Before he made this year’s Sundance breakout, and next year’s potential Oscar contender, Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon made this strangely structured horror sequel that will excite genre fans but quite possibly no one else. The original 1976 film, about a masked murderer in Texas, became a cult favourite (it was name-checked in Scream) and this meta followup starts with a Halloween screening of the film that ends in murder. Confused yet?
It’s an odd, if somewhat original, way of playing with sequel conventions: the plot exists in a reality where the original film also exists. But outside of knowing winks, this is cookie cutter carnage.
