 |
| Courtesy of Universal |
Most movie geeks spent their teenage years immersing themselves in blood, guts, and shrieking, naked blondes, but being a giant chicken means I missed out on some formative moments in my cinematic education. As a result, I’ve spent much of my adult years slowly catching up with genre staples.
John Carpenter’s Halloween, which established several of the slasher tropes we’ve long since internalized and spawned dozens of copycats, is easily my favorite of the bunch. The director had an innate talent for manipulating audiences’ fear without being condescending or treating them like idiots. He also understood that the masked, homicidal Michael Myers is far scarier when he doesn’t have an origin story or a logical explanation for his behavior. He’s just unknowable, unstoppable evil.
That’s why Carpenter didn’t have to rely on dark rooms and lame jump scares to terrify audiences. Heck, half of that movie takes place during the day with Michael standing on sidewalks in plain view and it’s still nightmare-inducing. It’s also far less gory than you probably remember: the murder sequences are almost bloodless, and the body count is astonishingly low (five humans and one German Shepherd).
The reason most people remember it being far more brutal is because Carpenter, along with his integral co-writer and producing partner Debra Hill, understood that if viewers are going to invest in the characters, they need to behave like real people and have at least some semblance of likability. The girls in Halloween are naïve, not stupid. That might sound like a nitpicky distinction, but there’s a big difference.
Annie, Lynda and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis, amazing in her breakthrough performance) grew up in the suburbs, where nothing bad is supposed to happen, and live in a culture that isn’t immersed in serial killer lore and horror movies. A masked murder stalking them would be as believable to them as aliens landing in front of their high school.
These brilliant elements that make Halloween a chilling experience, one that still holds up today, are mostly lost on the creators of the latest installment. Instead, director David Gordon Green (who co-wrote the screenplay with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley) updates the story utilizing modern slasher tropes that substitute quantity for quality, and over-the-top gore instead of earned suspense.
Before I dive deeper into why this sequel/reimagining left me cold, I do want to commend Green and his collaborators for quite a few shrewd elements. First, they made the wise decision to ignore all the sequels and their increasingly convoluted mythology – this this a direct follow-up to Carpenter’s original. That means Laurie and Michael aren’t siblings, Michael isn’t a zombie reanimated by a Druid curse, and Laurie wasn’t unceremoniously killed off multiple times in subpar, forgotten installments. All of that is chalked up to urban legend.
Instead, Michael – or The Shape (once again played by Nick Castle, with an assist from James Jude Courtney in the more strenuous scenes) – was apprehended soon after his killing spree on that fateful Halloween night in 1978 and has been institutionalized ever sense. Laurie, unable to move past the trauma of seeing her friends murdered and almost becoming a victim herself, has spent the last four decades training in a survivalist compound, preparing for the day he will come back to finish the job.
This seemingly insane assumption has cost Laurie everyone close to her, including two husbands, an estranged daughter (Judy Greer) and a granddaughter (Andi Matichak) who wants to have a closer relationship but is struggling to cope with grandma’s rants. However, when two idiotic podcasters (Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees) show up in Haddonfield to interview Michael and Laurie, they set off a chain of events that leads to Michael escaping custody and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake as he searches for the one that got away.
As that summary indicates, one of the film’s most obvious issues is an overly convoluted narrative. The original Halloween has a handful of characters and a plot you could describe in one sentence. It’s refreshingly simple and direct. Granted, Green’s update involves questions of trauma and legacy which necessitate more complexity, but I wish he would’ve spent more time with Laurie and her family to focus on those elements instead of wasting precious minutes with a host of bland townspeople Michael carves his way through.
On that note, I was annoyed at how infuriatingly stupid most of this movie’s characters are. In the original, a few kids made dumb decisions because they didn’t know anything was amiss on their tiny little street. That’s not the case with these characters – Michael’s escape is on the news, he leaves a staggering number of bodies in his wake, and essentially turns Haddonfield into a war zone. Yet parents still let their kids go trick-or-treating unsupervised, while drunk teenagers have sex in dark rooms and take shortcuts through poorly-lit parks that look like cemeteries.
The cops (including a wasted Will Patton) and Michael’s doctor (Haluk Bilginer) don’t fare any better. In fact, without getting into spoilers, a ludicrous scene involving these characters is the precise moment Halloween crashes and burns. Thankfully, the movie’s thrilling, cheer-inducing finale – which ingeniously mirrors some of the original’s most memorable moments – keeps it from being broken beyond repair, but even a couple of boneheaded story beats in that sequence turn Laurie into a dummy for a minute or two.
Despite multiple characters stating repeatedly that she’s been getting ready for this moment for 40 years, when the climactic battle finally arrives, Laurie’s behavior is dictated by the script rather than logic or common sense. If you’re hunting a masked killer who succeeds by lurking in the shadows, why not turn on some lights? If you’re trying to protect your family, why do you let somebody wander around alone outside at night? If you’ve turned your house into a fortress, why do you hang out around the only windows you haven’t fortified with steel caging?
The answer, of course, is so Green can go for cheap jump scares rather than earned thrills. The screenplay attempts a last-second explanation for this behavior, but it’s undercut once more by another idiotic character decision that only occurs so the creative team can keep the door open for a potential sequel.
Still, thanks to Curtis’ outstanding performance and Carpenter’s chilling score (which he co-wrote with his son Cody Carpenter and longtime bandmate Daniel A. Davies), the movie works far better than it has any right to. I can’t exactly recommend it, but fans of the series and those looking for nostalgic empty calories might have more fun than I did.
Halloween is rated R for horror violence and bloody images, language, brief drug use and nudity.
Grade: C+
Comments
Post a Comment