Halloween 2025: September 9th

The Final Destination (2009)

At the end of the 2000s, technology had advanced to the point that Hollywood became convinced to give 3-D another shot. They try this about every thirty years but the gimmick had slowly been gaining traction throughout the decade, mostly through animated movies and specialty documentaries utilizing the format. The impending release of James Cameron's “Avatar” – which would, indeed, prove the viability of 3-D, at least for a while – promised to revolutionize the tech. The horror genre, always eager to exploit a fad, jumped on the trend first. A 3-D remake of “My Bloody Valentine” hit theaters that February. In August, a fourth “Final Destination” movie would also utilize the third dimension. The third installment had been conceived in 3-D before the idea was abandoned, meaning Death hurling objects directly at audiences had been on somebody's mind for a while. Confusingly entitled “The Final Destination,” David R. Ellis was invited back to make the sequel after James Wong got busy with “Dragonball: Evolution.” While the fourth “Destination” is generally considered a franchise low, I bet Wong still wishes he had stuck with this one instead.

“The Final Destination” commits to the Mad Libs-like narrative formula for the series. Nick O'Bannon slots into the protagonist role, as the person who gets a vision of a massive calamari that claims the life of him and his friends. This time, it's wreck debris from a NASCAR race flying into the stands and causing the raceway stadium to collapse. As before, he gets a select group – including his girlfriend Lori, her BFF Janet, and some other bozos – out right before disaster strikes. As always, soon the survivors begin to perish in hideously gory “freak accidents.” Death has been cheated and now is out for revenge but you know that already. Once more, our hero and his friends attempt to figure out the pattern to Death's design and see if it can be escaped before anymore of them die. Rinse and repeat. 

It's easy to imagine why a producer would look at the “Final Destination” movies up to this point and assume 3-D would be a good choice for the series. Part two's bouncing log, speeding out-of-control truck or falling plate of glass would have extended off the screen nicely, ya know? It's a sound idea but “The Final Destination” makes an unfortunate miscalculation. More often than not, the sequel uses some truly mediocre digital effects to complete the illusion. A guy falling backwards onto a protruding piece of wood or getting segmented when launched through a chain-link fence are clever ideas for gory executions. They are ruined by exceedingly awkward special effects that render the ideas unimpressive CGI glopola. In fact, the entire stadium collapse sequence is hampered by some deeply mediocre effects. The sequel ends in an orgy of computer generated explosions, further underwhelming the viewer. As you'd expect with a 3-D sequel, there's a lot of tedious eye-gouging as well. When paired with the subpar effects, it drains a lot of fun from the film.

As I said, “The Final Destination” is committed to the series' formulaic approach. What made “Final Destination 2” such a blast was how it subverted and misdirected what the audience expected. By part four though, however, we've figured this shit out. When a mother of two boys goes into a salon, the puddle on the floor, the swiveling chair, and the rickety ceiling fan above are obviously fake-outs for the real method of doom. Disappointingly, this is the only trick the sequel has. A busy garage presents lots of chances for Death to strike, most of which obviously won't be used. A random speeding bus is taken directly from the first movie, the series having begun to repeat itself. “The Final Destination” is lacking in the cleverness necessary to make these gore shows any fun. At one point, the sequel can't be bothered to try and catch us off-guard. Once a faulty pool pump is introduced, we know the jock-o meathead is getting sucked into it. 

Ellis' “Final Destination 2” rose above the pack thanks to the sneaky ways it made the characters more memorable than those in the original. The third film leaned on lazy cliches instead and suffered because of it. “The Final Destination” can't be bothered to go that far. The meat bags this time around are about as indistinct as they come. There's a virulent racist, unpleasant enough that you want to see him die. There's a girl-chasing bro with frosted tips, who is only slightly less annoying. Our hero and his girlfriend, played by equally blank Bobby Campo and Shantel VanSanten, have absolutely nothing to offer us. About the only character with any substance is an older black man who contemplates suicide as a way to escape the vindictive reaper. It doesn't work. Which the man would already know if he had watched “Final Destination 2!” 

The general feeling floating around “The Final Destination” is a lack of new ideas. Only four movies in and it feels like the series has wrung itself dry, having become too dependent on its own routine. This is truly annoying because the repetitive nature of this franchise actually does imply something more interesting: Where do the psychic premonitions that kick off these movies come from? Why are certain people chosen to have these visions, only to fall victim to horrifying incidents afterwards? To me, the conclusion is obvious. If we can assume “Death” is a magical entity able to feel cheated and engineer elaborate malfunctions, is it too far of a leap to guess that he puts these visions into people's heads too? The Grim Reaper of the “Final Destination” universe is obviously a sadistic son-of-a-bitch who enjoys fucking with people. An exploration of the exact nature of the series' villain is the kind of thing the fourth entry in a series should've gotten around to. But that would've been too interesting for “The Final Destination.”

