Census Flashback: Girls School Screamers

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

This week, we are anticipating Annabelle: Creation, a spinoff prequel about a group of young orphan girls being menaced by a haunted doll. In honor of that film, we’re reviewing an 80’s slasher that pits another group of hapless schoolgirls against a deadly menace: Dario Argento’s Phenomena.

Year: 1985

Director: Dario Argento

Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasence, Daria Nicolodi 

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Dario Argento is the Robert De Niro of Italian horror directors. Although he made some masterpieces in the 70’s, his career began to wobble a bit after a decade and a half, before flying completely off the rails into a creative decline that turned his name into a punch line despite still producing the occasional success. Whether it’s Dirty Grandpa or Dracula 3D, you wonder what could have possibly happened to the cinematic giant. Then you take a look at their late 80’s work, where the first whiffs of rot began to set in, and you’re on the road to understanding.

1985’s Phenomena, which was released in the States as Creepers, came out in the five years between Argento’s more respected works Tenebrae and Opera. It is one of those whiffs.

Clothespin your nose, we’re about to dive in.

Even the plot of Phenomena is a little ragged and patched, sampling Suspiria so thoroughly that it might actually count as a cover. Instead of a ballet school in Germany, it’s a boarding school in Switzerland. Instead of awkwardly shoehorning in Udo Kier for an exposition dump, we get a wheelchair-bound Donald Pleasence as an entomologist with a chimpanzee best friend. And instead of a doe-eyed Jessica Harper, we get a very young Jennifer Connelly, packed to the gills with guileless earnest.

The plot is altogether too simple, despite its unusually elaborate window dressing. Connelly is Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a famous beefcake actor. She arrives at the Swiss girls’ school smack dab in the middle of the reign of terror of a serial killer who targets young girls using a knife fixed to a metal pole. She has nightmares about these killings and attempts to use her telekinetic power to control bugs to find out who’s behind them.

Yeah, that sounds pretty normal for… wait, what?

Yup, the protagonist has a bug-controlling superpower, and it just barely factors into the plot. It’s about as tossed-off a character detail as her famous father, who figures into the story not one whit despite the massive amount of lip service the dialogue grants him in the first act. As far as I can tell, the bug thing was just intended as an excuse to torture Jennifer Connelly, because from the evidence of this film it seems like Argento hated her guts. 

She’s the Bruce Campbell to his Sam Raimi, forced through a gauntlet of onscreen misery, including being dunked in water filled with rotting corpses, smacked in the face by a jet of sewage, at one point actually sent to the ER because the chimp tried to bite her finger off, and at any given moment being covered in beetles, flies, or maggots.

Phenomena is the director’s vocal tirade against little girls (the victim in the opening sequence is played by his own young daughter) to the point that everything else – including his typical phantasmagoric approach to filmmaking – seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Parenthood, am I right?

Even without the weird kid angle, Phenomena is a spectacularly spotty entry in the Argento canon. He’s never really been great at crafting murder mysteries that make a lick of sense (“style over substance” is the mantra of the Italian giallo movement), but this one is especially muddled, so completely failing to introduce anything resembling a suspect that I just figured the monkey did it (yes, I know apes and monkeys are different – do I look like I care?).

And fankly, the monkey gives the best performance of the whole lot. Pleasence just sits there and sputters a bunch of dotty insect mythology, bringing neither the inspired manic energy of his Halloween role nor the gravity he was certainly capable of, and Connelly is flatly uninteresting in a role that asks nothing of her other than plaintive suffering.

Certain critics have called Phenomena “dreamlike,” and they’re not wrong. Dreams are pretty incoherent. I watched the cut of the film that fans of this sort of thing tend to agree is more legible, and even it was a jumbled mess. Scenes crash into each other (sometimes quite literally) with no rhyme or reason, dropped lines and major characters either amount to nothing or randomly teleport into the film midway through, the plot has no thrust, and even the dizzy effects spectacle of the third act fails to entirely redeem its anemically meandering quality.

This plot is more of a labyrinth than that OTHER Jennifer Connelly movie.

