The next film in the EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest for 2020 is a sequel to one of my all-time favorite moves.

Unfortunately, Jaws 2 comes up very short of Stephen Spielberg’s classic Jaws. While it is not bad, Jaws 2 just was never going to match up with the magic of the film that preceded it.

We return to Amity years after the arrival of the original shark and we see that life has gone on. Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) has gotten on with his life, Ellen (Lorraine Gary) has a successful job working for businessman Peterson (Joseph Mascolo) and the beach is alive as ever.

However, the waters are about to become dangerous once again as the arrival of another great white shark starts to cause chaos among the sailor, water skiers and dumb kids.

There are some good moments in Jaws 2. I thought the idea of Brody being crazed when the idea of a shark returning happens. He seems to be suffering from PTSD and nobody believes him. I think if this had more of a focus on Scheider and his character Brody, this could have been much more successful.

Sadly, though, the original Jaws came down to the relationship between Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss (as Hooper) and Robert Shaw (as Quint) and that dynamic was missing from this film. Instead, the film was more interested in placing a bunch of dimwit teenagers in jeopardy than creating any real characters.

The score, which was a undeniable classic in the original, was overbearing here. John Williams did both, but this time his music was simply too much, at times downright distracting.

I actually found this worse on this viewing than I had thought before. There was little new here and the sequel felt totally unnecessary. As I said, there were some good bits here and there, but the rest of it outweighed it.

As we start off the final week of the EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest, we have a movie that I had never heard of before and only found out about thanks to the podcast Critically Acclaimed, featuring critics William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold.

Theater of Blood starred the iconic horror actor of the 1950s-1970s, Vincent Price is a roll that he is clearly having a blast playing.

After losing out on a prestigious acting award, Shakespearean stage actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) threw himself from a balcony into the river Thames in front of the group of self-important critics who had blasted his work in print and whom he blamed for costing him the award.

However, Lionheart did not die from his fall. Instead, he was rescued and saved by a group of vagrants and he spent two years healing.

When he was ready, he began to slay the critics, literally, in the same manner in which Shakespeare had killed some of his characters. It comes down to facing off with Peregrine Devlin (Ian Hendry), the critic who presented the actual award.

This is a horror/comedy and it delivers. Vincent Price is so over-the-top that he fits this perfectly. He provides his Shakespearean lines with gusto of an actor obsessed with the Bard. He could have been a perfect Batman villain as much of Lionheart’s story felt like a supervillain origin.

The camp factor on this is high, and very enjoyable. The British film directed by Douglas Hickox, included a large variety of well-known British actors. Some of these actors were Sir Michael Hordern, Coral Browne, Dennis Price, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, and Arthur Lowe.

Diana Riggs is also in the cast, giving one of her favorite performances as Lionheart’s daughter Edwina.

I suppose since I loved this, I’m safe from any retribution.

This was the strangest, most unexpected thing. I was watching the credits of the 2012 animated Frankenweenie on Disney + for the October EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest, when the screen popped up a graphic for another Frankenweenie, which appeared to be live action.

I had no idea what this was, so I decided to watch it. There was young Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern, which immediately put an end to the idea that maybe they had done this after the animated movie.

So it was clearly something that predated the animated movie. Then I saw that Tim Burton had also directed it.

Turns out that Frankenweenie started out as a 28-minute short from Burton and that they adapted the animated movie from this short. I had no idea.

The short was fun, considerably more condensed than the 2012 film, but it did a good job of showing the relationship between Victor (Barret Oliver) and Sparky. There were a few of the scenes (like the cars hooking up their jumper cables to Sparky) were exactly the same in the animated movie.

Much like the 2012 animated movie, this is an homage to the Universal Monster Movies, particularly Frankenstein (1931). The black and white film does a great job of creating that very mood. The short also makes you feel as if you were watching those older film with the staging and the way the actors carried themselves.

This was an interesting exercise, seeing this short after seeing the animated movie. There was more depth in the animated movie, but, as a short, this brought an excellent tone and set the stage for the future movie.

Today, in order to continue the October EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest, I pulled up Disney + for a little family horror entertainment. This would be Tim Burton’s animated classic Frankenweenie.

