Films – Page 3 – Spirit of Dee

31 Days Of Horror: Scream

11 October 201831 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I first saw Scream (1996) shortly after it came out, with my friend Fiona. I was eleven and she was twelve, so no, we didn’t see this 18-rated film in the cinema – she got her mum to rent it from a video rental shop, which was a thing that existed in the 20th century. It was the first slasher movie I ever watched.

The opening sequence with Drew Barrymore is infamous – she promoted the movie like she was its star, so filmgoers expected her to be the final girl, but instead she turned out to be the girl who gets butchered in the first ten minutes. As Halloween is referenced continually throughout this film (Barrymore’s character, Casey, identifies it as her favourite horror film in the very first scene), we’ll say she’s the Judith Myers rather than the Laurie Strode.

When the stranger on the phone says A Nightmare On Elm Street was scary, Casey opines, ‘The first one was but the rest sucked.’ Apparently director Wes Craven didn’t want to include this line because he felt it would come across as him slagging off the Nightmare films that he wasn’t involved in! Screenwriter Kevin Williamson persuaded him to go with it by explaining that ‘the rest’ included Craven’s New Nightmare.

The trick question about Friday the 13th is inspired – I bet nobody ever gets that one wrong in pub quizzes nowadays!

When I was younger I absolutely loved the trope callouts in this film, but nowadays I find it a bit too knowing – maybe just because the film has been dated by its slew of late ’90s imitators that formed the ‘postmodern slasher era’. It was hugely original at the time though, so I will try to look at it without the twenty-two years of hindsight.

‘Get in the car, drive down to the Mackenzies, call the police,’ says Casey’s father to her mother, which is an almost verbatim copy of what Laurie says to Tommy towards the end of Halloween.

We’re introduced to real main character Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) now, who is using very old-fashioned computer software for 1996 – you’d think she’d at least have Windows! Sidney’s dad, Neil, is conveniently going out of town for a few days, which is a bit strange given what is revealed later in the film. Sidney is visited through her bedroom window (major ’90s flashbacks to Clarissa Explains It All and Dawson’s Creek!) by her boyfriend Billy, who is not super happy about Sidney not wanting to get too physical with him recently. Billy can’t even complain about not getting sex without using a film analogy, which is a bit of a theme in this film and is part of the reason I find the characters and dialogue a bit awkward and unrealistic sometimes. We get a cover of Don’t Fear The Reaper (by Gus) playing during this scene, which is another callback to Halloween, in which Laurie and Annie listen to the original song while driving to their babysitting jobs.

(A quick ’90s note: after watching Halloween 6 and Scream, it’s settled in my mind that curtains were the worst, ugliest, most greasy-looking ’90s hair mistake ever and I can’t believe I used to have posters of boy popstars on my wall sporting that look. Wash your hair and put a bit of volume in it, for the love of God!)

The backstory is that Sidney’s mother Maureen was murdered a year ago, which is why it’s weird that Neil is going away on a business trip – you’d think they’d want to support each other during a difficult anniversary.

Marco Beltrami’s score is gorgeous! Really evocative.

Reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears here, and her skirt suit is insane – bright neon green and ridiculously short, like the Spice Girls going to a business meeting. In other words, it screams 1996 (no pun intended).

I think this is the only role Rose McGowan, who plays Sidney’s friend Tatum, ever did as a blonde – she dyed her hair in order to contrast with Campbell and Cox.

Yet another example of a high school not shutting down even though two of their students have been brutally murdered! However, it means we get some quality time to appreciate the brilliance of casting Henry Winkler (the Fonz from Happy Days, if you’re not aware) as the principal, Mr Himbry.

Sidney’s friend group – Tatum, Billy, Stu and Randy – are mostly idiots who don’t seem to care about what’s happened, instead making jokes about horror movie tropes. It’s kind of difficult to like the characters in this film. Sidney is perturbed and decides to stay at Tatum’s overnight.

However, back at home, she falls asleep for too long, and wakes up when it’s dark, meaning the killer comes (phone) calling. Sydney doesn’t seem very scared considering what’s happened – she just assumes it’s a prankster. However, once the killer appears, she’s really capable, and manages to fight him off. Billy arrives through the window again, to Sidney’s relief – but when she hugs him, a chunky ’90s mobile falls out of his pocket, and she decides he must be the killer. It’s a bit odd that she suspects Billy just for having a mobile – I know they were less common in 1996 but he can’t have been the only one! Indeed, at the police station, he insists to the police chief that ‘everyone’s got one’, but the chief decides to hold him until they can check the phone records.

Gale Weathers is a total cow, even to her cameraman Kenny. Kenny is overweight, which is a definite death curse in a horror film, as it means you can’t run fast enough!

Billy’s surname is Loomis, presumably after Dr Loomis, which is yet another Halloween reference if you’re keeping score!

Dewey is bit of a ‘comedy incompetent’ cop, which is pretty frustrating. He and the chief discuss the process of finding out whether it was Billy’s mobile that made the calls to Casey and Sidney, which is going to take until the next morning. I wonder why it takes so long to cross-reference calls?

Linda Blair (who played Regan in The Exorcist twenty-three years earlier) makes a cameo as a news reporter!

Sidney goes into the school bathroom to find that a couple of girls are gossiping about her in the stalls, speculating that she’s the killer. Even the cheerleaders at this high school have morbid imaginations! Sidney is then attacked by someone in the ghostface costume, but it’s not clear whether it’s just a prankster student or the actual killer.

Gale and Dewey flirting with each other is just really weird and uncomfortable. I’ve never bought into this pairing, even though there should have been good chemistry given that the actors ended up marrying each other in real life.

Himbry finally sees sense and closes the school, to much jubilation, and Stu announces a house party. There’s a daft sequence with Himbry trying on the ghostface mask, investigating a noise to find that the only person around is a janitor wearing a Freddy Krueger jumper (played by Wes Craven in a ridiculously self-aware cameo!), and then getting killed due to the school being deserted. Maybe this is why high school principals in horror movies don’t usually close schools – they’re protecting themselves!

Good use of School’s Out by Alice Cooper!

A rare non-slasher horror reference as we see the Universal version of Frankenstein being shown onscreen at the video shop where Randy works. Randy, Stu and Billy are clearly not all there in the head – they’re still making jokes, speculating about each other being the killer, and generally being really unsettling and not at all like actual human beings. Randy, the resident geek, out-and-out knows he’s in a horror movie, and makes no bones about it.

More awesome background music as the police announce a town-wide curfew – this time Red Right Hand by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The chief tells Dewey that the phone calls have been traced to Neil Prescott’s phone, which is the most obvious red herring ever.

Stu’s party attracts a lot of attention, with Dewey having been sent by the chief to keep an eye on things and Gale and Kenny sniffing around for more on the story. Gale persuades Dewey to let her come with him when he checks out the party, and secretly installs a secret camera to watch what’s happening from outside.

‘Why is Jamie Lee Curtis in all these movies?’ asks Sidney, flipping through Randy’s video collection. ‘She’s the Scream Queen,’ he replies, and it’s clearly slasher fan Kevin Williamson speaking here through Randy!

Tatum barely gets to enjoy the party, instead being picked off by the killer in the garage. When I was a kid, this death by catflap seared itself into my memory! Again, she automatically thinks the person in the ghostface costume is a prankster rather than the killer, which is not really a sensible assumption when it’s known there’s an actual killer about.

‘What’s Leatherface doing here?’ asks Randy when Billy arrives, giving us a nice Texas Chainsaw Massacre reference.

The footage from the secret camera that Kenny is watching in the TV van is on a thirty-second delay – this is important later.

Billy’s Silence of the Lambs analogy is one too many for Sidney, but his insistence that ‘life is just a big movie’ doesn’t put her deciding she’s ready to sleep with him.

Appropriately given the amount of Halloween references we’ve had so far in this film, the party guests are now watching the film, giving Randy an opportunity to explain ‘The Rules’ that characters have to follow in order to survive a horror movie:

You can never have sex.
You can never drink or do drugs.
You can never say ‘I’ll be right back’.

