Tag: Halloween

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009) is actually the tenth entry in the series.  I know it’s because the filmmakers keep rebooting the storyline, but it’s definitely a lot of work to keep track of what’s going on with these films.

We start off with a caption of another irrelevant quotation that’s not in the film or in any previous film, then we get a scene from the ‘fifteen years previously’ part of Rob Zombie’s Halloween, with Deborah Myers visiting Michael in the sanatorium (the latter played by a different child actor in this film).  Michael has had a dream about a white horse, and has been able to make quite a realistic-looking one out of craft materials, because the sanatorium just rolls like that.

Back to fifteen years later, and we pick up where the last film left off.  Laurie is walking about in a daze after shooting Michael, and screams and screams as she’s taken into hospital.  Loomis is also shown still to be alive.

Sheriff Brackett orders Michael’s body to be secured properly in the ambulance, but we know it won’t happen.  The ambulance drivers are too idiotic while driving, joking around, and end up getting into a crash.  Like the first film, these scenes are lit too darkly to see anything, so I don’t really know what’s going on.  Michael wakes up, unsurprisingly, and finishes off the surviving ambulance driver.  He then sees a white horse and a woman in white, which is presumably a hallucination.

In Laurie’s hospital room, the TV is playing some footage of the Moody Blues performing Nights In White Satin.  She wakes up and hauls herself out of bed, which is pretty surprising, given that a few scenes ago we saw her entire body being gruesomely stitched up and she should be under heavy sedation.  She visits the unconscious Annie in another room, and is soon taken halfway back to her room by one of the nurses, but Michael shows up and kills the nurse.

There’s then a sequence where Laurie finds the other nurse dead, escapes outside, hides in a hut where the Moody Blues are still playing on the TV, nearly gets rescued by a security guard before Michael catches up to him…and then wakes up on 29th October a year later.  The sequence was all a dream!  Thing is, it’s not really clear when the dream started.  Did the nurses and security guard really get killed, or did Laurie dream the whole sequence about the hospital?  I’m going to say the latter, because it means the film makes marginally more sense.

Laurie is now living with the Bracketts, seeing a counsellor (who provides the backstory that they never found Michael’s body after the ambulance crash), and working in a record store.  Dr Loomis, meanwhile, has turned into a total villain, only concerned about the sales of the new book he’s written about Michael.  This is an absolutely terrible way to treat a classic character and is the aspect I most hate about this film.  Loomis is convinced Michael is dead, which is completely out of character.

We get more hallucination stuff with the woman in white, who on closer inspection turns out to be Deborah Myers.

Michael shows up in a field in the middle of the night.  A farmer, farm worker and farmer’s daughter confront him, and the worker beats him up.  Naturally, they’re soon killed for their trouble.

Laurie and the Bracketts are eating pizza, which is juxtaposed with Michael eating the farmer’s dog.  Ew.  It’s almost enough to put you off pizza.  Almost.

The woman in white scenes are very pretty and artistic, with lots of floaty black ‘n’ white imagery, but also very nonsensical.  Laurie’s mind seems to be being taken over by Michael (shades of Jamie in Halloween 5), as she’s now dreaming about the woman too.

We go back to the ‘Rabbit in Red’ strip joint from the first film.  Maybe Michael’s just drawn to where his mother used to work, or maybe it was just an excuse for the completely unnecessary chase scene with a naked stripper that we get here.

Sheriff Brackett reads Loomis’ incendiary book, and panics, calling Annie to try and find Laurie before she can read it.  Meanwhile, Loomis is doing a book signing, which is incredibly awkward, especially when Lynda’s dad shows up, trying to kill Loomis for causing his daughter’s death.

Laurie, of course, ends up reading the book.  It really sets her off, due to finding out about having been Angel Myers, and that Brackett knew about it.  She doesn’t want to speak to Annie, and goes to find her record store colleagues instead.

Loomis is now going on talk shows.  This whole thing is incredibly uncomfortable.

Laurie wants to go out and get drunk to forget things, so she and her two record store friends, Mya and Harley, get dolled up in Rocky Horror outfits and head out to a Hallowe’en party.  The band at the party has strippers on stage, which reminds me of some very bad gigs I’ve attended.

Harley goes off to sleep with some guy in his trailer, and the guy says ‘I’ll be right back’ about ten times!   This is really hitting the viewer over the head with Scream‘s Rule 3, which must have been deliberate.  Either way, it takes you right out of the story.  Both characters are unsurprisingly soon killed.

