So, yeah, Halloween 5. The true nadir of the franchise. Or that might be Halloween 6, but I really cannot be bothered to dig out my video of it (The Curse Of Michael Myers is the only installment I don't own on DVD) and, hey, it's got Mike off of Friends in it, how bad can it be? It's fairly popular on the Internet Movie Database as well, but then, every film has its fans on the IMDb. Even Jaws 3-D. Yes, that's me.
It's a stupid, stupid film. Even leaving aside the wholesale raping of the finale to Part 4 and the sheer idiocy of the fact that some hermit - a fucking hermit! - looks after him for a year this is a movie where when he's locked up by the police, they don't even take his mask off him. Seriously, the guy is sitting there in a prison cell with his mask on. You have to wonder when they took the pictures if they took it off and then gave him it back.
There is one good bit in the movie when Jamie (having miraculously rediscovered the power of speech just as everyone who could interpret her for the audiences benefit bought the farm) is cornered by Michael (in a coffin he has unearthed from one of his previous victims, although why this is I have no idea) and as he pauses, she asks to see his face. He takes off his mask and we don't really see him. It's all in shadow and Jamie says 'You're like me,' which seems to be a remnant of a better script which dealt with Jamie's own homicidal impulses rather than bringing back Michael for a redundant encore.
Halloween H20, spurred on by the adrenalin shot administered to the genre by Kevin Williamson, is a much better film, mainly because it goes back to the essentials of the franchise. Whereas both Friday The 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series were both much more about the killer, Halloween is much more about the victims, or the Final Girl. The true star of Halloween is not Michael Myers, but Laurie Strode (well, actually, the true star of Halloween is its cinematography, Dean Cundey is a cinematographer that films like Friday The 13th dream about). And so Laurie returns in H20, twenty years older and wiser. This is a film which attempts to explore the psychological ramifications of being relentlessly hunted by a homicidal maniac. She drinks, she freaks out, she represses her son and manages to fuck up every relationship she's ever had because she's scared. She is, in short, not the star of a slasher movie. She's a survivor of a slasher movie, plunged into another one. The most apposite comparison I can find to make is Ripley in the first two Alien movies. When she chooses to go along with the marines in Aliens, she's facing her fears, conquering them. That's what Laurie does in H20, conquers her fears. Only where Ripley uses a flamethrower and a power loader, Laurie uses an axe.
And while H20 has come in for a lot of criticism from hardcore fans (and where it comes to 'comic relief' security guard LL Cool J, I'm right there with them) it does a lot right, including the contentious decision to ignore the continuity for every Halloween film since Halloween 2. It's a franchise reboot that works, because it strips the concept down to the bone and just lets it play out. There's a very low body count, very little blood and, most of all, it's scary. Unlike Scream and the reboots of Elm Street and Friday The 13th which emphasised the comedy, H20 is as old school as you can get, meaning that it's faithful in spirit to the original, which is not something many films can say. I mean, look at the differences between Dr No and Octopussy, or Friday The 13th and Jason X, both of which are two examples of the same franchise separated by twenty years but which, surface aside, are very different beasts.
Halloween Resurrection makes the same mistakes as Halloween 5, retconning Michael's death in H20, putting Laurie in a nuthouse, despite the clear implication at the end of H20 that she'd conquered her demons and then presenting us with a bog-standard story. No, actually it's worse than bog-standard. It's a story that seems to have been written by someone who's just constructed a melange of slasher movie cliches in their head and then vomited them up on the screen. So the old Myers home, which was never that important an element, is suddenly vastly important in the same way that Camp Crystal Lake was important to Jason or that Elm Street was important to Freddy. And with the unforgivable dispatching of Laurie at the beginning of the film, we're left without a decent heroine. Resurrection descends into something its predecessors (even the abominable Part 5) never were; a faceless slasher movie.
As of this writing I haven't seen the Rob Zombie remake of the first film. The trailers look good, but what I've heard of it - that it explains why Michael does what he does - doesn't do much for me. Michael's homicidal rampage was all the more terrifying because we didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. Why did he have an overriding impulse to wipe out his own family? It's scarier if we don't know. If we know, then he just becomes another serial killer wearing a stupid mask.
Peace out.
Thursday 13 December 2007
The Night He Came Home. Again. And Again...
There's conventional wisdom about slasher movies as well. Mainly that the first one is worth watching and then it's a steady rate of decline from then on. Basically, the higher the number after the title, the worse it is, which is probably why after Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan and Halloween 6 - The Curse Of Michael Myers they stopped using numbers and went with just the subtitles so that people wouldn't have any idea about how bad they were intentionally going to be (and, knowing Hollywood, there was probably some debate that if something is a Part 9, then you have to have seen Parts 1 through 8 to have made sense of it all, and in this dubious tactic they might be right, after all, The Golden Compass has just come out at the pictures and half the people I've spoken to have no idea that it's the first part of a trilogy - hell, I know people who went to see The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring and expected it to end).
But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.
The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.
Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.
So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.
Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.
Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.
I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...
But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.
The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.
Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.
So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.
Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.
Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.
I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...
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