Clay Achin'

Year: 2015

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Guillermo del Toro is such a visionary that his name is spoken with hushed tones in optometry circles. His Spanish language films are characterized by a lush etherealism that starkly contrasts with the frequent brutality of the “real” world. The genre he creates in his films like the widely renowned Pan’s Labyrinth and the tremendously underrated The Devil’s Backbone is utterly distinct and can only be described as horror fantasy.

And then he made Pacific Rim. Now, I’m not saying that del Toro’s American films are bad, but they certainly lack that ineffable quality that defines his foreign works. However, this Halloween saw a near perfect marriage of the disparate halves of his career: the gothic ghost romance Crimson Peak combines the best of his Spanish aesthetic and the narrative paucity of his Hollywood flicks.

Generic ghost stories are real. This much I know.

In Crimson Peak, Edith “Not Peter” Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is a young American writer. She’s penning a novel that’s not a ghost story, but a “story with ghosts,” a dangerous portent for the thrill-seeking teenyboppers in the audience. She falls madly in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a mysterious stranger who came to her father in search of funding for an invention of his, to be used to plumb the depths of the red clay mine beneath his English manor. 

After her father’s untimely death by murder, she marries Sharpe and is whisked off to live with him in England, along with his hawkish and brooding sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), much to the consternation of her suitor, Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam, again cruelly forced to adopt a stilted American accent despite the fact that three-quarters of the film tajes place in his native Britain).

The Sharpe manor, Allerdale Hall, is in a startling state of disrepair (much like the Sharpes’ finances). The entire property is sinking into the clay mine, and liquefied red clay bleeds from the walls as leaves and debris cascade continuously from the holes in the ceiling. Pretty much immediately, Edith begins seeing CGI ghosts who warn her of a terrible secret hidden within the house.

[SPOILERS] It doesn’t NOT have something to do with Tom Hiddleston’s bare ass.

If you tossed Jane Eyre, The Haunting, The Devil’s Backbone, Flowers in the Attic, and The Turn of the Screw into a blender, you’d come up with a story that is almost, but not quite, entirely like Crimson Peak. It’s fundamentally predictable, so much so that the dialogue could have been “lorem ipsum, etc…” and be just as effective. It’s just a heap of thinly veiled metaphors delivered in Masterpiece Theatre accents slathered liberally over a routine gothic mystery.

Crimson Peak is just a pile of gently steaming boilerplate. That is, if you’re watching it with your eyes closed. The narrative might be peaky odds and ends, but the storybook environment and pure stylistic enthusiasm blast through the picture like a mighty geyser. After less than a minute, you feel like you’re watching the film while strapped into one of those Clockwork Orange viewing devices, unable and unwilling to peel your eyes away from the screen for even a moment. Handfuls of popcorn are missing your mouth completely and about sixty percent of your fact is slick with misapplied Chapstick, but to look away for even a second would be tantamount to rank betrayal, like Eve biting into the apple.

Crimson Peak is much like 2013’s Stoker in that it takes a well-worn family drama and transforms it into a sumptuous visual feast. And Mia Wasikowska is there. It has its imperfections, like some CGI-laden ghosties that probably have beers after work with the pixelated monstrosity from Mama, wacky transitions that might have impressed at the Johnson Family Annual New Year’s Slideshow Barbecue 1998, and an obnoxious font that announces locations with the garish lettering of a local mini-mart, though thee are but the pettiest of complaints.

Except for that ghost thing. More on that later.

The audacious style of Allerdale Hall and its ensigns is like an architect enduring a bad comedown from his first acid trip. There is beauty and splendor in the manor’s decrepitude, pulling designs, colors, and shapes from a dark place far beyond the human imagination. The walls are slimy, shimmering visions of flowing red clay, a bloody brilliant element that gives the house sickly life and informs the color scheme of every set. Red never dominates a scene, but it punctuates every moment with vivid splashes of color. And the constantly fluttering stream of leaves and snow through the Hall’s blasted-out ceiling completes the property’s impression of constant, surreal, gorgeous motion.

Equally sumptuous is Crimson Peak’s sound design, which begs to be heard in theatrical surround sound. The sense of Allerdale Hall as a living, all-encompassing space owes a great deal to the efforts of its audio technicians, who create a richly textured portrayal of not only what’s in the house, but where it is at all times.

And let me tell you, if I come across this place in real life, I would not be included on that list of what’s inside. Woe to their local milkman.

Guillermo del Toro’s brutal realism also makes its way to Crimson Peak in some gruesome sequences that achieve the difficult ideal of hyperreal fantasy. There are no over-the-top head rippings or de-limbings at play here. Every gory moment is an intimate, personal horror that gets under your skin and flays you from the inside out.

It’s just pity the story containing all these stunning elements is so milquetoast. I wouldn’t say that what Crimson Peak needs is more ghostly action (del Toro has conclusively proven in Devil’s Backbone that he is capable of deftly handling a ghost story where the spooky supernatural presence is far fro villainous.), but there is a certain lack of luster to Edith’s visitations. This is frustrated even more by the fact that the phantasms could be lifted from the plot entirely without making the slightest mark on the film.

Plus, the ghosts themselves, while boasting stupefying designs, are rendered silly by too much FX processing. The buildup to any haunting (when actual physical objects are being manipulated) are far more intense than the cut-and-paste apparitions that follow. The ghosts are far from the only thing to be afraid of, so this isn’t a film-busting flaw, but it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed by the ghosts’ lukewarm portrayal.

Boo Hoo Hoo…

Speaking of portrayals, Jessica Chastain swallows her role whole, swooping around the manor like a majestic heron. The rest of the cast is also suitable, though a wonky accent yet again unmoors Charlie Hunnam. Oh, when will producers stop being cruel to him?

