TR reviews horror franchises: "Halloween"

[BoilerRoomBrawler]

Apr 10, 2008 12:24:25 GMT -5 hollywood said:

Might I ask how? I actually read previous scripts that were considered, and the one they went with was better by leaps and bounds.

Once again, I like FvJ.

It's the only "Vs" flick worth watching from this decade.

I still feel like it could have realized more potential than it did; It gets a "B" for effort.

It had a great premise: Freddy and Jason bring each other back, but turn on each other, kinda like Rated RKO actually.

It would have made for a better straight up slasher flick instead of one with a gimmick.

As far as previous scripts go... Freddy in boxing gear (The less said the better).

But this is probably a discussion for another thread.

Thomas Rigby, you know what to do!

[Lick Ness Monster]

Just to throw my own hat into the F vs J debate - I too read some of the earlier scripts for the project, and the one they went with was EASILY the absolute best way they could've done an F vs J movie. The "Freddy vs Jason" that was shot actually took good care to point out that both characters were evil, but it decided to have Jason win due to the fact that Jason is the lesser of two evils. Jason has a semi-tragic background story, while Freddy totally chose his own path. Still, Jason's obviously no angel, and one of the scripts that I read painted Jason as an extremely sympathetic character, to the point that it ended with a slow fade-in shot full of tender, tinkly music on eight-year-old Jason's big, happy smiling face.

Egads, that was awful.

I actually gave "F vs J" three-and-a-half stars in the "Nightmare" review thread. I liked it a great deal.

Anyway...

I'm just now in the formative stages in my mind of writing reviews of the remaining movies in this series. The next one won't be quite SO bad, but the last three...yikes.

[BoilerRoomBrawler]

Oh, there's a Nightmare review thread already, eh?

I'll be checking it out.

[Lick Ness Monster]

Apr 10, 2008 15:42:25 GMT -5 BoilerRoomBrawler said:

Oh, there's a Nightmare review thread already, eh?

I'll be checking it out.

Right here: www.officialfan.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=ota2007&action=display&thread=70550

[Lick Ness Monster]

HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS
1989
Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard

And here we are. Released one short year after the phenomenal success of "Halloween 4" (it had grossed more than four times its budget), "Halloween 5" shows the signs of a tired franchise - stupid stock characters, sloppy writing, and a premise seriously straining credibility on more than one occasion.
I'll start with the latter problem - credibility. This film opens with Michael's death at the end of Part 4 - Bonnie and Clyde-style gunfight massacre, with Michael falling into a mine shaft. So how is he resurrected? A crazy old hermit who just happens to live nearby picks him up and brings him back to his shanty. How's that for convenient? I realize these movies are not high art, but "Halloween", up until this point, was a series a little more grounded in reality than, say, "Friday the 13th." His resurrection in this movie really pushed it.
It's also with this entry that the writers - and even in the case of this movie, the director, Dominique Othenin-Girard - would begin to take the whole story into an entirely new, and entirely stupid, direction. Apparently the premise of an unstoppable badass as a villain was just not imaginative enough, so here we are given the first glimpses of what has come to be known as the "Thorn curse."
A little plot description to move things along: Michael lays in a coma in said hermit's shanty (seriously, why would the guy even keep a lifeless corpse around?) for an entire calendar year, reawakening on October 30th one year later. Killing the hermit, Michael uses his built-in family radar to relocate his family.
If you'll recall, the ending of "Halloween 4" was actually quite a nice little "Twilight Zone" style twist, with Jamie (Danielle Harris), Michael's niece, the nice, sweet little protagonist of the story having apparently just murdered her stepmother in cold blood. Jamie has not spoken a word since that night - her stepmother did not die as a result of the attack, and in an extended (read: never-ending) sequence at the top of the movie, Jamie has nightmares from Michael's point of view. The ever-so-subtle message is that now Jamie shares a telepathic link with Michael. I'm telling you, this movie loves being convenient.
Sam Loomis is also still in the picture, and sees Jamie's newfound talents as a means to take his nemesis down for good. And this all leads up to some thrown-together costume party scenes (with one party made up of Jamie and her friends, and the other being the requisite batch of horny teens required to pull this flick's body count just above the government minimum), with one of them being attended by Tina (Wendy Kaplan), a friend of Jamie's sister. By the way, this Tina character - worst acting ever. Seriously, her scenes are more grating than Quint's fingernails on the chalkboard.
What else am I missing? Oh yeah - the new chess pieces. This movie introduced all sorts of Wicca-inspired nonsense into this film's mythology. In periodic doses, we see a man dressed all in black following Michael on his mission to Jamie - all we see are his steel-toed boots, and a strange symbol on his hand. During this film's climax, we also see that Michael has the same symbol on his hand. It's all meant to be strangely metaphysical and fascinating, but as the writers and director have both admitted that they really had no clue where they were going to go with these new developments in the story, it just comes across like the "X-Files" mythology or the new "Star Wars" trilogy - it wasn't planned out at all, and thus it just feels really lazy, and especially anticlimactic when we see the next film in the series.
OK - the real, main issue I have with this film. The treatment of Danielle Harris' character in this movie is just downright insane. For all that I bitched about it in the previous review, it wasn't a bad movie - I liked it (though nowhere near as much as the first two films), and thought it had a fascinating ending. Both Donald Pleasence and Moustapha Akkad felt that the series should now revolve around this character - a sort of "passing of the torch" from Michael to Jamie, as it were, with this seemingly innocent character turning completely, utterly evil in one fell swoop. But director Othenin-Girard had other ideas - and thus, we get the phenomenally talented Harris as a mute for the duration of the movie. Turning Jamie into just another heroine-in-duress completely halts the momentum that the story was taking in H4 - all the stupid mysticism in the form of the man in black and the symbols is just the icing on the cake.
And DON'T even get me started on the single two worst comic relief chracters in the history of horror - the ineffectual cops who take part in at least six different nonsensical scenes, complete with (and I kid you not) clowny, rimshot-style music bumps for all their stupid little slapstick jokes. At least I was happy when Michael killed them.
And ONE MORE thing - Loomis believes that Michael wants to finish his mission at his own home, and thus decides to confront Michael at the aforementioned Myers household. This leads to a scene that furthers the mystical mythology, as Jamie appeals to Michael's MORE TENDER SIDE (wtf??) by calling him "Uncle" - leading to Michael removing his mask and honest-to-God CRYING. MICHAEL CRYING!!?? The same guy who, as Sam Loomis put it, is "absolutely and totally evil...with the devil's eyes."? It was at this moment that the writers just totally destroyed the Myers character - something that would only continue for the next three films.
Absolutely rushed, sloppily put together, and the product of at least four different creative inputs led to one mess of a movie that is only intermittently scary.
Sadly, it would get even worse.

* 1/2

[Jiren]

Are you doing the producers cut of "Halloween 6" because that's almost brand new flick

Plus i remember when i was doing a Review of the Halloween series

[Lick Ness Monster]

Apr 10, 2008 19:39:41 GMT -5 Jiren said:

Are you doing the producers cut of "Halloween 6" because that's almost brand new flick

Plus i remember when i was doing a Review of the Halloween series

No - haven't seen it.

And you know what that means.

[plushtar]

And now we jump the shark. Although the series was already getting worn down by the minute, the Man in Black could have turned into something better. I see more sharks on the way.