Relatedly, we then get to the point in Halloween where there’s a topless shot of Lynda, which is juxtaposed with Sidney taking her top off. Interestingly, ’90s slasher films are pretty much free of sex and nudity, especially when you compare them to ’70s and ’80s ones. I don’t know if it’s because they were trying to get more lenient cinema ratings (pretty much a lost cause with that much blood and gore!) or if those kinds of scenes were just considered a bit tasteless at that point in time.

Randy answers the phone to somebody who tells him about Himbry’s butchered corpse having been hung from a goalpost on the football field, so the bulk of party guests leave to go check it out (grim! there’s something really wrong with the teenagers in this town), which sets up the isolation nicely for the final sequence, as Randy chooses to stay and watch the rest of Halloween.

Gale and Dewey find Neil Prescott’s car while out in the woods. How does Dewey recognise it straight away?

While getting dressed, Sidney starts probing Billy about his one phone call when he was arrested, and I wonder why she’s starting to suspect him again at this point. Was the sex that bad? The killer shows up and allays her suspicions by seemingly stabbing Billy.

While Randy is watching Halloween, the killer creeps up behind him. ‘Look behind you, Jamie Lee!’ Randy says, when he should be taking his own advice.

Kenny dies due to the thirty-second delay – he and Sidney open the car door to try and warn Randy, only to find the killer has already caught up with them. Sidney escapes out of the back of the van. We then get the background of John Carpenter’s Halloween score playing while Dewey investigates the empty house, due to the film still playing on TV, which provides an automatic creepy atmosphere and presumably meant less work for Marco Beltrami.

Given that blood is pouring from the car roof, why doesn’t Gale realise there’s a body on top of there? She then knocks herself out by crashing the van, which is not helpful.

Dewey gets stabbed in the back offscreen, which is standard for an incompetent cop. Sidney can’t escape in the police car, because the killer has taken the car keys, which is at least original – usually horror movie killers just let out the petrol. The killer then somehow gets into the back of the car and grabs Sidney from behind, which echoes Halloween again.

Sidney escapes and runs into the house. Randy and Stu come running up behind her, each accusing the other of being the killer, but Sidney doesn’t trust either of them (which is understandable, given how creepy they both are). Billy is shown to be still alive – he seems at first to have survived his injuries but then reveals himself to be the killer by shooting Randy and explaining that his ‘blood’ is corn syrup. ‘Same stuff they used for pig’s blood in Carrie‘. It’s now quote-a-minute with the horror references, with Billy’s next line being Psycho‘s ‘We all go a little mad sometimes’.

Stu turns out to be Billy’s accomplice, which is not really surprising. Billy reveals his motive (his father was having an affair with Sidney’s mother, causing Billy’s mother to leave town), and also a tied-up Neil Prescott. The killers reveal that it was them who killed Maureen Prescott, not the guy who is in jail for the murder, and then explain their plan, which is to frame Neil for the murders and appear to ‘survive’ the killings. This means the two of them start stabbing each other to cause believable injuries, which is really grim! Billy’s motivation is clearly revenge, but I think Stu is just mad.

The plan appears to be foiled when Gale returns, having survived the car crash, and steals the gun. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to take the safety off, and Billy knocks her out. Just as he’s about to kill Gale, Stu notices Sidney has disappeared – she then turns the phone game on them, puts the ghostface costume on herself, and seemingly manages to kill both killers. In what is could be yet another Halloween reference but is probably just me obsessing, Sidney has the sense that Laurie didn’t, and picks up the knife from next to Billy’s body (seriously, it’s always really annoyed me in Halloween that Laurie is continually dropping knives next to Michael Myers whenever she thinks she’s killed him, so that whenever he wakes up he can just pick up the knife and go again!). Stu, meanwhile, suffers death by television, meaning we finally stop hearing the Halloween soundtrack in the background. I wonder how many royalties the filmmakers had to pay John Carpenter?

Billy wakes up and attacks Sidney again, but Gale wakes up at the same time, and has finally figured out the safety on the gun. ‘Careful,’ warns Randy as they approach Billy’s body. ‘This is the moment when the supposedly-dead killer comes back to life for one last scare.’ He’s not wrong, but Sidney now has the gun, and shoots Billy in the head. ‘Not in my movie,’ she says, bringing things neatly to a close.

As the film wraps up, we see that Dewey has survived (spoiler: he sort of becomes the Dr Loomis of the Scream franchise in this respect).

Side note: it was Roger Jackson who did the ‘phone killer’ voice! I’ve loved his voice acting in videogames for years.

Back to the Halloween films tomorrow!

31 Days Of Horror: The Exorcist

10 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Today’s horror movie is The Exorcist (1973).

Steps from The Exorcist — The steps that everyone gets thrown down to their deaths!

We open in Northern Iraq on an archaeological dig, where an elderly archaeologist and his team find a demon head statuette and a metal pendant. The old guy is a sort of grizzled Indiana-Jones-before-Indiana-Jones, and later in the film is revealed to be a priest (some guy here does call him ‘Father’, but I presumed it was his son). He goes to look at another site that has a large statue similar to the small statuette, which seems to be causing dogs to fight. All very confusing, and thus ends the Iraq sequence.

The action moves to Georgetown, Washington DC, where a clearly-quite-well-off lady lives with two house staff. She turns out to be Chris MacNeil, an actress currently making a film around the Georgetown campus. An apparently-important priest passes by as the director calls cut.

Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells is used beautifully as Chris walks home! The scene is very autumnal, clearly set at Hallowe’en time with leaves falling and kids in costumes everywhere.

Chris arrives home and greets her daughter Regan, who, at this point, is just a normal rich girl who wants a horse.

Father Damien Karras, the priest we saw earlier, stands on the subway platform and doesn’t help a homeless man, which is not very priestly. Instead, he goes home and visits his elderly mother, who is refusing to move out of her house.

Father Karras smokes and drinks a lot. Are priests allowed to do this? Were things different in 1973?

Back at the MacNeil house, Regan turns out to have found a ouija board in the wardrobe and has apparently been talking to someone (supposedly an imaginary friend but one that seems to have telekinetic powers) through it.

Father Karras is in the pub now with his priest friend Tom Dyer, so I’m going to assume drinking is A-OK under the priest code. Karras thinks he’s lost his faith, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the story.

Regan’s dad is a bit deadbeat and doesn’t call on Regan’s birthday, which leads to some over-the-phone hysterics and rudeness on Chris’ part. This is kind of a theme throughout the film, I guess because she’s an actress and therefore a bit of a diva.

Chris investigates a noise in the attic that she thought earlier was rats. House staff member Carl has also investigated, and says it’s not rats. I’m not really sure what the point of this subplot is, because the ‘noise in the attic’ thing is not really followed up.

Karras’ mother is hospitalised in a public hospital because the family can’t afford private care. Karras tells her he’ll take her home, but she won’t listen as she feels betrayed.

Chris hosts a fancy ’70s party with lots of booze and canapes, and some of the party guests talk about Karras – apparently it’s now a couple of weeks later and his mother died in her house alone, with her body not being discovered for two days. This doesn’t really make any sense, as we last saw her in hospital, so we’re left to assume that Karras did indeed take her back home and then didn’t visit very often, despite her being so ill that she should really be in hospital.

Film director Burke Dennings gets really drunk and accuses someone else of being a Nazi. This is not followed up either.

The ’70s party ends with a drunken piano singalong, but it’s interrupted by Regan, who, despite seeming perfectly normal when she was at the party in the earlier part of the evening, has suddenly switched to strange behaviour and urinates on the carpet. She tells Chris her bed was shaking and asks what’s wrong with her – apparently she’s been seen by one of those highly competent horror movie doctors, who thinks it’s ‘nerves’ and has prescribed pills.

Next time Regan’s bed shakes, however, Chris is there to witness it, so she now knows there’s something strange going on.