At the end of the day, Crimson Peak is a film worth experiencing. Is it for teen Halloweeners looking to get their hearts thumped? Certainly not. Is it for haunted house fans looking for their next great classic? Unfortunately, no. but is fit for people who deeply, truly love the art of cinema? That answer would be an emphatic yes.

TL;DR: Crimson Peak is a gothic romance that values style over substance.

Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Don't go in expecting intense scares, but if you see it you absolutely must do so in the theater.
Word Count: 1245

Die Hydrogen Monoxide

Year: 1988

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Adam Arkin

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Let’s not pull any punches here. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later is the single most asinine title ever inflicted upon an innocent horror movie. The core concept makes sense (this – the seventh film in the franchise – was released twenty years after the original and brings back many of its characters and themes), but the execution is downright execrable. This film has nothing to do with water, and the needlessly hip, hopelessly confusing title is just another outgrowth of the pop postmodern horror flicks that sprouted like kudzu in the years following the success of Scream.

Yes, we’ve finally reached that fabled genre-savvy period of the late 90’s, where slashers could be slashers and teens could be overwritten. While I’m on the subject, let’s take a moment to appreciate how much the Halloween franchise adheres directly to the historical development of the genre as a whole. It’s uncanny, really. The whole thing is like a road map of the dominant trends of each era. Halloween exemplifies the proto-slashers of the 70s, Halloween II the gory killfests of 1981, Halloween 4 the quasi-supernatural bent of the post-Nightmare period, Halloween 5 the soul-sucking crappiness of 1989, and Halloween 6 the bleak desperation of franchise filmmaking in the early 90’s. Then it would move on into the no-man’s land of the early 2000’s slashers and stand at the forefront of the remake boom, but that’s a story for another time.

Halloween H20 upholds the tradition, providing a textbook example of the self-reflexive slasher. Normally this wouldn’t bode well, considering that it’s in the company of mediocre films like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend, but the film was assigned a dream team of slasher bruisers, including many veterans of Scream itself. Along with the guidance of Screamsmith Kevin Williamson (who isn’t credited with the script, but according to the hot Hollywood gos, probably should be), we have Scream editor and composer Patrick Lussier and Marco Beltrami, as well as Friday the 13th Part 2 director Steve Miner. The cherry on top, naturally, is the return of reigning Scream Queen Jamie Lee of House Curtis.

Long may she kick ass.

Of course, there’s the nasty little wrinkle of Laurie Strode having been killed off in Part 4, but that’s nothing a little ignoring the last three sequels can’t solve. H20 is a direct continuation of Halloween II: Keri Tate (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the headmistress of a prestigious Southern California boarding school, but she has a secret. Back in 1978, her brother (yeah, that’s still a thing) Michael Myers (Chris Durand) killed a lot of her friends, then vanished in a hospital explosion, presumed dead. After that she faked her death and changed her name, living constantly under the fear that Michael will return once more.

This paranoia has led to some glam alcoholism (there’s nothing like shotgunning chardonnay in a chic cream sweater) and damaged her relationships with her son John (Josh Hartnett) and her boyfriend, guidance counselor Will Brennan (Adam Arkin). On Halloween night 1998 (helpfully proclaimed by a condescending title card that reads “October 31st – Halloween”), John ditches out on a school field trip in a rebellion against his overprotective mother, throwing a party with some Meat friends. He, his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams), and their horny mates Sarah (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) and Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd) sneak into the school building for some illicit merriment.

Of course, a little thing like an exploding hospital can’t stop Michael Myers, and he shows up to wreak havoc once more, though he must have lost his mask at some point over the years and had to make do with a Sideshow Bob wig.

You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to replicate the original mold, but you would be wrong.

The thing about Halloween H20 is that there’s a character named Brennan, and I only allow my namesake to be used by good films (for the record, there’s a Dr. Brennan in The Exorcist). Ergo, Halloween H20 turns out to be the best sequel of the entire franchise, in a close race with 4. Some might argue that bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back pretty much earns the movie a free pass, but some probably haven’t seen Halloween: Resurrection.

Halloween H20 is short and sweet. It gets in, does its job, and books the hell out of there, and I greatly admire it for that. The story it tells is simple and taut. A trauma victim must survive one more trial to wipe her slate clean and get her life back on track. It’s surprisingly poignant, and the return of characters we actually give a flying hoot about bumps up the scare factor something fierce.

Obviously, H20 couldn’t dream of matching the elemental terror of the original. Steve Miner is a competent workhorse at best, not a Carpenter-esque auteur. But after a couple dozen years in the business, you learn how to stage a scene, and he certainly horses his work. Scenes like the opening kill, where the police are called to one house while the murder occurs next door, are genuinely thrilling. It’s the first actually tense Halloween in a decade. In the later scenes especially, the film uses parallels with the original film to crate expectations and repeatedly thwart them.

It is in these moments that Halloween H20 truly works as a self-referential piece. There are several not so subtle nods to other films (like Curtis’ actual mother Janet Leigh being cast as her assistant whose every line is a veiled Psycho reference), but the canny Williamson humor doesn’t quite strike up a meaningful relationship with the narrative. In the Scream films, the characters are aware that they’re living out a horror film, hence the references, but when our H20 teens pop on a DVD of Scream 2, it’s only a leering pat on the back. Their knowledge of horror doesn’t influence events in any way. Most of the humor is totally acceptable and amusing (especially LL Cool J as a security guard/budding romance novelist), but a lot of it just sort of aimlessly drifts across the screen like an errant balloon at a Fourth of July picnic.

One day I’m going to gather up all these magnificent similes and write the great American novel.

