Following this morning’s race, Geth and I headed to the pub to meet up with our friend Matt, and then went for a well-deserved race celebration meal at Pizza Hut. Much as I like races, it was much nicer drinking and eating in warm indoor environments than it had been running in the rain this morning.
We made sure to finish our meal in plenty of time so we could get back and watch Doctor Who and the Strictly results, which is already becoming my favourite kind of autumn Sunday evening.
OOTD: showing off the new race shirt. T-shirt Yorkshire 10 Mile (2018), jeans Levi (2018), trainers Reebok (2013).
Today’s earworm playlist:
Traditional – Scotland The Brave
Eternal and Bebe Winans – I Wanna Be The Only One
Ella Henderson – Ghost
Duran Duran – Come Undone
Sigala and Paloma Faith – Lullaby
Samantha Fox – Touch Me
This is the second year running that Geth and I have run the Yorkshire 10 Mile. Last year, it was a very pretty race, and although I was struggling a bit as my training had suffered, I really enjoyed the scenery. This year, it was the opposite way round.
As forecast, it was absolutely chucking it down in York today, and it was the wettest race I’ve ever experienced. My running glasses are not water-resistant, and so, because the rain was so heavy, I was basically running the race blind. I couldn’t see the puddles, resulting in very wet feet. My hearing aids were getting waterlogged and kept cutting out. In short, I was pretty sensory-deprived and unaware of my surroundings. I didn’t notice a single mile marker, and I only realised two of the water stations were there after I’d already run through them. Luckily, it was so wet and cold that I really didn’t need to drink much water en route today.
However, Geth and I were both hopeful of PBs, as last year’s race was the only 10-mile race we’d done and we both felt we were in better shape this year. Geth took a good chunk off his time, as he’s had a really good year training-wise, though he is suffering with a knee issue that needs to be seen to. Last year, I’d aimed for sub-2hr but had ended up with 2:06:38. This year, I aimed for sub-2hr again, and was fairly confident I’d get it as my training between the GNR and Yorkshire has been much better. I ended up with a time of 1:47:31 – a 19:07 minute PB! I’m really happy with that, especially as the conditions were so miserable.
I doubt we’ll do this race again next year, as the organisers are moving it to later in October and it doesn’t really fit in with our race plans for next autumn. However, assuming I don’t end up saying ‘never again’ to marathons after I do London in April, I may come back and do the full marathon sometime.
Episode two of the latest Doctor Who series, and it’s an absolutely standard new series episode two. These episodes are never the most popular or well-remembered of the series, but they always have a very important job to do.
In a typical new series episode two, we usually get a companion experiencing their first trip to somewhere that’s either not their home planet, not their time of origin, or both. This episode is no exception, with Graham, Yasmin and Ryan travelling to the planet Desolation, though unusually it’s not in the Doctor’s TARDIS, as she hasn’t recovered it yet. Indeed, she didn’t even mean to take them along on her travels, so at this point they’re still very much ‘accidental’ companions, whom the Doctor intends to return home as soon as possible.
In the meantime, though, we’ve got an adventure to get on with. The plot of the episode is very simple, probably moreso than any episode since the series returned in 2005, which is a huge culture shock after the complicated storylines of the Moffat era. The Doctor and companions are rescued from the floating-in-space predicament in which they found themselves at the end of the last episode by a couple of contestants in a rally, Angstrom and Epzo, who turn out to be the two finalists competing for some prize money and a way off the planet. A man called Ilin appears by hologram and explains that the final stage is a race to the ‘Ghost Monument’, which turns out to be the Doctor’s TARDIS, fading in and out of view. After a boat trip and a fight with killer robots, during which the Doctor saves everyone’s lives multiple times, they reach the location of the monument (although there is no sign of the TARDIS), and after some persuasion, Ilin agrees to declare Angstrom and Epzo joint winners and transports them off the planet, leaving the Doctor and companions behind. Although the Doctor loses hope for a moment, the TARDIS reappears, and the Doctor sets the coordinates to take the companions home. The ‘next time’ trailer, however, indicates that this will not be successful.
(This, incidentally, gives me happy nostalgic vibes, as it’s reminiscent of the Doctor trying and failing to return classic companions like Ian, Barbara and Tegan home for multiple consecutive stories and getting them caught up in adventures instead.)
