Freddy Krueger Has Risen from the Grave

I'm taking some time at the moment to rewatch some of the horror films of my misspent teens and twenties. First and foremost: the Nightmare on Elm Street series. I've seen and adored the 1984 original a good number of times over the years, but I haven't watched the sequels since boarding school, back in 2003-4, on DVD with a friend. (I remember being thrilled by cherry coke and microwave popcorn, which didn't exist in my parents' sensible household.) We gave up after The Dream Child, if memory serves at all right, which from what I've read seems both sensible (in the light of Freddy's Dead) and regrettable (I missed out on Wes Craven's New Nightmare). The point is, it's been a while.

Back in the day I enjoyed A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985), but the reviews I've read since haven't been kind. And yet the film really holds up. Freddy's Revenge has problems, sure; a lot of them if you're exacting, but none to my mind film-breaking. And at the same time it's really bold and experimental and subversive (within the limits of the extremely rigid slasher genre, you understand). That's partly by accident - slasher aficionados have given the genre far more thought than the people who made most of these films ever did - but it's real nonetheless.

We open on a school bus in Springwood, Ohio, where an awkward-looking teenage boy, Jesse (Mark Patton) sits alone, while groups of cool kids giggle among themselves. But what seems like a normal ride to school turns to terror when the bus driver, a burnt-looking man with a knife-glove, drives the bus off the road and into the desert (!?), where shenanigans ensue - until Jesse wakes up, soaked in sweat and screaming, in his bed.

It turns out that awful nightmares have been a regular feature of Jesse's life since his family moved to 1428 Elm Street, the house where Nancy Thompson lived in the first film. Jesse has trouble fitting in at school, spending time only with his girlfriend, Lisa (Kim Myers). The nightmares grow worse: Jesse finds himself walking into the boiler room in the basement and keeps running into the fedora-clad bus driver from his nightmares, one Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). Freddy explains that he wants Jesse to 'kill for him' so that he can take over his body and return to the real world. Before long the bodies start to pile up, each followed by Jesse waking up with Freddy's glove on his hand...

The plot isn't just not a rehash of the original, it inverts it: where in A Nightmare on Elm Street Nancy was trying to pull Freddy into the real world to defeat him, in Freddy's Revenge it's Freddy himself who's trying to punch through the looking glass, while the heroes are trying to keep him down. What I like best, though (SPOILERS), is that the role of protagonist shifts from Jesse to Lisa at the end of the second act. As Jesse becomes ever more stressed and sleep-deprived, he's increasingly incapable of dealing with the situation; eventually, Freddy takes over his body entirely, so that Jesse, inasmuch as he exists any more, is now the antagonist. Lisa takes over as Final Girl and resolves the plot, so that the happy ending is her freeing him from captivity. The standard slasher structure is definitely there, but twisted for a more interesting take.

Here's what makes this messier, alas: Freddy's Revenge doesn't follow the franchise rulebook for what Freddy can and can't do. While he's still yelling about how he wants to return to the real world, he's already doing things in the real world that he shouldn't be able to. Specifically, a lot of stupid poltergeist crap that's more baffling than scary, like setting the family toaster on fire ('It wasn't even plugged in!' dunh dunh dunh) or the film's abiding moment of shame: Freddy possessing the family parakeet. Oh noes, the bird is swooping down on the family in tremendously goofy POV angles, giving Jesse's dad a minor cut on the cheek! Shock horror, Jesse's dad broke the lamp trying to hit the bird! Followed by the pièce de résistance: the bird bursts into flames and blows up, showering the family with feathers, like it swallowed a stick of dynamite in a forties cartoon.

But then again, A Nightmare on Elm Street didn't do it by the book either: Freddy levitates Tina off the bed, in one of that film's best scenes, in a way he absolutely shouldn't be able to do according to what we think of as the franchise rules. The ending, of course, is famously obscure and totally blurs the line between dream and real world: you tell me who's alive and who's dead at the end of the first film, since I can't (Freddy's Revenge clears that up in a bit of exposition), whether Glen and Nancy's mum were in fact dragged off bodily to the underworld or not and so on. Really, Freddy's Revenge is breaking rules that didn't exist yet when it was made, so I'm happy to give it a pass.

Then there's the issue of what, if you didn't know the meaning of words, you might call the film's 'homoerotic subtext'. Jesse is gay. It's just barely possible to read the film in other ways, since no-one ever says so in so many words; but really everything that's right there in the finished product insists on it. A small part of this is only due to Patton's performance (his palpable discomfort at Lisa's attempts at seduction, for instance), but pace writer David Chaskin, Jesse's visit to a fetish club or Coach Schneider's naked shower death are all in the writing and pretty hard to misinterpret. What's more, this can't be separated from the plot. Jesse's uncertainty about his own identity and inability to open up to his girlfriend create the insecurity that makes him a perfect victim for Freddy. 'The gay issue' isn't extraneous, it's central to the plot.

The dream sequences are much better than I remembered, though not a patch on Dream Warriors; the performances are fine, i.e. not Heather Langenkamp, but not Friday the 13th Expendable Meat either. Freddy is still a skulking shadow-dweller, but he does talk more this time around, since he has to explain the plot. He's definitely not yet the killer clown he'd later become, though. Witness this exchange towards the end of the film:

TERRIFIED PARTYGOER: Just tell us what you want, all right? I'm here to help you. FREDDY: Help yourself, fucker! *kills him*

Not exactly a zinger, is it?

Dream Warriors would bring back Heather Langenkamp and take the franchise in a totally different, initially delightful direction. That means Freddy's Revenge is a dead end, a road not taken. Does it have flaws? Yes, definitely. But it's still very much worth it: besides being a decent way to spend an hour and a half, it's one of the strangest slashers of the eighties.

Or, death in the woods

When Friday the 13th was released in 1980, the slasher had been around for a while. Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (both 1974) had pioneered the subgenre, while Carpenter's Halloween (1978) had codified its tropes: masked, silent killers with blades, young people murdered rapidly and swiftly, the Final Girl, and a reactionary moralism that constantly punished its own transgressions. Although the template existed, the floodgates had not yet opened.

Just a couple of years later, though, cheap horror flicks had absolutely overrun cinema, and Sean S. Cunningham did it. It makes sense, somehow. Cunningham had collaborated with Wes Craven on the latter's seminal Last House on the Left (1972), but in the second half of the seventies he'd turned to by all accounts wretched comedies. After Halloween he sensed an opportunity in the slasher and rushed Friday the 13th into production with an unfinished script, a budget of barely over half a million dollars - and special effects makeup wizard Tom Savini of Dawn of the Dead (1978).

We open at Camp Crystal Lake, in 1958. Two counselors get away from the group and into an attic where they begin making out, watched by an unseen figure who proceeds to knife the bloke and attack the girl. The frame freezes on her terrified face, then the franchise's logo fills the screen. It's a brazen and wildly unsuccessful attempt to rip off Halloween's immortal killer's-point-of-view opening sequence, and it's symptomatic of the film to follow.

In the present day we meet Annie (Robbi Morgan), a chirpy twentysomething who's been hired as a cook at the soon-to-be-reopened Camp Crystal Lake. Despite being warned by the locals, including Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney), that 'Camp Blood' is cursed, she accepts a lift to the camp from an unseen stranger, who very deliberately misses the exit to the camp. Annie, realising something is wrong, leaps from the car and limps through the woods, only to stumble and find herself at the feet of her pursuer. She pleads for her life, but the killer brutally slits her throat.

Depriving us of a sympathetic character we've been led to identify with is cold, nasty and shockingly effective, but that early peak means the rest of Friday the 13th is a rote stalk-and-slash bore with a bunch of people who never rise above tolerable. Preparing Camp Crystal Lake for the arrival of the campers are owner Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer) and his hirelings: macho Jack (Kevin Bacon), his sensitive girlfriend Marcie (Jeannine Taylor), not-Kevin-Bacon Bill (Harry Crosby), strip Monopoly aficionado Brenda (Laurie Bartram), insufferable prankster Ned (Mark Nelson) and sensible Alice (Adrienne King). In the course of one night, the killer whittles this group down to just the Final Girl.

