Carnography

Halloween (2018)

My carpets have been fitted, and so I can finally move everything back into place and get back to some semblance of a schedule. And just in time too, as today is the release of the long-awaited Halloween movie - released exactly 40 years after the very first one came out and invented a whole new horror subgenre. This new Halloween is a sequel only to the very first movie, throwing out such things as Michael and Laurie's familial relationship, the existence of his niece Jamie and, to the relief of many, Halloween: Resurrection. But is this movie worth all the anticipation?

40 years after his last escape and murder rampage through Haddonfield, Michael Myers is still being held at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, and he's spent those four decades not making a sound or reacting to very much at all. Shortly after a couple of podcasters visit him and show him his old mask, however, Myers is put on a bus to be transported to a new secure mental facility, whereupon he promptly escapes, gets his mask back and heads back to Haddonfield to deal with some unfinished business. That "unfinished business" is, of course, Laurie Strode, who has spent the last 40 years preparing for the possibility that Michael might one day escape again and come back to try to finish the job he started on Halloween 1978, including having enough guns for an NRA convention, a panic room in her basement and a wrecked relationship with her daughter and granddaughter as a result of her obsessive Michael-prepping. With Michael stalking the streets of Haddonfield once more, will Laurie be able to protect her family and stop Michael once and for all, or will Michael receive some help from unexpected places?

The opening credits of this new Halloween movie are deliberately designed to call back to the 1978 movie, complete with the same font and a jack-o-lantern on the left side of the screen. Only this time the jack-o-lantern starts off squashed and obliterated, and slowly reinflates during the course of the opening credits. I like to imagine that this is some sort of reference to the franchise being somehow reinvigorated by this new entry after previous entries (*cough*Halloween: Resurrection*cough) reduced it to little more than squashed... squash. It's far from the only callback to previous films in the series though - even Silver Shamrock gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo while the children of Haddonfield are out trick-or-treating. The movie still makes it clear, though, that the only canon it's following is the events of the first film, so no Strode family revelations, no Mark of Thorn, and no druids. We're back to Michael Myers just being a pure psychopath, killing pretty much for the sake of killing, with no explanation as to what drives him whatsoever.

And boy, does Michael kill a lot of people in this film! No-one is safe either, as Michael goes just about anyone who crosses his path or looks at him funny, be they man, woman or child. The deaths are a lot more varied than the traditional kitchen knife stabbing he's become almost synonymous with after all this time, as he uses his bare hands, a hammer he randomly picks up and even his feet during the course of the film. Clearly, he's been spending his time thinking about what he'll do during those 40 years at Smith's Grove - which must also have a first-class exercise facility when you consider that Michael is now around 61 and still keeping up with his victims, getting up from being shot and even at one point being run down by a car. Some things, at least, never change.

The evolution of Laurie Strode as a character is also an interesting thing. She's gone from being almost the archetypal Final Girl in the 1978 Halloween to taking on the role of the Woodsman, of Dr Loomis (side note: I'm not sure I liked the voice of the person they brought in to "voice" Loomis since Donald Pleasance is sadly long-departed), who is there to warn everyone of the threat and come in to save the day at the end, and it's good that there was no question of her filling that role. Laurie could easily join a support group for survivors of nightmareish stalkers out to kill you and everyone you love (founding members: Sarah Connor and Nancy Thompson). She's there to shoot Michael first and repair her relationship with her daughter later, and that's all there is to it.

There are flaws, though. The first act or so of the film felt less like it was setting events up and more like it was giving the audience the Cliff Notes of what happened in the first film - stating events a little too pointedly in case there were people out there who'd never seen, read or heard anything about the first Halloween (although to be fair, there probably are people out there now who might never have seen it). The two British podcasters/"investigative journalists" got on my nerves about as much as the loud idiot in the cinema with me who kept a running commentary on the film's events, and I really couldn't wait for their usefulness (a way to get Michael his mask back) to come to an end so they could die as the trailer promised us. And yes, the trailer does manage to give several key moments away, although they do manage to restrain themselves enough to not give everything away for once.

People are already talking about whether or not there will be another entry in the series after this one (not giving anything away, but if you know anything about slasher movies you know that masked slashers are like 1960s TV Batman in that if you don't literally watch them die they're going to pop back up at some point) but I really hope they don't. This was a good film, and it would be a good ending for the Halloween franchise... if they can just let it die.

 

 

Halloween II (2009)

If Rob Zombie's first Halloween movie caused some differences of opinions within the fandom, then his sequel really divided opinions. Even Zombie himself didn't originally want to make a sequel, but when he heard that the studio was ploughing on regardless he decided to come on board as the writer and director because he didn't want anyone else to ruin his "vision". Whether or not he himself ruined that vision is probably up to the individual viewer.

