The sharper-eyed among you will have noted that, despite my grand announcement to the contrary in 2015, I never actually retired the Summer of Blood, the beloved (to me, at least, and I’m the only one who counts in this scenario) annual tradition at the late Antagony & Ecstasy, in which I grind through endless waves of terrible horror movies for months on end. I just hid it behind a bunch of little gimmicks – “oh, I’m just watching all of the Amityville movies for no reason”, “it’s not summer if it’s just a month”, “well, it’s not summer in Australia!”, “I thought it would be a good idea to burn off an entire year of my life goddamn watching every goddamn Witchcraft“. But why keep up the ruse? I’m getting close to the end of my grad school career, the point where I pledged to bring the feature back. All that’s left right now is filling up the bits of the diss that are missing (these bits are called “two entire chapters”, no big deal).
And in the spirit of filling up the bits, I have a special theme for this summer. Scattered across my review archive are a bunch of incomplete series of horror movies: either I reviewed everything that existed but then they made more, or I just didn’t want to deal with the sequels at the time, or such things. So I’ve decided to spend every Saturday from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day (that’s 28 May through 3 September, for you non-Americans) patching some holes.
And great news for those for those of you who support the site as a donor through Patreon: you’ll be getting the reviews a full week early! Which means the first review is coming later today, so if you can’t wait for all the bloody fun, head over to Patreon, and for as little as $1/month you can get early access to the Summer of Blood and other classic movie reviews.
For those of you who want to watch along, the complete schedule follows.
28 May – Leatherface (2017)
4 June – Basket Case 2 (1990)
11 June – Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991)
18 June – Leprechaun: Origins (2014)
25 June – Leprechaun Returns (2018)
2 July – Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
9 July – Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)
16 July – Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)
23 July – Hellraiser: Deader (2005)
30 July – Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005)
6 August – Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)
13 August – Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)
20 August – Psycho II (1983)
27 August – Psycho III (1986)
3 September – Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)