Halloween (1978, 2018)

I remember being about 14 years old in 2005 and discovering horror movies. It was just this bizarre, misfit freak show treasure trove of a genre and lit my imagination on fire. I'd never been introduced to any of them before, my parents weren't huge fans. It was my own thing, brand new, and there seemed to be an infinite well of weird, eerie, macabre shit I was finding brand new. For me, it fit like a glove.

I rented them every chance I got; classics like The Exorcist and Nightmare on Elm Street as well as random shit I'd find at Blockbuster, some of it crap and occasionally maybe something cool like Frailty. It was all blending together and I was absorbing knowledge and appreciation for 'em at a rapid pace. It was an exciting time. I remember it fondly. I'd watch them several at a time, just let the day bleed away.

Director: John Carpenter

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance

IMDb

One of the biggest discoveries around that time was the original John Carpenter Halloween film. It just blew me away for the starkness and simplicity of it. Just a guy stalking a neighborhood at night with a knife. It's not anything really more than that, and it's the scariest movie I know by my count. There's just no bullshit to it, no posturing or goofy stuff like later movies imitating it. It was just dead serious and presented unpretentiously. I liked that, even if I didn't know how to articulate it when I was a kid.

New things stand out to me every time, as they would with anything good you re-watch. This year it really struck me how creepy the voyeuristic aspects of it were, all those silent scenes of him just out of sight or just the corner of him, just breathing his weird-ass breathing under the mask, watching a girl walk around her house. How fucked is that? There's something to a fear that the person being watched doesn't even register. And it's all very mundane. This shit happens every day in some form or fashion.

But it all still holds up. It's a classic formula now, the slow build-up and then the explosion of Satanic horror and violence by the end. But it's better here than some others, mostly due to the characters. It's surprisingly enjoyable to listen to Laurie and her friends bantering. Certainly not at all just a bunch of airheaded plot-filler before the killing starts.

They're real people and the conversations are enjoyable, setting up a desire not to want these kids to die. Later on, slashers would become dime-a-dozen, made for a laugh and by people without the same attention to detail or writing quality. Amazing, the difference in quality when all you do is actively care about how your movie comes out... they barely had a budget back then, but the quality and passion shone through.

Of course it ends with the infamous cliffhanger – just Michael falling off that balcony and then when they look again, he's gone. Fucking chilling. Then all those shots of the house empty and dark with his creepy breathing over-top. Again, chilling. You'd think a huge man in a mechanic outfit and a dirty white mask, probably bleeding all over the place, wouldn't have been difficult to find, but the sequels sure made it seem like everyone on Earth just had a blind spot for the dude.

Director: David Gordon Green

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer

IMDb

**MINOR SPOILERS HERE**

Flash forward 40 years and people still like the original. That's got to be a good feeling. That people enjoy your work 40 years after the fact – it's something to aspire to. And there was even a new sequel made, disregarding all the other lame ones since the first one. They even got rid of the dumb twist that Michael was actually Laurie's sister, which was a terrible plot device that removed much of the fear from the story. Overall, it's like an annoying person was wiped away from existence and replaced with a good replicate alien, like the twist in the movie The World's End.

Now we have David Gordon Green, of weird eclectic little movies like Prince Avalanche and Joe, directing, and Jamie Lee Curtis apparently remembering the original frenzy fondly enough to re-join. Weirdly, it's titled just 'Halloween,' exactly like the first one and the 2007 remake. I guess they wanted it to be like a shell game of sorts - guess which one you're gonna get!

Now Curtis's old and grizzled but still badass – hell, if anything, her improved acting chops after a decades-long career has only made the character more compelling than she was initially. The script's a lot of pulp type stuff. Michael escapes again after a bus crash transporting him to a new prison. These prison buses really fucking suck. Laurie Strode should write her congressman and get him to do something about it. Maybe that can be the next Halloween sequel – Laurie Strode versus the endless groaning bureaucracy of government insanity.

Curtis's Laurie Strode has spent the past 40 years building a fortress-like house in the woods, complete with a barbed wire fence and Home Alone-style traps. It's not really all that realistic, but then again, I guess a movie about a senior citizen wearing a Shatner mask slaying people with a knife was never going to be some kind of true-life documentary. And seriously – Michael is fucking old in this movie. Picturing him stopping between kills to change an adult diaper or take heart meds is a good way to take the edge off if you're really creeped out by the story.