While we’re on the complain train, I have one last grievance to air, which is again the fault of one Kevin Williamson. He certainly does adore writings teens who speak like overly trendy mini Rhodes scholars, and the non-Strode kiddos are irritating as balls. Or, as K-Dubs would say, more painful than Titus Andronicus’ tongue piercing. Sarah especially is a one woman quip machine, with a groan-worthy line constantly at the ready for any situation (“Inconsiderate, party of one!”). This archetype is what really dates this movie, even more so than Josh Hartnett’s haircut, which looks like it was chewed into shape by a rabid dog.

But lo and behold, H20 leaps those hurdles like it was born to do it. The most irritating parts are hardly onscreen longer than you can say “ixnay on the ipsquay.” This is a movie that has Laurie Goddamn Strode in it, and she isn’t about to let no pockmarked whippets ruin it for her. Jamie Lee Curtis is just as subtle and illuminating as ever, bringing her natural charm to the far meatier role of a Girl Next Door gone sour. She’s a vodka-pickled, snarling survivor with a plastic smile that’s all bared teeth and hard edges. Her performance really picks up on the nuances of a genuinely good girl closed off to the world, and it reinforces the strong emotional throughline that the film boasts.

A little loopy but always fun, a little gritty but always exciting, H20 is a massively entertaining entry in the franchise. Coming hot on the heels of the atrocious Parts 5 and 6, this was a much-needed breath of fair to allow me to regroup and keep on plowing full steam ahead. On to 2002 and the film that completely undermines this one’s climax! Hooray!

Killer: Michael Myers (Chris Durand)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets an ice skate buried in his face.

Sign of the Times: John’s shirt is about fifteen sizes too big for him.

Scariest Moment: Charlie drops a corkscrew in the garbage disposal and reaches in to get it.

Weirdest Moment: Another Halloween tradition this film follows is that the local kids go trick or treating absurdly early. They can be seen wandering the streets at the explicitly mentioned time of 1 PM.

Champion Dialogue: “I’d rather have my eyes pierced.”

Body Count: 6; not counting Michael Myers (whose head is chopped off), who always seems to find his way back home.

1. Jimmy is stabbed in the face with an ice skate.
2. Allegre is stabbed in the back.
3. Nurse Chambers has her throat slit.
4. Charlie has his throat slashed.
5. Sarah is stabbed to death.
6. Mr. Brennan is stabbed in the back.

TL;DR: Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later is a brilliant rejuvenation of the franchise through the lens of the post-Scream era.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1547
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)

A Thorn In My Side

Year: 1995

Director: Joe Chappelle

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Paul Rudd, Marianne Hagan 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Part sixes can be good. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is an excellent cross between gothic horror and winking humor, and Saw VI actually had a political agenda other than vacuuming people’s guts out. So forgive me for not adjusting the curve for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the first flat-out abysmal entry in the series. Sure, I also despised Halloween 5, but that film was too silly to provoke any hardcore ire.

Halloween 6 (which lacks the number in the official title, because producers already didn’t want audiences to catch on to how damn many of these films there were) does not have that luxury. No, it’s your run of the mill blood-boiling suckfest, and it’s all the worse for it. To be fair, the film was so extensively tampered with by overzealous studio heads that it’s lucky it even remotely resembles a coherent narrative and not a jumbled page from an asylum inmate’s scrapbook. However, my sympathy for an addled movie does not actually extend to enjoying it.

I’m not enough of a fanboy to be that magnanimous.

Halloween 6 goes like this: It has been six years since Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur returning from Halloween 4) and his niece Jamie Lloyd (played by the singularly unprepossessing J. C. Brandy, who looks about fifteen years too old for the part) disappeared in a police station explosion. We open on Jamie giving birth and escaping a cult compound, whereupon she hides her baby in a bus station bathroom before being gruesomely offed in an abandoned farmhouse.

Cut to nobody that matters. Relatives of the Strode family have taken up residence in the old Myers house, and they run through about 30 beats of twisted family drama (that never comes up again) over the course of one breakfast. Kara (Marianne Hagan) has recently returned to her family’s home after five years of estrangement, her six-year-old son Danny (Devin Gardner) in tow. Her dowdy mother Debra (Kim Darby) welcomes her with open arms, but her father John (Bradford English) is the undefeated gold medalist of the Dickhat Olympics and relentlessly berates her, calling her son a bastard, at which point Danny pulls a knife on him. Again, this never ever is addressed at any other point in the movie.

Meanwhile, Laurie Strode’s babysitee Tommy Doyle (introducing Paul Stephen Rudd) is all grown up and on the hunt for the Boogeyman. He uses clues in Jamie’s distress call to a radio station to find her baby at the bus depot, then hooks up with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance in his final Halloween film). Their combined hysterical soliloquizing leads us to the knowledge that the druids bestowed Michael Myers with the Curse of Thorn as a baby, forcing him to try and kill his family on the night of Samhain whenever the stars align or the producers need some fast cash. And although the Strodes aren’t technically related to him, he goes after them as well, possibly because he hates the tacky forest green and burnt umber paint job they gave to his house.

Double meanwhile, an obligatory teen subplot is hammed into the film at a sideways angle. Kara’s brother Tim (Keith Bogart) and his girlfriend Beth (Mariah O’Brien) attend the live radio show of shock jock Barry Simms (Leo Geter of Silent Night, Deadly Night), because this film is a science fiction tale about an alternate universe where teenagers actually listen to the radio in 1995. They go home, share the least erotic pillow talk in the history of sex, and get stabbed a whole lot.

If there’s one thing Michael hates more than his own family, it’s inexplicable teen hookups.