Another important job of a typical episode two is to allow us to get to know the companions better. On this score, I feel the episode falls down a bit. I love the character of Graham, who is well-written, but the younger companions still feel drawn in very light strokes to me. Ryan has a couple of interesting character beats, with his continuing reluctance to get close to step-grandfather Graham in the aftermath of his grandmother’s death and his ongoing struggle with his dyspraxia, but Yasmin, at the moment, feels like a complete cypher – there’s nothing that elevates her character above ‘generic young female companion’ yet. This is a little worrying, as it seems to confirm longstanding fan worries about three companions constituting an ‘overcrowded TARDIS’ where there’s not enough space for everyone to have satisfying character development. However, I will reserve judgment, as I’m still hoping, like I said last week, that each companion will have their share of the focus during this series.
Next week we’re back on Earth, but in a different time period. It looks like a ‘celebrity historical’ – which is a type of Doctor Who story we’ve not had in a while – featuring Rosa Parks, which should make for an interesting story!
A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 (1985) is the first film in this month-long horrorthon that I have never actually seen before. Out of the Elm Street series, I’d seen 1, 3, 7 and Freddy vs. Jason, and most of those were when I was a teenager. It’s a series I need to become more familiar with, especially seeing as I own the DVD boxset.
The DVD boxset comes with this nice souvenir booklet with lots of cool images and factoids about the films. I should get round to reading it sometime!
The credits call this ‘Part 2’, but as that appellation became very associated with the Friday the 13th series, it seems to have been quietly dropped in subsequent merchandising.
The film opens with a loner-looking teenager, Jesse, on a school bus, being laughed at by the other kids. It becomes apparent that this is a nightmare when the bus drives off the road and away over a field, and is revealed to be being driven by Freddy Krueger. The ground opens up, and the bus plunges back and forth on a precipice, threatening to fall.
Cut to suburbia where Jesse has just woken up from the bad dream. Apparently nightmares are common for him, judging by the reactions of his family. He drives to school with Lisa, his sort-of girlfriend, and we cut to gym class, where it’s revealed Jesse is no good at sports. He gets into a fight with another boy, Grady, but they sort of make up in a boy way while being forced to do punishment press-ups by sadistic Coach Schneider. When Jesse explains that he’s just moved into the area and is living on Elm Street, we get some backstory from Grady: the house that Jesse and his family have moved into is Nancy Thompson’s old house. The story around town is that Nancy went crazy after watching Glen get killed in the first film. Jesse doesn’t believe Grady.
That night, Jesse investigates a noise in the garden, which is a very Elm Street scene – suburban gardens with lots of trellises and trailing plants. Freddy appears, trying to influence Jesse’s mind rather than killing him – he clearly needs to use Jesse to achieve his evil ends.
Jesse, understandably, doesn’t sleep well for the rest of the night, and the next day, a boring biology class sends him to sleep. He dreams a snake is strangling him, causing him to yell out and wake up, only to find himself holding a real snake from one of the classroom tanks. The teacher thinks he’s messing about.
Back home, Jesse intends to go out and meet up with Lisa, but his dad insists that he clean his room first. Jesse plays loud pop music (Touch Me by Wish and Fonda Rae, a very minor hit that nevertheless has its own Wikipedia entry) while doing so, which is not very suited to the situation – some metal or punk would be more rebellious. This is quite a silly sequence, with Jesse singing into a pretend microphone and dressing up in daft accessories until Lisa arrives, having convinced Jesse’s mother that he’d invited her round to help sort out his room.
Jesse and Lisa find Nancy’s diary on a shelf. Apparently the events of the first film took place five years ago, which is infuriating if you’re enough of an ’80s fan to have a keen eye for the changing fashion trends throughout the decade. The first film was released in 1984 and this one in 1985, meaning that they both look emphatically mid-’80s. You couldn’t even get away with saying that the first one was set in 1982/1983 and the second in 1987/1988, because the fashions and decor trends of each year of the decade are so completely distinctive. Obviously in 1985 they had no way of predicting what the world would look like in 1989, but it’s still a real annoyance. To me, anyway.
That night, Jesse finds Freddy’s glove in his dream. ‘Kill for me!’ says Freddy, still trying to turn Jesse into a puppet.
The next day, the whole of Jesse’s family are complaining about the heat in the house, but Jesse’s little sister tells them to shush, because the pet birds are sleeping – there’s a cover on their cage. Unfortunately, the cage starts shaking bizarrely, and then explodes. The pet birds go nuts and start flying at Jesse’s dad’s face to peck him, drawing blood in a nice callback to The Birds, before exploding in a shower of feathers. Nasty.
Completely randomly, Jesse wakes up in the middle of the night and sneaks out to a nightclub. Coach Schneider is also at the club, catches Jesse, and takes him back to school (still in the middle of the night) to make him run circuits of the gymnasium. This whole bit is so bizarre that at first I thought it was supposed to be a dream sequence, but apparently not. There’s lots of Adidas product placement here too, which is distracting.
