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Halloween Kills (2021)
This Franchise Died Tonight
In HALLOWEEN KILLS, co-writer/director David Gordon Green takes on Michael Myers as a living (or is he living?) embodiment of chaos, a sort of destroyer of worlds where the more he kills, the stronger he becomes.
And one has to ask the question:
Why are they trying to both humanize Michael as a man-child who snapped and has an endless bloodlust but also mythologize Michael as something other than human?
It opens with Cameron discovering Officer Hawkins, after having his throat partially cut by the insane doctor caring for Michael, who declares that he has to kill Michael. Then we flash back to Halloween night in Haddonfield in 1978, the night of the original film, and Michael is still on the loose despite being shot several times by Dr. Loomis as he saves Laurie Strode and the two children she's babysitting, Tommy and Lindsay. A young Hawkins is with his partner searching the ancestral Myers house and his partner is accosted by Myers, but instead of shooting Myers, Hawkins accidentally shoots his partner and stops an impressive CG reconstruction of Donald Pleasance executing Michael before he's taken into custody. We then move to Laurie Strode, her daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson speeding away from Laurie's burning compound as fire trucks approach while Laurie screams in vain to "Let him burn!"
Then we cut to a talent show at the Haddonfield bar where adult Tommy, adult Lindsay and now septuagenarian nurse Marion are drinking and celebrating together their survival of that night 40 years prior when they're all alerted to Laurie being in the hospital after her showdown with Michael. Meanwhile, the first responders at Laurie's place are all killed just because they're there. The news of this spreads through the town and Tommy, Lindsay, and Marion decide that they need a vigilante mob to hunt down Michael and kill him due to the the ineffectual and incompetent town police. Within a matter of seconds the town shifts its focus from concern or mourning for Michael's victims to a murderous and bloodthirsty mob ready to kill anyone they believe is Michael Myers. And of course, Michael continues to cut a bloody swath across Haddonfield for... no particular reason.
This film has a number of problems, but one of the cardinal sins is that, after the first 20 minutes or so, you're starting to actively root for Michael because the townsfolk of Haddonfield are so grotesquely and laughably stupid in every decision they make that you honestly might end up thinking, "Well, the species just got stronger."
The other cardinal sin is that, while Jamie Lee Curtis is in the film, she spends almost the entire film in a hospital bed, having philosophical discussions with Will Patton's Officer Hawkins about who or what is to blame for Michael Myers and how he has apparently fully transcended humanity and become some sort of sheer force of nature or an embodiment of Haddonfield's sins or fear or ... something. It's very unclear what the film is trying to say, but that becomes less important as Laurie has nothing to do with the actual on-screen action, and sidelining her is just a very bad idea. In fact, the real horror of this film is the hospital bill Laurie is going to receive after she's undergone surgery, gets out of her recovery bed and is reinjured while she includes herself in the vigilante mob running amok in the hospital.
It also continues Michael's enhanced flair for the theatrical as more and more bodies are posed post-mortem with bodies being carefully placed on merry-go-rounds or posed the same way they appear in a photograph together. I give you that Michael, in the 1978 original, did take the headstone of Judith Myers and place it on a bed and posed the body of Annie Brackett beneath it, but he's going all out here as he shoves lamps inside decapitated heads and switches heads on headless corpses.
The film also seems to embrace Michael Myers in the era of Trump, as there's a very uncomfortable middle act centered around an angry, murderous mob fomented by the very idea that there is evil in their midst. This dredged up, intentionally or otherwise, some similarities to the Jan. 6th insurrection.
Obviously with any horror sequel, and anyone who saw SCREAM 2 can attest based on Randy's discussion on the rules of horror sequels, the kills are far more elaborate but instead of there being some humor or suspense to the kills, the brutality is increased a hundredfold. There is an early scene where Michael enters the home of an elderly couple and, after stabbing one of them through the throat with a broken fluorescent light tube, the victim is forced to lay there dying while Michael uses what must be every knife in the house to kill the victim's husband. And at that point, I was asking myself, "Is this supposed to be fun?"