‘I should have been there,’ Father Karras says about his mother’s death, and then has a dream about his mother coming out of a subway station, interspersed with images of the devil’s face and the pendant that the old priest/archaeologist found in Iraq.

Regan has undergone a full personality transplant now and is swearing and screaming at her doctors. The chief specialist doesn’t believe Chris about the bed shaking, stating that some mental issues can cause abnormal strength. Despite the fact that the doctors think it’s a brain lesion, an EEG shows up nothing, and when her spasms get more violent and the doctor comes to see her at home, there’s a brilliantly tense scene with Regan fighting the devil within her own body, the control going back and forth. The doctors perform further scans, but again they show nothing.

Chris arrives home to find the lights flashing on and off and Regan alone in her bedroom with the window open. House staff member Sharon arrives just afterwards and explains she left Regan with Burke for a few minutes while she went out, but Burke is nowhere to be found. However, there’s soon a knock on the door – they just found Burke dead on the steps outside.

Side note: I’m very fond of the Exorcist steps because Geth and I visited them when we were in Washington DC in 2009!

The Exorcist steps, October 2009 — We didn’t get chucked down them by a demon though.

A psychiatrist comes to talk to Regan/the devil, but is violently attacked. We cut to Karras running on the Georgetown racetrack. He should go for a run around Georgetown itself – it’d be much prettier! He’s approached by a police officer, Lt. Kinderman, about Burke’s death, which was apparently now a week ago (it seems that the narrative of the film lasts for pretty much the whole of November). Kinderman asks about witchcraft in relation to a church desecration that was shown earlier, as Burke’s body was found with his head twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, which indicates witchcraft…apparently? He also wants Karras to come and see films with him, ’cause he’s a bit of a lonely film buff and wants someone to discuss them with.

The doctors are still attempting to come up with explanations for Regan’s condition – they now think it’s a rare sonnambulism. The doctor actually suggests exorcism to Chris as a last resort, which in the real world would be nuts but in the horror movie world is a rare example of a doctor talking sense!

Chris discovers a cross under Regan’s pillow, and there’s a bit of pointless back-and-forth with the house staff about who put it there. This is interrupted by a visit from Lt. Kinderman, who after diligently asking lots of questions about Burke’s death, turns into a shameless fanboy and asks for Chris’ autograph. Nice that he’s got a hobby! In the course of his questioning/theorising, though, Chris comes to the horrified realisation that Regan killed Burke.

There’s a horrific scene with the now completely possessed Regan raping herself with a crucifix, forcing her mother’s face into her own bloody crotch, and using telekinesis to move heavy furniture about. It’s definitely time to get the priests involved.

Chris meets Father Karras and is surprised that Father Dyer, who was at her party, didn’t mention what happened with Regan. Karras doesn’t believe exorcisms even happen anymore, but agrees to go and see Regan. The devil indicates he knows about Karras’ failure to help the homeless man (‘Would you help an old altar boy, Father?’) and offers to take a message to his mother. Despite this, it takes a few visits for Karras to be convinced that an exorcism is necessary.

Karras’ boss recommends Father Merrin as the only priest he knows who has experience with exorcism. This turns out to be the old priest from Iraq, whom I’d forgotten all about at this point! He shows up at the MacNeil house in a nice moody, atmospheric scene, and he and Karras crack on with the exorcism.

The whole exorcism is a really powerful sequence – Merrin is apparently an old hand, and so the devil concentrates on trying to break Karras’ will by mimicking his mother. This eventually gets too much for Karras, and Merrin sends him outside so he can complete the exorcism alone.

Karras sits downstairs for a few minutes, but decides to go back and help when Chris expresses her fear that Regan will die. As he goes upstairs, Lt. Kinderman arrives at the door, with nice convenient timing.

Karras goes back into the room to find that the devil has killed Merrin offscreen (it’s unclear how, but we know from earlier scenes that Merrin had a heart condition, so presumably the strain was just too much for him). The devil and Karras get into a fist fight, and Karras sacrifices himself by asking the devil to enter him instead (I’ve no idea why the devil obeys!) and then throwing himself out of the window and down the stairs. Lt. Kinderman’s convenient arrival enables him to enter the room (where a now unpossessed Regan is crying for her mother) and see everything that has happened. Speaking of convenient arrivals, Father Dyer just happens to be outside and is able to give Father Karras the last rites before he dies.

Chris and Regan prepare to move out of the house, and Sharon seemingly quits her post, which is understandable. Regan can’t remember what happened, but she has retained some sort of sense of gratitude towards the priests, and kisses Father Dyer as they leave. Chris, meanwhile, gives Father Dyer the pendant that Father Merrin had brought back from Iraq, which I’m not sure is the luckiest gift in the world.

A lot of unexplained stuff in this film, but at least it ends better than Halloween 6!

Something slightly more recent tomorrow.

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween 6

9 October 201831 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

We complete the ‘Thorn trilogy’ with Halloween 6 (1995), generally considered to be one of the worst films ever. While it is pretty daft, there’s a lot to like in this one.

Halloween 6 DVD — They actually officially dropped the numerals with this one, but I’m still using it for clarification’s sake.

The film opens with the teenage Jamie Lloyd (now played by a different actress) in labour – she’s been kept prisoner by a weird cult for five or six years. Once she’s given birth, the creepy cult take the baby away to be used in some bizarre ceremony.

The midwife who delivered the baby has a change of heart about the cult, helps Jamie escape, and is almost immediately killed by Michael, who is seemingly allowed to wander around the cult’s headquarters at will. Either that, or the fact of it being Hallowe’en has woken him up again.

Jamie escapes in a truck. I’m not sure where she learnt how to drive, given that she’s been kept prisoner since she was nine!

The Myers house has now been refurbished and has a new family living in it – the young boy in the house, Danny, is being psychically influenced by Michael somehow.

Paul Rudd shows up in his first film appearance, playing the character of Tommy Doyle from the first film. Like everyone else in town, he’s listening to a local radio station that’s doing a show about Michael Myers. I love the radio show, as it provides a bit of comic relief with all the nutters phoning in with their theories.

We see Dr Loomis (Donald Pleasence in his last film appearance) is still about too (also listening to the show, obviously)! He’s visited by ‘old friend’ Dr Wynn at this point, who wants him to come back and work at Smith’s Grove sanatorium again. Dr Wynn was one of the people who didn’t listen to Loomis in the first film, so I’m not sure why Loomis considers him such a good friend!

Jamie pulls up outside the empty bus station and wanders around there for a while, rather than just driving somewhere where there might actually be people who can help.

The radio show is a good way of setting up the subplots, including the group who want to take Hallowe’en in Haddonfield back from the Michael Myers narrative.

Jamie calls the radio show from the bus station in the hope that Dr Loomis will hear her, which is very ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi’. ‘Dr Loomis? Can you hear me, Dr Loomis, are you out there?’

A car chase between Michael and Jamie results in a crash, and Jamie wanders around a creepy deserted barn before Michael eventually kills her. ‘You can’t have my baby, Michael,’ she says as she dies, and indeed he can’t at the moment. Returning to the truck, he finds that Jamie has swapped the baby for rolled-up towels and has hidden him somewhere.

The family in the Myers house are quite nice except for the abusive father. They turn out to be Strodes, relatives of Laurie’s adopted parents. The parents are called Debra and John after series creators Debra Hill and John Carpenter, which is a nice touch, though I’m not sure how John Carpenter would have felt about having such a nasty character named after him!

Tommy, who has been obsessed with Michael Myers since 1978 and whose room is full of newspaper clippings and recording equipment, tracks down Jamie’s location during her call to the radio station by playing the segment back and hearing a bus noise in the background. He goes down to the bus station to check his suspicions.

Why has nobody noticed or cleaned up the blood in the bus station toilets? You’d think someone would have complained. Anyway, it means that Tommy easily finds the baby, who has been hidden in a cupboard.

Loomis and Wynn hear that Jamie’s body has been found, and go down to investigate the barn. Michael has burnt the Thorn symbol into the hay, and Loomis somehow knows all about it now.