After a scene where all the basketballs and tennis balls in the gym equipment come flying out to attack Schneider, he’s dragged into the showers by an invisible force. There’s then a bizarre telekinetic towel whipping sequence, before Freddy, possessing the body of Jesse, kills Schneider.
There’s a knock on the door at Jesse’s house, and his parents answer to find the police bringing Jesse home after apparently finding him wandering naked along the highway. The next day, Jesse’s dad fits bars to all the windows, just like Nancy’s mother in the first film.
Another dream sequence, where Jesse finds Freddy’s glove in a drawer in his bedroom, then goes into his sister’s bedroom to find her skipping to the creepy ‘One, two, Freddy’s coming for you’ rhyme.
In the morning, Jesse confronts his father, asking angrily if he knew about the previous goings-on in the house, with Nancy going crazy and Nancy’s mother apparently committing suicide. Apparently Jesse’s dad did know about it, but didn’t care ’cause he was getting a good deal on the house. This is pretty much the same plotline as what happens with John Strode and his family in Halloween 6, which was released a decade later, so I guess Halloween 6 copied this one.
Lisa has been busy since they found the diary. She drives Jesse out to Krueger’s old boiler room and shows him all the research she’s done into the backstory. Jesse is too panicked about the dreams to listen to her – he believes that he’s going crazy and killed Schneider himself.
In Jesse’s next dream, Freddy nearly gets him to kill his little sister. Jesse starts taking pep pills to try and avoid sleeping.
Nobody at the high school seems to care much about Schneider having been brutally murdered (as we’ve seen multiple times this month, the standard motto of every horror film high school is ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’), and so the topic of conversation in the cafeteria at lunchtime is the party that Lisa’s throwing. Grady says he can’t go, ’cause he’s grounded.
At Lisa’s party, her parents go to bed early as promised. This results in a bizarre moment where the party gets wild and loud as soon as all the party guests see the lights go out in the parents’ bedroom. Just as I was about to ask, ‘surely the parents can hear all of this?’, we do indeed cut to the parents in bed, looking surprised at the fact that the party kids are stupid enough to think they won’t hear anything. However, Lisa’s mother persuades her husband to leave the kids be. The whole sequence is a bit weird and unsatisfying.
Jesse is so stressed he’s close to a panic attack, but Lisa calms him down by dragging him into the cabana for some alone time. However, Freddy tries to take over Jesse while he and Lisa are making out, and so he runs off, leaving her confused and annoyed.
Jesse breaks into Grady’s bedroom through his window and wakes him up. In an awesome and much-appreciated bit of set dressing, Grady’s room is super super ’80s – triangle-patterned wallpaper with Stray Cats and Limahl posters everywhere! Jesse makes Grady promise to watch him while he sleeps to make sure Freddy doesn’t appear, but once Jesse’s fast asleep, Grady gets bored and decides to go to sleep after all. However, Jesse then wakes up, and there’s a grisly body horror moment as Freddy breaks out of his chest, killing Grady and causing everything in the house to explode. This whole telekinetic power thing of Freddy’s is not very well explained – I don’t remember it being a thing in the first film.
Jesse becomes himself again and returns to Lisa’s house, but then turns into Freddy again and starts to chase Lisa. He slashes Lisa’s leg, but Lisa can’t kill him knowing Jesse is somewhere inside Freddy. There’s then a confusing sequence where Freddy keeps disappearing and reappearing as he goes through doorways, kills a bunch of kids in front of loads of witnesses including Lisa’s parents, then disappears again. I’d love to know how Lisa’s parents explain that one to the police, but of course it’s never followed up.
Lisa drives to the boiler room to confront Krueger, and has to cope with a bunch of hallucinations including creepy dream dogs with human faces and her leg wound being infected with locusts. After a final chase sequence, in which Lisa refuses to believe that Jesse is dead, keeps imploring him to fight Freddy from within, and then finally kisses Freddy (ew!), Freddy seemingly burns to death, and we get a ‘love conquers all’ victory with a burnt Jesse emerging from Freddy’s corpse. The whole thing is a bit confusing.
Cut to daylight, where an unburnt Jesse (apart from a bandage on his arm) waves goodbye to his mother and goes off to catch the bus to school, meeting up on the bus with Lisa and her friend Kerry. This school bus sequence is seemingly another dream, especially when Freddy bursts out of Kerry’s chest and the credits roll. It’s just as unsatisfying an ending as the first film, with more questions than answers.
Oh, and there’s some completely out-of-place old-timey music over the credits (Bing Crosby’s Did You Ever See A Dream Walking).
