The insanity ends now

It was probably a pretty insane undertaking to try to watch all ten of the Halloween movies I hadn't seen, plus to kick off the series by re-watching the first one, in a space of only 31 days. Really it was more like 28 or 29 days since I didn't watch the original Halloween until October 3rd.

It has undoubtedly affected my impression of the movies, at least a little bit, whereas spacing them out naturally across the course of my viewing life would have been a better way for me to take them on their own terms, and not be entirely sick of the whole experience. (But, I'd argue, I probably wouldn't have bothered to get to many of them, if those were the conditions under which I'd do it.)

But the question remains, how much has it affected my impression? Did it make me that much more likely to nitpick, or did it put me in the unique position of being able to submit these movies to their best possible analysis? The analysis they deserve?

"You are too close to it," a friend of mine said as a response to one of my observations about the catastrophically poor continuity of the series. "This would only bother me if I were watching them all in close succession."

That may be true. But just because a typical viewer is likely to have only a hazy memory of the previous film in the series they watched, it doesn't mean the movies are relieved of their responsibility of tying into one another in a way that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence or take his/her loyalty for granted. Because there are, indeed, some people who would watch them all in close succession, like I have done.

As I reached the final installment of the franchise last night, Halloween Ends, I'll say that I have to hand it to David Gordon Green. I expected one thing from his final film and I got quite another -- though the other thing I got is almost as much of a failure as his first two movies, in the end.

Now is the time for my final Halloween SPOILER ALERT.

The way Green left off the previous film, Halloween Kills, was to have a rage-filled Laurie Strode stride out of the hospital carrying a bloody knife, ready to hunt down and kill her brother, who had just killed her daughter. 

So I thought this movie would pick up straight at that point -- yes, a third straight Halloween movie taking place within a single 24-hour period -- with a protracted final showdown between Laurie and Michael Myers that somehow ran to feature length.

Instead, this movie picks up four years later, though only after picking up one year later. I should probably explain them in order.

Our cold open takes place in the home of a family we've never met before, involving a non-family member we've never met before, one year later. The non-family member is Corey Cunningham, a frizzy-haired 21-year-old overplayed by Rohan Campbell, who is a bit reminiscent of Patrick Dempsey in his Can't Buy Me Love days. He's babysitting a young brat who seems to be delightfully precocious, jumping out at his mom to scare her on Halloween, but might actually just be a little dickhead. After the kid locks his babysitter in a room upstairs right as his parents are about to get home, which means the babysitter will get in trouble for not having put his charge to bed earlier, Corey kicks down the door after repeated requests to the kid to let him out. The kid is on the other side of the door, and is knocked over the railing of a three-story spiral staircase, where he falls to his death. This is when John Carpenter's score kicks in and we are treated to the credits.

I didn't at first have any idea where this story was going to go, and I thought it was a promising attempt to break out of the formula that has plagued both the lesser (many) and greater (few) entries in the series. (There are only two movies in the series that actually feel fully fresh, which is the original and Halloween III: Season of the Witch.)

But then maybe the bigger surprise is that the movie jumps forward four years to the time of its release, 2022. Instead of Laurie having angrily tracked Michael down that night -- she tried but he disappeared -- she's started over in a calmer, apparently happier, more typically grandmotherly manner than she'd been displaying for the 20 years of her granddaughter's life. That granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichuk) now lives with her after the death of both of her parents over the course of the previous two movies, again apparently happier, in the quite large and traditional house Laurie bought in the wake of burning down her previous one in her attempt to kill Michael.

Okay let's stop here for a moment. It occurs to me we have no idea what Laurie does, or did, for a living. The series tried to give her a job in one of my "favorite" previous entries, Halloween H20, where she was serving as headmistress at a private school in California. But when those events were stricken from the record by Green's movies, that left us with no idea how Laurie managed to amass any income over the course of her shell-shocked life.

Especially not enough income to purchase a quite beautiful, quite large for two people, home in the suburbs. (Still in Haddonfield. Some people never learn.) Not after she was guilty of burning down her own home in Green's first Halloween, thereby voiding any provisions in her insurance policy that would pay her for that loss. Maybe this movie teaches us that Laurie is someone who commits insurance fraud? Okay that's probably too nitpicky. 