[Lick Ness Monster]

HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS
1995
Director: Joe Chappelle

One would think that, after all of the plot cogs introduced in the fourth and fifth installments of this series (the strange symbols on Michael's hand, the man in black, Michael crying, etc.) that they had something big, grand, and genuinely climactic for a finale to the entire storyline.
And man, would you ever be wrong.
"Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers" was unleashed on the public in 1995, a full six years after "Halloween 5." While I'm dead certain that the audience that went and saw this film in theaters was, by and large, definitely NOT the same people that saw the 1989 film, this is very much a direct sequel to Part 5. So what does this mean for me? As much as it pains me, it means that I must actually attempt to explain the plot, so bear with me. (takes deep breath)
OK, so the mysterious man in black kidnapped Jamie (who is not played by Danielle Harris in this one), had her impregnated, and in the film's beginning we see Michael Myers as some sort of guard in a strange facility. Jamie gives birth, at which point a midwife smuggles the baby out of the facility but is then immediately killed by Myers, who then returns to Haddonfield, where a new family has moved into the Strode residence - distant relatives of Mike. And you know what that means...
Paul Rudd makes his major film debut in this movie as well. Remember Tommy Doyle, the young tyke who Jamie Lee Curtis babysat in the first film? Yeah, it's him, all grown up, and like Sam Loomis, he's grown up completely obsessed with Michael. This character is actually the best thing about the film - he's well played by Rudd, showing flashes of what he would eventually become (I'm a big fan of the guy, as you can tell - his acting ability and comic timing are awesome).
The middle of the film? Michael comes back to Haddonfield in search of Jamie's baby, people start dying, etc. etc. And it's here where I start having some serious issues...
First of all, the supporting cast in this movie sucks. I confess - I did not rewatch this film (nor did I with the remaining two movies in this franchise, for that matter) before reviewing it, as I usually do. I'm having trouble with names - but this new Strode family? Very bland and cookie-cutter.
Secondly, this movie manages the impossible task of turning SAM LOOMIS boring. Yes, the Sam Loomis, the awesomely-performed, awesomely-defined Michael slayer is boring in this film. And for all of its faults, Halloween 5 STILL got one thing right, making Loomis a vital part of the plot. In this movie, he's window dressing at best, not really factoring into the movie's plot at all.
Indeed, it is Rudd's character who sets the plot in motion. See, he's researched the hell out of this thing called the "Curse of the Thorn" and has deduced what really motivates Michael, and what possessed him to go nuts for no apparent reason all those years ago. Yes, folks, it wasn't Michael's fault - it was all due to all of this druidic nonsense and some strange celtic ritual.
Alright, six movies have been leading to this point - this is the movie that finally gives us Michael's motivations, and the reveal is that they really aren't his at all (how much this betrays the awesome spirit of the first two movies - which were all about how awesomely evil MICHAEL was, I won't even elaborate on). Six movies of carnage and killing, and Michael is just someone's pawn in a religious ritual. So, you want to know the big payoff? You want to know who the all-knowing, almighty evil SOB of the "Halloween" series truly is?
Well, I'll tell you. It's Doctor Wynn.
Who?
Yeah - a character who is in the first film for maybe five minutes is in reality a man obsessed with studying the limits of evil, and the large facility that Jamie gave birth in is in reality hidden underneath the bowels of Smith's Grove Sanitarium, leading us to our big explosive climax. Said climax is also a total washout, ending with Michael getting beaten by Rudd with a few simple thuds to the face and back.
Again - really? Doctor Wynn? That's the best Daniel Farrands could come up with?
This is a movie that takes every available shortcut and backdoor in an attempt to wrap up the amazingly convoluted plot that had developed in Parts 4 and 5. It fails on every level - not to mention that the one thing that made the first two entries in this series so awesome is taken away. Michael Myers is absolute, total human evil - and the idea is that THAT was what made him invincible. And somewhere along the line, the screenwriters felt that there must be some other explanation - and also somewhere along the line Moustapha Akkad lost touch of the fans that made him a very rich man and greenlit these abominations, of which this was meant to be the final one at the time of its release. Sadly, this was also Pleasence's last film.
On the plus side, Brother Cane's "And Fools Shine On" is a rockin' song.

*

[Lick Ness Monster]

Please tell me there are others who were as angered as I am by the Thorn story - which took away Michael's identity and everything that made him scary in the first place.

I know Doctor Doom is. ;D

[Big DSR Energy]

I honestly didn't care enough about the Thorn story to be angered by it. I only saw Halloween 6 for Paul Rudd, who I had already seen in Clueless (even though that movie came out after H6). Anyway, yes, Paul Rudd is awesome. Haven't seen Halloween 6 in years, though. I may rewatch it later...even though it blows.

