Bent Out Of Shape

Year: 2021

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Wow. It's been a while since I've had reason to review a current movie on the blog proper (I do still do that occasionally over at Alternate Ending, when I watch bullshit that Tim doesn't want to cover). But we can't just sit with our thumbs up our asses when there's a new Halloween movie out in theaters and also everybody's favorite streaming service Peacock! The film's release (and the subsequent release of the trilogy capper Halloween Ends) was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so let's see if time has muted by ambivalence toward 2018's Halloween.

Spoiler alert: It hasn't.

Halloween Ends picks up on the same night as Halloween 2018. Well, it spends about eight seconds there before launching into a wholly unnecessary flashback to the events of Halloween night 1978 which both serve as a revision to Halloween II which was erased out of continuity and delivers absolutely no material that is interesting in the slightest, though where would we be if we didn't have a dead-eyed doppelgänger of Donald Pleasence's Dr. Sam Loomis (Tom Jones Jr. in creepily accurate prosthetic makeup, with a spectacularly unconvincing vocal imitation by Colin Mahan)? Talk about a Halloween: Resurrection!

After that flashback gives us insight into two characters who have no major bearing on the plot, we again pick up in 2018. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is being rushed to the hospital by her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Having smugly and gleefully erased Halloween II from the continuity, the screenwriters can now recreate it themselves by sidelining Laurie into a hospital bed for literally the entire film.

The killer Michael Myers (Nick Castle for the legacy value, but James Jude Courtney for anything that requires physical effort that they can't ask of a 74-year-old man, which is almost everything Michael does in the movie) was left for dead in Laurie's burning basement. Guess how that goes? He emerges and begins his rampage through Haddonfield anew. A mob gathers to take him down once and for all, led by survivors of his original 1978 rampage: babysittees Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall, taking over from Brian Andrews and Paul Rudd) and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), pisspants coward Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet, taking over for whoever the hell played that kid who Donald Pleasence hilariously scares away from entering the Myers house by shouting "Get your ass away from there!"), nurse and "Dr. Loomis' best friend even though I'm pretty sure they met for the first time that night in 1978" Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), and former sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), whose daughter Annie was killed by Michael 40 years ago.

I know filming was wrapped before the pandemic shut down productions, but Dylan Arnolds cheekbones seem three years more prominent, so I'm not sure what happened.

Can you tell I hated the screenplay for Halloween Kills? I cannot stress enough how richly hypocritical it is that the 2018 film drooled all over itself for retconning the Michael Myers-Laurie Strode sibling relationship that many fans disliked and then proceeded to repeat the much worse mistakes of many other films in the franchise, almost beat for beat. I've already mentioned Laurie getting Halloween II-ed (this is also a result of this being the middle film in a trilogy, but could we not have gotten Laurie and Michael together in one shot, even?), but this film also emulates Rob Zombie's Halloween in presenting Haddonfield as a low rent white trash haven where every word out of a body count character's mouth is shrill and vexing. And no specific spoilers on this, but it has a Myers backstory that's nearly as bad as Halloween 6, to boot.

There is not a single returning character who is treated with anything resembling respect. Not that I necessarily need the film to respect Lonnie Fucking Elam, but this reboot series has consistently failed to recognize any of the actual ways human beings react to trauma or even remember things from 40 years ago. Laurie has always born the brunt of this instinct, being twisted into an unrecognizable gremlin of a woman, but Tommy Doyle doesn't so much go from 0 to 60 as start as 60 and rampage through every scene like Michael Chiklis playing a rabid caveman. It doesn't even do justice to the characters we just met, running Allyson through an absolutely inscrutable arc that doesn't square with anything we know of her from the 2018 film. And dear lord, at one point, Charles Cyphers even gets to trot out his classic "one good scare" line even though he has no reason to recall something he said offhand to a teen girl 40 years ago 12 hours before anything memorable happened that day - honestly it would have had more creative integrity if he had said "It's Halloween. Everyone is entitled to one good scare... motherfucker."

Now don't misunderstand me. I don't mind that some of these characters become bad people or have bad things happen to them. I'm not particularly devoted to the lady who drove Dr. Loomis to Smith's Grove 40 years ago. It's just that every line of dialogue is stiff and unnatural, every action is ill-motivated, and while every character is packed with personality traits rather than being one-note body count fodder, none of these traits resemble anything a person would actually do or say, dunking the audience into a surreal morass of nonsense that's impossible to claw your way out of. There's a gay couple in the film that I have heard criticized for being offensive stereotypes, but I take umbrage with that interpretation considering that you can't be a stereotype if you're not performing a recognizable human behavior.