Because it's not. With the exception of one just absolutely ridiculous kill, none of the kills are fun or clever; they're just extremely brutal and ugly. Green clearly wants to have his cake and eat it too as he wants to give the gorehounds something to enjoy watching but also wants to bludgeon the audience into submission with each new kill as if to ask, "You must be scared by now, RIGHT?"
But there's the rub: HALLOWEEN KILLS is never scary. We don't know enough about the characters that die to care about them in the first place; they're literally just fodder for Michael's various methods of murder and if we don't care about them, we don't fear for them. The opening slaughter of the firefighters and EMTs is just there to set the table for how many more bodies we're likely to see by the film's end.
It's also never entertaining. It's okay for a slasher film to have fun with the cleverness of its kills or the witticisms of the characters, but no one's funny, and none of the kills really have any kind of entertainment value. I look at another recent big-studio horror film like James Wan's MALIGNANT, and I see a director who has a very specific vision of what he wants the film to be, and he's not looking to really scare the audience as much as entertain the living hell out of them. Yes, MALIGNANT is ridiculous in its central conceit, but it's gleefully and gloriously ridiculous. Wan understood that he couldn't let the audience take things too seriously because of the turn that comes in the third act, and here, Green seems to want to make both an 80's throwback slasher and a modern horror with something to say about society and violence and fear and it's clear very early on that he's bitten off much more than he can chew.
Another major problem is that this film is very obviously filler between parts one and three of this trilogy. The ending is so ridiculous and wrong-headed that it feels like the climax is supposed to now be a multigenerational revenge story, but it's clear that of the three generations represented in the Strode family, only one is going to survive all the way to the end of the next film.
When I originally heard that Green's trilogy was intended to be the only canonical sequels to the 1978 original, ignoring all the stuff that came later, it felt like part of that was a good idea, but the other parts weren't. All the "curse" garbage makes about as much sense as anything else in most of the sequels, but then there was Steve Miner's H20: HALLOWEEN 20 YEARS LATER, which, while being very much a post-SCREAM horror film, is the first film to excise all the other sequels with the exception of HALLOWEEN II where we learn that Laurie is actually Michael's sister. It's also the first to deal with Laurie's PTSD, where she's trying to get on with her life, but thanks to not just one but two times she had to deal with Michael trying to kill her, she's now a functioning alcoholic and kind of a terrible parent. This is indeed where the series should have ended, but of course it didn't because the real villain is the box office and if a horror film does well enough, it's going to have a sequel. Believe me: I'm not being harsh to Green's efforts just because I stan what I think is the only really good sequel to the original, but that film works better as a showcase for Curtis and the culmination of Laurie's arc.
The only real benefit of Green's canonical sequels is that we still have Curtis in the newer "Grambo" style of horror hero, but unlike H20, the family drama in this series seems to function only as a way to set up a new final girl rather than having Laurie Strode, scarred and weary, still complete her arc as the only one who can end Michael Myers.
HALLOWEEN KILLS falls short in every category. It's not smart, it's not clever, it's not fun and most importantly, it's not scary.
Shock Value (2014)
A Clever, Funny, Scary and Scathing Horror Film
What do you do when you're a down-and-out Z-lister schlock horror filmmaker and you've witnessed a serial killer claim his latest victims? Why, you blackmail him into being the star of your next film, of course! Naturally, this is a pretty absurd premise for a horror film, but one of the great things about director Douglas Rath's latest film, the micro-budgeted SHOCK VALUE is that he and writer/co-star Anthony Bravo KNOW that it's absurd, and they play that absurdity to the hilt with incredibly clever writing, smart performances, and some really beautiful direction.