It's a wonder that a formula that had barely been established can already feel as stale as it does in Friday the 13th: if I didn't know any better, I'd guess the film was released well into the slasher boom, not right at its beginning. Cunningham is the most inelegant of directors, moving his camera as if he's read about how to do horror in a book, but without any practical experience. This artlessness extends to the way he composes and structures his scenes, inevitably going for the blandest and most obvious visual cues. Barry Abrams, Cunningham's go-to cinematographer who disappeared into well-deserved obscurity with his patron, shoots the whole thing in the flattest manner conceivable, although nature gifts him some pleasant images.

The film isn't bereft of grace notes. There's Ron Millkie absolutely delightful cameo as an out-of-his-depth policeman ('We ain't gonna stand for no weirdness out here'), not to mention Betsy Palmer's pleasingly hammy turn. But Friday the 13th never relied on its script or performances. The film stands or falls with Tom Savini's craftsmanship: and heavens, Savini is at the top of his game. The practical effects - including the throat-slitting mentioned above, an arrowhead through Kevin Bacon's throat, and an axe blow to someone's forehead - are top notch, equalling if not outdoing the best the Italian gore masters had to offer at the time.

Tim Brayton has argued that Friday the 13th kicked off the slasher deluge where earlier films could not precisely because it was hackwork, painting-by-numbers horror filmmaking instead of the sometimes fiercely personal creations of Tobe Hooper, Bob Clark and John Carpenter. Cunningham, the line of reasoning goes, was readily imitable. Brayton, I think, is right on the money: F13 is middle-of-the-road in every way, but it demonstrated that you needed little craftsmanship except in the special effects department to make wheelbarrows full of money. So they did: Hollywood's underbelly spewed forth hacks' dime-a-dozen horror films, setting off the wild boom-and-bust of eighties horror. It's not a pretty story, but it befits its progenitor - a film visionary precisely because it is so mediocre.

Shear madness

The slasher film had been around in one form or another since the one-two punch of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas established the subgenre in 1974, but it took until 1980 for a trickle to turn into a deluge of cheap horror flicks. That year saw the release of Friday the 13th, by almost every measure a far worse film than either of the aforementioned ur-slashers, but one whose brutal non-aesthetic proved infinitely easier to imitate than Tobe Hooper or John Carpenter.

The Burning, released a week after Friday the 13th, Part 2 in May 1981, is thus still in the vanguard of the first wave of the slasher: late enough that it adheres to a recognisable template, early enough that the formula had not yet ossified into the artistic straitjacket the subgenre would be stuck in until A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Of The Burning's heresies, the total lack of a Final Girl is perhaps the most blatant - but I suppose I should start at the beginning. At Camp Blackfoot, some campers decide to play a practical joke on hated caretaker Cropsy (Lou David), but the prank goes horribly wrong, leaving Cropsy disfigured by severe burns. Released from the hospital five years later, Cropsy murders a streetwalker (K.C. Townsend) in an absurdly nasty fashion cut from the film's theatrical version, and disappears into the night.

Meanwhile at another summer camp, Sally (Carrick Glenn) takes a shower, begins to fear that somebody is stalking her, and to her horror discovers... fellow camper Alfred (Brian Backer), who when questioned by counselor Todd (Brian Matthews) claims he was only trying to scare Sally because the other campers bully him. It's an effective false scare, and exceedingly rare in the slasher subgenre in that it develops the characters involved - specifically, that Alfred is an indescribably awful creep. Which is unfortunate since he's the closest to a protagonist The Burning is willing to offer.

Together with his colleague girlfriend Michelle (Leah Ayres), Todd takes a group of campers downriver on canoes for a trip of a few days. The usual summer-camp slasher difficulty of telling apart kids and counselors when all the actors are adults prevails, but the group of campers consists of Alfred and Sally, her dumb bully boyfriend Glazer (Larry Joshua), shy Karen (Carolyn Houlihan), lusty would-be macho Eddy (Ned Eisenberg), Alfred's friends Dave (Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame), Woodstock (Fisher Stevens) and Fish (J.R. McKechnie). And a whole host of lesser campers, one of whom is portrayed by Holly Hunter, who judging by the way that fact is publicised you'd expect to have more than a couple of lines. She does not.

It's a whole lot of expendable meat, and Cropsy begins dispatching his victims brutally and efficiently once the group discover their canoes have been stolen and they're trapped in the wilderness. The Burning easily tops the already outré violence of Friday the 13th, especially in the infamous raft massacre scene (where Cropsy disposes of roughly half the cast in a vicious, surprisingly short sequence). There's a reason the brutality is so effective: special makeup effects maestro Tom Savini, who had contributed more than anybody else to the success of F13, passed on Friday the 13th, Part 2 in favour of this film - and turned in some of his finest work. (In the viciousness arms race, F13 would up the ante in later installments, to ugly results.)

That's not to say The Burning is some sort of spin-off of the F13 franchise. It's got an identity of its own, one that aims a little uncertainly in the direction of art-house hicksploitation darling Deliverance. There's the bluegrass on the soundtrack, unusual in an age in love with synthesizers and disco remixes; there are all the river scenes. Three decades on, the distinctive identity The Burning carves out with its raft massacre and its Final-Girl-less climax helps it stand out in a genre more rigidly dogmatic than your average KJV-Only Independent Fundamental Baptist church.

Above all The Burning benefits from solid craftsmanship. Characters act sensibly in what is a smart film by the low standards of the slasher genre. Produced by Harvey Weinstein and helmed by Tony Maylam (whose career never went anywhere), it's a handsome, well-directed film that uses daylight and sunset where F13 only knew pitch-black (although the film also features the worst obviously-fake 'night-time' scenes until Conan the Barbarian would take that particular crown just a year later). It is, if I may be so bold, kind of a good film. It wouldn't last, of course, but there it is.

Night of the living hillbillies

The North American slasher film emerged from two distinct exploitation horror traditions. There was the giallo, the genre of stylish and disturbing Italian murder mysteries that began with Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). Across the Atlantic, the countryside-revenge film explored tensions between city and country in an increasingly lurid fashion (Straw Dogs, Deliverance). In just one week in 1974, the slasher was born with the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas, each representing one of the traditions that were beginning to blend.

Why all that history to introduce a film released in 2003? Well, Rob Zombie has always been more interested in the countryside-revenge tradition than the giallo, to the point of turning John Carpenter's quasi-European Halloween series into a very different beast. His unfairly maligned Halloween II (2009) focuses on fields, woods and cabins to an extent previously unseen in the franchise, all the while deploying the freer structure of the countryside-revenge film over the narrative straitjacket of the giallo-style slasher.

If, then, Rob Zombie is all about recovering the countryside-revenge film and the broader church of seventies exploitation in the slasher's DNA, House of 1000 Corpses serves as a statement of intent: it's a blend of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), filtered through grindhouse nostalgia. The film starts with a black-and-white introduction by evil clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig): 'Howdy, folks! You like blood, violence, and freaks of nature? Well then, come on down to Captain Spaulding's Museum of Monsters and Madmen!'

And down we go. After a vicious opening scene and a typical Zombie montage of sideshow attractions, grindhouse clips and seventies pornography we meet our meat, four twentysomethings driving across the country in search of roadside attractions: Mary (Jennifer Jostyn), Denise (Erin Daniels), Jerry (Chris Hardwick) and Bill (Rainn Wilson). Spaulding points them in the direction of the tree on which local legend 'Dr. Satan' was hanged, but they lose their way before picking up a weird local hitchhiker, Baby (Sheri Moon). When the car breaks down, Baby invites the group back to her family home.

