Be thankful for what’s not on screen

For movie fans, the Thanksgiving holiday provides a chance to reflect and be grateful that some of the most annoying movie trends of the past two decades have died quiet deaths.

While there’s always a lot of rote, cynically produced junk sullying theater screens, for now it’s a different type of junk. At least when it’s not a remake of some slasher film from the 1980s.

So be thankful that:

•It’s been several years since a Steven Seagal movie has been shown in theaters.

The squinty one is still working, but his output has gone straight to video, where it can be easily avoided.

In the late ’80s and ’90s his movies took up valuable screen space in multiplexes, sporting interchangeable titles such as “Hard to Kill,” “Marked for Death,” “Out for Justice, “Above the Law,” etc. Each time Seagal played the same type of tough guy, the cop/ex-cop/ex-military man who takes on an inordinate amount of well-armed bad guys and beats them all to a pulp in humorless style.

He managed to achieve sarcasm in 1992’s “Under Seige,” making his filmography seem like the world’s most expensive acting class.

•There seem to be fewer serial killer movies being made.

Since the success of 1991’s “Silence of the Lambs,” the fascination with serial killers spawned innumerable, mostly unwatchable knock-offs. Currently the “Saw” films are the only notable survivor of the genre.

Movies like “Zodiac” and “Monster” don’t count because (a) they’re based on true stories and (b) they’re actually good.

•Pauly Shore has not starred in a major studio release since 1996.

In 2003 the comedian with the powerfully annoying California surfer drawl directed and starred in the independent comedy “Pauly Shore is Dead,” the title of which suggests a gesture of atonement.

His last studio film was 2001’s “The Wash,” a Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre vehicle in which Shore appeared as “Man in Trunk.”

•There has not been another “Police Academy” movie since 1994.

Periodically a producer who’s completely bereft of ideas tries to put together another sequel, most recently in 2006. It hasn’t happened yet, though anything’s possible.

But be bitter that:

•A remake of “Friday the 13th” is coming.

Since 1980, the horror film franchise has used every sharp instrument on Earth (axe, knife, machete, cleaver, ice pick, spear, arrow) to depict the killing of hormone-addled teenagers.

Some kind of epic-scale disaster would have to occur for producers to stop inflicting “Friday the 13th” films on the moviegoing public.

Maybe if a “Friday the 13th” movie bankrupted an industrialized nation, triggered an irreversible ecological decline or led to days of bloody rioting in the streets, the movies would stop coming.

For a few years, at least.