This is one of those movies that I watch so you don’t have to. At every single level, Halloween 6 is a technically incompetent slog and an abrasive insult against John Carpenter’s original masterpiece. Filled with irritating flash cuts to supposedly creepy images, the movie has the attention span of a TeenNick sketch show. When you take that with the lighting that drowns everything in shadow (at one point obscuring all but Tim’s forehead in a “close-up”), it feels like a Capri-Sun commercial as directed by early David Fincher.

And the sound design! It’s so easy to take good sound design for granted, but when it’s improperly done, it can tear a movie apart from the floorboards up. Halloween 6 might just have the single worst audio job I’ve ever seen in a reportedly professional film. The baby’s cries could only have been recorded in a tin outhouse for all the reverb on the canned track, and the kills sound like Michael is stabbing victims with a small piece of Velcro. Which, incidentally, I would pay to see. Also, the foley artist must have had a hot date that night, because every single sound cue in the rushed, sloppy mix is exactly the same. Unless it’s an artistic choice that closing a book, opening a door, and beaning someone with a fire poker all make the same identical, slightly metallic noise.

Perhaps it was an attempt to tonally match the violently wretched, screeching industrial music masquerading as a John Carpenter score.

Narrative logic went out the window back in Halloween 5 when Michael was revealed to have a tattoo that we haven’t seen the previous three times, but there are some extremely basic needs that fail to be met by the story. Let me ask you this: Who is the main character of Halloween 6? The obsessed Tommy Doyle, the eye-popping Dr. Loomis, and the besieged Kara all lurk offscreen for a nearly equal amount of time. There’s two separate innocent children that need protection from at least three villains who are jockeying for position. I’d suggest this was an Eisensteinian approach, emphasizing the socialist ideal of the collective over the individual, but I can’t say for certain that the director of Phantoms is intimately familiar with Soviet film history.

The logical leaps required to make sense of Halloween 6 would make a kangaroo jealous. I haven’t the foggiest idea how Michael would know where Barry was, or even have the inclination to kill him while in the middle of a siege on a house on the opposite end of town. Likewise, I’m very worried for the continued employment of the janitorial staff at the Haddonfield bus depot, who neither noticed the trail of blood across the floor nor the baby stuffed into the bathroom cupboard. The entire film is cobbled together from this sort of mildly confusing, perpetually frustrating detritus.

Michael Myers himself suffers from the film’s powerful negative aura. Though no mask could beat the combined efforts of Halloween 4 and 5’s sheer neck-flapping dime store tackiness, the hair on this one is teased out into Johnny Rotten oblivion, giving Michael the silhouette of a birthday clown.

I guess that’s intimidating in its own right, but it’s not exactly Beacon of Pure Evil.

Given the mire they have to trudge through, it should come as no surprise that the cast can’t make heads or tails of this movie. Donald Pleasance, just months before his tragic death, can’t bring himself to care about the dreck he’s spouting, reducing his scenery chewing to a mere nibble.  Paul Rudd does an OK job, his kind face and adorable almond yes clashing with the off-putting single-mindedness of Tommy Doyle. He does indulge himself with a couple of his trademark goody grins, but for the most part he provides the film with an unnamable dissonant quality that helps it along. As for the rest? I can’t imagine that they had the budget to fill everyone's mouths with marbles, but they sure did pull off that effect with aplomb.

I’ll say one food thing before we wrap up, just to leave things in a pleasant frame of mind. The gore, when it arrives, is pretty well constructed. There are only three moments in particular that stand out, but one is gruesome, one is devastating, and the other is a campy treasure. I can’t really complain about that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a page from Tim’s book and put my face directly beneath the shower nozzle to blast sand my brain of the memory of this painful, painful film.

Killer: Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur)

Final Girl: Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd) feat. Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan)

Best Kill: “John is such a dick, he’d better die painfully,” I said. I got my wish when he was split up the abdomen, impaled on a fuse box, and electrocuted, at which point his head explodes. Rah rah, Michael!

Sign of the Times: Doting mother or Twin Peaks log lady? You decide.

Scariest Moment: Blood rains down on a child from a tree where Barry’s body is stashed.

Weirdest Moment: Tommy Doyle has a magnet of the drag queen Divine on his fridge.

Champion Dialogue: “Psycho lays nympho – best sex she can ever dismember.”

Body Count: 9; not including an entire operating room full of druids.

1. Nurse has her head impaled on a spike.
2. Truck Driver has his head twisted backward.
3. Jamie Lloyd is impaled on a farming machine.
4. Debra is chopped with an axe.
5. John is stabbed, electrocuted, and his head explodes.
6. Barry is stabbed in the gut.
7. Tim has his throat slit.
8. Beth is stabbed in the back.
9. Random-Ass Doctor has his face smashed into iron bars.

TL;DR: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is pure pabulum with scarcely any redeeming qualities.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1610

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)

Slash From The Past

For our podcast episode about this film, click here!

Year: 2015

Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Malin Akerman, Adam DeVine

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I’ve been waiting for so long to tell people about The Final Girls. Sergio and I got the chance to watch it at a preview screening way back when in freaking January, and I feel like the NDA we signed has been branded on my heart, searing me with every beat. But now The Final Girls is here for all the world to see! I mean, in limited theaters, because distributors are too busy patting themselves on the back about Star Wars to bother putting effort into an indie horror-comedy. But VOD is a thing, so you can still watch it.

Oh, happy day!

If you haven’t seen The Final Girls yet and you are in any way a fan of slashers, horror, comedy, or movies in general, please ignore me and go watch it right now. Go in unmarred by any spoilers or expectations, thank me later. If you still need convincing, I’ll drum up a little review for you:

In The Final Girls, Max (Taissa Farmiga) is a high schooler living in the Valley. Her mother, Amanda Cartwright (Malin Akerman) is a struggling actress whose biggest credit is appearing in the 1986 cult classic slasher Camp Bloodbath. Unfortunately she doesn’t get do live out her dream and dies in a tragic accident. 