Halloween II picks up immediately where the last film ended, with Laurie Strode being taken to the hospital to recover from her injuries suffered during her neverending fight with Michael Myers. Michael, of course, isn't nearly as dead as the coroners believe, breaks out of the coroner's van and heads to the hospital as well to finish Laurie off, slaughtering everyone else along the way. It all turns out to be a dream, however (and this is okay, because it's happening at the beginning and not at the end of the film where the audience has gotten invested in the character's journey and development, only to have it all wiped away). The rest of the film takes place two years later, and follows the main characters from the first film as they deal with what happened to them in their own ways. Dr Loomis has become a media monster, getting fame off his encounter with Michael Myers, Laurie is a bag of angry, barely-contained psychosis, and Michael, whose body was never found, of course, has gone to live in a shack in the middle of nowhere to heal (and build himself a corpse pit in his spare time). Eventually, of course, Michael decides the time is right to find his sister again and everyone's destinies end up intertwined in bloody and final ways...

Halloween II has a lot to do with dreams and the subconscious, making it a Jungian horror film rather than a Freudian one for a change (interestingly, this is not the first reference to Jung in the series; that happened in Halloween: Resurrection). The biggest recurring theme is that of a white horse, which both Michael and Laurie see in dreams, visions and in supposed "subconscious" imagery throughout the film (such as a Rorschack picture that the audience can clearly see the white horse image in, well before it's mentioned). Interestingly, the start of the film defines a dream of a white horse as meaning "Linked to instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction," from The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams - yet every other dream guide I looked at on the web describes dreams of a white horse as meaning something like "favorable for prosperity and pleasurable commingling with congenial friends and fair women." Is this book real? I've not been able to find a record of it anywhere, so it looks as though it was just made up for the film to fit with the whole white horse imagery overall.

The movie also focuses a lot on the various ways in which survivors deal with the traumas they've endured, specifically Laurie of course as she's the main character. It's made abundantly clear that she's not dealing well with what happened to her one bit, and this is emphasised more by the comparison between her and Annie Brackett, who also survived Michael Myers and has dealt with it in her own way, seemingly becoming less as outgoing and rebellious as she was in the previous film. The idea of examining the characters via the traumas they've suffered in previous films is an interesting and original one, seeing how most slasher movie survivors who make it to a sequel seem to be remarkably unscathed by what they've been through (the only exception I can think of being Tommy Jarvis from the Friday the 13th series, and even he seemed to bounce back pretty quickly). Unfortunately it makes for some pretty unlikeable characters, even Laurie who we could understand being so screwed up. There's also the dream imagery, of course, which is considerably more confusing - it's one thing for Michael to be having the recurring dreams and visions of a white horse and his mother in white, but what are we meant to  understand from Laurie seeing them too? Is this another psychic link between brother and sister? Are we back to the nature/nurture debate? Or is it something else entirely that's never really explained? According to Zombie the Director's Cut of the film tells a rather different story to the theatrical one, with Laurie's descent into psychosis much more pronounced and plot-important (along with Michael having really died at the end of the last film), which at least can go some way to explaining the shared visions...

 As for the rest of the movie... Well, it's certainly full of the amounts of violence and nudity that you'd expect from a Rob Zombie Halloween movie. The most brutal murder is actually the one we see the least of, Annie's - it's got more impact because we know she'd already survived one encounter with Myers, and that and seeing only the blood-soaked aftermath of the second, fatal attack only makes it more poignant. But overall the movie might seem less bloody and death-filled than other Halloween movies because of its length, and that the deaths are more spaced out throughout it.

After this film, Dimension actually wanted to make a third Halloween film. Rob Zombie was not going to be involved and so they brought on another director for the film, but in 2015 they lost the rights to the franchise and so unless someone else gets them this is the end of the Halloween series. Whether that's a good or bad thing will depend on your feeling of the films overall...

 

 

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Halloween (2007)

For a while, they had wanted to make yet another sequel in the Halloween series. There was talk of naming it Halloween: Retribution, or featuring John Tate from Halloween H20 returning to hunt Michael Myers down to get revenge for the death of his mother, a crossover movie with Hellraiser like Freddy Vs Jason, or even making a prequel called Halloween: the Missing Years before the studio finally decided to go with Rob Zombie's remake. Production was delayed further after the 2005 death of long-time series producer Moustapha Akkad in a terrorist attack in Jordan. Finally in 2007, Rob Zombie's remake of the classic slasher was released.

 Haddonfield, Illinois, October 31, some time in the past and we're introduced to the Myers family. The stepfather is an abusive deadbeat, the mother is a stripper and the elder sister is, well, a typical teenage girl victim in a slasher movie, so it's of little surprise that young Michael (aged up to 10 here) is a complete and utter psychopath who only actually likes his baby sister. Before we're even 15 minutes in we've seen the aftermath of him killing a rat, a cat and a dog (thankfully we don't see any of it happening), and him beating a bully to death before the expected scene of him slaughtering half his family. After this he's admitted to the Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where a young(ish) Dr Loomis attempts to reach him but to no avail. 17 years later and Michael is now a 6' 9" hulking mute who does nothing but make masks, who escapes after two orderlies make the mistake of having a rape party in his cell. He then heads back to Haddonfield in search of his baby sister, who is all grown up now after being adopted by the Strode family, and we all know how the story goes from here...

