Remember Nedry, the fat guy played by Wayne Night in Jurassic Park?  Rebirth hopes that you do, because its opening scene is a weird callback to his character.  Seventeen years ago, before the events in Jurassic World took place, the scientists at InGen were just starting to experiment with dinosaur DNA.  One scientist curiously tries to eat a candy bar just before entering a controlled environment.  The guy is a slob and carelessly drops the wrapper just before he enters a sealed chamber with a dinosaur in it.  The wrapper gets sucked into the door’s ventilation and shorts it out.  Uh oh.  In the rush to lock everything down, the candy bar guy is left staring face-to-face with a very nasty dinosaur.  The lesson here is to not be a slob, because the repercussions are fatal.

I enjoy horror movie cliches.  I wouldn’t be able to watch as many horror movies as I do if I didn’t.  For example, most horror movies have at least one scene where a door emits an agonizing squeak while opening slowly.  Just like the light that stops working at the worst possible moment, the creaky door moment is a staple of horror movies.  These cliches and horror movies go together like hands and gloves, bacon and eggs or Michael Myers and Halloween.  Even though I can sense when a creaky door is about to make an appearance, I always appreciate when a movie does them correctly.  The problem I had with Cobweb isn’t that it has at least a half-dozen creaky door scenes, but that none of them had any effect on me.  Even worse is that I had the same reaction to every other scary element in this movie:  none.

Serial killers are a fortunate bunch.  While the job does require a commitment to planning, attention to detail and a level of perseverance that few can muster, it’s also heavily dependent upon luck.  Take The Butcher, the serial killer at the center of Trap, who somehow manages his homicidal enterprise in addition to being a devoted family man and a firefighter.  His dedication to all facets of his life is nothing short of admirable.  For starters, The Butcher’s daily schedule must be a logistical nightmare.  He must ping-pong between his home, putting out fires and attending to victims–residing at any one of his covert murder houses–without getting caught.  The Butcher may be good, but nobody’s that good.  Luck is always present to give serial killers a little helpful nudge when they’re so close to being caught.  In Trap, The Butcher is so darn lucky that he must be living the Life of Riley.

If you’re an American and are desperately running from your past, where should you go?  To a pet shop in Galway, Ireland, of course.  Given how essential this detail is to the entire story of The Watchers, you would think it would be addressed at some point, but no.  For a movie that is ultimately about the importance of getting the details right, The Watchers rarely bothers to do so.  While it does stop at regular intervals to deliver unwieldy gobs of exposition that explain what is happening, it never concerns itself with why.  It’s a story that insists on giving a perfectly logical explanation for everything, but doesn’t make any logical sense.

The Exorcist is proof that no franchise, no matter how moribund, will always get another chance at box office glory.  After proving time and again that they could not make a successful sequel, Warner Brothers let The Exorcist property languish on the shelf.  In the years since the equally  uninspiring prequels were released in 2005-06, an interesting thing happened.  Rival studios used the original movie as a template for their own demonic possession movies.  While those movies were not on par with the movie that inspired them, they were usually profitable.  (2010’s The Last Exorcism was inconceivably profitable.)  This steady stream of success is probably what led Universal to purchase the rights to The Exorcist, with the justification that if knock-offs could make money, a small-budget Exorcist movie rooted in the lore of the original certainly could make a healthy profit.

At one point in The Nun II, the demon known as Valak is terrorizing Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga).  While doing that, Valak is also possessing another character in another town that, according to the movie, is an hour’s car ride away.  For reasons left unexplained, Valak has grown more powerful since the last installment.  Of course, Valak was very powerful before.  For example, at one point Valak transported a priest into a coffin buried underground.  In this sequel, Valak has the power to warp space-time in two places simultaneously.  That display of power is very impressive.  And yet, no matter how hard Valak tries, I knew that Valak would lose again to a nun who might be ninety pounds soaking wet.