I hated all the post-Scream teen slashers when I was part of the target demo, and unlike other popular culture I casually dismissed as an insufferable teenager, I've never come around on most of them. I'm especially baffled by the seemingly endless reclamation project for this franchise, a deeply cynical, not-remotely-as-clever-as-it-presents-itself bore.
I agree with the gist of this piece that the series is not good and the reclamation project for it is odd—especially for 3, can't grasp why that's the one people most vehemently go to bat for. Love the structural comparison to pornography.
But I think 1 is pretty fun. Very much smacks of being a Morgan/Wong X-Files idea retrofitted into post-Scream teen horror. It has some of the best Rube Goldberg kill scenes. The characters are mostly bland, except for Clear Rivers which is funny every single time I read/write it and only gets better when you watch it and see how much of a jumbled, incoherent mess the character is. Great piece of pseudo-profound dialogue:
Clear: Almost autumn.
Alex: It's only the end of June.
Clear: Yeah, but everything's always in transition. If you focus, even now, just one week into summer, you can almost feel autumn coming. Kind of like being able to see the future.
Mostly, though, I think 1 does the best job of using POV and perspective shots plus the film grammar of horror/thrillers in a novel way. Here's what I wrote a few years ago:
"During his premonition of the inciting accident he becomes aware of the tense camera angles, the ominous slow motion and dissolves, and the heart-pounding music cues. He picks up on symbolic foreshadowing: clues appear in advertising slogans; in the names that reference horror cinema like his own last name or teacher Valerie Lewton or, most blatantly, hockey/lax goofball Hitchcock; in the book held by the class's smart loner being Henry Miller's mortality-obsessed Tropic of Cancer. Alex notices all the signs of impending doom that normally would only be accessible to the theatrical audience, images for the viewer to digest and decode; this is the story of a man who staves off death by becoming a semiotician."
I can never get over how stupid the core concept of these movies is. And also, why the hell does every movie start with a psychic vision that's never explained? I don't _need_ an explanation for the vision exactly, but the whole franchise makes premonitions into the equivalent of the video from The Ring.
I have never seen any of these movies, and I will continue to not see any of these movies, but I am very thankful that Scott did see them and write about them, because I really, really enjoyed reading this. 😁
I remember watching the first on video after it came out, and thoroughly enjoying it in a guilty pleasure way. A young Seann William Scott (aka Stiffler from the American Pie series) gets Vaemond'd - a reference you won't get unless you saw the latest House of the Dragon episode, so apologies there - and he's playing a side character in an ensemble right as his career was taking off, but not too long before it crashed and later recovered (a little). Odd thing is, I think he's back at that stature of his career, only he's long aged out of teen roles.
Also, I think it's kind of funny you acknowledged the acclaim of the FD2 opening logging truck pileup scene, and then later placed it last in the series ranking of opening scenes. Did *not* see that coming!
I remember assuming these movies were stupid for the longest time and only actually watched 'em about three years ago...and I loved each one.
I think in terms of comparison, they're probably the closest thing the 00's had to the Friday The 13th movies, which I suppose you could also do a marathon of with a "Is it any good? No" Jeff Foxworthy-style comedy repetition routine.
As much as I enjoyed 'em, I can't really argue that they're masterpieces, though I can argue that they're a lot of fun (but probably less so if you go in with arms folded, "impress me" mentality).
There are a lot of things I like about 'em:
* the best ones actually do a decent job of creating some empathy towards their main, vision-having character (thinking 1 and 3 though they blur together for me a bit)
* there are motions towards explanation in these but I love how hazy/dumb/fuzzy the logic is. No one really knows what's going on here - they sit on the shelf directly next to something like It Follows in that viewers get an explanation of 'the concept' but we never learn why it's happening or how it happens
* Big fan of the Tony Todd cameos, every movie should have Tony Todd cameos
* love the Rube Goldberg stuff, a lot more interesting than pretty much any slasher from the era (and infinitely more interesting than Scream IMO)
I’ll go ahead and offer a counterpoint as someone who was 9 years old when the original was released in theaters, these were always fun horror movies. Certainly not Good in any sense but they are perfect sleepover fodder and imo are a much more fun watch than the similar but also somehow much more stupid and ugly Saw movies. Looking back I don’t remember much about them. the classic 80s slashers at least have iconic imagery and soundtracks on top of the gore.