Also these films have an asshole problem. In that every character is one. 

But here's the thing. I don't hate this movie. I would, I really would, if it weren't for two things. First, the kills are generally pretty damn solid. They're a little too brutal to call "fun," but in terms of squeamish slasher movie joy, they deliver on all fronts, more than a typical Halloween outing. The creative weaponry is more Jason's milieu, but in this film, any object in Michael Myers' hands can become a deadly weapon, whether it's a light bulb, a car door, a stairwell, or his own thumbs. There are also some unique angles to the proceedings (when's the last time you saw someone get stabbed in the armpit?). The effects are terrific, the sequences are visceral and gut-jangling, and while they fail to capture the elegance of the violence of the Carpenter original, that is something I am fully willing to forgive for the 12th movie in a slasher franchise. I'm not a monster.

Also, the score is straight-up terrific. John Carpenter, his son Cody, and his godson Daniel Davies have assembled a superb collection of variations on the original electronic score. They have let themselves off the leash this time, no longer tying themselves to amplified versions of the classic Halloween themes, but really creating a minor key fantasia on what Halloween might have sounded like with several more million dollars and the piano was on fucking fire. Nothing reaches the heights of "The Shape Hunts Allyson," which was the standout track of the 2018 film (and is brought back in such a way that the filmmakers clearly figured out what they had after tossing it off in a 50-second scene the first time around). However, this score would have a much harder time giving us a standout, because every new composition is a bone-vibrating success.

Good music and good kills really do elevate a slasher movie. Hell, those two things are the only reasons Friday the 13th is remembered fondly. It doesn't make the horrible script that actively avoids having a plot or accomplishing anything satisfying with even a single character any less crushing. But it is somewhat of a balm for the pain of sitting through the worst scenes of the film, which are largely relegated to anything in the hospital or involving Tommy Doyle (AKA most of the scenes).

TL;DR: Halloween Kills is a sequel that learns all the wrong lessons from the franchise it's attempting to resurrect.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1401

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)

Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)

Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)

Halloween (Zombie, 2007)

Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)

Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

The Shape Of Things To Come

Year: 2018

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've already done some revisiting of previous franchise marathon entries this October, so it's only appropriate that the fun should continue with an actual movie in theaters! What a treat! We haven't seen good ole Michael Myers on this blog since we concluded our marathon with Rob Zombie's Halloween II a year late in 2016 because I could not convince myself to watch that one. And we haven't seen that pale blank face in theaters since the very same film when it was released in 2009, almost a full decade ago.

Well, here we are at a new entry that has already made so much money I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel is being rushed into theaters next weekend. That is unequivocally good, because if there's one thing I love it's a sprawling horror franchise. But as for the movie itself? Well, let's take a look.

At the very least, I'm glad Michael and Laurie are getting in on the ABBA craze.

It's Halloween, 2018. It's the only Halloween that matters other than the one back in 1978, when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was stalked by masked murderer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) while she and her friends were babysitting. Nothing else happened in between then and now, we promise.

Laurie Strode is now a reclusive shut-in at her survivalist compound in the sticks of Haddonfield, IL. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) has gone ahead and had her own daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). But having a teenage child in Haddonfield is never a good idea, because Michael escapes imprisonment while being transferred to a different facility (which he's already done twice before, once in this very timeline) and immediately begins stalking around town in his good ol' Shatner mask mowing down as many passersby as he can in the process.

Laurie, Karen, the cops, and Michael's new caretaker Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) run around Haddonfield in a state of general distress while Michael wreaks as much havoc as one might expect after being cooped up for so many years.

Oh, how we've missed the big lug.

So, this is the third film in forty years to be titled Halloween. Those are some big shoes to fill, but at least the presence of Rob Zombie's remake means that it could never be the worst one. Unfortunately, this entry barely rises to the middle of the franchise ranking at large.

Halloween has certain good ideas it's working with, but it doesn't seem to have found its own personality. It's actually a lot like Halloween H20, which is now as old as the original Halloween was when it was released: We finally have Jamie Lee Curtis back to play one of her most iconic roles, but this is still a Halloween movie and we need a slate of nubile teens to be offed in the background while she does her thing. H20 very clearly had two different plot threads like this, but it wove them together with reasonable success and cemented the whole thing with a heavy dose of Kevin Williamson snark. 

In Halloween, unfortunately, the threads just unravel before your eyes. The movie can barely maintain its focus on Allyson, let alone her slate of friends, who exist in disjointed scene fragments usually in pairs but never all together. This slasher movie is really missing a unifying element, and the Halloween dance setpiece they feature early on completely fails to be that. The cast splinters off into a series of stalker vignettes which don't tie together at all, or really make much sense as to how Michael managed to get himself between them. Instead of making a mosaic, these scenes just seem like a bunch of shattered glass littered on the ground at random.