So it's almost like Green -- and more to the point, his collection of writers, who include actor Danny McBride -- is trying course correct on his own movies. If you have set up Laurie as a hair-trigger survivalist type, it seems weird to abandon that. It's almost like Laurie is more calm in the four years since Michael reappeared for the first time since 1978 -- and then disappeared without a trace, meaning he's still out there -- than she was in the previous 40 years, when she had no reason to believe Michael would ever return to bother them again. (There's a humorous line here as part of her occasional voiceover, where he says "And just like I predicted, Michael escaped 40 years later." Um, you don't get credit for predicting something as a real danger when it takes four decades to finally happen.)

So back to this Corey character. He starts out as mildly sympathetic, maybe not an awesome guy but clearly not liable in the accidental death of this child who had locked him in a room upstairs. He's tormented by the locals, particularly a trio of stereotypical movie bullies (who at least have the benefit of appearing on screen in 2022, so they are diverse by gender and race). It's clear this guy should just get out of Haddonfield, but like Laurie, he does not either. (That's because he has a creepy (s)mother at home, who at one point in this movie tries to kiss him.)

Inexplicably, Laurie's granddaughter, Allyson, falls for him, despite no evidence whatsoever that this guy would be any fun to be with or that even has many of his marbles left. I think we're supposed to think that Allyson is attracted to him because she's also damaged, but Matichuk depicts her damage only very inconsistently. In fact, this script requires her to regularly change attitudes with no notice or antecedent in the action, which feels more like bad writing than true character beats.

Anyway, Corey has some sort of interaction with Michael in the cave where Michael has been hiding -- again I wonder how he has been feeding himself all this time -- and the experience causes some sort of transfer of Michael's evil to Corey. So now Corey is effectively an unstable Michael Myers clone, eventually doing his own killing and using Michael's mask. Of course, Michael is also still around and also uses his own mask. It would be really useful if they could get another mask, then they could each have one. 

When this movie is clearly framed as the final chapter -- like maybe for the whole franchise, though someone will obviously make another one, probably before 2030 -- it seems unusual to spend so much effort on introducing this new character. It's not the first time in this series that someone has introduced the notion that Michael's evil is contagious, but it seems more to be setting up the idea of Michael's evil being eternal, when this movie ends definitively enough in that regard (he's ground up in the gears of some kind of junk yard compactor at the end).

Again Green is trying to say something profound here, about the persistence and immortality of evil, and he has Laurie deliver these thoughts a number of times in some pretty bad dialogue. (Laurie is writing a book, which I guess excuses the voiceover.) But again he fails, and the ending of this movie feels very flat. Along the way there has been a bunch more random killing -- don't get me started on the mildly racist portrayal of a Black DJ who seems to be right out of the 1970s, who has no purpose in the narrative than to get his tongue cut off so it can ride around on the vinyl and interrupt the song every time the tongue passes the needle -- and really not a lot else in terms of anything that makes us think.

So while I am slightly more positive on this final entry than I was on the previous two, the movie still falls a full star-and-a-half short of a recommendation. 

I think I thought I was going to talk about more ridiculous things from this movie -- best not even to get into the Laurie Strode suicide fakeout -- but after a month worth of outrage, I'm all outraged out. 

And super relieved to not be watching any more Halloween movies, though I must say, I actually kind of enjoyed the experience in a weird way. Only one of the ten new movies I saw this month actually earned the minimum star rating for a recommendation, and it was from a movie -- Rob Zombie's Halloween II -- that I would have given a pretty low chance of attaining that distinction before the series started. But the experience definitely stimulated me, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of words I've written (not doing an actual word count here) over the course of ten different posts. That's right, I originally thought I would write combined posts in which I discussed more than one movie, but the one time I tried that, I found I had way too much to say, and was already forgetting things I wanted to say about the first of those two movies. I suppose for a blogger, it is better when you want to write more rather than less.