A drunk Laurie starts freaking out and hallucinating the woman in white.  Mya takes her back home.

The cop that Brackett has sent to keep an eye on Annie is a classic Haddonfield incompetent cop, and so Michael takes him out easily.  He then finally kills Annie…seemingly.  Laurie and Mya arrive at the Bracketts’, and Mya gets killed while calling 911, though the call does go through (why has Michael stopped taking out phone lines in this storyline?).

Annie is still alive!  How?  Does she have some small amount of ‘final girl’ power left over from Danielle Harris’ previous role as Jamie Lloyd?  Anyway, she finally dies in Laurie’s arms, and Laurie has to run, as Michael is still around.  After they’ve left, the 911 responders show up slightly too late, and Brackett finds Annie’s body.

Laurie nearly gets rescued by some guy in a car, but Michael kills the rescuer and carries the unconscious Laurie away.  He holes up with her in a hut nearby, and Laurie’s hallucinations of the woman in white become super sinister, with the woman forcing her to call her ‘Mommy’ and generally being really creepy.

Loomis sees a TV report about Michael having taken Laurie hostage, shows up at the location, and enters the hut despite Brackett telling him to leave.  ‘I owe you this, Sheriff,’ he says as he goes in, so I guess this is supposed to be him redeeming himself.  Inside the hut, Michael kills Loomis, enabling the police to get a shot at him through the window.  Laurie is freed from the hallucinations as a result.

Michael is still alive, but doesn’t kill Laurie.  She stabs him repeatedly instead, then comes out of the hut in her Rocky Horror Magenta outfit and Michael’s Shatner mask, which is a nice creepy image.

In contrast to the unclear ending of the previous film, Laurie has definitely gone mad at the end of this one – she’s shown to be in a white hospital room, smiling like Norman Bates and still having hallucinations of the woman in white, along with a white horse.

I’m glad that’s over, and I’m really looking forward to seeing John Carpenter’s return to the series this weekend.

Something old and monochrome tomorrow!

Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) is another film I’ve never seen, although I’ve been meaning to at some point for the whole eleven years since it came out.  I’ve always been a little apprehensive about it, because I hate remakes (and 21st century horror films have pretty much ALL been remakes, which is another reason to hate this century), but this one has always been described by its creators as a ‘reimagining’ of the story, so I’ve finally bought the DVD and am giving it a go.

Apparently this is the ‘Uncut’ version – I’ve no idea how it differs from the theatrical release.

There’s a caption at the start of the film with a quotation from Dr Loomis.  It’s not a line of dialogue from previous films, and it doesn’t appear in this one, so I’ve no idea what that’s about.

We open on a kid in a mask picking up a rat.  This is Michael Myers, and we’re about to get a whole half film of backstory about his childhood.  His family are absolutely godawful, with his mother Deborah (played by Rob Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) and stepfather Ronnie constantly screaming and swearing at each other, and the stepfather perving on oldest child Judith.  I’m not sure what year this is meant to be, but I don’t think it’s the original 1963 setting – the fashions are all wrong.  It looks more ’70s to me.

Michael turns out to be killing his ‘pet’ rats.  At school, he runs into some bullies in the toilets, who mock him for his sister and mother being whores and show him a ‘Rabbit in Red’ flyer for the strip night where his mother works – this is a nice callback to Nurse Whittington’s ‘Rabbit in Red’ matches in the original film.

The school headmaster, who has found evidence that Michael is killing cats and dogs, calls in Dr Loomis, now played by Malcolm McDowell.  Is it standard for a school to have the power to call in a psychiatrist?  It’s a bit late for the bully with the flyer, though, ’cause Michael beats him to death after school.

Judith is asked to take Michael trick-or-treating by her mother, but once Deborah’s gone out to work, Judith tells Michael to go by himself and stays home to have sex with her boyfriend Steve instead.

Juxtaposed against unnecessary scenes of Deborah stripping at the club, Michael kills Ronnie first, then Steve (again by beating him to death, which is super grim and not very Halloween).  In her room, Judith’s listening to Don’t Fear The Reaper, so it’s definitely not 1963!  Michael puts on the Shatner mask (again placing this in the ’70s) that Steve brought over, and then kills Judith.  He goes downstairs, but chooses not to kill his baby sister Angel.  When his mother gets home from work, she discovers Michael holding Angel outside the house.

