This final article looks at the remaining films released, in the reboot era, the Zombie films and the Gordon Green films, released between 2007 and 2022.
Halloween (2007, Dir. Rob Zombie)
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When I was a kid and was purchasing used DVD copies of the first Halloween movies to watch, my mother was doing the nails of a client (who I will refer to as a goth in nature and very clearly now to my 23 year old self – the ideal Rob Zombie head), this client told me to buy the 2007 film aswell, because it was better and it was better largely because of how it showed how Michael Meyers became Michael Meyers. Well. Even as a child I found this film absolutely grotesque and unwatchable and wondered how on earth someone could find this remake better or even half as good I quality. Time has now passed and this is the opinion I still hold in earnest. There is just something about this film that makes me feel icky, beyond the fact that by all accounts it defines the unnecessary remake concept. What we begin with is quite frankly the worst opening scene I’ve ever had to sit through as we are barraged with Zombie’s view of an awful red-neck family, the sort that would pervert Meyers as a child – ignore all reckoning with the idea that evil can just occur, it must be birthed by an atrocious collection of loud and insufferable stereotypes screaming obscene and unrealistic dialogue at each other until your ears bleed. The first half of this film follows Meyers becoming The Shape, before then the second half is a rushed and awfully bland condensing of the first film, aswell as forcing in the sister sub-plot into the 55 minutes aswell before a brutal and un-effective climax. We are greeted with what I can only refer to as “cool 70s daddy Loomis” played by Malcolm McDowell, who perhaps ironically is the highlight of both of Zombie’s film. His performance is solid, but the trajectory his version of Loomis takes is bizarre and indeed laughable. The introduction of Loomis in-fact features such gems as Michael’s mother offering up comments such as “Ah come on big deal, he found a dead cat” as dismissals of early signs of Michael’s behaviour. It’s this sort of laughable ridiculousness that paves the way for an incredibly lame at best and vulgar and vile at worst remake of the most abhorrent nature. Other highlights in this early segment include a child Michael sat wearily on a doorstep while Love Hurts plays and we cut between this and his mother stripping. The kills are bloody, but shallow and come thick and fast and lose any effect very early on. The film features the most horrific and grotesquely exploitive of rape scenes as the instigator for Michael’s escape once we pass time and enter into the rushed remake second half, before again a laughable deploying of Danny Trejo with no understanding from anybody’s end how stupid what they’re making is. The film features the original Carpenter score with very few alterations and as we watch Meyers become more like a Jason Vorhees figure, the subtlety of Carpenter’s original work becomes a faint and knowing memory. Exploitation is key throughout and a rule it seems for Zombie is that all women must be topless when being brutally murdered. I think the above puts quite succinctly how stunningly gross I find this film.
Halloween II (2009, Dir. Rob Zombie)
Zombie’s sequel is too a film I have little commendation for no matter to what extent Zombie’s vision was more fulfilled this time around. As a matter of fact I am none the wiser whether that is for the better or for the worse. Zombie here expands on the very few things that worked in his first film, mainly time spent with Brad Dourif and Danielle Harris (returning once more into the Halloween world) and the wackiness of a publicity hungry Loomis, however swamps his sequel with even more tripe, mainly a focus on the supernatural as to return Sheri Moon Zombie back into the film via a white horse premonition. This sequel incorporates so many of the worst parts of the Halloween franchise and Zombie’s first film that it does not need too much explanation why it is so often ranked low amongst people’s list of entries. It’s certainly in the bottom three for me, however there are glimpses of creativity that make this more interesting than the first Zombie effort. Not better, no, no, but more interesting, yes. The film even boasts a sequence with Werid Al as Loomis is interviewed about his new book, in a sequence which I actually found enjoyable. As a matter of fact I again found McDowell’s Loomis very enjoyable and a certain high point, even if it in no way meshes with the film at hand. The whole farce as a matter of fact barley blends with itself before its finale that is equally rushed as it is stretched out. The film serves as a grand experiment with the Halloween intellectual property that serves no one but Zombie himself. Awful dialogue, a mixture of good to bad performances and a lack of genuine horror or effectiveness leaves one to wonder what was the aim of this film and the first Zombie outing. In the grand scheme of things is this a case where such a departure from the original source material actually led to something not just far worse, but something at times even incomprehensible and unrecognisable in comparisons. Zombie is just for me the lamest of auteurs and one I desperately fail to enjoy time and time again.