It’s a race weekend for me and Geth, so we volunteered at parkrun this morning in the pouring rain. According to the weather forecast, we’re going to be running the race in the pouring rain tomorrow, so I suppose it was good practice.
We had a nice meal out with lots of pasta in order to carb-load for tomorrow, enjoyed the main Strictly show, and are now watching triathlon TV to get us in the mood for the race!
OOTD: actually today’s second outfit, ’cause I had to change out of the first after getting soaked at parkrun. Glasses Emporio Armani (2017), hoodie unknown brand (2009), Duran Duran t-shirt Amplified (2018), jeans H&M (thrifted from Steff 2016), trainers Reebok (2013).
Today’s earworm playlist:
Johnny Hates Jazz – Shattered Dreams
Princess – Say I’m Your Number One
Razorlight – Somewhere Else
Duran Duran – Save A Prayer
Rod Stewart – Baby Jane
Sacre – London Marathon
Duran Duran – The Reflex
Bruno Mars – 24K Magic
Vance Joy – Riptide
Madonna – Hollywood
Today’s film is Halloween: Resurrection (2002), which was the first Halloween film I was able to go and see in the cinema. I was seventeen then, which as we saw in the last film is a notable age for Halloween characters, so it was nice that an entry in the series came out that year! If you’re paying attention, though, you’ll notice that the film is actually set in 2001, because it’s stated to be three years since the events of 1998’s Halloween H20. From what I remember, this was because the film was originally meant to come out in 2001, but suffered from production delays.
Another ‘head lineup’ example of film promotion.
We hear about this three-year gap as part of the ludicrous opening backstory from the nurses in the mental institution in which Laurie Strode is now being held. Apparently the man Laurie beheaded at the end of the last film was not Michael but instead a random paramedic – Michael had set this up by putting his mask on this guy and crushing his throat so he couldn’t tell anyone he wasn’t Michael Myers. This ridiculous retcon obviously doesn’t solve all the problems with the scenario. Watch the last scene of Halloween H20 again and you’ll see ‘Michael’ clutching his head and face, feeling that he’s got a mask on. Why didn’t he take off the mask to show that he wasn’t Michael? This also ruins the oddly touching moment that I discussed yesterday.
Laurie has been mute for three years, according to the nurses. When they leave the room, we see she’s not as messed up as she’s pretending to be – she’s not actually swallowing the pills they give her, instead hiding them inside a doll.
Another patient, Harold, likes dressing up as serial killers and is constantly being caught wandering the grounds in different masks, cosplaying as his favourite psychopaths. This raises a lot of questions about the competence of the facility. Where is Harold getting his masks from? Why is he allowed them? The point of this character, of course, is to ensure that when the security guards see Michael Myers on the security cameras wandering around the basement, they think it’s Harold. The guards are easily picked off as a result.
Despite Laurie setting up lots of traps on the roof, Michael finally manages to kill her, because when she has the chance to kill him, she instead decides she has to be sure this time and so tries to take his mask off, enabling him to stab her first. ‘I’ll see you in hell,’ she says before falling to her death, which is a bit of an abrupt end for such an important character.
Rather cutely, Michael decides not to kill Harold, instead giving him his knife as a souvenir! This leads into an epic monologue from Harold, listing all of Michael’s murders, which emphasises that we are still very much in the H20 continuity that ignores 4/5/6.
The action moves to Haddonfield University, where we meet main character Sara. If you’re keeping score at home, you’ll remember that we only just had a character called Sarah in the last film. This irritating lack of character name imagination occurs a lot in this film, as we’ll see throughout the review.
Sara’s friends Jenny and Rudy are excited about being picked for an internet broadcast called ‘Dangertainment’ that’s about to be filmed in the Myers house. ‘We could be bigger than the Osbournes!’ says Jenny, dating the film horribly. I want to note that I absolutely hate the ‘isn’t this Web 2.0 thing new and exciting’ theme that characterised films and TV of the early ’00s. Because information technology moves so quickly in this century, over-featuring the latest messenger software and mobile phones is an absolutely surefire way to ensure that people watching the film in twenty years’ time will laugh at the quaintness of the whole thing. Media makers have still not really learnt their lesson about this (as shown by the number of songs in the charts at the moment that refer to things like Instagram Stories and Snapchat filters, which will have the kids of the 2020s and beyond shaking their heads and going ‘what?’), but the whole ‘wow! isn’t this technological century exciting!’ thing is not as prevalent as it was fifteen years ago.
We get a nice bit with a creepy fellow student doing the whole ‘you’re doomed!’ speech in lieu of Dr Loomis, but sadly we don’t see this character again. Sara, meanwhile, turns out to be sort-of ‘online dating’ a high school freshman student who hasn’t told her his age.
