Iro's October '18 Horror Thread

Now I want to see your take on every film in this series.

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

So do I - unfortunately the only other one I've managed to watch so far is Revelations, which really makes me want to take a stab at an updated "worst 100" list.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I remember how controversial that list was. You got people mad, hahaha.

Gotta go big or go home, buddy. In retrospect, I guess I had just led a privileged enough life to not have seen enough truly awful movies to make for an "acceptable" list - I've revisited a good chunk of those movies and more than a few of them, while not necessarily that good, don't deserve to be on the list. That and I've just watched more movies that would've pushed them off the list anyway.

A young woman is put on house arrest in her dilapidated childhood home but soon starts to suspect that there is something weird going on inside the house.

I'm always more than a little skeptical of horror-comedy, if only because it's already hard enough to get just one of those genres right that trying to pull off a good balancing act between the two is always a challenge. I've avoided them almost completely this October, with the closest I've gotten before this being a couple of the later Nightmare on Elm Street sequels that lean really hard into Freddy Krueger's twisted sense of humour. I decided to make an exception for Housebound, a New Zealand-based horror-comedy that sees protagonist Kylie botch an ATM heist and end up being sentenced to house arrest with her mum and stepdad in the childhood home she couldn't wait to ditch. Of course, she's annoyed at the whole situation as she has to contend with the boredom of being stuck in a house with not just her extremely chipper mother and silently standoffish stepfather but also the fact that the officer keeping track of her movements lives in the neighbourhood (and that's without mentioning the bad TV reception or dialup Internet). Things start to take a turn for the spooky when Kylie starts hearing strange noises coming from within the walls that escalate into increasingly creepy occurrences, spurring the otherwise jaded youth into action.

The quirky New Zealand humour takes some getting used to but becomes pleasantly familiar before too long as it builds a good handful of characters, especially when it comes to making you invested in a protagonist that could have been far too easy to hate. It handles its haunted house mystery rather well, teasing out all sorts of weird happenings and troubling theories about what's really causing these bizarre phenomena while still ultimately grounding it in issues that affect the characters on deeper levels. The complicated dynamic between Kylie and her mother definitely gives the film the substance it needs to sell its zanier (and more directly horrific) moments such as a talking teddy bear or a potentially murderous neighbour, and that's before it ramps up into the kind of frantic and bloody climax one would understandably expect from a film of this nature. Housebound isn't a great film, but I found it to be a decent hybrid of horror and comedy that doesn't embarrass itself on either front, and that alone should come as a high recommendation to anyone who wants to watch a horror-comedy.

When two young men disappear while taking a road trip, their families soon discover that it is because they met a group of sadomasochistic demons.

I realise that the pedigree of the Hellraiser franchise was never a particularly strong one, but I thought there was a considerable amount of enjoyment to be gleaned from its weird combination of Lovecraftian horror and Gothic sadomasochism. Of course, that premise was already starting to run a little dry by part two, never mind how parts three and four tried to amplify things by taking Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites to New York and even to outer space. While it doesn't seem to make any difference to any over-arching narrative or spoilers that I skipped all the way ahead to ninth installment Revelations, I still think it should be known that everything about watching this movie is a bad idea. A lot of that does stem from it being an ashcan copy with no real care being put into it beyond making sure it technically qualifies as a film capable of retaining Dimension Films' copyright on the franchise. This much is certainly evident thanks to its less-than-generic plot that sees two friends, mild-mannered Steven and party-hearty Nico, take a trip to Mexico with all sorts of debauched intentions. As can be expected, they get more than they bargained for when they not only cause the death of a local woman they try to hook up with but also end up being presented with the puzzle box that summons Pinhead (conspicuously not played by Doug Bradley for once) and the Cenobites to tutor them in the ways of suffering, which intrigues Nico and repels Steven. Meanwhile, both their families (including Emma, who is both Steven's sister and Nico's girlfriend) still worry about what happened to their boys but are in for a shock when Steven suddenly returns...

