GiraffeDoor

If I sed this was the worst one...well...the other three are so good in my opinion that that is no insult at all.

This was a surprisingly fun and gripping conclusion to the saga that finally confronts the essence of Dracula and Johnny's relationship.

We get to see a bit more of the actual hotel compared to the other sequels but we do get around in terms of location.

Arguably it's a bit of a cheat code when doing a latter sequel to try and body alter the characters into something opposite to what they were. Shrek did that in its fourth part.

Agen, Mavis is not the main focus but we always have the TV show for that. She's amazing as always.

On Amazon Prime you can watch in the Romanian dub which would be the canonical dialogue when Mavis is speaking with her father.

It's a good dub, I recommend it!

Agreeable retro yarn that is not too hevy or silly.

The opening prison escape is incongruously...adult and we stedily graduate to the giant monster action that are certainly all highlights.

It all takes place in what seems like a really beautiful location.

There's a perfectly fine story going on and good personality only really tainted by the really ugly sexism.

Pseudo-authentic footage is a genre a lot more fascinating than good. It has many permutations including but not limited to found footage.

Unsurprisingly, horror has correlated a lot with this approach to story-telling, this time by trying to look like that real documentary on true crime that has only grown more and more popular.

I get it: those documentaries are cozy and satisfy a need for a macabre without pressure to be original and making it wholly fake means 1) no research required and 2) you can make the most interesting subject matter ever.

A little bit like how "The Woman in Black" tried to simulate the 1880s gothic novella in the 1990s, the idea is admirable but it failed by not being more selective about what it kept and what it improved on. I mean to say that it felt too much like a novella from the 1880s and that counted against it.

I've decided not to say that if you want to look like a real documentary so much why didn't you just make one? But there is a story to tell here.

The issue is that they did not aspire to be a little better horror than a true crime documentary tries to be. There very first scene is someone stressing to you how disturbing this thing is going to be, not unlike chapter 1 of Woman in Black. It's just the author patting themself on the back.

In many ways very interesting; it's status as fake doesn't diminish how convincing it is and the profile they make of this killer that defies profiling conventions and even uses those to his advantage.

At times it feels pornographic and slashery in how it revels in the sadism as much as its villain and the grief and anger of those commenting only add to this. It's what these documentaries do but I am personally sick of it. I do not care to hear about how much this FBI officer "loathes" this killer. Oh, you hate an evil bully? What do you want? A cookie? (I'm a douche but that's how I feel.)

Perhaps it is the film-maker's intention to not only depict someone who is addicted to violence but also invite us to consider that we are also revelling in the cruelty. If so, it's just about subtle enough to not be pretentious about it.

While deeply imperfect, this overall sits in a class by itself and effectively does what it tries to do.