The movie most shown in other movies

"They're coming to get you, Barbra."

There are a lot of quotes we throw around from movies -- "I see dead people," "We're gonna need a bigger boat," etc. -- but steadily gaining on those, building up its cultural currency over the course of 56 years, is the most recognizable line of dialogue from 1968's Night of the Living Dead. 

The familiarity of the quote is not due to any higher number of people seeing the movie than have ever seen it, though I would argue that it's required viewing for any cinephile, and horror fans in particular. In fact, I would argue that I don't even need to argue that, because it is self evident.

No, we all know this quote now because of just how many other movies it appears in. 

A movie showing footage from another movie should be the ultimate sign of respect for that second movie, but it also depends on the context of why the movie is being watched by the characters. For example, Citizen Kane may be the greatest movie of all time, but there are not a lot of scripts that require the characters to be watching it for narrative purposes. And though there are plenty of contexts where we see a small snippet of a familiar movie playing in the real world of a different movie, the most common, by far, is characters watching a scary movie on TV when something scary is about to happen to them in their real lives. (Seven times out of ten, maybe more than that, that scary thing is their death.)

By overwhelming consensus in the filmmaking community, the most likely film to be used in this context is George Romero's seminal zombie film, the one that launched a genre that today has over 1,937 entries. (Note: Number may not be accurate.)

I started thinking about this topic early last month when characters in one of the movies I watched were watching Night of the Living Dead. Doing a quick google search now, I find that this movie was the original Halloween II from 1981, when NOTLD was 13 years old and was already firmly established as a cultural touchstone. To round out the month, the characters in All Hallows' Eve -- which I did watch late on Halloween night after bypassing it the night before in favor of Oddity -- can also briefly be seen watching it. I can't remember if the Barbra line made its appearance in the Halloween II footage, but it definitely does not in All Hallows' Eve -- perhaps considered too on-the-nose by 2013.

What prompted me to actually write this post was watching Borderlands on Amazon Prime last night. The Eli Roth film -- which started off terribly before salvaging itself into merely misguided -- has nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with zombies, though there are some mindless masked characters that sort of resemble war boys from Mad Max: Fury Road. Whatever the reason, Amazon delivered Night of the Living Dead as the next film up in my queue, and because I did not stop it, the movie started to play. 

It's been a long time since I've seen Night of the Living Dead. Or I thought it had been -- my notes now tell me I saw it in 2015, which I don't really remember. In any case, given that it had been on my mind, I was tempted to sit there and watch it. And might have, had it not been 1 a.m., which is actually on the early side for when I've been finishing movies recently. (I try to tell myself that the naps on my too-comfortable couch contribute to my total amount of sleep that night, but I'm not sure it works that way.) And now that I think of it, there's another reason it was on my mind in October, since I saw Ganja & Hess, which stars NOTLD lead Duane Jones.

Sense won out, but I couldn't turn it off without watching the "They're coming to get you, Barbra" line. So I forwarded through the opening few minutes of chit chat between Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) before getting to that line I'd heard uttered in so many other movies. Hearing it felt almost surreal, the way your mind snaps to a different sort of attention when you're listening to a famous speech from history, and then the part that always gets quoted suddenly arrives.

I watched a few more minutes to see Johnny's immediate comeuppance for his mischievous torturing of his sister, and then forced myself to turn it off.

I wanted to see if there was a way to get a definitive list of the other movies where NOTLD gets watched, but even Google's AI -- which takes over in any search situation whether you want it to or not -- could not give me more than a few titles. But given the age of those titles, and the fact that I haven't seen some of them, this is just the tip of the iceberg on the true results list.

Here was what the AI said:

There isn't much info about movies where characters watch Night of the Living Dead, but here are some other movies that reference the 1968 film:

• Christiane F. (1981)
• Halloween II: (1981)
• Terror in the Aisles: (1984)
• I Drink Your Blood: (1971)
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death: (1971)
• Dracula vs. Frankenstein: (1971)

I can't be sure those are characters watching the movie, and in some cases they likely wouldn't be. But I've seen only two of those movies, Halloween II and Let's Scare Jessica to Death, and I feel I have seen this trope -- it's common enough that we can upgrade it to a trope -- in probably a dozen films.