More unknown local bands doing the soundtrack, this time playing mid-’90s indie music!

Danny is drawing the Thorn symbol too, along with a creepy picture of his family all getting stabbed.

Tommy conveniently bumps into Loomis at the hospital and infodumps a load of backstory about Jamie not being the last Myers relative and the Strodes having moved into the Myers house. As a result, Loomis shows up at the Myers house and gives Debra Strode the full poetic/crazy speech about Michael’s evil – unusually, she actually listens to him.

Danny’s backwards baseball cap takes me right back to ’95! He bumps into Tommy and drops his pumpkin, which splits everywhere, a nice callback to a similarly broken pumpkin in the first film.

Debra calls her husband at Strode Realty to tell him she’s getting the family out of the house, and receives an earful of abuse for her trouble. She realises John hid the house’s background from the family and bought it himself because he wasn’t able to sell it to anyone else in town.

John turns out to be an alcoholic too, getting his bottle of whisky out as soon as he hangs up! Lovely guy.

Unfortunately, Michael catches up with Debra before she can warn the family. The Strodes’ daughter Kara (Danny’s mother) arrives home to a seemingly empty house, but Danny has made friends with Tommy, and she finds them both upstairs. Tommy tells her they need to leave the house, and so they go to Tommy’s place across the street (super safe and far away!), where he rents a room in Mrs Blankenship’s boarding house. While Kara is busy being freaked out/intrigued (it’s not clear) by all of Tommy’s newspaper cuttings, Danny sees Michael out of the window in another neat callback to the first film, when Tommy was constantly spotting Michael outside the window.

Tommy’s ’90s computer makes me all nostalgic for Windows 3.1/Windows ’95 graphics! He’s done a lot of tinfoil hat research about the Thorn symbol – it’s a druidic thing and a constellation that appears around Hallowe’en, apparently.

Mrs Blankenship is a bit ‘Conal Cochran’ about Samhain, which should give us some indication that she shouldn’t be trusted. ‘He hears the voice, you know – just like the other boy that lived in that house,’ she tells Kara, thus providing a (fairly poor) explanation for why Danny is drawing creepy pictures and pulling knives on people. She also claims to have been babysitting Michael Myers the night he killed Judith in 1963, which (a) is not really something to brag about in terms of babysitting skills and (b) contradicts the first film, in which Judith believes Michael to be ‘around somewhere’ in her own house and thus must be (poorly) babysitting him herself.

Barry the radio DJ comes to do a show in the park in Haddonfield, and is a right prat who is obviously not going to last long.

John comes home to the Myers house drunk, and soon meets up with Michael, who electrocutes him in the garage. The effect of his head exploding is pretty silly.

More ’90s nostalgia from Barry’s dodgy old primitive mobile phone! As expected, he meets his end at Michael’s hands before he can go and meet Kara’s brother Tim and his girlfriend Beth to do a radio show live from the Myers house. Tim and Beth return to the house and completely ignore the warning signs of the power cut and missing family members, choosing sex over sense, and we all know how that ends in these films.

‘It’s raining red,’ says the little kid who is getting blood dripped all over her, ’cause for some reason Michael has put Barry’s body in a tree. Loomis catches up with Tommy at this point, and they head back to find the baby.

Tim takes a post-coital shower, and Michael hands him a towel and waits for him to come out before killing him, for some reason (maybe the filmmakers didn’t want to get sued by the Hitchcock estate). Michael then kills Beth while she’s on the phone to Kara (who can see her from Tommy’s window) – this provides quite a cool moment with Kara frantically trying to warn Beth. Of course, Danny has gone over to the Myers house while Kara was on the phone, irresistably drawn to Michael/the house/the voices/something.

Kara follows Danny into the house, and at least has the sense to arm herself with a poker! After a round of find-the-body, the two of them escape, and there’s yet another callback to the first film as they bang frantically on Tommy’s door, having to wait until the very last moment for him to open it.

The baby is gone, and Loomis realises that there’s only one other person who knew that Tommy was looking after him. It’s Dr Wynn, who turns out to be the man in black from Halloween 5! Mrs Blankenship is helping him, which is wholly unsurprising. Loomis and Tommy are drugged and left in the house, but the cult take Kara and Danny with them.

Loomis and Tommy give chase towards the cult’s headquarters, which turns out to be Smith’s Grove sanatorium. Tommy rescues Kara, while Loomis confronts Wynn and gets knocked out for his trouble.

Wynn and his team prepare to carry out some unspecified procedure on the baby, but Michael comes in and wipes them out, which is quite well deserved. Kara and Tommy take advantage of the confusion to rescue Danny and the baby.

Tommy tricks Michael by pretending to offer him the baby, and drugs him, then Kara whacks him with a steel bar. This doesn’t have much effect on Michael, and he comes after Kara. He can kill most people in a single second, but even strangling Kara for ten seconds isn’t enough to hurt her – she’s right as rain after a moment. The power of the final girl!

Tommy really goes to town on Michael, managing to beat him unconscious. He, Kara and Danny prepare to drive off, but Loomis chooses to stay behind. ‘I have a little business to attend to here,’ he says, but we never find out what that is – we get a shot of the discarded mask on the floor with Loomis screaming in the background as he realises Michael’s escaped again, then a shot of a lit pumpkin lantern, then the film ends very abruptly. Bizarre and unsatisfying! Apparently the director’s cut rectifies this, but I’ve never been able to track down a copy of that one.

Another break from Halloween tomorrow!

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween 5

8 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

We continue today with the next film in the Halloween series, Halloween 5 (1989).

Halloween 5 DVD — These DVD covers are not the most beautifully composed things in the world!

The film starts with a reprise of the last film‘s ending, just like at the start of Halloween II. We see how Michael escaped, ’cause obviously he escaped – he crawls underground into a river, nearly kills a hermit in a hut, then passes out. We then get a ‘One Year Later’ caption and meet Jamie in the children’s hospital, still traumatised and mute a year after stabbing her mother.

Either Jamie’s nightmare (she’s very clearly mentally connected to Michael now) or the fact of it being Hallowe’en awakens Michael, and we see a strange symbol on his wrist. He gets up and murders the hermit, and you have to wonder why the latter’s bothered to take care of an unconscious guy in a mask for a year without calling the authorities.

Dr Loomis has hung around for a year at the children’s hospital, obviously, but it’s still the case that the other staff don’t take him seriously and treat him as a crazy old man.

I’m not sure where Tina’s come from (she wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the previous film), but it’s nice to see that Rachel has friends now. It’s also fun to hear some ’80s pop music (nothing you’d recognise – it’s all small local bands again!) while Rachel gets ready. Unfortunately, she’s soon interrupted by a phone call from the hospital, as Jamie’s psychic ability is telling her that her sister’s in danger.

(The characters keep referring to the Carruthers family as Jamie’s ‘stepsister, stepmother’ etc., which isn’t accurate according to the last film – they were fostering her then and might presumably have adopted her by now.)

Rachel calls the police, and some comedy incompetent cops appear, accompanied by silly honky-tonk music. I can’t stand this attempt at humour – it falls completely flat in the context of slasher horror.

The incompetent cops fail to find Michael in the house and tell Rachel it’s perfectly safe, meaning that she gets offed by Michael pretty quickly. This is the first example we’ve seen of the interesting trope of ‘final girl from previous film gets killed early in next film’ – I’ll note this again in other films this month.

Tina shows up at Rachel’s house, and tells the frantically barking Max the dog that she’ll get him some water in a minute. She fails to find Rachel, obviously, but her other friend Sam shows up, and so they both decide that Rachel must have gone out of town with her parents without telling anyone. Annoyingly for the viewer, Tina never gets Max the water she promised, and her surmising about Rachel seems to be off – why would Rachel leave the dog tied up and alone for a whole weekend? In general, both Tina and Sam come across as a bit thick.

Tina’s boyfriend Mike is a violent idiot, and I can’t wait for him to meet his namesake.

The other Michael arrives at the children’s clinic and chases Jamie through a deserted part of the building, but the editing is headache-inducing and you can’t see what’s going on.