At Smith’s Grove Sanatorium eleven months later, Michael is still talking like a normal boy in his sessions with Loomis, but Loomis thinks it’s a facade.  Though Deborah visits him every week, Michael’s condition is shown to deteriorate over the course of the next two years (we get a quick scene with a sanatorium worker dragging a Christmas tree through the grounds to the tune of Deck The Halls in order to show the passing of time, which feels totally out of place in a Halloween film!), with him constantly making primitive masks and speaking less and less.  Eventually, at the end of one of Deborah’s visits one day, she and Loomis go outside the room to talk about the situation, and Michael takes the opportunity to attack the nurse who’s supposed to be watching him.  Why is a sanatorium patient allowed real metal cutlery, incidentally?  These days, you’re not even allowed that in airport restaurants.

Devastated by Michael’s psychosis, Deborah shoots herself dead while watching family videos.  The videos are all colour cine-camera ones, again placing this part of the film in the late ’70s.

Fifteen years later, the older Michael has become a bit of a lumbering monster and has been mute since the nurse attack.  ‘Fifteen years…that’s nearly twice as long as my first marriage,’ says Dr Loomis to Michael.  ‘In a way you’ve become like my best friend, which shows you how f***ed up my life is.’  Loomis tells Michael that he’s leaving the sanatorium.  It turns out he’s moving on…to write a cash-in book about the case!  It’s called The Devil’s Eyes.  At his book reading, his doommongering about Michael’s black eyes is nice and Pleasence-esque, which I did appreciate.

Some super gross sanatorium workers have come into the sanatorium at night in order to rape a young female patient in Michael’s room, so Michael kills them.  I’m kind of on his side on this one.  However, he then kills a worker who’s always been nice to him, so yup, he’s confirmed evil.  When the bodies are discovered, the Smith’s Grove director calls Loomis out of retirement.

After Michael kills a trucker in a toilet stall (there doesn’t really seem to be much point to this scene at the time, but I guess it’s where he gets his overalls from in this film), we get the familiar opening bars of Mr Sandman as the action moves to Haddonfield.  If we’re going with late ’70s as the setting of the first part of the film, this part, seventeen years after Michael’s first murders, must be the early ’90s – and by and large, that works, although the female teenagers’ hair and fashions do scream 2007.

Laurie Strode is absolutely nothing like her portrayal in the original film.  She comes across as a total idiot teenager, making sex jokes in front of her mother and trying to scare Tommy Doyle rather than reassuring him about the boogeyman.  From this point on, the film loosely follows the plot of the original, although if you know Halloween as well as I do, it’s a bit of a strange watch.

When Laurie drops off the key at the Myers house, Michael is shown to be inside like in the original, although this time there’s a reason for it – apparently he left a knife and Steve’s Shatner mask in a hidden place, and has come back for them.  We then get a combination of two scenes from the original – some of the dialogue from the ‘walking home’ scene with Laurie, Annie and Lynda is combined with Laurie seeing Michael out of a classroom window, as the three characters are sitting in a classroom instead of walking home at this point.  (Annie, in this version, is played by Danielle Harris, who played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5.)

We get some more repeated dialogue when Loomis leaves Smith’s Grove, blaming the director of the facility.  It’s kind of odd and annoying because characters will start saying familiar lines, and then the words will be very slightly different.

We then get to the new version of the ‘walking home’ scene.  I genuinely can’t stand these versions of Laurie, Annie and Lynda – they’re just the most awful people and I would have utterly hated them if they’d been at my high school.  Annie’s dad, Sheriff Brackett, shows up and gives Annie a lift, thankfully cutting the scene short.

When Loomis is in the graveyard with the graveyard worker, he asks to borrow the guy’s mobile phone (‘Don’t have one.  They give you brain cancer’), which still just about works with a ’90s setting.

Lynda and her boyfriend Bob have gone to the rundown Myers house to have the sex scene that they had in the Wallace house in the original film.  This is very disorienting.  Why have they gone to the Myers house?  Was there really nowhere else in town that was suitable?  Also, how come all the boyfriend characters in this film have long hair?

We get another snatch of Don’t Fear The Reaper, with Lynda listening to it while Bob goes to get her a beer.  In this version, Bob puts the ghost sheet on with his glasses over the top BEFORE Michael grabs him.  Bob and Lynda get killed exactly the way they did in the original film, but in different locations.  We then see Michael taking Lynda’s body away to place it in an appropriate place for a find-the-body sequence later on.

Cut to Loomis in a gun shop buying a gun.  There’s really not much point to this scene.

Laurie is shown to have a very affectionate relationship with her adopted parents, who weren’t really featured in the original film other than a very quick scene with her dad.  Unfortunately, as soon as Laurie drives off with Annie to go babysitting, Michael drops by and brutally murders the parents.

