beer_good_foamy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beer_good_foamy) wrote2018-10-08 08:19 pm
beer_good_foamy) wrote2018-10-08 08:19 pm
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It's Halloweeeen!
...well, not just yet, but I just got a chance to see Halloween (2018), and I have thoughts on it and on how monster franchises and its Final Girls age. No specific spoilers, but then it's a slasher so there's only so much plot to spoil...
I'd been trying hard not to get my hopes up; like most of the classic slashers, the Halloween franchise is a complete mess - this is number 11 in a series that contains one stone masterpiece, a couple of half-decent efforts, and a bunch of truly awful wastes of videotape. (See below.)
So wisely, the new movie simply excises the whole bally lot of them; everything that happened after that scene of Donald Pleasence looking out over an empty lawn on Halloween 1978 now never happened. Instead we rejoin the original Final Girl Laurie Strode, now nearing 60 (much like Jamie Lee Curtis herself, looking very much her age) and living like a survivalist prepper out in the woods while her family try to have as little contact with the paranoid madwoman as possible. After all, it was a long time ago, it's a new day, she should just get over it, Michael Myers is safely locked away and anyway shouldn't she welcome an investigation of exactly what happened between them? In short, isn't it time for Michael Myers to be redeemed?
Three guesses how long that locked-away bit lasts. And what happens once he gets back to Haddonfield.
Halloween (which by all rights should be Halloween II, except of course there's already been two of those, and I guess The Retirement of Michael Myers doesn't have the same ooomph, so...) is far from flawless. They could easily have trimmed 10-15 minutes of characters and situations that don't contribute much. Once it gets down to business, though, it's very much a worthy sequel to a classic, and a very fitting finale to a franchise that hasn't done much to deserve one. It's a movie that runs on oak-barrel-aged anger. Seeing this after the last few weeks of news, watching JLC rack a shotgun and go on the hunt for the monster that plagued her entire life (remember, it took the real JLC years to get out of the Scream Queen corner Halloween put her in) is more than a little cathartic. The movie never tries for the sort of superficial Scream copycatting that H2O got 20 years ago, it doesn't try to humanize Michael Myers the way the Rob Zombie remakes did, instead it keeps the feel (and magnificent soundtrack) of the original but just tweaks the character's possibilities a bit. Michael Myers is still Michael Myers - or rather, he is Michael Myers again. But meanwhile, Laurie's story - bolstered by the return of JLC to horror - has gained legs of its own. The Final Girl has become the Original Bitch.
Of course, just as I write this I find out that they're already working on a sequel and possibly turning it into a trilogy. Because of course they are. You can't just let a franchise die. We love our monsters. We will pay to watch them repeat their crimes until once again, some idiot comes up with the idea of humanising them, making them just innocent victims, and brushing their actual victims aside as just cannonfodder. And you know... those movies sucked. We don't always need to repeat every single mistake of the past.
So, the scorecard:
Halloween (1978): 5/5
Halloween II (1981): 3/5
Halloween III: Season of the Witch AKA The One Without Michael Myers (1982): 3/5
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988): 2/5
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989): 1/5
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers AKA The One With Baby Paul Rudd (1995): 1/5
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998): 3/5
Halloween Resurrection AKA The One Where Busta Rhymes Roundhouse Kicks Michael Myers In The Face (2002): 1/5
Halloween (2007): 3/5
Halloween II (2009): 2/5
Halloween (2018): 4/5
I'd been trying hard not to get my hopes up; like most of the classic slashers, the Halloween franchise is a complete mess - this is number 11 in a series that contains one stone masterpiece, a couple of half-decent efforts, and a bunch of truly awful wastes of videotape. (See below.)
So wisely, the new movie simply excises the whole bally lot of them; everything that happened after that scene of Donald Pleasence looking out over an empty lawn on Halloween 1978 now never happened. Instead we rejoin the original Final Girl Laurie Strode, now nearing 60 (much like Jamie Lee Curtis herself, looking very much her age) and living like a survivalist prepper out in the woods while her family try to have as little contact with the paranoid madwoman as possible. After all, it was a long time ago, it's a new day, she should just get over it, Michael Myers is safely locked away and anyway shouldn't she welcome an investigation of exactly what happened between them? In short, isn't it time for Michael Myers to be redeemed?
Three guesses how long that locked-away bit lasts. And what happens once he gets back to Haddonfield.
Halloween (which by all rights should be Halloween II, except of course there's already been two of those, and I guess The Retirement of Michael Myers doesn't have the same ooomph, so...) is far from flawless. They could easily have trimmed 10-15 minutes of characters and situations that don't contribute much. Once it gets down to business, though, it's very much a worthy sequel to a classic, and a very fitting finale to a franchise that hasn't done much to deserve one. It's a movie that runs on oak-barrel-aged anger. Seeing this after the last few weeks of news, watching JLC rack a shotgun and go on the hunt for the monster that plagued her entire life (remember, it took the real JLC years to get out of the Scream Queen corner Halloween put her in) is more than a little cathartic. The movie never tries for the sort of superficial Scream copycatting that H2O got 20 years ago, it doesn't try to humanize Michael Myers the way the Rob Zombie remakes did, instead it keeps the feel (and magnificent soundtrack) of the original but just tweaks the character's possibilities a bit. Michael Myers is still Michael Myers - or rather, he is Michael Myers again. But meanwhile, Laurie's story - bolstered by the return of JLC to horror - has gained legs of its own. The Final Girl has become the Original Bitch.
Of course, just as I write this I find out that they're already working on a sequel and possibly turning it into a trilogy. Because of course they are. You can't just let a franchise die. We love our monsters. We will pay to watch them repeat their crimes until once again, some idiot comes up with the idea of humanising them, making them just innocent victims, and brushing their actual victims aside as just cannonfodder. And you know... those movies sucked. We don't always need to repeat every single mistake of the past.
So, the scorecard:
Halloween (1978): 5/5
Halloween II (1981): 3/5
Halloween III: Season of the Witch AKA The One Without Michael Myers (1982): 3/5
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988): 2/5
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989): 1/5
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers AKA The One With Baby Paul Rudd (1995): 1/5
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998): 3/5
Halloween Resurrection AKA The One Where Busta Rhymes Roundhouse Kicks Michael Myers In The Face (2002): 1/5
Halloween (2007): 3/5
Halloween II (2009): 2/5
Halloween (2018): 4/5