And so I have two more nights to watching a scary movie that is not a Halloween movie. (Not that any of the Halloween movies actually scared me, which might be their biggest sin.) I'm hoping to get to the  point of beingt scared with whatever I watch on Halloween night with my wife, but tonight I'll probably fall short as we watch the kid-appropriate movie Nightbooks with my ten-year-old.

Laurie Strode spends another night in a hospital

Last post, I vowed to try to take David Gordon Green's last two Halloween films, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends (oh don't tease us with the promised finality of that last one), on their own terms. 

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. 

Revising Michael's body count (again), making Laurie crazier

I have been looking forward to the end of this Halloween viewing marathon, for the obvious reason that it would no longer involve me watching a Halloween movie every 2.8 days on average this month. But the second reason is that it would finally bring me to the recent trilogy directed by David Gordon Green, beginning with 2018's Halloween, the third such movie in the franchise to be so named, which would also end the series' longest dry spell of nine years since the previous entry.

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. 

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. 

Time to reboot Halloween again

The eighth movie in the Halloween franchise is notable for a number of reasons, and again, there will be SPOILERS to follow:

1) It was the first one made in the 21st century, and it shows.

2) It was the first time in the series a second movie was directed by the same person. Rick Rosenthal, who directed Halloween II, is back for more with Halloween: Resurrection, but hasn't improved in the 20 years since his first franchise appearance. (Incidentally, the remaining five films in the series to date would be directed by two different directors, neither of whom directed fewer than two films.)

3) It definitively clarified something I was starting to get an idea about in the last new movie, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, that being that this franchise is now treating Halloween 4, 5 and 6 as if they never happened. How do I know this? Early on we meet a mental patient who is obsessed with serial killers -- knows when they're born, knows how many people they killed, etc. When he recites the litany of Michael Myers' crimes, he conveniently skips straight from the events of Halloween and Halloween II to the events of Halloween H20, with no mention of what can now be considered the ill-fated Jamie Lloyd side trilogy. I'd argue that without the dozen to 20 deaths in those three movies, Myers is not nearly the legendary serial killer we know him to be, as his crimes are essentially limited to the initial murder when he was six, the murders across one night covered in the first two movies, and the murders 20 years later. That is certainly impressive, but in terms of sheer body count, it's got nothing on the other killers this guy mentions, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. It also makes it curious indeed that Laurie Strode was so worried about his return in Halloween H20, because it means he had been gone for a full 20 years at that point, and was not reasonably considered a threat to anybody. 

4) It is sort of trying to end Jamie Lee Curtis' commitment to this series? She's in what essentially functions as a cold open in this mental institution, where she is fooling the nurses into thinking she's catatonic. Of course, she's hiding all her pills in a stuffed teddy bear, just waiting for this night that she somehow knows Michael is going to return to torment her? She's right, and she again has him where she wants him -- this time, the right him, though having to check by removing his mask forfeits her upper hand. (When she beheaded him at the end of the last movie, it turns out it was a paramedic with Michael's mask pushed over his head. He couldn't tell her this because Michael crushed his larynx. As ridiculous explanations go, it's not as terrible as it could be.) Anyway, she gets stabbed in the back and falls from the roof of the institution. We don't see her dead close up, so basically it's Curtis getting to decide whether that's it for Laurie or leaving open a plausible door for her return. Which we know she took since she's in the last three movies that I'll get to this month.

5) In a series that is mostly bad, this might be the worst Halloween of them all.

If I found the look and feel of the one two movies ago, The Curse of Michael Myers, stultifying because of the particular moment in time it was made, I might find Resurrection even more so. It's got a sort of Dawson's Creek look to it, which I suppose makes sense, as it was contemporaneous with the last few seasons of that show. (And don't forget, Michelle Williams was actually in the most recent Halloween movie before this, which coincided with the beginning of Dawson's Creek.)

But far more dated is the central conceit of this movie, that six college students are chosen to wear body cameras to spend Halloween night in the original Myers home, still looking as it did nearly 25 years earlier (which is more evidence that those three middle movies did not happen), for a live telecast broadcast over the web. Some of this perspective is not the fault of the movie. Technology that seemed cutting edge 22 years ago in 2002 can't help but feel a bit silly now. But the cheap production of the whole thing is what really grates.