This was a wonderful animated film, with the magic of stop animation giving us what appeared to be flawless artistic appearance of the characters and setting. The beautiful black and white filming highlighted every last piece of art that appeared on the screen making this a visually stunning film.

The story was touching and funny as well. Victor (Charlie Tahan) and his dog Sparky were inseparable until a tragic accident brought the dog’s life to an end. Engulfed in the world of science, Victor was inspired to attempt an experiment to resurrect the dog using lightning.

Clearly, the film is an homage to the 1931 film Frankenstein, as many of the iconic imagery appears in the animated movie. There is a lot of emotion here too as anyone who has lost a pet and who wished that there was something that they could do about it could feel for Victor and his plight.

The voice cast is strong. It features Catharine O’Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau, Winona Ryder, and Atticus Shaffer. O’Hara and Short pitched in with multiple voices each.

This is a great family film with some real emotion and some powerful moments for Halloween. Frankenweenie is the type of animation that does not speak down to children, but provides them with a good story and beautiful imagery to watch.

As the October EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest continues, we revisit the fourth movie in a franchise that brings meta filmmaking to a new level. Scream 4 features Neve Campbell as the ultimate victim-turned-bad ass Sidney Prescott, and directed by horror icon Wes Craven.

Murder is the name of the game in Woodsboro once again as super survivor Sidney (Neve Campbell) returned to face off again with the next version of Ghostface. This time, Ghostface is targeting Sidney’s cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) and her friends, in order to film his murders.

The basic pattern of the film follows the original Scream, which is actually a piece of the plot of the film. Our favorite characters Dewey (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) are married now, but that does not prevent them from being blade deep in this story.

We meet a bunch of new high school students, some of which are obsessed with movies and others who are there as red herrings to make the audience wonder if they might be the returning Ghostface. There must be something in the water at Woodsboro High to keep cranking out these weirdos.

I could understand someone saying that this movie is nothing more than repetitive, but I feel that the film uses that as a hook to the franchise. There is so much meta story telling going on in the Scream franchise that, with the inclusion of Stab, the movie-within-a-movie, it works.

You would think that, after all this time, Sidney might get herself a permit to carry a gun. Seems to me she could absolutely find an argument for why she needed one.

With the news of a fifth film coming from this franchise, you would have to argue that Scream is one of, if not the, best horror franchises of all time. While none of the sequels reach the campy goodness of the original, all three sequels are fun and entertaining, with lots of positives with them. Even the much maligned Scream 3 contains lots of positives and enjoyment to be had.

Scream has avoided the problem of being repetitive, actually turning that into a strength of the story, and we have recurring characters that we cheer for and want to see again.

Continuing with the October EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest, last night I watched the original Candyman, from the mind of Clive Barker, directed by Bernard Rose.

I had never seen Candyman and, honestly, knew very little about it going in. With that, I really enjoyed this horror film and found it to be original and very creepy.

Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) was a student who was preparing a college thesis on the urban legend of the Candyman, a creature who was said to arrive and murder people when the person would speak his name five times into a mirror. Helen was a true skeptic and was more interested in the psychology behind the phenomenon than the actual killer.

When it seemed as if she had proven her thesis, she made the mistake of summoning the Candyman and she found her life in a downward spiral.

The way Candyman attacked her was ingenious and very entertaining. Tony Todd brought a frightening ambiance to the character of the Candyman and the very reverence that the creature had among the neighborhood created the specific charisma of the character. The voice fit beautifully into the lexicon of the character.

Virginia Madsen is top notch as Helen, showing her growing fear and uncertainty of what is happening around her and how she just simply is never sure of what she can do.

There is a lot of blood and gore in the film but it is not done as an excuse. It has a reason for its inclusion in the story and, because of that, works well.

The music of the film helped increase the anxiety and tension that the movie was trying to build.

The ending of the movie was strong too, although the fire scene was a little confusing. I did enjoy the ironic resolution to Helen’s story.

I liked this one a lot. I am not sure why I had never seen it, or even knew much about it. One of the better horror films from the 1990s.

When I was watching Creepshow this morning, I saw the name of this movie listed on the screen and I decided that this would be a good film to continue the EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest with a film that I have not seen in a long time: The Dead Zone.

