#Nov30 in Nottingham

Today was an important day for the fightback against 'austerity', with two million public sector workers out on strike all over the country. It was a lovely late autumn day, cold but clear and sunny. We got up at an ungodly hour, by student standards, to support our lecturers on the picket lines around University Park Campus.

We put up posters, held placards and posted pickets on all nearby paths. Picketing an open campus is a little tricky: many of the cars going past you will be private sector contractors, who are not on strike, and students may be going in for more than one reason. Still, we encouraged all who came to turn back, go to the pub etc.: some did and were cheered for it. We got quite a lot of declarations of solidarity from passers-by, but really the old principle that you never cross a picket line needs to be reinstated. (I hope this will happen as the struggle against the government broadens and continues.)

There were tight-lipped managers in Jaguars, too, and scabs who would try to avoid looking you in the eye as they drove past. (We generally didn't denounce them as vigorously as I've seen happen at the 2009 Royal Mail strikes, for example.) Shortly after 10am, we packed up and walked to Forest Recreation Ground, where the trade union march was gathering.

It was a terrific march, certainly the largest I've been on in Nottingham. There were people from more unions I've ever seen outside the TUC March for the Alternative, including unions not commonly associated with protest and industrial action, like the Royal College of Nursing. The local Labour Party branches were there, too, reminding us that Labour is not just the spinelessness of an Ed Miliband. As in March, there were people from all sections of society, including many with children. We marched down Mansfield Road, through the city centre and Market Square (past the occupiers, with whom there was much fraternising) before gathering in Wellington Circus.

The atmosphere was amazing. No march I've been on has ever experienced quite so much support from the general public, I think: drivers honked and raised their fists, people young and old clapped and shouted. I don't want to exaggerate this, but polling data suggests the government has pretty much lost the argument on job losses and cuts to services. The Tories and their LibDem running dogs mishandled the conflict from the start, managing to create a broad front between smaller, more militant and larger, more conciliatory unions. The challenge to the anti-cuts movement is to maintain and expand the front that's been created, and keep pressing the most reactionary government since Caligula until victory.

Strange things are afoot at Silver Shamrock

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which features no witches, is not a slasher film. It's barely even horror. Instead, in the mode of sci-fi mystery tinged with horror Halloween III adopts for most of its running time it reminds me of nothing so much as an especially silly episode of The X-Files, minus the charismatic leads.

But you've got to respect John Carpenter and Debra Hill for trying. In 1982, slashers made boatloads of money, and their decision to forego that market for a horror anthology (Carpenter's original vision: Halloween II was merely a cash-grab) was therefore brave, if totally misguided. And it could have been worse: even at the time of Halloween II, Hill and Carpenter thought about using 3D, but the costs proved prohibitive. Friday the 13th fans were not so lucky: the third film in the series was released in three gaudy dimensions the same year as Season of the Witch.

The opening image, a jack-o'lantern in state-of-the-art computer graphics, might as well scream 'It's 1982!' in big neon letters, and it's accompanied by the sort of disco soundtrack common in early-eighties horror films. On October 23 - the film was released on October 22 for extra near-future suspense - toy shop owner Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry) flees implacable figures in business suits. He collapses and is taken to the hospital, still clutching a Halloween mask by a company called Silver Shamrock Novelties, whose adverts have been all over television lately. At the hospital Grimbridge is murdered by another business-suited villain who then sets himself on fire to escape capture.

The doctor who supervised Grimbridge, alcoholic divorced dad Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) decides to investigate together with the dead man's daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) Grimbridge's last known whereabouts are the town of Santa Mira, home of Silver Shamrock Novelties, where he picked up an order for halloween masks. In Santa Mira, Dan and Ellie stay at a motel whose owner (Michael Currie) tells them, in a ridiculous Irish accent, that the town is surveilled and run by the benevolent owner of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy). It seems that something's fishy at the toy factory, and our plucky heroes go off to infiltrate Cochran's empire.

I can't figure out who Carpenter and Hill (producing, while Tommy Lee Wallace wrote and directed) considered their target audience. It's a film about evil Halloween masks, suggesting it's for kids: and certainly, much of Conal Cochran's strange world of toys and robots - it's like Santa's workshop, but evil - seems designed to spook children more than adults. At the same time, the film has some titillation, courtesy of the ravishingly beautiful Nelkin, and quite a lot of gore: the effects are much worse than in Halloween II (obvious latex when someone has their skull pulled apart, a deeply unconvincing decapitation), but they're still quite enough to deter parents with children. (Apparently, Dino de Laurentiis insisted on graphic violence.)