The masterminds of this venture, called Dangertainment, are played by Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. Rhymes is a passable actor. Banks is not. Fortunately, she has less to do. 

Other cast members of note are Sean Patrick Thomas, Thomas Ian Nicholas (this was the era when everyone had three names, though Jamie Lee Curtis did it first) and Katee Sackhoff, though it should be noted that she is credited here as "Katee Sachoff." I could not figure out the reason for this spelling of her name, considering that her birth name does appear to be "Sackhoff." Maybe at that time she was too worried about its similarity to Jack Off?

Everything about the way this movie is made is slapdash and perfunctory, which includes both the logic and the choreography of the kills. Any apparent "cleverness" is supposed to be contained within the use of these web cameras. Don't forget, this was the first few years after found footage became a thing with The Blair Witch Project. And while some of the movies inspired by Blair Witch did interesting things with it, Halloween: Resurrection does not.

One of the funniest things about it is that there is a disconnect between even the advertising and the movie itself. The poster above makes it look like Curtis interacts with the other people who appear on Michael's knife, but she does not. And her hair doesn't look like that, as it's worn long in this film. Just a lazy and uninspired effort all around. 

And so it is time to reboot Halloween again with the Rob Zombie movies, only the second of which I will be watching since I just saw the first one in 2022. Depending on how you define it, this could be considered the fourth reboot of the series already. Here are the previous ones:

1) Halloween III: Season of the Witch, to take the series away from anything having to do with Michael Myers, albeit only for one movie.

2) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, bringing Michael back but making the protagonist for the next three movies Jamie Lloyd, who was at that time supposed to be Laurie Strode's daughter.

3) Halloween H20, to erase the previous three movies and bring Laurie back.

Since we know there is one more coming after Zombie's movie's with the David Gordon Green trilogy, in a very real way this is a series that has been rebooted five times already. And when they inevitably make some future Michael Myers movie -- even though the last one of Green's is called Halloween Ends -- that will make it an even half-dozen. 

Welcome back, Jamie Lee

If it seems like the Halloween movies have been lacking something since Jamie Lee Curtis exited the series after Halloween II, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later seems to confirm that is the case.

There is a sudden shift to professionalism under seventh franchise director (out of seven movies) Steve Miner, and it's not only being anchored by Curtis -- and not only because she was the original star of this franchise, alongside Donald Pleasence. (You may remember Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was Pleasence's last Halloween, since he died before it was released. That movie was in his memory, and so is this one, which may be the first time I've ever seen an actor memorialized in two different movies in the same series. I don't think even Paul Walker got that.)

No, it's because Curtis is an actual competent actress -- more than that, a movie star, at least to some degree. The flotsam and jetsam that joined Pleasence in the other movies didn't do much before or much after (other than Paul Stephen Rudd, from the last movie). 

Halloween H20 is further stabilized by a nearly all-star cast, if not maybe at the time they made it, then what they've gone on to do since then. Here we get the likes of Michelle Williams, Josh Hartnett (in his film debut), LL Cool J, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Adam Arkin and even Psycho scream queen Janet Leigh in a small role, though I must admit that after seeing her name in the opening credits, I forgot to look out for her in the movie. After the fact, I do remember who she played.

So does this all add up to a good movie?

Almost.

I'm still not quite giving a recommend on Halloween H20, as it is still a little beholden to the standard structure of a Halloween movie. (I'm starting to think there may be no other way to make one of these movies.) But the 2.5 stars I'm giving it are easily the highest number of stars I've given since the original Halloween. Halloween III is also better, but I didn't watch that this time around, having just seen it for the first time back in January.

SPOILERS to follow.

The clear advantages of this particular film:

1) It feels like more of an adult movie, perhaps because the final girl is an adult. There are some good, character-building scenes between Laurie Strode and her love interest, played by Adam Arkin, the kind you realize the other films did not have time for. (Though H20 doesn't add on extra celluloid to accomplish this as it is still only 87 minutes.)

2) There is finally a Black character in a Halloween movie! Welcome, LL Cool J.