There are the two journalists – or rather, podcasters, as one of them hilariously lets slip in a very 2018 way – who are hunting down a story about Michael. I'm not sure what their aim is, as they seem to know everything already. Whenever they talk to people it just seems to be reaffirming that, yes, Michael is bad and Laurie is traumatized. There's no real point to having them here except as a ham-fisted contrivance to get Michael's mask back to him after he murders them. And yes, he kills them in a gas station, which is good because anyone who is annoying is someone we should always want murdered graphically... man, slasher movies fuck us up.

There's also Laurie's family, including a daughter who's kinda stuck up and her weird husband, and a granddaughter who seems cool. I think my favorite line comes from the daughter as she's arguing with Laurie about security – she says something like “the world's a nice, happy, peaceful place and we don't need your negativity!” Really? The world's nice, happy and peaceful? Man, I wish I lived in Laurie's daughter's strange Stepford Wives alternate reality. Clearly Laurie must have fucked something up...

It starts off slow, though it picks up speed later. I wasn't interested in the two journalists. They were seemingly just there to provide exposition and little else, and it would've behooved the film to at least try to make them a little bit endearing, at least so we wouldn't be ambivalent when they died.

But Gordon Green's got a killer sense of style and the film looks cool all the time, very epic and spooky. John Carpenter's new soundtrack is wonderfully macabre, hitting like a goddamn anvil, adding loads of suspense. Michael is still fairly imposing, which I was surprised by after so long and so many inferior movies.

There's a good amount of suspense and releasing of tension, though the film can't quite match the slow-burn eerie tension of the 1978 original. But it makes up for that in sheer gleeful brutality. It's a quick-paced thrill ride once it picks up, and Michael is perhaps even more brutal than he ever was. There's one scene where he drops a bunch of human teeth he just pulled out of someone's head on the floor to taunt a victim – it's an unusual level of personality for a guy who's usually content just to lumber along like a zombie, and not a good kind of personality. My take was that he's just that pissed off from being locked up for 40 years.

The finale is careening, fiery action-packed stuff – a survival of the fittest, tooth and nail battle of horror movie filth. Some of the time, the film beautifully and hilariously inverts the original. There's one shot where Laurie, having jumped off a balcony to escape Michael, disappears the same way he did in the first one when he's looking down for her. In another scene, she attacks him with a knife from behind the way he did to her 40 years ago. It's a bit cheesy, but come on, you're telling me that isn't fun?

The ending's basically perfect for what this script was. Quick and violent. I hope they don't make another one. Just know when to fucking end something for once.

Images copyright of their original owners; I don't own them.

Review: Damien: Omen II (1978)

Director: Don Taylor

Starring: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathon Scott-Taylor

IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077394/

I'm just going to come out and say it; I don’t really like the Omen series. Even the first one is pretty overrated. These movies aren’t the worst out there, but they’re just so played out and so trite that there’s no point in watching them more than once. The first movie had its moments, but even then it didn’t really captivate, and it was really just a tamer and dumbed down version of the other two Satanic horror bigwigs of the time, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. And the series as a whole just doesn't provide any tension or danger – we already know Damien isn’t actually going to be killed, we know there will be mysterious deaths that mostly look like accidents or suicides, and we know people will start getting suspicious by the end. So what’s the point? Maybe if the writing was better it would be okay, but if the first one can’t even keep my interest these days, the sequel sure doesn’t have a chance. This…is Damien: Omen II.

The movie opens with the credits, which are delivered over the soundtrack, which I think is farting at us the entire time. We see the character Bugenhagen from the first movie showing some newspapers from all over the world to a colleague of his. They all have the story about the US senator and his wife from the first movie dying on the front page, and even though you’d think they would put a picture of the senator and his wife there, every article only has a picture of little Damien. I don’t know, that just strikes me as strange. Bugenhagen tells his buddy that Damien is the Antichrist, and that he needs to be destroyed.

So the colleague agrees to go to this underground ruins with him so that Bugenhagen can prove what he’s saying is true. They poke around for a bit until they find a picture of a young boy surrounded by snakes and fire and other evil things painted on the wall. They…somehow know it’s Damien, even though it could just as well be any other boy, and then right when they realize it, the ground starts shaking. Even though this kind of thing probably could have happened anywhere in this volatile underground room, Bugenhagen says it’s the Antichrist at work, and they promptly get buried underneath sand and rocks because the Antichrist presumably didn’t like their acting.