Oooh, I did a slightly different search and got a slightly different result. Check it out:

Here are some films that feature characters watching Night of the Living Dead:

• Fade to Black (1980): Eric watches this movie during a night out
• Halloween II (1981): The Elrods and a security guard watch this movie
• Document of the Dead (1980): This film features Night of the Living Dead
• Christiane F. (1981): This movie features Night of the Living Dead in a cinema room at a "sound" club
• Terror in the Aisles (1984): This film features Night of the Living Dead

You can see the AI teething here, as in some cases it is able to give specific information about what's happening in the movie, and in others it just notes a positive hit. Also it's now clear that the search is in some way limited by the age of the film, or forcing itself to only show a subsection of the results given that an AI search may not have been what I wanted in the first place. But this search gives us another two films that didn't come up in the previous search, neither of which I've seen.

I won't continue with slight alterations of these search terms to see what else I can get.

But you know it to be true. If a screenwriter is trying to prime a character to suffer an "ironic" death -- if it's by an actual zombie in the movie, even better -- then he or she will have the character watch Night of the Living Dead, and more likely than not include Russell Streiner's iconic line.

Now that I'm primed to watch this movie, and I know it's on Amazon, I may have to select my own late-night rewatch in the next few days, despite having missed Halloween. I'll just have to hope there isn't some sort of reanimated rotting corpse outside my window ready to get me.

Correcting the mistakes of the original Halloween II

I was not looking forward to Halloween II -- the second Halloween II, not the first one from 1981, which I also watched this month -- because I did not enjoy Rob Zombie's original Halloween remake. I saw that only two years ago so I didn't watch it again this month.

Two years has been enough time to forget exactly why I didn't like that movie, though I suspect I found it gratuitously violent and otherwise glum. (Whereas some of the other movies I've watched this month have tried to be sort of "fun" within the context of a slasher movie about an unkillable psychopath.)

So I was a bit surprised that I am handing out three stars to Halloween II, which means it is the most number of stars I have given to any movie I saw for the first time this month, just barely. Halloween: H20 earned almost that many at 2.5 stars.

I think the passage of those two years has also seen me become slightly more generous in my star ratings, as I see I gave the 2007 Halloween only 1.5 stars. And though I don't totally remember the particulars, it couldn't have been that bad. I gave Halloween 4 and 5 two stars apiece, and I'd think Zombie's movie has more artistic merits than they do.

Before we get started, my standard SPOILER WARNING. 

The 2009 Halloween II starts off as though it might be a straight remake of the 1981 Halloween II, before veering off in a manner that corrects one of my primary complaints about the original sequel to the original Halloween.

As you will recall from this post, I didn't care for the idea of picking up directly at the end of the first movie. I thought Laurie Strode deserved the chance to take a breath after not quite vanquishing Michael Myers, rather than running another gauntlet of misery at the hospital only a few hours later. 

In fact, here is my exact comment from that post:

"Most supernatural serial killers would take the near-death experience to regroup and recover, and return stronger than ever at some later point -- you know, exactly a year from now, that sort of thing -- with the element of surprise in their favor."

And this is in fact what Michael Myers does in this movie.

At first, we don't think that's the case. In fact, the action picks up at the hospital, much as it did in the first Halloween II. Michael is there and he is eager to chop up anyone who stands between him and Laurie, now played by Scout Taylor-Compton. (I say "now" not because there is a different actress in Zombie's original Halloween, but because this is the first person to play Laurie Strode not named Jamie Lee Curtis.) One of those he chops up is poor sweet Octavia Spencer in one of her earliest roles, playing a nurse. This is a pretty bloody and gratuitous scene, which prepared me to file away Halloween II with Halloween as Zombie going a bit too far.