3) We finally get out of Haddonfield, Illinois, where all but one of the previous movies (thanks again for being something different, Halloween III) were set. Laurie we now learn faked her death in a car accident in order to throw Michael Myers off her trail, which has worked for two decades now. Somehow she took the wreckage of her early life and turned it into a false identity serving as a headmistress for a private school in California. Just changing up the setting did wonders for this movie.

4) Laurie finally, really, truly, tries to take definitive action against Michael. Not only does she go on the offensive against him, once setting aside an opportunity to escape so she can actively seek him out on the campus of this school, axe in hand, but after "killing" him several times -- knocking him off a balcony, hitting him with a car, and rolling that car down a hill, where it pins him against a tree branch -- she takes that axe and chops his head off. I guess that's why the next film is called Resurrection.

5) I also really liked the straightforward approach to Miner's filmmaking. It seems that only the previous film was mired in 1990s serial killer "slickness," which was anything but slick in the hands of previous director Joe Chappelle. 

One big qualm I did have: The lack of mentioning of Laurie's daughter Jamie, who was in each of the past three movies, dying in the last one. There is no attempt to make reference to her, why Laurie took her son (played by Hartnett) to California but not her daughter, or even that she exited. It's almost like the movie -- the first movie in the series that feels sort of like a reboot -- just said "Eh, that was a mistake. Let's just forget it happened." With Jamie Lee's return, the other Jamie -- who is now dead anyway -- had become superfluous. There can be only one. 

I'm sure I should say more about the film that gave me a little hope for the second half of this viewing series, but the truth of the matter is, I'm writing this as quickly as I can before I head out the door on vacation and don't take a computer with me. See you when I return early next week, refreshed and ready for the final five movies I haven't seen in the Halloween series. 

Having to pay for Halloween, and introducing Paul Stephen Rudd

When I got this idea to watch all the Halloween movies I hadn't seen in the month of October, I thought it would be pretty easy since they all seemed to be available for streaming on my Australian streamer, Stan.

Well, they are not all available for streaming on Stan.

Stan typically seems to have all the movies available in a particular collection, if they have any of them. Examples in the past have included Harry Potter and James Bond. Why not Michael Myers?

Maybe because Halloween 5 and 6 are so bad that nobody wants to watch them?

Actually, there's a pretty big dropoff between Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. In the opening credits of the movies themselves, they don't have the series number, but retroactively, it seems to have been applied, perhaps to help us make sense of what goes where.

Some of this dropoff can be attributed to the abrupt change between 1980s filmmaking and 1990s filmmaking. 

Halloween 4 and 5 came out only a year apart in 1988 and 1989, and you may remember, I couldn't work up any specific hatred for Halloween 4. Halloween 5 -- directed by the series' fifth separate director, Dominique Othenin-Girard -- is pretty much of a piece with Halloween 4, as the actors all are about the same age and the filmmaking style is pretty much the same.

When you then shift forward six years to Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, bad 1980s horror filmmaking is then replaced by bad 1990s horror filmmaking, which is much worse than bad 1980s horror filmmaking. While there is a certain nostalgia to 80s horror cheese, especially for someone my age, 90s horror cheese has none of that, mostly because it tries to take itself seriously through darker lighting, ill-conceived editing and other showy gestures that are also empty. Nineteen ninety-five was also the year Se7en was released, and though they came out in too close proximity for one to seriously influence the other, both are indicative of a change in the way movies about serial killers are made. That was good for Se7en, not so good for Halloween.

I should pause to note that this is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of watching these movies back-to-back-to-back. Being scared by them is not even a consideration at this point, which makes it unfortunate for the month when I'm trying to be scared by movies -- but then again, I wasn't really scared by the horror comedy I saw last year either. Seeing how the same raw materials -- oh so much the same -- appear through the filters of different filmmaking techniques? Now that's a worthy exercise, even if in the case of Curse, it results in the least good Halloween movie I've seen.

But before we step back and start to go chronologically, I should probably finish my opening thought. Yeah, I had to fork over $3.99 for each of these movies. None too pleased about that. 

So I have two questions right off the bat about The Revenge of Michael Myers:

1) Why on earth does this guy need revenge? As far as I can tell, people might want revenge against him, but not the other way around. Just further proof that they'll make up nonsensical titles for movies just because they need a weighted word, not because that word applies to the story or character or franchise in general.

