Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

This is now the coldest of takes and I know it, but for years I planned to only own Halloween and Halloween III. When I took some movie posters home from my dad’s time running movie theaters (sadly now lost in a move sometime), I got a Halloween II poster in the bunch. I decided […]

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

Of the three big slashers of the 1980s—that is, the ones that went on to seemingly endless sequels—A Nightmare on Elm Street was, for a long time, the only one that held any interest to me. After all, it was inherently tied to the supernatural and the fantastic, which was able to wrestle with my youthful […]

Friday the 13th, Part 3

We’re in totally murky waters for me at this point. I never did watch most slashers, as I just outright avoided them for most of my life, even as a horror fan. I’ve got box sets of the big ones these days, just to have the experience of seeing them all. Because I guess I’m […]

Warlock III: The End of Innocence

I saw in advance that Julian Sands was not back for this one and so I had no real hopes. The second film, The Armageddon, was mostly only kept afloat by Sands’s presence anyway (if anything at all). Sometimes an off-the-wall, belated sequel is interesting (see: Mimic 3: Sentinel), but a direct-to-video sequel that loses […]

Scream 3 (2000)

It’s been a rollercoaster ride of third movies lately, soaring to great heights, and hitting some deep troughs. Given that I initially hated Scream back in the late 90s and thus hadn’t seen it in decades, and only saw its first sequel earlier this year, I had no idea where I was going to land […]

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

I most often talk about second sequels—third movies in a series, if anyone else has their brain snap on relative numbers like mine does—in terms of my “rule of thirds”, wherein third films go commercial, lighten their tone, and for some reason think that being a third film means they need a bigger audience, despite […]

Hollow Man II (2006)

I don’t watch an awful lot of direct-to-video sequels. I don’t own a lot of them to watch. I’ve now started to pick up a few simply because of “set”-type Blu-ray releases that stick them in for extra perceived value in “deluxe editions”. I’ve watched a couple over time, mostly the sequels to Mimic. Mimic […]

V/H/S/2 (2013)

I rather enjoyed the original V/H/S, with a set of familiar directors (Adam Wingard and Ti West, at least) and writers (Wingard and West again, plus Simon Barrett who wrote Wingard’s You’re Next), and some new voices, like Joe Swanberg, who caught my eye from it. I had gathered that the second sequel (V/H/S: Viral) […]

X (2022)

I’ve been seeing more slashers of late, finding an appreciation I wasn’t sure of in my youth of endless Friday the 13th sequels, and references to Sleepaway Camps and such. So when it was said that Ti West did a slasher, I was more intrigued than I might’ve otherwise been. Still, it meant going to […]

A Quiet Place Part II (2020)

I was not entirely enthused about the first Quiet Place. In some ways it reminded me of the work of Ari Aster: beautiful films with writing I just do not connect to. I was, as a result, less interested in this film as a sequel, but open to the idea that what bothered me in […]