You can guess where this is leading. The Firefly family, including Mother (Karen Black), sadistic mastermind Otis (Bill Moseley), scarred, stunted manchild Tiny (Matthew McGrory), and Grampa (Dennis Fimple), spend several hours creeping our heroes out over a meal and after-dinner 'entertainment' before turning on them, capturing and gradually murdering the young people as well as the posse searching for them (Harrison Young, Tom Towles, and Walton freaking Goggins). Who will survive... and what will be left of them?

As a conventional narrative House of 1000 Corpses is barely functional. It is instead a pandemonium of the American subconscious as filtered through exploitation cinema. In Zombie's hands, the film's vague southern setting becomes a nightmarish landscape stuffed with gore-soaked meaning, a microcosm of the modern American horror film filled with squalor, inbred freaks and vicious maniacs. When mutants and monsters suddenly push the film into speculative fiction in the third act, it's unexpected but ultimately not surprising.

It's a film awash in references, from the classic (a late scene focuses on an eye in a direct quotation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) to the more recent (Otis wears Norwegian-style corpse paint - in anyone else's hands this would be a savage indictment of black metal, but metal veteran Zombie probably intends it as a compliment). It may be recycling born of love, but the film's total dependence on its forebears is ultimately its greatest limitation: it just can't stand on its own. Zombie displays keen visual instincts in his debut, but he doesn't craft a satisfying narrative.

Even so House of 1000 Corpses is an important film: released in the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it helped usher in a new era for the horror film. Although Nispel's film is less interesting than House, the two pictures share a commitment to a grimy, repulsive anti-aesthetic and to earnest pastiche rather than the winking parody of the Scream films. They're also together responsible for the rise of torture porn, a genre I have no intention of ever exploring. Be that as it may, in 2003 the horror film became dangerous again. And whatever else you think of Rob Zombie, that's a good thing.

Totally swamped

Hatchet wasn't really a horror film. It was horrible, but that's not the same thing. Tasteless, poorly written and indifferently shot, Hatchet thoroughly failed to be a loving throwback, unless accurately recreating the worst inanities of the Friday the 13th franchise counts as success. In boasting that it was not a sequel, a remake or based on a Japanese film, Hatchet only made us wish we were watching any one of those things instead.

It's something of a surprise, then, that Hatchet II is an improvement over its predecessor in almost every department. It's still not a good film, but it's an acceptable way to waste an hour and a half. That has nothing to do with director Adam Green's decision to release the film without a rating: the over-the-top gore remains the worst aspect of the franchise. No, Green gets the job done with old-fashioned good writing and casting. But we'll get to that.

The film opens where Hatchet ended, with Marybeth (Danielle Harris, replacing Tamara Feldman) being attacked by Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). She escapes his undead grip by poking out his eye and flees the swamp, the only survivor of Crowley's murder spree. She's picked up by Jack Cracker (John Carl Buechler), who throws her out when he realises whose son she is, but tells her to see Reverend Zombie in New Orleans. After Marybeth is gone, Crowley attacks Cracker and strangles him with his own intestine.

After the credits, Green transports us back to New Orleans, where an incredibly tasteless establishing shot of someone vomiting on the pavement reminds us it's the day after Mardi Gras. Marybeth drops by the voodoo shop of Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, promoted from a cameo in the first film), who eventually agrees to take her back to Crowley's cabin so she can retrieve the bodies of her father and brother. Zombie insists, though, that Marybeth bring a family member along, while he'll assemble a team to go into the swamp that same night.

The cast duly return to the swamp by boat. Once on land, they split up into several teams of expendable meat plus a central group of five. The former are nought but bodycount padding, and I shan't bother to list their names, personalities of varying obnoxiousness, or their gory deaths. The latter consist of Marybeth, Reverend Zombie, badass middle-aged biker Trent (R.A. Mihailoff), Marybeth's uncle Bob (Tom Holland) and Justin (Parry Shen), the twin brother of Shawn, the previous night's tour guide. Marybeth soon finds out that Reverend Zombie has a sinister plan. It turns out that the three children who killed Victor Crowley were Marybeth's father Sampson, her uncle, and Trent. Zombie hopes that by killing these three Crowley will at last complete his revenge and find peace, leaving the long-forbidden swamp to Zombie's control (or something).

This plot twist means that Hatchet II has far higher stakes than the first film, where Marybeth was merely looking for her father and brother (who we already knew were dead). The element of uncertainty and suspense - will Crowley kill Trent and Bob? will the curse be ended? what of Reverend Zombie's nefarious schemes? - makes the film much more emotionally satisfying than the original's simple-minded 'meat enter swamp & die' schema. It's still full of shameless padding, though: Victor Crowley begins carving the meat 54 minutes into an 85-minute film. Before that, it's mostly inane drama about characters we know will not live long.

Aside from the peripheral meat, the characters themselves are much better drawn and acted. Todd's venal, theatrical performance is one-note, but it's an enjoyable note, while Holland and Mihailoff take sketchily drawn characters and turn them into full human beings (well, full slasher archetypes, but you know what I mean). Harris is better than Feldman, but mostly it's just damn amazing to see Danielle Harris, one of the great scream queens of the modern era (she's done four Halloween films, remember, the same number as Jamie Lee Curtis), get an absolutely terrific final shot that threatens for the briefest of moments to elevate Hatchet II to 'good', before we remember what came before.

It looks better, too: Will Barratt's daytime cinematography is superior to the nighttime equivalent thereof, although the latter, too, is improved. It's ridiculously, implausibly gory, with far more actual hatcheting than the first film. I'm no gorehound, but I've seen enough slasher films to know that a master like Tom Savini would laugh at the practical effects in the Hatchet franchise. That, of course, still seems to be the intention: to make us laugh. As it is, Hatchet II still isn't all that enjoyable, although a greatly improved sequel. On the current trajectory, it almost makes you look forward to Hatchet III, coming out this year - almost.

In this series: Hatchet (2006) | Hatchet II (2010)

Hatchet job

When a lazy filmmaker decides to make a pastiche or genre homage, he designs it to be critic-proof. 'Aha!', our savvy hack will exclaim when a keen-eyed reviewer savages plot, acting and direction, 'that's deliberate! I'm drawing attention to the badness of the works my film is based on!' The conceit seems to be that (a) you're being bold and iconoclastic, as if no-one had noticed those films were stupid before, and (b) making a bad film is an acceptable way of critiquing badness.

It is not; yet sadly Hatchet is such a picture, and writer-director Adam Green is that sort of filmmaker. Hotly anticipated by horror fans for its promise to be 'old school American horror' - unlike those remakes, sequels, and Japanese films - Hatchet failed spectacularly at the box office in 2006, debuting in thirty-ninth place and grossing a grand total of $175,281 domestically. (It later found a much larger audience on home video.)

Nor was it at all vindicated by critics: at 49%, Hatchet's Rotten Tomatoes rating could be called lukewarm at best. Yet I can't help feeling that the trajectory of heightened expectation followed by disillusionment actually represents a sort of weird victory for Green. Recall that the respectable (and a healthy proportion of the non-respectable) reviled slasher films in the eighties, so by being ignored and rejected Hatchet fits right in with the genre to which it's a declaration of love. Hatchet's richly deserved failure becomes unintentional performance art.

We open in a Louisiana swamp at night, where Sampson (Robert Englund) and his son Ainsley (Joshua Leonard) are sitting in a boat waiting for alligators. Englund, a great horror actor relegated to roles in 'all-star horror casts' of late, chews the scenery while telling Leonard he's a 'queer', and Ainsley gets off the boat to urinate. Upon returning he finds Sampson dead and disembowelled and is himself literally torn limb from limb by an unseen assailant a second later. This whole scene is very bad, just like in an old slasher film where you suffered through padding yearning for the inane characters to stop talking and start dying messily.