After about 15 minutes worth of hospital stuff, though, Laurie awakens from a nightmare in her bed at home. It appears the hospital stuff must have not happened at all -- so Octavia is actually alive out there somewhere -- because at the moment she awakens, he'd been just about to bear down on her once and for all. Then on the news we hear that Myers was thought to have been shot dead by Laurie, which must have been the ending of that movie I saw two years ago.

To me, this was Zombie basically saying "No, I did not think it was a good idea to set Halloween II in the hospital either." He felt the need to reference the setting of that movie, before pulling out the rug from under us and saying "Nope, that didn't happen."

And indeed, this is a year later from the original film, as we see Tyler Mane's Michael making a slow and steady track back to Haddonfield, Illinois, that begins on October 29th. 

Should mention Mane here. I can't remember if Zombie made this choice in his first movie, but he is more interested than the series' previous directors have been in showing Michael without his mask. I do think there's something a little deflating if we see Michael too much sans mask, but fortunately, Mane looks quite disturbing in the role, and he does always don the mask again even if it gets discarded for a few minutes. 

While the other incarnations of Michael always favored a knife, this Michael does as much bashing (a stripper repeatedly against a mirror) and crushing (someone's head under his boot) as he does slicing. It's consistent with Zombie's unflinching sense of 21st century brutality, one of several aspects that make the movie more realistic than its predecessors. Another is that Michael still takes a licking and keeps on ticking, but in the short arc of these two movies, he isn't required to survive any episodes that would have 100% surely killed him. Zombie likely correctly believes that he's more frightening if we understand that he's a real human being with major brain malfunctions rather than an actual spawn of the devil who can survive anything. 

A character really worth commenting on here is Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasance in five previous Halloween movies. Although Loomis was a bit nutty and often overplayed by Pleasance, as I've talked about several times already, we never doubted that he was a good guy with the best of intentions. That's not at all the case with Malcolm McDowell's version of the character. The time lapse since the first Halloween has allowed Loomis to release a book on Michael Myers, which is of course coming out on Halloween itself. During the promotion we see him doing for this book, it's clear this guy is a craven asshole who has contempt for his fans and his assistant. What's more, the parents of the girls Michael killed the year before blame him for his culpability, which is exacerbated by the fact that he's profiting off it with this book. Loomis does have a moment of redemption, or at least attempted redemption, in this film, but it's a "too little, too late" sort of thing. The shift in perspective reflects Zombie's cynicism that a heroic doctor would just keep showing up and trying to thwart Michael Myers. Instead, he'd probably be a craven asshole profiting off the experience. 

I enjoyed the other familiar faces that popped up here, from the sheriff played by Brad Dourif, to Bill Fagerbakke as his deputy, to Howard Hesseman and Richard Riehle in "blink and you'll miss them" roles, and even a single scene by Margot Kidder as another psychiatrist. Then of course since it is a Zombie movie, there's Sheri Moon Zombie, playing Michael's (and Laurie's) dead mother, who often shows up in Michael's visions dressed all in white and leading a white horse. 

Even though Zombie's take is darker than that of his predecessors, he does seem to be a leader in the 21st century trend to get into the minds of villains and reveal what made them what they are. Chase Wright Vanek plays the young Michael Myers, also part of the visions with his mother, and we do see some scenes of Michael doing ordinary things like missing his mother. It's consistent with a career-long interest by Zombie in, shall we say, flawed protagonists, as you have to remember that movies like The Devil's Rejects and Three From Hell are told from the perspective of sadistic killers.

I wanted to mention one other name that has not gone mentioned at all this month: Moustapha Akkad, who is the first name seen in the credits of every Halloween movie I've watched this month. This producer was, as far as I can tell, the single consistent creative force behind all the previous movies in the franchise, as each one began with "Moustapha Akkad presents." Well, Akkad died in 2005 -- killed in a bombing, shockingly -- meaning that Zombie's 2007 movie probably had a dedication to him. And that also means that his son Malek inherited that producing credit from him, which I can see he has continued to carry through the recent David Gordon Green films.

