by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

Now would you say this is the perfect time to cut back to another Couch Scene? No? Well you get one anyway! Give that fucking couch a SAG card! We learn why Terry was smirking: it's that time in a slasher movie where the Final Girl gets to go on a corpse tour, visiting all her dead friends in grisly tableau while the killer slowly stalks her.

The first stop on the tour is Jackie, the incompetent assistant who barely had enough screen time to warrant a name. Next up is Artie.

Look at the excitement on Terry's face. That's the look of a man who knows there's nobody who can stop him, mostly because the entire world seems to be dumb as shit. He and Artie wave goodbye as Karen runs off to the next stop.

First, though, time for some payoff from that earlier scene when Todd told the little girl not to let anyone into her apartment. "You're gonna hurt my kitty," she yells. Yeah, it's not exactly a game changer, but do you want that or another Couch Scene?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Karen's victim senses guide her to Julie's place. There's no sign of Bill's headless corpse, nor his festively-hung head. She does stumble across Julie, though.

I'm not really sure of the order of events here. Did Terry kill Julie right after he killed Bill, and then race over ahead of Karen to stab her corpse with his machete so he could withdraw it just as Karen arrived, or did he knock her out and kill her just as Karen got there? Either way, damn he is moving fast!

But he still leaves plenty of time to relax. Karen tries to escape but Terry is always one step ahead of her. Worse yet, Todd stumbles onto the scene, and Karen screams when she remembers the awkwardness of their last conversation.

The two brothers lock eyes.

It's not shaping up to be much of a climax, seeing as Todd totally pussed out last time. And in fact, Todd pusses out again, this time off camera.

Having never heard the phrase, "You can run but you can't hide," ducks into the baby's room and tries to call for help. I know it seems like I'm doing a lot of Monday morning victiming right now, but maybe put at least ten feet between you and the murderer before you settle in for phone calls.

Terry just starts laughing. How could it possibly be this easy? For Karen to make it any simpler, she'd have to work her way over to that stash of weapons and accidentally shoot herself with that spear gun.

But cornered as she is, she still has some fight left in her.

She winds up and whacks him right in the balls with that phone. It mostly wounds his pride, but it does buy her enough time to scoop up Julie's baby and run off again.

Meanwhile, Maddy's life threatens to become interesting as she discovers Terry's bloody shirt in the trash. May there was something to all that talk from Todd about not being a murderer. No wonder he didn't like the pie!

Maddy has had enough. She runs over to Brad's apartment to find out why he's been ghosting her.

She lets herself in and says she needs help because Todd has, "been killing again!" So... maybe that bloody shirt didn't have quite the impact it should've had.

Brad isn't giving her much feedback, though. It takes her a while, but she eventually notices something off about Brad. She gives him a little nudge.

Okay, this almost makes up for all the Couch Scenes.

Karen once again fails to hide herself, picking the building with the glass doors and tons of open space. Terry is back in full IDGAF mode. He takes a leisurely stroll around the pool and stops for a quick bounce on the diving board.

There's just a hint of annoyance in Karen's voice when she says, "Oh god!"

Again owing to her love of confined spaces, Karen makes a beeline for the men's room. She crams the baby in a cabinet under the sink and looks for somewhere to hide herself.

Okay, not the sauna. There's two people pretending to be dead in there.

She picks a stall and climbs up on the toilet. Terry continues to take it slow, even making a show of checking the sauna to make sure Greg and Andrea are still breathing when the camera's on them. Then he stops to take a leak! Can he draw this out anymore?

Yes he can. He pretends to leave in order to draw Karen out of the stall, but he taps her on the shoulder before taking another lazy swing at her. This time he at least nicks her, but you can tell his motivation is almost gone. He scolds her for running off again, and who could blame him? Ostensibly she doesn't want to get murdered but she clearly doesn't care about getting away either. What's an enterprising serial killer to do.

Todd shows up again. And he points his gun at Terry again. And he pusses out again.

When he flat out refuses to shoot his brother Karen grabs the gun and does it for him. Or she would have if it were loaded. As if we needed any further assurance that the therapist was blowing smoke when she said she could take care of herself.

Terry shoves her aside and faces off with his brother.

Having killed nearly everyone, he sticks the machete in Todd's hand and starts smearing blood on him. If that trick worked once before with tons of witnesses why wouldn't it work again?

Well this time Todd isn't having it. He wrestles with his stunt double for a bit before falling into the pool. Karen helps fish the perpetually-useless Todd out before he drowns himself. It's not love, but there's definitely some kind of mutual attraction between these two blundering idiots.

Oh look, all the main characters are here. I guess it's time to end the movie.

Maddy, at long last, has finally figured out that if you spare the rod, you spoil the child. Unfortunately, she tries to make up for that lost discipline all at once.

In light of what she said he Brad's office, her decision to shoot Terry instead of Todd was the biggest surprise of the movie. Biggest disappointment, too. Todd kinda sucks and I would much rather see more of Terry than Todd.

She comforts Todd with a lot of apologetic language, talking about how he's safe now, and they'll never be apart, and all they need is each other. Things that would sound off-putting when talking about a couple but that are way worse between a mother and son.

She only stops talking that way long enough to reveal that she thought she'd killed Todd instead. And Old Honest Todd, he just can't keep a secret.

He says, "I'm Todd". She says, "I'm Todd". They both start chanting, "I'm Todd," until Maddy figures out the only way to get out of this movie.

*BANG*

RIP Maddy Simmons. She was a worse mother than Pamela Voorhees.

Karen just sort of slinks out the back with the baby, leaving Todd to explain this whole mess to the cops. Granted, there's no evidence to suggest he was involved in any of the murders, but that didn't stop them from convicting him the first time, so why this time?

Kudos to director John Grissmer. He may not have made a great horror movie, but he understood that if you can't be great, at least you shouldn't be boring. You don't need a lot of pointless exposition to get your movie started. Just show a kid murdering someone and the audience will jump right on that.

Nega-kudos, however, for all the scenes with Maddy. Most of them served no purpose at all, certainly not when her only direction seems to be, "chew the scenery!" The actress who played her, Louise Lasser, actually got top billing despite most of her scenes being brief cutaways of her milling around the house trying to stay busy while the actual movie took place. I wonder if that ever bothered Mark Soper, the guy who had to play both twins and was the actual star of the film. I wonder if that put him into a... BLOOD RAGE.

And special high fives to Ted Raimi for inexplicably appearing in one scene, saying nothing, and then leaving.

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