A pre-credits scene in which random people we'll never see again are eviscerated already gives us grounds to suspect Green really wanted to direct a Friday the 13th installment c. 1982, and we're about to have our misgivings confirmed as Green transports us to New Orleans, where it's always Mardi Gras. Ben (Joel David Moore) has recently been dumped by his girlfriend and isn't enjoying the festival, so he decides to go on a haunted swamp tour with his black best friend Marcus (Deon Richmond). The guy who usually does swamp tours, the Reverend Zombie (Tony Todd, obviously shoehorned in just because they realised they might be able to get him for a cameo), points them to another place where they run into...

... two young women doffing their tops for the camera of softcore producer Doug Shapiro (Joel Murray)! The girls are Jenna (Joleigh Fioravanti) and Misty (Mercedes McNab), and they'll periodically expose their breasts for the rest of the film as if Green had decided to be as brutally literal with the old formula as possible. McNab's recurring role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel makes seeing her topless sort of cringeworthy and embarrassing, but hey. The haunted swamp tour is organised by Shawn (Parry Shen), whose Cajun accent is as overblown as his shifty manner. I suppose that's intentional, though. Fuck you, Adam Green.

The other tour guests are middle-aged couple Shannon (Patrika Darbo) and Jim (Richard Riehle), who are transparent bodycount padding, as well as Marybeth (Tamara Feldman), who we instantly know must be the Final Girl because (a) she seems tense, mature and mysterious and (b) she is the only young woman to not have exposed her breasts to the world at this point in the film. Do I even need to say that the best way to point out that eighties slasher casts were generally hateful, lazily written collections of stereotypes isn't to make your cast that, too? Thought not.

As the tour boat, steered by Shawn, prepares to enter the swamp, a homeless-looking man - let's call him, I don't know, Crazy Ralph (John Carl Buechler) - hollers warnings at them, but Shawn ignores him, and the meat depart into the swamps, where Shawn tries in vain to spook his guests with tales of Victor 'Hatchetface' Crowley, a deformed young man who lived in the swamps with his father (Kane Hodder). One Hallowe'en, ill-behaved children set the Crowley homestead on fire, and Mr Crowley accidentally killed his son with a hatchet while trying to break down the door that kept Victor trapped.

Soon the boat runs aground and begins to sink, and the meat have to go ashore, where they find themselves stranded in the middle of the swamp without knowing where they are. Marybeth, who reveals herself to be Sampson's daughter looking for her dad and brother, leads the group. Before long they're assaulted by a very much alive Victor Crowley (also portrayed by Kane Hodder in Grotesque makeup), who slaughters our meat at an astounding rate, and from there it's pretty much bog-standard slasher territory.

I don't feel comfortable even labelling Hatchet a horror film. It doesn't seem intended to frighten or disturb its audience. Green expects viewers to react with glee to the viscera on display. As someone who doesn't particularly enjoy gore, that doesn't quite work for me, but maybe you find limbs flying about the place hilarious and delightful, and who am I to judge? Green also tries to wring a lot of broad comedy from ethnic and gender stereotypes, forgetting that while subverting racism and misogyny may be funny, pandering to it generally isn't.

Among the actors Kane Hodder is the best by far, even if he and the script are both content to make Victor Crowley no more than Jason Voorhees in Louisiana! Speaking of, True Blood makes the swamps of the lower Mississippi more atmospheric than Green even attempts: as shot by the hack Will Barratt, Hatchet is uglier than the setting should allow, but I'm sure that's deliberate. More interestingly, Green totally eschews standard horror camerawork - the kind that gets close enough to the character to make sure we can fear but not quite see what's going on around them - in favour of a much simpler point-and-shoot aesthetic that robs the film of any suspense or terror; but again, Hatchet is not really a horror film.

I'm honestly unsure who or what Hatchet is for. It's an excellent facsimile of an early Friday the 13th film, before they tried to shake up the formula: young people go into wilderness, get naked, die. But haven't we had enough of those films? By 2006, American horror was far from dead: Rob Zombie had already entered the scene, and Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake had been better than it had any right to be. There's a reason the eighties slasher died, and Hatchet mostly reminds us why it should stay dead.

In this series: Hatchet (2006) | Hatchet II (2010)

Meet the ur-slasher

Lest this blog be accused of lacking Christmas cheer, I decided to do what I do best: watch a low-budget slasher film. But not, gentle reader, any old dead teenager flick. No, nothing but a Christmas-themed horror picture would do, because if the stylish slaughter of innocents is not the reason for the season, I don't know what is. (Jesus is. It's not Herodmass, after all.)*

Black Christmas isn't just yuletide-friendly, though.  It's also an important film, after a fashion: released on 11 October 1974, Black Christmas is the first North American slasher film, predating Halloween by four and Friday the 13th by five and a half years. That's how long it took for the template the film pioneered to catch on - which may have something to do with the fact that the first, glorious flowering of this most American of horror subgenres was produced in Canada.

It's shortly before Christmas at the Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house, somewhere in the northern US (portrayed by Toronto). The girls' Christmas party is interrupted by an obscene phone call from a man the sisters have dubbed the moaner for his fondness for gurgling, screaming, and animal noises. Foul-mouthed Barb (Margot Kidder, of Superman fame) shouts at the caller, causing 'professional virgin' Clare (Lynne Griffin) to worry about provoking someone obviously unhinged. She's right to fret since, while packing in her room, Clare is asphyxiated in plastic foil by an unseen assailant.

The next day Clare's father, Mr Harrison (James Edmond) arrives in town to pick up his daughter but finds that the house mother, Mrs Mac (Marian Waldman) hasn't seen her of late. (Mrs Mac, by the way, is an alcoholic spinster, and I'm never quite sure whether to be grateful or appalled that screaming stereotypes tend to die early on, as this character does.) Meanwhile, Jess (Olivia Hussey, who shot to fame with Romeo and Juliet) meets her boyfriend, highly strung music student Peter (Keir Dullea, of 2001: A Space Odyssey), to tell him she is pregnant but will have an abortion. Peter takes this badly, and the two part without agreeing.

Mr Harrison and the concerned sisters report the threatening calls to the police. There, Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon, who later played a similar authority figure in A Nightmare on Elm Street) decides to put a tap on the house phone. (The specifics of telephony - rather different in those primitive days - are rather important to the plot, and are thankfully well explained.) Before long, the police discover the shocking truth: the calls are coming from inside the house.

As a horror film Black Christmas is extraordinarily satisfying: suspenseful and, well, scary - a less common trait in the genre than one might suppose - it towers over its lesser brethren. That's in no small degree thanks to having an unusually threatening baddie in the Moaner (voiced by Nick Mancuso and director Bob Clark himself). Most slasher villains are not actually insane: sure, Michael Myers spent most of his life in an asylum and his madness is frequently asserted, but for all practical purposes he's a functioning guy who just really enjoys stabbing teenagers to death. The Moaner, on the other hand, is frakking psychotic, and the psychosexual menace in his calls ('Let me lick your pretty piggy cunt!') makes your skin crawl in ways simpler murderfests cannot muster.

It can't be denied, unfortunately, that Black Christmas is filled to the brim with padding - although at the time many superfluous subplots seem like they'll lead to something, and I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. For example, the search for a missing teenage girl keeps Jess, Phyl (Andrea Martin) and Mr Harrison occupied during the film's second act, but ultimately peters out. At least they're always diverting, thanks to the well-written script by Roy Moore. (My favourite moment occurs when Phyl's boyfriend Patrick (Michael Rapport), dressed as Santa Claus, glumly mutters 'Ho ho ho shit... ho ho ho fuck' into his fake beard.)

It's well-acted, too: Margot Kidder as the hard-drinking Barb, who enjoys shocking people with tales of her promiscuity to hide her lack of meaningful relationships, is perhaps the best, but Olivia Hussey comes close despite being hampered by an unsteady accent. Then there's the undeniable fact of the film's feminist subtext - surprising in a subgenre generally known for its vicious misogyny. Like many slashers, Black Christmas is in no small part about a man violently reasserting control over women; unlike some of its brethren the film problematises the patriarchal murder spree rather than celebrate it.

