Netflix recently revealed which films would be coming to their library to ring in the New Year, and they’re looking like a great collection for horror fans. Hailing from 2001-2004, you can now stream Jason X, Ghost Ship, Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, Cellular and The Butterfly Effect. Of course, none of these are stone cold classics, but they’re all worthwhile watches if you can put up with a bit of wonky early noughties CGI and occasionally very hammy acting.
My pick of these would be time travel/parallel universe caper The Butterfly Effect. Sure, Ashton Kutcher might be a bit wooden in it, but I’ve always enjoyed watching him gradually screw up his life more and more with each change he makes to the timeline. I also still find the overblown scene where he wakes up to realize he’s got no arms pretty funny, if only for Kutcher’s very silly performance. Now, we don’t know whether Netflix is screening the director’s cut of the film, but let’s hope so, because I simply won’t accept a version of this movie that doesn’t end with a fetus committing suicide in the womb.
As for the rest, I’ve always felt oversized spider creature feature Eight Legged Freaks is worth a watch, if only for David Arquette delivering a committed performance in the face of CGI spiders. Plus, it features Scarlett Johansson in a towel getting webbed to a wall by a spider, which has got to cater to at least one very specific fetish.
As for the rest, Jason X is an interesting and actually pretty witty update on the Friday the 13th formula that’s aged surprisingly well and Ghost Ship at least does what it says on the tin and provides ghosts on a ship. I struggle to say anything positive about Gothika and Cellular, though. The former features Halle Berry gamely struggling through absolutely terrible dialogue and the latter’s an extremely of its time movie that criticizes how much people are addicted to old-style cellphones (a fear that looks a bit quaint from a 2018 perspective).
Tell us, have you got any favorites amongst these new Netflix additions? Be sure to sound off in the comments section down below.