" catches up with the infected person and kills them, it then turns its attention back to the person who passed the curse on to them and so on, working its way back down the chain of infection.

Death, it seems, is inevitable and can only be delayed.

Once back home, Jay enlists her younger sister, Kelly (Lili Sepe) and their friends - which includes the hormonally-driven Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who has been crushing on Jay since they were kids - to keep her safe from her unseen stalker.

It Follows isn't perfect, and occasionally slips off the rails so you catch yourself thinking "waitaminute, that doesn't make sense", but generally you'll get swept up in the verisimilitude of the scenario, the dream-like aesthetic, convincing teenage portrayals and the atmospheric settings (accentuated by the John Carpenteresque soundtrack).

What also makes a pleasant change is we aren't spoon-fed explanations for what "It" is and why it does what it does. There is no way for the protagonists to discover this, so why should we. It is pure nightmare/urban myth fodder from start to finish.

The old school Elm Street comparison continues with Paul's pragmatic scheme to kill the creature - even though, ultimately, it kind of backfires and they have to resort to a more direct approach.

The ending is left open - again, this reflects the protagonists lack of solid evidence for what has occurred - but that doesn't mean It Follows needs a sequel. We don't need to know who created this curse. The horror works so much better with not knowing.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Trailer Park Of Terror (2008)

Trying to escape her trailer trash life, Norma (Nichole Hiltz) has got herself a townie boyfriend, only the local bullies accidentally kill him and so Norma storms off, strikes a deal with The Devil (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Stephen King's Randall Flagg aka The Walkin' Dude aka The Man In Black), returns to the trailer park, kills everyone and burns down the park with herself in it.

Twenty years later a minibus of juvenile delinquents, returning from Bible camp with their chaperone, Pastor Lewis (Matthew Del Negro) crashes in a rain storm and they seek shelter in the seemingly abandoned trailer park.

However, they are greeted by Norma, who offers to put them up for the night and that's when they discover they are in the Trailer Park Of Terror (bwahahahahaha!)

This 90-minute horror starts off promisingly enough, but once the ghost-zombies start to arrive it degenerates into a very by-the-numbers gorefest - with the "final girl" telegraphed from the moment she appears, as the only one of the young reprobates with any degree of personality and charm.

A strange brew, borrowing elements from sources as diverse as splatterpunk and Nightmare On Elm Street (several of the kiddies are offed in ways appropriate to their single character-defining quirks), things further spin out of control with musical numbers (courtesy of an annoying zombie with a guitar - a gimmick that grows old very fast) and a strange demolition derby climax!

By letting the story initially unfold chronologically, thus letting us see the inciting incident that creates the supernatural horror (facts usually discovered in the course of horror film, rather than at the start), I thought Trailer Park Of Terror was going to put a new spin on this kind of "teenagers trapped in the middle of nowhere by flesh-eating monsters" movie.

Sadly it doesn't and even the half-hearted attempt at a twist ending is fumbled. Apparently the movie was based on a comic book series and clearly this ending was a stab at leaving the door open for a sequel.

SAW WEEK: Saw VI (2009)

Picking up from the end of the last chapter, but with numerous flashbacks to weave the narrative into earlier episodes in the franchise, Saw VI concerns itself with the FBI closing in on Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) while John Kramer (Tobin Bell) gets to play one 'final' game from beyond the grave.

Hoffman is still trying to shift the blame onto the late Agent Strahm, but his injured partner Perez (Athena Karkanis) is back on the case - with Agent Erickson (Mark Rolston) - and she clearly has doubts about Hoffman from the get-go.

Although the opening "pound of flesh" sequence of Saw VI leans heavily towards gratuitous torture porn, the remaining 'tests' adhere more to the old school appeal of the original couple of entries in the franchise.

John - aka Jigsaw - has arranged for the man who refused his insurance cover, William Easton (Peter Outerbridge), of Umbrella Health, to be put through a series of 'games' which involve life-and-death situations for members of his staff.

This whole sequence is one of the best exemplars of the point that Jigsaw has been trying to make, and while I could never condone his methods, the perverse nature of America's health insurance system never fails to boggle my mind (coming from a country rightfully proud of its National Health Service).

Taking place in what appears to be an industrial maze under an abandoned zoo, there are elements of Freddy's boiler room in the atmosphere of these scenes, and eventually - that is, until the final twist (because there's always one) - you almost begin to feel sorry for William.