[Captain Wonderful]

I think the Thorn angle is kind of ass. (This didn't stop me from drawing the Thorn symbol on my wrist at the time.) Like someone said, it does pretty much take away what made him scary. Now there's this crazy cult and a curse that predisposes him to murdering his family...meh. You know what's scary? A guy who kills just because he f***ing wants to. (This reminds me: f*** Rob Zombie's remake in every single way possible with the exception of Danielle Harris being topless.) Like, that moment in part 5 where he takes his mask off for Jamie and he's crying. That's just the total pussification of the entire character; like he's afflicted with this curse he doesn't want and can't escape. Bring back the guy who is just. Smurfing. Evil.

I'm not "angered" by the Thorn angle like I am about some other things in movies. It just failed (especially the passing of the curse to Dr. Loomis, which failed so epically they decided to just kill him instead), and that's what I love about H20; it completely erases parts 4-6 from the storyline. And I do like the movies, on the whole (HA HA! "On the whole"), I think they're decent slashers, especially part 5. That greaser guy gets a random, haggard garden tool to the face and Loomis goes apeshit and beats Michael down with a log. Good times.

[BoilerRoomBrawler]

You know what else is stupid as hell?

On the VHS copy I have of H5 (yeah I know) it says that "Michael is finally unmasked!"

First of all, he was shrouded in darkness ala film noir so you couldn't see his face anyway, and secondly he already was de-masked in the first movie!

What's so great about him being de-masked in the first movie is that everyone expects a grotesque face to be peeking out of those eyeholes when it's just a normal looking guy, which also explains why Tommy was not freaked out by him when he bumped into him at school.

I could swear that there was some connection made between H3, H5, and H6, but I cannot remember where I read it.

[Bobeddy]

Apr 11, 2008 14:32:46 GMT -5 BoilerRoomBrawler said:

I could swear that there was some connection made between H3, H5, and H6, but I cannot remember where I read it.

I think I read somewhere that the cult in Halloween 3 was supposed to be the Thorn cult from 5 and 6.
It could've just been a fan theory though.

[Maidpool w/ Cleaning Action]

Apr 11, 2008 0:58:33 GMT -5 Lick Ness Monster said:

Please tell me there are others who were as angered as I am by the Thorn story - which took away Michael's identity and everything that made him scary in the first place.

I know Doctor Doom is. ;D

I'm not angered by it so much, but I do find it incredible stupid.

[Welfare Willis]

I wonder if TR will provide a review for Halloween 6 producers cut. Which I feel is slightly better then the original halloween 6.

[Big DSR Energy]

TR already said he didn't see the Producer's Cut, I think, a page back. I wish I had gotten my hands on the bootleg when I was at Wizard World Philly a few years back. I'd like to see it, myself.

Also, I want you to know that Lucio Fulci is my filmmaker idol.

[Maidpool w/ Cleaning Action]

You guys know what, I've worked at a video store the last 10 years and I take my job very seriously and consider myself good at it, and I still never knew about this producers cut until I came to the boards!

[Big DSR Energy]

Apr 11, 2008 23:30:59 GMT -5 Maidpool w/ Cleaning Action said:

You guys know what, I've worked at a video store the last 10 years and I take my job very seriously and consider myself good at it, and I still never knew about this producers cut until I came to the boards!

Booyah!

[BoilerRoomBrawler]

Apr 11, 2008 14:37:58 GMT -5 Bobeddy said:

Apr 11, 2008 14:32:46 GMT -5 BoilerRoomBrawler said:

I could swear that there was some connection made between H3, H5, and H6, but I cannot remember where I read it.

I think I read somewhere that the cult in Halloween 3 was supposed to be the Thorn cult from 5 and 6.
It could've just been a fan theory though.

Yeah, that was the gist of it.

It probably was just a fan theory.

A decent one though, IIRC.