Films – Page 4 – Spirit of Dee

It’s October! One of my favourite months of the year.

I’m a goth, a Celt, a lover of autumn, and a horror film fan, so it will probably come as no surprise that I absolutely adore Hallowe’en. What I’ve found over the years, though, is that I never have time on the day/weekend itself to watch as many horror films as I’d like. As such, this year I’m starting early, and watching a horror film every day of the month!

I’m starting with Halloween (1978), which may seem a bit backwards, but rest assured I’ll be watching it again on the day itself. I must have seen this film over a hundred times – it’s my joint favourite film of all time (Velvet Goldmine is the other joint favourite, if you’re interested!). There’s a new Halloween film coming out this month, so I’ll be watching all the others in the series before I go to see the new one at the cinema.

I love the opening credits with the slow zoom on the lit pumpkin lantern. It’s especially fun around Hallowe’en itself when I have my own lanterns on and can compare them with the one on the screen! (I don’t have lanterns carved yet – I’m not quite that obsessed.)

The opening section, set fifteen years before the main story, I always found super scary as a young teenager and always fast forwarded through it. These days, though, I just marvel at how poor the period feel is – I’m sure every attempt was made at the time to make it look like 1963, but the hair and clothes of the teenage characters just scream ‘1978’, like the rest of the film! (This is a persistent problem with recent retro/vintage period costuming in film and TV and I’m going to do a whole post on it at some point.) It’s shot in real-time from the POV of the killer (although there is a notorious continuity error with the clock in the hall) and so it’s also fairly hilarious when you notice that the teenage tryst only takes about ninety seconds between the couple going upstairs and the dude pulling his shirt on as he heads out the front door. The reveal of the child killer is brilliant and still really creepy forty years after the film was made.

Fifteen years later, we’re introduced to Dr Loomis, who is an amazing character – his obsession with Michael Myers comes across right from the off during the drive to the sanatorium with the nurse. Donald Pleasence’s accent is all over the place though! He starts off attempting an American accent, but it rapidly disappears. I like to assume the character is a Brit who has lived in the US for many decades, and is reverting to his native accent due to the stress.

Blue Öyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper is used beautifully when Annie and Laurie are driving to their babysitting jobs, and it’s been a favourite track of mine since my teens as a result.

Speaking of ways Halloween influenced teenage me, the fashions in this, with the costuming done by Nancy Loomis (who also played Annie), are awesome – as a result of this film I have been wearing colourful knee-high socks since age seventeen. Usually under jeans nowadays, but they’re still there (and very cosy in the autumn!).

Unlike later slashers of the ’80s (which was when the slasher craze really took off), all the characters are well-rounded, rather than just being one-note carving knife fodder. No matter how many times I’ve seen the film, I always find myself wishing they didn’t die and imagining an alternative universe where Michael Myers didn’t exist and they all got to live happily ever after. I know that would kind of defeat the point of the film, but maybe I’ll write that AU fanfiction one day!

I generally find the kid character of Tommy a little annoying, but I do appreciate his comic book geekery!

The tension in the final sequence, where Laurie investigates the Wallace house only to find all her friends dead, and then has to escape Michael, is brilliantly done. Even knowing all the scenes and dialogue by heart, I still find it incredibly tense to watch. Jamie Lee Curtis’ first film performance is fantastic, and you can see already why she went on to be such a big star. I also like the fact that Pleasence and Curtis’ characters don’t actually meet until the last sequence.

Also, the very first shot and very last shot of the film are both of the Myers house, which is quite cool.

The ‘it’s not over’ ending is great too! I’ll discuss how it was resolved in future films over the next couple of weeks – starting tomorrow, when I’ll be watching Halloween II.

Geth is a major Star Wars fan – it’s one of his main obsessions. As such, for the release of all of the new Disney Star Wars films, we’ve gone out to see the film on release day so that he can watch the reviews on all his favourite Star Wars YouTube channels without getting spoilered. The fact that we didn’t manage to do that with Solo – indeed, that it took us about six weeks to get around to seeing it – should tell you everything you need to know about how ridiculously busy life has been for us both recently.

Still, this last weekend, Geth has finally managed to celebrate his birthday properly – it was actually three weeks ago, but there just wasn’t space to do anything at the time – and as part of that, we managed to squeeze in a trip to the cinema on Friday afternoon.

I was slightly apprehensive about Solo, because I find recasting difficult – it really breaks my suspension of disbelief. I’d been very happy with the effects in Rogue One where they’d digitally recreated the likenesses of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher, but I do appreciate that you can’t really do that for the main character of a film. Still, Alden Ehrenreich is a great actor, and while I didn’t feel that he echoed Harrison Ford’s performance in the same way that Ewan McGregor managed for Alec Guinness in the prequel trilogy, I did believe that it was the same character, and I didn’t really think about the change of actors while I was watching the film, which I think is all you can ask for, really.

The story was very enjoyable – it was a good rollicking action adventure, and the tension never let up. There was a great moment with a surprise appearance from an old character you wouldn’t expect, though I would have thought it would be really confusing for people who only watch the films and not the animated TV series. I expect I’ll hear more about that when Geth catches up with his YouTube watching.

My only real issue with the story was that, like Rogue One before it, there were a lot of character deaths. I expected it from the start, and made sure not to get too attached to anyone, but I’m never a fan of killing off characters. I find it to be cheap and lazy writing – there’s always a more interesting way that you can write characters out of a story – and I get frustrated when certain writers become known and lauded for regularly offing their creations, as if it’s clever or brave to do so. It’s not. I find it especially irritating when characters are basically introduced simply in order to die, and I felt that there were a couple of instances of that in Solo.

On the whole, though, I liked the film, and I’d give it a solid three out of five stars. If we can arrange it before it stops being shown in cinemas, Geth and I will go see it once more with my dad (I have a tradition of going to see Star Wars films with Dad that dates back to The Phantom Menace! I wasn’t born when the original trilogy came out, sadly) and then it will fade into the kind of film that I’ll be happy to semi-watch while doing something else once Geth has bought the Blu-Ray.

Category: Films

31 Days Of Horror: Halloween

Film Review: Solo