Nope. Can't do it. I'm still hung up on Laurie Strode and the wretched continuity of her character.
I won't rehash everything I talked about it in my last post. It's the last post, so you can find it without a link if you want to catch yourself up to speed on the minutia. (And I'll put the requisite SPOILER WARNING in now.)
But I will say that Halloween Ends, the penultimate (to date) Halloween film that was released in 2021, definitively does the thing that I feared Green's first Halloween film from 2018 was doing: It wipes Halloween II from existence. The original Halloween II, not Rob Zombie's Halloween II, which looks like a masterpiece compared to these films.
I didn't like Halloween II. In fact I thought it was quite bad. But it is a part of the Halloween chronology, for better or worse, and at a bare minimum should serve a function in establishing why Michael Myers is considered a legendary killer you should fear with every fiber of your being.
Nope. Never happened.
I had thought that was what Green's first Halloween was saying, but now I'm sure. Why am I sure? Because in Halloween Kills, we get something that, in and of itself, is sort of interest twist in this series in that we haven't really seen it before. We get a full flashback scene set in 1978, buttressed by a few other callbacks to that full scene. For good measure, this scene includes the actor-director Jim Cummings and Thomas Mann, star of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
Promising enough start, and the flashback is interesting in and of itself. In this scene we learn that Sheriff Hawkins -- played by Will Patton, who I mistakenly thought was killed in the previous movie -- blames himself for not allowing Dr. Loomis to execute Michael on that night, when he was a young officer. (He also shoots Cummings in the neck while Michael is holding him hostage. Not a good night for young Hawkins.)
However, it's clear from this sequence that Michael was taken into custody right after Loomis' failed assassination attempt. He didn't go to the hospital to have another showdown with Laurie. In fact, now I'm even wondering if the end of the original Halloween, when Loomis shoots him and he staggers off the balcony, itself even happened. In any case, the stuff about Loomis blowing himself and Michael up, and Laurie's second ordeal of the night at the hospital? No, those things never happened.
This confirms the thing that annoys me most about this trilogy, which is now two-thirds completed: That this is the FIRST TIME Michael has come back since he was taken into custody in 1978. He killed a mechanic and three teenagers, he I guess also was responsible for the death of the Cummings character (which Laurie apparently never knew about, else she might have mentioned it) and then he was taken into custody, where he remained for the next FORTY YEARS.
What's so great about a guy who stuck a knife into a couple people and then wasn't heard from again until he was a senior citizen?
And yet they continue to talk about Michael as though he has come back several times before, as though the town of Haddonfield, Illinois has lived in fear of his next inevitable return. They continue to tell stories about that night in 1978 when he killed those people. The grown Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) even has a lifelong bond with two other kids, also now grown, who saw Michael that night. And he whips the whole town into a frenzy chanting "Evil dies tonight!" just from this one episode from a mentally impaired man who has been sitting quietly in an institution for four decades.
It's just complete and utter bullshit.
Halloween is just a bad serial killer movie. (Green's, not John Carpenter's.) Halloween Kills is a bad serial killer movie with a message in it, which is much worse.
And that message is: mob rule and mob vengeance is bad.
I'd be tempted to credit Halloween Kills with being very timely, if it was wagging its finger at the mob who tried to overthrow the government on January 6th. But I doubt the script was written in time to capture that, since the movie was released nine months later and they would have been working on it for a couple years, considering that its predecessor was released in 2018. Plus even if that was the intention, it does so badly.
So Tommy Doyle enlists a riot of crazy townspeople to go after Michael with whatever blunt instruments are nearby. He himself carries a baseball bat. I guess since Michael has never returned before and is only known for sticking a knife into a few people, maybe they figure they can get him with the blunt instruments. Maybe this also explains why non-professional vigilantes frequently pursue Michael into dark houses without any backup. (Talking about other scenes here, where they branch off from the mob.)
Idiotically -- I find I am using the word "idiot" or one of its variants a lot in these posts -- they spend a good deal of time chasing a different mental patient who escaped in the same crash of the prison bus that freed Michael. The guy they are chasing is about 5'1" and has long hair and looks a bit like an elongated hunchback. Green devotes so much time to this pursuit through Haddonfield Memorial Hospital that we are already laughing by the time the man decides to jump off the building to take his own life before the crowd can get him. I suppose this is slightly better than showing them beat the man to death, but given how little concept this guy has of what's going on around him, I'm hard pressed to understand why he would jump off a building to his death.
So this mob also factors into what may be the most ridiculous scene in any of these movies, and that's saying a lot. They do corner Michael Myers and go at him with their various blunt instruments, and it appears to be working. Michael is subdued and Laurie's daughter Karen (Judy Greer) appears to finish him off with a final knife in the back. You'd think the worse injury was when she stuck him through with a pitchfork earlier, but this is Michael Myers we're talking about -- you and I know what he's capable of even if these people don't.
Of course it's a fake death. But I can't believe Michael would allow himself to be subdued to the point of near death only so he could troll this mob by rising up and killing them all.
But that's what he does. He rises up, and in a series of slow-mo one-on-one moments, he slaughters each and every one of the dozen? two dozen? people who were just surrounding him, apparently without any nearby cops noticing, or any of the people fighting back like they were doing so effectively just a few minutes before. No, they just stand there and spurt large quantities of blood from their mouths and necks.
Did I mention that Michael also slaughters a whole team of firefighters, a pair of random Black characters who appear in a number of scenes but whose function in the narrative was never clear to me, and the two gay characters who are currently living in the old Myers house, who called each other Big John and Little John?
As if there has not been enough slaughter in this movie, especially compared to the original five people Michael was meant to have killed 40 years ago, the movie has to add one more in. Karen, Laurie's daughter, goes up to the second floor of the old Myers house so she can look out through Michael's old bedroom window. So she can see what it felt like, I guess? And then of course Michael's there, and kills her by stabbing her repeatedly.
So now Laurie's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichuk) has lost both of her parents in this long night, as her dad was killed in the previous film, and all the previous survivors of Michael Myers from 40 years ago, which include a nurse who has inexplicably appeared in like five Halloween movies now, have also been killed. Is more more, Green? I counter that it is not.
So where has Laurie been in all this?
At the hospital, of course. The place she spent parts of both versions of Halloween II, once when she was played by a different actress. And since this is, in its own way, another Halloween II, I suppose it makes sense that she's there.
But in all the ways this film and its predecessor -- and I assume the film that comes next as well -- are unrealistic, the one way they choose to resemble reality is that Laurie needs to go to the hospital and spend basically the whole movie in a hospital bed because she got stabbed in the stomach? Is that really the best way to go with Laurie, or for that matter, with Jamie Lee Curtis?
Maybe so. Curtis is pretty bad in these movies. It's hard to believe she was only a year away from winning an Oscar.
So she finds out Karen is dead because she calls her phone and Michael picks up, just breathing into it. She doesn't seem fazed that this means that her daughter is likely dead. She just tells Michael she's coming for him and then walks out of the hospital with a very purposeful look on her face.
God I can't wait for these movies to be over.
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