That storyline ends in gross death, but, for once in this franchise, it manages to go so over the top as to cross into the dark humour of Grand Guignol.

Meanwhile, the other plotline continues to fill in John's backstory, putting more of the plot in the hands of his ex-wife, Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), as we learn the contents of the mysterious box that John bequeathed her in his will (in Saw V).

I was also pleased to see the return of the first of John's accomplices, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) in these flashbacks, as she was always more charismatic - even if totally bonkers - than the oily and unlikeable Hoffman.

Her unmasking as one of Jigsaw's team was a shock, whereas Hoffman might as well as having walking around with a placard on his chest proclaiming his guilt. 

I have to confess that after the uncomfortable nature of the last film, Saw VI is something of a redemption - at least for the moment - for the franchise as, by having the traps set up by John and 'operated' by him posthumously, it moves back towards the modus operandi that made the first film a surprising hit.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Horror! The Horror! The Horror!

These days I'm a sucker for horror movies, with a particular weakness for monster movies.

While my passion for the genre began with a teenage viewing of the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead, one of my favourite franchises remains the Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

I can still clearly remember the buzz the first one generated around school when it came out in 1984.

I was 17 at the time and not as into horror movies as I am now, but the "word on the street" was - in those pre-internet, pre-DVD dark ages - that it was the "most terrifying movie anyone had ever seen ever!"

Of course, when I eventually got to see it on VHS it was quite tame; still brilliant, thrilling and gory, but nowhere near as horrific as my teenage mind had imagined, fuelled by the hyperbole of fellow teenagers who'd claimed to have seen it... and just made it through to the credits by the skin of their tough guy teeth.

Even at the time some of the mood-setting special effects seemed quite primitive, these days they look positively archaic.

I seem to recall that the first horror film my parents let me stay up to watch on television was The Omen II. That scared the crap out of me and gave me nightmares for days - but now that also seems quite tame to my cynical forty-something brain.

I guess at the time it was some 'reverse psychology' parenting to stop me pestering them to be allowed to stay up and watch 'grown-up' movies.

It must have worked because I don't recall any horror movie encounters until the height of the heady days of the tabloid-led 'video nasties' scare (in the early '80s), when it was de rigueur to go round each others' houses and dare each other to watch the latest piece of nasty that someone had acquired on video tape.

I didn't make it through either The Evil Dead or Texas Chain Saw Massacre - which is ironic as the latter would, decades later, form the backbone of my university dissertation, and both movies rate among my top horror flicks these days.

It wasn't until one of these illicit gatherings when a gang of us were watching George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead that I had my 'Road To Damascus' moment and realised I was actually rather enjoying this movie and would like to see more of the same.

But that's not to say I've become so hardened and blasé to horror that nothing has a lasting impact on me.

Here's a quick rundown of the top three horror movies that still give me the heebeejeebies:

• The Exorcist

• The Blair Witch Project

• The Amazing Mr Blunden

No real shocks with the first two. I know The Blair Witch Project doesn't do it for everyone, but it digs at me on a psychological level for some reason - I guess it's something about being lost in the woods with an unseen antagonist, and the cinema-vérité style, with the handheld camera, just makes it all the more real.

It's that level of 'truth' that also makes The Exorcist so unnerving to me. Later horror films have generally taken a lighter touch, and even been more action orientated, but The Exorcist unfolds like docudrama and, to this day, as with Blair Witch, I can't watch it without the lights on!

The final entry in this trio of terror is an unlikely one that is obviously very personal.

My gran took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the town centre cinema in Tunbridge Wells when I was six - and it scarred me for life.

To be honest I can't remember much of the specifics of the film, just that it involved a ghost and a large house fire. It wasn't the ghost that got to me, it was the house fire.

To this day, I haven't watched the film again because something about it just flicked a switch in my little, six-year-old brain.

And I have no plans to... even though it appears to actually be a U-certificate kids' film and not the hideous torture porn my addled brain recalls being 'forced' to sit through Clockwork Orange style with my eyelids pinned back.

A Tale of Two Exorcists

After Paul Schrader had filmed Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist, the studio took it away from him - because his psychological horror was not the gore-fest they'd wanted - and handed over the reins to Cliffhanger's Renny Harlin.

