Grim Reaper 3

 

Look at this cover art and tell me that you'd want to sit through Grim Reaper 3. No one, and I mean NO ONE is going to champion this film individually let alone on the merits and confines of the trilogy itself. I really had hope for what I wrote about in my previous review for Grim Reaper 2 that this next piece would pull a Scarecrow and bring this thing back from the brink in the third and final entry, and it did not. It somehow was worse, slower and even more plodding than the first two and I didn't even think that was possible. This hilariously terrible photo for the poster art tells you everything you need to know from how the mask for the reaper himself became shittier and cheaper than the second film, the same boring chick that plays Bethany is back from the second film and the sludgy, sluggish, slothy means of presentation is also back from the second movie, except it somehow was multiplied beyond what I was expecting. Even officer Wilkins from the second film is back again and he plays sort of like a rent-a-cop version of Dr. Loomis from the Halloween franchise and has some very similar dialogue and beats as he did trying to track down and analyze Michael Meyers in the fictional town of Haddonfield, IL. But that didn't help either. Nothing here propped up this final bit in any shape or form. Look, we know as horror fans that films like this are made because some people just want to do it to say that they worked on projects like this because they're passionate and they want to have fun. I get that aspect of it. But there has to be a level of actual entertainment there and if it isn't there, the whole thing falls apart and you end up having a droll mess that no one wants to clean up or admit to the fact that they were ever involved with it in the first place. Here's the skeleton-so Bethany is looking for some kind of job at an art museum type place, she gets the interview with the weird lady that runs it, she gets the job and then she ends up living there in the upper part of the building as part of the package of working there. Cool. A little tidbit that was also cool for me as a photography nerd is that she went to art school for photography and there's a scene where you see her taking shots with an awesome old school film Canon camera that has the "SLR" letters plastered on the front of it. I dug that for about thirty seconds. But outside of what's going on with her living in this art museum and dating this guy named Dylan, it's all just extraneous wet drippings sliding off of the face of the villain Clayface from the Batman franchise. A few people get killed by the reaper because they're in his way, Wilkins is trying to track him down, Bethany is living her life, and then at some point we get to where Wilkins and Bethany meet each other because Wilkins finds the reaper around where Bethany is-he shoots her and then Bethany beheads the reaper. That's it. No grandiosity, no build-up, no real climax. Just a subtle bubble up of steam that feels hot enough to cook something, but it never does. And that's all I have. This trilogy fucking sucks. I actually don't know which one of these is going on my worst of the year list, but I'm pretty sure that Grim Reaper 3 is replacing part 2. It has to. See you again soon.