Fright Night 2

A most unusual sequel.

Generally speaking, we expect sequels to carry on the story line from the preceding movie, or at least the general tone or spirit. While Fright Night 2 is ostensibly a sequel to 2011’s remake, it really is as much of a remake as the last one was. The characters of Charlie, Amy, Peter Vincent, and Evil Ed return (despite Evil Ed’s demise) without any knowledge of vampires or the events of the first film, and Jerry the vampire is now Gerri the vampire, and female.  Curious. As near as I can remember, it doesn’t have anything to do with Fright Night Part 2, the original sequel to the original film.

Charlie (Will Payne), Evil Ed (Chris Waller), and Amy (Sacha Parkinson) are American university students (all played by British actors, of course) whose class has gone to Romania for a course, field trip or something else. Not exactly sure on that one. Their professor is the sexy Gerri Dandridge (Jaime Murray), and Charlie spies her one night from a window dining on a young woman. Gerri is a vampire! He tries to convince Amy and Evil of this, but they haven’t seen the previous Fright Nights, so they are hard to convince. Eventually Evil comes around, and suggests they consult Peter Vincent (Sean Power), the famous host of a ghost-hunting reality TV show, who just happens to be in Bucharest. Vincent scoffs at them and tells them vampires aren’t real.
The plot plays out pretty much in the same fashion as the original and remake of Fright Night. The major change is Gerri is Countess Elisabeth Bathory, and that Amy turns out to be a virgin born at midnight during a blood moon, whose blood can either turn a vampire human or allow them to walk in the daylight. Gerri wants Amy, Charlie wants to save Amy, things work out for Evil Ed as well as you’d expect, etc., etc.

The movie is barely passable for a straight-to-dvd feature. The movie lacks the humor which helped elevate the first two versions of the movie, and suffers for it. The actors are competent but bland with the exception of Jaime Murray, who really, um, bites into her role. This one is for hardcore vampire movie fans and those who can’t bear to miss a sequel, even if the sequel to a remake is really a remake itself.
.

The Breed (2006)

Although I have a soft spot for all sorts of creature features, I run into a bit of a personal problem when said creatures turn out to be dogs, as I tend to like dogs a lot more than people. In my entire life, I have only met one or two dogs I didn’t get along with; while the number of people I haven’t liked is {supercomputer is busy calculating this}. Anyway, on to The Breed.

After a short introduction of a couple docking their sailboat on an island and getting attacked by dogs, we see a seaplane loaded with five twenty-somethings. They are two couples and their Token Black Friend. TBK is doomed of course, because black guys in horror movies don’t last as long as a drummer for Spinal Tap. The two white guys are brothers, with the younger one a high-achiever who is going to medical school and the older the ne-er-do-well of the family. This is a setup for conflict between the two, but since the older brothers is surprisingly competent, it isn’t as much of a contrast as the filmmakers intended. The other two are the girlfriends, one played by Michelle Rodriquez, which immediately started me to speculating about when and how she would die. Rodriquez is the distaff version of Sean Bean, rarely making it to the closing credits with a pulse.

The five are flying to the remote island for a holiday, because the two brothers inherited a house there from a recently deceased uncle. I was having trouble identifying with them, since the only thing I’ve inherited from an uncle was a pair of old boots. The only other building on the island is an abandoned facility where they experimented on dogs, supposedly shut down because all the dogs got rabies and had to be destroyed. Not giving anything away if you looked at the picture of the movie poster above, but group is soon under attack by a pack of feral dogs and trapped in the cabin, where they try to outwit the fidos and escape. It seems that the experiments performed on them made the dogs super aggressive and super intelligent, although there must be limits since they haven’t invented rocket launchers or anything.

There is something of a subplot about those characters that have been bitten and survived becoming more aggressive and losing control, as if the bites had given them rabies or maybe just made them irritable at being gnawed on by Lassie, but this goes nowhere at all. Maybe they were saving that for The Breed 2.

A tense scene from the movie, showing the cast being attacked by one of the killer dogs.

Anyway, both acting and direction are competent, with only a few fast cutaways needed to conceal vicious dogs wagging their tails and sporting doggie smiles. The script isn’t particularly dumb by the low standards of this sort of movie. The scenery is nice (It was filmed in South Africa). I suppose the final judgment on the movie is that it is a perfectly bland, middle of the road horror-thriller. There is nothing much to recommend it or trash it. If you are in the mood for this sort of thing and have nothing else to watch, it will pass the time well enough, I suppose.

The moral of the movie’s story is always carry bags of Milk Bones on your vacation. You will make friends with the murderous dogs, and they’ll eat your friends instead.

The Fog (2005)

Way back in the aughts (You remember those. No? They ended three years ago! Fewer drugs, dude.) there was a mini-wave of remaking horror films from the 70s/80s. Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Arthur all got remakes, with enough success to encourage studios to keep doing it.

John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog was a fairly obvious choice to be remade. Successful at the time, it isn’t held in quite the same reverence as some of his better-known films, and Carpenter himself has said is feels dated. So, cast some good looking young TV stars, use modern special effects and it couldn’t go wrong. Right? Oy…

Nick Castle (Tom Welling, Smallville) owns a charter fishing boat harbored in Antonio Bay, Oregon. Despite the name, Antonio Bay is a small island off the coast of Oregon. He takes fisherman out for brief excursions with his completely incompetent mate Spooner. We only get to know Spooner briefly, but in that short time he manages to almost capsize the boat with the anchor winch and ignores the small matter of engine trouble at sea. Gilligan was better. One day, Nick and Spooner are floating along when they snag their anchor, disturbing a small bag. This is significant because…I guess because that’s how the movie starts.

Back on shore, we learn there is tension in the town between young entrepreneurs like Nick, who want the town to spend to upgrade the marina, and the older generation who spent the funds on a statue of the four founding fathers of the town. This is supposed to be a heated controversy, but neither Nick nor the town elders seem to be able to work up much enthusiasm for the fight. The timing is crucial, since this is the 100th anniversary of the town’s founding in 1871. Wait, when is this movie set? 2005? But…Try not to think about it.

Nick has an old girlfriend Elizabeth (Maggie Grace, Taken) who has been gone to New York for a while, and a new girlfriend Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair, Hellboy) who is the owner and sole operator of the town’s radio station. Nick is surprised when he picks up a female hitchhiker late at night (in a creepy don’t-get-in-the-truck way) and finds it is Elizabeth, who has apparently walked back to Oregon from New York. This would seem to trigger a heated lovers’ triangle, but none of the three can work up much interest. Stevie has a son, whose purpose is to be put in danger.

