Late to the Party Again!

 

'Have you considered changing your energy supplier?'

I am a fan of the original 1978 Halloween. Ever since I saw that flickering jack-o’-lantern and heard John Carpenter’s minimalist synth theme when I was way too young and was told to turn the television off, it has been part of my psyche. I haven’t seen every entry in the franchise: I didn’t get to see the final straight-to-video one with Paul Rudd or the 2002 effort Halloween: Resurrection, and I refuse to watch the Rob Zombie ones, because frankly, while I enjoy his music, he should not be allowed in a film director’s chair.

So, with that in mind, I was very interested in the 2018 effort directed by David Gordon Green he co-wrote with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley. Due to a few factors, mostly money, I didn’t get to see it in the cinema, so I had to wait an entire year before getting to see it.

My first viewing was an enjoyable experience. It moved at a fair clip, once all the set-up was out of the way. It’s not the same as the original, there is a different feeling to it, not quite as lean, but that pace kept my interest until the finale.

So, this is a good place to point out that what follows has a plethora of spoilers. If you haven’t seen this film, want to and don’t want to have the whole thing given away, I’ll give you a chance to zip off and perhaps come back to compare notes. That would be cool, right? Beyond the giant ‘spoilers ahead’, there will be spoilers. Ready?

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Everybody settled in who is ready to take this journey with me? Good.

My first viewing of Halloween (2018) was a decent experience, with that in mind, this year, a few days after Halloween, I decided to go over it again. I was kind of inspired by the trailer for Halloween Kills dropping.

Let’s go over the plot, shall we? Just to get into the exercise.

This film takes place forty years after John Carpenter’s original and tosses out everything after that film, including Halloween II (1981). All the straight-video-sequels and H20 (which made vague allusions to all those iffy early nineties sequels) and, it goes without saying, the Rob Zombie films don’t even factor in.  The Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’s younger sister thread is thrown away as a rumour.

As such, the conceit is that after being shot six times and falling out of a first-floor window, despite the disappearing act, Michael Myers was apprehended. We find him at the start of this film in a psychiatric hospital on the eve of being transferred to a more secure facility. He is being visited by a couple of English true-crime podcasters who wave the Shatner mask at him that somehow upsets the other patients. This came under criticism at the time, and while it does have a bit of hokeyness, I can forgive it for cinematic casualty. It's atmosphere, man.

Myers’s attending doctor, Doctor Ranbir Sartain, is sympathetic towards Myers and he’s unhappy with the upcoming transfer. This will come up later, remember it.

He can't possibly have another agenda, right?

On the same day, the podcasters go to visit Laurie Strode, who has become a paranoid, possibly alcoholic, crank. They anger her by waffling some cod-psychiatric stuff at her about her connection to Myers and she tells them to leave.

We are introduced to Laurie’s daughter Karen Nelson, her husband Ted and her daughter Allyson. It is established that Karen’s and Laurie’s relationship is almost non-existent because of Laurie’s all-consuming obsession with Myers. An obsession that ruined Karen’s childhood, so she tries to protect Allyson from Laurie. There is a lot of stuff about Allyson inviting Laurie to her graduation, Karen lying about inviting Laurie and Ted being a bit of mild comic relief. Laurie is triggered after watching the bus take Myers to the new facility and she goes to Allyson’s graduation meal where there is a confrontation.

As is to be expected Myers escapes. The bus turns over in mysterious circumstances. Dr. Sartain is injured, but survives.  Myers murders a man and his son to steal their truck.

It’s at this point we are introduced to Deputy Frank Hawkins who helped apprehend Myers before.

Myers racks up more kills as he goes through the employees of a garage, in broad daylight and catches up with the podcasters. It’s here that he acquires the boiler suit and gets his mask back. The pace picks up too.

Allyson has a fight with her boyfriend at a Halloween party and leaves. There’s no point in mentioning him, as his entire purpose is to force Allyson to leave the party. He doesn't factor again and doesn't even warrant a killing.

Myers murders a couple of randos, getting himself a carving knife, and also kills two of Allyson’s friends who were babysitting. This is when Laurie has her first confrontation with Myers in forty years, but he escapes under her and Hawkins’s noses.

