There were three main reasons I was looking forward to it:
1) Green is a director of genuine talent who has made some movies I like very much. He's also made some movies I don't like, so his involvement was no guarantee of success, but it did stack the deck in his favor.
2) With these three movies having been made in the past six years, there would be no distracting choices that could be tied to the age of the film, which, whether fair or not, have biased me against certain entries in this series. (I've mentioned in previous posts not liking the look and feel of the movies made in 1995 and 2002, for example.)
3) Jamie Lee Curtis would be back again. Although Curtis stars, or at least appears in, two films in this series that I really did not like (the first Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection), more often than not, her presence brings credibility to this franchise.
Well, there were so many things I ended up not liking about Halloween that they overwhelmed the presence of Curtis and the generally good filmmaking of Green.
It starts with this line of dialogue -- given by Curtis' Laurie Strode to a pair of British podcasters inquiring about Michael Myers, who represent the series' latest attempt to tie this material to an entertainment trend, after Resurrection was set in the world of live webcasting -- which is dripping with incredulity:
"Michael Myers killed five people, and you want to try to understand him?"
Maybe the incredulity should be ours.
FIVE people? What the f is all this "five people" talk?
I could scarcely believe there was any single movie where Michael killed only five people, let alone in his entire history as a famous serial killer.
Because she can't have forgotten his original murder of her older sister, Laurie either has to be terrible at math or can only be talking about a single night of killing, which was stretched out over the first two Halloween movies. But even in those two movies, he has to have killed way more than four additional people.
Before I get into actually counting, I have to say what enraged me most about this. It means that after Halloween H20 had already definitively wiped out three movies worth of killing by Michael -- which included the whole existence of a Laurie Strode daughter named Jamie, who starred in the first two of those films and appeared briefly in the third -- this Halloween also wipes out H20 and the movie that followed it, Resurrection, in which Laurie also appeared just a briefly as Jamie had.
This I cannot tolerate, and it just doesn't make any sense.
If we think of the James Bond series as a comparison, we have all comfortably come to the conclusion that each individual incarnation of James Bond remembers all the other events in the life of that version of himself. So the James Bond who left the series after A View to a Kill, when Roger Moore exited, would remember all the way back to the events of Moore's first film, Live and Let Die. That's not to say that each Bond graduated the 00 academy when his first movie started, just that if we're trying to understand the experiences the character has had, we can limit them to those movies.
So now Laurie Strode does not even have all the memories and experiences of Jamie Lee Curtis' time as Laurie Strode? WTF?
I understand why they wiped away the Jamie Lloyd trilogy with H20. They decided, perhaps correctly, that it was a bit of a non-starter and they should just get back on track with Laurie Strode once Curtis decided to return. But why now wipe away certain parts of Strode's history? Why not write Halloween 2018 within the constraints of what has already happened to Laurie, which is her moving to California to become the headmistress of a private school, her beheading what she thought was Michael Myers when Michael (we learn after the fact) put his mask on the face of a paramedic who'd had his larynx crushed, and her suffering a breakdown and going into a mental institution?
I get that each new screenwriter who comes to the series may not agree with all the choices made by previous screenwriters. But when you have all this stuff out there, you have to "yes and" it, to use the improv terminology. You have to take what's already on the record and figure out a way to turn it into what you want to write now. I suspect the trio who wrote this -- one of whom is John Carpenter, so respect where respect is due -- just decided that these previous movements by Laurie didn't fit into their conception of where they wanted to take the character now, so they just discarded them, rather than giving themselves the slightly tougher challenge of explaining it. Then again, it's only slightly tougher. A single line of dialogue accomplishes it, usually.
There are two main reasons this does not work for me at all:
1) This now makes the second reconfiguration of Laurie's descendants, though this one was not even necessary. In H20, Jamie Lloyd was written out of existence as a Laurie Strode offspring, replaced by Josh Hartnett as John. Okay, fine. You get one do-over. Now in 2018, John has also been written out of existence. That's fine if you didn't want to use Hartnett again, but why not replace him with another actor and keep the John character in existence? The reason, I suppose, is that if you are disavowing the events of H20 and Resurrection anyway, then you are not committed to any of their logic. So now Laurie has a daughter again, Karen, played by Judy Greer, who has her own daughter, making Laurie a grandmother. Never mind that Laurie was already a grandmother back in 1995 in The Curse of Michael Myers, when Jamie Lloyd gave birth before being killed. (Incidentally, watching these movies in close succession has allowed me to identify their steaming piles of bullshit like no one else probably can.)
2) This now makes Laurie certifiably crazy. Because I haven't told you the type of Laurie Strode we meet here. She is a gun-toting survivalist in the mold of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, stockpiling weapons in her basement and triggering her house with traps in preparation for Michael's arrival.