Meanwhile, disturbing that bag (or possibly the 100th/134th anniversary thing, or sunspots or something) has triggered a strange fog that darts in and out, hence the name of the movie. The fog is filled with ghosts, who murder people indiscriminately and really hate streetlamps. It seems that in 1871, there was another mythical Oregon island with a prosperous trading colony. Through trade with China, they all caught leprosy. That isn’t how leprosy works, but whatever. Cast out from their island (by who?) they search for a new home. The good founding fathers of Antonio Bay promise them half the island, but rob them, lock them on their boat and burn them alive instead, and use the stolen wealth to build the town. This does seem like the way to get a monument to yourself, judging by history. Rather than take their revenge on those who actually wronged them, the ghostly lepers wait a century or more to punish the relatively innocent descendants and unconnected people living in modern Antonio Bay.

Oh. no! Limited visibility!

There is also a drunken priest who wanders around misquoting the Bible, various impalements, and a lot of broken streetlamps. I don’t reveal the ending of movies so as not to spoil them for those who haven’t seen the film, but in this case I don’t understand it anyway. Something happens, but who knows why.

The actors are good looking but uninspired. Even Ms. Blair, who is normally an interesting actress, looks like she wishes she were somewhere else. The direction is flat. The modern special effects don’t really look as good as the 1980 version. There really isn’t anything about which to recommend this movie.

My favorite anecdote related to this movie is the director insisted that Selma Blair, a petite woman, wear formidable falsies in her role. Why? The role of Stevie in the original version was played by carpenter’s then-wife Adrienne Barbeau, who was fairly busty. Again, why? This is apparently yet another mystery of The Fog.

The Final Destination

The Final Destination movies (of which there have been five to date, with further installments planned) have always been a guilty pleasure. The theme of inescapable fate, with death coming to those who thwarted it with various Rube Goldberg-esque machinations, was fairly repetitious, but there was a certain fun-loving quality amidst the gore, and I enjoyed the first three installments to some degree. Not enough, I suppose, since the fourth movie, titled The Final Destination*, sat on my shelf for over a year until I finally got around to it this week.

A group of vacuous twenty-somethings – who are supposed to be students, I guess – go to a track together to attend an auto race. None of them seems very interested in it but Hunt (Nick Zano), who is only there because he wants to see a wreck, and who is a dear friend to the others despite having a personality that makes you want to run over him with a steamroller. He gets his wish when a car wrecks, spins into the crowd, and kills the entire group along with various other bystanders in grisly fashion. Boy, that was a short movie, can’t say I’ll miss them thou – oh, it was just a premonition by Nick (Bobby Campo). He manages to get his friends, some of the bystanders, and a security guard out before the fatal accident. Well, that’s a more disappointing end, bu – oh, yeah, it’s the same setup for the other films. They have cheated death, but death doesn’t take that lying down, and will get them in the sequence they were supposed to have died. A few gory deaths, a trademark scene of gratuitous nudity, and a fiery climax at a 3D movie (how meta!) and it ends the same way as the others did.

Gallagher has gone too far!

There are a couple of differences. Nick continues to have vague premonitions (unlike the first specific one he had) although that mostly leads to frustration because his friends absolutely refuse to believe him. After all, his vision only saved their lives. There is also a minor twist that someone who has cheated the reaper can’t die until it’s their turn in the sequence again, which would allow you to have a pretty exciting day or two. I can’t see that these additions add or detract from the movie, but one change does: Tony Todd is not in this film. If you have seen the first three, you know he appears as a mysterious character to explain things to the victims-to-be and to thoroughly creep them out. Todd had a scheduling conflict that kept him out of this one, and the film suffers for it, for as I’ve said before, a movie should have as much Tony Todd as possible.

The big failing here is there is no reason to care if the cast survives, with the possible exception of George (Mykelti Williamson), and in the case of Hunt and Racist (that’s the only way he’s referred to in the film or credits) you actively root for them to get it. If you don’t care about characters, you won’t care about the movie, and The Final Destination definitely falls short of the guilty pleasure status of its predecessors.

The Final Destination was the first in the series to be filmed in 3-D, but I watched it in 2-D since I’m not a fan of splitting headaches.


* I’m sure it’s an example of some form of OCD, but I can’t express to you how much it irritates me the other movies are titled Final Destination, Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3, and Final Destination 5, but this one is called The Final Destination. Consistency, people! It makes my shelf look unorganized.
.

The Faculty

Back in the 1990s, Kevin Williamson probably did more than anyone to bring horror movies back to popularity. The writer who was best known as the creator of the angsty teen drama Dawson’s Creek also created the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer franchises, making slasher movies hip for Generation X. In 1998, he turned his formula to a re-visioning of the alien body-snatching subgenre, with The Faculty, directed by Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, From Dusk Till Dawn).

In a typical high school in Ohio, we find a fairly standard collection of students. There is Delilah the mean girl (Jordana Brewster), Zeke the slacker drug dealer (Josh Hartnett), Stokes the goth girl everyone thinks is gay (Clea Duvall), Stan the jock who wants to be known for more than his physical skills (Shawn Hatosy), and Casey the hopeless geek (Frodo Elijah Woods). We are introduced to each in short illustrative vignettes, most notably a group of students picking up Casey and slamming him crotch-first into a flag pole, over and over. As a confirmed hobbit-hater, I approve of this. The kids have little in common except the usual teenager’s belief that adults are aliens. In this case, they’re right.

Starting with the teachers, people are taken over and controlled by alien entities that love water and conformity. Our gang of misfits are the only ones who tumble to the truth before it’s too late, and it is up to them to stop the alien takeover. They have two advantages. Stokes is a science fiction reader, so she knows they only have to find the alien queen and kill her to end the reign of terror. They have a weapon when they discover Zeke’s homemade speed is lethal to the invaders (Nerdism: Zeke says his power works against the water-based aliens because it is a diuretic. I think he means it is a dessicant, because it doesn’t give the ETs an uncontrollable urge to pee.).

This is not a terribly well-regarded movie. Robert Rodriguez has mostly disavowed it, saying he only did it to learn how to work with CGI and to satisfy a contractual obligation. It is the only one of his movies without his distinctive special features on the home video release, and has little of his individual style. It currently has just a 6.3/10 rating on imdb.com.

Still, I love this movie. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and try to be something it’s not. It is, I think, a lot of fun. Williamson was the first screenwriter to write a slasher movie where the characters realize they are in a slasher movie, and here, thanks to the character of Stokes, they are aware of the science fictional precedents. Stokes quotes Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, even getting the name right on the later. Curiously, she doesn’t mention John Carpenter’s version of The Thing, but that maybe because The Faculty steals/pays homage to it so directly. For instance, when our heroic band decides to test themselves to see if any of them are aliens, it is virtually the same scene as the test sequence from The Thing, right down to the couch and the revealed alien crashing through a wall to get outside.

If this sort of a thing interests you and you haven’t seen it yet, you might want to give The Faculty a try. If you are a political conservative, you will probably be delighted when Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the eye. (In the interest of political balance, liberals should watch Anaconda, where Jon Voight gets eaten by a snake.
.