A man in black (you never see his face, only his black steel-toed boots) shows up outside the drugstore where Brady and Kelly worked in the last film, having arrived in Haddonfield on the Greyhound bus. He has the same symbol on his wrist that Michael does (a new tattoo trend?) and is clearly a bad guy, so I find it quite quaint that he used the bus!

Loomis goes to creep around the scary rundown Myers house, knowing Michael tends to return there when he’s on the loose. The man in black has had the same idea!

As expected, Mike soon gets butchered by Michael, and we see the man in black watching as the wrong Michael picks up Tina for the evening in Mike’s car, wearing the mask she gave Mike instead of his usual whitefaced Shatner mask. We don’t usually see Michael Myers attempting strategy like this (even if it’s not completely clear what his plan is) – I would have expected him just to dispatch Tina and head back to the children’s clinic. In fact, what has he been doing away from the clinic all afternoon? He nearly caught Jamie earlier, and it’s not like she’s under guard all the time.

Tina kisses the wrong Michael through the mask. Ew!

I like the sequence with Jamie identifying the store where Tina is in danger, with help from her friend Billy. ‘Cookie woman!’ she manages, and one of the cops immediately realises she means a poster on the wall of the store. A rare example of Haddonfield police competence!

There are some odd inconsistencies with the ‘One Year Later’ caption mentioned earlier. One year later (after the 1988-set Halloween 4) would set the film in 1989, the year of its release, but there are a few indications in the dialogue that it’s actually 1990 – Loomis talks about Hallowe’en 1978 as being twelve years ago, and Jamie is referred to as a nine-year-old girl, when she was seven in Halloween 4. A possible indication is that Hallowe’en seems to fall on a weekend, as none of the teenage characters are in school – but as it fell on a Tuesday in 1989 and a Wednesday in 1990, that doesn’t help us!

At the party at the Tower Farm, we get some nonsense with teenagers playing pranks on cops, which is becoming a bit of a theme in the Halloween movies. Tina, Sammy and Spitz all come across as annoying idiots, so I wasn’t exactly disappointed when Michael dispatched the latter two in the barn.

I quite like Billy and Jamie’s initiative in hunting down Tina by themselves. Naturally, the incompetent cops from earlier don’t last long, and as the rest of the partygoers from Tower Farm have decided to go skinny-dipping elsewhere, the three of them are left alone with Michael, which results in an awesome sequence with Michael chasing down Jamie in a car through a wheat field (apparently she can run faster than a car!).

After Tina dies saving Jamie, Jamie agrees to Loomis’ dangerous plan. The plan turns out to be to get Jamie to brush her hair in the bedroom in the Myers house, just like Judith Myers was doing when Michael killed her in 1963, and then fake an incident at the clinic so that Michael won’t be deterred by police presence. The plan works, and Michael shows up as soon as the police cars leave.

Michael often attacks Loomis when he has the chance, but never actually kills him for some reason. On this occasion, the injury is enough to put Loomis out of action for ten minutes or so, meaning that Michael can chase Jamie around the house, and we get the first of the Halloween laundry chute sequences, with Jamie hiding in the chute, which makes for a really tense sequence!

Michael has set up some kind of weird shrine upstairs with candles and a child’s coffin, similar to the gravestone he stole in the first film. Jamie comes across the bodies of Rachel and Max here (poor Max! I don’t know what Michael has against dogs), which makes for a good scare.

Jamie escapes downstairs and bumps into Loomis, who has come prepared with all sorts of gear for capturing Michael. He throws a net over his ex-patient and beats him into submission, before collapsing himself. Unusually, this actually works to subdue Michael, and the cops manage to take him into custody and put him in a cell! Unfortunately, this is the point where the man in black shows up, kills all the cops in the station, and helps Michael escape. We end with Jamie wandering alone and terrified through the destroyed police station.

This is another film where it’s not clear if Loomis is dead at the end, but as (spoiler alert) he shows up in the next film, I expect he’s been taken to hospital.

Halloween 6 coming tomorrow, where things will get really silly!

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween 4

7 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Halloween 4 (1988) returns to the Michael Myers storyline (well, the first of them!) and swaps the Roman numerals for Arabic ones. This is the first of a trilogy that delves deeper into Michael’s backstory.

Donald Pleasence gets top billing, and is definitely the star here! His portrayal of Dr Loomis with ten added years of paranoia and stress is fantastic.

The film is set ten years after Halloween/Halloween II, which keeps the setting contemporary. We’re firmly into the late ’80s here, which adds a lot of fun and colour to proceedings.

We start off with Michael Myers about to be transferred from the sanatorium in which he’s been kept for ten years back to Smith’s Grove, which is the place he escaped from back in 1978. Why are they taking him back to Smith’s Grove when he’s already proven he can escape from there?

In case you’ve not been keeping up, the backstory is delivered by a helpfully chatty sanatorium staff member. ‘Both of them nearly burnt to death,’ he says of Myers and Loomis, letting us know that the fire in Halloween II wasn’t fatal for either character.

While one of the doctors is checking Michael’s blood pressure, his arm falls down from the bed, so he clearly wasn’t very well restrained in the first place. The Smith’s Grove doctors get him in the back of the ambulance and on the road, and start talking about his living relatives. As soon as he hears he’s got a niece, Michael gets his strength back, and off he goes on his killing spree!

We’re introduced to seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd here. The backstory is that Jamie’s parents (Laurie and an unknown other) died eleven months ago, and Jamie is being fostered by the Carruthers family, including teenager Rachel and Sunday the dog. Jamie has a picture of Laurie that is clearly a publicity still from the first film! She’s also having dreams/hallucinations about Michael Myers, which doesn’t make sense given that she doesn’t know anything about him yet.

It’s still the case that nobody else in the Illinois medical system is listening to Dr Loomis, which is nice and nostalgic!

There are lots of beats matched from the first film as Michael makes his way to Haddonfield – including him killing a mechanic just because he needs a new pair of overalls.

The school bullies at Jamie’s school are really vile! Mocking her for being an orphan, yikes.

We get a good introduction to Kelly, the sheriff’s daughter, who works in the drugstore with Brady, Rachel’s boyfriend – it’s clear early on that she’s a romantic threat to Rachel, especially as Brady is frustrated by Rachel having to cancel their date to babysit Jamie.

Jamie chooses a pierrot costume for her Hallowe’en outfit, just like the one Michael was wearing when he killed his older sister as a child. I don’t know why kids were ever into those pierrot costumes – they’re really creepy!

As Michael has destroyed his car, Loomis has to go hitchiking. I quite like the invocation of the ‘crazy drunk evangelical who happily picks up hitchhikers’ trope here!

Haddonfield is beautifully decorated for Hallowe’en – an absolutely picture-perfect American small town. I never know how people manage to put pumpkin lanterns outside on their porches and not have the wind blow the candles out. Maybe there’s no wind in Illinois.

While escorting Jamie for trick-or-treating, Rachel catches Brady at Kelly’s house. ‘So you just hop onto the next best thing?’ Rachel says angrily. Brady tries to make excuses, but yes, that is exactly what he’s doing. What a dick! He only holds Rachel up for about twenty seconds, but it’s still long enough for Rachel to lose sight of Jamie, who has clearly never been schooled sufficiently about how children shouldn’t go running off.

At least Sheriff Meeker is sensible enough to believe Loomis! Haddonfield cops apparently never forget. We also get some nice backstory about how Sheriff Brackett retired to Pennsylvania in 1981.

I like the rednecks from the bar who decide to go vigilante as soon as they hear Michael Myers is back in town, even though it’s pretty clear that it’s all going to go horribly wrong.

Loomis and Meeker investigate the Carruthers house to discover that Michael is back to his dog-killing habits again. Poor Sunday!

Michael also comes up with a rather spectacular way of taking the whole town’s power out, by chucking some poor power plant worker into the electrical grid!

The redneck riot mob naturally kill the wrong person. Poor Ted Hollister joins Ben Tramer from Halloween II on the list of characters who die in Halloween films without the assistance of Michael.

