Friday the 13th Part 3 3D (1982)

Friday the 13th Part 3 was the first major 3D movie of the 1980s. I, of course, am using the term major in a rather loose sense. But it was bigger budgeted than the two that preceded it--1981's Comin' At Ya! and the 1982 Demi Moore sci-fi horror flick Parasite--and it was the first one to be released by a major studio. It was also the first major hit in 3D in the 1980s. So in a way, it shares those things with 1953's House of Wax. However, that's where the similarities end.

The first of the Part 3 in 3D movies of the era, Friday the 13th Part 3 is generally considered the best of the 3D movies of the 80s. It's also the film that gave Jason his iconic hockey mask (he had a flour sack over his head in the previous film). Having finally watched it in 3D, I will say that the 3D is quite spectacular. The movie, on the other hand, is quite craptacular. I mean, this is the movie Scream referenced with the joke about running up the stairs instead of out the front door. It literally happens in the movie.

I see dead people

The opening five minutes (in 2D) are the end of the previous film. After burying a machete in Jason's arm, that film's final girl leaves. Jason, of course, is not dead, and he promptly gets up and walks off the wound. He heads over to a general store owned by an annoying couple named Harold and Edna, steals some clothes from them and murders them after a set up that feels like it takes forever.

Meantime, another bunch of dumb teens are getting together to go have a quiet weekend in the woods. They are Chris (Dana Kimmel), who is suffering PTSD from an encounter with Jason two years earlier, stoners Chuck and Chili, pregnant Debbie and her show-off boyfriend Andy, annoying prankster Shelly, and his reluctant date Vera. At the cabin they meet up with Chris's horny boyfriend Rick, who can't understand that she doesn't want to have sex due to what happened to her previously. None of these characters except for Final Girl Chris have any personality. They exist merely to be killed off by Jason. Shelly and Vera run afoul of a trio of bikers in a convenience store, who also have no personality but are there to also add to the body count. Death by meat clever, knitting needle, pitchfork, machete, fire poker, electrocution, spear gun, knife, and having one's eyeball popped out of their head ensues. 

The Lucky One

I get that you shouldn't expect too much from a film like this, but it would be nice if there was something to recommend it beyond the 3D. It's my understanding that this is one of the better entries in this series and all I can say about that is that I can't begin to imagine what the lesser entries are like. Most of the acting is non-existent, the characters are just tropes, and frankly, the movie isn't even scary. There's no real suspense to it. The big slaughter happens an hour into the film and is done with in about 10 minutes of screen time. I also understand that the gore effects were tamed to avoid trouble with the MPAA and there's very little nudity in it, too, which I always heard was a big part of these movies.

Instead director Steve Miner put all his eggs in the 3D basket with this one. Like most of the 80s crop of 3D movies, Friday the 13th Part 3 is more interested in what it can throw out of the screen than it is in telling a story. All manner of objects fly towards the audience, and not just implements of death from our hockey masked madman. Wallets, weed joints, popcorn, juggling fruit, and a yoyo coming flying our way along with the fire poker, spear gun, pitchfork, knives, and eyeballs. Some of the effects are pretty impressive while others are just plain stupid. For almost 40 years I heard about the legendary eyeball effect when Rick's head is crushed. Imagine my disappointment at how silly it looked when I finally saw it.

Come on, give me a ride, babe!

Despite the visual assault on the audience, the 3D is surprisingly well shot for this era. I don't know if Shout Factory made alignment corrections or it always looked like this, but the movie doesn't hurt one's eyeballs in quite the same way some of it's contemporaries like Comin' At Ya! do. 3D movies of the 80s had a bad habit of getting their gimmick shots too close to the camera, which made them physically uncomfortable to watch. Though there are some gimmick shots that come way out of the screen in this one, they don't reach the point of ripping your eyeballs out of your head watching them. 

As I've said before, none of the 80s 3D movies are what anyone would call good movies. In 3D they are sometimes fun and that goes for this film, too. I'd never watch it in 2D, though. I suppose if you're going to pick just one 3D movie from the 80s to watch, this is probably the one (though I'm partial to Jaws 3-D myself). Just don't expect anything as good as House of Wax.