The police say they have some questions for Bill O'Reilly

The Wicker Tree

The 1973 movie The Wicker Man is probably one of the more beloved cult movies of the horror genre. It had a very spotty distribution record outside of the U.K., and in some places only made it to the screen after 10 years or more.) The story of an upright, religious, and sexually repressed policeman who investigates the case of a missing girl in the Hebrides and has his faith challenged and his life taken by the pagan locals was very daring for its time. Home video increased its notoriety, and for years the original writer-director, Robin Hardy, has struggled to make a sequel. A big-budget remake was released in 2006 that has become legendary for how awful it is. Look for youtube clips of Nicholas Cage wearing a bear suit and screaming “Oh no! Not the bees!” if you dare.

In 2010, Hardy finally succeeded in filming a sequel, entitled The Wicker Tree, adapted from a novel he wrote called Cowboys for Christ. Was it worth the wait? Let’s just saying I was really missing those bees before the end.

Steve and Beth (Brittania Nicol and Henry Garret) are two sincere young Christians living in Texas, where all the men wear cowboy hats and everyone speaks with an exaggerated Southern accent. Beth used to be a successful country singer with songs about drinkin’ and whores (like all good country songs) but she saw the light and now sings turgid religious songs. Steve and Beth are engaged and wear silver rings as a promise they won’t have sex until they are married. They are the people you hope you won’t have to sit next to at the company picnic, but end up having to do so anyway.

Scotland, it seems, has a chronic shortage of evangelical Christians, so there is a Lend-Lease type program called Cowboys for Christ that sends Protestant missionaries over to witness to the heathens. It’s a shame Scotland doesn’t have Protestant churches of their own. They could even call their church The Church of Scotland if they wanted to. But, I digress. Beth and Steve arrive in Tressock, Scotland and begin preaching and singing to those sinners. They learn the locals worship Sulis, a version of Minerva, and accept it calmly, rather than freaking the hell out like real evangelicals would. A Scottish hussy flashes her boobs at Steve, his chastity ring flies off at the speed of light, and he begins the forbidden boning. He could have remained pure if he hadn’t traveled to Scotland, the land where women have breasts.

A tender, romantic moment

It turns out the pagan-ness is the result of some manipulation by the local bigwig. He owns the local nuclear power plant, which has been leaking a peculiar kind of radiation which apparently makes men sterile without any other effects. Lest the townsfolk turn against the power plant since they can’t have children, he has convinced them to wear silly masks and practice cannibalism and human sacrifice to restore their fertility. Groundskeeper Willy would be offended by this depiction of the Scots. In due course Beth gets her bare butt buttered (!), Steve is part of a very special meal celebration, a tree gets torched, and Beth has a chance to escape if she’s smart enough to do so. I’ll leave you to guess how that turns out.

This is a terrible movie, and it’s hard to believe the same person who made the first one is responsible for this as well. The stereotypes of Texans and Scots are painful to watch, and it has the depth of a puddle. The original presented the culture clash of an authentically religious Christian against true pagans, but here, no one really seems to be much of a believer. You know all along where this is heading, and the only suspense is how they get there. Hardy is supposedly working on a third film in the series, but my expectations are now low.

Christopher Lee was supposed to be one of the leads in The Wicker Tree just as in the earlier film, but an injury restricted him to a completely unnecessary cameo.
.

Poster for the new Carrie

The remake of Carrie starring Chloë Grace Moretz has a new poster. I have no idea if the movie is going to be good, but the poster is pretty cool. Amazing how often Ms. Moretz has (movie) blood on her face.

Subspecies

Way back in the late 80s/early 90s, when there was money to be made in the direct-to-video market, Full Moon Features was the biggest name in the B-movie market, at least for horror fans. They had several lengthy series, the best known of which is the still-going Puppet Master films. In 1991, they ventured into vampire movies, with Subspecies, which spawned three direct sequels and one kinda sorta sequel.

In rural Romania, vampires are still thick on the ground (The characters in the movie mention there being many vampires, although we only see three. The recession is hitting every profession.). The local vampire king is one Vladislav (Angus Scrimm from Phantasm in a cameo scene). He has a generally pro-human policy, and has left the local populace alone. He has two sons, Radu (Anders Hove) who is more the typical bad-guy vampire, as evidenced by his amazing finger extensions, and his wimpier son Stefan (Michael Watson). Vladislav is in possession of the Bloodstone, an acorn-shaped jewel from which drips the blood of saints. All the vampires crave the Bloodstone because…well, I didn’t really catch that part. Maybe the blood of saints has a chipotle flavor? I thought the blood of saints kept vampires from needing to drink human blood, but this is contradicted by the movie.

Careful where you scratch.

Anyway, Radu decides to kill his father for the Bloodstone, but is thwarted when his dad hits a switch that releases an overhead cage exactly where Radu is standing. What luck. Vladislav’s victory is temporary, however, as Radu breaks off his own fingers (!) and they turn into tiny demon-looking creatures. I swear I was not on any medication, legal or otherwise, when I was watching this. Seeing this, Vladislav obligingly runs to the other side of the room so the homunculi can get to the switch to re-raise the cage, instead of, you know, stepping on them. Radu is released, Vladislav is skewered.

(Incidentally, the little creatures are apparently the subspecies of the title. I assumed it referred to vampires, but no, it’s a group of four-inch high toadies.)

Coincidentally, there is the arrival in town of four graduate students to study local folklore. They are played by three attractive young ladies, hired more for their willingness to forego a no-nudity clause in their contracts than their acting ability. Well, two-thirds of them, anyway. They could not behave less like graduate students if they tried. It’s sort of Valley Girls in Eastern Europe. Stefan shows up, falls in love with one of the girls, and they fight to end Radu’s (short) reign of terror. Radu is disposed of, although if you remember where I mentioned sequels, you know this doesn’t take.

Subspecies is a victim in many places of the film’s microbudget, but it is a good bit of fun. Director Ted Nicolaou does a good job of setting the mood, and was strongly influenced by Murnau’s Nostferatu, most obviously with Radu’s long fingers, and the creepy way the shadows of those hands look thrown against walls and across of the faces of sleeping victims-to-be.

Subspecies was the first movie to be filmed in Romania following the fall of Communism. The featurette on the blu-ray disc shows a number of Romanians being asked if they believe in vampires. All say they do not, and think it a frivolous question, no doubt partly because they had just gotten out from under the thumb of Nicolae Ceaușescu, a dictator so beloved that when he fell from power he was given a two hour trial and an immediate three minute execution. One of the interviewees stated that Dracula was a myth made up by a “stupid American.” I don’t think Bram Stoker was stupid, and I know he was an Irishman.
.

Skyline

Not the famous brand of Chili in Cincinnati. Not the small northern Alabama town where everyone seems to hate each other. This is Skyline the movie.