The lock-in, with all the characters holing up in the Meeker house, is quite an interesting setup for the penultimate sequence – everyone is in the same place and on high alert (except for Kelly, who’s still thinking about sex – this is a very good indication in a slasher film that someone’s not going to survive for long).

We conveniently lose all the competent characters when Loomis goes off to hunt Michael at the Carruthers house and Meeker goes off to stop the rednecks, meaning that everyone at the Meeker house is now doomed.

‘Wish they’d fix the power. At least we’d have some MTV while we wait for the cavalry,’ says Kelly to the dead deputy, approximately five seconds before she realises he’s dead and then gets killed by Michael herself. Are these the most ’80s last words ever? I will pay attention for the rest of this month and keep you posted.

Brady idiotically traps the surviving characters in the house by not checking whether the door lock’s made of metal before shooting it, and then finds that he’s run out of ammo and is too clumsy to reload the gun before Michael catches up with him, but at least he dies heroically and thus sort-of-redeems himself (punching Michael Myers in the face is pretty fruitless but also pretty brave!).

The rooftop sequence, with Rachel and Jamie trying to escape Michael by finding a way down, is fab! Really tense and well shot.

The rednecks see sense at last, deciding to let the state troopers handle it, but are sadly not long for this world – Michael quickly dispatches them in his last-ditch attempt to reach Jamie.

The cops arrive in time to load several clips of bullets into Michael, but there’s some convenient unstable ground for him to fall into at the end, so he’s clearly not dead yet! ‘Michael Myers is in hell,’ says Loomis, but without a body to prove it, he should know that you can’t be sure about that.

Having been sent insane by Michael (which is not explained in the slightest), Jamie puts a mask on and stabs her mother, providing a great chilling moment, bringing Loomis to utter terrified hysteria, and nicely setting up the next film.

Speaking of which, we’ll move onto Halloween 5 tomorrow!

31 Days Of Horror: Nosferatu

6 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Nosferatu (1922) is nearly a century old now, so it’s a very interesting watch! It’s so fascinating to see the techniques and the overacting-by-modern-standards that was common in the silent film era.

FW Murnau didn’t have the rights to make a film version of Dracula – so he made it anyway but changed all the names. The action switches from Whitby to Wisborg, Dracula becomes Nosferatu, and the Harkers become the Hutters. I don’t think it stopped the filmmakers from getting sued by the Stoker estate.

Junior estate agent Thomas Hutter gets a big job from his boss Knock. ‘I may be away for several months,’ he says to his wife Ellen, and off he runs, no preparation, he just runs back in to grab his hat! We then get a couple of scenes where he’s clearly come back for a long drawn-out goodbye, and Ellen can’t cope with this so she has to be looked after by relatives.

We get our first example of ‘superstitious locals’ here, so ably demonstrated in later films such as yesterday’s Friday the 13th. They warn Hutter off, but of course he takes no notice.

I love the ‘I don’t believe this book about vampires’ overacting! Hutter then has a good laugh at the superstitious locals being all ‘No way, we’re not driving you up to the vampire’s castle’ and leaving him at the side of the road. Maybe he likes the exercise?

Count Orlok’s opening scene is quite understated – no big entrance, he’s just standing in a courtyard.

The traditional ‘Whoops, cut myself’ scene is present and correct though. ‘Blood! your precious blood!’ says Orlok, who is kind of obviously sinister about it, sucking Hutter’s finger and all, and you kind of wonder why the latter doesn’t run there and then.

Also, Hutter sleeps in a chair the first night – you’d think Orlok would keep up the pretence by offering him a bed.

There’s a nicely-done reveal where Thomas is writing to Ellen and says that he’s been bitten by mosquitoes – two bites very close together.

I love how you could apparently send a letter in those days just by flagging down the nearest random on a horse! I wonder if that was actually the case?

‘Your wife has a beautiful neck,’ says Orlok on seeing Ellen’s picture. So hokey! ‘I shall take the house – the handsome deserted house opposite yours,’ he continues, because he completely doesn’t care that he’s being really obvious about his plans.

Suddenly Hutter believes the vampire book from the last place he stayed in, which he still has with him. Why has he been carting it about if he thought it was stupid in the first place?

Back in Wisborg, Ellen randomly has a mad turn and tries to climb off a balcony – the reason for this is not explained. There’s some connection between Ellen and Orlok that stops the latter from harming Thomas – where is this psychic energy coming from?

‘A harmless blood condition!’ says the doctor who’s been called to look at Ellen, starting a fine tradition of clueless authorities telling horror film characters that there’s nothing to worry about.

The reveal of the vampire in the coffin takes place fairly early on for a Dracula adaptation. Again, why doesn’t Hutter run away at this point? After opening the coffin, he just goes straight back to his room! Still, it does mean he (and therefore the audience as well) sees Nosferatu being loaded onto a cart. Hutter then does the classic bedsheets-out-the-window escape, which is a bit superfluous seeing as the vampire’s left the castle – he could just have walked out the front door instead.

What does the ‘Professor Bulwer gives a lecture to his students about carnivorous plants’ bit have to do with anything? ‘That plant is the vampire of the vegetable kingdom.’ Yes, but that tenuous link is ALL it has in common with Nosferatu, and it’s not followed up.

Nosferatu uses long-distance psychic means to turn Knock, who is still in Wisborg, insane. What’s the vampire’s plan here? Knock never does anything useful for him for the rest of the film, apart from being a scapegoat when strange things start happening in town.

I like the atmospheric beach scenes of Ellen waiting for Thomas. Very Whitby…in Wisborg.

There’s a nice plot progression on the boat carrying the vampire, with the sailors gradually falling ill. There’s also an irritating continuity problem with the vampire apparently wandering about the ship deck in broad daylight!

Ellen is now also psychically controlled by the vampire, but at least there’s an explainable purpose for that.

There’s a nice page-long explanation about the vampire needing to sleep in the earth in which he was buried. You don’t get many explanations for things in this film, so I quite appreciate it.

Why has Thomas brought the vampire book back to Wisborg if he doesn’t want Ellen to read it?

I like Ellen’s realisation about what she has to do to kill the vampire – an early example of a female character showing nouse and self-sacrifice!

Professor Bulwer has a purpose after all! Ellen uses him as deception to get the hapless Thomas out of the way so she can get on with her plan of destroying the vampire.

Does Ellen die at the end? It’s not clear.

On the whole, it’s all a bit nonsensical, but it’s quite fun to watch such an early example of a horror film!

Back to the Halloween movies tomorrow.

31 Days Of Horror: Friday the 13th

5 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I watched Friday the 13th (1980) fairly recently, in the summer (similarly to Halloween, I usually watch it when it’s a Friday the 13th, and I realised this year that there won’t be another one until 2020!)

It’s another film with a flashback opening sequence, which again is not-quite-period – 1958 looks very 1980 in terms of hair and makeup, though the props are done quite well.

Friday the 13th is probably the most egregious slasher film series for the ‘sex equals death’ trope – any time characters so much as think about it, the killer comes calling.

I really like the character of Annie, whose doomed journey to Camp Crystal Lake opens the contemporary narrative of the film. She comes across as quite sweet and whimsical, and I always wish she survived long enough to interact with the others at the camp! This is another film where the characters are written quite well and I always end up imagining the alternative universe where they didn’t get killed.

The date is given as Friday June 13th, setting the film in its release year of 1980.

Crazy Ralph shows up, who is my favourite example of ‘mad old doommonger’ in slasher horror!

The backstory to why all the locals think the camp is cursed is explained quite well by the old dude who gives Annie a lift, so the audience are nicely up to speed.

I can’t stand the daft honky redneck music that plays while Jack, Marcie and Ned are driving to Camp Crystal Lake – I can only imagine it’s meant to indicate that Ned is the comic relief character.

Jack is played by a pre-fame Kevin Bacon, which adds some interest! It does mean that I keep being reminded of the latest EE advert whenever he’s on screen.

