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‘Hayride 2,’ a streaming movie review

Stream Punk

When mining the depths of what I could do for a living, I wondered about maintenance work. I am short, fat, and have difficulties bending, lifting, etc. Okay, so maybe not maintenance. It seems like my body needs more maintenance than what I could provide on the job. Still, the dream never died. Thankfully, “Hayride 2” shows me a day in the life of a maintenance worker. Not only that, there’s more! Like, a horror movie.

Freddy. Jason. Michael Myers (and “Saturday Night Live’s” Mike Myers, as of late.) Leatherface. This is how writers list the icons of horror. Now that I have listed the icons, I am supposed to compare the pop culture characters from our nightmares with the nightmare created for “Hayride 2.” Since this is how these articles work, I must try to do that. Alas, I cannot. I’ve seen the newest “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie … but only the last 15 minutes or so. I watched “Freddy Versus Jason” and admired how one of the two — I forget — could leap out of the water, like in “The Matrix.” I saw the newest “Halloween” movie after starting and stopping it no less than three times because the childhood of a serial killing monster is at the very least tragic, let alone depressing.

I like the old “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and like the idea of the newest iteration, but the newest iterations of horror movies seem to fall short. (I like “The Thing” franchise, from the 80s remake to the 2011 prequel. I know them’s fightin’ words. But I like them both. This is just to show I am not without my faults and guilty pleasures.)

Now the hack and slash genre re-introduces Pitchfork. His name sounds like an obscenity. Like, you stub your toe and kids are around, so … “aw, pitchfork!” But not like, there’s a man-monster after us, “AAAAH, Pitchfork!” Not like that. My favorite quote is from a really, really old man — who is apparently Pitchfork from the first movie but may now be the spirit of Pitchfork or something else, because I didn’t pay attention — but remember, this is from an old man, “When they mess with (protagonist)’s daughter, they mess with the Pitchfork.”

I think of “mess with” as youthful slang, from when I was young … 20-odd (very odd) years ago. I want to do a re-write where the old man says, “When they creepin’ on baby daddy’s lil girl, they frowny-face, pitchfork emoticon, for reals.”

But Pitchfork does not text death via your cell phone, like a bad “The Ring” spinoff I’m sure already exists. Pitchfork meets you at your local hayride. It’s Halloween and haunted hayrides mean Pitchfork — a seven-foot, twelve-inch beast — coolly slips in, unnoticed and kills people. I didn’t make it to this part. I made it to the part where the 20-something man who survived “Hayride 1” looks at the television in the hospital, sees an ad for a haunted hayride, and yells into the ether, “NOOOOOOO!”

What is cheaper than a micro-budget horror movie? This is. Not in the way where you feel like you’re really there. Remember the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre?” In this situation, it is an uncontrollably shaky camera that is supposed to add tension but makes you sick.

Every character that survives feels awful they survived the first movie, but probably feel worse they signed a two-picture deal. The motto of the movie is if you do it once, beat a dead horse; where, all of the characters have complex survivor’s guilt and shock and PTSD … and, they play all of this to the last row. If you can make it past all of the “emotional stakes” maybe you can make it to Pitchfork doing what he does best … killing people with a pitchfork, I assume.

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