The 'powerful man controls spooky town' theme was explored by The X-Files more than once in episodes like 'Our Town', and it's painful just how much better that show was at it than Halloween III. Santa Mira just isn't a credible community, and Cochran is reminiscent of a lesser bond villain. Surrounded by strong but ridiculously vulnerable robot servants, he plans to murder thousands of children across the US because... that would be evil? The soliloquy in which he explains his designs is pretty much anti-Irish hate speech:

You don't really know much about Halloween... It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal. And the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween: the festival of Samhain. The last great one took place three thousand years ago, and the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. [Sacrifices were] a part of our world, our craft. [Witchcraft] was a way of controlling our environment. It's not so different now. It's time again.

Dan O'Herlihy rocks that scene, incidentally. He's far and away the best part of a film that feels like a tremendously misguided labour of love all the way, albeit one that was messed up in post-production: the soundtrack by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter is sub-par, and the sound effects work is really quite shoddy (a couple of punches are heard before landing, for example). It's pretty, at least: DP Dean Cundey, a series veteran by now, gives us a number of gorgeous shots of Santa Mira at sunrise and a particularly memorable image towards the end, of bodies arranged in a circle of blue energy. It's never once scary, though; and whether the decision to return to the Myers tales after Season of the Witch was artistically sound or not, it was commercially inevitable. 

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Doctor, kindly tell your wife that I'm alive

In a nutshell, Halloween II sucks. I now feel I've been too hard on Rob Zombie's attempt at a Halloween sequel. The metal maestro has ambition and ideas, even if he doesn't always execute them well: but the 1981 film is nothing but a tired cash-in, released only after the first two Friday the 13th films kick-started the eighties slasher.

And yes, we can blame John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who wrote the screenplay together and very much acted as the film's public face. Rick Rosenthal may have directed Halloween II, but he was hand-picked by Carpenter, who reportedly reshot some scenes and reworked the whole thing in post-production - leading to a backlash from Rosenthal, who felt his film was being taken away from him.

Halloween II begins right where Halloween ends: Michael Myers (Dick Warlock, Kurt Russell's long-time stunt double, replacing Tony Moran) has been shot six times (for some reason, the sound effects team adds a seventh shot in the sequel) but has got away, while Dr Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) stays behind with the injured Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, who now gets equal billing). It's not quite the same, though: Rosenthal inserts a number of glaringly obvious new shots of Loomis running around outside to insert momentum (you can't have dénouement right at the start, I suppose).

Then the credits start up: it's 'a Dino de Laurentiis Corporation film', practically guaranteeing quality. Remember how the credits of Halloween showed up next to a jack-o'-lantern? Same in this one, except OMG, the pumpkin opens up to reveal a skull! That's Halloween II's terrible case of sequelitis in a nutshell: it tries to one-up the original, but falls flat on its face.

Anyway, Michael roams the neighbourhood in a mixture of conventional and POV shots that negates the entire point of using somebody's point of view, namely audience identification with the character - it's as if Rosenthal decided to pay homage to Carpenter, but didn't understand what he was doing. Michael sneaks into an elderly couple's home and steals a kitchen knife while Night of the Living Dead plays on the telly. Across the yard, Alice (Anne Bruner), a teenage girl, speaks to her friend on the phone and listens to the radio, helpfully summarising the first film; Michael then stabs her in a terrible shot because, I suppose, killing teens is what he does.

Meanwhile, Laurie is carted off to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. It's a pretty massive building, but Laurie is apparently the only patient. She's befriended by Jimmy the ambulance driver (Lance Guest), besides whom there exist the following hospital staff: Mr Garrett (Cliff Emmich), the caretaker; nurses Jill (Tawny Moyer), Janet (Ana Alicia) and Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop), who is in a relationship with ambulance driver Budd (Leo Rossi); Dr Mixter (Ford Rainey), who's drunk; and head nurse Mrs Alves (Gloria Gifford). These people are remarkably likeable for a slasher film, and from Jimmy Laurie, who of course never found this out in the course of the first film, even learns that her attacker was Michael Myers - a pretty good catch from Carpenter & Hill. Eventually, of course, Michael turns up and starts massacring everyone.

In the meantime, Loomis is running around Haddonfield with Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers). They see a man, apparently Myers, be hit by a car that subsequently explodes, burning him alive; but the dead guy turns out to be one Ben Tramer. (The bloke Laurie fancied in the original, which is a cruel and pretty funny nod.) Brackett decides to pack it in because he's had it with Loomis, so the doctor follows Deputy Hunt (Hunter von Leer) instead. They find that for whatever reason, Michael has broken into a local elementary school and scrawled 'Samhain' on the chalkboard in blood; this convinces Loomis that Michael is somehow linked to ancient druidic cults who supposedly burnt their victims to divine the future. Which they didn't, since we're not even sure druids ever existed.