Halloween (2018, Dir. David Gordon Green)
And the cycle suddenly starts again. So this film will always have a special place in my heart, after all it was the first Halloween film I ever had the chance to see in the cinema. Yes, watching this opening night with my closest of Halloween friends was a triumphant experience, and for as much as time and this current iterations sequels have dampened my lustre for this first entry in the Hallow-Green trilogy, I would be lying on every account if I did not truly state to what extent that first viewing was one of the great movie-going evenings of my life thus far. So with time gone by, what still works and what has faded, and for that matter what never worked in the first place? Well once again starting somewhat afresh, only acknowledging the original 1978 film, leads one to have a little hesitance. Starting all over again, dismissing gleefully in the dialogue previous incarnations and where they took the story. David Gordon Green here as director of all three of these new entries began with such a sure hand it seemed on making a solid and fresh new film continuing and revitalising a long dormant (in regards to quality) horror series. Watching this entry again for writing this even I found the film to still have a lot of effect to it and found it worked rather well. The film has a few major issues going against it, but overall does reside in a positive realm in my mind. The films is far removed from the slow build suspense and horror of the first one and does reside in a more action-based slasher vibe than anything else, with many sequences having a nice tension to them only to end up as a dynamic and brutal action fight. Again though these are all for the most part very effective scenes, but certainly by this trilogy’s second entry, this all wears pretty thin. Green as a director has a modern sensibility about him that makes all the talk of returning to the original null and void, especially when all attempts to return to the originals aesthetics fall eerily flat. At the end of the day the whole film has a clash of personalities at its core that makes it a fun thrill ride on that opening night first viewing, but not exactly a firm and truly great horror staple in my mental cannon. It’s refreshing above all else that Meyers is truly frightening again, but one just can’t help but plague themselves with questions of intention. There is also a permeation of comedic beats in this film that at times work, but at many points are used whether intentionally or not to completely undercut the tension or horror of a moment. One particular brilliant child performance is hilarious prior to the Michael attack, but remains funny afterward even commenting “oh shit”. Funny line, great delivery, but at what cost when it removes nearly all suspense from the moment?
This is a continuation of the original and a film that strives to recreate the vitality and dynamic horror of that first film, dismissing all of the sequels that took things to ridiculous extremes. Well even here in the first film and even more so across his next two entries, Green simply takes what he likes from the previous sequels and constantly references them all the same. Perhaps the most infuriating element of all this is the adherence and consistency when it comes to whether or not Michael is of a supernatural evil. Green is clearly focusing on him as a human being with psychotic urges only to bit by bit remove all credibility and possibility for that to ever be the case. Of course the film does boast another return from Jamie Lee Curtis and her strident and joyous involvement with this new trilogy is perhaps its strongest and most admirable factor. Here Laurie is a survivalist who has grown estranged to her own daughter and to some extent her granddaughter also due to her own intense compulsion and belief that Michael may at some point return. The films arc of these three generations of Strode women is by the films best factor, with Judy Greer as Laurie’s daughter and Andi Matichak as Laurie’s grand-daughter. James Jude Courtney as the shape himself is also really great offering a fresh and dynamically brutal physical envisioning of the character. A personal favourite for better or for worse is that of Haluk Bilginer as Dr Ranbir Sartain, a character whose ‘arc’ is one that is not only shockingly un-surprising, but disastrously expositional and forced. However the performance and the mania of the character is always entertaining to me, albeit certainly not by design - bar one line; “you just sit still”, “what do you mean I was already sitting still”. Perhaps my biggest peeve with the film and one that extends into the later sequels of this trilogy too is this obsession for every single victim to have some forced and cringey moment of humanising characteristic. It all just feels so pained to have every single character who is about to die say something about their lives and their hobbies to humanise them before they get swiftly murdered. Every single person has to have a small but of humour or a small bit of life about them, the attempt is clear to make likeable and believable characters we don’t want to see die, but it grows very thin very fast. Overall one can’t help but feel the same way when it comes to the insistence to recreate or warp iconic images we have seen before only to shift characters who were in them originally or things to the same effect. However in actuality on first watch these were all moments that worked for me and I can’t lie, this film will forever be perhaps unfairly tainted by his horrid sequels that did everything I didn’t like here and took them to major extremes, albeit here they’re only mild issues.
Halloween Kills (Dir. David Gordon Green, 2021)
The below is an abbreviated version of a full review written for the film on it’s initial release. The full review can be found elsewhere on this blog.