The film underwent a major rewrite, some recasting and an almost total reshoot and emerged on the silver screen as Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004.

Schrader's version - although highly anticipated (this was the man who wrote Taxi Driver after all) went unseen until all the Exorcist films were released together on DVD in the early 2000s.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the wait was worth it. Dominion is very rough round the edges, and while it builds slowly (like the original Exorcist - but totally devoid of the genuine fear that film still invokes after all these years) and the threat level is allowed to gradually develop as the madness of the demon Pazazu spreads out from its hiding place, nothing very substantial actually ever materialises.

And the "suddenly everything is better" ending is shameful.

Both films follow a young Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgaard), who has left the church to pursue his passion for archaeology after a crisis of faith during the Second World War.

In 1947 East Africa he investigates a mysterious, perfectly preserved, buried church... and what lies beneath.

But where Dominion goes for discreet imagery and symbolism, Exorcist: The Beginning relies on in-your-face shocks and a gruesome body count. Merrin in this film is more a shotgun-wielding, babe-snogging, tomb-robbing Indiana Jones than the conflicted priest of the earlier iteration.

The film's main female character - a doctor - changes from the 'average/normal' looking woman of Dominion into the Swedish beauty of the second (as Harlin says in the 'making of' doc: "You don't go to the cinema to see everyday people").

The African natives, who play a smaller role in the The Beginning, have also learned to speak perfect English. The language-barrier was something that Schrader had used in his version to emphasise the differences and rising tensions between the locals and the British Army occupiers.

Pazuzu itself, once it appears, has also been transformed from a floating baldy guy into a gravely-voiced, Buffyesque, butt-kicking monster with direct visual lifts from the original (something sorely lacking in Schrader's version).

Harlin's film also cherrypicks from other horror classics, for instance we get the flys from The Amityville Horror and mad priests and menacing dogs (in this case, hyenas) from The Omen.

This is The Exorcist for the Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday 13th generation, who don't like their horror to test their brains too much; but 'sadly' it's still a more exciting movie than Schrader's insubstantial meditation on the nature of evil.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

Remember that visceral feel of tingly excitement you felt the first time you watched the original Nightmare on Elm Street or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II?

Prepare to feel it again (although maybe not for quite so long).

Jennifer's Body isn't quite in those leagues but is still a meaty, thrilling, monster-stalking-teens horror flick... that just happens to star two of the hottest stars in Hollywood at that time: Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.

The story opens with Needy (Seyfriend) in a mental institution then flashes back to explain how she got there.

Needy and Jennifer (Fox) are BFFs, friends since childhood, in a small town called Devil's Kettle - named for a nearby waterfall and its freaky sinkhole (a wonderful detail that makes for a great red herring).

Head cheerleader Jennifer is a typical gorgeous, ditzy teen, always thinking about boys, while Needy is a more normal, average, homely girl with a pleasant boyfriend, Chip (Johnny Simmons) - until the girls go to the community's one, out-of-town, bar to see a visiting big city band play.

A fire breaks out at the dive, killing several people, and in the confusion Jennifer leaves with the band... only to show up hours later at Needy's home, looking like death... and spewing up disgusting, tarry bile over the lino.

Jennifer is no longer the girl that Needy grew up with, but a flesh-eating demon (possibly a succubus) after the band tried to sacrifice her to Satan to ensure they had a successful career.

Unfortunately the ceremony required a virgin and that's one thing Jennifer wasn't!

And to maintain her good looks, Jennifer now needs to feed...

Writer Diablo Cody clearly has an ear for teen banter and there's a lot of a very dark humour at work here that, with the overall Buffy The Vampire Slayer vibe of the piece, made it compelling viewing in my book.

About two-thirds the way through, my sixth sense started trying to tell me that there was "something else" going on here and while some of the clues suggested a Fight Club-style twist might be on the cards; ultimately I was quite relieved to be proved wrong.

What seems odd though is there are several rather hurried segues between scenes that, upon further exploration of the DVD, are covered in the "deleted scenes" (particularly from Chip and Needy's tussle with Jennifer in the abandoned swimming pool to Needy's attack on Jen in her bedroom).

As it stands the movie is only just over an hour-and-half long and it could easily have absorbed a lot of these cut moments back into its flow.