Alice is introduced quite unusually for a final girl, coming across as a slightly older and more sensible camp counselor at first. It’s not clear during this early section who the main character is supposed to be. There’s also a hint of romance between camp leader Steve and Alice that is never followed up.

There’s some backstory about Alice not really being happy working at camp, but this soon becomes unimportant.

Ned’s flirting with Brenda – constantly grabbing her from under the water during the lake swimming sequence – comes across as super creepy from a modern point of view!

Annie succumbs to the first of the classic Friday the 13th through-the-woods chases. These become more prevalent in the sequels.

Ned crying wolf about drowning should really have been followed up later with him calling for help for real and nobody believing him – it would have made for a much better death scene!

The bit with the counselors being slightly cheeky to the police officer is hilarious – it really gives them all some character.

Marcie’s fear of thunderstorms is quite touching, and again rounds her character nicely.

Ned doesn’t even get an onscreen death! He just investigates a strange noise and disappears.

The infamous strip Monopoly game is one of the highlights of the film – it’s very funny. I remember when I last watched this in the summer, Geth kept getting notifications on Facebook from his favourite boardgame discussion group, who were also all watching the film (and commenting on this scene) to celebrate it being Friday the 13th!

This is the second film I’ve watched this week (after Halloween) where characters think the strange noises they hear must just be their friends pissing about to try and scare them. I’ll be watching for this trope all month now.

In order to lure Brenda outside, the killer plays a recording of a child’s voice calling for help. I’m not quite sure how the killer is doing this with 1980 technology in the middle of a thunderstorm!

Brenda’s death is offscreen too – offscreen deaths are quite unusual for a slasher and I don’t think it happens much again in subsequent entries in the series.

There’s a good reveal where Steve turns out to know the killer – he greets them with surprise just before getting stabbed.

For a while after realising something strange is going on, Alice and Bill do the sensible thing of sticking together…but not for long. ‘I’ll be right back!’ says Bill, which is such a stupid thing to say in a horror film that Scream highlighted this particular phrase sixteen years later.

Bill’s death is offscreen too. The trend in this film seems to be for people to die offscreen and then show up as corpses for scare value later on.

The sequence of Mrs Voorhees showing up, first providing relief from the tense atmosphere by appearing to be a helpful adult figure (though it shouldn’t be too much relief if you picked up the Steve clue earlier) then turning out to be the killer, makes the ending chase sequence quite interesting.

The ‘beheading’ special effect, by effects specialist Tom Savini, was lauded at the time but looks a bit hokey now!

I’ve seen the infamous lake boat ending moment so many times it doesn’t make me jump any more, but it’s still a great scare – it’s not clear if it’s just a hallucination on Alice’s part though.

The ending, with Alice suspecting Jason Voorhees is still in the lake, sets things up nicely for Part 2!

A non-slasher to discuss tomorrow.

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween III

4 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

Halloween III (1982) would later become known as the entry in the series that’s not as good because it doesn’t have Michael Myers in. This is quite a shame, ’cause it’s actually quite a fun (if daft) wee film, and I think things would have been different if the filmmakers had done what they originally intended to do with the series, which was to have different standalone stories with the common theme of being set on Hallowe’en.

Halloween III opening credits — Love those old computer graphics!

We get some awesomely of-the-time ’80s computer graphics in the opening credits, with a pumpkin lantern being drawn line by line on a screen. This image plays a part in the story later on. </foreshadowing>

The story opens with some standard-looking men in black chasing a guy down; he manages some impressive car-hauling to kill one of them who’s trying to strangle him, and buys himself probably half an hour more of life so he can kick off the plot. Good work!

There’s a lovely bit in the nearby petrol station (or gas station, I suppose, as it’s California) with a British news correspondent reporting from Stonehenge, where it’s been nine months since somebody stole one of the stones. The whole Stonehenge stone-stealing plot point is utterly ludicrous. As a teenager who had only seen the giant standing stones you get in the Outer Hebrides, I always used to say it would be impossible to steal a standing stone. When I later visited Stonehenge in adulthood, the standing stones there turned out to be tiny in comparison to the Hebridean ones, but I still think they’d be pretty tough to steal and ship across the Atlantic/continental US (spoiler: it shows up in California later in the film) without anyone noticing.

The highlight of this film is the brilliantly silly advert jingle to the tune of London Bridge (‘X more days till Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en, X more days till Hallowe’en, Silver Shamrock‘) that is on every TV and radio station advertising the masks made by the sinister Silver Shamrock company. I find myself singing it in the lead-up to Hallowe’en every year!

Nancy Loomis (who played Annie in Halloween and Halloween II), credited as Nancy Kyes this time, shows up as Linda, the ex-wife of main character Dr Dan Challis. Nice to see these nods to the previous films – many of the same production staff are involved too.

Speaking of nods to the first film, thorazine is mentioned again! In Halloween, Dr Loomis wants to use it to sedate Michael Myers before they realise he’s escaped, while in this film, Dr Challis is more successful in using it on poor, doomed Harry Grimbridge, the man who (temporarily) escaped the men in black.

The men in black just seem like regular creepy mooks to start off with, but when one of them crushes Harry’s head it’s pretty clear they’re robots.

Dan seems to have a history with autopsy specialist Teddy, which perhaps gives us some insight into why his marriage failed.

The first Halloween – or an advert for it – is being shown on TV, indicating that this is definitely a different universe in which the first film is just a story.

The creepy town of Santa Mira is really well done, with the locals all staring at Dan and Ellie (Harry’s daughter) when they arrive, and the curfew announcement over the tannoy. It wouldn’t be somewhere you’d want to stay even if there was nothing sinister going on.

‘Relax, I’m older than I look,’ says Ellie when Dan finally thinks to ask her how old she is AFTER sleeping with her. I sincerely hope so, ’cause she looks about twelve to his forty-five! (I just looked up actor Tom Atkins to check I wasn’t being unkind about his age, but he was indeed forty-six when this film was made! Stacey Nelkin, who played Ellie, was twenty-two.)

The other people staying in the motel/visiting the factory are shown to be pretty awful, but you still feel sorry for them when they fall victim to Conal Cochran and his murderous plans.

I love the primitive creepy old woman robot that Dan knocks the head off when he enters the factory to look for Ellie, although it’s really obvious she’s mechanical so I’m not sure why he thinks she’s human!

Hallowe’en falls on a Sunday in the film, indicating that it is indeed set in its year of release, 1982.

The Stonehenge stone turns out to be being held in the factory, which is still silly. Apparently tiny chips of the stone have the power to transform rubber masks into death traps that turn kids’ heads into locusts and snakes!

The demonstration scene with the toy salesman and his family is gloriously grisly – a lot of horror films shy away from straight-up killing a child character, but there are no bones made about it here. The purpose of the pumpkin graphic is also revealed here – it’s the trigger that sets off the death trap chips!

I quite like the round-the-US roundup of kids in Silver Shamrock masks, showing that the whole country is in danger.

The adverts say that the giveaway (i.e. the thing that kids in Silver Shamrock masks are supposed to tune into at nine o’clock) will be shown straight after Halloween finishes. However, when Dan is tied up in a room in the factory with the TV on, it’s ten to eight, and the scene from Halloween being shown on TV is at completely the wrong point in the story if the giveaway’s still an hour and ten minutes away!

Dan blowing up the Stonehenge stone setup by chucking the chips around the place is a bit daft, but it’s also quite a punch-the-air moment.

It’s kind of obvious that the ‘Ellie’ Dan has rescued is not the real one, ’cause she doesn’t speak for the ten minutes between being rescued and being revealed to be a robot.

I quite like this early example of the ‘robot arm comes to life and tries to strangle character’ trope! Doctor Who didn’t do this one until twenty-three years later!

I love that when Dan finally makes it to a phone and tries to get the authorities to shut the giveaway broadcast down, it’s the same gas station – and the same attendant – as in the opening section of the film! ‘Don’t I know you?’

Did they manage to take the broadcast off the third channel before it was too late? We’ll never know, because the film ends without telling us.