That feminist edge is present in our Final Girl, too. Jess, you'll recall, is pregnant out of wedlock and determined to have an abortion, and yet she's a fully drawn, rounded human being. Her let's-get-married-and-have-the-baby boyfriend, with his obsessive need for control, is clearly the less mature of the two. I'd argue, in fact, that the old 'sex equals death' cliché conceals the fact that survival in a slasher film is not primarily about virginal purity but about level-headedness and maturity - qualities exhibited by the nonvirginal Jess and the virginal-by-lack-of-opportunity Laurie of Halloween, but not by their promiscuous friends. Seen in that light, Black Christmas is a far less heterodox slasher than it seems at first.

Bob Clark's direction is far too eager to waste time with gratuitous shots from the killer's point of view but is otherwise good: the best scenes, for my money, are a slow close-up pan over the girls' faces during the moaner's first call and an eeriely beautiful murder committed with a crystal unicorn statue, in the film's most Italian moment. Black Christmas never hides the debt it owes to the giallo: the telephone subplot is cribbed from Dario Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), as is what Tim Brayton has termed the uncovering of the tableau, the scene - present in most slashers and gialli - in which the Final Girl discovers the bodies of her slain comrades.

These characteristics lead me to identify Black Christmas as the first slasher film, despite the fact that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released ten days earlier. Tobe Hooper's violent fantasy grew out of the very American countryside-revenge film typified by Deliverance (1972) rather than the giallo, and the series has retained that genre's tropes - incestuous, unhygienic hillbillies, a rural, Southern setting, a group or family of killers rather than a lone murderer - to the present day even as it's been intertwined closely with the true slasher.

If Black Christmas still feels like a giallo in places, it has already transcended that genre and created something new - new in 1974, that is: after the Friday the 13th series set to churning out braindead paint-by-numbers slashers, its originality is easily missed almost four decades on. Many of the tropes it introduced - the lone, unseen killer, the meat whittled down one by one, the Final Girl, the crucial role of the telephone - form the bedrock of the genre to this day. Black Christmas is not, however, only the archetypical slasher. It's also one of the very best, and has lost little of its raw creepiness.

*And now I find myself wishing someone would do a slasher adaptation of the Christmas story, with Jesus as the Final Girl.

Halloween retrospective: thirty years of terror

I've completed my ten-film Halloween retrospective - peruse at your leisure!

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)

So slay we all

It's an iron law of film franchises that they never end on a high note. Business logic dictates that studios must keep cranking out sequels until, inevitably, they produce an installment so critically reviled and commercially unsucessful that public disgust forces them to lay the series to rest. One can imagine a world in which artistic vision alone determines the lifespan of film series: but to get there we'd need to overthrow the social conditions that give rise to films like Resurrection.

Halloween: Resurrection (2002) killed the Halloween franchise for good: it was simply so bad that Dimension Films had to stop flogging the dead horse and let Michael Myers die at last. A few years later, series producer Moustapha Akkad - a great man, after a fashion - was blown to kingdom come by a suicide bomber in Jordan, and thus ended one of the great slasher franchises, in fire and blood - until the 2007 remake, anyway.

We open with credits, presented in a grossly terrible font before a dark background, and then we hear Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) recite a fauxlosophic speech about the door to hell etc. Laurie has been confined to a psychiatric institution after accidentally killing an innocent man on Halloween night, 1998, according to exposition spouted by a senior nurse (the late Lorena Gale) for the benefit of her colleague (Marisa Rudiak). Both Gale and Rudiak are deeply terrible in this scene, incidentally; and since Gale at least was excellent as Elosha on Battlestar Galactica, I'll hold the script responsible.

It appears that at the end of H20 Michael Myers crushed a paramedic's larynx and switched clothes and mask with the unconscious man, and it was this poor devil that Laurie killed. I don't need to tell you this makes no sense, and I honestly wish the writers had just brought Michael back by fiat. Why not claim a wizard did it? It's not like they hadn't gone there before. Anyway, it quickly emerges that Laurie is only pretending to be catatonic: in fact, she's waiting for Michael to turn up and finish the job. Curtis, incidentally, is much worse than she was in H20: I believe she was contractually obliged to appear, but it's clear that just like everyone else in the whole world, she was sick to death of this series.

Michael comes for Laurie, murdering security guards along the way. There follows a pretty good fight-chase scene between Laurie and Michael, at the end of which she lures him onto the roof and catches him in a snare (as he attempts to hack his way out, his knife makes comically overdone slashing noises). Just as she's about to finish him, though, she hesitates, fearing she may kill the wrong man again; Michael exploits this to throw her over the edge. She kisses the mask, hisses 'I'll see you in hell!' and falls to her death. This is every bit as underwhelming to watch as it is to read about, incidentally. As Michael walks out, he hands his knife to an inmate obsessed with serial killers - handle first, of course: wouldn't want anyone to get hurt.

With Laurie dead, the mantle of final Myers scion should theoretically pass to her son John; but Josh Hartnett being out of Resurrection's budget in the wake of Pearl Harbor, we instead get a cast of random unknowns. Our obvious Final Girl this time around is Sara (Bianca Kajlich, of Dawson's Creek). The film introduces us to her in a lecture on the Jungian concept of the shadow, which is apparently 'a figment of ourselves that even the collective unconscious denies... Inside all of us there lurks a dark, malevolent figure, a kind of bogeyman, if you will'. That may sound ominous, but it's so much nonsense: in analytic psychology, the shadow is a complex uniting the 'socially undesirable aspects of the maturing personality' (Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction, p. 64). Am I wasting my breath here?

Sara and her friends Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), an enthusiastic cook, and Jen (Katee Sackhoff - no, really) have just been chosen for a new internet reality format thought up by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes). 'Dangertainment' will see a group of contestants spend Halloween night in the old Myers house in Haddonfield, supposedly to find out what drove Michael to kill; the teens have cameras strapped to their heads and viewers can choose their own angle. Of course, Freddie and his assistant Nora (Tyra Banks) have secretly loaded the house with knives, fake corpses, spooky toys and the like, hoping for more entertainment value.

Beside Sara, Rudy and Jen, the contestants include Donna (Daisy McCrackin), who spouts what the screenwriters believe is high-falutin' college talk; Jim (Luke Kirby), a music student who wants to get into Donna's knickers; and Bill (Thomas Ian Nicholas), who dies very quickly. Of all these people, Katee Sackhoff is probably the most dispiriting: evincing none of the brilliance she displayed as Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck, she is very bad here, and it makes me feel a little embarrassed. It is, in general, a loathsome bunch of meat - although on the plus side, we have three named black characters, a series record and quite possibly an all-time high in the slasher genre.

Obviously, Michael turns up and begins murdering everyone. The kills are pretty rank, gory but unoriginal; and if you were to ask me when the old 'killer kills with people in the next room none the wiser' trope got really stale, I'd have to say it was around the time of Halloween II, back in 1981. We're treated to the worst head prop I've seen in a very long time during Jen's death scene, and there's one fake-out of a seemingly dead character returning to life, because in the Halloween series multiple stab wounds lead to either (1) instant death, (2) brief loss of consciousness, after which you carry on as if nothing ever happened. Michael is played without distinction by Brad Loree, and let me issue my familiar complaint that the mask looks different again: the eyeholes are smaller now and have black rims.

In Resurrection, we see everything that makes a slasher bad coalesce. Its screenplay, penned by Larry Brand and Sean Hood, is truly lousy, leading to a film so braindead it makes The Curse of Michael Myers seem downright ambitious. The performances are terrible and, worst of all, it's unimaginably ugly. The 'choose your own perspective' gimmick means that a lot of what we see is low-quality, grainy webcam footage, and the innumerable POV shots make for a miserable viewing experience (there's a reason why POV is used sparingly in film). Director Rick Rosenthal's return to the franchise sees it at its nadir, and Rosenthal has no luck making any of what happens less confusing. It's a miserable little film that escaped direct-to-video hell only because of the franchise's prestige and Akkad's clout, and thus it's a good showcase of the slasher as a whole c. 2002.