One other thing I noticed from the end credits: The stunts were coordinated by Danny Aiello III. Yes, that's Danny Aiello's son. Unfortunately, he also died, the very next year, of pancreatic cancer, meaning his father outlived him by nine years.

In the end I can't really put my finger on why I liked Halloween II enough to give it a mild recommendation. Part of that seems to stem from comparing it to the other movies I've watched this month. If I'd watched Halloween II in a vacuum, maybe I would have felt less enthusiastic toward it, like I did Zombie's first film. But as a change of pace from the sameness of many of the preceding entries that I've watched this month, it may have been just what I needed.

I will finish with the three David Gordon Green movies, scattered in whatever manner I find most tolerable over the remaining six days before Halloween. 

Halloween II - later that same night

I said I was not going to write about each of the 11 movies I'm watching in the Halloween franchise this October, because that's just too much writing. But I had to devote Halloween II its own post, for a number of reasons, but one in particular: This is probably the last Halloween movie with some sort of creativity purity, before the series succumbs to major sequelitis and presumably takes a huge dip in quality.

Also I found it kind of hilarious, and in a way that is noteworthy, rather than just the expected arc of any franchise that devolves into making more and more money with less and less artistic justification.

The biggest determining factor in the quality of the movie, I am inclined to believe, is the fact that John Carpenter was not back as director. He wrote much of the film (that's on him) and was expected to direct, but he had other directing assignments at the time (would have been either The Fog or Escape From New York) and he couldn't make it work. So in stepped Rick Rosenthal, whose only other film I've seen out of a dozen titles is the Sean Penn movie Bad Boys from two years later. Let's just say it was not a fortuitous switch.

The most problematic choice from a narrative perspective is to pick up the story at the exact moment that the original Halloween ends. 

A little lesson in viewer psychology: We like to think that the characters we were following in the first movie got a little break after they emerged with their lives. Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, just barely did at the end of Halloween. We know Michael Myers also only just barely emerged with his life -- at least, we have to assume it was a very narrow survival, after he was shot six times and fell from a balcony -- and so we assume he's still out there, ready to complete the kill on Laurie. But most supernatural serial killers would take the near-death experience to regroup and recover, and return stronger than ever at some later point -- you know, exactly a year from now, that sort of thing -- with the element of surprise in their favor.

Not Michael Myers. He's going to take as many shots at Laurie on Halloween of 1978 as he can possibly manage.

And while that isn't a problem for the end of Halloween, since we don't know at that point that they are going to take this tack on the story, it is certainly a problem for Halloween II, now that we know. 

I might as well give you a SPOILER WARNING for Halloween II at this point.

So equipped with the knowledge of the area he developed as a six-year-old before he was shipped off to a mental institution, Michael follows Laurie to about the darkest and quietest hospital you have ever seen in your life. I'm not sure if you have ever been in a hospital at 2 a.m., but if you have, you know that only the individual patient rooms are dark, while the hallways tend to be as bright as ever due to the need to navigate them safely and due to the 24-hour nature of monitoring patients and ensuring they don't suddenly start to die. This hospital has about one active staff and, as far as we can tell, no patients other than Laurie.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I suppose that is inevitable when you have so much to say about a bad movie that you can't figure out the correct entry point.

So let's back up a step and talk about Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasence.

Now, I tend to think of Pleasence as a good actor. He never got an Oscar nomination or anything like that, but he was a stage-trained British thespian who carries with him a certain serious and sober presence. At the very worst, he's a reliable professional you shouldn't have to worry about being the weak spot of your movie.

From an acting perspective, Pleasence is the weak spot here. I'm not sure if we can blame it on the passing of the directorial baton from Carpenter to Rosenthal, but to put it simply, Dr. Loomis has gone crazy in this movie. Because the film was shot fairly soon after Halloween and because it's the same character, you'd expect Pleasence's performance in Halloween II to be of a piece with his performance in Halloween. Nope. 

I already gave you a spoiler warning, so let's get into and address all of this silly things about Loomis in one paragraph. 

