New Year's Resolutions: Overlooked

Continuing my slate-clearing to begin 2016 with a bang, here is a selection of mini-reviews of classic and classic adjacent genre flicks that I have watched but unfortunately failed to cover over the past few months.

Escape From New York

Year: 1981

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Renowned criminal Snake Plissken is coerced into rescuing the president from the island of Manhattan, which has been converted into a prison in the distant future of 1997.

Now, here’s a film that’ll put hair on your chest. If you squeezed all the testosterone out of every pituitary gland in the world, Escape From New York would put it in a glass and drink it for breakfast. A towering tribute to the American testicle, Escape From New York is essentially the U.S. translation of the Mad Max ethos (with all the musky homoeroticism that that implies).

Depicting a prison state populated exclusively by men and the handful of objects that other, lesser beings know as women, Escape From New York indulges in excess of the highest caliber in the costuming, production design, and performance. On paper, the film’s action would also join that list, but unfortunately this leads us directly into the most fatal flaw of the film. Although there are plenty of exciting ideas crammed into the script (ninja stars, cab chases around bridge minefields, etc.), much of the actual excitement is choked out by the films all too casual approach to their execution.

John Carpenter as a director likes to pace his films as deliberately as possible, which works for a ponderous fablistic slasher or a relentless experiment in Arctic isolation. However, when that tendency is transplanted into the action genre, everything feels like it’s playing at half speed. Car chases, fistfights, and sudden attacks are staged about the same as a character making a sandwich. They play out at a snail’s pace, which makes it awfully difficult to care about the tremendously operatic plot beats that drive them.

As a cheesy, macho ham sandwich, EFNY is worth a watch. However, it’s a Mad Max world with a Calm Max execution.

Rating: 6/10

The Shining

Year: 1980

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A man gets a job as a winter caretaker for the secluded Overlook Hotel. When he and his family are snowed in, the haunted building starts to drive him crazy.

By now, any horror fan has probably heard that Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his bestselling novel. For good reason, too. His thinly veiled tale of a father struggling to redeem himself while backsliding into his alcoholism is deeply personal and utterly obliterated by Kubrick’s standoffish direction and casting of the permanently deranged Jack Nicholson. But while it’s true that Kubrick’s Shining is a downright abysmal adaptation of its source novel, the things that make it a classic are completely, exclusively different from what made the book a classic. Taken as two separate works, one a spine-tingling allegory and the other as a chilly mood piece, both Shinings have a place in the canon of classic horror history.

This incarnation of The Shining is certainly style over substance, but oh what a style it is. This is perhaps the film where Kubrick’s habitually precise style and the content work best. His penchant for lengthy Steadicam shots pulls you into the preternaturally still world our characters are trapped in, and the smooth gliding of his frame evokes a sinister presence keeping watch over our characters. His camera really drives home the sheer enormity of the Overlook, dwarfing its subject every chance it gets. There’s an occasional bit of ego wanking (was it absolutely necessary to zoom in on the cook’s apartment for six minutes?), but for the most part – and in a 146 minute film, it’s ALL the most part – it clicks.

And another thing. If you show me a 1980 film with a more exquisite sound design than The Shining, I will cry tears of gratitude from my ears. Listening to The Shining in cranked-up surround sound is the best burst eardrum you’ll ever have, with its atonal jangling score careening into common household noises expanded to unearthly proportions. It’s like the Devil’s white noise machine.

Last but not least, we have the actors. Kubrick’s casts tend to be largely incidental, but here they are integral cogs in the film’s mechanism. Shelley Duvall is the standout as the shrill, mousy wife, giving such irritating nuance to the role that you can begin to understand why the hell her character might continue to be married to the professionally psychotic Jack Nicholson. Naturally, he too inhabits his role with aplomb, but even young Danny Lloyd (as their son Danny) is unbearably terrifying, giving maybe the best child performance of the decade. And the 80’swere nothing if not crawling with child performers.

So no, The Shining ain’t no Stephen King movie, but it’s certainly worth its reputation. Just make sure you empty your bladder before sitting down to watch it.

Rating: 8/10

Trick 'r Treat

Year: 2007
Director: Mike Dougherty
Cast: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A variety of stories play out in a small town on Halloween night, in which people are punished for not respecting the traditions and rituals of Halloween.

I’ve seen my share of horror anthologies, so please don’t take it lightly when I say that Trick ‘r Treat is one of the best. Not only does it integrate its distinct stories in a colorful, creative way, it is actually pretty great. Not content to merely avoid being unwatchable crap (something many anthologies flagrantly fail to do), Trick ‘r Treat is genuinely well-directed, by first-timer Mike Dougherty (who has since lent his holiday fever to the largely charming Krampus).

Combining traditional Halloween imagery with a uniquely spooky atmosphere, Dougherty has birthed a series of unforgettable shots, my favorite being the lights from jack-o-lanterns flickering in the fog as children vanish one by one. Trick ‘r Treat manages to sustain its campfire tale atmosphere, even during the more overtly silly vignettes, including an excellently timed Dylan Baker tale.

