Well, well, look what’s coming back to the theaters for a 40th anniversary engagement! My fellow Gen Xers and especially Carroll County, MD folk will recall we had the dinky two theater job of the 140 Cinema in Westminster with the beat-up, transparent screens. You didn’t dare as an adult go there on a Friday night since we teens took over the joint, especially for new horror movies on opening night.
Horror night back then was Party Time and we made Rocky Horror look tame by our rowdy behavior, screaming, laughing, scaring the ladies to much shared amusement. Toilet humor abound. Popcorn and Milk Duds flying all over the theater. Other flotsam pelting the screen. The theater oversold tickets and people sat on the floor screeching over spilled sodas. Catcalls at the random fools trying to make out admist such mayhem. Always a wit a minute hollering at the butcher fodder teenagers doing what we wanted to be doing, other than die!
I think of Friday IV when I think of this wonderfully immature time of life. I confess to being participant in the shenanigans. I also have to testify to being only 14 when The Final Chapter came out, getting myself and six of my neighborhood buddies into an R-rated movie. Glory days.
This was one of the zaniest nights of my teen life, ending with the usual teen farmer fight in the back parking lot and the all night spinnerama of teen cruising around the shopping center, lap after lap. A 140 Shopping Center tradition for much of the decade.
Definitely NOT the Final Chapter, but the second best of the whole series and one of Tom Savini’s SFX masterpieces. Won’t be the same arena of lunacy as we enjoyed back in the day, but I love sharing this story with younger generations of horror fans
–Ray Van Horn, Jr.
Roads Lesser Traveled 
Ha! The real terrors being the teens at your theatre on a Friday night.
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EXACTLY!!! I think of that quite often when I see a film on a Friday anymore, especially a horror film. Where’s the commitment, new gen? I mean, damn.
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Better have a sit down chat with the son. Perhaps he can save these heathens.
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I know it’s almost unbelievable but I haven’t seen any Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
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GAAAASSSSP!!!!! Well, after the humor-laden Friday 6, you had to be a die hard. Friday 5 I have a teeny place in my heart for, since it was another one of those rowdy opening nights as I described, but the cringeworthy ending is worth the memory of the entire theater of teens groaning with displeasure at the same time, lol. The Nightmare films are mostly worth your attention.
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I like a good horror flick but have never been a fan of the mad slasher genre. Never saw I Know What you Did Last Summer either.
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Fair enough, because as an adult, I crave far more out of horror than what slashers offer. It was mindless, if gruesome Grand Guignol entertainment for us as teens to shove all that adrenaline toward. If I watch slashers anymore, it’s for nostalgia, or if it’s new, it had better have some substance!
Summer was pretty good, its sequels, meh. For the most part, slashers have run their course. As a horror writer, I never write your prototype slasher. There’s no challenge!! LOL
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