Captain America: Civil War

2016 may go down in cinematic history as the year superheroes stopped punching bad guys and started punching each other. Captain America: Civil War is the second and better of these movies, if only because it's the more personal.

After an attempt to stop Brock Rumlow in Nigeria ends with collateral damage the United Nations wants to put The Avengers under their rule. Tony Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) is all for it but Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans) wants to stay independent. Battle lines are drawn and sides are chosen over the proposed Sokovia Accords. Things get worse when Steve's friend turned brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes is accused of bombing the signing of the Accords, killing the King of Wakanda. The King's son, T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), under the guise of Black Panther, wants revenge. Stark wants to put Bucky down. Steve wants to help his friend clear his name. This set up drives the rest of the film.

Yes, there's a lot more of the Avengers in the movie. In fact, this is basically Avengers 3 more than Captain America 3. On Team Iron Man is Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Vision (Paul Bettany), War Machine (Don't Cheadle), Black Panther, and--making his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut--Spider-Man (Tom Holland). Team Captain America has Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Bucky, and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd).

One would think that with that many characters and a 2 1/2 hour running time, the movie would be too much and too bloated. Surprisingly, it's not. It's multitude of characters and storylines doesn't overwhelm it or feel forced. It's not like some of the more unfortunate DC attempts of "oh, look...it's (insert Batman villain)! Oh, look! It's (insert Justice League hero #1)! Oh, look, it's grainy video of (insert Justice League hero #2)." It's not even like the Marvel Netflix shows that attempt to convince you they're part of the same MCU as the movies by vaguely name-dropping a character without actually mentioning them by name. It remains a slick, taut thriller that manages to pull its various storylines together cohesively in the end. It all clicks and clicks wonderfully, especially under the direction of Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors of Winter Soldier.

About that ending. No spoilers but this movie duplicates the feat of last year's Ant-Man. There's no apocalyptic situation, no extinction level event going on. The fate of the entire world and life as we know it isn't hanging in the balance. There's no wanton destruction with possibly thousands of unseen lives lost. What there is a simple but brutal fight between former friends. To say that it's as tense if not more so than the finales of almost all the previous Marvel movies is to undersell it. Oh, sure, there's a big superhero on superhero brawl earlier in the film where all the heroes fight each other. But that's not the finale. That's the scene we expected when we came in. The finale is much more personal. You don't root for a winner in these fights. We like all these characters and just don't want to see anything bad happen to any of them.

That may be the secret power of this movie. We have been invested in these characters since the MCU started with Iron Man in 2008. The result is that we like all of these characters. Civil War not only recognizes that fact, it exploits it. The movie never demonizes any of its heroes. We can get behind any one of them at any given time. Most iconic brawl movies clearly delineate who we should ultimately root for in the movie. When you have Ant-Man on one team and Spider-Man on the other, how in the world do you choose who to root for?

On the topic of Spider-Man, Tom Holland has the promise to be the best screen webhead yet. The youngest actor to play Peter Parker and his alter-ego, Holland actually looks like a nerdy high school teenager. He also brings Spidey's banter to life in a hilarious way that neither Tobey Maguire nor Andrew Garfield pulled off. It actually makes one excited to see Spidey's next movie. As for this movie's other major introduction, I never was that interested in the character of Black Panther until this. But like Holland's Spider-Man, Boseman's Black Panther is a fascinating character. Since this movie is almost an origin story, I really want to see where the character goes next.

Some may say this isn't quite as good as The Winter Soldier. If that's true, it's through no fault of the movie's own. It's just that Winter Soldier was just that great. But it's almost like arguing whether The Godfather or The Godfather Part II is a better movie. It's still an amazing movie that has much to say about loyalty, friendship, sacrifice, and the cost of revenge.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

The end of 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger found the WWII era superhero in the modern world. This first sequel picks up on that thread, highlighting the differences between the world Captain America left behind and the modern world.

Chris Evans returns as Steve Rogers, now working for S.H.I.E.L.D. and becoming greatly disillusioned with it. When he finds Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) downloading files for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson in one of those few movies where he doesn't say MF) during what was supposed to be a rescue mission, he confronts Fury about his lies. Fury tells Rogers about a new S.H.I.E.L.D. initiative known as Project Insight: three new Helicarriers designed and programmed to eliminate America's enemies before they can do any harm. This, needless to say, doesn't sit well with Rogers.