Why is this crazy? Because it means it has now been 40 YEARS since her one and only interaction with Michael Myers. Anyone who tailors 40 years of her life toward something that you have no evidence for believing will ever happen is a certified lunatic. And even if she's ultimately right, and all those guns and booby traps play into the finale of this movie, that doesn't make her any less crazy. If I won't ride in a car for 40 years because I am worried about dying in a car accident, then die in a car accident after finally riding in a car, that does not make me smart for not riding in a car. It just means I did way too much walking or riding on horseback for 40 years.
This also has a major impact on the idea that Michael Myers is a legendary serial killer in this world, his name mentioned in hushed tones only. If you killed five people over one night -- actually four people, since you killed your sister 15 years before that -- then you are not a serial killer. You are a guy who had a bad night. (Though I suppose, not as bad a night as those four people had.)
This Halloween wants all the accumulated kills of the previous ten Halloween movies -- I would not be surprised if they approached 100 -- in its consideration of Michael as an iconic member of the all-time pantheon of killers, without any of those things actually having happened. And that is a major problem. Do you really do a podcast 40 years later on a guy who killed four people in one night? Does anyone care, or even remember him?
Okay now let's get back to fact-checking even this film's own logic about the number of people Michael killed. And for this I will go to Wikipedia in the hopes that it will mention each of the kills individually.
We know it started with Michael's sister in 1963. So that's one.
Michael's first murder as an adult is of a mechanic after he escapes the mental institution, whose coveralls he steals to help comprise his iconic outfit. For the benefit of the doubt, let's say that murder was not definitively tied to Michael or that Laurie doesn't know about it. (Or that, Laurie doesn't consider a mechanic a person. Such a snob.) For our count, though, that's two.
Once Michael is in Haddonfield proper and begins stalking Laurie's friends, he kills three of them: Lynda, Annie and Bob. This gets us to the five that Laurie mentioned, as he does not manage to kill anyone else in the first Halloween, though he does kill a dog.
The problem with getting to five after a single Halloween movie is that it means that even the events of Halloween II have now been scrubbed from the record, which just makes any continuing fixation Laurie has with Michael, to say nothing of his enduring place in popular consciousness, all the more absurd. According to Wikipedia, he kills another eight people in Halloween II.
Idiocy. Idiocy that ruined much of the movie for me with just one stupid line of dialogue.
Oh but there are plenty of other things I didn't like. So many that I'm not sure I can comprise a logical order for presenting them, so I won't even try. I haven't yet issued a SPOILER WARNING so it is probably time to do that now.
1) The British podcasters are bad characters, but they are killed unceremoniously quite early on in the film. It's just one example of an idea the movie starts but doesn't see through to its logical conclusion. If we are meant to despise them because of their opportunistic interest in, and usury of, the Haddonfield locals, doesn't it make more sense to carry them around until the end, when we can really get behind their inevitable slaughter? Instead, they are dispatched in a random scene in a bathroom after they stop to get gas.
2) Another idea not seen through: the randomly cheating boyfriend of Laurie's granddaughter Allison. Trying to be current or topical, I suppose, the movie has these characters go to a Halloween party dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, only she's Clyde and he's Bonnie. His name is Cameron and he's played by Dylan Arnold, an actor with a very definite good guy face. Yet despite the fact that these two seem to be quite gaga for each other, including a cutesy joint Halloween costume, at this party he randomly kisses another girl, and then throws Allison's phone into a bowl of punch. (It's supposed to be because he's drunk, but this is quite a ludicrous interpretation of drunkenness.) Even though this seems like completely unmotivated behavior, it's the kind of thing we might expect when a movie is trying to undercut a character so we aren't so heartbroken when the killer slashes their throat. You know, the traditional role for the teenage girl who dies because she had sex. Instead, Allison walks off on Cameron and we simply never see Cameron again. Huh?
3) WHEN IS SOMEONE GOING TO TRANSFER MICHAEL MYERS BETWEEN HOSPITALS AT A DIFFERENT TIME OF THE YEAR? For what seems like the fourth or fifth time in this series -- including all the movies that apparently no longer exist in the chronology -- Michael gets an opportunity to escape because he's being transferred. Why not just transfer him in April? June? February? September even? Why does he have to be transferred on October 29th or 30th every single time?