For starters, his manner is that of a crazy person, which is especially problematic since he's playing a doctor who treats crazy people. A generous reading would be that he's become unmoored from his previous calm demeanor because he shot a serial killer six times (a number he keeps repeating in Halloween II) only to watch him not die, but I'm not sure that adequately explains his increasing agitation throughout this movie, as well as certain specific line deliveries that suffer both from writing problems and directing problems, and make you laugh out loud. It gets really absurd when Loomis pulls his gun on a U.S. marshal in order to force the marshal to return to the hospital where he (correctly) believes Michael Myers to be. He waves that gun around like a fool for the rest of the movie. 

His final act actually requires a new paragraph because it's so silly in context. With the gun Loomis gives Laurie near the end of the movie, Laurie shoots Michael in the face, twice. We know this not because we can see a bullet hole in the mask but because there is now blood coming from Michael's eyes. Okay. Whereas Michael has now twice survived a round of bullets to his chest, most recently about 15 minutes earlier in this very hospital, being shot in the face really seems to bother him. He's now left semi-blinded and swinging a scalpel wildly at his targets in an attempt to continue his killing spree. It should be very clear to both Laurie and Loomis -- who has been stabbed, but not fatally -- that Michael is truly incapacitated this time, at least temporarily, and since they don't know what it takes to kill Michael, this is a positive development that should at least allow them to escape the room while Michael is wildly swinging his scalpel. (An image, I should say, that is quite silly in and of itself.) Instead, they release gas into the room and then Loomis stays to flick his lighter, which causes the room to explode and Loomis obviously to be killed. Michael staggers out on fire before finally face-planting, which seems to have really gotten him this time. Again getting a head of myself, the movie ends a few minutes later on a still of this flaming corpse, so we have no reason to believe Michael Myers is not dead. (No reason at the time. In retrospect, they were never going to let this newly iconic serial killer disappear entirely, not when he could keep making them money -- though it should be said that they allowed him to be dead at least for Halloween III, which has nothing to do with him.)

So why on earth did Loomis need to kill himself when he could have easily slipped out of the room and waited for reinforcements while a half-blinded Michael, now clearly operating at diminished capacity, swung around a scalpel wildly? No idea.

Incidentally, I now see that one of Donald Pleasence's few screen acting nominations of any kind was, get this, a Saturn Awards nomination for best actor for -- you guessed it -- Halloween II. 

So let's get into the big spoiler of this movie: There was a "secret file" on Michael Myers that showed that Laurie was actually his younger sister, little more than a toddler at the time Michael killed their older sister. The reason her name isn't Myers is because she was put up for adoption after her parents died, and the Strode family adopted her. Let's get into my problems with this:

1) Since Laurie was obviously too young to remember any of this, not even knowing she was adopted as far as we can tell, that means that her parents had to have both died immediately following Michael's killing of his older sister, in either one or two separate events that have no direct relationship to Michael. Perhaps that subject matter is explored in later films, but at this point in time, it seems pretty unlikely and worth more than just a throwaway comment. 

2) If you are going to put her up for adoption but then seal the records so that nobody could find out, wouldn't you prefer to adopt her off to, I don't know, some other part of the country? Rather than a family who lived on the same street as where the murder occurred? (It may not be the same street but it is at least the same town.)

3) Considering that Michael has, as far as we know, spent the entire time since his institutionalization essentially in a catatonic state -- just waiting, as Loomis says -- how does he even know that Laurie is his sister, let alone how to find her? I suppose we've already suspended disbelief on the idea that he can drive a car, as he did in the last movie, and that he would know how to get to his old home in the town of Haddonfield. But how did he know where to find her on that night? And is "he killed one sister and now wants to kill the other" really a rational motivation for a serial killer? To the extent that anything a serial killer does has any rational mental or emotional foundation. 

Okay let's finish our discussion of Halloween II with some quick-hit observations:

1) One of the bits of unintentional comedy in this movie occurs when, for a moment, they think Michael Myers might have been killed when an adult in a Myers-style mask is hit by a police car at full speed. The police car then collides with a truck, pinning the man between the two, and both vehicles erupt into a very localized fire that allows the police officer to escape the vehicle, but the man to immediately burn to a crisp, requiring the identification of dental records to determine whether or not it's Michael. The slapstick, almost sped-up way this crash plays out cannot be watched without bursting into laughter. 