Freddie (Busta Rhymes) and Nora (Tyra Banks) are in charge of Dangertainment. I am pretty sure neither of them have done much acting either before or after this film. In another bit of unimaginative naming, Nora is a very similar name to Norma from the previous film.
Most of the students chosen for Dangertainment are total idiots – Jenny is vapid and just wants to be famous, Rudy has a gory, morbid sense of humour, Bill is really pervy, Jim is really creepy, and Donna is just pretentious. Sara is the only one who comes across as normal. When she visits Freddie in his dorm room (Freddie’s a student? He looks far too old, and with good reason – Busta Rhymes was thirty when this film came out!) and tries to back out of the project, he explains that her ‘normalness’ is the reason he wants her on the show, because she’s ‘real’. Freddie is also shown to love kung-fu movies, but not quite as much as he loves himself.
Back to Sara’s ‘online boyfriend’, who calls himself Deckard, and his fellow freshman friend. Deckard wants to stay in for Hallowe’en and watch Sara on Dangertainment, but his friend is insistent that they have to go to a party instead, because it’s a really big honour for freshmen to be invited to a party hosted by older students. ‘Your sister invited us so you wouldn’t tell your mother about her tattoo,’ retorts Deckard, which was a line I really appreciated at the time, since a major feature of my late teens was me and my mates constantly getting tattoos that our parents didn’t approve of.
The nasty shaky primitive internet camera used for the broadcast is incredibly irritating to watch, and is another thing that dates the film now that we’re in the age of slick YouTubers!
Nora is setting the broadcast up from a small studio with lots of screens for the different cameras, liaising via walkie-talkie with a cameraman. The cameraman is called Charley, which is another slightly-differently-spelt reused name from the previous film – this is fairly infuriating now. He quickly gets offed by Michael, but Nora is too busy dancing to a CD she’s put on and hence conveniently turning her back on the screens to see him getting killed.
Michael Myers is ‘a mystery wrapped up in a riddle wrapped up in an enigma’, according to Freddie. This phrase crops up in fiction a lot, but apparently originated with Winston Churchill.
The students enter the Myers house, and immediately things don’t seem right. The ‘forty year old’ ingredients in the kitchen cupboards smell fresh, according to student chef Rudy, and there’s a creepy baby high chair with chains on it, which indicates the whole broadcast is obviously a setup. Unfortunately the participants are a bit thick, and so they’re nowhere near close to realising this fact yet.
Deckard and his friend are clearly only at the teen party to add some visual interest and comedy relief to the film, seeing as Deckard spends the whole party on a PC watching the broadcast – other partygoers join him in watching the show as the film goes on!
Bill gets killed by Michael through a mirror, but Freddie and Nora are too self-absorbed to notice what’s happening on the screen in front of them. The students in the Myers house find more creepy obviously-planted toys, and Rudy finally realises that the whole thing is fake.
Donna and Jim start getting it on in the basement, only to be fallen on top of by a creepy skeleton. Watching in the studio, Freddie and Nora high-five, for the benefit of the one remaining viewer who hasn’t realised they’re the ones who’ve set all this stuff up. Donna and Jim realise the skeleton’s fake, and Freddie decides to up the ante by donning a Michael Myers mask and entering the house. We then get a ridiculous comedy scene of one Michael Myers stalking another. Freddie notices the real Michael behind him, thinks it’s Charley, and has a go at him for ruining the setup, telling him to get out of the house. Strangely, the real Michael obeys, despite there being no reason for him not to try to kill Freddie at this point.
Jim leaves the basement, but Donna investigates the hole/tunnel revealed by the fake skeleton. She finds a news clipping about Laurie Strode, a half-dead rat (ew!) and Laurie’s doll from the sanatorium, indicating that she’s found the real Michael’s lair. Before she can warn the others, she gets chased down by Michael and killed.
Jenny and Rudy are smoking a bong in an upstairs room, which is a flagrant breach of Scream‘s Rule 2. Sara, meanwhile, freaks out when she thinks she sees Michael roaming around, and drags Rudy downstairs to investigate. The fake Michael leaps out and drags Sara along the ground, but has to reveal himself to be Freddie when Rudy starts beating him up. Sara, Jim and Rudy are angry at being set up, but Freddie implores them to finish the broadcast, promising that they’ll be well-paid.
Meanwhile, the stoned Jenny discovers Bill’s corpse, and runs out to the landing screaming. The real Michael materialises behind her and chops her head off with a knife (grim!), meaning the other characters finally realise what’s going on. This is the point where the students start dropping like flies – Freddie is seemingly knocked out, Jim gets his head crushed, and Rudy gets killed in exactly the same way as Bob from the first film, which is a morbid but much-appreciated callback.
