“Ma’am – we didn’t find any boy.”
THE TIME HAS COME. I’m finally going to write about all the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. I did one big review of the whole saga almost 13 years ago, so it’s time for a reboot. At long last I will review them separately, giving each one the focus it deserves – the type of one-on-one, individualized attention that the counselors failed to give poor Jason Voorhees while he was swimming on that fateful day, on account of they were having s-e-x. As far as I am aware no one else has shared opinions on these films before, especially on the internet, so I’m very proud to be breaking this ground, for the good of the community. At last, Jason’s story can be told.
Maybe part of the hangup in starting a series like this is that this first one is the hardest to write about. As a result of the weird choice to make Jason the killer in part 2, the smash hit cultural phenomenon original retroactively became somewhat disconnected from the rest of the series and much of what we associate with it. Like, when they said they were remaking FRIDAY THE 13TH, we knew that meant they were remaking the sequels to FRIDAY THE 13TH. In that favorite horror fan pastime of ranking the installments of a horror series, you gotta be a little hot-takey or at least personal-favoritey to not choose #1 as the best for the TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, HALLOWEEN or A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET franchises, yet very few would do that for FRIDAY THE 13TH. By definition, if you’re a fan of the series you’re a fan of Jason, right? (read the rest of this shit…)
RAW is a 2016 French-Belgian movie I’ve been planning to see for years. All I knew is that it was something about cannibalism, directed by a woman (Julia Ducournau), supposedly made people faint at film festivals (haven’t we all?), and is beloved by many horror loving friends and critics, especially women. With Ducournau’s new one TITANE looking very promising even before it won the Palme d’Or (the trailer makes it look like Cronenberg meets Tarantino meets 
CASH TRUCK (Le Convoyeur) is a 2004 French crime movie I never heard of until Guy Ritchie remade it as 
Like many citizens of the world, I love most of Steven Soderbergh’s movies. Still, the nature of streaming services and the lack of urgency their releases seem to inspire in my brain have left me behind in his return-from-retirement period. I haven’t seen the basketball one, the app one, the laundromat one, surely others.
KATE is the straight-to-Netflix Mary Elizabeth Winstead action movie produced by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski’s company 87North (formerly 87Eleven). As you’d expect from that pedigree, it has excellent action scenes, with 
THE GREEN KNIGHT was one of my adventures in mostly-empty Covid-era theater-going, but I’m always working on a million things at once and I didn’t finish the review until after it’s left most theaters and most people’s minds. And yet I continue, undaunted. (It’s on VOD now and comes to disc October 12th.)
I don’t know if Maggie Q thinks of herself as an action star. She’s a good actress, and in recent years she’s been in horror movies and thrillers and on Designated Survivor, and she has a new sitcom coming soon. Maybe one of her best known roles was the title character in Nikita, where I assume she kicked a multitude of asses every week, but it’s not like anybody puts the original TV Nikita Peta Wilson or the original movie Nikita Anne Parillaud or the second movie version Bridget Fonda in a category with Jean-Claude Van Damme and those guys. They’re just actors without much association to the genre.
CRY MACHO is the new one starring and directed by Mr. Clint Eastwood. In a way it seems like a movie he would’ve made when he was younger, and in fact he almost did make it in the late ‘80s, but decided to do 
ZOLA tells a wild road trip story that, I feel, doesn’t amount to much, but it’s worth it for the ride, and for the telling. The big hook is that it’s based on the 2015 “now iconic series of viral, uproarious tweets” (source: A24films.com), something that’s not only emphasized in the marketing, but noted on screen at the beginning. The official onscreen title is @zola (which is actually the Twitter handle of some wedding company, not author/protagonist A’Ziah “Zola” King), the main characters are often looking at their phones and monotonously speaking aloud their texts to each other, and there’s a notification sound heard frequently throughout the movie – I was never really sure if it was meant to be diegetic or not. Admittedly all that sounds stupid, but when it comes down to it this is really just “based on a true story.” Not even entirely based on a true story told in an unusual medium, because a Rolling Stone article about the whole affair…
I think RIDERS OF JUSTICE, a Danish film technically released in November 2020, is my favorite movie I’ve seen this year. It plays off of some genre traditions and themes that interest me, but it feels unlike anything I’ve seen before, and it was exciting to discover that as I watched it. So this is one of the reviews where I have to start by suggesting you take my word for it that it’s a truly special movie, stop reading, go watch it, and then come back. But I know most people won’t do that, so I’ll start by explaining what the movie is and warn you before I get into heavy spoiler stuff to analyze the meaning with those who have seen it.
