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The Destruction Of The Halloween Universe/Canon

Started by Malcy, October 06, 2018, 01:00:20 AM

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New Jack

Phew. Andrew Jupin justified, this is good

AvClub is a load of fucking advert-packed shit that's insufferable. Who knew?

cliggg

There were 2 very very rude people (isn't there always?) talking nonstop in the screening I went to, they eventually left as they got offended at being told to shut up so many times. If everyone there behaved like a decent human being I don't think it would change my opinion of this as boring. It would have been entertaining if he wore that Nicolas Cage mask.

colacentral

This is not a good film. It's at least worse than Halloween 2, maybe worse than every other sequel.

It's flat and tensionless, often not even feeling like a horror film. Just having a maniac killing dozens of people doesn't make it a horror film, otherwise Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men would be horror films, and I actually think those were scarier, and certainly more tense.

It did itself no favours by opening with the podcasters and spending so much time with them. The use of podcasting seems so unnecessarily zeitgesty in the way that webcams and reality tv were used in Resurrection. And the bloke reminded me of Elaine's boyfriend from London in Seinfeld, same voice, clothes, haircut. Cliche American idea of an English person. Awful character.

And that was the biggest issue - too many characters, and almost all bad. It was like the pilot of a HBO series with how many characters there were in this, and several of them disappeared after a bit. Where did the boyfriend go? Or the black cop in the cowboy hat? Why did a new pair of comic relief cops have to appear doing a Pulp Fiction routine about Korean sandwiches right at the end of the film?

The abundance of characters and even extras is the biggest reason there's no tension. Look at how in the original the streets are deserted; you never see any of the girls' families; that one woman behind the curtain turns off the light and leaves Laurie on the street, and you don't get a sense of anyone being in any of the other houses. That's eerie. It's a dead town.

Compare that to this film where there's a Halloween fiesta going on in the streets and there's a big dance and multiple people around at all times. At one point the grand daughter escapes after Michael kills the fat lad and gets comforted by a family of people and several police officers. There's nothing spooky or dangerous about that.

The scariest moments in the original are when nothing happens: Michael stood in the distance, seen through a foggy window, either staring or carrying the dead body around the side of the house with no scary music to tell you how to feel; or the one girl walking outside to do the laundry and getting stuck in the window. This film had none of that.

And the bit towards the end with the zooms into a load of mannequin heads was laughable, like a parody. This is not a good film. It Follows, which got panned by this forum, is much closer in spirit to what a Halloween film should be.

Bad Ambassador


colacentral

What half was that? The dull family drama intercut with dull podcasting subplot half? You can't be suggesting that the annoying characters having breakfast and talking bollocks in school constitutes suspense? When the same things happened in the original, Michael Myers is either constantly in the background or the cinematography gives you the impression he could be (long, wide empty streets etc). One of my favourite bits is when he passes by in a car in the background, completely out of focus, and the film makes no attempt to bring your attention to it. That's creepy.

I noted this film's attempt to mimic those parts at one point with Michael stood behind a tree in the graveyard and it didn't work at all. You can't just cut to a shot of a bloke stood behind a tree and expect it to have the same impact when the surrounding film has no suspense, not helped by it taking place during a scene with the podcasters.

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on October 08, 2018, 11:29:00 AM
The deaths are so much more gruesome, purely because that's what other movies were doing [...] He isn't a mysterious inhuman force, he's just a nutter [...]The problem is it's saddled with the dull backstory and gory conventions

You could be reviewing the new one here.

colacentral

This review better articulates how I feel:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-2018

QuoteAs much I hate to say this, I'm not sure that David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and the people behind a new sequel to John Carpenter's "Halloween" really understand what made the first film a masterpiece. Their highly anticipated take on the legend of Michael Myers is admirable in its thematic relation to Carpenter's vision, but the no-nonsense, tightly-directed aspect of the influential classic just isn't a part of this one. Carpenter's movie is so tautly refined that the sometimes incompetent slackness of this one is all the more frustrating. As is the complete lack of atmosphere, another strength of the original. In that first movie, you can hear the crunch of the leaves and smell Fall in the air. This one always feels like a movie, never transporting you or offering the tactile terror of the story of The Shape. Green and McBride are playing with some interesting themes and there's a female empowerment story of trauma here that's interesting (but underdeveloped), but do you know the biggest sin of the new "Halloween"? It's just not scary. And that's one thing you could never say about the original.