2) There is also some fairly silly stuff in this movie involving a paramedic played by Lance Guest, star of The Last Starfighter a few years later. At first I didn't get that this guy Jimmy was a paramedic, so for half a second I thought it was the kid they had talked about in the first movie, whom Laurie wanted to ask to the dance. That would have been strange as that kid wasn't in the first movie at all, and now he's coming to the hospital to see Laurie? But that was an incorrect assessment of Jimmy.

So Jimmy is one of those creeping around the hospital with Michael potentially pursuing him, but he ultimately has no interaction with Michael, even though it seems like he would have been set up to be cannon fodder. Instead, he finds a dead nurse on a gurney with all the blood drained from her body. The silly thing about this scene is that Jimmy approaches her body apparently without any recognition of the fact that he's walking through a giant pool of blood, on which he slips and conks himself out after he's started to walk away again. Jimmy's only role in the proceedings is to get a concussion from his fall, which prevents him from being able to drive Laurie away from the hospital later on, when he passes out behind the wheel due to the concussion. And that's the last we hear from Jimmy. (To say nothing of the fact that none of the blood that should cover his entire back, from slipping in the puddle, is anywhere to be seen.)

3) This is less a nitpick than just an observation. Dr. Loomis introduces a discussion of Samhain in this movie, of course pronouncing it "Sam Hain" because that's how the word looks. Having watched the Netflix show Bodkin, I now know this word is a Gaelic word that is actually pronounced more like "Saw Win." Obviously this movie was never going to try to explain that to people.

4) Dana Carvey is in this movie! Though I never would have known unless I'd been watching the closing credits. He plays "assistant" and here is how he looks in the film:

I just watched the clip on YouTube and he doesn't even have a line of dialogue. He just nods to what this woman, a reporter, is telling him.

In fact, in watching this clip, which is very near the beginning of the movie, I just realized it reveals something interesting about the movie's narrative structure. Immediately before we close in on this pair, there is a male reporter speaking to a camera and talking about the three bodies found in the house behind him -- the house where most of the killing occurs in the first movie -- and that the suspect, Michael Myers, is thought to have burned to death.

I didn't notice that when I was watching the movie, but it indicates that this scene is taking place after everything we are about to see. While that also doesn't make sense on some level -- this scene is taking place quite earlier in the night, while Michael doesn't succumb to that fire until almost dawn -- it's an interesting choice as it gives away this movie's ending. I'm almost tempted to go back and re-watch the start of Halloween II to try to get a better sense of the purpose of revealing that Michael burned to death at the very beginning of the movie.

Almost. This movie is not good, and I have a lot more Halloween to watch this month. 

The weekend of problematic horror titles

Scared of the end of summer?

Hollywood is banking on the fact that you are, which is why two studios are releasing high-profile horror sequels this weekend, opposite each other.

What else do these movies have in common? They both have titles that should make you scratch your head, at least for a moment.

First let's take Halloween II. This is supposedly the film that "completes Rob Zombie's vision" for his Halloween remakes, the first of which was released on the same weekend two years ago. (As a personal aside, this is one of only a few movies I returned to the store unwatched. I rented it while my wife was out of town on business, knowing she didn't have much interest. It didn't get watched, and I couldn't be bothered to make the time to watch it after she got back, so I just returned it.)

Now, we all get the idea of rebooting a series, and then naming the new movie the same as the first movie in the original series. Other recent examples include Friday the 13th and The Hills Have Eyes.

But doesn't it get a little conceptually goofy when the sequel in the rebooted franchise has the same name as the sequel in the original series? Halloween II (1981), meet Halloween II (2009).

So in a sense, I guess you could consider this Halloween II ... II.

When the sequel to the new The Hills Have Eyes came out, at least they had the decency to give it a different name than the original sequel. Even if it was only slightly different: The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985) vs. The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007). (The word Part has fallen out of titular fashion these days, as understood as the missing o in the contract don't).