Rob Zombie went for a very different take on the mythology of Michael Myers, with the whole first half of the film being more like that proposed prequel of his earlier years than the more traditional Halloween plot that we know. This led to a lot of mixed reactions from people, with a good number unhappy with the way the remake went, but I found it all quite refreshing and an interesting take on the slasher mythos - Zombie does a pretty good job of presenting Michael as a budding psychopath, ticking a good many of the boxes along the way. It certainly doesn't hurt that the actor playing young Michael, Daeg Faerch, is really quite good at playing an intense, psychotic murdering child. Tyler Mane as the adult Michael has something of an easier job, seeing as he just has to loom over people, kill them and has about one line of dialogue in the whole movie, but he does acquit himself well. There's also Malcolm McDowell taking on the role of Dr Loomis, which is... interesting. Because there's more of a focus in the film on young Michael's time in Smith's Grove, Loomis has a larger role than in the original, but his character feels rather... schitzophrenic for most of the film. He spends the first half doing his best to be Michael's friend so as to help him better as his doctor, but the very moment he escapes he shifts into Crazy Ralph/Woodsman role as if he'd been waiting for this moment all his life. Maybe he was, but his last words to Michael before his escape are ones of apology and friendship. There's also hints of the fame-hungry persona he has in the sequel, but we'll get to that next time.

Because it's a Rob Zombie film there's several things that we've come to expect from his films - excellent use of music (I'd never have thought that Nazarath's Love Hurts would work as a stripper song, but it's hauntingly effective); scenes of extreme violence and sex - that's something I didn't like; the rape scene in Michael's cell because it seemed thoroughly gratuitous - and the inclusion of all of his friends in cameos. There's Danny Trejo, Ken Foree, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Tom Towles, Brad Dourif... oh, and Danielle Harris in the role of Annie Brackett (played when she was 29). I'm just surprised that Diamond Dallas Page didn't appear for a moment in Marilyn.

The biggest flaw with Rob Zombie's Halloween is it's length. Or rather, the ridiculously overlong ending. Michael finds his sister and tries to reconnect with her, but fails, and then they fight. And they fight. And then Loomis shoots him. And then there's more fighting. And more fighting. There's at least three false endings in this whole sequence, where we're certain Michael is dead but it turns out he isn't, and it gets annoyingly boring quite quickly.

 Overall though, this remake of Halloween is a success. It' brings something new to the story and the movie, which is really the only proper reason for a remake to be made, while also being true to the original. Rob Zombie actually told John Carpenter what he was doing before he started his film, and Carpenter told him to "make it [his] own", and I think Zombie succeeded in doing so quite admirably.

 

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Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Halloween H20 had such a great ending. Laurie Strode had returned, Michael Myers was dead, and the whole thing had ended on a good, strong and high note that would have been the prefect end to the series. The horse has no head; it is most certainly dead and people really should stop beating it and send it on to the glue factory. But as we know by now, there are always people who just can't let a profitable franchise die, and so Halloween: Resurrection was born. To be fair, the studio did consider trying a repeat of Halloween III: Season of the Witch and having a non-Michael Myers episode again, but this time it was the fans themselves who insisted on the return of Michael, thus confirming that fans should probably not be left to make such decisions.

Three years after the events of Halloween H20 and Laurie Strode is in a mental hospital after decapitating the wrong man at the end of the movie. Michael turns up, of course, and finally takes her out of the franchise before finding himself at a loss over what to do next. So after handing over his knife to a groupie (yes, really!), he decides to return home so that he can re-evaluate his life choices. Unfortunately for him, the Myers family home has been taken over by a bunch of college students and reality show filmmakers, who are shooting a Halloween special there that's being livestreamed on the internet. The vast majority of these "reality stars" are annoying, even for reality TV stars of the early 2000s, and so we can totally sympathise with Michael when he starts killing off the trespassers in his home. It's up to one geeky freshman watching the stream to save his crush from Michael's enactment of Castle Doctrine and possibly stop him once and for all...

What did we do to deserve this insipid attempt at a sequel? The ending of Halloween H20 was perfect - or at least an acceptable way to end the series - and there was no need to make yet another one. But make another one they did, and so here we are. And considering they've had 23 years at this point to get the formula right, I'd have expected something better than what we got.