Ultimately, the sequel has two things going for it. The last sequence in the mall features an especially nasty death, when someone is feed into an escalator. That's the kind of common anxiety horror movies like this are made to play off on. The sick humor that powered “Final Destination 2” is largely absent here. However, a sequence involving an overflowing therapy pool – which otherwise features the same crappy effects as the rest of the movie – ends with a shot that made me chuckle. Otherwise, the lack of creativity apparent in “The Final Destination's” title also shines through the entire production. Underwhelming CGI and a lame script too satisfied to repeat what came before results in the weakest entry in the series. A 3-D “Final Destination” movie was a good idea on paper but, when paired with a total lack of new ideas, it does nothing to elevate the sequel. Ya know what might've improved things, if just a little? Tony Todd growling some bullshit about Death's design. You can easily tell which entries in this series are the bad ones by the amount of screen time the distinguished thespian has. [4/10]

Hunchback of the Morgue (1972)
El jorobado de la morgue

Among the classic Monster Mash line-up, the hunchback is the archetype that puts in the fewest appearances in the modern day. It's easy to guess why. Referring to someone with, as Wikipedia puts it, “an abnormally excessive convex curvature of the spine in the thoracic and sacral regions” as a “monster” is, at best, very rude and, at worst, totally dehumanizing. On another level, a dude with a fucked-up back isn't an especially impressive “monster” anyway. A condition that can be improved with a brace or posture exercises isn't exactly akin to being a zombie or vampire. Such sensitivities had clearly not reached Spain circa 1972. That is when Paul Naschy, the country's home-grown horror icon, starred in “Hunchback of the Morgue.” The especially lurid U.S. poster carried the tagline “Beware The Hunchback! A freak of nature whose crimes go beyond your wildest terrors!” I don't see that one getting past civil liberty organizations these days. All of that aside, among devotees of Naschy, this one is usually considered one of his best films.

In a small Spanish village lives Wolfgang Gotho, a deformed and simple man who works in the morgue of the local hospital. Gotho is bullied and belittled by everyone in town. The only person who treats him with any kindness is Ilse, a sickly childhood friend in hospice care. He brings her flowers every day but, when she dies, Gotho's already limited grip on reality totally slips. He steals her body from the morgue, murders the two doctors in attendance, and hides the corpse in an underground torture chamber once used by the Inquisition. On the run from authorities, Gotho ends up in the employ of Dr. Orla, a biologist obsessed with creating life. After promising to bring Ilse back from the dead, Gotho becomes the doctor's faithful servant. He manipulates the increasingly murderous hunchback into providing him with fresh bodies to feed to the weird monster he's growing. When Orla starts commanding Gotho to kidnap girls from the local reformatory, his colleagues – including Elke, who sees Gotho's sensitive side – take notice and try to stop these mad experiments. 

As much as they were blatant exploitation flicks, Paul Naschy's monster movies have a direct line to the Universal classics because he always made sure his beasties had a sad, sympathetic side. This is perhaps most true of The Hunchback of the Morgue. Gotho seems reasonably intelligent in some scenes but, at other times, is unable to understand the concept of death. It is not his fault that his understanding of right and wrong is skewed. Aside from his hump, he doesn't look especially deformed. However, he is still relentlessly mocked and abused by everyone around him. (People call him a monkey a lot and I do not know why.) Naschy's sad, soulful eyes truly get a workout in this one. There are several moments when Gotho looks up at someone with a tear rolling down his cheek and they genuinely tugged at my heart strings. He's so misunderstood, you guys. I mean, he brings a sick girl flowers every day! He worships her, despite considering himself unworthy of her love. Any time a woman is kind to him, his default reaction is to kneel at their feet and kiss their toes. And in a sweet way, not a Tarantino way. 