You've got this, Laurie...or maybe not.

Laurie persuades Karen and Ted to go to with her to her isolated house in the woods, while the police look for Myers and Allyson. Allyson can’t be contacted because her boyfriend threw away her phone.

Sartain joins Hawkins in the search for Allyson, which happens pretty quickly after Myers kills another one of Allyson’s friends after they have an argument.

Now we get the payoff to Sartain’s sympathies as Myers is spotted by Allyson, and Hawkins runs him over. Before Hawkins can finish Myers off, Sartain reveals he has either a bespoke murder pen or a tactical pen. Whatever, he stabs Hawkins to death and shoves Myers in the back of the cruiser with Allyson. The ‘mysterious circumstances’ from earlier were Dr. MadBastard stabbing enough people to allow Myers to escape and he would have got away with it if it weren’t for a literal pesky kid. He wants to ally himself with Myers, but Myers being a consummate lone wolf murders all of the shit out of him, while incidentally allowing Allyson to escape.

Two more police are killed, along with Ted. Ted, of course, having about as much impact on the whole thing as the two anonymous police officers.

This is where my problems started with the film. Going through the plot again, there are some curious things, but again, there’s leeway for the medium, you know?

Before I get to the main reason for me writing this, I’ll go over some of the ways in which the film does good work, but most of these points have caveats. I was amused by Allyson’s and her boyfriend’s gender-swapped Bonnie and Clyde costumes. It does feel a bit like a novelty inclusion, though.

There are two characters here, I promise.

Sartain could be seen as a representation of the dangers of centrism. His ‘both the victim and victimiser are damaged by the acts’ is as bonkers as the current political media thoughts on both sides having a right to airing their views, no matter how abhorrent. Just like in real life, this kind of extreme fence-sitting only helps the party causing the damage. Is that me reading too much into it? Dunno, could be.

The feminist thread is a lot more obvious. Most of the male characters are ineffectual or outright harmful and it’s left to the Strode women to take care of things. There is a serious caveat here that I’ll get to later.

Those nice shots that recreate the 1978 version are nice though. Like Allyson sitting in the same classroom, even the same position Laurie did, looking out the window to see, not Myers, but Laurie.

Here we come to the inspiration for this post. I’ll throw in a spoiler of my own here, the end severely ruined my re-watch of this film. There was a hint or two earlier that it was going to drop into a mire of stupidity, but I didn’t expect it to drop so far, even after my first watch.

Perhaps my expectations were raised after watching Crawl (2019) a few days before. This is another lean film with a couple of capable characters in a fucking awful situation and being thwarted by circumstance.

Myers is now at Laurie’s house which we would expect to be a damned fortress. We’ve seen that she has a hidden cellar full of weapons. You would imagine that the front door with the heavy metal bar would also be reinforced. Especially those glass panels. Nope. Laurie looks out at Myers after he’s just broken poor old ‘I know Brazilian jiu-jitsu’ Ted’s neck and hides behind the door. Only to be almost throttled when Myers easily punches through those not-at-all-reinforced glass panels.

We’ve already established Laurie is an obsessed crank. She ruined Karen’s childhood in a wrong-headed effort to protect her from this trauma that almost claimed her life (oh, look a theme that I missed, the cycle of trauma), going to such lengths as creating a hidden bunker brimming over with weapons under her kitchen. She knows that Myers is an implacable murder-force, who is improbably strong and has a minor waving acquaintance with the idea of dying, but decided she just had to have those decorative panels instead of toughened glass, or even a sliding panel she could safely poke a gun out of. It seems like a bit of an oversight for someone who we’ve been told has been preparing for this confrontation FOR FORTY YEARS!

'I stand by my choice in door aesthetics!'

As you all know, she escapes by blasting off a couple of Myers’s digits with her shotgun. Okay, okay. Then she just runs away.  She’s fired a single shot.  Remember, lumbering kill-golem, Laurie?  The dude you’ve been having nightmares about for five decades? Why you not empty the shotgun into that Shatner mask? Why you run away? Even if not blasting face, pulping his knees with the shotgun would do. He obviously can’t magically regenerate, as we see from the glimpse of his damaged eye where she stabbed him with a coat hanger.