Then we cut to 7 years later, where frankly the movie could have started in the first place and not lost any momentum. But I guess they really needed the extra bit of hokey mysticism. Two boys named Damien (gasp!) and Mark are leaving to go to military school, glad to be away from their crazy, mean old aunt. The family has a discussion at the table where it’s revealed that the crazy aunt hates Damien for some reason, and the rest of the family will have none of it. So later that night a big black bird gets into her room – the family has an infestation of them this time of year, I gather – and the soundtrack becomes so ridiculous that it gives her a heart attack.

After some political garble and some history lessons, we see that the Thorn cousins are initiated into the new drill sergeant’s little regime. The drill sergeant is probably intended to be menacing and strict, but really it’s more like he’s reading his lines off a cue prompter. Oh and his name is Neff. That’s…just silly. Then we see Richard Thorn, the father and brother of the senator from the original movie, meeting the journalist who he was told was going to talk to him, a woman named Joan Hart, who we were told is a professional working on a big project about archaeology. They start to talk until she reveals that Richard’s brother met with Bugenhagen for the purposes of an exorcism, and she starts talking faster and crazier with each new development, at the end reducing to nothing but screaming at him to “Believe in Christ!” Yes, this professional, well known reporter sure does have a great method of interviewing, doesn’t she? She’s so persuasive! I wonder how anyone could turn her down.

Ugh. So after some more brilliant journalism in which she pretty much just shouts at and alienates everyone who could possibly help her or listen to her, her car comes to a stop on the road and she’s killed by one crow while the soundtrack goes on a rampage again, sounding like it’d be more credible if it were composed by a cat with Down’s syndrome.

Then we switch to the winter time at home, where it’s Mark’s birthday. Damien talks to one of the politicians from earlier in the movie about initiation, and the guy tells him that Damien’s 13^th birthday will be his ‘initiation’, and his ‘time to set aside childish things and face who he is.’ Uh…maybe if this were the year 1903 it would be. But I don’t think that’s really quite how it works in the 1980s, you morons.

The next day we see everyone playing ice hockey until the oldest member of their group, the president of Thorn’s company, falls under the ice and gets pulled away by the current until he dies, thus making the other guy, who wants to set up a progressive plan to make more money, the acting president. At the military academy, we see Damien facing off with his teacher, who accuses him of not listening in class only for Damien to get the answers right to every single question. Kid, nobody likes a show off. Just sit back down and draw some more funny pictures instead.

But no, then we see Sergeant Neff pulling Damien out of class and telling him to look in the Book of Revelations in order to find out who he really is. Pfft, I hate these military academies. They always have to try and push the same old conformist beliefs on everyone! But ooh, then Damien looks in the book like he was told and finds out he’s the Antichrist! Yeah, I remember when school teachers used to guide me on my anti-Christian path to global human domination, too. Those were the days.

Oh, and can you believe that upon discovering the classic 666 sign on his head, Damien actually runs out to the sea and shouts “Why? Why me!?” Dude, I thought that was one of those clichés that was so old that nobody ever actually used it. But hey, who am I to argue with the franchise that brought us the psychic fair in Omen IV? I must not understand the complex inner workings of this brilliant story. Yeah, that’s it.

Ocean = Dramatic; it's practically a rule.

So while Damien, Mark and some other kids are taking a tour of their father’s company workshop, something goes wrong and radioactive smoke floods the room. Every kid except Damien suffers minor side effects, and the doctor reveals that Damien’s cell structure is different. So…the Antichrist has different cell structure from regular human beings, and nobody noticed that until now. Even though the kid has been living a perfectly normal and happy life, probably going to the doctor for check-ups routinely, nobody noticed anything different about his bodily makeup until now. Yeah, right. And I’m the prince of Ecuador.

The doctor dies a horrible, bloody death, and then the next day one of Richard’s friends comes to tell him of Bugenhagen’s warnings, which he mysteriously found…Richard doesn’t believe him, but he does start to admit that something seems strange. Mark is killed in the woods after a talk with Damien, a funeral is held, and Richard becomes more and more inclined to go searching for the mysterious wall with Damien’s face on it that will prove everything, which his friend also saw. Let’s see…yup, everything expected is here. We get ominous shots of Damien looking cold and unfeeling, we get a few more mysterious deaths and then we get a rushed climax where it’s revealed that the mother was working for Damien the whole time, too. She kills Richard, and then…is burned in a fire herself, because I guess she figured out that this series sucks, and didn’t want to be in the third movie. Smart move!