What I like most about the new "Halloween" is that its message could be boiled down to something as simple as "Don't Fuck Around with Evil." Don't try and study it, or understand it, or do a podcast about it, or whatever—just kill it. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) learned this lesson the hard way the night she survived an attack by Michael Myers, who has been incarcerated for the 40 years since (this movie pretends all of the sequels never happened, even number two, and even has a character make fun of the stories about Michael being Laurie's brother and things like "revenge" and "curses" in a way that comes off as snarky more than clever). Laurie has lived as her own kind of prisoner since that night, completely terrified of the day Michael would come home, basically becoming a doomsday prepper, turning her home into a heavily armed bunker. She also obsessively taught her daughter (Judy Greer) how to fend off the ultimate attacker, so much so that she's nearly estranged from her.

"Halloween" opens with a pair of podcasters going to meet Michael and Laurie for a piece they're doing, allowing for a lot of the last paragraph's "what have they been up to" exposition. Michael has been completely silent for four decades, never saying a word, but the podcasters think it a good idea to bring him his mask on the day of the interview, meaning they (and it) will be nearby when Mike later escapes and beats them to death. As he makes his way back to Haddonfeld on Halloween, a dozen or so victims stand in his way, including Laurie's granddaughter and some of her teenage friends, some hapless cops, and a few other locals. There's an excellently staged sequence as Michael's killing spree starts and Green's camera stays mostly outside of homes, watching the icon go about his work through windows.

And yet even this moment feels almost too precious. Green makes a number of explicit references to Carpenter's film with dialogue and even shots, but there's a difference between referencing something and actually incorporating it into a new vision. The former is just an echo, and that's often what I felt watching "Halloween"—the echo of the original is loud, but that's ultimately hollow compared to sequels that truly build on what came before instead of just expressing how much they love it.

Worst of all, Green bungles the ending. I would never spoil it, but you might imagine that an evening massacre that its central characters have been anticipating for four decades has to really stick the landing. At its best, "Halloween" is about a woman dealing with trauma for more than half her life, and only able to exorcise her demon when she faces him again. That sets up a great deal of pressure on the closing scenes, and—other than one nice twist—"Halloween" just doesn't deliver when it needs to most of all.

I walked into "Halloween" wanting to feel the magic of the original again in some form. Carpenter's film is one of my favorite films of all time. And David Gordon Green and Danny McBride are clearly smart guys, bringing a higher pedigree than nearly any other horror sequel, allowing for optimism. And there are, of course, elements that display Green's craftsmanship more than, say, Dwight H. Little (director of "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers"). I've heard a number of people say that it's the best "Halloween" sequel, to which one almost has to laugh at the low height of that bar. And shouldn't we expect more from a project this high profile than "better than H20?" Especially when the answer to that question is "just barely."

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: colacentral on October 21, 2018, 12:11:57 AM
This is not a good film. It's at least worse than Halloween 2, maybe worse than every other sequel.

And that's the part where you lose people.

colacentral

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on October 21, 2018, 02:43:36 AM
I think you missed half the film.

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on October 21, 2018, 04:47:20 PM
And that's the part where you lose people.

Some good rebuttals here.

It fails to even feel like a horror film, as I said. In that sense, I almost would prefer a schlocky B-movie slasher sequel over a film which has pretensions to be more and falls flat on its face. That's what I mean by it being worse than the other sequels. There are shades of Rob Zombie, both in how it demystifies the character, and in the way its brutality works to undermine the tension.