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)

Nor any drop to drink

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was the last gasp of the old franchise, or so it appeared: the low point of the series in every way, there seemed to be no possibility of another film. Just a year later, though, Scream made slasher films fashionable again, and so, from a story by Kevin Williamson, the man behind Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, we get Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998).

That clumsy title hides one of the better films of the series: the best, certainly, since 1988's Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Damning with faint praise seems the appropriate response, for 'better' does not mean 'good': and if the film is superior to its dismal predecessors, it's also chock-full of nineties 'irony'. It's an entire film of screenwriters Robert Zappia and Matt Greenberg giggling while doing air quotes.

It starts right, though. We're in Langdon, Illinois, on 29 October 1998, and the use of 'Mr. Sandman' on the soundtrack already tells us what ponderous exposition will establish later: H20 follows Halloween II, ignoring the preceding three films. This isn't really necessary: the diverging timelines are quite easily reconciled, although we'd then have to explain why Laurie abandoned her daughter, Jamie Lloyd, to be attacked by Michael. But I won't blame the film for pretending the druidic silliness of The Curse of Michael Myers never existed: I've been there.

Anyway, we meet Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Loomis's colleague from Halloween, who has just discovered her house has been broken into. The long and short of it is that someone has taken all the information on Laurie Strode, revealing that Laurie faked her own death and moved to California. Stop right there, H20: if Laurie was so keen to assume a new identity, then why does Chambers have all that information on file, including Laurie's current address? Presumably Loomis knew, but why tell Chambers? (The answer, of course, is that Donald Pleasence had died in 1995, and they needed a replacement character.)

Before Chambers can fully process the implications of all this, she discovers that Michael Myers (Chris Durand) has already murdered two annoying teens (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Branden Williams - one of these is more famous than the other) and, in short order, our villain murders Marion herself, in a shockingly bad throat-cutting effect. (In Hollywood, severing someone's carotid instantly causes them to shuffle off the mortal coil rather than bleeding to death for several minutes.) Michael then gets in a car and drives to California - hang on. So two days before Halloween, Michael Myers, who's been out of commission for twenty years, commits a triple homicide in Langdon, and Laurie, who's later shown to be paranoid and thus likely follows Illinois news, waiting for just this sort of thing to happen, is totally surprised by Michael's appearance. I suppose plot holes are one thing the franchise didn't abandon along with the Curse of Thorn.

The police appear and spout some exposition: apparently Michael is believed dead in the hospital fire at the end of Halloween II, but they never found the body. (He was on fire and would have surely died with medical attention or without, but I'll let it slide.) Then we get the credits, over news clippings and Tom Kane reciting Donald Pleasence's speech about pure evil from Halloween; and I must say that apart from the horrid font in which the title is presented, this sequence is really quite good. Compared to the nonsensical tilts and flash cuts Joe Chappelle saw fit to inflict on us in The Curse of Michael Myers, director Steve Miner, a horror veteran, is a massive improvement: his camera moves a lot - forwards and sideways - but never in an incoherent manner.

So it turns out that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, very much the single best element of this project) is now headmistress of a boarding school in northern California under the name of 'Keri Tate', has a seventeen-year-old son, John (Josh Hartnett), and carries on a clandestine relationship with the school's guidance counsellor, Will (Adam Arkin). It seems that the entire school is going on a trip to Yosemite over Halloween. Laurie won't let John go at first, but following one of those classroom scenes in which students offer opinions on characters' actions for symbolism's sake instead of ever discussing the technical aspects of fiction, she's convinced to be less controlling. However, Will secretly stays behind for a secret Halloween party in the school's basement with his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams) and his friends Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe) and Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd).

With virtually everyone having left for Yosemite, the following people are left at the school: Laurie, Will, John, Charlie, Molly, Sarah and Ronny (LL Cool J), a porter with aspirations to be a romance novelist. I've been to boarding school and don't find this 'everyone's gone except for a bunch of expendable meat' scenario too credible, but whatever. Laurie, telling Will about her past, suddenly realises that John is the same age she was at when Michael attacked her and panics, fearing Michael is after her son. Recall, if you will, that at this point Laurie has absolutely no concrete reason to fear any Myers-related mayhem is afoot; recall further that Michael was unaware Laurie even had a son until two days ago, so the whole creaky edifice of H20 requires some serious suspension of disbelief. Anyway, Michael appears and murders Charlie and Sarah (the former off-screen, the latter in a shockingly brutal scene, smashing her leg with a dumb waiter and then stabbing her), and the night takes its course.

After Scream, horror films felt the need to be 'ironic', turning the exercise of watching a horror film into a game between screenwriter and viewer. Can you decode all the clever references Zappia and Greenberg are throwing your way? H20 is full of this stuff, especially in the first act, but let's single out just a few. Remember the characters in Scream were watching Halloween and commenting on it? Well, in H20 Molly and Sarah are watching Scream 2 on the telly! The character of Norma, Laurie's secretary, really takes the cake, though. Norma, you see, mentions a problem with blocked drains in the girls' showers when she first appears; and a little later she begins a speech to Laurie with the words, 'If I could be maternal for a moment...' I will now adopt H20's idea of subtlety and explain the joke. Norma is portrayed by Janet Leigh, who is famous for a little film called Psycho. In Psycho, her character, Marion Crane, is murdered in the shower by Norman Bates. Janet Leigh is also Jamie Lee Curtis's mother. There you have it.

If the film is burdened by the writers' insistence on a hamfisted tongue-in-cheek tone, it's much helped by Daryn Okada's cinematography, emphasising ochres and browns in a way the franchise hadn't done before; and although it's mostly quite boring, none of the padding approaches the inanity of The Revenge of Michael Myers. Michael looks annoyingly different again (the eyeholes are much larger, and he has no burn scars from the hospital fire), but Chris Durand does a fine job with the character, perhaps the best since Nick Castle in the original. Most of all, H20 wrapped up the fine franchise in a satisfactory way, ensuring Michael Myers would never return to haunt another sequel. Hang on...

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)

Thorn in the U.S.A.

I may have been a little mean to some of the previous installments in the Halloween franchise. I'd like to apologise for that. Whatever the faults of Michael Kills, Michael Kills Again etc., there was always something to enjoy in them, and be it only bit parts and gore effects. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, by contrast, is without any redeeming merit whatsoever.

The Curse of Michael Myers was released in 1995, in the deepest dark age of the slasher, before the genre was rejuvenated by 1996's Scream; and like pretty much all slashers from that period, it's mercenary and uninspired. It's not bad in the almost charming way of its predecessors, though. No, its rankness is nineties through and through, all flash cuts and MTV aesthetic; and my utter loathing for the film has something to do with that. Before I count the ways, though, a little plot recap.

There is no title sequence, proving, by the rule of Halloween credits, that The Curse of Michael Myers is beyond the pale. Instead, we get a cold open: Jamie Lloyd (J.C. Brandy, who is very bad), abducted from the police station together with her brother Michael at the end of Halloween 5, is wheeled through some sort of underground labyrinth on a gurney, before giving birth surrounded by cloaked figures. The cheap-ass sets and props (it's pretty much ominous cult 101: stone walls, cowls, torches, the like) look like the sort of conspiracy pap one might find on the telly on Saturday afternoons: Relic Hunter, say.

Our bad direction alarm goes off at once, too: director Joe Chappelle uses nonsensical Dutch angles and appalling slow-motion during this sequence, and all of that is very nineties indeed: the hacks behind previous Halloween installments at least knew how to point the camera straight at whatever inane thing they were filming. I have no idea who Joe Chappelle is, but I hate him.