The characters are terrible. Most of them are not just slasher movie annoying, they're detrimental to the movie annoying. I'm not sure who I disliked most - the horny music student who's just there to get laid, the diet-obsessed cook who's convinced that if Michael Myers had only had more zinc in his diet then he wouldn't have killed all those people, or the character played by Busta Rhymes. Actually no, I definitely dislike the one played by Busta Rhymes the most, and not just because he just will not die. He and his assistant are so ridiculously clueless for the sake of the plot that it's stupid, and actively detracts from the film in places. I get that it's supposed to be dramatic irony and that that can be effective - if done sparingly. This isn't the case here, where we're beaten over the head with "Oh no! We know something the cast doesn't!" just about every other minute of the film. Let's be honest, Scream did it far better. Regardless, when most of the characters get killed by Michael it's something of a relief.

There is one moment in the film which stands out particularly harshly against the rest of the film. One of the technicians for the reality show is setting up when he is cornered by Michael and killed with the spike at the end of his camera tripod, the camera capturing his face as he is stabbed and dies. This is clearly meant to be an homage to another of the great early slashers, Peeping Tom (and if it's not then it's a damn big coincidence), and seeing it in the middle of the rest of this dreck makes it stand out even more. Actually, as I look at it I realise that there are a lot of moments in the film that seem to be "homages"/ripped off from other, better horror films. I'd even swear I saw a brief Blair Witch Project moment in there as well.

Finally, a lot of the effects aren't that good; they feel like they're more on the level of... well, a low-budget internet reality show, particularly a decapitation scene which is clearly meant to be one of the highlight spots of the film. And let's not even go into the cheap trick of giving Jamie Lee Curtis top billing and then killing her off within the first fifteen minutes just for added shock value (and the ridiculously contrived way they had Michael survive the end of H20, which would only have worked if that poor paramedic had had the same recuperative powers as Michael). Halloween: Resurrection had clearly run out of ideas of its own at this point, and had resorted to ripping off other, better horror films to try to repeat their success by cramming them all together and hoping for the best. If only they had let the series die at part 7...

 

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

The title for the seventh entry in the Halloween franchise is wonderfully nerdy. "H20" is clearly mean to stand for "Halloween: 20 Years Later" as the title itself states. However, it also has a double meaning. "H2O" is also the chemical symbol for dihydrogen monoxide, more commonly known as water. Water has a pH of 7.0, and since this is the seventh movie in the series, the title also says "Halloween 7.0: 20 Years Later".

...yeah, you probably have to have a certain mindset to appreciate this sort of thing, but dammit, I think it's neat.

 20 years on from the original Halloween and Halloween 2, and Laurie Strode has changed her name and gone into hiding to try to make sure that her psychopathic brother Michael Myers can never find her to finish what he started in 1978. She's now Keri Tate, headmistress of a private school, and has a 17-year-old son named John. She's also still haunted by the events of Halloween 1978, which she deals with by pill-popping, drinking impressive amounts of vodka neat and being overprotective of her son nearly to the point of psychosis. John doesn't appreciate this one bit, of course, thinking his mother is just overreacting to a threat long dead, and along with several of his friends plans to hold a secret Halloween party at the school while the rest of the students are on a trip. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, Michael is not dead and has learned of Laurie/Keri's witness protection trick. Stopping only to kill Joseph Gordon-Levitt for overacting without a permit, he heads off to the school, where he and his sister will finally finish what they started all those years previously...

 Halloween H20: 20 Years Later was directed by Steve Miner, who was an associate producer on the original Friday the 13th and director for Parts 2 and 3, so it's safe to expect that he knows his stuff when it comes to slasher movies. Certainly H20 feels a lot more like the first stalk-and-slash movies of the late 70s and early 80s that started the whole trend off, with a lot more of Michael Myers slowly but surely stalking his prey; stingers of us seeing him watching people as they repeatedly just miss seeing him, and a whole lot less of silly supernatural backstories trying to explain his motivations and Energizer Bunny-like ability to keep going no matter what. In fact, you can't help but be impressed at Michael's level of cardiovascular fitness; for a guy now in his early 40s he never gets winded and the moment when he lowers himself from the ceiling one-handed is stunning both in the tension department and in the general athletic ability department. Michael's determination to kill off his sister is back to being his sole superpower, but it's no less scary or impressive.

Yes, and perhaps most importantly for the film, Halloween H20 completely retcons Parts 4-6 out of existence, apart from one mention of Laurie's "death" in a car accident, the act she used to start her new life. The fact that the film isn't hurt by this in the slightest really says something about how silly that whole plot thread had become, so this time there's no druids, no Mark of Thorn, and no attempts to explain how Michael keeps surviving all the damage done to him. Just as it should be for a slasher film, it's just accepted that he's going to just keep getting up until something extremely terminal is done to him, and no-one questions this or tries to rationalise any of it. Michael has that really big, sharp kitchen knife again, and it's best to just run from him till you know he's not getting up any more.