When Fury can't access the files, he visits Defense Secretary Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). Not long after, he's attacked twice: first in the streets then later in Steve's apartment. After Fury seemingly dies, Pierce and S.H.I.E.L.D. turn on Cap, making him a fugitive. With war veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Black Widow as his only allies,  Cap investigates Fury's murder and makes the disturbing discovery that old nemesis HYDRA had secretly taken over S.H.I.E.L.D. over the decades and were planning to use Project Insight to eliminate their enemies. Worse yet, their number one assassin--the infamous Winter Soldier--is Steve's best friend, the long presumed dead Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), now brainwashed and with a cybernetic arm.

Evans cements his place in comic book movie history as the definitive version of this character. His Rogers is a character whose values have not kept up with the world around him. We're living in a post-9/11 world where in some ways we've forsaken freedom for security. The movie replaces 9/11 with the end battle from 2012's The Avengers but the parallel between what happened in the years following is not lost. Rogers is a character who has gone from living in a world with easily defined bad guys to a world where the distinction is harder to make. Evans does not fail the character, making him moral enough to stand against Project Insight even before we learn its a tool of HYDRA's but conflicted about fighting his former friend.

He also has a great chemistry with Johansson's Black Widow. In fact, this may be the best of her appearances as the character. She's always been fun to watch in these but this is the most interesting she's been.

Stan is physically awesome as the Winter Soldier, a frightening and mysterious force of nature. His battles with Captain America are brutal and nasty. They're also well shot. The ability to follow the action in an era where directors favor cuts that are at best confusing in nature is a definite plus.

As for the others, they are exactly what you would expect. Anthony Mackie is an excellent update to a character who looked a little too disco. Emily Van Camp as Steve's neighbor who isn't who she seems to be at first is also a plus but could have used more screen time. And Robert Redford is Robert Redford. Does anything need to be said beside that?

If the first Captain America was a serial style WWII adventure film, The Winter Soldier is a 70s style paranoid political thriller ala The Parallax View. The only major difference between this and those films is the number of things blown up.  Directed with style by Joe and Anthony Russo, the twists and surprises in the movie elevate it above standard comic book fare. There is humor to counter the action, too. The best running joke in the movie is Widow constantly suggesting hook ups for Rogers.

You can argue if this or The First Avenger are better but at the end of the day, it's splitting hairs. The Winter Soldier is the best Marvel sequel, period. Captain America is the best Marvel franchise, period. With the Russos in charge of not only the forthcoming Civil War but the next two Avenger movies, things are looking pretty good for the MCU.

Sequels, Remakes, and Reboots Part III: Sequels

Of the three things being discussed in this series, sequels are generally speaking the hardest to come to a vague defense of.  And yet, they've been around for decades to say nothing of centuries. The biggest argument against them is that they seem to be nothing more than a money grab. But, truth to tell, one can say that of almost any commercial endeavor, especially in regards to movies. Movies are a business, after all, something most people forget.

While we like to think of sequels as being of relatively recent vintage, they really aren't. They stretch back to at least the 1910s. But back then, nobody just numbered the films. One of the early examples of a sequel comes, fittingly enough, from the serial format. The first serial was done in 1912, called What Happened to Mary?. It was a success--as well as being one of the early movie tie-ins where a novelization was done in serial format in the newspapers--and inspired a second serial called Who Will Marry Mary?. Admittedly, neither one of those sounds like an edge of your seat cliffhanger, but then again, it took a couple of years for the serial format to really develop into that. That wasn't the only serial from the era to gain a sequel. 1916's Pearl White thriller The Exploits of Elaine got one called The Romance of Elaine.

Of course, I'm just speaking cinematically. You can take it back a lot farther than 1913. In fact, you can take the numbered sequel routine back to a guy whose name may or may not have actually been William Shakespeare. Seems he did a few Part 1 and Part 2 type plays back in the day. In fact, you can take it father back than that to the Greeks, with the Thebes plays by Sophocles and The Illiad and The Odyssey. "Yes, but those are classics" you may be saying. They're classics now, but they were pop entertainment--in particular Shakespeare's work--in their day.

