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.
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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.
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Ghosts of Mars

John Carpenter is probably the most revered living directors working in the horror genre, yet a surprising number of his films were initially unsuccessful before becoming popular as “cult” classics. Movies like The Thing and Big Trouble In Little China flopped in the theaters, but found a place on home video, and are well regarded today. I had not watched his last release, Ghosts of Mars, since its initial release, and wondered if it, like the others, might have grown in stature in the years since.

The movie is set in 2176. Mars has been settled, and partially terraformed, with a more or less breathable atmosphere. Society has gone matriarchal for some unexplained reason, an interesting concept that is never really explored in the film. A group of police officers, led by Commander Helena Braddock (Pam Grier) is dispatched form Chryse, one of the major towns (I suppose) to a mining camp to pick up the notorious criminal “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube). Included in the team is the real star of the film, Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) and Sergeant Jericho Butler (Jason Statham, when he still had hair). They arrive at the camp to find everyone dead. It seems a dig has released the ghosts of ancient Martians, who have infected most of the locals, turning them into insane, self-mutilating killers. (It’s basically a zombie movie.) The police force will have to work with the criminals to survive.
Well, Ghosts of Mars really hasn’t improved with age. Sometimes movies simply don’t come together the way filmmakers wanted them to, and this is probably a good example.

There is a framing sequence to the story of Lt. Ballard testifying before a board of inquiry about what happened, and it doesn’t really work. The only purpose it serves is to let you know Ballard will be the only survivor, and that spoils a little of the suspense. It also means the bulk of the movie is told as a flashback, and any time something needs to be presented from the point-of-view of another character, it cuts back to the board room so Ballard can explain the sequence is based on what she was told by another character. That’s too clunky, and it makes for one of those flashback-within-a-flashback things that are so hard to pull off.

Special effects look fairly low budget, and they resort too often to the cheap shot of a stunt person jumping in front of an explosion to illustrate its force. This always looks ridiculous, and it’s done every time something blows up in the movie. A lot of things blow up in the movie. It looks like your kids playing on a trampoline, while you hurl grenades behind them.

The police/paramilitary force may be the worst cops ever shown on screen. If a bad guy flashes a knife, they instantly drop all their weapons, and then after they are disarmed and helpless, begin to bluster about how they don’t care if they die. That would be more effective done while they still had their guns, for your information. They also do nonsensical things to further the plot. The one hardened site in the camp is the police station, difficult to penetrate, with ammunition and other supplies inside. They abandon it not once but twice, so they can have running gun battles with the zombies/mutants/Martians. At one point, they set up a perfect kill chute, where the bad guys have to come at them no more than two at a time. They quickly retreat from that position, lest they kill all the bad guys and end the movie prematurely. Half the movie is spent with the characters trying to reach the train, so they can escape the camp. As soon as they reach it and are safely away, they decide they have to turn back.

The cast generally acquits themselves well, although there are some casting decisions that make you chuckle long after the fact. Statham was originally set to play Desolation Williams, but was switched to a lesser role since Ice Cube had more “star power.” Statham might have been better in the role, but that possible loss is balanced by Henstridge replacing the original lead Courtney Love, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.

The bare bones of the plot are basically a re-working of Carpenter’s first real success, Assault on Precinct 13, which itself was a re-do of Howard Hawks’ classic western Rio Bravo. (To make things more convoluted, Hawks more-or-less remade his film twice as well, with El Dorado and Rio Lobo.) Therefore, it is essentially a science fiction western, but whatever magic was present with Assault on Precinct 13 was not accessible here.

The biggest tragedy of Ghost of Mars is that Carpenter felt burnt out after making it, and it would be almost ten years before he directed his next film, the forthcoming move The Ward.
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Carpenter to Direct Darkchylde

According to Total Film, John Carpenter's next film will be an adaptation of the comic book Darkchylde. I'm not familiar with the comic, but sense I watched The Thing and Halloween last night for Halloween, I'm on a bit of a Carpenter high, and hoping for the best. I wonder if that means he will no longer be directing Fangland?