 Which leads me on to the other thing I really like about Halloween H20: the kick-ass Final Woman that is Laurie Strode/Keri Tate. She's grown and evolved from the frightened teenager we met in the first films who, while she did put up something of a fight against Michael, still ultimately needed to be saved by Dr Loomis into the strong, determined woman who meets Michael head-on in the climax of the film. She's not been taken to ludicrous levels of female badassery like Kay-Em from Jason X or Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 - she's clearly been deeply scarred from her experiences with Michael the first time around, and the film doesn't shy away from showing this to us - but the moment she realises her brother is back and he's not had a change of heart since the last time they met, she arms herself and refuses to just be a passive victim in any of this. Knives, axe, van... she's ready to use whatever's to hand to put Michael down once and for all. Conversely her lover Will is pretty insipid and useless in a crisis, and the one time he tries to take charge he actually makes things worse. 

Halloween H20 has gotten a lot of mixed reviews over the years, with a lot of people disliking it because of its wiping Parts 4-6 from the continuity. Personally that's one of the reasons I do like it, as that whole storyline had gotten rather ridiculous and bloated. Other things that make this movie far better than some of its previous sequels for me include (as said above) the strength of Laurie Strode, the little love notes to Psycho lightly peppering the first half of the film, and the way that the ending of the film was clearly meant to be a solid full stop on the series. Because really, there was no way Michael was supposed to come back from that...

 

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Six years. It took six years for them to get round to releasing the next chapter in the Halloween franchise, and it was a mess. Production issues, budget issues (they wouldn't even pay Danielle Harris the $5k she wanted to reprise her role as Jamie Lloyd), plot issues and editing issues meant that The Curse of Michael Myers ended up being a confused hatchet-job of a movie. The fact that it ended up being Donald Pleasence's last role before his death just makes it worse (even more so when you learn that a lot of Pleasence's scenes were cut from the movie by the director because he thought that Pleasence was "boring"), and so this film really is a tragedy of a movie.

Six years after the events of Halloween 5 and the now 15-year-old Jamie Lloyd gives birth to a baby in the underground industrial facility-cum-temple where she has been held for the past six years. Jamie is later helped to escape with her baby by a sympathetic doctor, but not before the mysterious Man in Black from the previous film daubs the Thorn rune on him in blood and gives us some inaccurate backstory (Michael is said to have killed all his family members save Laurie and Jamie, but he couldn't have killed his parents as he was locked up by that time and I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed if he'd been let out to do that). Michael eventually catches up with Jamie and kills her, but she hides her baby from him. Meanwhile, in Haddonfield, Dr Loomis is somehow still alive and relatively kicking, and soon gets back on the case of hunting down Michael even though he says he's retired, and a grown-up Tommy Doyle is back in town as well, also hunting for Michael. Finally, some relatives of the Strodes have moved into the old Myers house, but the youngest member of the family Danny is having nightmares about a "boogyman" and a darkness he calls "Thorn"... It turns out that Michael was actually chosen and cursed by druids all those years ago and given the "Mark of Thorn", which gave him his supernatural indestructibility and desire to kill everyone he was related to as part of a Celtic ritual to prevent death and destruction from affecting everyone, and the druids are now looking for a new child to pass the curse onto...

I bet you all thought you'd seen the last of druids in this franchise with Season of the Witch, didn't you? And these druids are no less crazy than Conal Cochran's - they've been trying to create a child that will be the "ultimate evil" using Michael's DNA and the female patients of the sanitarium, and apparently succeeded with Jamie's baby (thankfully it was in-vitro fertilization). Considering how little control they had over Michael, I'm not sure at all how well they thought this plan was going to go, but I can't see it ending well. Personally, I'd like to think that these druids are actually the "east coast" branch of a whole bunch of evil druids with supervillain-esque plans, and the druids from Season of the Witch were the "west coast" branch.

There were three versions of The Curse of Michael Myers: a theatrical version, a director's cut and a producer's cut. Unfortunately for me, I got stuck with the theatrical version, which is wildly considered to be the worst of the three versions. It's cut to ribbons, and because of the opinions of a test audience allegedly made up of "14-year-old boys", they re-shot the ending and cut about 20 minutes of important plot from the film. The original ending had Dr Loomis confronting Michael and somehow having the mark of Thorn passed to him, but they re-shot that to simply have Loomis screaming off-screen (as Donald Pleasence had sadly died by this time) while Michael's mask lay on the ground. The final insult comes with the "This film is dedicated in memory of Donald Pleasence" credit that comes straight after the theatrical end scene, knowing how much of Pleasence's scenes were cut from the film for being "boring". It's really of little surprise that a lot of the crew have since disowned the theatrical version.

 The rest of the film isn't too spectacular either. Having an adult Tommy Doyle return and prove to be a far better male protagonist/saviour than Loomis was after the first film was a good touch, but that was one of the few. There were a couple of thoroughly dislikeable characters in the film that you just knew were going to get killed messily, but they're killed off very quickly before the film's halfway mark. Sure, their deaths are suitably messy, but we don't get nearly the level of payoff that keeping at least one of them alive till nearly the end would have given us. In the end, The Curse of Michael Myers brings the whole "Mark of Thorn"/supernatural element of the franchise to an end, for which we can at least be thankful.