Pictured: The screenwriting process.

Even more unfortunately, none of these fragments are pulled together under a unifyied tone. We get some action hero set pieces with random shards of comic relief sprinkled in (these tend to work, actually, thanks to David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride's familiarity with comedy filmmaking, though one horny teen character in particular gets a monologue that I think is supposed to be funny but it completely odious and made me want him to die all the more), and it occasionally cuts to horror sequences of the most brutal and unrelenting variety.

To that end, I will say that this is certainly the goriest Halloween film ever made, and a lot of the kills are incredibly well-realized. As a bit of a gorehound myself, it was nice to see Michael making a play to join the big boys of gruesome slasher killing (usually he's a bit of a bore, going with a couple swipes of the kitchen knife and not much else), but the murders here seem unusually mean-spirited and difficult to watch. Slasher films are supposed to be fun, especially when the other scenes are as silly or high-octane as they are attempting to be. Halloween is kind of miserable at times, making choices that do up the full-tilt horror, but feel more in tune with Rob Zombie's take on the material. Which I hardly expect anyone was actually asking for.

A la carte, though, I can accept the gore for being a very good example of the form. And John Carpenter's new original score is full of bangers, especially the droning alarm bell of his most frequently used new theme. And I'll never complain when Jamie Lee Curtis or Judy Greer are onscreen, even though the former is stuck in a retread of a character she already pulled off twenty years ago in H20. This is the rare example of a horror movie that actually gets better as it goes along, as it pares down its cast so we can focus on three generations of Strode women, all well-performed, and all kicking ass, fighting for their lives in solidarity with one another. 

And wearing wigs like the dickens.

If the whole movie was just a home invasion with the three of them squaring off against Michael Myers, it might have been the best in the entire franchise, including the first. Unfortunately, there is far too much fat on this one, and the filmmakers - especially in the first act - seem focused on delivering scenes that are quite self-evidently shaky ideas, like tremendously misguided pre-credits sequence. 

It's one I'll almost certainly visit again at some point and re-evaluate, unlike the previous two modern entries in the franchise, but there are a lot of other ones I'd prioritize for a rewatch over it. I will be first in line for any and all sequels that Halloween spawns (and it certainly will, if that record breaking box office weekend has anything to say about it), because I think there's a good movie in there, or even a lot of good movies. This one just doesn't happen to quite hit the nail on the head, and that's fine. Almost is better than nothing, and "nothing" is what we've gotten for too long.

TL;DR: Halloween is a middling entry in the franchise with many decent highs and some tremendous lows.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1211

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1988)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Bropocalypse

Year: 2013

Director: Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen

Cast: Jay Baruchel, Seth Rogen, James Franco

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

First, an apology for missing This Is the End when it was in theaters - due to reasons I've never been able to adequately comprehend, movie tickets cost money.

This is the first "End of the World" film from the relentlessly unwatchable and overwhelmingly nihilistic 2013 summer season and to my knowledge the only mainstream comedy (if not the only mainstream film in general) to deal with the Biblical Armageddon. Granted, it's Biblical Armageddon as experienced by a group of douchey comedy actors and viewed through a haze of pot smoke and dick jokes, but it's an interesting fact nonetheless.

Also to my knowledge, this is the only film in which the entire cast is playing themselves (albeit slightly fictionalized versions). This idea could almost certainly not exist in any other era, what with the mainstream media's increasingly microscopic coverage of the minutiae of the celebrity lifestyle. Thanks to Reality TV and TMZ (don't get me started), stars are more accessible to us. They have characters outside of their onscreen personas and they seem like they could be our friends. They are our friends.

It's hard to imagine Clark Gable or Audrey Hepburn being willing to take on a project like this (even without the dicks), but in today's world we have the ability to see what Anna Kendrick is having for breakfast. We can see Kim Kardashian's Christmas presents. We can visually explore the subtle daily shifts in Justin Bieber's abdominal body fat percentage. Why not make a movie like this?

Essentially, This Is the End is the apotheosis of meta. The period of postmodern cinematic recursion that didn't start with but reached highest visibility with the release of Scream, a film that thoroughly explored the concept that its characters were well aware that they were characters in a movie has reached its pinnacle. We've seen characters who know they're characters but what about characters that simply aren't characters at all?

Such a brilliantly weird high concept would almost certainly have ended up in a back drawer somewhere had it not been for the high profile cast attached to the project (and their willingness to take massive pay cuts). 