After an auto accident, Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) wound up in a coma for five years, altering his life forever. When he awoke, he discovered that he had an ability to see the future.

Christopher Walken is tremendous in The Dead Zone. His performance carried the plot and made the strangeness of the story reasonable. The Dead Zone could have been way over-the-top, but it was grounded and realistic. Walken was a major part of that.

Martin Sheen’s work as the cruel political candidate for Senator was exceptional. It did not take long for me to hate this character, and Sheen embraced that.

The story had several parts to it, which felt almost like an anthology of adventures for Johnny Smith. He was involved with Tom Skerritt as a sheriff trying to stop a killer. He was a tutor to a young kid (Simon Craig) who was having trouble interacting with the world. He was involved in the Martin Sheen story. These all blended together into the story that would become The Dead Zone.

The ending of the Dead Zone hit me hard when I first saw this years ago at a sleep over at a friend’s house. I did not like it at the time because I wanted a happier ending than what was here. At this point, I found the ending extremely satisfying.

I think this is one of the better Stephen King adaptations around.

After watching the 1990 version of Lord of the Flies, I decided that the next film for the EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest would be the original version from 1963,

The 1963 version was directed by Peter Brook and was shown in black and white. The use of the black and white always creates a more interesting dynamic of the film, and this is not the exception.

However, I was surprised how consistent the two versions were, with the 1990 version being larger in shots but not much different besides that.

One difference was that in the 1990 film, the kids were all from a military academy whereas this version had them separate. The group introduced with Jack (Tom Chapin) were from a military school, but Ralph (James Aubrey) and Piggy (Hugh Edwards) were British school boys. That difference between them make the eventual turn more effective.

There also seemed to be that the start of the movie had the world involved in a nuclear war, leaving everything up in the air about what might be around in society outside of the island.

Those were all basically character moments that altered the manner in which the characters would react, but the basic structure of the plot was fairly close to the 1990 movie.

The child actors here do a fine job as well, though we still only really get development among the three main characters, Ralph, Jack and Piggy.

This feels as if the innocent lost theme is stronger than in the 1990 version. I would be interested in reading the original novel and seeing where they fall after that.

The next film in the October EYG Halloween Horror Bingefest is an adaptation of William Golding’s iconic novel, Lord of the Flies.

This is the most recent adaptation of the novel that tells the story of a group of kids stranded on a deserted island and how they descended into chaos and savagery without the rules of the adult world.

I remembered liking this movie a lot when it originally came out despite middling reviews. This time through, it was still a good watch, but I will admit to not feeling the same power as I did the first time.

I have not read William Golding’s novel, so I cannot comment on the adaptation. I am planning on watching the 1963 film version soon to make a comparison. I have heard that the 1990 adaptation is not on the level of the 1963 one and that it changes a lot of what make the book special. This is not uncommon among movie adaptations, but you would hope that any changes were made because of proper reasons and not just to make changes.

The most powerful moment in this movie for me back when I first saw it was the death of Piggy (Danuel Pipoly). I had a hard time accepting the manner in which it happened and how these kids could just go along with it. This time through I was expecting it and it did not make as large of an impact on me.

The rivalry between Ralph (Balthazar Getty) and Jack (Chris Furrh) is at the center of the film, but it feels pushed here. I would have liked to see more between the boys. There was an early movie scene of them play fighting on the beach which was nice, but there was not enough of that to really drive home the power of Jack’s eventual betrayal.

I am not sure that the movie ever sufficiently dealt with the storyline of the “monster.” It was obvious who the monster was but I did not see it handled. Maybe I missed it.

The ending of the movie came very quickly too. It lacked a flow that made it feel as if it just came out of nowhere.

Having said all of these negatives, these young boys did a good job with their roles. Unlike the Children of the Corn, these boys brought emotion and skill to their parts, even those that were small and not deeply developed.

The shots on the island were done well and the music added to the tone of each shot. The look of the movie was top notch and helped balance out some of the other parts that may not have been as solid.

This did take a step back from where I saw it back in the early 1990s, but it was still a good effort and the positives do stand out.