There's also a couple of sequences of heavy info dumping when (a) Jennifer is recounting what happened to her when she went away with the band and (b) when Needy is researching what has happened to Jennifer.

I realise both, and especially the latter, are slightly tongue-in-cheek - as highlighted by Chip's comment: "Our library has an occult section?", but it isn't quite as subtle as maybe Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama were hoping.

Perhaps I was paying too much attention - because I was enjoying it so - but some of the more mysterious aspects of the story, like the wild animals flocking round Jennifer when she is about to kill someone and Needy's almost physic connection with, and vivid daydreams about, the demon are thrown out there but never really fully explored or explained.

Ultimately, Jennifer's Body is a flawed masterpiece. It could have been a horror movie of legendary status because it's heaving with good ideas, but somewhere along the line those ideas got either partially diluted or exorcised completely.

Its failure at the box office wasn't helped by some dreadful miss-selling and the complicit, lazy media who accepted the PR spin that this was some Megan Fox vehicle in an American Pie (with lashings of blood) style vein.

It's so much more than that, but unfortunately the movie's strange idiosyncrasies meant it wasn't strong enough to overcome the crass publicity campaign that 20th Century Fox had attached to it.

It would be nice to think there's a more complete "director's cut" lurking out there somewhere that more closely resembles the writer and director's original vision for this movie, but I fear that's an empty dream.

Nevertheless, Jennifer's Body is still a fine piece of gore-splattered, Buffy-style entertainment that's over too quickly and certainly leaves you with a desire to revisit Devil's Kettle sometime soon.

Never Sleep Again - The Elm Street Legacy (2010)

If you are at all 'into' the Nightmare On Elm Street series of horror films - as I am - then you owe it to yourself to seek out the incredible documentary Never Sleep Again - The Elm Street Legacy.

Although clearly a labour of love, this FOUR HOUR documentary isn't a straight lovefest for the franchise, but a proverbial 'warts-and-all' behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the series, chronicling the highs and lows, the conflicts, the cut corners etc offering an unrivalled insight into the world of low-budget movie making.

Running parallel to the main arc of the documentary is the story of how A Nightmare On Elm Street effectively 'made' New Line Cinema, the company that would eventually bring us Peter Jackson's magnificent Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Each movie - from the original through to Freddy Vs Jason, and embracing the short-lived TV spin-off, Freddy's Nightmares - gets its own chapter, with a wonderful stop-motion animation bumper, and is packed to bursting point with talking heads of the majority of the main actors and movie crew, unseen footage and photographs etc

Unsurprisingly, Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette (whose careers began in the franchise) are conspicuous by their absence, as is Peter Jackson (who wrote a draft of one of the later movies), but there are so many other - more than 100 - interesting interviewees with great things to say that you don't really mind (and didn't really expect them anyway).

For instance, I'm far more interested in Wes Craven's opinions of the sequels to his classic original or his insights into the post-modern brilliance of Wes Craven's New Nightmare, and Robert Englund (the one and only Freddy Krueger) is always good value for money.

Of particular interest are the revelations that several of the films were effectively 'made-up-as-they-went-along' as directors and crew raced to hit pre-determined release dates with unfinished scripts - which, I guess, explains the "dream-like" quality of some of the stories!

Narrated by Heather Langenkamp (aka Freddy's nemesis Nancy from the movies), the film also examines Freddy's transformation from child-murdering supervillain into cartoon cultural icon, and various attempts to reclaim the character as a genuine figure of fear.

The two-DVD set includes a disc of extras as fascinating as the main feature covering topics such as the Freddy Krueger comics and novels, hardcore fans (Fred Heads) and a tour of the movie locations used in the original Nightmare On Elm Street.

Insightful and entertaining, Never Sleep Again is the ultimate, definitive insight in to one of the truly iconic figures of horror cinema, who now ranks alongside Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy and The Wolfman in the psyche of horror-loving film fans.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

While it was not the next Friday The 13th movie made (that was Jason X, which we will get to later), in my mind 2003's Freddy vs Jason is the next entry chronologically as it ties to final scene of Jason Goes To Hell.

Taking place four years after the dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) last plagued the residents of Elm Street, the older generation of Springwood have concocted a conspiracy of silence, to erase Freddy from the local mythology.

By forgetting him, they are depriving him of the fear that the feeds him, and so he remains trapped in Hell.