OK, so enough with the film theory BS. What about the actual movie?

It's.... OK.

The Bling Ring has gone way too far this time.

This Is the End is certainly funny, but it's funny like a California winter - mild and enjoyable, but you can't shake the feeling that it really should be something else.

The plot follows Jay Baruchel (Jay Baruchel, one of many Judd Apatow alums in the cast, having starred in Undeclared in 2001) on his first trip back to LA in some time. He's staying with his buddy Seth Rogen (Seth Rogen, who also co-wrote and co-directed) who suggests they hit up a party at James Franco(James Franco)'s new house in the Hollywood Hills despite Jay actively despising the whole scene and everyone there.

The party scene (one of the funniest scenes in the film) is a veritable avalanche of guest stars including Mindy Kaling, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, a coked out Michael Cera, and scores of other good natured celebrities who gave up a weekend to help out with their friends' movie. It's really quite charming that none of the guests seem to be plugging themselves in any way, just appearing for the sake of how funny it is to see them die violently.

And boy do they. Immediately following the Rapture, a massive sinkhole opens up out front, swallowing fistfuls of celebrity partiers into the bowels of Hell. Michael Cera is impaled by a broken streetlight. Paul Rudd accidentally squishes a woman's head. It's really quite hilarious in a low fi CGI kind of way, although it seems more like a silly celebrity home video than an actual wide release motion picture (something which is true of essentially the entire movie).

Stars are nonchalantly chucked left and right without so much as a backwards glance. The only one who's actively mourned is Rihanna, a pop star whose preponderance of close-ups suggest that the filmmakers' passion for her rivals even Sergio's, a concept that is scientifically impossible.

As calculated by Einstein's Theory of Rihannativity.

The only survivors of the world's biggest party foul (besides a bedraggled Emma Watson who makes an extended cameo) are Jay, Seth, James, Craig Robinson (Craig Robinson), Jonah Hill (Jonah Hill), and Danny McBride (Danny McBride). And I hope I speak for more people than just me when I say who the hell is Danny McBride?

Against Jay's wishes, the six of them hole up in James Franco's palatial home to try and survive the siege of flames and sinkholes and poorly composited CGI monsters (the atrocious CGI is mostly forgivable here because the film in no way asks us to actually take the demonic threats seriously). The motley crew goes through the motions arguing over rations, forming alliances, and desperately trying to survive. Oh, also dancing to Gangnam Style (an already dated touch) and filming homemade sequels to Pineapple Express.

They also film reality TV-style confessionals that I choose to believe is part of the overarching parody of the Hollywood elite because they serve no actual purpose.

The bulk of the film takes place in this location and the comedy is mainly derived from watching these horrendously emotionally stunted individuals dealing with the apocalypse. The longer we spend in the house, however, the more grating the humor gets and by the time two of the men have a three minute shouting match about cum before another of them gets raped by a demon, I had long since checked out. By that point, the good bits had waned to the point of plateauing and the bad, sometimes unnecessarily offensive, abrasive bits had taken center stage.

The movie sags greatly in this middle half, but picks up again once our heroes are forced to exit the house after a truly hilarious exorcism scene, the best in the entire film. The final act of the movie is inconsequential but much less infuriating and thus a considerable success.

Also Emma Watson is the best.

For the most part, the actors are solid, the standout being Jonah Hill as a hilariously sycophantic toady and the worst being Danny McBride as all of the worst qualities of humanity rolled into one doughy ball.

And despite the infrequent truly hilarious scenes and the thankfully not overwhelmingly intolerable bad ones, there is a heart buried deep in there, the core story arc being Seth and Jay struggling to repair their  fizzling friendship. It's no Old Yeller, but it's more heartfelt than most of any of these actors' entire output put together.

Overall, This Is the End is breezy entertainment that deserves more laughs than cringes, especially considering the fact that it's essentially a silly celebrity YouTube video with a $30 million budget. 

Yes, that comes with its flaws, but such an idiosyncratic project should be embraced in today's cinematic climate. I mean a movie that contains a lengthy reference to The Exorcist and a fully choreographed Backstreet Boys performance within half an hour of each other is to be cherished. And though it isn't the crown jewel of comedy, such an eccentric little film is welcome in an age of bland blockbuster flops and endlessly manipulated, committee-mandated sequels. This Is the End is a fluke; a strange and mostly accidental byproduct of a waning studio system, but a charming one nonetheless.

TL;DR: This Is the End isn't exactly funny enough to earn its dizzyingly high concept, but it's a quirky and fun meta film.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1296