That’s not to say that Phenomena is a total failure. It’s mildly amusing enough that it’s never boring, and that finale really is incredibly gross, if that’s something you value as I do. But you can’t help but feel like some projectionist mixed up the reels, even if you’re watching it on DVD. The film just never manages to come together.

The kills have some Argento flourishes (particularly his favorite image of heads crashing through glass windows), but for the most party they’re pretty workmanlike, created without an iota of the feeling or glamour that typically accompany Argento’s murder sequences.

It’s a pale imitation of the far superior work displayed as recently as Tenebrae, the film immediately prior to this one. It’s 80’s Argento, so it’s still heaps more interesting than your average Italian slasher knockoff, but it’s a mélange of genre clichés that fails to flesh out any of the idiosyncratic details that threaten to make it interesting. It didn’t feel like a slog to get through, but I certainly wouldn’t dream of recommending it. Just watch Suspiria again instead.

Killer: [Mrs. Bruckner (Daria Nicolodi)]

Final Girl: Jenifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly)

Best Kill: A man is decapitated with a huge sheet of metal in a hilariously overreaching bit of excess.

Sign of the Times: A major tension sequence involves someone trying to lift a phone by its cord.

Scariest Moment: Jennifer Connelly has maggots under her fingernails. Icky!

Weirdest Moment: A group of boys hit Jennifer with their car, offer her a ride, and then end up dumping her out on a hill.

Champion Dialogue: “He’s got more hands than the entire basketball team!”

Body Count: 7

1. Vera is stabbed in the gut with scissors.
2. Gisela is knifed through the back of the head.
3. Sophie is stabbed.
4. Professor McGregor is stabbed in the gut.
5. Mutant Son is killed by bugs.
6. Morris is decapitated with a metal plate.
7. Ms. Bruckner is slashed to death.

TL;DR: Phenomena is a tremendously wonky motion picture with a muddled, unsatisfying mystery at the center of it.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1186

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)

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)

Census Bloodbath: Hush Hush Hush, Here Comes The Boogeyman

Year: 1988

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After the debacle that was the Myers-free Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the entire franchise went dormant for over half a decade. By the time it came wheezing back into cinemas waving the white flag of its desperately placating title – Halloween 4: the Return of Michael Myers – it was already 1988, perilously close to the death rattle of the slasher genre.

At this point in the decade, slashers were still a viable box office draw, but only if they were attached to franchise names. Luckily for Halloween 4, it was coming on the heels of one of the most successful slasher films of all time. The franchise may have lost its way, but that name still had caché.

Unfortunately for Cheerleader Camp, Destroyer, and Amsterdamned. But really, who would have watched them anyway? Oh right, me.

Halloween 4 finds itself at the beginning of a trilogy (though it doesn’t know it yet) centering on Haddonfield youth Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris). Jamie is the daughter of Laurie Strode (played by a headshot of Jamie Lee Curtis), who has since passed away and left her in the care of a foster family. Not many details are given, but I like to imagine that Laurie married Lance Guest the EMT and subsequently perished in a boating accident like the parents from Frozen.

Jamie’s adopted sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) wants to spend Halloween night with her boyfriend Brady (Sasha Jenson), but is forced by her parents to take Jamie trick or treating. Brady, being a dude in a slasher movie and essentially a walking pair of testicles, immediately goes home with Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), a girl with a bigger set of candy corns. When, as the title promises, Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) breaks out of the hospital and returns to Haddonfield, murderously pursuing his niece and her sister, the girls take refuge in the Sheriff’s house (where Brady and Kelly have holed u) to wait out the night under police protection. Awkward.

And of course Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) returns, because how else would we know that Michael Myers is Pure Evil and that we don’t understand what death is?

Apparently hospital explosions are hardly stronger than accidentally placing your hand on a stove, at least if you’ve got a franchise riding on your back.

So here’s the deal. It’s basically impossible to have a lower budget than the original Halloween, which was pretty much made for the cost of a hardback book at Barnes and Noble. As exorbitant as that price may seem, it’s a pittance in the world of Hollywood filmmaking. Halloween 4’s allowance was easily 16 times that, but Dwight Little isn’t John Carpenter. He could have had 100 million and still not made a film as richly complex as Halloween. Although, to be fair, John Carpenter didn’t direct Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, so Little has that over him.