However, Freddy has a plan to escape: remind the residents of Springwood of his existence by releasing Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) from Hell - and pointing him at Elm Street.

The idea being that Jason will stir memories - and fears - of Freddy, eventually giving him enough power to escape Hell himself.

Not only is this is a canny plot device, but Freddy vs Jason doesn't hang around - with Jason butchering his first Elm Street victim within minutes of the story getting on.

For a 16-year-old film, the visual effects are particularly striking in places, such as in the first few "nightmare" sequences, nice touches like the disappearing bloody footprints and the turning heads on the "Missing" posters, and then, later, the imagery of the burning Jason striding through the cornfields.

What makes Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's screenplay really sing though isn't just the brilliant set-up, but also the way it wove in the conflict between the two supernatural antagonists: having released Jason onto his "patch" Freddy gets pissed when he starts losing potential victims to the hockey mask-wearing zombie.

Given Jason's habit - in several of the earlier Friday The 13th films - of jumping in and out of Crystal Lake, I don't really buy the "fear of water" he's been given here (as a heavy-handed polar opposite to Freddy's fear of fire) and the script also plays a bit fast and loose with the specifics of Jason's origin story.

However, I can excuse that as we witness it through the lens of Jason's own dreamscape - nightmare? - and, of course, dreams and, recollections in them, are rarely 100 per cent accurate.

But, even with its narrative flaws, Freddy vs. Jason is a slick, pulpy, clash of two horror icons, that's probably smarter than the casual viewer might even realise.

While Freddy is, obviously, the more vocal of the pair, the film perfectly balances spotlight time for both the villains, so you can't say this is Jason appearing in a Freddy film or vice versa.

As well as interesting dives into what passes for Jason's psyche, there are also some nice touches in the movie that a diehard Fredhead like myself can really appreciate.

We get to see Freddy's world operating on an almost Looney Toons-level of dream logic, that makes a significant change in tone to match the change of setting, and then it's really brought home just how weedy Freddy actually is when pulled through into the "real world".

It's his evil cunning, as much as anything, that allows him to go toe-to-toe with Jason on the dock at Crystal Lake.

With Jason well and truly back at the end of the film - but Freddy certainly not out of contention - Freddy vs Jason actually does a nice job of restoring the status quo to both franchises.

Just a shame that Friday The 13th only managed one more (before its failed reboot) and A Nightmare on Elm Street went straight for the failed reboot option.

As the last few entries in the Friday the 13th series showed (and I'm including Jason X here, but excluding Jason Takes Manhattan), if you're willing to take risks talented writers can always breathe new life into a long-running franchise... if given the chance.

Jason Goes to Hell - The Final Friday (1993)

Okay, time for some brief personal backstory: the only reason I started this Friday the 13th challenge was an incentive to get to Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday.

I wanted to watch them in order, to see if there was any foreshadowing for some of the moments I knew were coming in this entry in the franchise, even though it was one I definitely knew I'd never seen before.

Although it's not available via Sky Cinema or through streaming, Paul had bought me the DVD over a year ago - but I hadn't gotten around to watching it until now.

And, I have to say, I loved it. Primarily for the way it ties in not just to Nightmare On Elm Street (with Freddy's claw grabbing the mask right at the end), but also with the Evil Dead mythology.

I'd known about that link for ages (hence my keenness to see this chapter in Jason's story) but hadn't expected it to be so overt.

I thought it might be a shot of the Necronomicon (which also gives it some Lovecraft flavouring as well) in the background, or some such fleeting Easter Egg. but it's front and centre, when Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay) is exploring the Voorhees home and flicks through the ancient tome:

Completely ignoring Jason's fate at the end of Jason Takes Manhattan, Jason Goes To Hell opens with the FBI setting a trap for the supernatural serial killer in the woods near Crystal Lake, resulting in him being blown to kingdom come.

The pieces of Jason's body are taken to a morgue, where his still beating heart mesmerises the coroner (Deadwood's Richard Gant), sending him off on a murderous rampage.

Meanwhile, Crystal Lake is celebrating the lifting of its 20 year "death curse", with Joey B's Diner offering Jason-themed meals.

But tough guy bounty hunter Creighton Duke (The X-Files' Steven Williams) is having none of this, because he knows that Jason can only be finally killed by destroying his heart, and only someone of the Voorhees bloodline has the power to do that.

