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I couldn't even sit through Burton's Apes remake, so I can only furl my brow when I read that someone enjoyed that. I've wisely steered away from most of the other movies on the list.
However, I'm old enough to have seen the early Friday the 13th movies in the theater, and I will say, they had their moments. I certainly laughed in F13 3D when Jason squeezed some teenager's head and his eye shot out of his skull into the camera and when some dope doing a handstand gets whacked in the crotch by a machete.
I guess the one I would like to raise--particularly because Dan and Ben gave it such a scathing review on their podcast--is M Night Shamalayan's The Happening. I thought it was quite a suspenseful thriller that tapped the sense of bewilderment and helplessness that NOTD or Nosferatu had. Both of the latter two films were pretty much the first in their respective subgenres of zombie and vampire movies, and as such, they had a strong conviction about the mysteriousness of the threat being posed. In both cases, the characters don't understand what they're up against. In NOTD, the characters at first think the zombies are just people who are mentally ill, and in Nosferatu, the characters believe that it's the beginning of some kind of pestilence. In subsequent vampire and zombie movies, the conventions are already well established and I always find myself impatient with characters who don't know that you have to shoot zombies in the head or that vampires flinch at the sight of a cross.
The Happening did an excellent job of capturing a similar mood of confusion and helplessness posed by an unfamiliar threat, in this case a massive outbreak of suicides by people with no known cause, that might have something to do with plants--or might not--and that there was no effective way to defend against. Protagonist Wahlberg as the scientist has an excellent beginning scene, that Ben and Dan ridiculed, where he's lecturing in his high school class about how science is frequently at a loss to explain any given natural phenomenon. In this case, Wahlberg is talking about the gradual but definite worldwide disappearance of the honeybee. Scientists can make reasonable guesses as to why such a thing could happen, but there's ultimately no consensus in the scientific community and nothing can really be done to counter it. When the title threat breaks out in the movie, indeed Wahlberg's observation of humanity's complete helplessness to cope with anomalous natural disasters is borne out.
I thought this was the best horror movie the year it came out, but evidently I was in the minority. On the other hand film critic Roger Ebert liked it, so maybe Ben and Dan are the odd men out.
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"Where life had no value, death, sometimes had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared."
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