I like this Loomis, incidentally. Malcolm McDowell in the new series is a bit of a jerk, but Pleasance's Loomis is full-on crazy!, thoroughly earning italics and an exclamation mark, and in line for capitals. And he chews the scenery in a glorious mess of a performance that threatens more than once to lift Halloween II into the realm of interesting. Loomis eventually finds out that, spoiler, Laurie Strode is Michael's baby sister he's determined to kill. This, besides retroactively sullying the original in ways we could discuss 'til the cows come home, introduces plot holes in the present film, since it takes away the motivation for most of Michael's killings.

If it's Laurie he wants, there's simply no point in Michael stalking around the clinic murdering every last named character: but he does, since this is a slasher film and has a body count target to meet. With a count of ten, incidentally, Halloween II seriously one-ups the original's three shown murders - two stranglings and one stabbing - and they're much nastier too. Victims are, minor spoilers, stabbed, beaten to death with a claw hammer, strangled, scalded to death in a hot bath (with gore effects I really did not need to see), and stabbed in the eye with a hypothermic needle, they have all their blood drained and their throats cut. Misplaced creativity in murder is a classic Friday the 13th feature, as is the attendant focus on gore rather than suspense; and so Halloween II is much more in the tradition of that abhorrent series than that of its predecessor.

This isn't the same old Michael Myers, either. Dick Warlock's physical acting is indifferent, ending both the menace and childlike curiosity Tony Moran brought to the role. This Michael walks and murders as if in a daze. Slasher film villains have always walked slowly, but here Michael is positively glacial, which ruins a scene in which Laurie is frantically pressing lift buttons, hoping to close the door before Michael reaches her: if he moved at a normal human pace, he'd get her in no time. Oh, and he walks straight through a freaking glass door instead of opening it. I suppose he's much more explicitly supernatural now, shrugging off bullets left, right and centre, but some sense on his part would still be nice.

It's well shot at least, and there are a couple of images that linger in the mind: although I don't think that, other than Conan the Barbarian, I've ever seen a film in which the night scenes were quite so obviously filmed in daytime. But after the lofty arthouse glories of Halloween, the sequel brings us right down to harsh reality. This is the eighties slasher, and it ain't pretty. Now we're in for the long haul of disappointing cash-in sequels.

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Slice 'n' dice

In Halloween, Rob Zombie boldly attempted to make the slasher franchise his own. Halloween II (2009) is absolutely not a mercenary sequel: the director's full of ideas, albeit thoroughly muddled ones; and since he doesn't know what to do with them, Halloween II ends up a rote slasher, distinguished only by its brutality.

The film opens with a short flashback in which Michael Myers's mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) gives her son (Chase Vanek), imprisoned at a mental institution, a statuette of a white horse. Paying attention? Good, because white horse symbolism is all over the film, and it would be a shame if you were to miss out on it.

Then we're in the present day, right where Halloween left off. En route to transporting grown-up, post-murder Michael Myers (still Tyler Mane) to the morgue, the police van suffers an accident, allowing Michael to behead the surviving cop and escape, before being drawn to a vision of a white horse and his mother, clad in white. Meanwhile, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) has been taken to the hospital. It isn't long before, true to the original Halloween II (1981), Michael returns, viciously murdering hospital employees in his pursuit of Laurie, who flees outside and is granted shelter in a security outpost by corpulent night watchman, Buddy (Richard Riehle). Michael murders Buddy with a fire axe, smashes his way through the wall, and Laurie wakes up.

It's a really nifty surprise. We are, perhaps, twenty minutes into the film, and the longer the hospital scene goes on for, the less likely it seems it could be a dream sequence, and there's nary a hint that what we're watching isn't real. Zombie obviously enjoys toying with fans' expectations by appearing to follow established continuity and then pulling the rug out from under our feet. A slasher film franchise is not where you expect clever intertextuality, but there it is, and let's rejoice in that. Unfortunately, it's the last good idea of the film.

Anyway, it's two years after the events of Halloween. Laurie now lives with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his daughter, Laurie's scarred-but-alive friend Annie (Danielle Harris). Laurie, deeply traumatised by the murder of all her friends and her own near-death at the hands of a psychopath, is still in therapy and pops pills like there's no tomorrow. She's pretty much insufferable to live with, but at least she's got new friends, Mya (Brea Grant) and Harley (Angela Trimbur). Meanwhile, Dr Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) has written another cash-in book on Michael Myers, and is going on tour to Haddonfield to promote it. (In this instalment, Loomis is even more of an asshole than before: in universal lazy writer's shorthand, he's awful to his publicist.) Laurie, reading Loomis's book, discovers that she is in fact Angel Myers, Michael's baby sister, and consequently only wants to get drunk with her friends and forget. Michael, in the meantime, walks towards Haddonfield, guided by his mother's instruction to bring Angel home.