By far, the easiest type of movie to review is one that is completely awful. The jokes basically write themselves. It’s also easy enough to rave about a movie you love. The hardest movie to review, in my opinion, is one that you never form a strong opinion about and neither like it well enough to particularly recommend it or hate it enough to mock it. This is also Skyline the movie.

An artist named Jarrod (Eric Balfour from Haven and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) and his girlfriend Elaine arrive in Los Angeles for a birthday party for Jarrod’s best friend Terry (Donald Faison from Scrubs). Terry has hit it big, and wants Jarrod to move from New York to work for him. We are treated to a dullish party where we learn Elaine is pregnant and doesn’t want to move, Terry is cheating on his wife with his personal assistant, and the building super objects to loud music. It’s a very special episode of Party of Five. If you’ve ever watched one of those TV shows about angst-ridden yuppies and wished aliens would invade and kill them all, this might be your kind of movie, because Jarrod and Elaine have arrived in L.A. just in time for a big alien invasion.

Alien spacecraft descend and produce bright lights. If you look at them, you become all veiny and are drawn into the light and sucked up into the spacecraft, no doubt for a nefarious purpose. The military is no match for the alien menace, and soon Jarrod, Elaine, Terry, and company are attempting to survive the attack and get the hell out of town.

The obvious connection to be made here is Cloverfield, a similar and better movie about a group of affluent young things trying to survive horror. In both movies, the main characters (and the viewers) never get the full story about what is going on, and seem to be a side story to the main action. In this one, the characters seem a little less sympathetic, and the ending tends toward the confusing side.

More interesting than the movie itself is the back story of how it came to be made. The co-directors are successful in the field of computer-generated special effects and self-financed the production, spending $500,000 to shoot the live action before adding $10,000,000 of special effects in post. (The movie was shot in one of the co-directors condominium building). It does look great.

I suppose this is one of those films that should be seen by viewers who love alien invasion films, a group of which I am a member. A sequel has been rumored to be in the works since this came out, but has not yet materialized.

It will clear up. Just give it time.

.

R.I.P. Herbert Lom

Czech-born character actor Herbert Lom passed away last week at 95. He was probably best known for playing the long-suffering Dreyfuss in the Pink Panther films, but he made a number of horror movies, including the Hammer Films version of The Phantom of the Opera, Asylum and Now the Screaming Starts for Amicus, Mark of the Devil, and many others. He was also in a sci-fi movie that creeped me out as a kid called Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, although I doubt many people remember that one.
.

The Thing (2011)

It's not human. Yet.

Like a lot of horror fans, I have a special place in my evil heart for the 1982 version of The Thing directed by John Carpenter. It’s probably my favorite horror film, and there are a lot of people who agree with me, it seems. That’s quite an achievement for a movie that was critically reviled and a commercial dud upon its theatrical release, but home video has been very good to it.

I had mixed feelings when it was announced that a prequel was being made. The 1982 version was a masterpiece of paranoid, claustrophobic horror, and it was difficult to see how it could be matched. Still, there was always the sense we had seen the middle of the story, and didn’t know exactly what had happened before the infected dog reached Outpost 31, or anything about what happened after the ‘82 movie ended. I was pretty eager to see it but it met with a similar fate as the first one, with a poor box office and terrible reviews, and it disappeared from local theaters quickly. I had to wait until the blu ray was released to see it.

As you probably know, the movie shows us what happened in the Norwegian camp before Carpenter’s version. A group of Norwegian scientists working in the Antarctic discover an alien spacecraft frozen in the ice, and, more ominously, a life form frozen nearby. The head of the expedition, Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) calls in a paleontologist, Kate Loyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) to help study it, keeping the discovery secret from the larger world from the time being. As you can guess, the thing in the ice isn’t nearly as dead as the scientists think, and it wakes up, breaks free of the ice, and, to quote the ’82 movie, is “weird and pissed off.” Soon the human numbers begin to shrink, and they discover what the scientists of Outpost 31 did/will: the creature can devour and replicate any living thing. Once this realization is reached, the survivors become locked in a struggle not simply to live, but to keep the thing from reaching the rest of Earth.

The filmmakers were in a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t situation with this movie. If their version was too close to the Carpenter film, they would get savaged for copying the “beloved” classic. If they made it too different, they wouldn’t be true to the source material. I really don’t think there is anything that could have been done to satisfy the true fanboys. They did try to protect the earlier film as much as possible. The studio originally wanted to do a full-fledged remake, but the producers and director (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.) argued the ’82 version was too good, and swayed them to a prequel instead. The prior film was praised for its use of practical effects, so the effects were practical wherever possible, with some CGI enhancement. Instead of the somber mood of the Carpenter version, this is a more action-oriented film, and Winstead’s character owes more to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley than Kurt Russell’s MacReady.

So, is it any good? I think so, yes. It isn’t as good as the 1982 movie, but almost no horror films are, in my opinion. It does manage to pay careful homage to the first film while presenting something new. The alien in this one is more given to overt attacks on humans rather than the stealth we have previously seen, but that is logically explained as it learning to be a little more cautious after being set on fire a few times. A new test is devised to determine that some people aren’t the thing, which is low-tech and fairly clever. The cast acquit themselves well, and the ending, although pre-ordained, is clever. If you measure the movie in your mind against the version you love, it will probably come up short, but if you approach it with an open mind, I think it will be enjoyable. I’m looking forward to watching the two movies together to see how it works as a double feature.

I do think many of the characters could have been developed further. Other than Loyd, Halvorson and the helicopter pilot Carter (Joel Edgerton), most the characters are just meat for the grinder. Halvorson also comes across as a bit of a stock scientist villain. Winstead was criticized by a lot of reviewers, but I think she does a good job of portraying the outsider in the camp who has to take over in a crisis because no one else can.

I’ll address a couple of the message board concerns from before the movie’s release. A lot of fans of the first were upset that two women are in the cast of the new version, whereas the first movie is generally believed to have an all-male cast (it doesn’t, but most people don’t get it). I can’t help with that, since fear of a vagina is a matter for psychiatrists. If you are one of these, you may be comforted by the fact that Halvorson treats Loyd and the other female scientist like dirt. There was also quite a bit of noise from the “remakes are bad and ruin the first movie” crowd. I’ll just point out that Carpenter’s film was a remake of the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, and leave it at that.
.

Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later

After Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the Halloween franchise seemed to have run out of steam, tangled in its own convoluted continuity. Was Michael subject to the Curse of Thorn? The result of a genetics experiment? It was unclear where to go with the story, and the box office receipts had been in decline for some time, while costs were rising. I suppose in 1996, it seemed doubtful Michael Myers would ever be given a chance to increase his body count. A couple of things happened, though, which brought him back to life, just as he always revived from whatever apparent death he suffered on screen.

