The quintessential valentine’s day slasher movie was already long made by 2001 (that’d be 1981’s My Bloody Valentine, of course), and yet there was a quality still untapped in the concept. Most slashers set on or around a holiday have a transgressive, impish quality to them—a sort of “hey, this holiday kinda sucks, right? Well now it REALLY sucks!” attitude that allows both people who love and loathe the holiday in question to enjoy some fictional characters’ misery during it.…

Schizoid is actually fairly clever as a whodunit, casting plausible suspicion on just about every character. At everything else, it’s fairly inept (including a honker of a synthesizer score that sounds like someone farting on a keyboard at times*), but this gives the movie a charm that us fans of trash cinema find enduring. Kinski plays it fairly straight, making his tormented seedy physician a compelling character, and this is for my money Craig Wassom’s finest hour—the guy is an…

Filled to the brim with wild abandon, writer-director Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day 2U frees itself from the shackles of “another Groundhog Day” (or rather, I should say, feels free to greatly expand that concept) by going full fledged parallel universe/multiverse/time travel-y sci-fi shenanigans. It’s a completely different movie from its predecessor in structure and style, yet tonally it’s so on point that it truly feels like a natural extension of the story rather than a hard left turn of…