Embracing and inverting typical horror tropes, Trick ‘r Treat is a film that truly loves Halloween rather than just taking place on the holiday as a gimmick. Trick ‘r Treat wants to marry Halloween and massage its feet for the rest of its life, and it shows. This spirit can e felt in the film’s major contribution to popular culture, the bag-headed Sam, a trick or treating spirit of holiday vengeance with a singularly prepossessing design. Just like Sam, Trick ‘r Treat is fun, spooky, and oh so stylish. It should earn an immediate spot in everybody’s October screening list.


Rating: 8/10

Red Dragon

Year: 2002

Director: Brett Ratner

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes

Run Time: 2 hours 4 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Will Graham must enlist the help of his imprisoned ex-partner, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, to capture a serial killer known as the Tooth Fairy.

Red Dragon is a pointless, pointless movie. An essential remake of Michael Mann’s Manhunter (also based on the Thomas Harris crime novel Red Dragon), Red Dragon was a cash-in on the only remaining Hannibal Lecter property that hadn’t had Anthony Hopkins crudely grafted onto it yet. Although it boasts Ralph Fiennes in an electrifying villainous role, the rest of the film is a wan redo of Silence of the Lambs from the structure down to the production design details, glossing over its own story in order to properly service its connection to the Oscar-winning (read: box office smashing) property.

In and of itself, Red Dragon is a competent, adequate film, but there’s a reason that when looking through my notes, all I can find is ralph Fiennes comments. The relationship between Hopkins and Edward Norton’s Graham is a malnourished trifle, a flaxen imitation of Jodie Foster’s chemistry that refuses to engage with the mountains of readily available backstory that could actually make sense of their alleged connection.

This film is worth seeing for the Tooth Fairy alone. If you pretend that the actual A-story is just the commercial breaks between a nuanced, deranged, transformative character study full of blazing twists and turns, it’s completely palatable. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a bust. It’s less operatically indulgent than the worst Hopkins Lecter film (Ridley Scott’s Hannibal), but it’s even less interesting for it.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1433
Reviews In This Series
The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)
Hannibal (Scott, 2001)
Red Dragon (Ratner, 2002)

May All My Backlog Be Forgot

Happy New Year, everybody!

I know you’re probably still sifting through that gargantuan post I dumped on you two days ago, but I would like to take this first week of 2016 (Oh man, we really are living in the future, aren’t we? The other day I met a Big Lots cashier who was born in 2000.) to enact one of my New Year’s resolutions. As you may or may not know, I have vowed to write a review of every single movie I’ve watched since I started this blog. However, as my work gets harder and my free time shrivels away, it has become more difficult to pen my ambitiously wordy reviews with my old frequency.

I’ve already begun to transition to a new format, bestowing full reviews on current or featured movies and penning medium-length reviews for the rest. But the avalanche of film with which I’ve concluded my year has left me with a backlog of embarrassingly overwhelming magnitude. In an attempt to clear my slate before the cinema offerings of 2016 really get kicking, over the next few weeks I’ll be flushing out my system with a glut of mini-reviews. I’ll also be finally catching up with some promised titles. Sorry, Hunter. We’ll be starting with a set of films already reviewed in full on my podcast, Scream 101.

Please enjoy this Popcorn Culture reboot and have a wonderful 2016!

The Thing

Year: 1982

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David 

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An Arctic team discovers a spaceship buried in the ice, along with a shape-shifting alien creature that infiltrates their group.

The thing about The Thing is that it has pretty unequivocally the best practical effects in the history of cinema. Sure, some scenes have aged better than others. But even the most jaded of modern viewers, those caustic children of CGI, will be utterly unable to keep their spines from turning to jelly when that severed head sprouts spider legs and stars skittering across the floor. It’s a movie full of gooey, bombastic effects setpieces, and yet it still lets its smaller moments (of which there are plenty, because John Carpenter isn’t made of money) breathe.

This can be seen in both the special effects (a cut thumb and the subtle detail on an icicle of blood are just as chilling as the grand latex arias that follow) and the tension building. This is a story about paranoia. Whether it be AIDS or commie related (pick your metaphorical poison), it’s a harrowing masterwork of distrust that places just as much emphasis on the dialogue scenes as the blockbuster heebie jeebie showcases. The characters themselves are a smidge shallow, but it works in the context of not really knowing your fellow man (there are no women in this film, the musk from Kurt Russell’s bear repelling femininity like Kryptonite).

And at any rate, they’re all very well-performed. Even the dog is an incomprehensibly terrific actor, providing a powerful argument for the introduction of a Best Animal Wrangler Academy Award. Overall, The Thing is a chilly menace, propelled by a thumping Ennio Morricone score, John Carpenter’s stark, Arctic cinematography, and enough latex to smother a small army.

Rating: 8/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Troll 2

Year: 1990

Director: Claudio Fragasso

Cast: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A vacationing family learns that the rural town they’re staying in is populated by wicked, people-eating, vegetarian goblins.

There are bad movies, there are fun bad movies, and then there are comprehensive experiences that transcend the mere act of filmmaking. Guess which category Troll 2 falls into. A jumbled hash of lunacy, Troll 2 is a treasure trove of unintentional comedy. Humor thrives on the unexpected and the increasingly wacky ways the film flies off the rails are an endless spring of entertainment. There is literally no way of predicting what scene might be around the corner. It’s a funhouse ride of lime green amateurism.

Yes, it’s a bad movie. Poorly translated lines are drunkly performed by amateur actors in front of cardboard sets and community theater special effects. But the madcap intensity and genuine earnestness with which the film was created have made it an instant cult classic.