First of all, Scream came out, which led to a brief revival of slasher movies. Secondly, Jamie Leigh Curtis became interested in doing a follow-up to the earlier films, something she had been deadfast against. I’ve always assumed this was partially because her career was slowing as she hit the 40-year-old wall that limits the opportunities of actresses, but that’s just speculation. The fact that so many A-list actors and actresses appeared in the Scream franchise probably helped remove some of the career stigma as well. Whatever the reason, with her involvement, a new sequel was prepped to take advantage of the twentieth anniversary of the original, with the somewhat kludgey title of Halloween H2O: 20 Years Later. Story ideas were supplied by Kevin Williamson, the writer of the Scream franchise. John Carpenter was approached to direct and was interested, but the studio balked at his $10 million fee, which seems to have stemmed from lingering resentment at being done out of a rightful share of the profits for the original Halloween. Instead, the movie was directed by Steve Miner, a producer on the original Friday the 13th, and director of the first two sequels in that series.

The movie opens in Langdon, Illinois, presumably close to Haddonfield. (At first, I thought the government might have just given up and nuked Haddonfield due to the carnage there, but I guess that wasn’t the case.) On the day before Halloween, a familiar person visits Nurse Chambers (Dr. Loomis’s nurse from the first two movies), killing her and two neighbor boys. Michael is back! We get one final look at the (cinematic) incompetence of Illinois policemen, as they take forever to respond to the report of a burglary, then go to the house next door to where three murders are being committed.

The scene shifts to California, the next day (finally, they won’t have to work around all the greenery at Halloween). Laurie Strode (Jamie Leigh Curtis) has faked her own death, changed her name to Keri Tate, and is working as headmistress at a posh boarding school, living with her son John (Josh Hartnett, in his first film role). No one knows of her secret, but she hasn’t exactly ended up well adjusted, and still suffers from various psychological problems centered on Halloween. Frankly, she’s a bit of a shrew, but who can blame her? At Halloween, the school is deserted except for Jamie, her boyfriend Will (Adam Arkin), her son, his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams in another early role), two of their friends, and a security guard played by LL Cool J. Michael shows up to continue his life mission of killing his entire family, and soon various actors and actresses are being impaled by sharp things.

Although there was originally to be plot points that explained how this movie fit with the fourth through sixth installments, the decision was made that they would be ignored as if nothing had happened since Halloween II, although Laurie’s fake death remains as a remnant of that earlier version. No explanation is given for where Michael has been for the last twenty years, although I like to think he was working as a chef at Benihana. Poor Jamie from the preceding films never existed, although since she ended up spending most of her life being raped as part of a breeding experiment, that may be for the best.

Anyway, carnage ensues, many secondary characters die, and we get a face-off between Laurie/Keri and her big brother. Blood is spilled, although H2O continues the tradition of the series being less gory than most of its counterparts (never fear on that point, gore fans, Rob Zombie is on the way), and Michael is once again killed for good. Despite the seeming finality of his demise this time, having seen his previous five appearances, I’m betting he’ll get better soon.

So, what’s the verdict? Surprisingly good, to be honest. I’ve never been much of a fan of Steve Miner, but the film does a good job of building suspense, swapping a high body count for increased tension. The cast is pretty good, and film buffs will enjoy the small part played by Janet Leigh (Psycho) who is of course Jamie Leigh Curtis’ real life mother. She gets to repeat the “one good scare” line from the first movie, and give us an in-joke when she asks Laurie if she can “be maternal for a moment.” I think if you are a fan of the first two, you can segue right into this one without any real disappointment.

For the trivia buffs, the two movies seen briefly on TV sets (a series trademark) are the legendarily awful Plan 9 From Outer Space, and writer Kevin Williamson’s Scream 2.
.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

Although this is the sixth film in the series, it is the first not to have the number in the title (some of the home video releases do call it Halloween 6). This was done so that when you put them on your shelf, you have to look closely at the production date to figure out which order to place them. You don’t shelve your movies by category, sub-category, production dates, etc.? Oh, well. I have a touch of CDO, which is OCD but with the letters alphabetized, they way they should be.

It’s six years after the events of Halloween 5, and a strange cult attends a young woman giving birth. When the baby is born, it is taken by the Man in Black from the preceding film for a ritual involving painting a rune on its stomach. With the help of a sympathetic nurse, the girl escapes and takes the baby, only to be pursued by Michael Myers. We eventually learn the girl is little Jamie from the preceding two films, that she was kidnapped along with Michael, and that apparently the cult has been breeding her with her uncle Michael. (May I say: Ewwww!) She heads back to Haddonfield, with Michael on her trail.

Back in good ol’ Haddonfield, there isn’t any of the Myers family left, but relatives of the Strodes, Laurie Strodes’ adoptive family, are now living in the old Myers house. That’s convoluted. Meanwhile, next door, there is a boarding house where Tommy (Paul Rudd, in his first film), the little boy Laurie baby-sat back in the first film, now lives. Tommy has grown up to be a little weird, which is understandable, and is watching the Myers’ house for the inevitable return of MM.

It seems that Michael is as Michael is because of the ancient Curse of Thorn, which causes one person in the village to become a mad killer so that…something or other. The cultists want the curse to be passed from Michael to his son/grand-nephew because…they just do, that’s all. Michael kills everyone he meets, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) shows up once again to save the day, the Man in Black is revealed to be anti-climactic, and there is another open-ended ending.

By this point, the series had degenerated into a twisted mess. The production was famously complicated, and delayed by various lawsuits. Endless re-writes and changes meant the “Curse of Thorn” angle which is the main plot point of the early part of the film disappears at the end, and the cult is revealed to be doing genetic experiments instead, for some unknown reason. There are several bootleg alternate versions of the film floating around, and many claim they are better. They would almost have to be.

Casting was a problem. Danielle Harris was willing to come back, but producers supposedly wouldn’t meet her salary demands, which were for the amazingly low price of $5000, which shows how seriously the production company took the project. The producers wanted to bring back the actor who played Tommy in the original, but apparently couldn’t find him, although I doubt they put that much effort into it. Instead Paul Rudd got his first part. I’ve never been a fan of Rudd, and feel he is the opposite of charismatic, but he doesn’t do a bad job here as the damaged-to-the-point-of-weirdness Tommy. Donald Pleasance has been the heart and soul of the series to this point, but here he seems old and weak, and with good reason, as the legendary actor would pass away before the film was released.

The movie was savaged by critics, and with good reason. It also opened on the same weekend as Se7en, which was a much more sophisticated look at a serial killer movie, and suffered in comparison. Despite this, the sixth installment of the franchise did surprisingly good business, drawing a box office about three times its production budget. Thank Thorn they saved that five grand.

Oh, and everyone still mispronounces “Samhain.”