So we have three storylines (Laurie, Michael, Loomis) which don't properly converge until the end. Halloween II cannot help feeling disjointed and random, and more's the pity since Zombie clearly has plenty of ideas. The symbolism of Deborah Myers and the white horse is omnipresent (towards the end, Laurie sees it too), and Laurie increasingly hallucinates herself committing Michael's murders. It's all vaguely creepy, but I'm not at all sure what it's supposed to mean: there's something pseudo-Freudian going on, I guess, but apart from that I have no idea (neither, it seems, does Zombie). Now, of course muddled symbolism is bad, but considering that, say, any Friday the 13th film won't even aspire to symbolism I'll give Zombie the benefit of the doubt.

The stupendous padding, though, I can't forgive as easily. Michael's wanderings through the Illinois fields are the worst in this respect: he mostly just walks around murdering random people for no apparent reason. Mya and Harley are another part of the problem. They enjoy absolutely minimal characterisation (Harley is the slutty one. Er, that's it), existing only to inflate the already impressive body count. It is, in the best slasher tradition, at heart a boring, inert film: no forward movement, punctuated by brutal murder every five minutes.

Ah yes, the violence. I may have claimed that Rob Zombie's Halloween is pretty vicious, but it ain't a patch on its sequel. Halloween II has beheadings, throats being cut and, most of all, repeated brutal beatings to death. Zombie's vision for Michael Myers (big brute rather than androgynous everyman) is complemented by another element: unlike the original film's, this Michael is angry. He screams and growls when offing his victims, and he stabs and beats them with great force even after they're clearly dead. This rage contrasts with the original's silent inevitability (compare the curious head tilt in the 1978 film). The difference is telegraphed visually, too, as Michael's mask becomes ever more torn and filthy.

In keeping with Zombie's interests, Halloween II continues the previous film's trend of barely using Carpenter's Halloween theme at all (in this case, it plays over the credits): Tyler Bates's minimal score emphasises harsh dissonance. Still, Halloween II doesn't have much of a consistent style: it throws reds and bright white lights (mostly police torches) around far more readily than the previous film, but all that doesn't amount to much of an artistic vision. I can appreciate what Zombie is trying to do, but it just doesn't work here. Still, let's salute the most artistically ambitious remade franchise of the last decade.

 ---

Thus ends my exploration of the Halloween franchise. I've blogged my way through ten films, from 1978 to 2011, of varying quality: from the lone masterpiece (Halloween) to the tired cash-grab (Halloween II) and the failed experiment (Halloween III: Season of the Witch), from the successful attempt to bring Michael back (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers) to a film that came close to interring him for good (Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers), from the ugly, tired mess of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers to the film that rounded off the franchise (Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later), and Resurrection, the franchise killer.

Then there's the Rob Zombie reboot of the series. Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009) were not successful films by any standard, but they were absolutely not the timid commercial fare we've come to expect of remakes: they were bold, crass and very, very bloody. It's for this reason that I'm an unashamed Zombie apologist. After the feeble, increasingly creatively bankrupt slasher fare Dimension Films had served up for years, Zombie's films were the work of an auteur, a wake-up call to a horror industry mired in repetition and slick, vapid gore.

What makes the Halloween series different? It's not marked by high body counts and creatively nasty tool murders like Friday the 13th, nor by the dreamscapes of A Nightmare on Elm Street. A good Halloween film relies on mood and the strength of its characters. Most Halloween films are not, in fact, good: with hindsight I consider only the original, 4, and the Zombie films worth anyone's time. (We are, as the Americans would say, grading on a curve.) But cash-grabs and the mercenary sequels have always fascinated me, too. There's something mesmerising about pathetic excuses for films, and it makes us appreciate the good bits all the more.

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Aus dem das kroch

Forgot to plug my recent review of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in Ceasefire:

All works dealing with Nazism have to face Truffaut’s paradox. Since fascism, highly theatrical at all turns, conveyed meanings through the politics of the spectacle, it’s difficult not to fall prey to the narratives built into its totalitarian aesthetic: because the Nazis spent so much energy trying to look cool, making sure they don’t is a major task. (A film like Downfall, for example, inadvertently pays homage to the Nazi cult of death.)