Incredibly, given its reputation, there are actually a small handful of actually OK filmmaking moments, betraying director Claudio Fragasso’s long history with Italian B-movies. Two shock gags actually hold water, some low angle shots are legitimately imposing, and the finger trauma gore as one character is turned into a plant (don’t ask) is quite stomach-turning. But that semi-skill is part of why Troll 2 is so indelible. It actually sort of knows what it’s doing the whole time (as opposed to the rampant inadequacy of, say, The Room), and those moments help provide contrast for the truly inspired awful bits, of which there are a couple million. 

Troll 2 is a must-see for any aspiring cult film fan. Watch it with a friend and seal your bond together with the super glue of dozens of new inside jokes and shared peals of snorting, gasping laughter. Plus, you’ll want a spotter in case you choke on your popcorn during the process.

Rating: 8/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Nightbreed (Director's Cut)

Year: 1990

Director: Clive Barker

Cast: Craig Sheffer, David Cronenberg, Anne Bobby

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young man is accused of murder and flees to the underground city of Midian to live with the monsters.

Nightbreed is a very scatterbrained movie. Sold as a slasher when it was really a parable about how minorities are treated by a society that doesn’t understand them, it made next to no money at the box office with its monstrous mish-mash. Now here comes the director’s cut two decades later, to finally restore the original monster-fueled, gothically romantic intent. It’s still a hell of a mess, but with Clive Barker at the wheel, at least you know the crimson tide is flowing in the right direction.

Nightbreed is like a magic eye puzzle. The individual pieces (a button-eyed slasher, a hillbilly shootout, a full rock ‘n roll number…) don’t exactly gel, but when you step back and unfocus your eyes, you can see the shape that it has created. An over-the-top, bold exploration of its universal themes of being sidelined and misunderstood by the world at large, Nightbreed is an orgiastic, hallucinogenic canvas on which Barker paints his magic.

More than character or plot, the headliner of Nightbreed is its spectacular make-up effects, used to create glorious (and gloriously expensive) creatures of every shape and size. A triumph of macabre monster manufacturing, the wicked creativity of Nightbreed is its goopy oozing, raison d'être. It’s an art gallery of nightmares more than it is a film, but that’s hardly a problem if you’re in the mood.

Rating: 6/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

From Dusk Till Dawn

Year: 1996

Director: Robert Rodriguez

Cast: Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Juliette Lewis 

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pair of criminals and a kidnapped family end up fighting for their lives in a biker bar run by vampires.

Many fans of notorious foot fetishist/occasional filmmaker Quentin Tarantino have been yearning for him to create a horror film for quite some time. And while some detractors of From Dusk Till Dawn might still argue that he hasn’t, the truth is that the film is a campy horror flick penned by the greasy maestro himself, so it’s about as close as we’re gonna get to that wish, under the circumstances.

Directed by Robert Rodriguez in signature “Baby Quentin” style, FDTD is a fun thrill ride. Actually, it’s two fun thrill rides. The first hour, which is focused on the criminal exploits of the Gecko brothers, and the second, full of balls-to-the-wall vampire mayhem, don’t quite cohere together as well as they should, but they’re both excellent, flippant exemplars of the craft. Sometimes campy, sometimes creepy, always irreverent, the tone is what carries the stories through to the finish line rather than the actual plot.

However, it’s hard to find much to complain about when the ensemble comes together as ludicrously, ingeniously well as this film’s. George Clooney dishes out a standout role as a churlish, protective thug, and Tarantino gives the performance of his career as his little brother, an all too human monster imbued with sweaty, clammy menace. The rest of the cast also rises to the challenge, but the true blue standout is gore imperator Tom Savini as Sex Machine, the purest, most effortless bad-ass of Rodriguez’ career. From Dusk Till Dawn might not be a coherent whole, but the sum of its parts is far greater than that, anyway.

Rating: 7/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Ghost Cat

Year: 2004

Director: Don McBrearty

Cast: Michael Ontkean, Ellen Page, Lori Hallier

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A young lady and her father move into a home that is watched over by the spirit of its former occupant, Margaret the cat.

The crux of our episode was that this “supernatural thriller” was quite easily repackaged as the heartwarming family film The Cat That Came Back, so as you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly a spine-tingling excursion into Animal Planet original content. A basically adequate Lifetime-esque cheese puff about saving the animal shelter from the wicked real estate developer, Ghost Cat ticks all the boxes for being as safe and bland (not to mention disappointing) as it could possibly be. There is one almost absurdly dark scene where the villain attempts to asphyxiate an entire barnful of adorable baby lambs and puppies, but it’s more a runway for Ellen Page’s ludicrous mid-2000’s fashions than anything resembling a horror movie.

As an insipid, rote story, it does the trick, but there’s nothing to make Ghost Cat stand out above all the other formulaic crap that daytime TV stations force sick (and hopefully delirious) people to sit through. There are some vaguely amusing tidbits, like how a lantern-jawed 21-year-old is supposed to be both a high school student and a viable love interest for Ellen Page (gag me with a spoon), or the presence of My Bloody Valentine Final Girl Lori Hallier as the animal rescuer with a heart of gold. 

