Remember that opening POV shot of Halloween, in which young Michael Myers goes to kill his sister? The opening murder in Friday The 13th is mostly done from the killer's POV, and The Funhouse starts with the POV of a little kid scaring his sister. The Halloween plot about someone returning to kill after being away for a while? You'll find that also in Friday The 13th, The Burning, My Bloody Valentine, and a ton of others. The ending wherein the killer survives something like gunshots or stabbing or a watermelon to the head in order to obviously return in the sequel? I would start listing movies that copied that, but I'm sure that we'd all like to wrap this column up before Christmas.
It's all of the beats to remind you of the original, along with upping the gore and nudity (as if that's what it was missing), but with none of the atmosphere or slow building dread. And even the magic of the original is diminished, because any kid who stumbles across it just sees a bunch of cliches they've seen a million times, only on a lower budget. This movie made those cliches mainstream, you little bastard!
And while we're on the subject of copycat horror ...
138 Comments