It’s cute that Deckard can direct Sara around the house via old-fashioned early ’00s text messaging. This leads to a well-done tense sequence as Sara hides from Michael.
Freddie turns out to be still alive, and he and Sara try to escape together. This leads to a slightly cringeworthy scene where Freddie uses his kung-fu movie knowledge to kick Michael out of the window and suspend him from a cable. However, by the time Sara and Freddie have had a lengthy debrief by the front door (WHY are they not running straight out of it?), Michael has escaped his predicament, and stabs Freddie from behind.
Sara, still allergic to the front door, goes down into the basement to play find-the-body. Climbing up through the tunnel to the Dangertainment studio, she finds that Nora has been killed offscreen. Luckily, there’s a convenient chainsaw stashed in the cupboard, which means Sara can carry out CHAINSAW REVENGE! on Michael…until the chainsaw runs out of fuel.
The leaking fuel sets the studio hut aflame, and Sara is trapped by a fallen table. Must be a fairly heavy table if she can’t push it off herself. Michael readies for the kill, but Freddie’s still not dead yet. ‘Trick or treat, motherf***er!’ he says as he blasts Michael into a burning wall, which must be the worst line of dialogue in the entire Halloween franchise.
Wrapped in a ‘horror film survivor blanket’, Sara speaks to the press (and thanks Deckard for saving her life, leading to him becoming the hero of the high school party), as does Freddie, who is a character that really shouldn’t have survived this film by rights. When have we ever seen the idiot who decides to stir up danger actually surviving a horror film? That character is always meant to be satisfyingly killed about halfway through the film, as penance for his own stupidity. Those are the rules! As a result, this ending feels very unsatisfactory.
Michael has seemingly burnt to death, but long-time viewers will know better. In the morgue, his eyes open, and the credits roll.
Another good day getting lots of work and admin done in preparation for the weekend! Now catching up with Strictly and other TV. I’m really looking forward to the next couple of days – it’s a race weekend so we’ll be volunteering at parkrun to kick things off tomorrow morning.
OOTD: a cosy day in. Jumper Faber (vintage 1980s, bought at vintage fair 2018), jeans Levi (2018), boots Carefree (2017).
Today’s earworm playlist:
Calvin Harris – Acceptable In The ’80s
The Clash – I Fought The Law
Let Loose – Crazy For You
Madonna – Crazy For You
Duran Duran – Girls On Film
Duran Duran – Come Undone
Abba – Lay All Your Love On Me
King – Love And Pride
Will Powers – Kissing With Confidence
This is the last of the Smirnoff fruit ciders I tried recently. As you can see, I was enjoying it so much I didn’t remember to take a picture of the bottle until after I’d finished!
Smirnoff Mandarin & Pink Grapefruit.
This flavour is really summery. The fruit in it is really tasty and refreshing! It’s probably my favourite out of the Smirnoff ciders.
We kick off a new Halloween storyline with Halloween H20 (1998), which ignores the ‘Thorn trilogy’ of Halloween 4/5/6. In this storyline, Laurie Strode didn’t have a daughter called Jamie in 1981 and then die with Jamie’s father in a car crash in 1987; instead, she faked her death in a car crash sometime before 1981, moved to California and changed her identity to Keri Tate, got married, had a son called John in 1981, got divorced, and became the headmistress of a private boarding school. Everyone caught up? Great.
A good example of the late ’90s ‘head lineup’ poster popularised by Scream.
We get a reprise of the Chordettes’ Mr Sandman playing over the opening scene, symbolising the continuation from Halloween II. Still gloriously creepy! The action opens in Langdon, Illinois, where Marion Whittington, the nurse from the first and second films, is still chain-smoking away. She arrives home to find her house has been broken into, and sensibly goes to get help rather than investigating by herself.
There’s a Friday the 13th series reference as Marion bumps into someone in a hockey mask. It turns out to be neighbour kid Jimmy, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a beautifully late ’90s bit of casting. Despite Marion’s exhortations to wait for the police, Jimmy goes straight in to explore the house. Marion’s office has been ransacked, but nothing else has been touched; however, Jimmy spends so long nicking beer from Marion’s fridge that it’s dark outside by the time he comes out, and the police STILL haven’t shown up yet!
The power goes out as soon as Marion goes into her house, because that’s Michael Myers’ MO. She investigates the ransacked office to find that the ‘Laurie Strode’ file is missing, and immediately realises who’s responsible. She heads over to Jimmy’s house to get help again, but it’s too late – Jimmy has taken an ice skate to the face from Michael, and his friend’s dead too. The police finally show up just as Michael catches up with Marion, and Michael drives away at the same moment they start discovering the bodies.