But the only reason to watch this movie in today’s enlightened age is the presence of Ellen Page, who gives far from a star-making performance. She’s clearly a step up from the other youngsters around her, but this is not a script that challenges its performers to push the envelope. My recommendation is to steer clear of Ghost Cat like you’re allergic to animal dander. Even in ectoplasmic form, it can still screw you up.

Rating: 4/10

Listen to the podcast episode here!

Word Count: 1821

All Hallows Evil

For our podcast episode about this film, please click here.

Year: 1978

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, P. J. Soles

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Well folks, the first of October has struck once more, so you know what that means. While you are busying yourselves with warm-ups for the pumpkin spice flavor gauntlet your taste buds are about to endure for the duration of the autumnal season, my wicked little elves have been hard at work putting together a delectable collection of Halloween treats for you all. In addition to our yearly crossover with the Great Pumpkin himself, Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue, and a whole host of Scream 101 Podcast goodies, we are also heralding the beginning of our second annual franchise marathon, in which I take this scariest of months to pore over a horror series that has been unduly neglected by Yours Truly.

This month’s topic was an easy choice: Halloween. We’ve only dropped in on our old pal Michael Myers just once with my Halloween II review in May, and he’s the only slasher villain of the Unholy Trinity to not have a complete archive of reviews here on Popcorn Culture. Over the course of this increasingly blustery month, we will see to it that that glaring oversight is rectified. 

We will travel to the rotten mires of druid cults, the mystifying enigmas of Stonehenge, the cutting prose of Kevin Williamson, the classical lyricism of Busta Rhymes, and the redneck rampage of Rob Zombie. But before any of that can happen, we must take ourselves back to one very special night in 1978, a crisp fall evening rife with enchantment and wicked possibilities…

The night HE came home.

When Michael Myers (Nick Castle behind the mask, Tony Moran in front) – a lunatic who killed his sister on Halloween night when he was only six years old – escapes the insane asylum, he heads back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois (played here by Pasadena, California under a not entirely convincing blanket of imported fall leaves). [SPOILERS] By random happenstance, the first person he sees is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her first feature role), whom he latches onto with a sharklike intensity. After stalking her round town for the remainder of the day, he holes up in the house across the street from where she is babysitting, killing her friends Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (P. J. Soles) in the process of his single-minded, totally arbitrary pursuit.

All the while, Michael is pursued by the well intentioned but monologue prone Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), who teams up with the put-upon Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) in an attempt to apprehend his marauding patient. The sheriff doesn’t necessarily believe the doctor’s story and quickly grows tired of his habit of endlessly soliloquizing about Michael’s pure eeeeevilness like he’s Hamlet’s Tumblr page, but he agrees to the stake-out, at least for the night.

The night HE sat around rambling for 80 minutes before actually making himself useful.

Halloween is not a slasher movie. It is THE slasher movie. Psycho may have turned on the gas and Texas Chain Saw may have lit the pilot light, but the rolling boil that was the slasher genre could not have existed without the roaring flame of John Carpenter, Michael Myers, and Halloween (in this extended metaphor, Friday the 13th is a kid throwing his spaghetti-o’s at the wall to see if they stick).

Halloween, however unintentionally, cemented in the rules of the slasher film: the silent masked killer, sex = death, the virginal survivor… And while there may be a handful of slasher films that I personally prefer to Halloween, not a single one of them handles those particular elements better. You see, Halloween is a fable. A shadow-drenched, pot smoke-infused fable, yes, but a fable nonetheless. It tells a brutally simple tale of Good vs. Evil played out in a distressingly innocuous canvas: American suburbia.

The characters might be thin enough to be extras in Oliver Twist, but Halloween isn’t a character study. It’s a broad strokes narrative about good (Laurie Strode) triumphing over evil (Michael Myers) and learning pure evil can never be truly stopped, only stalled for a time. This story is told within a pulse-pounding, Euro-inspired edifice of unparalleled structural quality, showing audiences a terror that could reasonably strike in their own neighborhoods.

And scaring the bajeezus out of so many people, the face of modern cinema would literally never be the same.

As a work of cinema, Halloween is a triumph, especially considering that they barely had enough money to start a fire. John Carpenter utilizes every creative tool at his disposal with the assured skill and confidence of a much older man (which, of course, he now is – and pretty much all he cares about is X-Box and basketball, so maybe he has a Benjamin Button thing going on). We’ve already discussed a bit about how the script is such an intelligent and efficient engine of terror, but there’s a lot more that goes into scaring people than a good story. There’s a reason we aren’t talking about The Outing in similarly hushed, reverent tones.

One thing the film couldn’t live without is the cinematography, courtesy of Dean Cundey (of every film you like). There’s remote beauty in the iconic, unbroken tracking shot that opens the film and puts you in the indelible perspective of a young killer, the fantastically skilled color grading (on certain prints) that paints a fantasy Midwest town in vivid oranges and blues, or the shadow-drenched Steadicam that stalks and frightens just as much as Michael Myers himself. Even after decades of filmmakers aping his techniques, Cundey’s work here remains fresh and untarnished.

The other key figure in Halloween’s success is John Carpenter’s minimalist synth score, about which I have already written a fairly lengthy essay. However, in a nutshell, the self-penned score of this film changed the game. Instead of lush (and expensive) orchestration, necessity drove Carpenter to this devilishly uncomplicated music, which drives the film forward with unrelenting determination, switching between several repeated motifs to alter the tone of scenes on a dime. It’s elemental and incongruously huge, painting the basic, primal evil of Michael Myers with a distressingly parsimonious, unflagging melody.