Sequels proliferated in novel format once the printing press was invented. Accordingly, a number of said sequels were essentially repeats of the novel that preceded them. Sound familiar? This was done mostly to assert the author's ownership over the properties.

The point is, this sort of thing has literally gone on for centuries and isn't likely to change any time soon.

Up until about the 1970s, however, sequels--or at least movie sequels--tried to tell somewhat different stories and have completely different titles. The sequel to the 1931 Frankenstein wasn't called Frankenstein 2, it was called The Bride of Frankenstein. While some of the nuts and bolts of the story were similar, it also wasn't a direct repeat of the first movie, either. Not even serials told the same exact story or numbered their sequels.

There were a couple of examples of sequels being numbered prior to the 1970s--Quatermass 2 from 1957 being possibly the earliest example--but starting in that decade, the floodgates started to open. While both The Godfather Part II and The French Connection II were both considered better than their respective first movies, they also seemed to help get the trend of numbering started. The Exorcist II, Rocky II and Jaws 2 followed by the end of the decade. Then came the 1980s.

For reasons that film historians will be debating 100 years from now, if they're not already debating it, the sequel concept really caught fire in the 80s. It mostly seems to have started off with the slasher film. 1981 brought us both Halloween II and Friday the 13th Part 2, both of which were just sucessful enough for the studios to ensure that we'd be spending much of the decade watching their spawn. Sequel after sequel to those and other horror franchises followed and so long as they made a profit, they kept getting made. Comedies--most notably raunchy juvenile comedies like Porky's and Meatballs started getting in on the act as did action movies. The single biggest problem with a large number of these is the fact that they really did simply repeat the first movie--and nowhere near as well. I enjoyed the first two Police Academy films when I was a teenager but quickly abandoned the series after the third film when I realized that not only did it suck, but it simply repeated all the jokes in the first two. Mind you, this is coming from someone who didn't always have the greatest of taste in movies when he was a teenager.

The trend was so bad by 1983 that Siskel and Ebert's "Worst of the Year" show for that year was dedicated to nothing but sequels. I have to admit, there were some pretty wretched sequels unleashed on the public that year. They highlighted such rotten sequels as The Sting II, Staying Alive--the sequel to Saturday Night Fever and the only film on the list of sequels to not have a number--, Smokey and the Bandit 3, Jaws 3-D (which I kinda like even though it is a bad movie), and Amityville 3-D. At the end of the show, they implored audiences to not watch any sequels unless they said so.

I will be fair to the 80s, however. There were some sequels that were very good in that decade, mostly in the science fiction genre. I'm not sure what it is about science fiction, but the sequels to sci-fi movies are rarely dumb repeats. The Star Wars and Star Trek sequels are all fairly decent. Even the "bad" entries in those series are better than most comedy and slasher sequels. I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch the much hated Star Trek V: The Final Frontier than the same numbered Nightmare on Elm Street or Police Academy movies. None of the 80s Indiana Jones movies--even the much maligned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--are bad movies either. Continuing with the sci-fi theme, Aliens was also an excellent sequel. We just won't talk about the 90s Alien movies.

Part of the problem, which again goes back to the 70s, is that following the law of diminishing returns, sequels got lower and lower budgets as the series went on. The original Planet of the Apes series is a prime example of this. The excellent make up jobs on all of the apes in the first film gave way to bad Halloween masks in later entries. The diminishing budgets may not be as evident in comedies like the Revenge of the Nerds series, but it comes up front and center in an effects heavy series like Superman. The budget and effects for the notorious Supergirl and Superman IV were so bad that they killed the series until the 2000s.

Lately, however, that doesn't necessarily follow. Movies are trying to put more money into the sequel, to make it bigger and more spectacular than the film that came before. Sometimes that pays off. A fairly surprising source of good sequels nowadays seems to be in the comic book genre. With the exceptions of a few notable missteps like X-Men III--a movie I truly regret seeing--the comic book genre has really stepped up. The latest Thor and Iron Man movies were, if not better than their predecessors, at least as good as. Spider-Man 2 and X2 were also better sequels. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy got better as it went along.  In the coming months we'll have sequels to both Captain America and X-Men that both look like they should be good. Again, like Sci-Fi movies, the thing that these newer comic book movies have going for them is their ability to tell different stories in each film. That helps make the movies at least seem fresher, or at the very least, not make us think "didn't we see this story already?".