Yes, Gotho the hunchback is a precious smol bean of a horror villain... Ya know, except for all the people he kills. The very first action the character takes is murdering Ilse's unfaithful boyfriend, dragging the drunk guy into the morgue, slashing his throat and dismembering him. This is not the only time the character has a violent outburst before his sweetheart dies. Often, “Hunchback of the Morgue” will stop everything else it's doing and devote a long scene to Naschy gorily killing people. There's decapitation, disemboweling, an iron maiden being used for its intended purpose, a smothering via a bouquet of flowers, and multiple bodies being dunked into a pool of acid. This is an European exploitation flick from the seventies, so “Hunchback of the Morgue” tempers its gore with women disrobing, taking showers, and being whipped. There's an up-skirt scene of a corpse, which is probably the tackiest moment in a fairly tacky motion picture. Because Naschy usually wrote his own films and clearly used them as vehicles for his own fantasies, the miserable wretch Gotho still ends up getting a love scene with one of these beautiful ladies. The inconsistencies in the treatment of the character, sympathetic and misunderstood one minute, utterly murderous the next, mostly play as camp. Save for the moment where Gotho gets pelted with some very real rats that are then set ablaze with some very real fire. I didn't like that.

The mixture of classic horror tropes and bloody, sleazy action causes “Hunchback of the Morgue” to play like a low budget emulation of the later, grislier Hammer movies. The locations certainly contribute to this feeling. Naschy waddles around several genuine crumbling old buildings and churches. The underground chamber features a rack, old timey torches, and a robed skeleton, looking like an Aurora Monster Scenes model kit blown up to actual size. As the film goes on, it reveals itself as essentially a “Frankenstein” variant where Igor is the main character. Except weirder than that, as Dr. Orla isn't merely stitching dead body parts together. No, he's growing an artificial life form in a vat, which takes the form of squirming organs in a glass bucket. In its latter half, the film falls into a repetitive structure of Gotho retrieving bodies to feed to this ravenous beast, the already loose plot starting to truly go into circles. At least it comes back together for a properly ludicrous finale, wherein the oddball monster slithers on-screen.

Like nearly all of Naschy's films, there is an undeniable sloppy quality to “Hunchback of the Morgue.” (If admittedly less mixed up than “Count Dracula's Great Love,” the next film Naschy would make with director Javier Aguirre.) The story feels a bit jumbled up. The characters do not always act with much rhyme or reason. Especially Dr. Orla, who goes from reasonable enough authority figure to mad scientist in the blink of an eye. The movie is also a bit slow at times, as its plot wanders around in search of an ending. However, it is all worth it for those scenes of Naschy gazing at the camera, conveying so much pain and loneliness with only his eyes and face. I enjoyed the cheesy but grimy gore effects too. This would certainly be a better movie with a larger budget, a less slapdash script, and the freedom to not conform to exploitation movie expectations. At the same time, there's a charm to the seams showing. As a fellow monster kid, I can do nothing but salute Naschy's goofy vision. [7/10]

Out of the Unknown: Tunnel Under the World

The history of British genre television is a rabbit hole onto itself. Here, let me show you: In 1956, ITV started airing “Armchair Theatre,” a program that showcased a different dramatic “television play” every week. The idea proved popular enough to spawn spin-offs, such as “Armchair Mystery Theatre” and science fiction centric “Out of This World.” The show-runner for the latter program would soon begin developing a similar series for the BBC, which became “Out of the Unknown.” Bringing this all up is almost a moot point. Owing to the British television practice of recording over old video tapes, most of these shows are lost forever. Only one episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted “Out of This World” is extant. Of the Donald Pleasence hosted “Armchair Mystery Threatre,” ten episodes survive as 16mm recordings but good luck finding any of them. The hostless “Out of the Unknown” is the most complete, with twenty and a half installments commercially available at the moment. Of these, season two episode “Tunnel Under the World” seems to be the most highly regarded. 

Office worker Guy Birkett is having reoccurring dreams about being caught in a factory explosions. His wife, Mary, is having the same dream too, the couple waking up unsettled every day. By the way, every day is April 15th, according to the newspaper and the radio broadcast Guy receives every morning. The days are otherwise different, with the couple being inundated with a barrage of different advertisements every morning. In the mail, from the radio, from people walking around, and from car-mounted speakers. Obnoxious commercials for inane products like soda pop, candy bars, and fancy freezers assail them all the time. Upon arriving at work, a nervous man named Swanson requests a meeting with Guy. He claims that he can explain the unnerving feeling Guy feels every day. Guy dismisses him as a nut. As he gets ready for bed one night, Guy discovers a metal flooring underneath the rug of his flat. He passes out in the closest and maintains his memories of the previous day, while his wife does not and the rest of the world seems to reset. Teaming up with Swanson, Guy attempts to get to the bottom of this apparent conspiracy... But he's not prepared for the bizarre answers he discovers. 