2) Why on earth does a vagrant living by the water nurse Michael back to health for a year, only for Michael to rise up and kill him after completing his convalescence?

It's this last one I really want an answer to.

Okay, to catch you up -- and I will pull out that likely unnecessary SPOILER WARNING just to cover my bases -- the latest method of allegedly disposing of Michael, at the end of the previous film, saw him shot into a pit in the woods that collapsed in on itself, supposedly burying Michael in building refuse and allowing Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis to quip that he'd gone to hell where he belongs. Just to be sure, though, they tossed a stick of dynamite into the pit.

At the start of this movie, we see that Michael actually wormed his way out of the pit and into a nearby river just before the dynamite exploded. A rather silly nod to "realism," because how could Michael ever possibly survive a stick of dynamite, right?

So apparently that took all the strength he had, and Michael collapses after pulling himself up on a river bank a little ways down. Which is where some vagrant is living in a little encampment that is more than just a single tent, but a fairly sophisticated little domicile where apparently no one bothers him.

That he takes this man wearing a frightening mask, whom he would likely know from local lore is the famous killer Michael Myers, into his care for a day or two is strange, but maybe not inexplicable. Perhaps this guy has a soft spot for famous killers.

But the really absurd thing is that when another Halloween strikes the following year, Michael sits bolt upright, and kills this man who has been looking after him for the past 365 days. 

There's obviously the problem of Michael's ingratitude. Without this man, he'd surely be dead, or as dead as Michael Myers gets, anyway.

But then, what's going on in this man's head that he keeps a comatose serial killer in his tent encampment for a whole year? How does he care for Michael? How does he feed him? How does Michael use the toilet? If Michael has been in a coma for a year, how long does this man plan to go on cheerily caring for him? What's in it for this guy? 

It would be one thing if this vagrant were made out as some sort of Satan worshipper, hoping for some of Michael's evil to rub off on him. But he seems more like a good samaritan who decided that holding some stew up to Michael's comatose lips for a whole year was a better medical approach then, I don't know, bringing him to a hospital. 

After that, Halloween 5 is fairly conventionally boring and unremarkable. Pleasence is back again for some outsized dialogue and general overacting, Michael hunts the little girl from the last movie (Jamie) again, everything you would expect. 

Though there's one other thing I wanted to mention before moving on to Halloween 6.

The "final girl" from the last film, played by Ellie Cornell, was Rachel, the adoptive sister of Jamie (Danielle Harris), Laurie Strode's daughter who is now the focus of Michael's bloodlust. Rachel was the one looking out for Jamie at the end of the film and the one who dodged all of Michael's knife thrusts successfully. 

She's back in this film, but is curiously used indeed. She has some time at the beginning and then appears again at the end as a corpse, though I don't believe we ever see her get killed. (I can't say for sure, this stuff is all starting to blend together, especially if I don't write about it straight away.) Instead, the woman playing this role in this movie is Tina, Rachel's friend, played by Wendy Kaplan. She's not your typical final girl in that she's got a slutty side and a really stupid boyfriend (who gets killed very early on) despite the fact that she also wants to come visit Jamie in the hospital for traumatized children where she lives. The film never properly establishes her connection to Jamie, though, so when Jamie spends the second half of the movie always crying for "Tina! Tina!" like she is her sole lifeline -- while never asking where her adopted sister Rachel has gone -- it just doesn't make any sense. 

That's all I remember about Halloween 5 at the moment.

I just watched Halloween 6 last night, so it's "fresh" -- though that is hardly the appropriate word to describe it. 

Other than looking like a really tawdry version of a "serious" 1990s serial killer movie, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers has one extremely noteworthy element:

Paul Rudd.

Only, he was Paul Stephen Rudd at the time, something I never knew.

This was actually released after Clueless -- and here I always thought of Clueless as a 1996 movie -- but Rudd still gets an "introducing" credit. 

Well, it wasn't a great introduction. I hope this guy can still manage to have a career.