I get it, there had to be tension. There had to be the possibility that Laurie might die but getting a dose of The Stupids should never be it. Stupidity is one of the biggest reasons horror films stand or fall. A few dumb character actions can be forgiven and even move things along, when it’s the only driver of the plot, the driver at a critical moment or the actions of a character we've been shown should be more than capable, we have problems.

The stupidity continues when Myers disappears somewhere in the house. Laurie has set up shutters at the door to each of the rooms, clever, in case she missed a corner, or he slinks in through a window, he can’t sneak up on her. However, she has one room, a single room, she’s decided to designate her target practice mannequin room, which is also The Balcony Room. Instead of saying, ‘fuck it, I’ll just roll down the shutter’ she goes in with a rifle and searches. Weirdly this does not go well, and we get a flipped situation from the 1978 film where Myers looks out to see Laurie lying on the ground, but when he looks again, she’s gone(!).

It’s almost the end game. Myers discovers the bunker where Karen and Allyson have been hiding.  Karen lures him out to shoot him. When he falls into the bunker she and Allyson run out and we discover it’s been a trap all along! The whole house is set up to burn, with Myers stuck in the inferno.  Except, not really. Cue, the bizarre trilogy idea.

'Fire?  More like splire, amirite?'

This whole sorry mess undermines the women-getting-it-done narrative. There are so many questions and idiotic decisions that lead to the confrontation and it’s by sheer luck it doesn’t just end up with three generations of women strewn all over the house and Myers tottering off for his next scheduled massacre. I mean I’m not sure the entire house needed to be burned down – have a heavy door that seals the basement, the superheated air would burn out his lungs, Myers needs those lungs for his heavy breathing antics.

As far as I can see the whole narrative turns into a fucking stew of dumb about the time Sartain kills Hawkins. I feel like once he’d done that, he could have taken Myers and Allyson somewhere to lure Laurie into the confrontation he thought should happen. It would also have set up her house as the final-final confrontation in the upcoming Halloween Ends. The set up for Halloween Kills is improbable even by Halloween standards.

I’ve seen the Halloween films as a whole be described as lazy, but I’m not entirely on board with that. The original still stands up, because it’s not trying to do anything fancy. The 2018 iteration was doing well until the climax, the set up for the two follow-ups is just a lethargic cherry on top of an already sloppily finished desert.

I’m sad that the re-watch only served to show up the horrible weaknesses in this film. It won’t be a film I’ll watch again, at least not by design. However, I will watch the rest of this trilogy to see how many tedious knots the writers tie themselves in to stretch it out. I know, I’m being part of the problem, pity me.

Okay, I might give this another whirl after thirty-some years.

Riffling some brain folds.

On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films.  I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero.  You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.

I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here.  In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it.  If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.

When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day.  The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying.  When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer^* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax.  I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.

Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years.  There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question.  Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering.  I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.

Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed!  The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog.  Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way.  The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him.  Hacking the school's computer.  He commits several kinds of fraud^** including impersonating a police officer.  Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories.  And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this.  Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron^†.

My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film!  How can this be?  My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it.  He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world.  I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters.  You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.

As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend.  It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma.  For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.

In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding.  I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel.  I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science^‡.  I've even gone in a similar direction.

For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later.  He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane.  He's got a good life.

One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat.  Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life.  Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor.  Tom says she reminded him of his mother.

Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs.  Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future.  Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.

There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character.  I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?

^* Bonus!  Played by Charlie Sheen!

^** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.

^† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.

^‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.


Will

There's actual sunlight?

My, but I like my films.  I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story.  Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.

In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films.  I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years.  It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.

You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me.  And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.

Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film.  It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.

Not something that can be said for Dread.  I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker.  Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power.  Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes.  Arrrgh!  What the fuck, man?  Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever?  You probably failed, but you weren't that far off.  You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act.  Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be.  That's something you should've learned in primary school.

At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them.  They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me.  No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just).  The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on.  But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.

Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise.  The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them.  If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV.  I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was.  You were wrong, you bastards.

The same applies to Super 8.  This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious.  I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business).  And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP.  The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.

Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go.  I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure.  Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.

I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!


Will