As such, depicting Nazis as Chicago gangsters undercuts their self-mythologisation and rings true in another way, too: in the 1920s, Hitler was cultivating a gangster image by wearing a trench coat and a fedora, while carrying a bull-whip.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is at its best when savaging the mixture of ingratiation and bullying that characterised the Nazis’ relationship with Germany’s ruling class and the elites’ self-serving opportunism, cowardice and well-honed skill at not seeing things one would rather not know about.

Dangerously overscraped

Here we are: the lower reaches. Direct-to-video hell. It's the first time I've delved into the netherworld of low-budget, no-audience films: but considering the delectable stench of desperation surrounding I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006), I'll be coming back. In truth, I enjoyed the film: it's bad, sure, but it passes the time in an agreeable fashion.

We open with gut-churningly awful, nonsensically flashy shots of the annual Fourth of July carnival in Broken Ridge, Colorado, where we meet our meat: recent high-school graduates Amber (Brooke Nevin) and her boyfriend Colby (David Paetkau), Zoe (Torrey DeVitto), Lance (Ben Easter), Roger (Seth Packard) and PJ (Clay Taylor). Make no mistake: these people are the least likeable bunch of assholes this side of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and they're portrayed so poorly one wishes disembowelment upon them at every turn.

(If you compare the cast list to the poster, incidentally, you'll notice the young lady on the far left is not in the film. This is because the filmmakers Do Not Care, and are convinced - reasonably, I fear - that women who are not in the final product will attract more buyers than men who are.)

Anyway, the teens' forced conversation turns to the events of the first two films in the series, almost as if they were setting up a horror film. It seems that 'the Fisherman' (the name Ben Willis is nowhere mentioned) has become something of an urban legend, killing off young people with dirty secrets. (He is, apparently, 'like Jack the Ripper, except the guy never got caught', a line that suggests the writer possessed very incomplete knowledge of either the Jack the Ripper case or the series of which this film is an instalment.) And would you know it, a cloaked figure wielding a fish hook duly appears and chases the frightened teenagers around the carnival. Leaping off a building with his skateboard (!) to escape the Fisherman, PJ is impaled and killed. The rub: the Fisherman was actually Roger, in a prank planned by him, Amber, Colby and Zoe. They decide to conceal this and destroy the evidence, swearing that 'the secret dies with us'. Could it be foreshadowing?

Apparently so. One year later, the four return to Broken Ridge. In the meantime they've grown apart, as is series tradition. Amber is about to go off to college, while Colby, who has broken up with her, is taking up a summer job as a lifeguard. Roger fixes ski lifts, while Zoe is a rock'n'roll singer and guitarist (and therefore the most awesome & attractive of a bunch generally ranking low on both). When Amber begins receiving text messages of the 'I know what you did last summer' type, she begins gathering the old gang. Roger is soon found dead. Could it be the Fisherman? (Yes.)

Like the first two films, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (fun to type, fun to say) sets itself up as a mystery: who is the killer? Is it PJ's grieving father, Sheriff Davis (Michael Flynn), Deputy Hafner (K.C. Clyde), who clearly harbours an unholy crush on Amber, or Lance? Unlike Know and Still, however, the mystery in Always isn't insultingly obvious: instead, spoiler!, screenwriter Michael D. Weiss cheats, in the matter of Friday the 13th, by having the killer be none of these people. It's Ben Willis's ghost (played by awful CGI, and also by Don Shanks). Which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense: what, the Fisherman's eternal destiny is to slaughter groups of teens who conceal a killing on the Fourth of July? That seems an awfully specific vengeance demographic.

The answer, of course, is that director Sylvain White (lately of The Losers and Stomp the Yard) doesn't care: I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer is hackwork pure and simple. The director's detachment - or incompetence, perhaps - leads to the bungling of simple jump scares. The film doesn't have a scary bone in its body. It's sleepy and inoffensive, and although the despair and dawning realisation of one's entire career path mapped out in direct-to-video world, evident in the performances, is interesting, it's not, well, good. The surreal directorial flashes (dream sequences, moody landscape shots) add another layer of unreality. But I can't be angry with I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. It sets out to achieve so very little with its limited means that I'd rather pat it on its would-be slasher head and tell it, and its latter-day slasher brethren, to go home and watch Halloween.

In this series: I Know What You Did Last Summer | I Still Know What You Did Last Summer | I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer

The Z word ain't so bad

'Re-imaginings' are commonly anything but: the word tends towards a desperate attempt to conceal the fact that your film is neither similar to the original nor particularly creative. 2010's A Nightmare on Elm Street has no reason beyond the bottom line for existing: but dress it up as a 're-imagining', and oh! It sounds so much better than, 'Well, we like money'.