Cut to three years later. On the anniversary of her mom’s death, Amanda is coerced by her friend Gertie’s (Alia Shawcat) brother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch) to make an appearance at the movie theater where he works, which is hosting a Camp Bloodbath double feature. When a fire breaks out, the three of them plus Max’s crush Chris (Alexander Ludwig) and his crazy ex-girlfriend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) attempt to escape through the screen, which transports them into the world of the movie.

Now, this “classic” slasher might be fictional, but it’s still 1986, so let’s revive that Census Bloodbath standby and Meet the Meat of Camp Bloodbath. There’s Kurt (Adam DeVine), the horny jock in a crop-top; Blake (Tory N. Thompson), the New Waver with plenty of flair on his suspenders; Tina (Angela Timbur), the ravenous slut; Paula (Chloe Bridges), Camp Bloodbath’s über cool Final Girl; and Nancy (Amanda Cartwright), the shy girl who gives Kurt her flower and gets murdered. To escape the film, the teens need to make it through to the end, surviving the onslaught of masked killer Billy Murphy (Dan B. Norris) and making sure he gets slaughtered by the Final Girl.

Their appearance alters the natural course of the movie, leading to Paula’s death. A new Final Girl must be appointed, and Max sees this as an opportunity to save Nancy, the character her mother played, from yet another grisly demise.

You know, the usual lighthearted horror comedy stuff.

The Final Girls does many things, nearly all of them very well, but the one that’s foremost on my mind is that it has solved the problem of the post-Scream slasher. After the subgenre’s death in 1989, it faced a resurgence thanks to Wes Craven’s pop horror masterpiece, but the wave of slashers that followed inadequately forced themselves into that postmodern, self-referential framework. Then the genre was drowned beneath a tsunami of dour remakes, making hardly a peep since them.

TV shows like MTV’s Scream reboot and Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens are attempting that same winking style in a long form medium with varied success. People have tried, but the knowing slasher has prevented the genre from being traditional or particularly good. But The Final Girls slips right into that framework while keeping it totally fresh by marrying the leering satire to a genuine love for the genre, an organic incorporation of classic tropes, and a heartfelt, incredibly impactful storyline.

The Final Girls is a dazzling effort, cobbling a wholly original film from age-old tropes and situations. But context and structure be damned, it’s just plain good. It’s far more of a comedy that it is a horror film, but it’s a pretty funny one. With an exquisite cast at the wheel, the laughs flow freely, the best zingers coming from Middleditch (as the Randy-esque horror nerd, AKA me) and DeVine (whose over-the-top portrayal of the worst kind of stock character reminds one of the time that Jim Carrey used to be truly great). The fish-out-of-water antics come at the viewer from two angles (the characters don’t realize that they’re fictional and they’re trapped in the 80’s, history’s largest exporter of disposable pop culture), lancing their funny bones at every opportunity and incorporating familiar film conventions in unexpected ways.

The direct parody of the slasher genre is also effective, avoiding the pop culture-laden clunkiness of other entries in the genre. It does reference specific films (including, astoundingly, Pieces – these people know their stuff), but in a subtle manner that doesn’t obviously call itself out. Slasher veterans will intuitively recognize these clever nods, but it won’t distract from the overall narrative. This quality is decidedly important because, though it is undoubtedly funny the truth strength of The Final Girls lies in a surprising dimension.

Dun dun dun…

The beating heart of The Final Girls is the mother-daughter storyline that drives it. It’s an unflinching, heartbreaking look at loss and grief that hides tender emotion beneath the glittering comic sheen. While all slasher necessarily depict death, this is one of the only ones in history that’s actually about death. [SPOILERS/AWESOME MIND-BLOWING ANALYSIS In a way, The Final Girls is a slasher analogue to last year’s Big Hero 6 – a young protagonist (Max, Hiro) loses a beloved/hot family member (Amanda, Tadashi), then encounters a surrogate for them (Nancy, Baymax). Through the loss of this surrogate, they learn to cope with their grief and accept the tragedy (Nancy sacrifices herself to save Max and end the movie, Baymax is launched into an evil space portal, saving Hiro). Where Big Hero 6 has a cop-out happy ending, The Final Girls is a heart-wrenching parable that has me crying real man tears.]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horror-comedy as sensitive and meaningful as The Final Girls, nor one that juggles those three disparate tones so well. Nor one that makes me want to listen to “Bette Davis Eyes” on repeat quite so much.

That said, as much as I passionately adore this film, there are some minor issues that need airing out before we move on. First, the movie hobbles itself by taking on a PG-13 rating, which prevents it from really digging into the sex and violence inherent to the slasher genre. The story it tells is absolutely good enough that this absence doesn’t derail it, but they missed a big opportunity to really dive into bloody goodness. There’s also two extremely shoddy pieces of FX work, both of which mar the all-important opening scene, which sets the tone for the entire piece. One is just some cheap but blissfully brief CGI, but the other is the ludicrously unconvincing wrinkle makeup requited to get Malin Akerman to look her own age.

That woman is an immortal goddess.

Those aren’t damning flaws by far, though they’re enough to knock my rating down a point or so. But you can’t knock down my heart. Or my eyes. Because, damn does The Final Girls have some visual splendor. The film is shot like a fairy tale, with a bold color palette, a lush forest tapestry showered with glowing daffodils and cheerful fecundity, and slick camera work that elegantly frames even the simplest of shots. And those shots that aren’t so simple? Some of them are frankly breathtaking works of art.

Just look at this! I think about this shot every night before I go to sleep in the hopes that my dreams are this gorgeous.