Sixth franchise director Joe Chappelle, who would go on to direct episodes of The Wire, doesn't get much out of the young Rudd, certainly nothing of the impish charm that would go on to characterize the man. There isn't a hint of humor here, and some of his line readings are painful. He was probably always miscast, but there isn't a lot to be hopeful about here. You never know who is going to surprise you. 

Rudd does represent a form of continuity to the original film, though, in this, finally Pleasence's final appearance in the franchise. (He likely would have kept going, but dying on the 2nd of February that year kind of put a damper on that.) Rudd plays Tommy Doyle, who was one of the kids Laurie was babysitting for in the first movie. Not a character who, by any means, needed to pop back up again for the first time in five movies and in 17 years of time in the narrative, but hey, when you're desperate, you're desperate.

He plays kind of a weirdo 25-year-old who still lives across the street from the Strode house, where he gives people the creeps by watching them from his window. And guess who is the Strode house -- more Strodes!

That's right, the house still hasn't sold because of being the location of multiple acts of grisly murder, so the brother of the Strode paterfamilias moves into the place without telling his family he knew what happened there. 

(I'm getting a little confused about the timeline though. The original murder was, of course, in the Myers house, not the Strode house, because the Strodes adopted Laurie after her parents and older sister died and her brother was institutionalized. Was the Strode house the location of the climax of the first Halloween? Or was that the Myers house again? In any case, there have been dastardly deeds done in both houses at one point or another.)

So there's yet another Laurie Strode surrogate this time, not Rachel (R.I.P.), not Tina (R.I.P.), but this time Kara (Marianne Hagan), a Strode daughter, who is in Laurie's generation (Laurie's adoptive cousin I suppose), but has her own son, Danny. Is Danny a variation on Danielle? Everything has to connect.

In any case, it is for a moment suggested that this curse of Michael Myers might be passing to the youngest Strode -- even though the Strodes have no biological relationship to Laurie, and therefore, to Michael -- as Danny has a foreboding moment with a knife. But this is dropped like a hot potato and never comes back.

Oh, we have to get back to Danielle here. And because I already told you this was going to include spoilers, we have to reveal the fate of Danielle -- especially since that contributes to the absurdity of this movie.

I don't remember this happening in Halloween 5, but apparently, Jamie is taken at the end. All they really show happening is a mysterious man in black shooting up a police station and once again freeing the not-dead Michael Myers. If my memory of three days ago serves me, Jamie sees that Michael has escaped and has another of her anxious freakouts. (No shade on this actress, who was good.) Not taken, though. 

At the start of this film, she's definitely a captive, and -- only six years later, mind you -- she's shown giving birth to a baby. (Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you -- Michael is after a baby in this movie.) She's been kept by a bunch of creepy psychopaths led by this mysterious man in black (whose reveal later in this movie is utterly banal), and in a dungeon-like setting, she gives birth. Now, Jamie is Laurie Strode's daughter, don't forget. So in only 17 years from the original Halloween, Laurie Strode would have gone from a teenage babysitter to a ... grandmother? (Had she not died of course. Though of course, she's not dead, just "misplaced" until Jamie Lee Curtis decides to return to the series.)

So that makes this baby -- Paul Rudd's character calls him Steven, I think -- Michael Myers' grand nephew. Jeez. 

So that means that Jamie, who looked like this in 1988/1989:

Has been kept in captivity with the specific intention of producing an offspring, and looks like this in 1995:

Sorry, I'm just not buying it. I know a woman can give birth at age 13 or younger, but the actress playing Jamie here -- J.C. Brandy -- was 20 in 1995, and too right, considering what they put her through on screen. (We don't have to go into too much detail about how Jamie buys it.)

Also, what exactly are the rules regarding how many new generations of Myers there must be? If Jamie is held captive specifically to produce another descendant, was she ever in any danger in any of the previous movies? And does that mean this child will have to grow old enough to father his own baby before Michael can strike again? 

I am starting to ramble and have no hope of encapsulating all the ways this movie fails, so I'll just say it's a one-star stinker. 

Though, farewell to Donald Pleasence, a consistent if sometimes absurd pleasure in five Halloween movies, all of which I've watched in the last ten days.