It almost goes without saying that Hellraiser: Revelations is an out-and-out horrendous excuse for a movie. The film runs a mere 75 minutes and every one of them makes itself felt for all the wrong reasons. Everything about it looks dull and cheap, not least the parts where it does engage in the franchise's predilection for gory flesh-rending and unfathomable body horror. This extends to the film largely being confined to a single mansion with a handful of characters (none of which are acted well, especially not Steven and Nico) - in this company, Bradley's refusal to show up is thoroughly understandable. All of this is shot with some remarkably flat cinematography that somehow manages to feel lifeless despite its constant handheld motion. That's without getting into the ways in which the plot (which already rips the original off quite heavily for the most part) twists and turns in ways that somehow manage to be unpleasant even by the standards of a franchise built around incomprehensible displays of senseless cruelty - this is especially true of how the film handles the character of Emma and how she is alternately repulsed and fascinated by the whole situation and the opportunities it presents. As a result, it's easy to consider Revelations to be as close to actual torture as a Hellraiser movie is ever likely to get. There's not even any amusement to be had over how goofy-looking the noticeably-recast Pinhead looks. Not only would I consider it the worst movie I've seen for this thread, but it is almost certainly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I may still work my way through the remaining installments of the franchise, if only because I honestly can't imagine any of them plumbing the absolute depths that Revelations does.

An eccentric doctor sets up a carnival sideshow starring a somnambulist around the same time that a series of horrific murders start taking place.

I thought I had watched this many years ago but it soon became clear that, beyond what must have been a mere couple of scenes' worth of the film, enough of it seemed so unfamiliar that it seems much more likely (if not certain) that this would be a fresh watch. Even though it's well-known enough within cinema-lover circles that I was at least a little familiar with how the story would ultimately conclude, it doesn't matter when the film is handled this well. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari may be the quintessential German Expressionism film as reflected in its jagged title cards and surreal production design (to say nothing of its Gothic-looking characters), but those do function as captivating visual realisations of a plot that definitely holds up a century later. Broken up into six clearly-delineated acts, Caligari centres on young Francis as he tells a bystander the tale of the eponymous Dr. Caligari, who shows up in town one day and applies to be part of the local carnival. The sideshow he presents is one involving a "somnambulist" named Cesare who only wakes up from his allegedly lifelong trance during Caligari's performances. Where the plot really kicks in is when a bunch of strange murders start happening around town and it appears that Caligari and Cesare may well be connected to them.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari runs a mere 70 minutes or so but it packs a lot into that as it tells a story that may understandably feel familiar due to how thoroughly influential it's been but still feels like it's got some surprises in store. Though I find the changes in the print's coloured tinting to be a little distracting at times, they are ultimately good at communicating moods of a given scene as they frequently alternate between chilling blues and jaundiced yellows (sickly greens, on the other hand, don't always get put to good use). The nightmarishly unconventional appearances of characters and locations alike occasionally make themselves especially pronounced through the disjointed use of forced perspective (such as the establisher of the carnival set) or staging that draws attention to slanted windows or buildings snaking their way into the sky. All of this does a tremendous job of accentuating the story, which moves at a clip and actually does make the apparent limitations of silent cinema into much-appreciated features - a simple murder mystery where you suspect Caligari and Cesare from the jump doesn't become less engrossing as a result, especially when both potential and actual victims start piling up and stalwart hero Francis comes ever close to finding out the truth and putting an end to the madness once and for all. It all comes together to fuel an intense level of postwar distrust that becomes more and more palpable as the film draws to its conclusion, resulting in a thoroughly unsettling experience that may well be the best new watch I've seen all month.

Nice to see some appreciation of Maniac Cop (don't know that you'd care for either sequel) and The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligali.

I quite agree with you about The Witchfinder General and the level and tone of the brutality in that film. It's never sat comfortabley with me (probably the whole point) but it's what has always kept me from loving that film. I never fell in with the modern torture films either and this is one occassion where its age doesn't help its cause with me.

I was pleased to see another good/positive review of Housebound. Bloody film has been out for years and I've still not gotten around to seeing it (nothing new there, I know) but as you may or may not know (being an Aussie) there's Neighbours alumni in that film, so I would like to get round to seeing it sometime.

Always pleased to read your thoughts about stuff like this, Iro. Thanks for doing this again this year.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Yeah, a shame that it hasn't really drawn that much attention this time around - I guess I over-estimated how much a horror-only thread would interest people, at least not to the point where the effort to write full reviews for each film was justified.

During Christmas, the inhabitants of a sorority house are targeted by a deranged murderer.