John Carpenter Has A Seizure

Several news sources have reported legendary director John Carpenter suffered a seizure while signing autographs for fans in Florida this weekend, and had to be hospitalized. The ailment described as not life-threatening, but this is still disturbing news. I hope one of my favorite directors gets well soon.
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Halloween in Spanish Fort

If you are in or near Spanish Fort, Alabama on October 22nd, Premiere Cinemas is having a special late screening of the original John Carpenter Halloween, with appearances by Tony Moran and Brian Andrews from the original cast. Sounds like a great time, and you can get more information by clicking here. I'd love to go, but although it's in the same state, that's about a seven hour drive from where I am.
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John Carpenter's The Thing

Man is the warmest place to hide.

Back in 1982, I was dating my future wife when, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we took in the strangest double feature pairing at a local theater I have ever seen, the musical Annie and John Carpenter’s horror movie The Thing. Both of us fell in love with the violent, gory The Thing, and since the advent of home video, it has become a pre-Halloween tradition to re-watch it in October.

One of the key elements in a lot of good horror is isolation of the protagonists. When you have no backup and there’s no possibility of being rescued, the fear is intensified, and The Thing handles this well by placing the movie at a scientific research station in Antarctica during the relatively inaccessible winter months. There the boredom of the station’s staff is interrupting by a fleeing dog, with men shooting at it from a helicopter. It turns out the men are from a Norwegian base nearby, and a visit to the base finds devastation. The entire Norwegian contingent has been wiped out in some desperate battle. The Americans also learn the Norwegians found something buried in the ice.

It is slowly learned the thing found in the ice is an alien organism, with the ability to consume and replicate any living thing. Unfortunately, by the time this realization is reached, the staff knows that at least one of them has already been replaced, and if they don’t stop it here, the thing will escape and menace all life on Earth.

The story began as a novella called “Who Goes There?”, written by Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym for legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell had grown up in a home with a mother who loved him and his aunt, his mother’s identical twin, who despised him, which seems to have led to the themes in the story. I first read a reprint of the novella when I was nine. The nightmares had mostly subsided by the time I was fourteen, and if you’re a fan of the movie but have never read the novella, I encourage you to do so. The novella was filmed under the production of Carpenter’s hero Howard Hawkes in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. It, too, is a classic, but due to the limitations of special effects at the time, as well as the mores of the day, it bears only a superficial resemblance to the source material.

Although The Thing is now recognized as a horror classic, the best horror movie ever in many people’s minds (including mine), it was a box office disappointment upon its release, which came shortly after the release of the very different alien movie, E.T. Most of the reviews of the day were amazingly hostile, with one prominent science fiction magazine dubbing it the worst movie of all time.

Regardless, this movie is the great John Carpenter at the peak of his talent, and it has gone on to be recognized as a classic of filmmaking. I have never seen anything else that communicated paranoia and looming menace as effectively as this film. Debates still rage among fans as to which of the characters in the movie (including the lead character Macready, well played by Kurt Russell) had been taken over by the entity. And talks of a sequel/prequel still arise now and then.

The tight script was written by Bill Lancaster, son of legendary actor Burt Lancaster, whose only other produced screenplay was the decidedly different Bad News Bears. There were plans at the time for Carpenter and Lancaster to continue with their collaboration, and Lancaster had written a couple of scripts, including a reportedly excellent re-working of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, but the failure of The Thing at the box office scuttled all those plans.

If you own the DVD, I would also recommend you check out the audio commentary with Carpenter and Russell. Their banter is informative and humorous, among the better commentaries I’ve ever heard. If you want a drinking game, take a shot every time you hear one of these apparent chain smokers flick the wheel of his cigarette lighter. You should be dead of alcohol poisoning by the time the first creature appears.
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New John Carpenter Film On The Horizon

There’s no living director in the horror genre that I idolize more than John Carpenter. If he had only directed The Thing, it would have been enough, but throw in Halloween, The Fog, Big Trouble in Little China, In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness…. You get the picture. Carpenter hasn’t directed a feature since 2002’s disappointing Ghosts of Mars (he did direct two episodes of Masters of Horror), so it made me happy to see he will be getting behind the helm of a new film.

Variety reports Carpenter will direct a ghost story entitled The Ward for Echo Lake . Hopefully, this also means Carpenter’s health, which has been shaky for a while, is on the upswing.