Jamie gives birth, the baby has a thorn rune (þ) smeared on its belly in blood, and not soon after a nurse helps her escape; she tells Jamie to run and 'Save your baby!' At this point my notes read, 'Who the hell wrote this?' We are, for the record, less than five minutes into an 84-minute film. And since you wonder, it was written by Daniel Farrands, by now something of a veteran of third-rate horror films; perhaps he's improved since, but in 1995 Farrands couldn't write a halfway competent line to save his life.

Anyway, Jamie cum baby escapes, the nurse is murdered by Michael (George P. Wilbur for the second time, after Halloween 4), Jamie flees in a truck whose owner Michael also kills and gets to a bus station, from where she calls a local radio show (why not, say, the police?). It's DJ Barry Simms (Leo Geter) doing a segment on the Haddonfield murders, and he pretty much laughs at Jamie.

It just so happens, however, that Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence, looking like he's at death's door - which, sadly, he was) and Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd. Yes, that Paul Rudd in his first film role, and he's pretty bad), the boy Laurie Strode babysat back in 1978, are both listening to the radio (why, I have no idea: it's not the sort of station Loomis would care for). I will now give the film my only bit of praise: its brief sketch of Haddonfield as a community still in the grip of Myers, who's become something of an urban legend (Halloween has been banned in the town since 1989, to the chagrin of the younger generation), is pretty good.

Jamie has to flee again, eventually crashing her truck into a huge pile of pumpkins (sigh) and running into a barn where Michael kills her by pushing her into a corn thresher. It turns out, though, that Jamie didn't have the baby with her. Instead, Tommy, who's become obsessed by the Myers legend, discovers the boy at the bus station and takes him in. Loomis, meanwhile, visits the scene of Jamie's murder with his colleague, Dr Wynn (Mitchell Ryan), declaring that the thorn rune burnt into bales of straw is '[Michael's] mark'. Which, from the evidence of previous films, is in no way true, but Farrands cares not for your pathetic continuity worries.

And now it's time to meet the Strodes, who have just moved into the old Myers house. They're John (Bradford English, who is bad), brother to Laurie Strode's foster-father, his wife Debra (Kim Darby, who is very good in a small role) and their daughter Kara (Marianne Hagan) with her six-year-old son, Danny (Devin Gardner), whose very existence raises John's ire. And then there's the Strodes' son Tim (Keith Bogart), but he's only expendable meat. The fact that the parents are obviously named for John Carpenter and Debra Hill is interesting, by the way, given that John is an enormous jerk.

That's more plot synopsis than I've ever done for a Halloween film, I think, and this despite the fact that most of it is too stupid to relate in detail. In some ways, The Curse of Michael Myers isn't a proper slasher film: Michael is mostly an obstacle, wandering around inconveniencing our heroes, whose real beef is with the Cult of Thorn. (Incidentally, the identity of the traitor who's secretly leader of the cult came as a surprise to me: not because it was a clever twist, since the character in question was clearly only introduced so he could be the villain, but because I'd forgotten said character existed due to boredom.)

According to Tommy's research Michael is under the Curse of Thorn, an ancient Celtic rune that represented a demon that spread sickness and destruction, and that there is a Cult of Thorn (the hooded chaps we saw earlier) who want to control him, or something. Now, this is mostly hilariously wrong: thorn is a Germanic rune and thus didn't exist in '500 BC', no matter what Tommy may claim, and the rest is just made up; but since thorn stands for þurs, a malicious giant/troll in Norse folk-belief, the sickness demon isn't too far off. It's almost as if Farrands did some research and then decided to discard most of it, so that the thorn business would fit with Samhain.

All this is very far removed from the 'Michael is pure evil' simplicity of Halloween, and it seems apt that Michael is pretty much at his worst this time round. George Wilbur's second stab (ho ho) at the character is not noticeably improved, and he's impeded by the old 'slasher villains walk slowly' trope: as in Halloween II, there's a scene in which he could easily catch our heroes if only he hurried up a little. More power to the make-up team for remembering his hands should be burnt, though - even though Loomis's face is mysteriously pristine again.

It's mostly bad in a really sleepy fashion, as if everyone involved wished they were elsewhere. The kills are bloody, but still quite tedious, and the gore effects are poorly done. Marianne Hagan looks bored; Paul Rudd, embarrassed. The excessive ninetiesness of the entire affair - profoundly overbaked sound effects, slick, vapid cinematography courtesy of Billy Dickson, flash cuts, strobe lighting, slo-mo, all to no avail - dates The Curse of the Michael Myers in the worst possible way. It does, however, suggest that there is a pronounced visual continuity between the pre- and the post-Scream slasher; and in this, the worst possible sense, The Curse of Michael Myers is still with us.

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)

A dish best not served at all

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers didn't set cinema on fire, but grossing almost $18 million on a $5 million budget was enough for Moustapha Akkad to greenlight a sequel. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, released in October 1989, made a profit, but the precipitous drop in box office returns compared to its bearable predecessor killed the notion of further Halloween films for a full six years. This fact encourages those of us who steadfastly believe in audiences' intelligence, for The Revenge of Michael Myers is terrible.

We open with the worst title sequence of the series, confirming an ironclad rule: the opening credits of any Halloween film are an excellent indication of the quality of what is to follow. Glowing, swirling text is intercut with a soul-crushingly awful sequence of someone using a knife to eviscerate... a pumpkin. With attendant metallic slashing noises. I haven't been so terrified since the Masks of Doom in Season of the Witch.

So anyway, we see the ending of Halloween 4 again, but now we learn that the hole Michael Myers (played this time by Don Shanks, an old friend) fell into was some sort of mineshaft. He crawls out through a ravine and into a river, is washed downstream and nursed back to health by a character the credits identify as 'Mountain Man' (in Illinois - but Halloween 5, like its predecessor, was filmed in Utah, which accounts for the more realistic depiction of autumn). After being in a coma for a year, Michael awakens, kills the Mountain Man and marches off to murder his niece Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris, still out-acting everyone but Pleasence), who has been confined to a children's clinic after stabbing her foster-mother while under Michael's mind control at the end of Halloween 4. She's visited by her foster-sister Rachel (Ellie Cormell) and Rachel's friend Tina (Wendy Kaplan), and I'd just like to say that I normally feel sorry for the fools who befriend Michael Myers's extended family, but Tina is hateful beyond belief.

Jamie goes into convulsions when her psychic link to Michael tells her her uncle is back to his murderous ways, sending the doctors into a panic. And then we get what is perhaps my favourite scene in any Halloween sequel. Ready? So the camera looks up from Jamie's perspectives, doctors and nurses standing over her preparing to operate - and then Loomis, who we had no indication to believe was anywhere near, suddenly hobbles into shot, screaming 'NOOOO!' and doing the Crazy Eyes of Pleasence. That's the character's first appearance in this film, and if there's a finer summary of the glories of Samuel Loomis I don't know of it. Anyway, he convinces the doctors to just wait for Jamie to calm down, and that does the trick.

Rachel, meanwhile, takes a shower at home and walks around her petty-bourgeois bedroom getting changed in a scene that has so much almost-but-not-quite nudity you'd think we're in a 2000s slasher. After some hijinks, Michael murders her with a pair of scissors and spirits her body away. (He also kills Max the Doberman, in another instance of Michael Myers's unending crusade against America's dogs.) With the loose end thus tied up it's time to meet the meat, in an absurdly padded sequence. There's Tina and her boyfriend Mikey (Jonathan Chapin), who's even worse than Tina and dies in a most satisfying manner, their friend Samantha (Tamara Glynn, who was apparently drunk on set), and Samantha's awful boyfriend Spitz (Matthew Walker). It seems that these teens are all headed to a Halloween party at The Tower Farm, an out-of-town agricultural site and prime murder territory.