I love The Final Girls. I don’t know what more I need to say. A film this sweet, silly, and impeccably spectacular deserves to be seen and I hope I got through to you. Make this your Halloween treat and you won’t be disappointed.

TL;DR: The Final Girls is an utterly impressive horror-comedy, mixing sentimental heart with strong laughs.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1372

Cardboard Science: Wild Goose Chase

Year: 1957

Director: Fred F. Sears

Cast: Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum

Run Time: 1 hour 15 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

This October, we’re bringing the past to life. As I’ve now reached the halfway point in my Halloween marathon, it’s time to bring back another tradition from our ‘Ween season spectacular: Cardboard Science! That’s right, it’s our second annual crossover with BFF (Blog Friend Forever) Hunter Allen over at Kinemalogue! He’ll be taking on three choice treats from my Census Bloodbath gallery of terrors and I’ve been assigned three tricks from his favored genre: 50’s sci-fi.

Obviously, I’m not quite as well equipped to discuss this genre in a cinematically historical context. My understanding of 50’s B-movies begins and ends at The Blob. But I’m greatly looking forward to taking on this challenge of exploring a new genre. I hope you are too!

Last year, I left you off with the insipid Invaders from Mars, the pedantic but engaging The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the secretly pretty cool Them!. It’s time to dig a little deeper, starting with our first film: The Giant Claw.

Oooooh……

First off, that title is a bit of a misnomer. There’s definitely more claws than they’ve been letting on, and they’re attached to a bird the size of a battleship. When electronics engineer Mitch MacAfee (Jeff Morrow) is test piloting a plane for the military, he spots this brobdingnagian buzzard out of the corner of his eye. In no time, planes start disappearing all over North American (including Canada, marking what must be the first time our northerly neighbors were ever mentioned in a Hollywood film – history comes alive!).

It’s up to Mitch and mathematician turned girlfriend Sally (Mara Corday) to discover the truth behind the giant fowl and help the Good Old Boys of the army discover how to stop it. They’re accepted with open arms because there’s nothing the military likes more than letting plucky civilians have access to top secret equipment and intelligence. Of course, the job gets more challenging as the bird widens its range, attacking all the important world cities that white people care about and they discoverer that the beast is surrounded by an impenetrable force field of antimatter.

Science, y’all.

For an epically corny giant monster movie that doesn’t even have the decency to be an allegory for nuclear woes. The Giant Claw actually starts off pretty strong. It’s a pretty typical first act, but “generic done well” is still a surprising stroke of quality for a film of his caliber. The strong-jawed hero with a belt around his ribs in a futile attempt to give him a barrel chest, the beautiful and smart heroine, the slow burn before the bird’s reveal… It’s all there.

The really startling thing is the dialogue, which is just genuinely fun. Sally and Mitch’s sly flirting incorporates a good half dozen baseball metaphors, and they approach every scenario – no matter how intimidating – with wry, clever banter. A personal favorite comes when Mitch is urgently called to the general’s office and he answers the door in his bathrobe: “You keep your shirt on and I’ll get my pants on.” Ibsen it ain’t, but it’s highly amusing and far more intelligent than one could reasonably expect from a flick called The Giant Claw.

Somebody call Aaron Sorkin and let’s get a remake going.

So here we have clever characters barreling through a variety of aerial antics, including an airplane crash that’s edited using every trick in the book to make it only minimally cheesy, like a quick dash of parmesan. These engaging archetypes are attempting to solve the mystery of the Unidentified Flying Object and discover that it’s attacking in a spiral pattern, a nice touch that shows off their skill and aptitude. The film starts rockin’ and rollin’, but it rocks a little too hard and rolls onto its back, where it gets stuck.

About midway through the film, all those nice setups (the blossoming romance, the spiral theory, any subtextual potential) scatter like cockroaches when a light is turned on. Where once it was a slightly eerie giant monster flick, the film abruptly converts into a hard science extravaganza of macho insipidity. The discovery of the bird’s flight pattern is never utilized, in favor of blundering after it with big-ass guns while a scientist provides an absurdly detailed lecture about the nature of antimatter and serosorted quarks or whatever. Look, it’s not like I took notes. This flick had the budget of a sewer rat, it’s not like they could have consulted with Stephen Hawking to keep the science accurate.

The question that arises is this: Does the giant bird really need to have an antimatter force field to avoid radar and repel missiles? It’s already an evil space bird. Can’t it just be really strong or something? It smacks of pandering to the popular science of the day, and the intense focus on educating the viewer smashes the characters into oblivion, converting them into soulless flesh lumps that nod and go “Oh, how interesting.” Then they build a Science is Magic weapon so they can go shoot more rockets at a bird. Whee.

It’s a primitive, almost vulgar approach to the conclusion of a story that began with such relative elegance. The finale is such an anticlimax that it dominates my negative responses to this movie even more than the hideous puppet that plays the bird.

Behold, The Giant Flaw!

Yup, this is the abomination summoned to terrify the masses. I’ve seen my share of shoddy special effects, but the work here is just mortifying. There’s a couple decent moment overall, including a crumbling building and a wounded pilot with an alarming amount of blood for the 1957 crowd (this was before Psycho, remember, the musty charms of which were the goriest thing American audiences ever bore witness to at the time). But that outsized chicken is past redemption. It looks like one of those hand turkeys that kindergarteners trace pm Thanksgiving, and its stiff beak never once matches up with the forlorn cacophony of caws on the soundtrack.