Looking at Black Christmas in 2018, it's easy to see why this is often cited as the prototypical slasher movie as it features many of the tropes and developments that would ultimately be codified by the commonly-cited "original" slasher that is 1978's Halloween. If one were to be particularly uncharitable, one could consider the latter film a flagrant rip-off with its use of first-person shots, drawn-out pacing, and centring of the film's conflict around women being subject to the violent whims of a male antagonist (then again, you could say both films owe more than a little something to the likes of Psycho and Peeping Tom - copies upon copies all the way down). Of course, what I wanted to do is see how Black Christmas actually does hold up, especially before I did my own run-through of the entire Halloween series it allegedly inspired. Certainly, there's a lot of be said for its compact and seasonal narrative that takes place in and around a college campus as the students prepare to leave for Christmas break. The film gets complicated immediately when an unseen, hard-breathing killer manages to break into a local sorority house and murder one of the sisters before she has a chance to go home - and it definitely won't be the last time he strikes.

There is quite a bit to be said for how Black Christmas is at once a sufficiently familiar rendition of the slasher formula and yet still distinct enough in its rawness that it stands out as its own thing. Much like inspiration and imitator alike, it is a patient film that begins with one shocking death and then takes it time getting to the next one, making sure to establish a vast collection of characters and the conflicts between them (with a prominent one involving the film's protagonist looking to abort an unwanted pregnancy despite the objections of her boyfriend). It still manages to maintain a perpetual sense of unease through such simple but effective sub-plots involving the sorority house receiving a series of increasingly disturbing phone calls or the disappearance of a little girl, never mind how the film does occasionally cut back to the killer's point-of-view to remind audiences that, yes, he's still out there somewhere and there's no telling when or where he'll show up next. These elements combine into something that never exactly manages to burst out into anything particularly intense but still maintains a simmering sense of dread, which may well be better than simply resorting to jump scares or even especially graphic displays of violence. As a result, I'm not overly wowed by Black Christmas but I can't deny that it's effective enough to deserve consideration as a minor classic in the genre. It may rely on a less-is-more approach to a fault, but at least it works out more often than not.

Fifteen years after being institutionalised for inexplicably murdering his older sister, a mental patient escapes custody to return to his hometown and kill again.

I decided to run the entire Halloween series in the lead-up to watching David Gordon Green's new sequel, so of course that means starting off with the much-venerated original, though it's a film of such immense stature that the prospect of actually writing anything about it is more than a little daunting (especially after my recent review of Black Christmas acknowledged that taking inspiration may have given way to outright plagiarism). That's one of multiple factors that make me question whether or not I can actually review Halloween honestly. I think a lot of that does come down to the involvement of John Carpenter, who I've long considered one of my favourite filmmakers - and yet I've always sort of held his break-out film at something of a remove when it comes to assessing his filmography, wedging it in alongside solid but not quite as beloved films like The Fog and Assault on Precinct 13 in the process. I think its status as a seasonal watch is something of a double-edged sword - being guaranteed an annual watch due to its centring around the eponymous holiday is always liable to dilute its power and bring the act of watching it dangerously close to feeling like a chore (it's for this reason that I've broken with one such film-watching tradition by not watching Die Hard over the past couple of Christmases). I suspect that I'll still at least make the effort to watch Halloween whenever October rolls around, but the question I find myself asking each year is "Should I?"

Fortunately, Halloween answers that question by proving thoroughly watchable long after the initial shocks have died down. I would argue that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more successful in creating a slasher with unrelenting atmosphere. However, when I think of it in comparison to Halloween I consider them to be fire and ice in their approaches to atmospheric terror - and slashers don't get much more icy than Halloween. The coldness is most definitely a by-product of Carpenter's self-composed soundtrack that tinkles around with foreboding piano melodies when it's not striking heavily-synthesised scare chords to accentuate Michael Myers's readily-apparent lack of humanity. As he moves around his home town of Haddonfield in ways that don't initially (and admittedly never totally do) make sense, this latest viewing made me realise something - that Michael, for all that his doomsaying psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) says to convince others that his recently-escaped charge is a dead-eyed manifestation of pure evil, is honestly something of a prankster. The ways that he opts to pursue and attack his prey takes the "trick" part of trick-or-treat to a dangerous extreme - committing his first ever murder in full clown costume, wearing a classic bedsheet-ghost costume to get the drop on a victim, stealing a headstone in a way that is even immediately assumed to be an ordinary Halloween prank by onlookers, etc. Such actions prove unsettling in a way that the likes of other slasher villains don't quite match - he's got a bit more personality than fellow mute Jason Voorhees but doesn't go overboard like Freddy Krueger does.