The film follows the exploits of Miles Fowler (Zak Hudson), a bad writer/director of Z-grade horror who is looking for his shot at the big leagues, and finds it quite by accident as he witnesses a brutal double-murder committed by serial killer Nick (Anthony Bravo), a wiry yet menacing "quiet loner". He enlists the help of his new producer, the shy and seemingly unassuming Justine (Michelle Campbell), and they confront him with an ultimatum: Star in our new film (entitled "The Whorehouse That Screamed"), or go to prison. Nick very reluctantly agrees, and as soon as Miles casts his leading lady and muse, the incredibly sexy and opportunistic Ashley (Janelle Odair), filming begins. Miles believes that the hook that will make the film work is having a real serial killer play a fake serial killer and then, after turning him in after filming is over, the resultant publicity will pack millions of fans of the truly macabre into theaters to see the film with the now-infamous serial killer. Of course, there are some problems along the way; an aging horror film icon and full-blown loon, Edward Dean Huntley (Malcolm McDowell) is awaiting a script from Miles, and Ashley's handsome and volatile hipster musician boyfriend Jeff (Will Brandt) is intent on wreaking havoc on the set. Complicating matters further, we see Justine's budding romantic inclinations toward Nick, with whom she perhaps sees a kindred spirit, and Miles' own darker impulses coming to life as the film nears its completion.
Rath clearly delineates the world of the film-within-a-film and the real world with some wonderful stylistic flourishes. Clearly lovers of the Italian horror sub-genre of Giallo, both Rath and Bravo give the look and feel of the film Miles is making a very Argento-esque atmosphere, with characters like Ashley playing clairvoyant identical twin sisters and Nick playing a cross-dressing, cleaver-wielding maniac against a 70's pop-psychedelia influenced backdrops of extreme purples and greens, while giving the real world a hyper-real feel a lot of clever Dutch angles, beautiful wide-angle shots, and long takes. The performances are all quite good. Hudson plays Miles, the pseudo-stylishly unkempt and egomaniacal bottom feeder, with gusto and increasing mania. Odair as Ashley is surprisingly vulnerable underneath her sex-kitten exterior making her a fully fleshed-out person and not just a cliché. McDowell seems to be having a lot of fun in his extended cameo as the crazed has-been. Brandt sadly doesn't really have a lot to do here except look handsome and be a huge jerk, and in a lesser film, that would be a greater sin than here, because he does play those moments exceedingly well. As Justine, Campbell plays her as an initially mousy and weak-willed but is in fact a smart, caring, assertive and lovely woman. But arguably, besides Campbell, the real star of the film is Bravo as Nick. With a sharp wit, a fearsome glare, and an outwardly calm demeanor cleverly hiding the beast within, he shows an incredible flair for comic timing, he plays his scenes of horror and drama as effortlessly as the comedy scenes.
And also worth a huge mention, Bravo's script is nearly flawless. SHOCK VALUE is part-comedy and part-horror, but with an undercurrent of metatextual commentary of modern horror tropes, as perfectly demonstrated in McDowell's scene where he lays out the idea for a 21st-Century "reboot" of Dracula which includes backpackers filming everything with their cell phones. Like its stylistic predecessors such as Wes Craven's SCREAM films as well as the Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard collaboration THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, SHOCK VALUE both lambastes and embraces the sub-genre it resides in, and does both with style and verve. The film also delivers a scathing satirical portrayal of what it takes to make it in the horror movie business that often reminded me of George Huang's brilliantly acidic SWIMMING WITH SHARKS. Also worth mentioning is the eerie, stylish score by Jeff Danna as well as the lush cinematography of Jeffrey A. Cunningham, that mostly belies the use of digital film.
Currently, SHOCK VALUE is only available for viewing on VOD platforms such as iTunes and Vudu, and as much as this film is worthy of a theatrical release, it might find a better home through VOD. With the scores of sub-par horror releases with semi-recognizable names and significantly larger budgets, this is that rare diamond-in-the-rough that stands head and shoulders above the very films that SHOCK VALUE is satirizing here, and is, in my opinion, the best VOD horror film I've seen in ages.