 

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

We've reached the fifth movie in the Halloween series now and I've hit upon something of a problem: I can't come up with anything to say for the introductory paragraph. The primary reason for this is because, as I said way back in the first Halloween review, the series has never held the same level of interest for me as other films and franchises, and so I have less obscure trivia stored in my head to bring out for times like these. One thing I can say is that I'm not too surprised that this film was the lowest grossing of the franchise, because even after watching it I'm hard-pressed to describe very many details from it. It's quite the non-entity of a film - which is awkward considering that it's supposed to contain vital plot points that connect Halloween 4 with Halloween 6 at the very least.

So, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers starts off with the final couple of scenes from Halloween 4. We see the combined forces of the Haddonfield Sheriff's department and the National Guard unloading a few hundred rounds into Michael Myers before the ground collapses underneath him and he appears to fall to his death. Instead, we discover that he managed to roll into a river and get to safety, finding himself in the shack of a hobo before collapsing into a year-long coma. Meanwhile Jamie seems to get possessed by Michael's spirit and attempts to stab her foster mother to death. One year later, and Jamie is a patient at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, where she's been for a year. She's now mute since last year's events, and still has that psychic link to Michael, which throws her into a seizure when he wakes up the day before Halloween and starts back up on his murder tour. Dr. Loomis is still around as well, convinced that Jamie's psychic link with her uncle will be the key to stopping him for good... if he can figure out how to use it. Meanwhile Michael returns to town once more and takes a rather circuitous route to getting to and murdering his last remaining family member...

 I mentioned in the Halloween 4 review that Dr Loomis' role in the film had changed as the films had progressed: going from the role of the Woodcutter coming to save the day at the last minute to the role of Crazy Ralph by the fourth movie. Now in the fifth installment his role seems to have changed again - now he's the Van Helsing of the movie. And not the refined gentleman Van Helsing, probably played by Peter Cushing, either. He's much more like the Anthony Hopkins version - quite mad, obsessive and very nearly as bad as the monster he's hunting. He has no qualms about using a nine-year-old girl as bait to catch Michael, or about effectively terrorizing Jamie in his attempts to get her to tell him where Michael is, and as a result he ends up losing most of his sympathetic protagonist status by the end of the film, even if he does somewhat redeem himself in the film's climax.

One thing that really bothered me about Halloween 5 at first was its throwaway attitude towards its final girls. By two-thirds of the way through the film we've lost two protagonists who the audience would have expected to be the final girl, and at first it seems as though it seems like the film just doesn't know what it's doing. It's all a case of redirection, as the film's final girl is in fact Jamie, who goes through a whole Perils of Pauline-esque sequence in the final third (on top of everything she's gone through in the film before that). It's interesting to note that Jamie only starts to take on this new role after she receives a first kiss from her crush at the children's clinic; is this marking her transition from little girl to teenager as being tied in with her status as a final girl?

Halloween 5 also continues the story arc introduced in Halloween 4 - the potential supernatural origins of Michael Myers' rage and seeming indestructibility. Suddenly we see a strange tattoo on the inside of Michael's wrist that we've not seen before (it's the Thorn rune), and all of a sudden this rune keeps turning up all over the rest of the movie! There's also a strange man dressed all in black, with silver toe caps and spurs on his shoes and a black gunslinger's hat, looking for all the world like a skinny, emo version of the Undertaker, who arrives in Haddonfield at the same time as Michael and wanders around ominously for most of the film before apparently having a pivotal role in the film's ending stinger (we know he's up to no good because he kicks a puppy when he arrives). The problem is that it requires this sub-plot to have been (a) already explained to some degree to the audience before this, and (b) ready to carry on with some speed after Halloween 5 ends. As it took another six years for part six to be made, this means that the film actually ends on a particularly annoying anti-climax...

  

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the... change of pace that was Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the Halloween franchise lay dormant for several years. The creators of the franchise, John Carpenter and Debra Hill, had wanted to continue with the idea of a different standalone story for each Halloween sequel, and had even had the idea that Halloween 4 would be a ghost story. Producer Moustapha Akkad, however, wanted to bring Michael Myers back. In the end, money won out and Michael Myers was brought back from his fiery demise to terrorise Haddonfield once more.