Luckily, the bird does provide some of that crappy B-move sparkle. The Giant Claw doesn’t have too much in the way of camp (it’s way too enthusiastic about didacticism for that), but between the bird and a chirpy narrator espousing the community values of the 1950’s, there’s enough to go on for cinematic dumpster divers (my favorite moment is when the disembodied voiceover seems to get actively frustrated at Mitch’s failures to create a machine, a touch very reminiscent of Arrested Development). And let us never forget that, for about fifty percent of the time, the film is actually kind of a good movie. Unfortunately, the sum of its parts is far lesser than the whole, but as it stands, The Giant Claw is a totally passable, mildly amusing diversion.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Mitch builds an anti-antimatter weapon with a screwdriver.
• Cabin pressurizing technology is so advanced on military planes that they can access the outside via a regular swinging door.
• The bird isn’t antimatter, but it comes from an antimatter galaxy and surrounds itself with a cloud of anti… Johnson! Get the encyclopedia!

The morality of the past, I the future!:

• A committed relationship can totally start by kissing an unconscious woman on a plane. No flaws here.
• Sally might be a mathematician, but we can’t ask a man to get the sandwiches and coffee.
• “A kiss you take is better than one you give.”
• A woman shoots a gun in this movie, but it’s OK because she’s from Montana. Some men probably taught her how, so we’re safe.

Sensawunda:

• I’m honestly impressed that they allowed Mitch to make a spanking joke in the first scene. Go 1957!
• In 1957, you could say “holey Toledo” and “honest to Pete” in the same sentence without getting shot.

TL;DR: The Giant Claw has a promising beginning but quickly devolves into insipidity.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1340

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture

2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

Arrow in the Head: I Can't Sand It

Year: 2015

Director: Isaac Gabaeff

Cast: Brooke Butler, Meagan Holder, Jamie Kennedy

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have a very special announcement to share with you. After three and a half months of writing horror news for Arrow in the Head, I have been asked to write my first official review for their hallowed pages. There’s no telling if or when I’ll write another one, but I’m happy to share with you my very first, a review of the Jamie Kennedy sand monster movie The Sand.

…We all gotta start somewhere.

Check out the full review here!

Additional Notes: Phew, now that we’re back on safe ground, I’m free to be as free form and bluntly honest as I like. The gloves are off, baby! The worst thing about The Sand is that it’s not even bad enough to hate. It’s just plain dull. It wants to be bad-good so much (or at least I assume, considering that it opens with a topless sunbather kicking the bucket), but it’s hardly even bad-bad. It’s just bleh-bleh.

The opening is promising, alternating between the traditionally shot empty beach vistas and found footage debauchery from the night before, but it goes on for what feels like ten minutes. Or a decade. It’s just plain grueling, and the ending is even worse, holding on two characters emoting poorly for a ludicrously sustained period. I’d rather have watched my roommate wash the dishes. And he’d probably rather I washed the dishes myself. But I’m too busy with important work commitments. Like eviscerating The Sand.

The Sand is not the worst film I’ve ever seen, bt the acting is mostly juvenile (Cynthia Murell’s every line is delivered in a nasal whine, and Cleo Berry literally drools as he’s speaking), the gender politics are hideously reductive yet think they’re redeeming, and major plot points or character beats are shelved and forgotten for half hours at a time. An entire death occurs that filmmakers apparently forgot to include in the finished cut. It’s sloppy, it’s inane, it’s bland, and it includes the line “he’s stuck in a goddamned trash can without any hope,” delivered with the earnestness of a Borgnine. But I’m glad I was given the chance to tackle it, and I hope I did y’all dedicated readers proud.

Peace and love, guys.

TL;DR: The Sand is a poorly acted, boring, film laced with terrible CGI.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1141

Census Bloodbath: The Boogie Woogie Boogeyman

Year: 1989

Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell |

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And so we come back, as always, to 1989. That year is like a black hole, taking every franchise we know and love and crushing it into oblivion. Many slashers entered that dark void and very few returned. The ones that did were in bad shape. Freddy Krueger was shipped off to a 3D suckfest that turned him into a blithering cartoon character. Jason Voorhees was abandoned on New Line’s doorstep, converted into a body-hopping demon worm, and shuttled off into space. And Michael Myers… Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Many films worked in tandem to murder the illustrious slasher genre in cold blood during that hallowed year. Some were putrid, obscene messes. Some were quite fun, but didn’t have the moxy to make a splash at the box office. Most were a chore to sit through. But perhaps none so effectively derailed a franchise as Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. This was a film so ludicrously inept that it buried a series that had already withstood the assault of the Michael Myers - Laurie Strode sibling connection and a Michael-less entry about evil Stonehenge masks.

We’re talking heavy artillery here.

Halloween 5 starts promisingly enough. A direct continuation of Halloween 4 (with some light retconning to spinelessly reverse that dark ending), we follow Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), the young niece of Michael Myers (Don Shanks of Sweet 16) who has been institutionalized following their encounter last year. More or less direct continuity, a returning lead, actual recognition of Jamie’s trauma… What could go wrong? The answer is everything. Immediately.

Michael Myers, having recuperated in the hut of a mountain man one evening that lasted an entire year according to the editor, returns to Haddonfield to continue his relentless pursuit of Jamie. But THIS TIME THEY’RE READY, so proclaims the poster. This is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual plot, unless you count the fact that Jamie seems to have some sort of useless psychic connection to Michael that gives her seizures whenever he kills. It’s not the most efficient defense mechanism in the world, and it only ever helps to save Tina (Wendy Foxworth), who is the single most annoying human being in the known universe, so I say she’s better off without it.

And of course Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is back, because what would a Halloween flick be without some purple monologuing and an old man tormenting a little girl with tales of hellspawn and baby coffins? There’s a slightly larger teen presence than usual here, so let’s also take a short break to Meet the Meat.