Drawing comparisons to the most noteworthy peers of both Michael and Halloween does seem like it's doing a disservice to the film as its own entity, but it almost seems necessary just to distinguish what makes the film work so well. The autumnal setting isn't just the only way in which Halloween manages to make things seem more than a little chilly as Michael's ever-looming presence makes it hard to truly settle even after multiple viewings and plenty of chances to acclimatise to its jump scares. It also gives you what may be the genre's best (if not definitive) final girl in Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Much of what makes Michael's threatening nature so truly felt is how Laurie reacts to it across the course of the film, whether by noticing his inexplicable appearances (and disappearances) throughout the daytime or having to contend with his gradual and brutal intrusion right through her friends' bodies and into her rather ordinary Halloween night. Pleasence gets top billing as Loomis, who functions as another foil to Michael in his relentlessly single-minded pursuit of his prey (though he is understandably afforded much more in the way of humanising features), but it's Curtis who charms us as the extremely responsible Laurie to the point where seeing not just her survival of Michael's attacks but also her progression from chipper teenager to a traumatised woman asking if she had really seen the "boogeyman" she'd spent the entire film denying is the true beating heart of a film ostensibly centred around a man with the devil's eyes. The characters may seem slight, but they are a solid bedrock upon which Halloween truly builds its reputation as a horror classic. Last year, I thought I wouldn't bother watching it again the following Halloween - after this viewing, I'm not about to make that assumption again.

A teenage girl is hospitalised following an encounter with a serial killer only to be threatened when the killer shows up at the hospital.

Anyone sufficiently well-versed in horror tropes has a fundamental understanding of that of the so-called final girl who, as the title obviously implies, is the only character effectively guaranteed to survive all the way to the end of a particular horror film. What I've started to find interesting is how films handle the prospect of having the final girl of one film return in a subsequent installment. While this usually manifests in them being unceremoniously bumped off (usually before the end of the first act) in order to make way for a new batch of villain fodder, Halloween II instead sets about building its entire story around the continued survival of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as she is once again threatened by the inscrutably evil Michael Myers. Of course, the steps it takes to engineer this particular situation prove a problem all their own not just in terms of how the plot contrives a reason for Michael to continue stalking Laurie instead of moving on to new targets but also in terms of how it effectively plays like a whole new sequel anyway due to how little it ultimately focuses on Laurie. The film picks up immediately after the end of the first film and sees Laurie taken to hospital to recover from her ordeal, but of course Michael finds out where she's gone and heads to a hospital whose skeleton crew of nurses and paramedics present prime vessels for his particular brand of unpredictable and vaguely mischievious mayhem. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) once again continues his pursuit of Michael even as he has to deal with obstructive authority figures and the calamity of a town in panic.

Even before the 2018 Halloween decided to disregard every other sequel in the franchise, Halloween II felt inessential to me. It's split between being a straightforward slasher and being an epilogue to a film that never needed one, which is very much emphasised by how Laurie is effectively sidelined for the first two-thirds of the film while Michael attacks various hospital staffers (with the same being true of Loomis once again having to handle exposition duties for the bulk of his screentime). In an attempt to one-up the scariness of the first film, Michael's means of attacking his victims get more than a little graphic; however, the trade-off is the lack of atmosphere generated by a hospital setting where the bare walls and empty corridors make it seem especially flat and lifeless rather than grim and foreboding. Though he doesn't actually direct this installment, John Carpenter still makes his presence felt through an appropriately sinister score that adds some extra edge to the ice-cold original (to say nothing of how he and Debra Hill return to write the screenplay or even how cinematographer Dean Cundey returns to do what he can to temper the blandness on offer). Halloween II isn't necessarily the worst of the franchise's sequels but I've seen it three times now and I struggle to think to it as being particularly worthwhile. While I'm not about to rule out a fourth viewing just yet, my generally apathetic attitude towards its more-of-the-same content doesn't make the prospect particularly enticing (to say nothing of marathoning the entire series again). As with just about every one of these movies, I wouldn't recommend it unless you really dug the original, but even by those standards I would still consider it one of the better sequels.