All in all Halloween
Kills should have worked. It’s an easy enough thing to say now, but it
really should have. 2018’s film brought new life into the franchise, taking the
best elements of many of the sequels and bolstering them in a new timeline with
a distinct focus on the reality. However once again we have delved into the
absolute ridiculous in the case of this new entry. Meyers has gone beyond an
unstoppable foe and has grown once more into a mythic being, without any
explanation (who knows if in the next film we’re back to ‘the curse of thorn’).
“The next thrilling chapter of the Halloween series”
unfortunately is a desperately messy farce of loose plotlines and painfully
forced characters, all brought together by a script so terrible, so shamelessly
nostalgia mining, so cringe-worthily on the nose, that this fan can barley even
come to terms with just how bad it was. I think the biggest thing for me on why
I hated this film as much as I did is because of just how good 2018 was and how
well it brought us back to the tangibility and realism of the horror of the
first film, not to the really stripped down respect that I would want, but to a
level that is probably the best we could expect in this current climate of
films. This film however feels in its script that it can justify any ridiculous
happening by just having the character literalise and mythologize the previous
events of the other films to the extent where people are repeating themselves
over and over again. It truly is rather abysmal. Look, everybody performance
wise is still great. Myers is still and will always be scary. There are moments
and there are scenes where suddenly we are given a decent sequel again, however
all in all and all over this film is a desperate longing to take this film somewhere
beyond a regular slasher, something transcended. In this regard it fails
desperately.
I feel one is in a tricky spot when reviewing Halloween
Kills, for one can’t talk anymore about the film just as an 1hr 45min
horror, and perhaps that’s unfair in some ways. However many of the outside
factor issues I have with the film have been brought upon the film by its own
creators, actors and creative team. During the marketing campaign for this
film, many of the stars and creative have made repeated allusions to the films
commentary on larger headier outside social themes, as if the film being written
and shot some 4 years ago made it unknowingly and powerfully prescient in some
way. This worked for me in the case of 2018 and its incorporation of elements
of the female reclaiming of trauma at the hands of violent male assaulters, of
course if one is to make a sequel to the 1978 film then such a theme is not
only deeply perfect but also feels integral. However in this case the
filmmakers and writers have chosen to make this film, which features multiple
scenes of an angry mob growing, and make comment that it relates to such things
as the #blacklivesmatter movement. After watching the film however I can only
comment that these correlations are dangerously over-simplified and painfully
wrong-minded. Yes there is a group of people who want change, but this is a
film where that mob is completely wrong for long stretches of the film and
fuelled and blinded by rage and anger. That doesn’t feel like #blacklivesmatter
to me in the slightest, I don’t know about you. Also the film has multiple
flashbacks constructed around a lousy character arc based around police
brutality, where the ultimate decision is that they were wrong to stop the
police killing an unarmed apprehended suspect. I mean, come on. It can’t just
have been me. On a script level the arcs don’t work, but on a deeper societal
level the film is almost reprehensible. These are very big words to throw
around for a movie such as this, however if the film was marketed as a simple
enough enjoyable slasher film then we would not be in the situation where these
comments feel nesercery to be made. However every single interview and piece of
marketing is based around this embarrassingly self-righteous concept of the
film being prophetic. I must once again elaborate Halloween is
at its best when it is striving in the simplicity of the tale it is telling,
the simplest and scariest of camp-fire tales, but when it is over-stuffed with
plot, characters and outside social commentary – the film can implode, such is
the case with Halloween Kills. And worse than all that, the
film isn’t even scary. It’s thrilling at times and the action is exciting. But
never once was it scary to this man in his viewing. A
terribly disappointing and painfully over-stuffed 5/10 mess. 2018 was no
masterpiece, but the highs of that film fly far, far above that of this
seriously lesser sequel. As a horror film it fails, having more or less
completely adopted the action thriller elements of other entries. As a comment
on society it feels painfully forced and dangerously misinformed. As a musing
on the effects of the aftermath of the first film it’s fine. As a fun slasher
it’s even great and fun. The performances too are all largely excellent.
However this trilogy of entries has needlessly sidled itself with the burden
and campaign of making it a prestige picture with a deeply serious allegory for
greater themes and hence leads one to think that this fine slasher is a lot
more, when it actuality that couldn’t be further from the truth. Once again
John Carpenter is the MVP, with his score composed with Daniel Davies and Cody
Carpenter being another shining beam of light in this otherwise shoddy affair.