New Jack

I'm struggling to get myself excited for this after seeing the word 'podcasters'

SavageHedgehog

I wouldn't be too concerned; loathsome characters but we only know they're podcasters from one brief line. Would have assumed them as journalists if that had been cut.

On the whole I liked it quite a bit. A few moments were closer to generic sequel territory than I was expecting (it even briefly threatens and thankfully drops a subplot which could have been almost as silly as the thorn cult) but I did feel it made Myers genuinely creepy again and Curtis is as good as you'd hope. If not quite the Rocky Balboa or Logan of slashers it's much closer to that than the Superman Returns.

Clive Langham

I haven't seen the film yet, but from reading about it it seems to make a bit of a meal of how traumatised Laurie is. Obviously in the real world people do get traumatised by events, and that goes on to colour their lives, but is it really believable that something that happened forty years ago should have affected her so deeply that it's ruined her relationship with everyone she knows and caused her to spend four decades obsessively training herself and preparing for Myers' inevitable return?

Only five people actually die in the original Halloween (and two dogs). Not to sound heartless but that's far fewer than die in the average school shooting.

In H20 Laurie is depicted as a PTSD-afflicted high-functioning alcoholic, but that film is a sequel to Halloween II, in which an additional ten people get iced. Also Myers is her brother, which is an additional reason for her to be terrified he'll bother to track her down. I can definitely understand someone being incredibly traumatised by an attack that happened, and then happened AGAIN, that lead to fifteen deaths, and was done by her brother.

But in the new film she seems twice as traumatised as she was in H20, despite the fact that in this timeline Myers is just some anonymous loony who attacked her decades ago when she was a teenager, killed five people, and has been dormant ever since (and is now an elderly man.)

Obviously I'm glad to say that nobody I know has ever been murdered by a masked killer,, but...I don't know, it just seems that they're making a bit too much of it.

But like I see, I haven't seen it. Can anyone who has seen it comment?



colacentral

Sorry to keep posting but I keep thinking of issues I have with this and how it compares to the original and I need to get it out somehow. I'm rambling a bit.

I feel that this film gets the portrayal of Michael Myers and the world of the original wrong in a few ways, and the way they use the mask is emblematic of that.

The original hinges on the power of Michael's POV, what's inside his head (or what's not inside it), how the mask transforms him. It opens with his POV, just before picking up his first mask. You only see his face twice, and his adult face once, briefly. Importantly that adult face is seen towards the end of the film, when you've become used to seeing him as an otherworldly figure, and it's a shock.

He scrambles to get his mask back on at that point because it dehumanises him: there's a suggestion that it gives him power, or he believes it does, like it's channeling that boogey man the kids keep talking about. What's more is that he knows the mask is scary - he's trying to scare people throughout the film. He makes threatening phone calls, he stares at people from a distance, he gets in that ghost costume at one point, and he creates a house of horrors with the dead bodies. You could maybe infer that he loves Halloween night for that reason: he takes the excitement of creating fear too far, maybe.

The other thing with the mask is that when you see his face it's completely ordinary, and that's scary too: like most real life serial killers, his appearance is of a normal guy. Throughout the film the idea is toyed with that he may be supernatural in some way, rising from the dead and disappearing etc, but the reveal of the face casts doubt on that. Maybe he's desperate to get the mask back on because it gives him that aura. But when the film ends, and he seemingly survives being shot six times out of the window, that push and pull of "is he otherworldly or just a man?" is paid off as it seems to suggest the former.

All this to say that right off the bat I feel that this new film loses all of that. You see far too much of Michael's face too early, so that by the time he gets the mask he isn't otherworldy at all - we've seen him go on a rampage killing several people by that point and had a good look at him. There's no mystery, he's not a ghost or a shape, he's a nutter in a mask.

