Michael Myers Lives!

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.