2007's Halloween, on the other hand, is a re-imagining all right. Director Rob Zombie actually has an artistic vision and a style, both totally different from John Carpenter's: and if Halloween still isn't a great or even a good film, it deserves to stand out among its soulless slasher-film remake brethren all the same.

As the film opens we're introduced to the awful lives of Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie), her worthless boyfriend Ronnie (William Forsythe), her teenage daughter Judith (Hanna Hall) and her favourite, ten-year-old Michael (Daeg Faerch). When Mrs Myers is called in by Michael's headmaster it emerges that the boy, ignored by his sister and bullied by Ronnie and assorted idiots at school, has been killing and dissecting animals. Soon after, Michael ambushes one of the bullies, beating him almost to death with a heavy branch. On Halloween night, he murders Ronnie, Judith and her horny boyfriend Steve (Adam Weisman) in a shockinly brutal sequence that remarkably pays almost no homage whatsoever to the iconic opening scene of Carpenter's 1978 film.

Michael is confined to a mental hospital, where he is treated by Dr Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). But the boy degenerates rapidly and takes to making elaborate masks which he wears at almost all times because 'it hides my ugliness', alternating between sullen silence and seemingly normal childhood behaviour in therapy. 'Seemingly', you see, because when he is left alone Michael assaults a nurse, stabbing her almost to death, and is confined to the institution for life. Mrs Myers eventually kills herself while Dr Loomis gets over his feeling of failure by publishing a cash-in book on Michael. And shortly before Halloween fifteen years after the original murders, a grown-up Michael (Tyler Mane) escapes, leaving a trail of corpses in his wake.

He's headed to Haddonfield, Illinois, in the part of the film that is actually a recreation of the original, albeit greatly compressed. We're introduced to Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), Michael's baby sister who is now living with adoptive parents (Pat Skipper and Dee Wallace). Laurie and her friends Annie (Danielle Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) notice they are being followed by a strange man, but shrug it off. On Halloween night, Lynda goes heels to Jesus with her boyfriend Bob (Nick Mennell) in the old Myers house while Annie and Laurie babysit Lindsey (Jenny Gregg Stewart) and Tommy (Skyler Gisondo) respectively, and Dr Loomis races to Haddonfield to liaise with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and stave off a massacre.

Zombie's style is wildly at odds with Carpenter's. Let's start with Michael Myers himself. The Shape of 1978, as played by Tony Moran and Nick Castle, was a totally anonymous person: of average height and build and, with a perfectly normal face when briefly unmasked. In the remake, by contrast, Michael is played by 6'8'' ex-wrestler Tyler Mane, and the move from Joe Bloggs to hulking strongman makes a massive difference. This Michael is physically far more similar to Jason Voorhees, and the move towards superhuman proportions is accentuated by his far more brutish and forceful attack style: he beats people to death with his bare hands more than once. (There's a gender dimension to this: the original's androgynous killer has been replaced by an aggressively masculine one.) Then there's the mask. The original's expressionless white turned the killer into a symbol. The remake's mask is greyish, torn and dusty, loose and ill-fitting.

That's Rob Zombie's aesthetic in a nutshell. Where Carpenter's film was artsy and clean, in the style of a giallo, this Halloween is visually almost impossibly gritty, filthy, stained. There's splinters, dust and dirt, and there's a whole lot of blood. This film's violence is not tasteful. It's not even brutal: it is, excuse my language, fucking vicious. Far more people die than in the original, and they're killed in nastier ways (none of them more imaginative, though: the most famous slayings of the original are largely reproduced). All that isn't usually my cup of tea, but I absolutely have to give Zombie points for making the film his own, for producing horror that really gets under your skin, as good horror should. It's an unsafe film, and all the better for it.

More points, I think, for the part of the picture that shows Michael's messed-up childhood, and how the boy took to hiding behind masks and preying on those weaker than himself as a defence mechanism. It's a bit trite, and the interpretation it implies is later contradicted by Dr Loomis's bestseller; but the masks Michael takes to lovingly making are childlike and creepy in equal measure, so power to the props team. Daeg Faerch is pretty terrific as a loner who learns that murder can be empowering, apparently (there's your lesson, kids!), and Sheri Moon Zombie is just as good as his mother, scared of what her little boy has become and loving him all the same.

Once they're gone, Halloween loses a lot of steam, although Malcolm McDowell's deliciously hammy performance makes up for some of this. All the same, the film's second half is clearly the weaker of the two. Zombie's style works, but precious little else does. For starters, Taylor-Compton's Laurie is fearfully weak, not a patch on Jamie Lee Curtis's portrayal of the character; and her whiny, annoying performance takes much out of her scenes (Laurie has been relegated to supporting character, thankfully). Tommy and Lindsey are also much less likeable than they were in the original, and neatly reflect the way in which the portrayal of young people in fiction has changed. The biggest problem is that it's all too rushed, allowing none of the slow tension-building Carpenter excelled at.