I'll watch one more Halloween movie before going out of town for five days and giving myself a break from all this. I should probably write about that one on its own, because this combo post was way too long and you probably stopped reading long before now. I'm probably talking to nobody. 

Halloween 4: The Return of Dr. Loomis

I said I was not going to write about each Halloween movie I watched in the month of October. So far I
am failing in that pledge.

But I haven't written anything else this week, and I've got some time on a Friday afternoon.

The fourth movie in the Halloween series, and third I've watched this month (I watched Halloween III only back in January), is subtitled The Return of Michael Myers, but the more noteworthy return, in terms of plausibility, has got to be that of Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis.

Now, it is entirely implausible that either Loomis or Michael Myers would have survived the explosion that ended Halloween II (oops, spoiler alert). But we are already giving Myers, an unkillable killing machine whom Loomis describes as the personification of evil, the benefit of the doubt. Considering that I believe this character is still alive even in the movies made the last few years, it seems clear that he's going to survive several more climaxes of several more movies that should have obviously killed him. That's just standard slasher movie tropes for you.

But Dr. Loomis? He's a human being, plain and simple. 

So how did he emerge from the explosion at the end of Halloween II with nothing more than a slight limp and a relatively modest scar on this face that seems to be only cosmetic in nature?

Well, folks, it appears that reboot logic and fan service logic was alive and well even in 1988. Loomis returned because they thought the presence of Pleasence in some way underpinned the success of the franchise.

And, spoiler alert, he's still alive at the end of Halloween 4, so we are certain to get at least one more movie with him.

I wanted to hate this movie. I really did. The fourth movie in any slasher series, especially series that had their origins in the 1980s (or late 70s in this case), are supposed to be terrible. Although I haven't seen them, I feel pretty confident that I could wave off the later Friday the 13th movies without a viewing, just knowing they are bad because they were made quickly and no one who was making them gave a damn.

Halloween 4 is not great, but I actually found it less egregious than Halloween II, which was poorly directed and silly. I'm not sure if Dwight H. Little is a better director than Rick Rosenthal, but he made a movie that I dislike a little less. And something happens at the end of this movie that redeems its otherwise unremarkable narrative. Arbitrarily, I won't spoil what that is.

I do of course have nits to pick.

1) Because Michael Myers must, it seems, always be motivated by killing his own flesh and blood, here he is going after a little girl named Jamie, played quite well, I thought, by actress Danielle Harris. She gets the fear down, which is what you need in a child performance in a horror movie. The character's name is a bit cheeky, as it is obviously inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Laurie Strode in the first two movies -- and is absent here except for appearing in a photograph.

Why does she appear in a photograph at all? Well because she's Jamie's mother, of course, now deceased.

Now, we know that Laurie Strode is not actually dead, because she's the main character in David Gordon Green's three most recent Halloween movies, which I'll get to sometime in the October 20s. And whether they were already setting that up for a long-term payoff, I don't know. 

But I thought it was very curious that this movie tells us both Laurie and whoever Jamie's father was are both dead, leading young Jamie to be adopted, yet the movie tells us nothing about how that happened, and does not make it a significant portion of the story. It's almost like they poochied Jamie Lee because she didn't want to come back for this movie, abruptly ending the storyline of Laurie Strode, at least within the context of this movie's narrative. "Don't want to be in this movie? Fine, you're dead. You went back to your home planet and died on the way."

But begging of an explanation even more might be the fact that in the ten years since that traumatic 1978 Halloween, Laurie not only recovered enough to get into a serious romantic relationship, but also to have a child who is now seven. That's a lot of recovering to do between the end of 1978 and sometime in 1981. 

2) Michael Myers' ability to show up in places he wouldn't otherwise be able to be, too soon after he was in a very different place, is equaled in absurdity only by his knowledge that Laurie had a young girl and this is where he can find her, when by all accounts he was lying in a sort of vegetative state in a prison hospital for all the years in between. That's slasher film logic for you.

The other details of the movie are a bit bland and are already fading from my memory.

There is quite a good chance that I will write a combined post on Halloween 5 and Halloween 6. But don't hold me to it. 

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.