And the portrayal of his body and face isn't the fairly ordinary guy of the original - it's a Jason Vorhees hulking monster. He's noticeably taller than the original with a huge build, and the camera makes sure to give you a good view of his scars. They want to make the man under the mask a monster, like Rob Zombie did, which sucks the magic out of the character.

I think a common theme of my complaints is that they haven't followed the creed of the original that less is more. The original, like Alien, is best in the first half before the action begins. Every bit of tension is wrung from not much happening. Characters are made to feel vulnerable as they walk through streets and houses with space and silence around them, until that tension becomes unbearable. Maybe the new film thinks it's doing that with how slow it starts, but it has no atmosphere, and ruins momentum by cutting between so many groups of generic characters. The original stays with two small groups of characters who intersect, so for as shallow as their characters are, you at least stay with them long enough to invest in them.

I even feel with this new one that Carpenter's score is misused, going too big too soon, while the quieter pieces from the original barely get a look in. That's not a criticism of the music, just where the different pieces come in and what effect that has.

SavageHedgehog

Quote from: Clive Langham on October 21, 2018, 06:19:03 PM
But like I see, I haven't seen it. Can anyone who has seen it comment?

Well in the real world there's no set rule for how people will react to trauma or tragedy, and in this film they do make it clear that she's certainly tried to live a normal life over the last 40 years.

Bad Ambassador

I think one of the film's few flaws is the lack of a subtitle.

Halloween: The _______ of Michael Myers. Any suggestions?

colacentral

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on October 22, 2018, 04:46:58 PM
I think one of the film's few flaws is the lack of a subtitle.

Halloween: The _______ of Michael Myers. Any suggestions?

Halloween: The "Force Awakens" of Michael Myers Films

Bad Ambassador

Quote from: colacentral on October 22, 2018, 05:14:20 PM
Halloween: The "Force Awakens" of Michael Myers Films

I'm not sure you understood the rules.

Avril Lavigne

Quote from: Bad Ambassador on October 22, 2018, 04:46:58 PM
I think one of the film's few flaws is the lack of a subtitle.

Halloween: The _______ of Michael Myers. Any suggestions?

New Adventures


New Jack



Replies From View

Halloween (2018):  The Pink Panther of Michael Myers

Halloween (2021):  The Shot in the Dark of Michael Myers

New Jack

Halloween: The Edgy, Post-Austin Powers Reboot of Michael Myers

The next will be a soft-boiled reboot simply called "Michael".


Golden E. Pump

It needs a musical sequel.

Michael McDonald's Halloween, featuring the classics:

Ja Mo B There (Breathing Heavily in Your Closet)
I Keep Forgettin' (How Many Sequels There Are)
Sweet Freedom (From a Psychiatric Hospital)

And of course,

What a Corpse Believes featuring Kenny Loggins and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The Dead-Eyed Soul experience, coming to theatres everywhere this Halloween.

Quote from: colacentral on October 21, 2018, 12:11:57 AM
the podcasters

Just reading these two words has ensured I will never, ever watch this film.

lipsink

Quote from: thecuriousorange on October 23, 2018, 12:55:53 PM
The next will be a soft-boiled reboot simply called "Michael".

Maybe they'll go the Logan route and have one called 'Myers'. He passes on the torch to a new young crazy on the block.

New Jack

Quote from: ErnestTakadichi on October 23, 2018, 04:26:53 PM
Just reading these two words has ensured I will never, ever watch this film.

See, I was thinking that, and posted as such a few days ago, then I realised half the fun of films like this is seeing people get murdered violently

And do I want to see podcasters getting murdered violently? Well, yes. Yes I do.

Replies From View


Custard

Gonna go see this next Friday, but it's disheartening to read some of the reviews it's getting. After rewatching the perfect original today, I'm really up for a decent sequel. Bit sad to hear this might not be it

But the original. Man oh man. Still a belter

Might rewatch III again soon, as although that has cock-all to do with the first film, it's still a lotta fun. Glad it's so loved on here. We know the score