Why I Love Horror Movie Sequels

Sequels get a bad rap.  Most people say that the best a sequel can hope to do is recapture what made the original good but it will still be inferior because it lacks the originality factor.  This has some truth to it as most sequels that succeed do so by expanding the story of the original in ways not possible the first time around or by taking things to crazy new heights.  The Godfather Part 2, almost universally considered the benchmark of sequels, gives us back story that the original didn't have time for while also moving the story forward.  Aliens, James Cameron's renowned spin on Ridley Scott's classic, took the character of Ripley and fleshed her out while also introducing great new characters and upping the stakes exponentially.  Cameron's other sequel masterwork, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, took the simplistic sci-fi/horror charm of The Terminator and expanded it to a truly epic action movie and showed us the evolution of characters we cared about.  This is all to say that sequels in general can be good, even exceptional, but are usually derided as cheap cash-ins, which at times they definitely are.  But I've never felt that they are pointless because at worst you end up with a mess that fans of the original can just ignore, or at best you end up with an expanded world in which you get to spend more time with characters that you like.

Nowhere is the sequel more popular than in the world of horror movies.  And, yes, it's undoubtedly true that just about every horror sequel ever made was made to make money.  Take a surprise hit, spend some money (a lot of times less than what was spent on the original), and have something new to sell.  But then we also have something new to watch, and whether it's genuinely good or so bad it's funny, its usually pretty fun to check out.  Just about all sub-genres of horror have had needless sequels churned out over the years but the ones with the craziest amount has to be the slasher flick.  The plots of slashers are so simple that you can basically just keep making the same movie over and over with different characters and people like me will watch them all.  The Halloween series has ten titles to its name, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser both have nine, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has seven, and even something as silly as Child's Play has six.  The reigning king though has to be my favorite, Friday the 13th.  The Friday the 13th franchise has cranked out twelve movies since 1980 and more will surely be made.  To most people this probably seems like overkill, but I, and a lot of other horror fans, can't get enough.

"Well...maybe he can come back."

The Friday the 13th series is actually the perfect example to flesh out my defense of horror sequels.  The first entry originated as a cash in rip off of John Carpenter's Halloween about a disturbed mother who kills camp counselors as revenge for the death of her disabled child.  Along the next 11 movies that dead child inexplicably grows up to be a murderer living in the woods worshiping his mother's severed head, a resurrected Frankenstein-ish zombie creature, a body jumping Hell worm, a reluctant astronaut, and an opponent to Freddy Kreuger in a fight to the death.  How the hell did these things happen?  Why the hell did these things happen?  That's what makes these movies so fun to me.  The original Friday the 13th is basically a simple but effective murder mystery but the fact that the producers wanted to keep exploiting its success caused a lot of different people to come up with more and more strange ideas and it's interesting to see the various ideas that get used.  It's almost like the way comic books work.  Characters exist in a fictional universe but different writers give them a different flavor over the years and you eventually have a mythology that might not make the absolute most sense but is no doubt fun to study and critique.  Each subsequent entry gives you something completely new to dissect and you can then compare and contrast it with the previous entries.

So, even though some of these films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween are stone cold classics I've never felt that the sequels hurt those legacies.  Sure, there are some duds like Halloween: Resurrection and the A Nightmare on Elm Street remake that get made along the way when the studios keep the franchise train rolling but that doesn't take away from what made the originals so good.  And when the reins of these sequels are given to smart, creative, and ambitious young filmmakers sometimes you end up with entries that are almost as good as the source material like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part 6 and that makes it all worth it.  Take a chance and revel in the insanity of some of these sequels one day.  Some of them are good, a lot turn out bad, but they are always a fun way to spend a movie night. - TG

Dead Snow 2: Red VS Dead Review

When I first watched the original Dead Snow years ago on my girlfriend's recommendation I definitely enjoyed it but was pretty sleepy at the time and always meant to give it another try as I felt I hadn't given it it's fair shake.  I did that late last year and wasn't sorry.  The movie is a gorefest filled with self-aware characters and an over the top plot that I totally dug.  The main thing that stuck with me about the flick even from that original viewing was that the characters in the movie were horror fans themselves and by extension it's clear that the people behind making the movie were too.  So what would those horror fans come up with when it was time to make a sequel to their cult hit?  Their answer was apparently:  "Let's go crazy with it."

In all honesty this is the first zombie movie that I've watched in quite a while that didn't bore me.  The zombie thing has become so prevalent today that it's hard to stay interested, but director Tommy Wirkola and his writing partners Stig Frode Henriksen and Vegar Hoel deliver such a unique and interesting spin on the sub-genre that you might forget for a minute that zombies have become television staples, in league with other creatures such as the "20 something New Yorkers" and "The five member nuclear family".   The prevelance of zombie culture is even poked a bit of fun at in the movie with a few characters being American zombie nerds fiending for a real zombie attack, something most horror fans have at least come across.  But anyways, not only are these zombies Nazis, as you probably knew, but they also have a lot in common with traditional zombies...the old school ones that were resurrected with a purpose like completing a task for a master or retrieving something, not just shambling corpses like Romero's classics.  Throw in some supernatuaral elements, such as characters with the ability to raise the dead (no matter how many times they have died), and it's clear this isn't some Night of the Living Dead retread.

The first Dead Snow actually did start as somewhat of a slow-burn, cabin in the woods style horror movie that eventually devolved into gore soaked insanity but this entry picks up exactly where the original left off and just gets crazier by the minute.  I would say it's not random that a character in the first Dead Snow was wearing a shirt of Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (Dead Alive), as this movie could almost be seen as a spiritual successor to that movie.  Make no doubt about it, this is a horror comedy in league with classics like Jackson's early films, Michele Soavi's Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetary Man), and Sam Raimi's immortal Evil Dead 2.  And, like those movies, this one throw all good taste out the window.  I thought I had almost grown out of shock/gross out humor but I found myself genuinely laughing at the moments where they were obviously trying to offend.  Children, old people, mothers and their babies in strollers...nobody is safe in this movie.  Plus, there are tons of great deaths and stunts (this movie wasn't made on a shoe string budget, there was money put to good use on this one) that would be right at home on one of Joe Bob Brigg's classic Drive-In Totals.

All in all, if you enjoy horror-comedies, you probably won't be disappointed in this one.  I have to give it my full recommendation.  Check it out! - TG