4) We have to talk about this movie's Dr. Loomis surrogate, a former student of Loomis' named Dr. Sartain, who is played by Haluk Bilginer. (I could have sworn it was Rade Serbedzija, but it was not.) This character represents the single dumbest bit of plotting in the whole movie. He's doing Dr. Loomis-like things, presiding over Michael's transfer and then arriving on the scene to help provide a pop psychological profile of Michael to the local police, so they will understand what they are up against. (But if Michael is such a famous serial killer, shouldn't they know this already?) Anyway, the thing about Dr. Sartain is that it turns out he's so fascinated by Michael from studying him all these years that he actually wants to see what it's like to kill someone, as well as keep Michael alive in order to keep studying him and to see if Michael will ever utter a word. So after he's riding in a police cruiser carrying Allison that hits Michael with a car -- which makes the six or seventh time in this series either the actual Micheal Myers, or the wrong Michael Myers (both Halloween II and H20), has been hit by a car -- Dr. Sartain pulls out a scalpel-like knife and stabs the officer in the neck, killing him in order to keep Michael alive. He then temporarily dons the mask himself. This was just dumb.
5) We need to say something about this police officer because it is another of the film's half-baked ideas. He's named Officer Hawkins and is played by Will Patton, and he's supposed to be a link to the original Halloween -- he says he reported to the scene the night of Michael's 1978 killings. That isn't a problem in and of itself, but the way the film introduces him, it's like it's a bit of fan service. We see him playing pinball, being razzed about his prowess by some black dude who never appears again and is probably in this movie only for tokenism, and then he finally turns so the camera sees him. It's the kind of shot you use when you want to reveal that this is a character we know but were not expecting to see, and we're supposed to say "A-ha!" when we see him. But I checked IMDB just now, and Patton was not in the original Halloween. Even if the character was -- which I doubt -- revealing him in this way only works as a surprise if we know the actor, since we wouldn't at this point know who the character was. As with the podcasters, this character is dispatched in a manner that does not seem to fully play out his arc before it gets rid of him.
6) We have to talk about Laurie Strode's house. She lives in the woods behind a gate with all kinds of security measures. I won't go on and on about how this is stupid because she interacted with Michael Myers on only one night 40 years ago, because I've already done that. What I will say is that she uses her security measures in a truly idiotic fashion.
So Laurie has this cool device in her kitchen where she can use a remote control so that the island in the middle of her kitchen moves to the side, revealing a hidden compartment in her basement that is basically like a panic room. That's where all her weapons are. Presumably, this was created just for the purpose of the arrival of Michael Myers, since she would not have any reason to believe any other serial killer was stalking her. Yet when Michael does arrive, and she does safely get her and her daughter Karen into the panic room, she completely blows the entire purpose of having a hidden chamber by taking a shot at Michael with her shotgun through the floor boards. Since Michael has never been to this house, we have to assume he would not know about the panic room and would walk around fruitlessly for a while before deciding to leave and go do something else. But by taking a random shot at him, now she has revealed that there are people under the floor, and now Michael knows that he should start ripping away the island to try to get down there.
What's even dumber about this is that Michael actually does leave for another part of the house -- I can't remember why -- even after Laurie has shot at him, which suggests that their hiding place is still safe. Saying she has to "finish this," Laurie then opens the door and goes back up, risking that Michael would see the island moving aside and know where they were hiding. Why have such a thing if you are not planning to properly use it the one time you actually need it??
But without a doubt the most idiotic part of Laurie's plan is that she has rigged her panic room and other areas of her house with gas and an ability to ignite flame, so she can burn down her house as a means of killing Michael. This includes bars that cross the exit of the panic room if she hits a particular switch, meaning she was already planning for the hypothetical scenario where Michael would be in the panic room but she and her family would not be. You'd have to figure things had already failed pretty spectacularly if you got to that point. But let's set that aside. Let's also set aside that Laurie plans to burn down her whole house, where her daughter (who is now about 38) lived when she was a little girl, in order to hopefully kill Michael, sacrificing any comfort and sentimentality from 40 years of her life for this purpose. The biggest problem is that in the events of Halloween II -- which, granted, may not have even happened in this version of the timeline -- fire was a means of killing Michael that notably did not succeed, as getting caught in an explosion and burning to a crisp were apparently survivable injuries for him.
I have to stop at this point due to the sheer quantity of words. But I could go on for quite a long time.
One thing I did want to mention, though, is that I was interested to note that this movie is dedicated to the memory of Moustapha Akkad, the longtime series producer who died in 2005 and who I assumed would have been memorialized in Rob Zombie's 2007 movie Halloween, when his son Malek took over as producer. This means they either didn't dedicate the Zombie movie too him, which I find odd, or they did dedicate it to him, but still felt that it was appropriate to dedicate this version of Halloween to him too, even though he died 13 years earlier. Which is also odd.
And so it is that, to my great surprise, at least one of David Gordon Green's Halloween movies gets as low a rating from me as the series' previous lows, The Curse of Michael Myers and Resurrection, each of which got only a single star on Letterboxd. I have a system of recording my favorite and least favorite new movie I watch each month, and it will truly be a dogfight between these three to see which gets the latter for October.
It is my sincere hope that after getting all these story complaints out of my system with this movie, I can just focus on the movies on their own terms for the final two movies, to date, in this franchise.
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