Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Manchester by the Sea

Casey Affleck stars as a Boston transplant brought to his home town of Manchester to deal with the passing of his brother and the son he leaves behind. As he tries to cope with his own inadequacies as a parent, he struggles to find a way to help his nephew endure the pain of loss while having locked his own deep inside.

While the story is simple, the complexity of emotion is immense. You have a son grieving his father and avoiding his feeling any way he possibly can; you have a brother plagued by memories of his past that directly prevent him from forming the type of connections that would enable him to overcome his grief; and you have a pair of ex-wives, both with demons, who must find ways to handle their own losses and frailties.

Affleck is a strong, emotional presence in the film, letting the audience get under his character’s skin even if he won’t normally let anyone else do so. He’s both head strong and vulnerable, but never in an unrealistic way. Lucas Hedges, as Affleck’s nephew, is also a strong presence. The family resemblance in terms of emotional avoidance is there, though coming from an inherently more positive family life, his coping mechanisms are slightly more healthy. Michelle Williams is also fantastic in an all-too-brief performance.

The Collection

The sequel to The Collector has a significantly higher body count, though it stretches credulity beyond belief. The Collection arrives as a new set of potential victims arrive at a party where a series of booby traps await them. As the raft of nubile youngsters parties unsuspecting, our protagonist from the prior film waits for release from the box in which he was captured at the end of the first film.

Josh Stewart reprises his role as the unsuspecting thief, captured and tortured by the man in the black hood, who must navigate a new lair of horrors at gunpoint to rescue the young woman who releases him from the steamer trunk. After the bloodletting of the first few minutes, disposing of all the throwaway characters, the depravity of this new installment goes beyond the original in less creative, but more realistic ways.

For horror, this is pretty minor stuff. It might have been relegated to the Horror shelf at your local video store where numerous other ’80s titles languished, picked up only by those fascinated with such things. The most frustrating element of films like this is the lack of character development or, at the very least, introducing and giving backstory and information to characters that are only going to survive a few minutes. Horror that kills its young members early in the film rather than letting them being tortured by long sequences of frights isn’t nearly as exciting as it wants to be. This is an improvement over its predecessor, but not by much.