The only one of these I've seen is FD3 -- for reasons too convoluted to go into -- but I thought it was fun enough to give it a passing grade. It didn't make me want to seek out any of the others, though. I figured this was a franchise where if you've seen one, you've seen them all.
They've only done the first three (so far), but I would heartily endorse the We Hate Movies episodes on these, all of which are on Youtube - the third one in particular gets into a detail outside this guide's remit, the dumber-than-the-3D 'choose-your-own-adventure' DVD exclusive
With the exception of FD4, I'm in the "pretty enjoyable" camp, though not films I've returned to a lot, and not watched for several years. They're horror films that are are neither particularly gory (at least not in the SAW sense of the word) nor especially scary, which gives them a broader appeal - and, with only five of them, they're easy to binge. Ultimately, they're not good enough to be unclaimed masterpieces, and aren't bad enough to be guilty pleasures. They're either enjoyable or they're not; their surface-level-only pleasures a feature or a bug.
I'm with the apparent consensus that FD3 is the best one - which is to say, the one I'm more inclined towards as a standalone rewatchable. Winstead is easily the best actor to have appeared in these things, and she at least approximates how someone might actually react in such circumstances. It's also the first one in the series that just delivers solely on the premise - FD1 is cluttered by the subplot of Sawa being a murder suspect, and FD2 ties itself up in knots trying to be a direct sequel. FD3 just *is*. Plus, the rollercoaster is perhaps the most relatable of the opening sequences - I think even people afraid of flying generally don't believe there's a great risk of the plane just exploding in mid-air.
“Is it any good? No” is a great running gag.
You’re doing the Lord’s** work here, Scott. I thoroughly enjoyed every word, and am almost tempted to also suffer through a marathon now.
** Satan
I hated all the post-Scream teen slashers when I was part of the target demo, and unlike other popular culture I casually dismissed as an insufferable teenager, I've never come around on most of them. I'm especially baffled by the seemingly endless reclamation project for this franchise, a deeply cynical, not-remotely-as-clever-as-it-presents-itself bore.
I agree with the gist of this piece that the series is not good and the reclamation project for it is odd—especially for 3, can't grasp why that's the one people most vehemently go to bat for. Love the structural comparison to pornography.
But I think 1 is pretty fun. Very much smacks of being a Morgan/Wong X-Files idea retrofitted into post-Scream teen horror. It has some of the best Rube Goldberg kill scenes. The characters are mostly bland, except for Clear Rivers which is funny every single time I read/write it and only gets better when you watch it and see how much of a jumbled, incoherent mess the character is. Great piece of pseudo-profound dialogue:
Clear: Almost autumn.
Alex: It's only the end of June.
Clear: Yeah, but everything's always in transition. If you focus, even now, just one week into summer, you can almost feel autumn coming. Kind of like being able to see the future.
Mostly, though, I think 1 does the best job of using POV and perspective shots plus the film grammar of horror/thrillers in a novel way. Here's what I wrote a few years ago:
"During his premonition of the inciting accident he becomes aware of the tense camera angles, the ominous slow motion and dissolves, and the heart-pounding music cues. He picks up on symbolic foreshadowing: clues appear in advertising slogans; in the names that reference horror cinema like his own last name or teacher Valerie Lewton or, most blatantly, hockey/lax goofball Hitchcock; in the book held by the class's smart loner being Henry Miller's mortality-obsessed Tropic of Cancer. Alex notices all the signs of impending doom that normally would only be accessible to the theatrical audience, images for the viewer to digest and decode; this is the story of a man who staves off death by becoming a semiotician."