Whether I be a whore of nostalgia or not, I will always enjoy these films on a
very base level due to my love of the characters and the music itself, to such
a case that when everybody is on screen I feel some notes of joy, but even with
all these elements present, Halloween Kills did seriously push
how far even I was willing to go.
A note
on Kills, 5 years on.
In
complete honesty there is a little bit of a camp ‘so bad it’s good’ quality to Kills
for me, which is hampered by the quality of certain sections making overall
the experience a little disjointed. However overall the bits that made me
cringe to all hell on a first watch, I now enjoy on a level of amazement almost
that something this bad in parts was put on immediately following 2018!
Halloween Ends (Dir. David Gordon Green, 2022)
The below is an abbreviated version of a full review written for the film on it’s initial release. The full review can be found elsewhere on this blog.
Following an interesting and
genuinely shocking opening, the film then has a solid opening credits - I’m in.
But then we meet Laurie once more who is know thankfully taking the horrid
editorialising that was the dialogue of the previous film and putting it into a
memoir, which technically does make more sense. Somewhat easier to stomach then
real characters saying it aloud, but no less cringey and un-affecting. This is
all paired with a montage of moments from films this current trilogy doesn’t
ignore, as-well as moments from its own previous two films. Then we start
meeting our new characters and retuning to our other remaining folks. And then
you detach. The dialogue is lame and trite, and at worse laughable. The new
characterisations of our leads is at times bizarre and at others wholly
unearned, and overall we are back to at times a level of unintentional humour
that matches the camp farcical glee I have now watching Kills. The
issue is that at a certain point this segues into boredom. Curtis as Strode is
always wonderful and always fun to watch, but again her actions and decision
and changes of thoughts are so wildly baffling that it’s hard to not laugh.
Same with the wonderful Andi Matichak, who is delightful and great but is
forced into a romance with the new character of Corey Cunningham played by
Rohan Campbell, and to their credit the two actors are believable in their
scenes. But make-ups and break-ups and lust and love are so badly plotted out
and shift so soon from scene to scene that again one can’t help but lower their
head or look in awe of the fan-fictioney feel of this finale. The character of
Corey without directly commenting on his purpose in the film is one that is
effectively the lead of the whole film, it is effectively a character study of
this disturbed individual with our legacy characters coming in and out of his
story. Does this work? No. But the problem is not that this is an original
entry in the Halloween series, more so that it’s just not
delivered very well. The film is such a hodge podge of ideas and some are
derived well, and as always Green is very good at delivering brutality and
thrilling action horror in these films, as always these are violent slashers,
rather than pieces of tension film-making (those days are long gone). But
overall whether these original concepts were good or not, the film eventually
has to give up with that enterprise and conclude with the ultimate Strode
versus Michael showdown that they’ve been promising. But it’s not as good or as
thrilling as 2018, it’s not as uproarious as H20 and it’s not
as masterful as 1978, nor as explosive as Halloween II. There is a
sense that Ends is an attempt to please everybody, but no, it
did not please me.
It’s the sort of film where on a
re-watch who knows I may feel more akin to what it’s revealed to be going
for, but right now it’s got to be a 4/10. I know there are many Halloween fans
who I agree with on most fronts who are appreciative of the zag that this film
takes, but beyond the admiration to the zag, I don’t know where I can find joy
with this film. The story is original, yes, but it’s still badly made with
badly drawn characters and by the end of course gives up on its new storyline
for a re-hash of a final showdown between Laurie and Michael that ends up one
of the worst and most anti-climatic we’ve received in this series. Ends has
its moments but they are few are far between and what it re-hashes it does so
to little effect and what it does new is not well conceived or delivered to be
enjoyable either. There is a satisfaction to seeing a final definitive
undoubtable conclusion to Michael. However there isn’t a single time I don’t
rewatch the first film and see those glorious final shots and not wish deep in
my core that we never got a single other film again in this series and this
from a guy who likes a lot of them. But still there will always be a part of me
when I hear that breathing that admits to himself that above all else, I wish
they never touched this property again. For is there actually any real satisfaction
in Michael being killed? Or is the horror and is the eternal enduring quality
all down to the mystery. The crux of course is that I think most anybody would
agree and yet I’ll see you again in - I'll say ten years, max.
A note on Ends, 1 year on.
Nope. Not yet. Not shifted perspective just yet. The things I loved I still loved and the many, many things I found baffling or even hated remain most certainly in that state. Sorry Gordon Green.
- - Thomas Carruthers
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