Putting this music on your iPod shuffle will turn any drive into a daring adventure.

Unfortunately, Halloween’s methodical approach to terror has left a lot of modern horror fans (weaned on the Saw franchise and the like) in the dark as to its staying power. However, it’s not a big leap to get into the mindset of audiences of the time, as it is to watch something like Dracula or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It merely requires a willingness to turn on your brain and engage, because Halloween has a lot to offer even the most Twitterfied millennial horror fan. Here, terror builds like steam pressure in a kettle, though there are also a decent smattering of hard jolts for the impatient.

And what would a Halloween review be without mentioning Jamie Lee Curtis? I could lose my credentials if I skipped over this performance, which inaugurated the reign of the Scream Queen. Jamie Lee is deserved royalty not just because she was in an astonishing number of early 80’s horror flicks (though she indubitably was), but because she’s the best of the best. Laurie Strode is a broadly simple character, a challenge for any true actress, but Curtis brings her to vivid life, balancing vulnerability and inner strength in a girl next door who never ceases to be a believable, rational teenager.

And of course I could hardly dare to skip over Donald Pleasance’s contributions, though they are certainly of a different ilk. His performance as Dr. Loomis is far from the grim reality of Laurie Strode, a bravura effort that constantly brushes against the fabled Top without slipping over it. Without Pleasance enacting the miniscule modicum of restraint he applies to the role, the entire character and his florid but thematically essential dialogue would be naught but a searing black scar over a classic film. But as it stands, Loomis is a loud, brash, intense piece of the puzzle, but a tremendously fitting one just the same.

Halloween’s success changed the horror genre forever, but nothing coming down the pike could ever match its elemental terror and thoughtful balance of shaded violence and fablistic fervor. There would be great slasher to come, but none that would exist in this pure, unfettered, absolutely essential form.

Happy October, everyone. Get ready for a wild ride.

Killer: Michael Myers (Nick Castle)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: Lynda is strangled with a phone cord while she tries to call Laurie.

Sign of the Times: Literally nobody drives anywhere without getting drunk or stoned first.

Scariest Moment: Laurie pounds on the front door while Michael pursues her across the lawn.

Weirdest Moment: Annie spills butter on herself so she takes off all her clothes.

Champion Dialogue: “You know, it’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Body Count: 5; not including 2 unfortunate dogs.

1. Judith Myers is stabbed to death.
2. Mechanic is slashed offscreen.
3. Annie is strangled and has her throat slit.
4. Bob is stabbed in the gut.
5. Lynda is strangled with a telephone cord.

TL;DR: Halloween is an elemental exemplar of the slasher genre.

Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1560
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)

Census Bloodbath: Haddonfield Memorial

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Rick Rosenthal

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Lance Guest

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Sequels are tough. Especially for runaway hits that happen to be ruthlessly simple, auteuristic horror flicks that left half of its cast in body bags.

Getting John Carpenter to do things is tough. Even at a young age, he seemed to have perfected the "grumpy old man" schtick. So when the time came for his contractual obligation for Halloween II to kick in, he reluctantly agreed to pen the screenplay. But, aided by his partner Debra Hill and a six pack of beer, he tossed together a script with exactly none of the slickness and nuance of his 1978 masterpiece.

What it did have, however, was a heavy influence from 1980's Friday the 13th and its endless cadre of clones from the months following. Between 1978 and 1981, the genre had received a major facelift, and Carpenter's biggest strength was in his acknowledgment of that fact. Instead of turning in another moody, low key horror film, he turned his magnum opus into a glittering example of a 80's slasher crud.

The most difficult thing about viewing the film with open arms is separating it from its genuinely thrilling forebear. But if you can clear that road block, Halloween II is a sweet holiday treat.

Like a Nerds Rope or something, not those gross Malted Milk Balls.

Halloween II picks up immediately after the original film, with Final Girl extraordinaire Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) being sent off to the local hospital following the massacre of her best friends at the hands of escaped madman Michael Myers (Dick Warlock, also of Pumpkinhead). While the Myers-obsessed Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) continues to chase the masked figure around the town of Haddonfield and the heavily sedated Laurie strikes up a tentative romance with cute ambulance paramedic Jimmy (Lance Guest), Myers stalks and kills the staff of the eerily empty hospital while attempting to get another crack at his escaped victim.

The film never for a single second escapes the looming shadow of Halloween. For all its decentness, especially compared to the crop of its 1981 peers, it's hard not to note "wow, the plot point that Laurie is Michael's long-lost sister really diminishes the effectiveness of the original without actually informing any of the narrative in the sequel," or "wow, I really wish they hadn't introduced the Celtic ceremony of Samhain in this one, which would have eliminated some of the druid nonsense in the later sequels," or even "wow, John Carpenter does not handle his beer well."

I'm gonna give it to you straight, here. Halloween II is not a great slasher film. It has a slapdash plot at best, supported by a series of fun, if not particularly imaginative kills. Such is the law of diminishing returns. But at all times it is a good slasher film. Such is the law of having freaking Dean Cundey as your cinematographer. (For those not in the know, Cundey is the man behind the original Halloween, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Apollo 13, and every other film on your dad's DVD shelf.)