At the Doyle house, Laurie is still mocking Tommy about his belief in the boogeyman.  ‘Not appropriate babysitter behaviour, Laurie,’ says Tommy, and I have to agree.

Annie decides to take Lindsey over to the Doyle house pretty much immediately in this version of the film, ’cause she’s impatient to have her boyfriend Paul come round.  In the scene with Lindsey watching horror films on TV, we see that Michael is already in the Wallace house, biding his time for some reason.

The ‘Annie trying to set Laurie up with Ben Tramer’ thing is really lame and awkward in this version.  In the original, it was a nice sweet aspect of Laurie’s character – she liked Ben, but she was too shy to go out with him.  In this version, it just comes across like Laurie’s desperate and would go out with anyone.

Sheriff Brackett takes a lot more convincing than he did in the original film, largely because he’s read Loomis’ cash-in book and thinks Loomis is just trying to get more sales by building the myth of Michael as some kind of monster.  Even though I still think the book is out of character for Loomis, I quite like this plot point!  Once Brackett is convinced, he explains to Loomis that after Deborah Myers’ suicide, he hid baby Angel from the records and had her put up for adoption, following which she was adopted by the Strodes and named Laurie.

Annie’s boyfriend Paul – who was just an offscreen character in the original, voiced by John Carpenter when on the phone with Annie and Lindsey – actually shows up onscreen and gets killed in this one.  Before that, he and Annie get some dialogue about not ripping Annie’s blouse that was originally given to Lynda and Bob in the 1978 film.  After killing Paul, Michael turns on Annie.

In this version, Laurie decides to take Lindsey back home rather than waiting for Annie to call her, and so Lindsey is with Laurie when she discovers the half-dead Annie and the fully-dead Paul in the Wallace house.  Laurie sends Lindsey back to the Doyle house and hysterically calls 911.  I guess this version of Michael isn’t as good at remembering to take the phone lines out.

Michael reappears, and Laurie escapes the house by smashing the patio door window like in the original.  She then runs out of the house, limping like she did in the original – but as she’s not actually fallen down a staircase in this version, there’s no reason for her to limp!

In the Doyle house, the police show up early but are pretty ineffectual against Michael.  Michael ignores Tommy and Lindsey and drags Laurie out of the house, carrying her unconscious body in the same way he carried Annie’s dead body in the original.  A lot of the imagery is the same, but because it’s got different story contexts, it feels jarring to a longtime fan of the series.

Sheriff Brackett finds a still-alive Annie in the Wallace house.  Meanwhile, Laurie wakes up in the Myers house, by Judith Myers’ tombstone, with Lynda’s body nearby.  This ending sequence is so dark I can’t see much of what’s going on, but there’s a lot of standard chasing and screaming.

Dr Loomis temporarily rescues Laurie by shooting Michael, but only three times, not six/seven like in the original!  Michael doesn’t stay dead, and seemingly kills Loomis.  I say ‘seemingly’ because fans of the series will know that Loomis is almost as unkillable as his former patient.

Laurie hides in the Myers house, and Michael drags Loomis inside for some reason.  Loomis is still alive but fading in and out of consciousness.  He grabs the leg of Michael as he goes past, but Michael’s got one job – he goes after Laurie.

After more chasing and screaming – I’m sure it’s supposed to be tense but I really don’t care about this version of Laurie Strode – Michael pulls Laurie over the balcony before she can shoot him with Loomis’ gun.  She wakes up in the garden, on top of the unconscious Michael, and tries to shoot him point-blank in the head.  One, two, three shots fail, because the barrel slots are empty.  Was this the point of the gun scene earlier, so that we know how many bullets are supposed to be in the barrel?  Anyway, the fourth one has a bullet in it, the gun fires into Michael’s head, Laurie starts screaming and screaming, and the credits roll, with another reprise of Mr Sandman over them.

Things that are not clear at the end of this film:

1. Is Annie alive?  She was last time we saw her, which is kind of irritating, because she was killed outright in the original film and there’s no reason for Michael not to have finished the job other than the fact she’s played by a series stalwart here.
2. Is Loomis alive?  He’d just slipped into unconsciousness again last time we saw him.
3. Has Laurie gone mad?  That ending was very Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with all the screaming.

Thankfully, tomorrow we’ll be watching Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, so hopefully we’ll get some answers to these questions!

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.

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 quick break from Halloween tomorrow!

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.

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.

Another Halloween film tomorrow!

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.

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!

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

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!