 It's October 30, 1988 - ten years since Michael Myers last returned to his home town of Haddonfield to kill a whole bunch of people in his quest to murder his sister Laurie. Since the end of Halloween II, however, Michael has been in a coma after the explosion that Dr. Loomis caught him in, and Laurie has married, had a daughter named Jamie, and died in a car crash. When Michael hears that he has a niece, however, he miraculously comes out of his coma and escapes from the transport taking him back to Smith's Grove, killing his guards in the process, and heads back to Haddonfield again to get his murder on. Meanwhile his seven-year-old niece Jamie has been having nightmares about Michael, who she calls "the nightmare man" - the two appear to have some sort of psychic link. Jamie's foster sister Rachel agrees to take her out trick-or-treating that Halloween, unaware that Michael is heading straight for them. Oh, and Dr. Loomis returns as well, his only injuries from the massive explosion at the end of Halloween II being some facial scars and a limp, and immediately gets back into his role of being one step behind Michael, working with the sheriff to try to stop Michael before he slaughters most of the town.

You know, if I were the town of Haddonfield, and I was hoping to never have a repeat of the worst mass killing in its history or even make mention of it, I wouldn't let the stores sell Michael Myers masks at Halloween (or indeed at any other time of the year). There's at least one death that could have been wholly avoided if the town had followed that plan, and possibly even more. Then again, Haddonfield could at least teach the towns of Springwood and Crystal Lake a thing or two about handling their notorious serial killers - instead of pretending they didn't exist or trying to erase that part of their history, when the residents of Haddonfield hear Michael Myers is back they promptly form up a posse and go hunting. Hey, I'm not saying it was the best plan, just that it's a change to see a more pro-active response in these films.

Of all the Halloween films up till this point, The Return of Michael Myers is by far the one that fit the traditional 80s slasher mould. It's got a remarkably high body count, several teens-in-peril, and most of the deaths are particularly gruesome. I particularly like the impalement via shotgun (and there's probably a study to be had there on the role of guns in 80s slasher films and why the majority of the stalk-and-slashers of that time avoided using them). It's also got a pretty good cast - Donald Pleasence is of course the obvious one here, but Danielle Harris as Jamie in her first film role is also very good. Of course, Harris has also gone on to have an excellent film career in general, and has become something of a horror movie icon as well.

However... Halloween 4 also introduces the supernatural plot element that very nearly killed the franchise stone dead by the 6th installment, and it's not even used particularly well here. The psychic link that Jamie and her uncle Michael apparently share is barely explored except for a brief instance of it near the beginning and the ending stinger, of course - it barely qualifies as Checkov's Sinister Psychic Link. Also, Donald Pleasence is really badly used in this film - he's gone from being the woodcutter of the first two films, coming in the nick of time to save the day, to becoming the series' Crazy Ralph - limping from scene to scene to inform everyone of how dead they'll all be if Michael Myers isn't stopped. The fact that the filmmakers decided to just not even try to explain how both Michael and Loomis survived that explosion at the end of Halloween II doesn't help matters either.

Halloween 4 isn't a bad film - in fact it's above average when you compare it to the fortunes of some other slasher franchises of the same time period - and it must have cheered up the fans who were likely still reeling from Season of the Witch. But it also marks the beginning of an unfortunate downturn in the series' quality, as they start to shoehorn in one of the most unlikely plots to exist in 80s slashers...

 

Halloween II (1981)

There was never meant to be a second Michael Myers film. John Carpenter had always meant for the 1978 Halloween movie to be a standalone one, and other than that last scene which technically left things open, he had tied everything together quite nicely. But by the time 1981 rolled around, the slasher subgenre of horror was disgorging money like a broken Vegas slot machine and, seeing the success of films like Friday the 13th and The Burning, the Universal studio executives decided they wanted a share of that cash too and so poked at Carpenter to make a sequel.

Halloween II starts off pretty much where Halloween ended - Dr. Loomis turns up just in time to save Laurie Strode; he shoots Michael Myers several times and knocks him backwards off the balcony; we get the Boogyman quote; then finally Loomis goes to check on Michael only to find him gone! (Not a spoiler considering it was in the last film, so if you're watching the sequel first then you've got to be expecting to be spoiled; plus Michael Myers is known for being second only to Jason Voorhees in his ability to get the living crap kicked out of him and yet keep going). Thus starts the movie proper, as Laurie is taken to hospital, Dr. Loomis keeps running around Haddonfield trying to find Michael, and Michael continues to just stroll around the town, stopping occasionally to kill someone and vandalise the local elementary school before heading to the hospital to finally finish Laurie off - not to mention everyone else at the hospital as well.

As I said earlier, John Carpenter had never intended for there to be a sequel to the first Halloween, and in fact only came back to write the script for this sequel because Universal offered him more money and Carpenter felt he hadn't been paid enough for the first film. Even then, Carpenter wasn't happy with his work on Halloween II at all, blaming a daily six-pack of Budweiser, among other things, for the way the script came out. And if I'm being completely honest, that does explain a lot, such as Michael's sudden need to grafitti Celtic words on blackboards and the sudden, shoehorned-in plot revelation that Laurie was in fact Michael's sister, adopted as a child after their parents died (that might technically be a spoiler, but believe me this is going to come up a lot in future episodes of the series and so I'm afraid you'd be finding out sooner or later anyway). To make matters worse, this particular plot revelation, which is a pretty important one all things considered, is delivered via one of the worst sins of storytelling - a character is pretty much parachuted into the film to just tell the other characters (and us), completely out of nowhere. The ultimate case of telling rather than showing. And as a final insult, the worst thing about this revelation is that it actually makes Michael Myers less frightening. Suddenly he goes from a silent stalking killer who picked his victims completely at random just because he saw them walking down a street, to a silent killer who just wants to kill his remaining family (even if we don't know why he wants to do that either).