In theory, it shouldn't be that much harder to digest than having two movies called Halloween. IMDB will list the year in the parentheses, and you'll click on the appropriate link.

So I'm trying to analyze why it isn't sitting with me as well, this Halloween II. And I think it's because we're new enough into the rebooting/remaking game that a lot of series have had the original remade, but not yet the sequel. (The Hills Have Eyes and several other prominent examples not withstanding). We're okay in theory with a classic being updated, even keeping more or less the exact same story, with a few modern details to keep things fresh.

But I don't think we're that interested in seeing an entire series play out the same way. Halloween II calling itself Halloween II makes us think that there could then be a Halloween III, which would essentially be a remake of Halloween III, and then a Halloween IV, which would essentially be a remake of Halloween IV. Even though, as mentioned above, this "completes Rob Zombie's vision," the vision of the studio heads may not feel complete if this weekend's box office is good. Then again, those potential future titles would pretty much have to diverge, because the full title for Halloween III was Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and the full title for Halloween IV (they ditched the Roman numerals at this point) was Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. I doubt we'd be quite so "surprised" by the return of Michael Myers this time around.

Of course, there were two more Halloween movies before we even got to the first attempt to reboot/revisit the series, Halloween: H20, which came out in 1998 on the 20th anniversary of the first. If I see Halloween: H20 II, or Halloween: H40, come out in 2018, I'll be really concerned.

Okay, let's move on to the second movie, about which I have considerably less to say.

It's The Final Destination, the fourth in the Final Destination series, making this series an infant compared to Halloween, which today offered up its (gasp) ninth.

The most obvious problem rests there in that definite article in the title.

We won't worry about confusing search engines, which sometimes drop the word "the," considering it a superfluous term that could get numerous false hits. (Just for fun, I googled the word "the" just now, and it returned 1.2 billion hits -- which suggests to me that's probably the most hits the algorithm can handle). In one sense, this is essentially the same trick that The Fast and the Furious pulled when it rebooted/produced the fourth in its series (the debate is still open) with Fast and Furious early this year. (Check here for a complete discussion).

Except that The actually could have a different function here. It could be a reboot, yeah -- an idea supported by that that they're returning IN 3-D! (Capitalization, italics and excess enthusiasm are mine).

But it could also mean that this is THE final destination -- the ultimate destination, the last in the series. All those other ones were final destinations, sort of -- but this is THE final destination.

Kind of robs the word "final" of some of its prior power, doesn't it?

Of course, it serves the producers of this movie to be ambiguous. Hey, they've got their minds on their summer homes just like the rest of us. (For most of us, on the theoretical summer homes we one day theoretically will have). "Vision" always gives way to the chance to make more money. Ambiguity prevents them from having to commit to this really being the last chapter. Pending this weekend's box office, of course.

So will I be adding to the box office of either this weekend?

Halloween II, possibly; The Final Destination, no, but I will be in a couple weekends.

Halloween II is one of the movies playing at the drive-in this weekend. We may or may not be there tomorrow night, depending on a number of complicating factors, not the least of which are the health of my car and the health of my own person. (I'm still trying to cough out the rest of the residual phlegm). There are eight movies playing, four double features, and we aren't planning to see Zombie's movie, but you never know how things will turn out at the drive-in -- one of its chief thrills.

In a weird kind of preparation for potentially seeing it, actually, I borrowed the original Halloween from the library, which my wife hasn't seen. We may watch it tonight. I figure if we end up seeing the sequel to the movie neither of us has seen, at least we'll both have seen the original, and in that sense will have some basis for understanding what we're seeing. (How much backstory you actually need in a horror movie is, of course, debatable).

As for TFD, I have a date to see it in a couple weekends with the same friend who saw at least the second in the series, and possibly the third, with me. I'm a sucker for that 3-D. (Except when, sometimes, I'm not).

Yeah, I can attack the semantics of these movies' titles with the best of them. But do I back it up by depriving them my money?

Nah.