As Myers stalks and slashes a variety of thinly etched-out nursing staff, Cundey soaks the goings-on in spooky Halloween atmosphere, lighting the slickly sinister hospital hallways with creeping, glistening shadows and the occasional splash of vivid, saturated color to shake up any visual complacency. It's gloomy and organic in an impossibly effective way, considering how difficult it is to create variation in a hospital interior. Halloween II is by far the best-shot slasher of the year and that is no small achievement considering that subgenre filmmakers were still actually trying in 1981. 

The bone-deep genre fatigue wouldn't begin to set in until 1982, when 43 of the godforsaken things squirmed their lumpen selves out of the womb of cinema.

It's a gory, exploitative hunk of cheese, but thanks to Cundey and - to a lesser extent - Carpenter, it's the aged brie of The Burning rather than the Kraft Singles of, say, Bloody Birthday. By far the most interesting parts of Halloween II stem from its departures from the original, engaging with the new slasher formula and highlighting just how much had changed in the genre in a few short years.

That's not to say it's better, but as an integral cog of slasher history it's fascinating. The classic minimalist score is spruced up with some truly challenging Flock of Seagulls synths, the cop character that replaces Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers, who was presumably too busy to appear in more than one scene) looks like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and a frying pan, there's more gore and a higher body count, a Spring-Loaded Cat scare, and everything explodes. There's even an appearance by Dana Carvey in a small role! It's like the vanilla ice cream cone of Halloween was dipped in the decadent chocolate coating of the 1981 slashers.

I'm making a lot of food puns. Maybe I should eat breakfast.

There are still some decently scary moments while Myers stalks some unwary staffers up and down the preternaturally empty hallways, but for the most part the 80's aesthetic plays it a little too hot and heavy with Haddonfield's favorite serial killer. He is shown in full far too often and far too early, diminishing his power as a mysteriously evil force of nature. And honestly, Dick Warlock can't hold a candle to the original Nick Castle performance, rendering the character a tad too mundane for my liking.

Actually, all across the board the performances are diminished. Jamie Lee Curtis' powerhouse turn as Laurie is diluted through the multitude of Meat as the cardboard characters sneak out, hook up, and get knocked down. In fact, Laurie Strode, the supposed main character only gets about 25 minutes of screen time in the entire movie, during which she is swallowed beneath the most hideously waxy broom-bristle wig I've ever had the displeasure of watching. 

And I haven't done the math on this, but I'm pretty sure Myers could beat her total run time by almost half. When your villain is onscreen longer than your heroine, you know somebody beat too many eggs into the batter.

Seriously though, I might be starving to death.

So JLC is out of commission, wasted on a character who is heavily sedated for the bulk of her already truncated appearance, Myers is bland, and even Donald Pleasance's reliable Dr. Loomis has sprung a leak. The character himself seems to be getting tired of his incessant monologuing about the pure evil and yadda yadda yadda of Michael Myers. But hey. It's not the original film. The acting is still about 800 degrees better than the average slasher. It just feels so much more egregious because of the gold it follows.

Halloween II has the kind of kills that would revive any garden variety lackluster slasher: hypodermic needles, hot tubs, scalpels, and all sorts of creative misuses of hospital implements. The effects themselves look a tad too "accident at the acrylic paint factory," but they're jolly good campy fun.

Honestly, the biggest issue with Halloween II is that it's scatterbrained. It can't focus on its main characters, it gives too much credit to its killer (who works best as a haunting metaphor rather than an active presence), and it's a little too chintzy to earn the truly wonderful talent behind the camera. But hey! It did provide the song "Mr. Sandman" to the franchise's soundtrack, so it's definitely not the worst thing that could have happened to Haddonfield's finest.

No, that would be the Rob Zombie remake, but we'll get there my pretties. Unfortunately.

Killer: Michael Myers (Dick Warlock)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: Ben Tramer is hit with a cop car and slammed into a nearby van, which then explodes, lighting him on fire. The best part is that this is the guy that Laurie said she had a crush on in the first film.

Sign of the Times: The way Michael Myers learns of Laurie's location is that a kid walks by him carrying a ghetto blaster turned to the news.

Scariest Moment: Michael Myers slowly appears behind Janet after she discovers Dr. Mixter's body.

Weirdest Moment: Apparently Michael Myers broke into an elementary school just to make a crayon drawing and stab it, then write an ancient Irish word on the board for kicks.

Champion Dialogue: "Amazing Grace, come sit on my face."

Body Count: 10

1. Alice is stabbed in the chest.
2. Ben Tramer is hit with a cop car and burns to death. 
3. Mr. Garrett is hit in the head with the claw end of a hammer.
4. Bud is garroted.
5. Karen is drowned and burned in a boiling hot tub.
6. Dr. Mixter is stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle.
7. Janet is stabbed in the temple with a hypodermic needle.
8. Mrs. Alves is drained of her blood.
9. Jill is stabbed in the back with a scalpel.
10. Marshall has his throat slit. 

TL;DR: Halloween II is a scattershot slasher that's too generic to live up to the power of its predecessor, but still pretty fun in its own right.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1612
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)

Surprise Cameo

It's been a while since I've featured another writer on the pages of this blog, but why be stingy? It's always nice to have a guest star. Today's very special article introduces Shannon, one of my very best friends, in her Popcorn Culture debut as she writes about her introduction to horror (I am not ashamed to admit that I appear heavily in this tale) and why scary movies make the perfect date nights, along with some personal recommendations.