Next morning, we get a backstory infodump from the detectives investigating the case. Marion’s house turns out to have belonged to Dr Loomis – ‘he was that shrink who died years ago, she took care of him’ – meaning that the office and the files were the property of Loomis. Appropriately, we get a voiceover of Donald Pleasence’s monologue about Michael from the first film, along with a montage of newspaper clippings explaining what happened, over the opening credits.
A couple of notes from the credits: Marco Beltrami from Scream did the additional music for this film! Also, there’s a photocopy of Laurie’s high school yearbook that reads ‘Class of ’78’, but it should be ‘Class of ’79’, because she was in her senior year in October 1978.
Laurie, as I explained at the start, is now ‘Keri Tate’, a headteacher in California. She’s having nightmares about twenty years ago, and is shown still to have the scar from where Michael slashed her in the first film.
Josh Hartnett makes his first film appearance as Laurie’s son John. He’s used to dealing with his mother’s nightmares and gets her some pills from the bathroom. He receives a birthday card from his father, two months late, revealing that he’s seventeen. Laurie, as you might expect, is horribly overprotective of him and is refusing to let him go on a school trip to Yosemite.
John complains to his friends Charlie, Molly and Sarah about not being allowed to go, and because it’s now the postmodern post-Scream era, we get a Psycho reference from Charlie – ‘in twenty years you’re probably still going to be living with her, running some weird hotel out in the middle of nowhere’.
Laurie is having hallucinations about seeing Michael everywhere. This is apparently a normal occurrence, especially around Hallowe’en. Meanwhile, the teenage characters make non-Yosemite plans, deciding to have a Hallowe’en party in the school while everyone else is away on the school trip.
We then get a scene with a mother and child attempting to use a roadside public toilet – the ladies’ are locked, so they use the gents’. This is the standard ‘Michael needs to change cars while travelling to Haddonfield’ scene, although unusually, he doesn’t kill them – perhaps it was considered a bit too brutal, but it comes across as out of character.
Laurie turns out to be having a secret relationship with Will Brennan, the school counselor. The school secretary Norma, meanwhile, is played by Janet Leigh, who was Jamie Lee Curtis’ real-life mother and whose most famous role was Psycho shower victim Marion. I’m very fond of this particular horror callback!
LL Cool J is, I believe, the earliest example of the curious trend of late ’90s/early ’00s slashers featuring R&B stars who weren’t generally known for their acting. In this film, though, it’s an inspired choice – his characterisation as Ronny, the security guard and wannabe novelist, is hilarious, with him constantly on the phone to his wife reading out the bad erotica he’s been writing!
John has Ronny wrapped around his little finger, and persuades him to look the other way while he and Charlie sneak out to town to get supplies for the party. Laurie is also in town, and is clearly freaked out by the kids in costumes roaming the streets. On her lunch date with Will, she turns out to be using alcohol to deal with the stress, sneaking an extra glass of Chardonnay while Will is in the bathroom. I quite like this character beat.
In case we hadn’t guessed, John then explains to Charlie that he can’t steal booze from Laurie’s cupboard because she’s a ‘functioning alcoholic’ and would notice if it went missing. Charlie goes shoplifting for it instead, which is a pretty good indication he’s not going to survive this film. Laurie catches them in town and drives them home, and we see Michael Myers brazenly pulling up in his car right behind them at the school gates. Nobody notices for some reason.
John meets up with girlfriend Molly to show her his decorations for the party – he’s excited as he’s never celebrated Hallowe’en before. In class, Molly reprises Laurie’s classroom scene from 1978 – she sees Michael Myers staring at her from outside, but is distracted by being asked a question by the teacher (in this case Laurie, who apparently teaches English class as well as being headmistress – the class discussion is on Frankenstein, because postmodernism!).
At the end of the class, Laurie reveals that she’s changed her mind about Yosemite, and gives John the permission slip. He’s already decided he’s not going, though, as he wants to party with his friends. The school clears out for the trip, leaving the building deserted.
Laurie bumps into Norma, who repeats the Sheriff Brackett line from 1978 (‘it’s Hallowe’en…I guess everyone’s entitled to one good scare’), and then launches into an absolutely shameless Psycho callback sequence. ‘I know it’s not my place, but if I could be maternal for a minute…we’ve all had bad things happen to us,’ she says to Laurie, then gets into the car she drove in Psycho, while the Psycho soundtrack plays in the background!
Ronny finally notices Michael’s car, and goes out to investigate. I love how Michael just casually saunters past him while he’s checking out the car!
The phone lines are cut, cutting off Ronny’s wife, which is a shame ’cause she’s one of the best things about this film.