By the end of Curse, it was difficult to see where the franchise could go. The last two installments had strangled themselves trying to create an overly complicated mythology, and it was going to be hard to continue the story and deal with the sometimes contradictory subplots that had been created. Not to worry, though, this would be dealt with by retconning the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth movies out of existence. The next movie would pretend nothing had happened in the story since Halloween II.
.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

When last we left the Halloween franchise, Michael Myers was finally dead, due to being shot a lot, and lovable moppet Jamie had turned evil, icing her adopted mother with a knife. So, Halloween 5 would be the first in the series without Michael Myers (omitting Halloween 3, which is part of the series, but not really part of the series. Continuity, I mean. Oh, you either know what I mean or don’t care, so let’s move on.) and would feature a pre-teen girl on a rampage with a knife, right? Not so fast, my friend…

The movie opens with a recap of the ending of Halloween 4. Everybody shoots Michael Myers repeatedly until he falls down a mine shaft. They then rush forward and drop explosives down the shaft, blowing everything up real good. They do everything they can to insure that MM is dead, other than, you know, checking to see if there actually is a body. There isn’t, because we see MM crawl out of the bottom of the shaft and exit in a nearby river. His body floats downstream until he is found by a hermit, who takes his comatose body to stay at his shack with him and his parrot. This is too obvious an homage to Bride of Frankenstein to be unintentional.

Meanwhile Jamie (Danielle Harris), who only managed to wound her mom, is institutionalized, rendered completely mute by her experiences. She is frequently visited by creepy Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) and big sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell). She also has a friend at the institution, Billy (Jeffrey Landman) who stutters. If the stutter fascinates you, please listen to the commentary on the DVD, because Landman and Harris go on about how much of it was scripted longer than you would imagine possible.

On October 30th one year after the events of Halloween 4, Myers wakes up in the old man’s shack and kills him. I couldn’t help wondering why someone would live with a stranger in a coma for a year, but I guess hermits are supposed to be that way. The fate of the parrot is unknown, which is surprising since this series is very hard on canine pets, with the fourth death of a pet dog coming in this installment.

Back in Haddonfield, where I guess people continue to live because of low housing prices, Jamie has developed a telepathic link with her uncle Michael, which would be more helpful if she could talk, since MM is soon butchering a brand new crop of the town’s teenagers. (Graduation ceremonies at the local high school must have felt like a wake.) There is also a mysterious man in black stalking around town, although we never see his face.

Finally, we reach the climax, when MM confronts Jamie, who has regained the ability to talk now that it’s too late. Before he can kill her, Loomis rushes in and saves the day. For a change, Michael doesn’t “die” at the end of this one; Loomis just shoots him with a tranquilizer gun and beats the crap out of him with a two-by-four. Jamie is saved and Michael is taken to jail, which seems like a Really Bad Idea. As it proves to be, when the man in black shows up at the station, kills all the cops, and releases MM. This is the end of the movie, which is an obvious setup for the next one, where hopefully we’ll find out who the man in black really is. I’m betting on Johnny Cash.

Up until now, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the series, but it begins to go off the rails here. It’s too much of a generic slasher movie, and probably seemed tired even when it was released. Most of the characters exist only to be killed, and many of them are the types who seem to deserve it. One of the girl’s boyfriends is supposed to be a “bad boy” type, but comes off as a sullen version of Fonzie from Happy Days. In keeping with the tradition of showing everyone in Haddonfield as a moron, there are two bumbling cops who are useless even by the Haddonfield PD’s dubious standards. They even have their own “clown music” musical cue, which is supposed to be an homage to the original The Last House on the Left.

Danielle Harris does a commendable job with what she has to work with, since she has no lines for most of the film, and has to show some variation of the same frightened face throughout the first two-thirds of the movie. Donald Pleasance does a good job of chewing the scenery, which is what his role calls for. Overall, though, I don’t feel very confident as I move on to the next installment.

Halloween 5 did reasonable business at the box office, but it was obvious the slasher genre it had spawned was running out of steam at the end of the 80s.
.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

I intended to finish my recap of the Halloween series on Halloween day. I also intended to be rich and handsome; that didn’t work out either. Even though the holiday itself is over, it lives on in the hearts of each of us, whether those hearts still beat in our chest or sit in a jar on the desk of the local serial killer. So, we continue on with Project Halloween. No more Roman numerals!

Ten years have passed since the night Michael Myers “came home” in the original Halloween. Contrary to what we saw at the end of Halloween II, neither Myers nor Dr. Loomis died in the fiery climax, they just picked up some interesting new scars. Michael is in an apparent coma at an insane asylum, while Loomis continues his new career of telling everyone that Michael is going to wake up and kill them all. He is the Cassandra of this series. Naturally, he is proven right when Michael wakes up, kills a few attendants, and hits the road back home to see his family.

Meanwhile back in Haddonfield, life has gone on. Laurie Strode grew up, got married, had a child and was killed in a car wreck along with her husband. (Don’t worry, in about three movies she’ll get much better.) Her daughter, Jamie (Danielle Harris), is now Michael Myers only living relative, and therefore his principle target. Jamie lives with her foster family, including Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Jamie is getting ready for Halloween by picking out her costume – a clown costume nearly identical to the one l’il Michael Myers wore at the beginning of the first one. This won’t end well. Donald Pleasance, who plays Dr. Loomis, is the only cast member to return from the first two movies.

A brief digression: I mentioned the incompetence of everyone in my review of Halloween II, but in this movie I was really struck by what a miserable place Haddonfield is to live, even if you discount the periodic spree killings. Jamie is teased mercilessly for having a dead mother; a group of teenagers taunt an old man trying to get a ride, and a bunch of local rednecks grab their guns and take off after hearing word of Myers’ escape, managing to shoot innocent bystanders in the process. The police are as clueless as in the rest of the series. In short, if I lived in Haddonfield, I’d move.

Once MM reaches Haddonfield, he goes on the usual massacre, including killing the only teenager who has sex, as is the custom. After being thwarted for several movies by the fact that Michael is impervious to being shot, the townspeople find the way to kill him: shooting him a lot. It seems the not-so-good people of Haddonfield can get back to the lives they lead between bloody massacres. After being suspiciously absent during the chaos, Jamie’s foster family picks her up and carries her home. All is well until we hear Jamie’s mother give a blood-curdling off-camera scream, and Jamie emerges in her clown costume, holding a bloody knife. It looks like Halloween 5 is going to be a nine-year-old girl on a rampage.

After the semi-failure of Halloween III, the Halloween franchise set dormant for a few years, while Michael Myers’ “offspring” such as Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger went on regular, money-grabbing, killing sprees. This inspired the studio, led by Moustapha Akkad to revive the series and get it back to its roots. John Carpenter and Debra Hill were contacted, and, with noted horror author Dennis Etchison, produced a treatment that dealt with the psychological aspects of a town such as Haddonfield dealing with the aftermath of tragedy. Supposedly, Akkad read it, pronounced it too cerebral, and said he wanted a guy in a mask running around stabbing people with a knife. Carpenter and Hill sold their rights to the franchise, Etchison was canned, and the series re-started. I’d love to know what Carpenter and Etchison intended for the movie, but that dwells in the realm of Things That Were Not Meant To Be.