Much of the blame can safely be directed at the screenplay. Originally written by Shem Bitterman, revised by Michael Jacobs because it wasn't any good and then revised again by director Dominique Othenin-Girard, it is a tremendous mess, leading to a film whose plot is a veritable Swiss cheese. It's all over the place, but most of all it's enormously boring. There's no reason to care about any of the characters: despite all the time we waste with them, Tina, Sammi, Mikey and Spitz are clearly nought but expendable meat, existing solely to pad the body count. (They forget Rachel ever existed once she's dead, too.) Worse, whichever of the writers decided to add comic relief in the form of two goofy coppers should be executed in front of his family. (It's just a joke, like on Top Gear. But coincidentally...)

Speaking of, the murders are very Friday the 13th. Michael Myers was always a knife nut, but here he enjoys using farm tools: Spitz is impaled with a pitchfork mid-sex in a scene that rips off Friday the 13th, Part 2 (which in turn stole the idea from Twitch of the Death Nerve), while Sammi is killed with a scythe and Mikey has his skull caved in with a garden hoe. I find the inconsistent portrayal of Michael Myers only a year after Halloween 4 really quite baffling: here he's not quite as gigantic, and his mask is looking totally different again. Oh, and he does a whole lot of driving. I'm not entirely sure where he learnt that, since he's lived in asylums since the age of six.

It's pretty obvious they just didn't care. Dominique Othenin-Girard, a hack who mostly directs TV films, doesn't even try to make Halloween 5 scary. For example, he bungles a scene in which Tina and Sammi are talking in the foreground while Michael watches them in the background, seen in the space between them; and when comparing that to John Carpenter's effective use of similar stalking tropes in Halloween, one must weep. Shot by the rightly forgotten Robert Draper, The Revenge of Michael Myers also ends the series' tradition of fine cinematography: the ugliest, for my money, are the scenes set in the Myers family home (which is now a sprawling mansion, apparently). Composer Alan Howarth, too, seems to have given up, turning in a repugnant remix of Carpenter's Halloween theme.

At least you can't accuse them of being totally indifferent to series continuity (as if that was a bad thing...). Halloween 5 is full of foreshadowing that didn't pay off for a whole six years. Michael Myers has the letter thorn (you know, þ) tattooed on his wrist, as does a mysterious Man In Black whose face we never see, but who sure spends a lot of time walking around Haddonfield; and the rune turns up again drawn on a doorframe in the old Myers house. I fear the payoff will be terrible, but in a film that's otherwise the most dispiriting hackwork the series has seen so far, any relief is welcome.

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)

Haddonfield, ten years later

After the disappointing box office returns of Halloween III: Season of the Witch scuppered the planned horror anthology, the Myers Murders lay fallow for six long years. When Moustapha Akkad finally decided on another Halloween film - it was the eleventh hour of the slasher, in truth, but that wasn't obvious then - John Carpenter was no longer interested; and thus henceforth we no longer face the embarrassment of having to blame a great man. From here on out, it's hacks all the way.

It's perhaps surprising, then, that Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) is significantly better than the mercenary second and the baffling third film, both of which were made with Carpenter's involvement. It's not as good as Halloween, of course, and it isn't scary; but it's not aggressively stupid, it doesn't grate, and it doesn't promote hate crimes against the Irish. In fact, it suggests - in the teeth of evidence otherwise - that the slasher had still not totally burnt itself out creatively.

Halloween 4's title sequence is the best since the first film's. No more the tired attempts to pay homage to the original while outdoing it. Halloween 4 uses a series of shots of the Illinois countryside in late October - and it stretches credulity less than ever before that this might actually be the Midwest, rather than, say, southern California - to create a haunting, deserted atmosphere: barns, leaves blowing in the wind, scarecrows and the like, although the focus on sharp farming implements in the latter part of the sequence is perhaps more appropriate to a Jason Voorhees vehicle. I rather want this to be the inspiration for Michael's countryside wanderings in Rob Zombie's Halloween II, but the artistic similarities are limited. Anyway, the title sequence isn't high art, but it's undeniably striking: cinematographer Peter Lyons Collister's capturing of autumn light alone is worth writing home about.

Then the plot kicks in. Of course, even having another Michael Myers film required some contortions on the part of the writers: after all, both Michael Myers and his psychiatrist Dr Loomis had perished in a fire at the end of Halloween II. Exposition clumsily establishes that Michael (portrayed this time by George P. Wilbur, a stuntman) is still alive, and as the film starts, ten years after the events of that fateful night, he escapes while being transported back to Smith's Grove. Loomis (a visibly aged Donald Pleasence), scarred both physically and mentally by his last encounter with Michael, immediately pursues him, realising Michael must be headed back to Haddonfield to murder...

... Michael's niece Jamie Lloyd (ten-year-old Danielle Harris, who would later portray Annie in the 2007 remake), the daughter of Laurie Strode, who had to be written out because the filmmakers could no longer afford Jamie Lee Curtis. Jamie's teenage foster sister Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell) is planning to spend Halloween night (for it is, of course, All Hallows Eve) with her boyfriend Brady (Sasha Jenson), but is asked by her parents to babysit Jamie instead. As Rachel goes to relay these news to Brady, we encounter something I've never seen in a slasher film before: a false Meet the Meat scene. We're introduced to Lindsey Wallace, babysat by Annie back in Halloween (Leslie L. Rohland), who has outrageous eighties hair, and several of Brady's friends, some of whom have names: and after this scene none of these people are ever referred to again & are therefore not spectacularly slaughtered.

Rachel and Jamie go trick-or-treating, Jamie having ominously picked the same Halloween costume in which Michael Myers murdered his sister all the way back in 1963. Rachel, distressed at the discovery that Brady is cheating on her with Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), loses sight of Jamie. Meanwhile, Loomis discovers that there's a new sheriff in town: Ben Meeker (Beau Starr), who takes the threat of Myers extremely seriously. While they search for Jamie, Michael kills Jamie's dog in another display of his by now notorious fierce hatred/culinary appreciation of canines, and massacres the Haddonfield police department, prompting a lynch mob to roam the town looking for him. The meat eventually barricade themselves in Meeker's house, but if the previous films have taught us anything, it's that keeping Michael Myers out is pretty much impossible.

It's a bit all over the place. Even the final girl sequence - involving a terrific chase across a slippery roof - really isn't: it starts, is interrupted, and starts again. Not to mention that Rachel isn't a traditional Final Girl, since she's protecting little Jamie, and thus the dynamic of the chase is entirely different and much more urgent than what we're used too. The meat, too, are thoroughly nontraditional, with only two of a healthy number of victims teenagers. Yes sir, Halloween 4 is a good ol' rebel, flouting the rigid conventions of the slasher with an air of criminal ruthlessness.

Our villain's had a bit of a makeover. After the human-sized stuntmen who'd slipped on the Shatner mask before, George Wilbur's titanic stature should theoretically give him more presence, but Wilbur's indifferent acting foils all that (good thing, too: if I want Jason, I'll watch a Friday the 13th film, thank you very much). The mask looks nothing like its ancestors, either. It's all change in Haddonfield, and our favourite psychiatrist is no exception. I, for one, like the new Loomis very much. The scar makeup, the limp and the cane are a visual reminder of the terrors of Halloween '78, and Pleasence's more nuanced performance - there's despair in it - counteracts the fact that the character is, if anything, even crazier than before: a terrific scene suggests that Loomis's zeal is similar to that of the mad preacher (Carmen Filpi) who gives him a lift.

Mostly, Halloween 4 is just solid filmmaking: not inspired by any means but, unlike its predecessors, not actively incompetent either. Director Dwight H. Little, latterly of various television series, creates perhaps the most stylised if not stylish installment since Halloween: it's pretty full of striking images, anyway, even if there's no sense of an overall aesthetic. Only the killings are thoroughly unsatisfying: they're not scary, vicious or creative, they're just... a little tedious. For a slasher, that's a problem; but I'll take Little's solid craftsmanship over the creatively murderous incompetence of Halloween II any day.

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)