Another break from the Halloween films tomorrow!

31 Days Of Horror: A Nightmare On Elm Street

3 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

When I was a young teenager, out of the ‘Big Three’ of slasher horror (Halloween and Friday the 13th being the other two), it was A Nightmare On Elm Street that I found really scary. It’s clever, because if you think too much about the film, you end up having nightmares about Freddy Krueger yourself. This happened to me for years, so I was careful not to watch it too often!

Nightmare On Elm Street boxset — This boxset contains all the films up to *New Nightmare* (1994), but I’ve only ever watched the first one!

Being less easily spooked nowadays, I really appreciate the innovation of this one. It’s not always clear whether something is a dream or not, just like in real life, and the whole feel is really unsettling.

The boiler room opening sets up the atmosphere really well. The creepy skipping rhyme (‘one, two, Freddy’s coming for you‘) is also inspired and is one of the most memorable aspects of the film.

There’s a bit of a theme of bad mothers in this one – Tina’s mother seems only to care about her boyfriend, and Nancy’s mother is an alcoholic. I think the latter can be explained, however (unless I’m giving the script more credit than it deserves), by her trying to cope with having been part of the angry mob that killed Krueger with fire.

Johnny Depp makes his first ever film appearance, looking crazily young from today’s perspective!

I find it a bit odd that the local high school just goes on with classes as normal when one of their students has been brutally killed!

I’ve not seen most of the sequels (I plan to rectify that partly this month) but a common complaint is that Krueger’s not scary in the subsequent films due to being overexposed and having too many wisecracking lines. That is not a problem in this film – the character is brilliantly creepy and gruesome.

‘Oh, God…I look twenty years old,’ says Nancy as she looks in the mirror after a week of avoiding sleep. I can never work out whether this is meant to be a sly joke about the fact that the actors playing the fifteen-year-old characters ARE twenty years old, but it kind of takes you out of the story.

I like the bit with the doctors studying Nancy at the sleep disorders clinic, but Geth will probably know better than me whether it’s realistic or not.

When Freddy is on fire in the ending sequence, it’s really obviously a stuntman, ’cause he looks about five stone heavier than when he’s played by Robert Englund!

The ending scene is a bit confusing. Is it a dream sequence? Is Nancy dead now? What’s going on? Apparently the reason it makes no sense is because Wes Craven and the producer wanted different endings, so they came up with a nonsensical compromise.

And finally, here we have the very ’80s thing of having a rock song (Nightmare by 213 in this case – not to be confused with ’90s rap supergroup 213 – this was the band’s only credit as far as I’m aware) over the end credits. Gotta provide some work for small unknown local bands from the Los Angeles area!

Back to the Halloween films tomorrow.

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween II

2 October 201819 October 2018 Dee Leave a comment

I’ve not watched Halloween II (1981) for a while. It’s set on the same night as the first film and is a continuation of the story, but there are a few things that give away the fact that it was now the ’80s when it was made. You can’t hide the ’80s!

Halloween II DVD — Gotta love those early ’00s DVDs and the long boring anti-piracy ads you can’t skip.

The film opens with the Chordettes’ Mr Sandman playing over the top. I’m currently catching up with Doctor Who Magazine in preparation for the new series, and so I recently reread an interview with Mark Gatiss from last year in which he was discussing his episode Sleep No More, in which Mr Sandman was also used. Apparently it was Russell T Davies who pointed out to him how creepy the song was – but being a horror fan, Gatiss should have known that the Halloween series did it first!

The opening sequence is a reprise of the end of the first film, mostly with original footage that has been recut slightly, but with the final reveal on the balcony having been reshot, which is a bit jarring. The reshot sequence results in a continuity error – throughout Halloween II, Loomis is constantly insisting that he shot Michael Myers six times. In the original film, that was indeed the case, but in the reshot sequence, there are actually seven gunshots! The sequence is also overdubbed with new music – it is, of course, ’80s synth music, which is the first giveaway that this is indeed an ’80s movie.

We get the cool spooky pumpkin opening again, this time with an added bit where the pumpkin cracks open to reveal a skull. Showing off the shiny new ’80s special effects! I have to say I prefer the simplicity of the lantern flickering out in the first film.

The series continues with the nods to classic horror through the old films that are playing on TV. This time it’s Night of the Living Dead, with the infamously badly acted ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara!’ scene.

Michael Myers’ MO seems to have shifted slightly as soon as he gets back to killing. He ignores a barking dog (in contrast to the first film, where he killed nearly as many dogs as he did humans) and the nice old couple in the nearby house – he just steals their carving knife instead. As soon as he spots a teenage girl in the house next door, though, he just nips in and offs her for no reason!

Laurie Strode has been taken to a local hospital, and there’s a couple of fairly pointless characters who get two scenes here – a mother with a child whose mouth is bleeding profusely. It’s not 100% clear, but it looks like he’s got a razorblade stuck in his lip, which would be a nice (if grisly) nod to the ubiquitous American Hallowe’en myth about razorblades being hidden in apples to hurt kids out trick-or-treating.

The doctor who treats Laurie is clearly a bit tipsy. I assumed this was just for comedic value, but there’s a brief line later about him having been at the same party as Laurie’s parents, whom the hospital can’t track down.

I quite like the gang of nurses and paramedics who comprise this film’s gang of young, disposable, doomed, horny idiots. Jimmy, the paramedic with the crush on Laurie, makes for a cute sideplot too.

There’s a great bit where some journalists are in front of the Wallace house desperately trying to get the whole story, and then Dr Loomis is just shouting the whole truth about Michael Myers right in front of them, but this is never followed up!

In comes the security guard cliche! This became a real trope of slasher horror, the poor incompetent overweight security guard who’s too distracted by reading a magazine or something to notice the killer wandering across the security monitors.

Speaking of tropes, we’ve got the good old ‘phone lines are cut’ going on here as well. In more recent films, in addition to the landlines being cut, they always have to throw in a line about there being no reception for mobiles (how convenient!). Oh, for simpler times.

Laurie has a creepy dream/flashback to when she was a young child circa 1970. In contrast to the non-attempt at 1963 from the first film, the costume/makeup department here actually does quite a good job of period 1970 hair and clothes.

The thing about Laurie being Michael Myers’ secret baby sister who was later adopted by the Strodes is introduced here. This continued to be the official story in the two different continuities of Halloween 4/5/6 and Halloween H20/Resurrection, as well as (I believe – I’ve not watched them yet) the Rob Zombie remakes, but apparently they’re not going with that in the new one, which should be interesting.

There’s an unintentionally hilarious bit when Jimmy discovers Mrs Alves’ body, realises he’s standing in a pool of blood, and decides it would be a good idea to start running. Obviously, he immediately slips in the pool of blood and knocks himself out like a prat. Who didn’t see that coming? Jimmy, apparently.

One nurse nearly escapes! She knows there’s danger and that she has to call the police, makes it out to the car park, realises the tyres on all the cars have been let down…then goes back into the hospital building. Why?

The ending sequence is really well done – there’s a bit with Laurie waiting for a lift to arrive that’s nearly as tense as the first film.

However, just like the nurse, Laurie doesn’t leave the scene when she makes it out to the car park, instead hiding inside a car. Why will no one leave the hospital grounds? Surely the best thing would be to run away from the building to try and find a phone box (or booth as I think they might be called across the pond) or flag down the nearest driver for help?

I love the bit with Laurie and Dr Loomis teaming up at the end, but I find it odd that Laurie’s such a good shot given that she’s clearly never held a gun! Also, it’s interesting, having not watched it in a while, that neither Loomis nor Jimmy are confirmed alive at the end. Indeed, Loomis is clearly meant to be dead, having done the whole heroic sacrificial blowing-up-the-room-while-still-inside. (Spoiler alert: he shows up in later films, which is why I never think of him as having died in this one.) I can’t remember why I had the impression that Jimmy survived, but maybe something in the next few films will remind me.

Something different tomorrow, for a bit of a break from the Halloween marathon!