So that’s Omen II, and it’s just a chore to sit through. The acting is pretty mediocre, the directing is nothing special, the music is too over the top and silly, the characters are boring and the story just isn’t that great. The entire Omen series is pretty much hack work anyway, with little to offer any seasoned horror fan. I guess this isn’t a terrible movie or anything, but it’s just so unimpressive and so droll that I can’t recommend it. Moral of the story, being the Antichrist gets you chicks.

Lucky bastard.

Review: The Deer Hunter (1978)

Director: Michael Cimino

Starring: Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, Meryl Streep

IMDB Page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077416/

"One shot."

-Michael

I never really thought about the psychological ramifications of Russian Roulette before I saw The Deer Hunter. The wait once you pull the trigger – the second that lasts for an eternity – must feel agonizing. This film, focusing on three friends who get sent off to Vietnam, has this as a central theme. De Niro, Walken and Savage find themselves forced by brutish Vietcong to play Russian Roulette for sport, with their lives on the line. Even though they all escape with their lives, they find themselves traumatized and changed as they come back home.

Really, even without the Russian Roulette angle this story would be believable and tragic. That just adds cinematic flair, making for a symbolic point to draw in the viewer. This is a long, long movie, stretching out to the 3 hour mark, and worth every second of it. It starts out slow, building up the uncertainty of our main characters to go away to war, especially when they have so much going for them back at home. John Savage’s character Steven just got married, and the guys have a big community of friends that really feels like a big community of friends. I found myself completely immersed. They really don’t make movies like this anymore. Watching the guys hunting one last time before our three heroes have to go to Vietnam is just heartbreakingly good. Look at the scene where De Niro runs down the street toward the pier, tearing his clothes off in one final, defiant act, one final act of free will before the military takes him. You really get a feel for what it’s going to be like for them to leave this all behind.

The scenes in Vietnam are pretty harsh and bare-bones. It is cinematic in that hard-hitting ‘70s style, but it never feels cheapened or melodramatic. De Niro and his friends are holed up in a cage like pigs, and when they’re done playing Russian Roulette, they’re thrown out into the water. One thing I really like about this is how quickly and subtly the tone changes – after they kill the Vietcong and escape into the nearest city’s war veteran hospital, everything seems to have shades of grey. As De Niro wanders the streets, and as Walken goes to visit a prostitute, everything feels so aimless, in such a dismal way…nothing will be the same again for these men, you can tell.

Surprisingly, it is the previously cool and collected Walken, the character I least suspected, that cracks the hardest. He starts going to an underground Russian Roulette betting pool and starts obsessively playing, putting his life on the line again and again. De Niro returns to the US an even quieter and more withdrawn man than he was before, more serious and grown up. In a bittersweet victory, he finally gets the girl he wanted, played by Meryl Streep, who in the beginning of the movie promised to marry Walken when he came back. But he never came back, and so she gets with De Niro instead. Both men wanted her fiercely, and one of them finally got her. Sometimes, though, she still cries for Walken…

Again, I am just in awe of the mature, deep-rooted character drama going on here. It never shoves itself in your face and never feels hamfisted or Hollywoodesque. It’s just fantastic. Watch the scenes after De Niro gets back into town. I really enjoy the scenes where he gets greeted by the townsfolk at the supermarket, or at the bar. And the one where they all go bowling is great. But things take a darker turn once we see the remains of Savage’s marriage, and how he did actually come back home after all…albeit not all in one piece.

Yes, the hunting is a focal point in this film…they take their guns and go out into the mountains to shoot deer. It’s a form of bonding, and it was what tied them all together. It just isn’t the same after De Niro comes back without Walken and Savage, though. He goes hunting with the guys back home, but it feels…different, somehow, and less happy, like a hollow shell. All that is left for him to do is to go back to Vietnam in search of Walken, where he finds him at last on the losing end of his treasured new game.

The Deer Hunter is a very vital and important film. It’s about how people deal with war, and at that, it excels in many great ways. It’s about friendship, and about how it changes over time. Christopher Walken’s character is probably the most fascinating of all, as the way he keeps on playing Russian Roulette even of his own will is crushing. He’s been pushed over the edge, and this is the only way he can cope – perhaps he hears the clicking of a hollow gun every night, wondering when it will stop. I don’t know. This film is great, with wonderful acting, powerful direction and a metric ton of majestic sorrow to boot.