It's a strange film in some ways: resolutely Zombie's own, it nevertheless has a couple of near-exact recreations of Carpenter shots (Laurie walking past trees in Haddonfield, Laurie noticing Michael looking up at her). And there's a false ending that absolutely only works if the audience has seen the original: by subverting our expectation of when the evil is vanquished, Zombie achieves perhaps the best shock of the entire film. It's not a great work of art, disjointed and weighed down by bad performances in its latter half, but Halloween is brimming with potential. You wouldn't guess it from a man who named himself after an undead monster, but that Rob Zombie is a far better filmmaker than some of his world-weary, hackwork-prone peers.

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Well, I wasn't hooked

I was socialised in late-nineties pop culture. On the walls of our classroom were posters of Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters and, foolish as that may now seem, Fred Durst. But I wasn't a full participant. I didn't turn thirteen until the year 2000, so even if I had wanted to watch I Still Know What You Did Last Summer in 1998, I couldn't have. (Instead, I sneaked into Godzilla and The Mask of Zorro.) The point is, these films were big in the late nineties (I Know What You Did Last Summer was cited as an example of increasing violence in cinema by people who'd clearly never seen any of the slashers of yore), and Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Philippe and Freddie Prinze Jr. were as gods. How are the mighty fallen!

I complained in the very first post on this blog that I Know What You Did Last Summer is a bad film. It also killed off the better half of the cast, so now, a year after the events of the first film, we get to meet a new group of expendable meat. There's still Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt), struggling with memories of her friends' brutal murder, and her college friends Karla (Brandy), Julie's sassy black best friend; Karla's jock boyfriend Tyrell (Mekhi Phifer); and nice guy Will (Matthew Settle; and the fact that within nine years Settle would play a washed-up rock star with two teenage children on Gossip Girl I find both hilarious and telling). Karla and Julie get a call from the local radio station, asking them 'What is the capital of Brazil?'. Having correctly answered 'Rio de Janeiro' (the screenwriter clearly thought their audience was composed of nothing but morons), they win a weekend on the Bahamas. Meanwhile in a subplot, not-quite-dead fisherman Ben Willis (Muse Watson) attacks Julie's boyfriend Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and his colleague Dave (John Hawkes, who is a demigod for this but clearly has some skeletons in his closet), killing Dave and injuring Ray, who vows to find Julie and warn her.

Their hotel turns out to be on a tiny island whose population is solely composed of the following: hotel staff Brooks (Jeffrey Combs) and Nancy (Jennifer Esposito), who were my favourite characters because of their sarcastic detachment and open hostility to the main cast; Estes (Bill Cobbs), a vodou-practising baggage handler (this is less offensive than it seems: apparently, Haitian vodou does exist on the Bahamas, even though it's obviously the pop-culture version of same); weed-growing poolboy Titus (Jack Black); Olga the maid (Ellerine Harding); and finally Darick the Dockhand (Benjamin Brown). Obviously, very few of these people make it out alive as Ben Willis returns to kill teens.

It's a shame that the peripheral characters are slaughtered first, because rarely has a main cast of such unlikeable jackasses been assembled. They're terrible actors, and to make up for it Jennifer Love Hewitt's main asset, prominently displayed on the poster above, is shamelessly exploited throughout the film. I'm also peeved by the film's portrayal of Tyrell, who speaks entirely in stereotypical black people's phrases and of course dies first. (Also, in films there are no interracial relationships. There's always the alpha couple - white, cerebral, decent, and shy - and the beta couple - black, physical, impulse-driven, and sassy - that acts as its Jungian shadow.)

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer's script, perpetrated by Trey Callaway, is even more stupid than Kevin Williamson's screenplay for the original. A big part of this - pretty much series tradition by now - is that the villain, supposedly out for vengeance because Julie and her friends left him for dead two summers ago (and there goes the title), kills people who are neither involved in all that nor are any sort of threat; and this is doubly stupid because the original crime of running over a man and hiding his body is barely mentioned, so that the film, despite its repeated insistence that 'I still know', really becomes more a 'madmen kill because they are mad' feature, i.e. it strains against itself for no good reason. But really it only starts there: there are so many contrivances, plot holes, and frankly laughable choices (Will Benson is stealth) that it's best to ignore the film's narrative structure entirely.