Jason's supernatural - Deadite - power is burning up his host body, so he needs to transfer the parasite within him to other bodies on his journey to find someone of his bloodline - not only are they the only ones that can kill him, they are also the only bodies that he is able to transform into his natural form (the zombie slasher we know and love from the later films in the franchise).

Hapless doof  Steven Freeman ends up getting framed for one of Jason's murders, but soon discovers - through a meeting with Duke - who Jason is really targeting and why.

He busts out of jail and sets off to track down the body-hopping killer.

On one hand, Jason Goes To Hell is quite unlike earlier entries in the Friday the 13th series, but it's a real hardcore '80s gonzo trio that extrapolates on the supernatural elements that were woven in Jason Lives and The New Blood, so we already know he's operating in a world where these things are possible.

Jason Goes To Hell is also full of definitive details about the franchise: such as the killer being born of Elias and Pamela Voorhees in 1946, he supposedly drowned when he was 11, he's responsible (prior to this movie) for 83 confirmed kills (and many more unconfirmed), the existence of the Voorhees home (which, surprisingly, we've never seen before) etc

So, as someone who sees movies like this through the eyes of a gamer and comic book reader, I'm totally grokking all these stats, and attempting to headcanon them into my own vision of Jason's mythology (which now embraces Freddy and Ash, of course!).

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.

Friday the 13th Part VI - Jason Lives (1986)

Turns out we were lied to in the last film, Jason has not been cremated but is buried in the Crystal Lake - now renamed Forest Green - graveyard.

However, Tommy Jarvis - a couple of years older and played by a different actor (Thom Mathews) - wants to make sure, and plans to dig up the killer's corpse and burn it himself.

Unfortunately, the combination of a thunderstorm, a metal fence post, and Tommy's grave-robbing accidentally end up in bringing Jason (C.J. Graham) back to life... as an unstoppable zombie!

Jason, of course, was already some kind of zombie, having come back from the dead once after Tommy killed him when he was 12-year-old Corey Feldman, but now Jason's supercharged and bullet-proof.

Tommy tries to warn the local police, but Sheriff Garris (David Kagen) is having none of this "Jason has risen from the grave" bullshit, and wants to drive Tommy out of town.

Not only has Crystal Lake changed its name to try and forget its bloody past, but someone thought it would be a great idea to open a new summer camp on the lake shore.

One of the new counsellors is the sheriff's slightly wild daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke, the 'Star Child' Elizabeth from the classic series of V), who takes a shine to Tommy and believes his claims about the supernatural slasher.

However, Jason is heading back towards the camp, and as bodies start to fall, the Sheriff reckons Tommy is responsible, that it's part of his Jason-obsessed psychopathy.

Tommy, of course, knows better and, with Megan's help (and occult knowledge gleaned from a paperback book bought at a Forest Green convenience store) hatches a plan to defeat undead Jason once and for all.

After a couple of rather middling movies in the series, this is more like it. Jason Lives is peak Friday The 13th. It's back on brand with the coterie of camp counsellors for Jason to slaughter and the action has returned to Crystal Lake.

Production values have increased from the first swath of movies, making the kills more visceral and horrific, but this is tempered with a better quality script, and even some moments of deadpan humour.

Writer/director Tom McLoughlin's screenplay even includes a nice Nightmare On Elm Street Easter egg, with the the little kid that has nightmares about all-powerful monsters being called Nancy (Courtney Vickery)

Elm Street only came out a couple of years before this, but already it seems as though the seeds were being sown for some kind of connection between the two blockbuster horror franchises.

When the general public talk about Jason, I think this is the era they mean, starting with this great little slasher flick.

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is when the mythology really starts to expand, as it draws on supernatural elements, which I'm pretty certain will now become a more prevalent feature in the upcoming entries in the franchise.

Friday The 13th (1980)

I do loves me some long-running, trashy, horror franchise shenanigans, but for some reason - unlike, say, Nightmare On Elm Street and Wrong Turn, where I watched each episode religiously as it came out - I've only seen random parts of the Friday The 13th story.

Although I was well aware of the big twist on the killer's identity (it's not Jason) and the suckerpunch right at the end (it is Jason), the film still holds up after all these years with some clever touches (such as the girl we initially think is being set up to be the Final Girl is actually the first to go), decent acting and palpable tension.

