Don’t know what ‘David Crow’ refers to, or why the glass has been replaced with a single panel, but it’s always nice to find a phone box in an unexpected place!
Update 26th February 2026: I’ve not been able to find an exact picture on Google Street View (a common problem with indoor phone boxes!) but I have added a coordinate link for the hotel bar. If you get that far you should be able to find it!
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.
A much better DVD cover than we’ve been featuring recently!
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.
I woke up with a sore throat this morning, so I decided not to risk going for the short run I’d planned. Lots of paracetamol seems to be sorting me out though, so I think I’m okay to go to the dinner party hosted by our friends Mark and Ruth tonight. Looking forward to that!
Geth had pest control come round this morning and get rid of some wasps’ nests that had accumulated around our property, so I’m also glad we don’t have to worry about those any more.
OOTD: dinner party outfit! Scarf unknown brand (2016), dress Polo Ralph Lauren (2018), tights unknown brand (2014), shoes Office (2018).
Today’s earworm playlist:
Robin Beck – First Time
The Wonder Stuff – Give Give Give Me More More More
Panic! At The Disco – High Hopes
Duran Duran – Meet El Presidente
Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells
Ne-Yo – Let Me Love You
Madonna – Crazy For You
Calvin Harris and Sam Smith – Promises
Duran Duran – Planet Earth
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!
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!
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m taking advantage of a quiet period at work to get a lot of life admin done. I’m also making sure to find time for writing fiction at the moment, because that’s always the thing that gets neglected when work is busy. It’s come at a good time for me, because autumn always makes me really excited about my ongoing fiction projects, especially as I’ll be taking advantage of NaNoWriMo to get another first draft written.
Today, therefore, has involved getting on with both of those. It’s nice to be able to make progress on these projects, even if everything does feel a bit regimented at the moment (I have a huge list of stuff to do every day – it’s the only way I’ll get anything done!).
OOTD: loving autumn and my favourite vintage ’80s jumper! Jumper unknown brand (vintage 1980s, bought at vintage fair 2017), jeans H&M (thrifted from Steff 2016), boots Carefree (2017).
Today’s earworm playlist:
The Art of Noise and Tom Jones – Kiss
Prince – Kiss
Madness – Wings Of A Dove
Jan Hammer – Crockett’s Theme
The Beatles – Taxman
The Power Station – Some Like It Hot
I’ve been trying out the Smirnoff fruit ciders recently. This is the first of them!
Smirnoff Passionfruit & Lime.
This cider is very sweet and a bit alcopop-tasting – it takes me right back to the sugary Hooches and Bacardi Breezers that I used to drink with friends circa 1999! The taste does dry out a little as you get through the bottle. Interesting, but not likely to become a favourite.
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.
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.
When Mum and Dad go to France, they usually bring me back some Breton or Normandy cider. It’s always much appreciated!
La Fauconnerie Cidre de Bretagne.
I developed the taste for French cider on childhood family holidays, when we used to drink it out of cider bowls outside on the terrace at the gîte we were staying at. It has a distinctive apply taste, with even the dry variety tasting quite sweet, and it takes me right back to the summer of 1995, when we spent many long weeks in Brittany. I don’t have Breton cider very often, but it’s really nice as a treat.