Laurie sees Michael approaching her, and assumes she’s hallucinating again. Before she can wonder why she can’t get rid of the hallucination as usual by squeezing her eyes shut, Will shows up, and they decide to go back to her place once he’s checked on the students staying behind.
In Molly and Sarah’s dorm room, they’re watching the video of Scream 2, because this is the late ’90s. This, incidentally, results in one of those fictional universe paradoxes where, as we saw yesterday, the Halloween series exists as a fictional story in the Scream universe, and as we see now, the Scream series exists as a fictional story in the Halloween universe. I would love to see the version of Scream that exists in the Halloween universe – it’d be a very different film without all the Halloween references!
Sarah stubs out her cigarette just as Will enters the room. There is no way on earth he wouldn’t be able to smell it!
Back at home, Laurie has a whole tumbler of vodka plus a swig of gin to calm her nerves. Will shows up with a pumpkin, and suddenly Laurie doesn’t seem so against celebrating Hallowe’en. She tells Will her backstory, and suddenly realises that both she and her sister Judith were seventeen when Michael came to kill them, the same age that John is now. Freaked out, she tries to call the Yosemite trip to make sure John’s okay. The phone lines have been cut, and she notices that John never picked up his camping gear. Laurie immediately grabs a gun, and nearly ends up shooting Ronny, who has come to her house to report about the strange car.
About five different characters say ‘I’ll be right back’ in this film, which is probably another Scream reference. Charlie dies offscreen, and after discovering his body, Sarah gets chased down by Michael, leaving John and Molly the lone party survivors. They escape through a window, and Michael gives chase, slowing them down by stabbing John in the leg. There’s a brilliantly tense sequence where they’ve managed to get through a locked gate but can’t open the door behind it, meaning they have to cower from Michael trying to stab them through the gate. Laurie gets them through the door just in time, and the small window in the door allows her to come face-to-mask with her brother for the first time in twenty years.
‘Do as I say, now,’ orders Laurie as she ushers John and Molly into a locked room, which is exactly what she said to Tommy and Lindsey in the first film when hiding them in the same way.
Will accidentally shoots Ronny, apparently killing him. This has become a bit of a theme in these films! As they’re checking Ronny’s body, Michael sneaks up and kills Will. Laurie manages to escape with John and Molly in her car. At the school entrance, she gets out of the car to open the gate. ‘I want you to drive down the road to the Beckers, get them to call an ambulance and get the police,’ she says to Molly, paraphrasing words we’ve now heard many times during this horrorthon!
Laurie stays in the school to confront Michael, grabbing an axe to fight with. After a lengthy fight sequence around the school, where it’s no longer clear who’s chasing who, she seemingly manages to kill him, and then drops the damn knife AGAIN, just as she was always doing in the first film. Luckily, though, she has another one, and goes down to make sure she’s finished the job. Unfortunately, just as she’s about to stab Michael, Ronny shows up and stops her, apparently not dead after all. To be honest, I don’t think stabbing Michael would have killed him – he’s too superhuman for that.
Ronny, despite having been shot several times, seems perfectly fine in the aftermath, chatting away to his wife on the phone about his new idea for the ‘erotic thriller’ he’s going to write! Maybe Will was just a really bad shot.
Despite the fact that hundreds of police and ambulance workers have shown up to deal with the situation, Laurie decides to take matters into her own hands and drives Michael’s body away in a van so she can kill him properly. When she sees him wake up, she brakes hard so he goes flying through the windscreen, and then runs him over, sending the van crashing down a hill into a tree and jumping out of the van just in time.
After the crash, there’s a sort of oddly touching moment where the trapped Michael reaches out a hand to Laurie, and she reaches back, nearly touching but not quite. Then she chops his head off with an axe, which is the only sensible way to deal with Michael Myers, and the film ends.
Incidentally, this is the second Halloween film in a row that has an ‘In Memory of Donald Pleasence’ caption during the end credits.
It’s been a fairly normal Thursday, bookended by Slimming World and Pilates as ever. We have a couple of weeks’ break from Pilates now, so it’ll be good to have some extra time to get on with things.
Now spending the evening watching some of the BBC4 music shows I’m always recording and never getting round to watching!
OOTD: comfy Pilates gear. Hoodie Sonar (2006), t-shirt Great North 10K (2016), leggings Primark (2018), trainers Reebok (2017).
Today’s earworm playlist:
Bucks Fizz – Piece Of The Action
Backstreet Boys – Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)
The Jam – Going Underground
Duran Duran – All She Wants Is
Duran Duran – Hungry Like The Wolf
Duran Duran – Come Undone