Being a sequel, Halloween II of course has a higher body count and gorier deaths. Chief among them include a nurse being scalded to death in a jacuzzi, and another nurse suffering death via the ultimate blood donation (and again, where exactly did Michael learn to properly set that up?). The irony of those scenes is that they were added to the film by John Carpenter himself because he felt the film wasn't gory enough - even though the actual director Rick Rosenthal had been trying to emulate the first Halloween by focussing more on suspense and tension rather than the attention-grabbers of gore and nudity.

The ending of Halloween II was meant to end the story of Michael Myers, which is why they went all-out to come up with a climax that even the seemingly indestructible Michael would be hard-pressed to come back from. Of course, we all know that even that didn't stick, but in the meantime they did go with John Carpenter's original idea for the Halloween series, which was to try having a new story for the next movie...

 

Halloween (1978)

Happy 2nd anniversary, blog (albeit a day late). It's that time again, when we celebrate making it through another year - or six months, to be exact - by going through another horror series from start to finish. This time we're looking at the third part of what I term the "unholy trinity" of slasher movies, John Carpenter's Halloween.

At the age of six, young Michael Myers takes a kitchen knife and stabs his sister to death on Halloween. Fifteen years later, the now-adult Michael decides to escape from the mental institution where he's been since he killed his sister, and returns to his home town of Haddonfield, Illinois - just in time for Halloween once more. Stopping only to kill a man for some overalls and break into a hardware store for a William Shatner mask and a murder kit, he then proceeds to stalk several teenage girls he came across randomly while cruising the streets - the sheriff's daughter Annie, cheerleader Linda and "good girl" Laurie Strode. As the girls go about celebrating Halloween in their own ways, mostly involving smoking pot or having sex, Michael does as well - and in his case he "celebrates" by killing everyone he comes across. At the same time as all of this Michael's psychiatrist Dr. Loomis is on his tail, convinced that Michael will have returned to Haddonfield to continue where he left off, even though the authorities and local police think it's highly unlikely...

So, I have a confession to make. Out of the three "big" slasher series, the Halloween series has always been my least favourite. I never found the character of Michael Myers to be all that interesting (possibly not all that surprisingly considering he has also been known as "The Shape" for a lot of the movies), and the series started to go downhill a lot faster than either the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street series (although in the case of the latter it might be a close thing). That's not really fair of me, however, as certainly the first Halloween film is not only an excellent film but is also a genre legend - often imitated but rarely equalled. Hell, even Friday the 13th effectively tried to make their own version of Halloween two years later.

Furthermore, as I rewatched Halloween for this review, I started to notice things that I'd not noticed before in previous watchings. For one, Michael Myers is actually a pretty cunning and sadistic slasher considering he's always been portrayed as silent and emotionless. Even ignoring just where he learned to drive while in the mental hospital, throughout the film Myers shows a surprising level of forward planning and cunning - breaking into the hardware store to steal the things he needs in advance of the night's killing spree, using a disguise to torment one victim further, blocking exits so that his victims can't escape... he's not nearly the voiceless, faceless "Shape" that we think of when Michael Myers is brought up in conversation.

There's also an element of dark pantomime throughout the film as well, nearly all of it centred on Dr. Loomis who spends most of the film pretty much one step behind Myers but just missing him by moments. At one point Myers drives straight past an oblivious Loomis who has his back to the road, and you almost feel like yelling out, "He's behind you!". We can take this pantomime or fairy tale aspect of it even further with Loomis taking on the role of the woodcutter come to slay the Big Bad Wolf in the nick of time - unlike some of the other slashers of the time period, Halloween decided for whatever reason not to have Laurie save herself completely, even though she puts up a good fight, and has Dr. Loomis to save the day at the film's climax (is that a spoiler? Since everyone knows there's at least half a dozen sequels, I'm thinking not).

The movie's score has also had a huge effect on the film's effectiveness as a horror film and in its place overall in pop culture. John Carpenter's 5/4 score is instantly recognisable by anyone who hears it, and the fact that it is mostly used for the stalking and murder scenes amps up the tension without having to show very much at all of either Michael or the deaths (and if you listen closely, you can hear the beginnings of the score for Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing in there too). Made for $300,000, half of which went on the Panavision cameras alone, Halloween went on to take $47 million at the box office and became a cultural phenomenon.

 

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