I can never get over how stupid the core concept of these movies is. And also, why the hell does every movie start with a psychic vision that's never explained? I don't _need_ an explanation for the vision exactly, but the whole franchise makes premonitions into the equivalent of the video from The Ring.
I have never seen any of these movies, and I will continue to not see any of these movies, but I am very thankful that Scott did see them and write about them, because I really, really enjoyed reading this. 😁
I remember watching the first on video after it came out, and thoroughly enjoying it in a guilty pleasure way. A young Seann William Scott (aka Stiffler from the American Pie series) gets Vaemond'd - a reference you won't get unless you saw the latest House of the Dragon episode, so apologies there - and he's playing a side character in an ensemble right as his career was taking off, but not too long before it crashed and later recovered (a little). Odd thing is, I think he's back at that stature of his career, only he's long aged out of teen roles.
Also, I think it's kind of funny you acknowledged the acclaim of the FD2 opening logging truck pileup scene, and then later placed it last in the series ranking of opening scenes. Did *not* see that coming!
I remember assuming these movies were stupid for the longest time and only actually watched 'em about three years ago...and I loved each one.
I think in terms of comparison, they're probably the closest thing the 00's had to the Friday The 13th movies, which I suppose you could also do a marathon of with a "Is it any good? No" Jeff Foxworthy-style comedy repetition routine.
As much as I enjoyed 'em, I can't really argue that they're masterpieces, though I can argue that they're a lot of fun (but probably less so if you go in with arms folded, "impress me" mentality).
There are a lot of things I like about 'em:
* the best ones actually do a decent job of creating some empathy towards their main, vision-having character (thinking 1 and 3 though they blur together for me a bit)
* there are motions towards explanation in these but I love how hazy/dumb/fuzzy the logic is. No one really knows what's going on here - they sit on the shelf directly next to something like It Follows in that viewers get an explanation of 'the concept' but we never learn why it's happening or how it happens
* Big fan of the Tony Todd cameos, every movie should have Tony Todd cameos
* love the Rube Goldberg stuff, a lot more interesting than pretty much any slasher from the era (and infinitely more interesting than Scream IMO)
I’ll go ahead and offer a counterpoint as someone who was 9 years old when the original was released in theaters, these were always fun horror movies. Certainly not Good in any sense but they are perfect sleepover fodder and imo are a much more fun watch than the similar but also somehow much more stupid and ugly Saw movies. Looking back I don’t remember much about them. the classic 80s slashers at least have iconic imagery and soundtracks on top of the gore.
The only one of these I've seen is FD3 -- for reasons too convoluted to go into -- but I thought it was fun enough to give it a passing grade. It didn't make me want to seek out any of the others, though. I figured this was a franchise where if you've seen one, you've seen them all.
They've only done the first three (so far), but I would heartily endorse the We Hate Movies episodes on these, all of which are on Youtube - the third one in particular gets into a detail outside this guide's remit, the dumber-than-the-3D 'choose-your-own-adventure' DVD exclusive
With the exception of FD4, I'm in the "pretty enjoyable" camp, though not films I've returned to a lot, and not watched for several years. They're horror films that are are neither particularly gory (at least not in the SAW sense of the word) nor especially scary, which gives them a broader appeal - and, with only five of them, they're easy to binge. Ultimately, they're not good enough to be unclaimed masterpieces, and aren't bad enough to be guilty pleasures. They're either enjoyable or they're not; their surface-level-only pleasures a feature or a bug.
I'm with the apparent consensus that FD3 is the best one - which is to say, the one I'm more inclined towards as a standalone rewatchable. Winstead is easily the best actor to have appeared in these things, and she at least approximates how someone might actually react in such circumstances. It's also the first one in the series that just delivers solely on the premise - FD1 is cluttered by the subplot of Sawa being a murder suspect, and FD2 ties itself up in knots trying to be a direct sequel. FD3 just *is*. Plus, the rollercoaster is perhaps the most relatable of the opening sequences - I think even people afraid of flying generally don't believe there's a great risk of the plane just exploding in mid-air.