Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

In this horror movie, Sara Price travels to Japan to look for her identical twin sister Jess, who was last seen wandering around in the Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji. Everybody fears the worse, because Aokigahara is said to be a popular destination for people considering suicide. There's a lot o...

Army of Thieves is a prequel to the zombie movie Army of the Dead. Surprisingly, it's not zombie movie and it's one of those rare second films in a series that's better than the first.

Dieter was probably the only character in the first movie whose name I remembered after the movie was over. He...

Las Vegas has been quarantined due to a zombie outbreak, and the USA plans on dropping a low-yield nuke to clear everything up. But there's 250 million dollars locked in a safe beneath a world-famous casino. Let's go in and retrieve the money!

It's a really good setup, 80% Escape from New York a...

In 2009, Friday the 13th was rebooted after 10 or 11 films (depending on how you count Freddy vs. Jason). This retold version of the story is a combination of the first, second, and third movies of the original series, while also being an entirely new and modern take on the story.

As in th...

Friday the 13th 400 years in the future and on a spaceship. A spaceship named for a D&D dragon goddess (Tiamat, so technically it may have been named after the ancient Babylonian religion). A stalker onboard a wounded spaceship, a spacewalk to survive. This is, easily, one of my favourite in the Fr...

The 11th movie in the series, more or less, but the 10th in continuity, Freddy Vs. Jason seeks to answer the age-old debate of who would win in a fight: Freddy or Jason? I was always firmly in the Jason camp (so to speak), but the counter-argument was strong: Freddy Krueger is basically immateria...

Remember Part 5, the Friday the 13th movie without Jason? This movie takes that idea and runs with it, only with more explicit guidance for the audience to assure them that even though Jason Voorhees body isn't in the film, Jason Voorhees the force of evil is.

In fact, that largely the plot o...

Call me a traditionalist or call me sentimental, but I tend to prefer the Friday movies set in the campgrounds of Crystal Lake. So you might think, as I did, that taking Jason out of the woods and putting him in a metropolitan setting invites a lot of whacky "only in New York!" opportunities, and s...

Do you like the movie Carrie? Do you like Friday the 13th? Would you like to bring the two together? That's the elevator pitch for the seventh movie in the Friday the 13th series.

I don't care for the movie Carrie, so it's convenient for me to have a movie that brings the story of a relucta...

You may remember, if you've watched the series lately, that in the previous film A New Beginning, somebody states that Jason was cremated. They were incorrect.

In this movie, it is revealed that someone paid the city to bury Jason, instead. And when Tommy Jarvis shows up in this film, on a br...

The fifth movie is the Friday series suffers a little from its setting: a halfway house for mental patients. Obviously, it needed a remote location for the obligatory murders to take place, but I find that a home for people recovering from serious mental illnesses wasn't the correct choice. Not onl...

In my previous posts in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the movie that started it all, and its two sequels. This month, it's time to take a look at the fourth in the series.

A machete-wielding woman threatens an innocent hockey player.

First of all, let it be said that there's no way the filmmakers honestly believed that the fourth movi...

In my previous posts in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the original movie and its first sequel, and this Friday I review Friday the 13th Part 3.

If your idea of Friday the 13th is typical B-grade horror about unsympathetic teens being killed by a guy in a hockey mask, this is th...

In my previous post in my Friday the 13th series, I wrote about the original movie that started it all. It's not just one of the most persistent sequel film franchises, it provided the blueprint for the modern slasher horror genre. This Friday, I'll look at its first sequel in an impossibly long...

The Friday the 13th movie series is a hugely influential franchise, and when something influences pop culture so profoundly, it can be hard to separate legend and reputation from reality. The best way to be objective, or at least as objective as one can be about works of art, is to go back to the...