Horror with your Honey: 

Why a Week of Scary Movie Dates are Beneficial to a Relationship, and Where to Start

I had never seen a single horror movie before meeting Brennan Klein. All of a sudden, by signing a contact of friendship, I was his go-to movie date for all the classics and everything in between (Literally everything, I cannot tell you the weird horror movies I have seen thanks to him— not complaining).

Luckily (or so I thought), Brennan met someone else who is now responsible for watching horror movies from Spain about someone chopping pieces of students and then piecing them back together into a monster. Initially I was slightly relieved to pass the torch to his boo, but now, in reflection, I miss him dragging me into a movie starring Lee Pace with a title I had never heard of.

[Editor's note: She is referring to Pieces and Possession, the former a great/terrible slasher movie and the latter a decent psychological ghost/possession piece.]

Why?

Because if you and another person were stranded on an island, in scary, deadly conditions, and you get rescued, only that other person can understand the trauma you went through, and thus you and that person have a magical, singular bond because of a horrific experience.

Brennan and I became best friends because we went through the mini-traumas that these horror movies are. Horror is like a roller coaster that pumps adrenaline and dopamine into our systems, and we get off the ride a little closer than before.

So, when you reach that part of your relationship when you are looking at Fandango trying to decide between a sappy romance or some indie flick with subtitles, close your browser and turn on Netflix, because nothing could be better for a relationship than a solid injection of horror.

Now whether you are a horror movie buff like Brennan, a gorehound like me, or a novice on the scary front like I was two years ago, these movies I have selected hit a multitude of the bases.

Allow me to introduce the perfect introduction-horror-movie-date-night-movies!

Movie Cluster #1 : The original trifecta of horror, and its sequel

(watch in this order for the best effect)

Day 1:

Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter)

Why this movie: 

Horror movies used to be about tiny budgets, shadows, and masks. John Carpenter (who I met with Brennan) knows this better than anyone else, and which is why the rather tame, theatrical Halloween is my first choice. You get an introduction to the Scream Queen (now better known for her Activia commercials) Jamie Lee Curtis, get to look evil in it’s face, and is not scary enough to make you want to give up on horror as a genre.

Day 2:

Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham)

Why this movie (Writing about this one without spoilers is hard): 

While this movie is no Revenge of the Unhappy Campers (if you have seen that movie, email me), it is the greatest introduction, and arguably just the greatest camp-genre horror movie. One of a major aspects of the horror genre in general is the fact that people are in a contained area when the monster decides to pick off victims one-by-one, and what better buffet is there than kids at a summer camp? Plus, Kevin Bacon is in it. Just watch it.

[EN: For my lengthy review of this film, click here.]

Day 3:

A Nightmare on Elm Street (THE ORIGINAL ONE) (1984, dir. Wes Craven)

Why this movie: 

Wes Craven (who I also met with Brennan) has a really weird mind, as you will see in this movie. Unlike Halloween which is a psychological slasher and Friday which is a classic camp kid killing spree, Nightmare goes beyond the fathomable, into a world one could only dream of— or should I say nightmare. Freddy Krueger is probably the most well known of the three horror baddie front runners, maybe for his complex past or simply his use of wonderful puns. Or maybe it’s because he’s the only one of the three that actually speaks… Also, young Johnny Depp.

[EN: For my lengthy review of this film, click here.]

Day 4:

Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven)

Why this movie: 

Kevin Williamson basically wrote fan fiction about the three original horror classics and Wes Craven made it amazing. Craven reintroduced horror in the 90s. I was one of those kids who had no idea why everyone was so obsessed with ghost face costumes (keep in mind that I didn’t see a horror film until college) and now I am so bummed because I want to own one. I guess that’s what the internet is for… But in all seriousness, Scream is a perfect watch for a couple who just watched the original three, because together you can point out the references to other horror films that this movie makes, and point out all the stars who were just kids back then, and point out most importantly the horrible 90s fashion.

[For my lengthy review of this film, click here.]

Movie Cluster #2: The other bases (watch any order, but be prepared)

Day 5:

They Live (1988, dir. John Carpenter)

Why this movie: Some of the different subgenres in horror are torture porn (sorry, not covering this one in this feature), monster, slasher, and psychological thriller. So no, I did not pick this movie simply because it is one of my all-time favorite movies, but also because this bad-ass action/thriller/monster movie has the most incredible freaky monsters ever, with an additionally creepy Carpenter commentary on the state of the country. Also you know Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY Propaganda” line? Originated from this movie. BOOM HISTORY MADE.

Day 6:

You’re Next (2013, dir. Adam Wingard)

Why this movie: 

Modern day badass Australian chick visits her boyfriend's family and they start getting killed off in their old family house. It’s essentially a great survival story up to par with classic horror but without the horrible 80s hair-dos.

[For my review of this film, click here.]

Day 7:

The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin)

Why this movie: 

In my opinion, this is the scariest of them all. This is a possession/ghost sort of horror film, and a classic one at that. For it being the oldest on the list, this movie has the most intense special effects. It is also super perfect for couples, because every time someone decides to walk up those stairs, you will need a hand to hold. And then once the credits roll, you two can both celebrate surviving the possession of Linda Blair.