“Tunnel Under the World” is one of those narratives that play off common paranoid fantasies, except the characters here are totally justified in their beliefs. We, the viewer, see small cameras emerging from the walls of Guy's apartment, watching him. At night, strange men emerge from the floor and perform bizarre experiments on the sleeping populace. It's a potent nightmare, the idea that easily dismissed schizophrenic concerns are actually true. That “Tunnel Under the World” takes the form of a mystery, where the protagonist is slowly discovering the scope of this conspiracy, makes the idea more powerful. Maybe it's only me but I feel imagining your entire life has been an engineered lie, and stumbling upon evidence for this revelation, is a common intrusive thought. It's “The Truman Show” psychosis and “Tunnel Under the World” was exploiting the idea three full decades before “The Truman Show” came out.

Like “The Truman Show,” what makes this scenario far more insidious is that it's not the result of some grand, God-like entity playing with its creation. No, the evil force behind this betrayal of the basic rules of reality, of the privacy we all take for granted, is something much more down to Earth: Capitalism. From the opening minute, Guy is bombarded with extremely obnoxious commercial jingles. The hard-sell advertisements only get more intrusive as the hour goes on, until the command to buy, buy, buy is literally screamed at him from a loud speaker. In our modern world, we are similarly assaulted at all hours by the siren call of commercialism. Every video we watch, every screen we look at, every place we visit is covered with advertisements for products. It's gotten to the point where it's impossible to tell if we are watching a sincere expression of a thought or feeling or an ad. “Tunnel Under the World” was quite ahead of its time in exploring this fear, the idea that every facet of our lives is being directed and controlled by a pressure to buy, consume, spend and nothing else. 

Like all British science fiction shows from this era, “Out of the Unknown” has extremely modest production values. There's very little music and the story mostly takes place on a series of mundane sets. Ronald Hines' acting goes a bit over-the-top, as he plays out the role of a stuffy British man “what's-all-this-then”-ing at a series of increasingly improbable circumstances. In its last act, “Tunnel Under the World” throws in a number of sudden plot swerves that get more and more outlandish. Was it some kind of law that the BBC couldn't produce a show like this without including an extremely goofy looking little robot? The final reveal is the campiest one of them all. However, that doesn't stop the script from exploring some very potent and fascinating ideas. The final image is rather unsettling, reinforcing the idea that all of us are at the whims of forces outside our control. Good stuff, if you can handle the early “Dr. Who”-ness of it all. [7/10]

 

The Addams Family: Morticia, the Writer

Once again, Wednesday and Pugsley are used as catalyst for a plot that otherwise doesn't involve them much. The two kids come home with the books their school has provided them with, ordinary fairy tales that demonize giants and goblins. Outraged by the content, Morticia sets out to write her own children's literature. She is soon absorbed in her new hobby, spending days at a time cranking out Addams-ified takes on classic kids tales. Gomez grows despondent without his wife and sets out to sabotage her burgeoning career, by rewriting the books before sending them off to the publisher. Said publisher turns out to be a con artist, asking outrageous prices from gullible would-be authors to publish their manuscripts before running off with the cash. Which only complicates matters more. 

“Morticia, the Writer” is kind of a weird episode. First off, it is over-reliant on the established running gags of these series. Right from the get-go, the inciting incident recalls how the very first episode of the series kicks off. This is the second episode since the new season started to reference the adjustable echo effect in the cave and Cousin Cackle. Both the fire pole, Gomez' passion igniting when his wife speaks French, his Zen Yogi habit, and Uncle Fester threatening to shoot someone in the back with his blunderbuss all reappear here as well. The episode also gets a minor detail of the established genealogy wrong too. Gomez refers to Fester as an “in-law,” despite the “Morticia's Romance” two-parter recently establishing Fester as Gomez' uncle. Weirder yet, this episode was written by Hannibal Coons and Harry Winkler, the same team that wrote “Morticia's Romance!”

I can only conclude that the duo were having an off-day when they composed this one. When the characters aren't re-enacting bits from previous episodes, they are acting a bit out of character. The premise of Gomez being separated from Morticia for a while, and getting so horny for his wife, that he's pushed to desperate measure is funny. However, I can't see the guy betraying her trust by re-writing her work behind her back like this. That the episode allows him to get away with this without facing any consequences, never truly considering Morticia's feelings about this scheme at all, rubs me the wrong way. There's also two extremely odd jokes early on, where Morticia refers to herself as an “Indian giver” and Gomez has an unexpected reaction to considering telling his children about the “birds and the bees.” Not really sure how to interpret those two and I'd rather not consider the connotations. I did like the pun about Morticia seeking out “D. Press” to publish her book and Lurch tucking Gomez into bed after he falls asleep in a random spot. [5/10]