I haven't seen this, but after seeing the new Halloween (2018) I think I'll give this one a visit.

I also read that Carpenter and Hill didn't want to do any sequels, but was offered writing credits and a lot of money. Carpenter made zero money off the first Halloween and justified a sequel as getting his payment for the first.

After one of his patients is brutally murdered under mysterious circumstances, a doctor teams up with the patient's daughter to solve the mystery.

I'm just going to come out and say it - this is my favourite Halloween sequel.

Obviously, I do hold the original film in high esteem and all but none of the Michael-centric sequels, for whatever strengths they do possess, have really come close to matching it as far as I'm concerned. The seams were already starting to show in Halloween II and since then the sequels have ranged from middling to downright awful. I'll grant that this is probably an easy thing to say in hindsight, but I do wish the series had continued on as an anthology series where each new installment was a standalone story connected simply by the concept of Halloween. While the bulk of the Halloween series is loosely connected to the holiday by a serial killer who always carries out his murders on Halloween night, Halloween III opts to show its faith in the concept by going even deeper into the holiday's mythology with its extraordinarily bizarre premise. It begins with an old man being chased and eventually murdered by mysterious men in suits, with the on-call doctor (Tom Atkins) taking note of both his rambling and the seemingly innocuous Halloween mask he brings into the hospital. When the victim's daughter (Stacey Nelkin) shows up looking for answers, Atkins agrees to join in the search and the two end up driving to a small Californian town that specialises in the production of Halloween masks and is overseen by an affable CEO (Dan O'Herlihy), but it's clear right from the instance they see security cameras all over this seemingly-normal town that something really isn't right.

From there, Halloween III just gets weirder and weirder with its tale of a company town and the horrible conspiracy that beats at the heart of it. It is this weirdness that gives it the edge over the average Halloween sequel as it takes what could have been a family-friendly premise and saturates it in a heady blend of body horror, sci-fi pulp, and pagan imagery. This much is borne out by some surprisingly committed performances, not just Atkins' amusingly schlubby everyman but especially O'Herlihy lending some much-appreciated gravitas to what could have been another stock villain - the part where he lays out the motivation behind his evil plan is a highlight simply because of his mellifluous intonations. While ostensibly the creation of writer-director Wallace (who served as editor on the original Halloween), it still has enough of Carpenter's fingerprints on it thanks to another distinctive score of his that maintains (and, at times, even expands upon) the same coldly synthesised vibes that worked like a charm across Michael Myers' first couple of capers. The same can be said of cinematographer Dean Cundey creating some appropriately sinister compositions that deftly balance ominously darkened occurrences with harshly-illuminated signs of occult carnage. Though I think one's appreciation of Halloween III will likely be tempered by one's tolerance for '80s horror camp, it proves a surprisingly solid piece of work underneath its cheesy exterior. While there's admittedly no guarantee that an anthology franchise would've been better than a Michael-only franchise (and this film is not without its own flaws anyway), at least this weird little experiment exists and makes a good case for what could have been.

It deserves to be your favorite sequel, because it's the best sequel.

I think it could have been a cool anthology series if they kept this trend up, but people were too busy expecting more Myers. Blame Halloween 2 for that I guess.

I haven't seen this either (Halloween, H20, Resurrection, Zombie's Hallowen, H2 and Halloween 2018) are the only ones I've seen. When I think of this though, all I think about is that one Buffy episode where they become their costumes.

Ten years after committing a notorious killing spree, a serial killer escapes custody and returns to his hometown to kill again.

Given how much I dug Halloween III for shaking things up in the franchise, you'd think (as I did) that the scramble to bring back a certain Shat-faced murderer would be easy to regard with cynicism and possibly contempt - after all, this does come across as abandoning a bold new direction in favour of returning to a well that was already in danger of going dry. However, by the extremely modest standards of Halloween sequels, The Return of Michael Myers is arguably one of the better ones. The problem being that Jamie Lee Curtis had moved on to other things so the film had to figure out how to continue on after Halloween II had revealed that Michael Myers' continued targeting of beleaguered babysitter Laurie Strode (Curtis) was due to her being his long-lost sister, thus giving this seemingly-inscrutable killer a concrete motivation that tied into his first murder being that of his older sister. The work-around seen in Return is that Laurie has died in a car accident, but not before having a daughter of her own that has since been adopted into a normal Haddonfield family. Even without the threat of Michael's seasonal escape looming, things are already tough for Jamie (Danielle Harris) - she's got a somewhat strained relationship with her teenage foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell), plus the kids at school tease her for having "the boogeyman" as her uncle (who she already seems to be marginally aware of due to having recurring nightmares about his pale visage). Meanwhile, just as day follows night, so too does Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) follow in Michael's bloody footprints in yet another attempt to put a stop to his crimes.