Supposedly, the producers felt there was too little gore in the completed cut, and the bloody scenes were re-shoots, added later. One of the things that have surprised me in re-watching this series is how relatively bloodless it is, and Halloween 4 isn’t that gory even with the new scenes. The franchise was at its best when it suggested bloody horror, not when it was shown.

So, how is Halloween 4, after all that? Surprisingly decent, in my opinion. It is very low on originality, but as a by-the-numbers slasher film, it is well put together. The cast does a good job, the clothing and hairstyles have as little 80s embarrassments as possible, and the script and direction are solid. If you like slasher films, you should like this one.
.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

And now for something completely different…

Although Halloween II was a bit of a box office disappointment by the standards of the original film, lost amid the glut of early 80s slasher films, it was still very profitable, and therefore talks on continuing the series were almost immediate. John Carpenter was adamant that Michael Myers had died at the end of the second film, and that his story was over. To continue the film series, Carpenter had the idea of a yearly series of movies set around some aspect of Halloween but independent of each other, an anthology series on a grand scale. This would begin with Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which would have little or no connection to the first two films, at least in terms of story. Carpenter chose Tommy Lee Wallace, art director on the original Halloween, to direct the movie, and commissioned a script by Nigel Kneale, the British writer of the Quatermass films.

A businessman is chased by mysterious figures, clutching a Halloween mask and saying “they’re gonna kill us all.” He collapses and is taken to the hospital, where he is placed under the care of Dr. Challis (Tom Atkins), who continues in the Halloween movie tradition of drunken doctors. After one of the pursuers follows the man to the hospital and kills him, Challis for no good reason begins to investigate the case himself, with the man’s daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin). The trail leads them to Santa Mira, California (no fake leaves this time) and the Silver Shamrock Halloween mask company, run by kindly Irishman Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy). Except Cochran isn’t so kindly. He has created an army of robots to do his bidding, and, as a follower of the ancient Druid religion has stolen Stonehenge and shipped it to America (!). A chip from Stonehenge is in each of his Silver Shamrock masks, and when the wearer hears the Silver Shamrock jingle while wearing the mask, he will be killed. Thus millions of children will die, and the ancient Druid gods will be appeased. Or something.

It was a bit of a troubled production. Kneale didn’t like the amount of violence being added to the movie, so he sued to have his name removed from it. John Carpenter did a rewrite of the script, and so did Wallace, although Wallace gets sole credit for screenwriting. The plot demanded several special effects shots and the tiny budget ($2.5 million) just wasn’t enough to do a good job. The effects in the climactic scene are particularly cheap looking. The movie was savaged by critics. Appropriate, since there is an apocryphal story that carpenter wanted to do the film because Rex Reed had said he would resign as a film critic if they made a Halloween III.

Still, Atkins, Nelkin, and O’Herlihy do a good job with their roles, and the anti-corporate message was ahead of its time. There are too many problems to call it a really good movie, but it isn’t the complete waste critics railed about at the time. Oh, there is a connection with the first two, as footage from the original film is shown on a television set in the background.

The movie took in less than half the receipts of the previous one in the series. While profitable, this decline killed the concept of a Halloween anthology series in its infancy, leaving future entries in the “What Might Have Been” category. When next the series returned, we would learn Michael Myers wasn’t all that dead after all.
.

Halloween II (1981)

Continuing Project Halloween…

When we left off at the end of the first movie in the series, Halloween had become a surprise hit. Director John Carpenter and Producer Debra Hill were satisfied with their work and saw no reason for a sequel. The story of The Shape ended with the disappearance of his body, and somewhere, he’s still out there. Laurie Strode survived and can try to put her life back together after her ordeal.

But…

When they made the first film, Carpenter and Hill had been focused on just getting it made. The contracts they signed were not very favorable for them, typical for filmmakers without any clout. Halloween had made a fortune for the distributors, but not for the creative people. The only way to see money from it was to be involved in a sequel, so Carpenter and Hill wrote a new script, although Carpenter was not interested in directing the sequel, instead picking newcomer Rick Rosenthal.

The sequel is a little unusual in that it starts immediately after the end of the first movie. In fact, the opening scene is a replay of the end of the first Halloween. We watch as the injured Laurie is taken by paramedics to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, bodies are collected, and Dr. Loomis starts badgering the police to keep looking for Michael Myers, referred to by name in this movie (in the first, he is simply The Shape, and Carpenter intended him to represent faceless evil). We find out that Laurie is actually Michael’s sister, a bit of retconning that was never intended in the original movie, but there had to be some reason for Michael to keep chasing that one particular girl. He follows her to the hospital, and some there are numerous openings among the hospital staff.

The movie was pretty well savaged by critics when it was released, and the general opinion was that it lacked the originality of the first one, and was just a generic slasher film. In retrospect, it deserved better than that. It is just a slasher film where the first was something fairly fresh, but it is a well done slasher film, much better than the pale imitations flooding the theaters of the day. The first one is a superior movie, but the first sequel holds up much better than I remembered. Supposedly, Carpenter was disappointed with Rosenthal's direction and shot a number of the scenes himself, upping the gore factor.

It’s also a little odd. Everyone in authority is laughably, criminally incompetent. The police chief and Dr. Loomis chase an innocent teenager into the street, where he is struck and killed by a police car, and no one seems to care. The ER doctor is drunk, the lead paramedic is smoking pot, and a nurse abandons her station in the nursery to have sex in the therapy room. The hospital security guard is reading a magazine, so he doesn’t see the psycho killer slip into the building. Another paramedic takes a pratfall in a pool of blood, either knocking himself out or killing himself, depending how you want to look at it. It’s a fairly playful movie, considering the subject matter.

There are a few gaffes. Southern California is still standing in for the Midwest in late fall, so the trees and grass are way too green. Dr. Loomis mispronounces “Samhain”, but if he pronounced it correctly, 99% of the moviegoers would have been confused. (It’s pronounced “sow-in” by the way. Those crazy Celts!) Loomis bizarrely fails to recognize his old nurse, although by the movie timeline it has only been a few hours since he last saw her. The hospital, on a night when there have been over a half dozen fatalities and accidents in town, is staffed by just one doctor and four nurses. All in all, though, if you’ve been putting this one off because you are in the “sequels suck!” crowd, you might be surprised at how well done this is.