The awkward, occasionally stilted, dialogue comes across as naturalistic, helping to heighten the verisimilitude of this very-grounded (except, of course, for that famous moment at the end) opening salvo in the Friday The 13th franchise.

The film unfolds over a single day and rain-soaked night, with the bulk of the kills falling into the middle third of its 92-minute duration, before third act game of cat-and-mouse between the actual deranged killer and the actual Final Girl.

A half-dozen young councillors (including Kevin Bacon) arrive at Camp Crystal Lake to help prepare for its grand reopening, several  decades after it closed following a drowning, a couple of unsolved murders and some arson attacks.

Unfortunately someone doesn't want the camp to reopen...

Compared to some of today's gorefests, Friday The 13th is quite tame and even the (very brief) sexy time isn't exactly hardcore.

The Psycho-inspired stings and wind score emphasises the power of intelligent, nondiegetic, music to heighten tension and director Sean S. Cunningham wisely doesn't let us see us a fair number of the kills as they happen as I'm not convinced all of Tom Savini's effects stand the test of time.

It's only really in the last half-hour or so that the survivors suddenly twig that something is going on... and start finding the bodies.

Kevin Bacon manages to stay alive for less time than Johnny Depp in the original Nightmare On Elm Street and is best remembered for getting an arrow through his throat.

My only real criticism is the film should have ended with its Carrie-like shock moment, rather than then rambling on to the final scene with Alice (Adrienne King) in hospital.

This adds nothing except to slightly undercut the horror of the shocking scene before.

And as to the 'twist' with the killer's true identity, I guess at the time it wasn't even a twist as no-one knew of the unstoppable zombie that was Jason Voorhees in the later films.

MONSTER MAYHEM: Tarot (2024)

A clichéd group of generic college students have AirBnB-ed a spooky mansion in the Catskills for a drunken (yet, admittedly, rather tame) birthday party for one of their number: Elise (Larsen Thompson).

Low on drink, the group search the house and discover - behind a "keep out" sign - a basement reminiscent of the Warren's 'storeroom of evil' from The Conjuring franchise.

Of course, the kids poke around. Of course, they find a deck of creepy, hand-drawn tarot cards in a wooden box. Of course, one of the students - Haley (Harriet Slater, aka Fran from Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny) - knows how to do readings.

Breaking the 'golden rule' of tarot (that you don't use someone else's deck), Haley does tarot readings - tied to the subject's horoscope - for all her friends and herself.

They all have a good chuckle, except Haley's ex-boyfriend Grant (Wrong Turn's Adain Bradley), and then settle down for the night.

After a long drive back to the university, the gang all go their separate ways... and that's when the killing starts.

Elise is the first to die, then Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz).

Only then do the survivors realise that their friends are being bumped off in ways that are literal interpretations of Haley's vague, metaphorical tarot card readings.

Searching for answers online, the first name their Google search throws up is a discredited - and kooky - expert called Alma Astrom (Olwen Fouéré, the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sally Hardesty).

Alma, of course, knows all about this cursed deck of tarot cards and their origin, and even has a personal connection to the cards - as a survivor of a similar murder spree to the one our protagonists are caught up in.

In a nutshell, the cards were cursed by a Hungarian peasant - known only as The Astrologer - who transferred her essence into the cards so she could kill any who receive a reading from them.

Now, our heroes have to find a way to remove the curse before too many of them are brutally slaughtered by The Astrologer's manifestations of the demonic forms she drew on the Major Arcana.

Written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg - based on the 1992 novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams - Tarot feels like an '80s throwback, direct-to-VHS, monster flick.

However, as the film is really on-the-nose with its unsubtle, supposedly spinetingling, goings-on it also comes across as a parody of the genre for the most part.

The characters are so two-dimensional that we can't really get invested in their fates beyond a surface level, yet - for some reason - all the kills (essentially the 'selling point' for this kind of teen flick) are either off-camera or overly shy about showing anything resembling gore.

The script oscillates between wanting to be the foundation of a serious horror franchise, stylistically suggesting Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street during its 92-minute runtime, and being a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the same.

As the plot gets increasingly silly, characters are forced to exposit about how these unconvincing twists could actually have happened, which compounds the suggestion that this really could be a parody.

To be fair, Tarot isn't awful (we've all seen a lot worse), but the most terrifying thing about this would-be horror movie is its mediocrity.