But the fact remains that Halloween 4 looks more than a little tacky, which is by far its biggest flaw. The Michael Myers mask looks like a bargain bin purchase from the 99 cent store, and the makeup that bestows Dr. Loomis with his “hideously” burned visage brings to mind half-dried pancake batter. Not to mention it shifts position every time it thinks we’re not looking. If you’re craving convincing effects, you’re gonna stay hungry.

Although there is a pretty cool exploding gas station, because everything spontaneously combusts in 80’s horror. It’s a venerable tradition.

So that’s the readout when you weight Halloween 4 by Halloween standards. But that’s hardly fair, considering that that film is one of the true masterpieces of modern horror cinema. When you take it at slasher standards, the outlook brightens considerably. For a late 80’s creeper feature, the storytelling at work in Halloween 4 might as well be Chaucer.

It might sound unbelievable to those of you who are keen followers of Census Bloodbath, but this film actually has characters. I know, right? Perhaps they’re a bit fundamental, but they have substance, and Rachel specifically has an honest to goodness arc as she transforms from a selfish teenage brat into a caring older sister. On top of that (my, are we being spoiled), there are multiple storylines that weave in and out of Haddonfield’s ensigns, all of which come together in a remarkably satisfying manner. It’s almost like they think “seven to twelve teens gather together, then die” isn’t a solid enough structure to hang a story off of.

The nerve!

Halloween 4 also differs from the norm by actually casting people with more than a tattered shred of talent. Of course it goes without saying that Donald Pleasance is at the top of the heap, toning down his florid spittle spraying to a manageable dull roar, but he’s not the only standout. Ellie Cornell is a tenacious Final Girl with real vulnerability, incredible strength, and a tremendous scream (you’d think good screams would be a given in the horror genre, but that kind of thinking will only bring trouble).

Even young Danielle Harris knocks ‘em down, with a layered rendition of a young girl desperately in search of validation and identity. She seems decades older than she really is, a haunting effect that’s creepier than anything else in the movie but totally fits her tragically orphaned character. She proves herself more than worthy to carry on the royal lineage of the genre’s reigning Scream Queen (both within the movie and in real life – Curtis bailed out of horror after Halloween II wasted her and drowned her beneath a waxen wig.), but some tense, character-based chills tossed together with a dark, smoky, outdoor atmosphere is nothing to cry about.

If you really want to complain about something, you have limited options. There’s the aforementioned tackiness, of course, but that’s hardly out of character for the late 80’s. The only other element you can latch onto is the film’s vanilla approach to exploitation. A promising sex scene manages to avoid showing female or male chests, and the 1988 gore just ain’t what it used to be. But Halloween 4 is strong enough as a piece of cinema that it’s hard to feel cheated by the missing slasher trappings. Of course, it’s still a cheesy slasher at heart, but it’s a dark, engaging entry that’s absolutely worth checking out.

Killer: Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur)

Final Girl: Rachel (Ellie Cornell)

Best Kill: Kelly’s impaled on a shotgun. It’s pure slasher mayhem when guns are used as murder devices, but not as intended.

Sign of the Times: At one point, Michael mysteriously sports bleached blond hair.

Scariest Moment: Michael’s siege on the barricaded house.

Weirdest Moment: A gas station wall is decorated solely with dozens of framed photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

Champion Dialogue: “Oh God, Rachel Please come alive!”

Body Count: 12; not including a paramedic team, a dog, or an entire police station.

1. Attendant has a thumb shoved through his forehead.
2. Mechanic is impaled with a metal rod.
3. Waitress is killed offscreen.
4. Bucky is electrocuted by a transformer.
5. Ted Hollister is shot to death.
6. Deputy Logan is mangled offscreen.
7. Kelly is impaled on a shotgun. 
8. Brady has his face crushed.
9. Orrin is stabbed in the back and pushed off a truck.
10. Alan is stabbed in the stomach and pushed off a truck.
11. Unger is thrown off a truck.
12. Earl has his neck ripped open. 

TL;DR: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is a prim, but thrilling and skillfully told story.

Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1272
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)

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)