This concludes the introduction to horror and the conception of a long lasting relationship.

And if things don’t work out, maybe you could use some of the skills you’ve learned from these horror films for other things… 

Thanks for reading, everybody! If you have any opinions on these picks and/or how a horror movie has changed your relationship, please sound off in the comments below. I'm sure Shannon will be patrolling the comments section like a mad hound. If any of these films have piqued your interest, I can offer further recommendations. Have a nice day!

Word Count: 1281

Beat It, Essay: Music Of The Night HE Came Home

Phew! I survived the A to Z Challenge! Now we can return to regularly scheduled programming and I can survive finals week without a post every single day. But never fear, I won't forget about posting, I'll just stick to my regular average of one every two days or so until summer begins and my schedule clears up again.

But for now why not check out what's going on in finals week! Here's my final essay for my Music in Film class!

The Prompt

Discuss the role of music in a single film created in 1970 or after.

In 1978, the horror genre saw a great sea change with the release of John Carpenter’s low budget fright flick Halloween. Prior to its innovative approach to the genre, few films (like Jaws or The Exorcist) broke through the mire of pale Psycho knockoffs that had been permeating the market. But this fablistic tale of a purely good babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis defending her charges against Michael Myers, a faceless boogeyman, sent a shiver down audience spines, aided in no small part by Carpenter’s self-composed minimalist score.

Three major themes dominate the score for Halloween and all of them serve a unifying purpose – to highlight the nature of Michael Myers’ evil. This is an important endeavor because he is no mere slasher villain. In fact, slasher films didn’t even exist yet in the shape they would after Halloween’s influence. Michael Myers was a signifier of pure unstoppable evil, a force utterly divorced from humanity. The blank white mask he wore helped to signify this, stripping him of any defining features, but the music is what really drove that point home.

The first and most common theme in the film is the Halloween Theme, an unrelenting and shrill synth composition comprised of a ten beat pattern (1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2) repeated endlessly. Accompanied by a series of low tones to create an ominous mood, this theme sets the stage, evoking feelings of an autumnal Illinois night with its repetitive but nostalgic tune and consistent tempo while the more ominous undertones provide another layer; a feeling of being watched by some dark evil lurking in the shadows.

The second theme is Laurie’s theme, the musical cue that ties in most clearly with the fablistic tone of the film. The idea of Halloween is not that it tells a story of a realistic serial killer and his realistic victims, but rather a much grander display of the struggle between good and evil. This is reflected in Laurie’s theme, which opens with a lilting, almost whimsical melody using two alternating high notes to suggest her purity and inherent goodness. However, it doesn’t take long for the low, ominous notes to encroach upon her theme once more. After all, this film is about her battle with pure evil, the nature of which is ubiquitous and unrelenting.

The third theme is the Shape Theme. The Shape is the name given to Michael Myers in the credits and in the script, further dehumanizing him and turning him from sympathetic madman to an instrument of pure evil. His theme provides a similar effect. A large majority of the theme is a single low note repeated in staccato intervals. The harshness of this theme reflects the thought inside Michael Myers’ head and the pure visceral evil that fuels them. Persistent, dark, and terrifying, the focus on one single note of evil provides clues to the killer’s “motive,” implying that he moves with singular purpose to stalk his prey, the sweet young symbol of good whom he happened upon by accident while visiting his old home.

The entire score is composed on a synthesizer because of budget necessity, but sometimes such limitations are all a great artist needs to fully explore the limitations of their craft and create something delightfully new and dazzlingly creative. Because of his lack of an orchestra, John Carpenter was forced to think simpler, creating an immensely complex soundscape out of only a few musical colors and tones. The heavy use of leitmotif in Halloween is derived from this limitation and that, more than anything, is what makes the thematic material drill into the audience’s subconscious.

The music trains audience members to react in certain ways to certain situations, creating a musical atmosphere where the introduction of a single note can change the tone of a scene and keep viewers on their toes. The genius of the music does drive heavily from the cues themselves, but the tone lives and dies on their placement in the film. Carpenter plays the audience like a fiddle, using abrupt shifts to music or silence to create tension and a sense of imbalance.

Carpenter’s Halloween score became legendary more or less immediately with only about six notes dominating a majority of the score and that is what separates the geniuses from you or I. He realized that the tone and cue placement were essential to the horrific qualities of the film and its score more than the compositions themselves. They of course played a big part in the creation of the atmosphere, but Carpenter proved that films don’t need wall-to-wall original music with only a few repeating motifs. An even more jarring and unnerving effect could be created with only a small pool of cues to choose from, driving them into the minds of the viewers like a jackhammer.

Carpenter’s work on the film was so influential that his score was pilfered for years to spice up lesser slasher films like The Boogeyman or He Knows You’re Alone and large quotations of the score were directly incorporated into the finale of Wes Craven’s postmodern masterpiece Scream in the mid-90’s. The Eurodance scene in clubs across the pond would never be the same after this film, nor would be the entire slate of horror films for the next decade and a half. And it didn’t take miles and miles of dutifully composed pages. It didn’t take hundreds of unique instruments played by a herd of professionals. It didn’t take a lush postromantic style. All it took was a Shape.

Word Count: 1018