The Shed (2019)

Having been attacked in the woods by a Nosferatu-like vampire (Damian Norfleet), hunter Joe Bane (Frank Whaley) crawls away to a nearby shed to recuperate... and complete his transformation into a bloodsucker.

The shed stands in the garden of Bane's neighbour, 17-year-old orphan Stan (Jay Jay Warren), who lives with his alcoholic and abusive grandfather, Ellis (Timothy Bottoms).

After the vampire kills Ellis and his dog, Stan realises he can't go to the authorities as his grandfather was the only thing standing between him and another spell in a juvenile detention centre.

Thus, he confides instead in his best friend, Dommer (Cody Kostro).

Unfortunately, Dommer immediately sees the "pet monster" as a weapon to strike back at the school bullies, Marble (Chris Petrovski) and his cronies, Pitt (Francisco Burgos) and Ozzy (Uly Schlesinger).

Naturally, things don't really go well for anyone, eventually culminating in Stan and his cute ex-girlfriend Roxy (Sofia Happonen) besieged in his house by a small horde of vampires.

Slightly reminiscent of several classic urban vampire flicks, from the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie and Fright Night to Near Dark and Salem's Lot, The Shed is an innovative, tight, well-made, well-acted, low-budget, low-key monster movie that, ultimately, doesn't quite live up to its potential.

Jay Jay Warren has a certain Anton Yelchin-like quality about him and together with Sofia Happonen they make for charming, easy-going leads, while Cody Kostro's Dommer, especially when he finally gets one over on Marble and cracks, is superb.

Spanning a three or four day period, the 98-minute movie is well-paced and a believable slice of small town American life in a community where everybody knows everybody.

However, a couple of things stand in the way of The Shed being a truly great horror flick.

The first is that, for a film that isn't a Nightmare on Elm Street, it spends far too long in Stan's dreamscape, unless this is somehow connected to a previously unknown power of the vampire. Sadly, this is never explained.

Secondly, the abrupt ending feels like writer/director Frank Sabatella just suddenly ran out of ideas (or money?) and called a halt.

Too many questions, many of them practical and grounded in the real world, are left unanswered.

And there's the obvious Chekhov's Gun of Deputy Haiser (Mu-Shaka Benson), introduced early on and clearly having a grudge against Stan, who then never appears again, even after his boss, Sheriff Dorney (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) fails to return from a routine call-out.

It feels as though The Shed could have done with, at least, five or 10 more minutes of run time to wrap up its many dangling plot threats.

Galaxy Of Terror (1981)

Recommended to me by my good mate Paul, Galaxy Of Terror is a slightly bonkers, early '80s Alien-wannabe, produced by the legendary Roger Corman and resplendent in that "they're making this up as they go along" feeling that he always brings to his movies.

In an alien galaxy, there is a world ruled by a glowing-headed dictator known as The Master (a very natty special effect, it must be said, and a character that has nothing to do with Doctor Who), who hand picks a miss-matched team of astronauts to embark on a rescue mission to the desolate planet Morganthus - where an earlier ship has crashed.

The rescue team boasts a host of well-known performers: Erin Moran (Joanie from Joanie Loves Chachi and Happy Days), Robert Englund (Nightmare On Elm Street, V etc,) David Lynch-stalwart Grace Zabriskie, horror-movie veteran Sid Haig and familiar TV faces Ray Walston and Bernard Behrens.

Throw in some rubbery monsters and an unpleasant assault by a giant rape-maggot that ranks with the original Evil Dead's animated tree as just plain wrong, and it's no wonder this has become a cult classic.

To be fair it quite quickly shakes off its Alien aspirations as it heads more into pseudo-psychological territory somewhere between Shakespeare and Space 1999.

For a low-budget schlockfest, Galaxy Of Terror has some very impressive visuals: as well as the storm-lashed surface of Morganthus we are treated to the sci-fi/Dungeons & Dragons delights of the massive, maze-like interior of a pyramidal structure the adventurers have to explore to turn off the energy beam that caused them to crash-land as well.

And if that isn't enough of an incentive to track this B-movie treasure down (as long as you can stomach the giant maggot scene and a squirm-worthy moment involving a shard of crystal sliding under someone's skin) there's the added bonus that the film is only 81 minutes long.