The Return of Michael Myers plays like an obvious reflection of the various imitators that sprung up in the wake of Halloween's runaway success (one can readily draw parallels to Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, most notably through the introduction of a child protagonist) and it only just manages to add its own particular spin to the proceedings. I do acknowledge that it has its strengths - Harris and Cornell have good chemistry as siblings that have their differences but ultimately come through for one another in the face of an incredibly traumatic ordeal, forming a potent emotional core without which the film would become a complete and utter mess. Otherwise, it's the kind of semi-competent slasher business as usual but with somewhat effective series-specific additions like Loomis as a battle-scarred Cassandra who underscores the conflict with his own weariness of the constant battling with Michael (illustrated perfectly in an early scene where he straight-up begs to be killed if it means "the Shape" might spare anyone else, which goes about as well as you can imagine). While I'm not inclined to consider Return a classic by horror standards or even by slasher standards, I do concede that it's still relatively okay and does just enough right to not be out-and-out terrible - something its successors would have done well to copy.

The only think I know about the Halloween movies I haven't seen is:

Bad masks

Young Paul Rudd and Danielle Harris

Someone has psychic abilities.


I actually was about to watch Halloween 2 last night...then fell asleep just as I was about to hit play.

I dare you to run the first eight next October (or at least just the pre-H20 ones), if only for completion's sake. How many horror franchises have you seen all the way through anyway?

A serial killer returns to his hometown a year after being presumed dead.

The first three Halloween sequels have all had problems to one extent or another but I'd still say that, at the absolute worst, they are still vaguely decent as far as superfluous slasher sequels go. However, the series takes a serious dive in quality with the release of fifth entry The Revenge of Michael Myers, which really does set the tone with its own variation on the iconic jack-o'-lantern opening sequence that opts to simply show quick, jagged close-ups of someone hacking a pumpkin to pieces in between the title cards. The hack-work continues into the film proper as it picks up by showing how Michael has survived yet another seemingly-fatal attack by being nurtured back to health by a homeless person, who he naturally murders upon recovery before putting on an even worse mask than he had in the last movie and setting off to once again pursue his long-lost niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris). Jamie has spent the past year recovering from her ordeal in a psychiatric clinic, but as with the previous film she's having weird psychic visions connected to Michael, which Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) naturally wants to exploit in his latest attempt to find and stop Michael. This being a slasher and all, all this is inter-weaved with how Jamie's foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) and her friends are planning their own Halloween night shenanigans that make them obvious targets for Michael.

Whatever goodwill The Return of Michael Myers generated for the fledgling franchise is swiftly compromised here in the name of providing a much more generic slasher experience that is occasionally interspersed with scenes of a traumatised Jamie having her visions. It's comparable to Halloween II in that its first couple of acts are so sluggishly paced due to having to work around a protagonist in recovery by cooking up a whole new batch of unlikeable deadmeat for Michael to butcher before finally putting said protagonist in harm's way for the tense finale. At least there is more of an attempt at developing Jamie and giving her an arc as she has to overcome her fears and trauma in order to use her psychic ability for good, though it's still a flimsy one that comes across as more than a little manipulative in how it relies upon the relentless endangerment and traumatising of a child at the hands (and mind) of a remorseless killer. If nothing else, it's certainly at odds with the rest of the film's attempts at goofy humour such as comic-relief deputies getting their own jaunty theme music or even a drawn-out sequence involving Michael wearing one victim's absurdly ugly Halloween mask to dupe another potential victim. Though I wouldn't currently consider Revenge the worst of the bunch (even after two exceptionally leaden viewings), I would definitely place it low in an overall ranking as a result. I do think it's ultimately saved from a lower rating by how much residual investment there is in having likeable protagonists like Rachel and Jamie return, but the film really does work hard to undermine that through a film that alternates quite frequently between being cruel and boring.