Of course, there's a lot of other sequels coming this summer and even more in 2015. The thing is, some of them will be good. They certainly have the capacity and lately haven't been too bad at it. Well, except for comedy sequels. They still haven't figured out that idea. Other sequels--like the forthcoming Dolphin Tail 2--will make us wonder why in God's name a sequel was necessary. Others still just may make us hate humanity for their existence.

So, at the end of the day, should you listen to Siskel & Ebert's advice from 30 years ago? No sequels unless directly told otherwise. Not necessarily. I still watch sequels and in a few weeks will be happily dropping money to see the second Captain America. I'm fairly sure it will make a mint, too. So long as sequels make money, sequels get made no matter how good, bad, or indifferent. That's the way it's always been, that's the way it is, and that's the way it's always going to be.

Thor: The Dark World

When Thor came out in 2011, my interest in seeing it was only slightly more than my interest in seeing a torture horror movie, which is to say practically non-existent. However, I had heard some good things about it and when it hit Redbox, I plunked down a dollar to rent it. After watching it, I immediately felt stupid for having not seen it in the theater. A wonderful mix of superhero goofiness and Shakespearean intrigue, Thor worked far better than I expected. So naturally I determined early on not to let it's sequel get away from me.

While most sequels fail to live up to their predecessors, Thor: The Dark World comes from the rare breed of sequel that is actually better than it's first entry. This is especially surprising when you consider that, outside of The Avengers 2, known of the Phase One directors are coming back to direct Phase Two movies. What this means for the second entry in the Thor series is that Kenneth Branagh isn't guiding this one. That actually translates to less Palace Intrigue and more Big Fights, but surprisingly, this doesn't work against the movie like it should.

The film opens, as it's predecessor did, with the Asgardians defeating a powerful enemy, this time the Dark Elves, led by Malaketh. Doctor Who fans will take glee in seeing Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston as Malaketh, who aspires to send the Nine Realms back into darkness using a weapon called the Aether. Malaketh escapes from Odin's father and the Aether is hidden from him by the Asgardians. Eventually, the Aether is found by Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and Malaketh and his minions rise up to reclaim it and finish the job of sending the Nine Realms back into darkness. Naturally, it is up to Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to put an end to all of this.

I realized as I wrote the above summary that some of this sounds an awful lot like Lord of the Rings and maybe it does. Despite that, it's not something you think about as you actually watch the movie. Thor: The Dark World moves at a pretty good clip and is filled with some great one-liners. It brings back all of the major players of the first film, from Anthony Hopkins and Renee Russo as Thor's parents Odin and Frigia to Stellan Skaarsgard and Kat Dennings as Portman's sorta scientific colleagues Dr. Erik Selvig and Darcy, all of whom put in exactly the type of performance one would except of these actors. In fact, the only major player from the first film not in this is Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson, and that's because he's on TV right now. Though I would love to see him and the Agents of SHIELD team pop up in one of these films.

And then there's Loki.

Tom Hiddleston's Loki was the high point of the first film and, in many ways, of The Avengers as well. Point in fact, he's the best villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and probably a top ten--maybe even top five--movie villain period. This time Hiddleston gets to put a little more depth to Loki, playing him as more of a shade of grey than previously. Throughout the movie, the audience is never fully sure who's side Loki is on, and it makes for fascinating viewing. It also helps that he gets many of the best lines, too. The scene where he disguises himself as Captain America is a riot. No one in the movie can match him--not Eccleston, not Hemsworth, not Portman, not even Hopkins. How often can you say that? Hiddleston completely walks away with the movie, leaving the audience wanting more.

It is a given that The Avengers is the best movie in the MCU. Hower, Thor: The Dark World, while not quite as good, is not far behind. I admit to being concerned that the Phase Two movies would be major letdowns after what came before them, but so far, I'm loving what I'm seeing. Iron Man 3 had only a couple of minor missteps while this particular film does everything right. I'm looking forward to Captain America: The Winter Soldier now. My only regret was not seeing this in 3D last night, but that was on the theater. I'll gladly see Thor: The Dark World a second time. It's a movie well worth seeing, especially on the big screen.