There’s Rachel (Ellie Cornell), Jamie’s adopted sister who takes all that lovely character development from Part 4 and tenderly tosses it in the shredder before being tragically reduced to the role of Girl Who Takes a Shower; you’ve already met Tina, Rachel’s best friend who is woefully unfit to take her place as teen protagonist and never speaks normally when a dog whistle shriek will do; Mikey (Jonathan Chapin), Tina’s greaser boyfriend who I would say is the least attractive slasher hunk in history if I hadn’t already met Spitz (Matthew Walker of Child’s Play 3), a Neanderthal with a puddin’ bowl haircut, and yes that is his real name; and Sammy (Tamara Glynn), his inappropriately sexy girlfriend. The teens are alone in Rachel’s house for the weekend and head out to a barn party, because Halloween 5 has no idea what type of movie it is.

I can tell you one thing for sure, it’s not a good one.

I didn’t think it was possible, but Halloween 5 proved me wrong. I thought no slasher character could be more profoundly irritating than Joey from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Or Franklin in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Or – heaven help me – Jack Black in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. But I was wrong. Dead wrong. Tina’s car alarm chirpiness is bad enough, but when you roll her up with the grimacing, gibbering imps she calls friends, it’s enough to make you want to tear out your eardrums and staple them over your eye sockets so you never have to see or hear them ever again.

I think writer-director Dominique Othenin-Girard (whose name is actually misspelled in the opening credits, because this film is a work of art) took notes on everything that slasher sequels do wrong and vowed to copy that formula exactly. Mysterious killers are ruined with too much mythology? “Let’s throw in a cult tattoo, a shadowy Man in Black following the proceedings, and vapid psychobabble about quelling Michael’s inner rage!” Slashers are no fun when they’re not working with sharp implements? “Let’s have our first finale [EN: There are like twelve endings to this damn movie] be an extended car chase!” The Last House on the Left had infuriatingly inept comic relief cops? “Great idea! Make sure you throw in some honk-honk sound effects so people know that they’re silly!”

“Just call me the Jean-Luc Godard of horror cinema.”

Halloween 5 is just all over the place. It can’t decide whether it wants Tina to be a Final Girl or a victim. It can’t decide whether Michael Myers is the product of supernatural forces or a shattered psyche. It even misplaces an entire character (Billy – a young boy with a crush on Jamie) and never finds him again. All it knows is that it wants to have its cake and stab it too.

The ineptitude at work here is frankly staggering. Let me give you an example. If you were a director staging a sex scene in a barn, how would you do it? Would you throw on a smoky filter and layer some light music, toss in a couple boob close-ups, and call it a day? Or would you have it completely silent save for the uncomfortable grunting of two actors who would clear rather be nowhere near each other, one of whom is supposedly engaging in intercourse without ever having taken off her panties? If you answered the former, congratulations. You are not Dominique Othenin-Girard.

At least the gore is safe from this kind of treatment. Because there is none. Only two deaths have any sort of visceral impact, but they happen to 1) the fourth most annoying character, which is still well above the curve, and 2) a character we only meet 20 minutes before the ending. Needless to say, it’s a bit difficult to care.

Also, Michael has a mean case of turkey neck.

The pure negative power of Halloween 5 is such that it finally defeats Donald Pleasance. His deflated wheeze of a character sounds something like Winnie the Pooh after running a half marathon, and his fire and brimstone speechifying flings itself so far over the to that it’s visible from space. He’s laying it on thick, and his lines constantly bounce from subject to subject like an untrained high school improve show. After four films, I suppose it’s hard to really put your heart into lines like “Hell would not HAVE himmm!”

You’d think people would know that Michael Myers is kind of a dick at this point, without Dr. Loomis’ help.

But after all this trial and tribulation, a seed germinates, containing hope for a better future. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are positive factors to Halloween 5 as well. A shot from inside one of Jamie’s drawings proves that somebody somewhere has at least a crumb of visual ambition, and a scene between Tina and Jamie at the clinic is actually pretty tender and sweet. Plus, it’s hard to knock the finale, which pits Michael against Jamie as she tries to escape imprisonment in a slick metal laundry chute. Of course, that’s immediately followed by a metal net, a weepy Michael getting beaned with a 2x4, and a machine gun-toting druid, but this is Halloween 5 after all. It needed to reach its crap quota.

At least it’s fun to make fun of, right? And the few genuinely good moments are scattered at an even enough distance that it almost feels like a tolerable motion picture. Halloween 5 isn’t the worst Halloween film (thank you, Rob Zombie), but it is the keystone film of the year that destroyed the traditional slasher once and for all. That’s no small achievement. A round of applause, everyone, for the final Halloween of the 1980’s.

Killer: Michael Myers (Don Shanks)
Final Girl: Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris)
Best Kill: Charlie is hung using the very rope ladder he was going to escape with.
Sign of the Times: Hell hath no fury like Tina’s outfit.

Scariest Moment: Michael attacks Jamie while she’s trapped in a laundry chute.
Weirdest Moment: Tina ends up in the spooky barn because she chased an adorable kitten in there.
Champion Dialogue: “When you’re older there are people you’re gonna meet that make you feel connected. Like your heart is made of neon.”
Body Count: 9; not including 10 cops, who were alternately machine gunned by the Man in Black or slaughtered by Michael Myers – Or Max, the family dog.

1. Mountain Man is stabbed to death.
2. Rachel is stabbed in the chest with scissors.
3. Mikey is stabbed in the face with a three-pronged garden tool.
4. Spitz is impaled with a pitchfork.
5. Sammy is slashed with a scythe.
6. Goofy Cop #1 is pitchforked offscreen.
7. Goofy Cop #2 is pitchforked offscreen.
8. Eddie has his face smashed into a steering wheel.
9. Charlie is hung with a rope ladder.

TL;DR: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is an inept horror picture that pisses all over the legacy of Halloween even more than the other sequels already had.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1641
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)