Ah, but if you do that, what's left? Not scares, certainly. I've probably seen more incompetent horror films (the gloriously abysmal Friday the 13th, Part 3, for example), but I Still Know What You Did Last Summer need not hide in such company. Director Danny Cannon (Judge Dredd) does not know how to film horror. Oh, sure, he does a reasonable facsimile of the sort of camerawork the genre uses, but it doesn't work at all. There's nary a striking image, nothing at all unexpected or suspenseful; and the fact that they go over the top with the scare chords and painfully obvious redubbed scared breathing to compensate just seems sad. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is an inferior sequel, and that's saying something.


In this series: I Know What You Did Last Summer | I Still Know What You Did Last Summer | I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer

Birds of a feather

Giallo, the subgengre of violent 1970s Italian murder mysteries that inspired the North American slasher films, is a bit daunting. I finally decided to take the plunge after reading the A.V. Club's excellent introduction. And Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) proved a great place to start - a taut, thrilling slice of sleaze that introduces many of the genre's tropes.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is an American writer living in Rome with his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall). The night before he is supposed to return to the States, Sam witnesses a cloaked, gloved madman attempt to murder a woman with a knife at an art gallery, but being locked on the other side of a glass door can't intervene. He's informed by police that this attack is the latest in a series of murders of young women in the city. Sam tells the police all he knows, but is certain that there is an important detail he just can't recall. He decides to aid the police by doing some amateur sleuthing of his own (the police are amazingly supportive of this, by the way) and speaks to, among others, a stammering pimp (Gildo di Marco), a bumbling snitch (Pino Patti) and an eccentric painter (Mario Adorf, much more famous in Germany than in the US), all while being pursued by the killer...

As I said, this was my first foray into giallo, but I do know a thing or two about slasher films. Early slashers borrow liberally from Argento (who himself pays homage to Hitchcock's Psycho in several shots, incidentally). The first North American slasher, Black Christmas (Bob Clark, Canada 1974), takes the framing of one murder, the prevalence of POV shots and a subplot about phones from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, among other things, but the most obvious influence is in the music. Ennio Morricone's score for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage - wildly different from his more familiar spaghetti western scores and remarkably prog-influenced - may well have provided the base Carl Zittrer worked from in Black Christmas.

The film is marked by what were to become the tropes of the giallo: a masked, glove-wearing psychopath stalking and murdering young women using - much like later slasher film killers - primarily bladed weapons (although the killer in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sends a pistol-toting accomplice to off Sam). That iconic poster, drawn from a famous scene, is emblematic of the defining lurid, sexually suggestive threats to women (men are only murdered when they get in the killer's way). But it also points to the importance of style when assessing the giallo: the gleaming knife, the bright colours, the gloves, the symbols of wealth.

It may be too much to link the genre directly to the 'years of lead', the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when Italy was wracked by political violence, or to plays like Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which premiered in 1970. But what gialli share with Fo and left-wing critiques of the Italian state is a focus on the corruption of the wealthy and powerful. Their fear of knife-wielding maniacs invading decent people's homes, on the other hand, is much more conservative and parallels the obsessions of North American vigilante films from the same time; and although they are woefully incompetent, the police in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage are affable and well-intentioned. (Like Black Christmas and unlike later slashers, Argenton's film is a murder mystery first and a horror film second.)

An exceedingly well-filmed murder mystery at that: Argento's directing genius is displayed in the choreography and editing at least as much as in the framing of individual shots. There's an extraordinary number of killer's POV shots, later (wrongly) held to be a defining feature of the slasher film; but just as importantly we get POV shots from the victim, while being attacked - the knife stabbing at the audience, tearing the screen as in Psycho. For my money, the opening gallery scene is the highlight of the film: the protagonist is separated from the scene by glass that muffles sounds, allowing alternation between full volume and creepy almost-silent horror; the place itself, a cold white with a number of spooky-looking exhibits, contrasts with the killer's black outfit.

When Sam is trapped on the other side of the doors and can't intervene, Argento's use of negative space is brilliant:

Having sung the director's praises, I feel free to turn to what struck me as most odd about The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: the humour, of which there is an extraordinary amount. For me, the best of this is the snitch's excellent preamble: 'Now get this straight. I don't know anything, I don't know anybody, and I ain't seen anything. What do you want to know?' There are entire scenes - such as Sam's visit to shaggy cat-eating painter Mario Adorf - that rely on broad comedy. I don't think this is bad - by and large, the humour works - but it's certainly odd to anyone familiar with the fairly dark early slashers.

As someone new to the genre, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage strikes me as a weird hybrid between a cerebral mystery like Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder and a slasher film. It's a great film, though, disturbing and luridly entertaining, and I look forward to continuing my foray into the depths of the giallo.