A personal note. Like the first one, I saw this in the theater. I was dating a very sweet girl who was a nursing student in college. When the movie reached the scene where the neo-natal nurse sneaks off for a tryst and gets boiled in the hot tub, I heard my date muttering under her breath, “Kill her. Kill her. Kill her.” This seemed uncharacteristic, so afterward, I asked her why she was so eager to see the nurse die, and she explained she was outraged that the nurse would leave the children in the middle of her shift, and thought she deserved to die for it. I haven’t seen the young lady in question for many years, but I bet she made a very conscientious nurse herself.

The horror movie playing on a TV in the background of this one is The Night of the Living Dead.
.

Halloween (The Original)

In 1978, John Carpenter was a very promising graduate from USC film school. He had directed a student film called Dark Star, which was pretty good – for a student film, and a praised low budget film called Assault on Precinct 13. He was developing a good reputation, but the major studios weren’t exactly breaking down his door. For his third feature, he and producing partner Debra Hill had written a script called The Baby-Sitter Murders, about a series of killings stretching over several days. The movie was budgeted at $320,000, half of which went to renting the cameras. Largely to save money by reducing costume changes, the decision was made to condense the action to just one day, and a certain date seemed perfect. So the movie’s name was changed to Halloween, and it was shot on a 21 day schedule in Southern California.

The movie is set in Haddonfield, Illinois, and opens with a flashback in which a small boy murders a young girl at Halloween. Jump forward a few years, and the now grown boy escapes from an insane asylum and heads back home, again on Halloween. Laurie (Jamie Leigh Curtis), Annie (Nancy Loomis), and Lynda (P.J. Soles) are getting ready for the holiday. Laurie and Annie are baby-sitting, while Lynda is looking for a place to be alone with her boyfriend. Michael Myers (actually identified as The Shape in the original) arrives to wreak mayhem, with psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) in hot pursuit.

Expectations were low for the movie, but it struck a nerve with movie goers, going on to gross the equivalent of $150,000,000 today. In those pre-home video days, it became customary to see it multiple times, and it stayed in theaters for months. (In the movie theater where I saw it, it was customary to turn off all the exit and other lights during the frenetic last fifteen minutes – regulations were a little lax in those days – and if there was a full house, a tall usher would put on a mask and walk down the aisle waving a fake knife. Good times.) It wasn’t the first slasher movie, but it largely gave birth to the slasher genre.

Since the movie was shot in the spring in southern California, everything is too green for late fall in Illinois, but the low-fi solution was to make a number of fake leaves, scatter them about for a scene, then gather them up and re-use them for the next. The ubiquitous pumpkins were also difficult since they were out of season, and gourds painted orange were substituted, which is why all the jack-o-lanterns look unusually squat. As most people know, the mask is a cheap William Shatner mask painted white with the eye-holes stretched. As he did in most of his early films, Carpenter did the soundtrack (recorded mostly in unusual 5/4 time) himself.

A personal note: Back when I and a friend were doing our late, unlamented horror podcast, we took the name from a line in Halloween, One Good Scare, which you can see on the poster in the previous post.

The two horror movies playing on TVs in the background are the original The Thing from Another World (which Carpenter would remake in about four years) and Forbidden Planet.

I read once that it is impossible for modern audiences to fully appreciate Citizen Kane, since the innovations in that film have been copied so many times in subsequent movies they don’t seem fresh and original any more. There is some of the same problem with Halloween. When it arrived at the theaters in October 1978, its use of camera angles and narrative, especially scenes shot from the POV of the killer were mostly new to audiences, but some of their impact has been blunted by dozens of inferior films mimicking them. Still, it is a tight, focused, suspenseful film, and as close to Citizen Kane as the slasher genre ever got. I think it holds up very well. One of the peculiar things is the movie was seen as shockingly graphic at the time, but there are only two brief scenes of blood, and if you took out a couple of topless scenes, it could probably be shown on prime time TV without complaint. Times change. Carpenter and the rest of the creative people knew they had gotten as close to perfection as that sub-genre would stand, and there would never be a need for a sequel.
.

Project Halloween

Usually in October (Blogtober!) I go into a frenetic posting pace to rev up for Halloween, but this year, real-world considerations have made that impossible. Still, I wanted to do something for the season that would be a little special, at least to me. A couple of years ago, I went through the entire Friday the 13th series in order, and my brain didn’t melt or anything, so, in honor of Halloween, I’m going to try to get through the complete Halloween series of movies. I’ve only reviewed the second Rob Zombie movie here (which will save me from having to watch it again) and there are a couple of them I don’t think I’ve seen. I hope the later movies in the series are better than I remember.
.

The Midnight Meat Train

I am old enough to have been reading horror when Clive Barker’s work (Dread, The Book of Blood) exploded like a bomb in horror fiction with the publication of the first Books of Blood. The collections of short stories introduced a new emphasis on body horror to the genre, and new and fantastic variations on traditional horror tropes. The vibrant, amazing imagery in the stories soon attracted movie makers, and to date there are 31 movies (according to imdb.com) adapted from Barker’s work, although many of these are continuations of characters in long-running horror series. Like with most authors, the cinematic interpretations of Barker’s work have been spotty at best, with only a few truly good films in the mix. Hellraiser? Yes. Candyman? I think so. Lord of Illusions? Well, I liked it.

A few years ago, Lionsgate Films committed to a reasonably high budget adaptation of the first of the stories in The Books of Blood, “The Midnight Meat Train” (Barker had a way with titles), to be made under the supervision of Barker himself. The movie starred Bradley Cooper (before he got famous playing self-centered drunks), British tough guy Vinnie Jones, Leslie Bibb, and Brooke Shields. The movie got an enthusiastic response from advance screenings, but there was a shakeup in management at Lionsgate before its release. The VP who had advocated The Midnight Meat Train was out, and his successor, in time-honored fashion, did everything he could to torpedo the movie to make the other guy look bad. As a result, the movie had little or no theatrical run.

Leon (Cooper) is a photographer in New York, looking to make a breakthrough in the art world while his girlfriend (Bibb) has a real job to pay the bills. After prompting by a socialite art patron (Shields) he starts photographing people in the subway late at night. A chance encounter with a model who later disappears starts an obsession with the Butcher (Jones) who Leon believes is a serial killer riding the late night rails. (Incidentally, despite the title, the train in question leaves at around 2:00 AM) His friends and girlfriend are soon drawn in as he seeks the Butcher’s dark secret.

Is Midnight Meat Train worth the hype? For the most part, yes. The film is well acted and expertly photographed, with a weird ending that is true to Barker’s style in a way most adaptations of his work are not. There are moments of true suspense, and plenty of gore for the gorehounds. You’ve heard the phrase “not for the faint of heart”? Certain sequences, particularly where the Butcher removes the teeth, eyes, and fingernails from a victim may not be for the strong of heart. Maybe we could have done with a little more sympathy for the main character – Leon’s obsession destroys the lives of everyone around him, so it’s hard to feel very kindly toward him – but in general, this should appeal to horror fans.
.