Shall we maybe anticipate David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's HALLOWEEN sequel/reboot?

i've never seen the tv cut of halloween ii but i'm v curious about it, the version that lives in the imaginations of a lot of ppl who love it is the tv cut

i just rewatched halloween 4, which is a creepy little hollowed-out movie imo, especially when michael cuts the power and everyone is illuminated faintly by generators. i think i like it even more than 2

saw it again. liked it a wee bit better, but the needle didn't move all that far.

also, was thinking, how many different Laurie Strode timelines are there now? since H20 ignored 4-6, and this one ignores 2, 4-6, I come up with....

1. Laurie Strode was Michael's sister, had a daughter named Jamie, died in a car accident, orphaning her daughter.
2. Laurie Strode was Michael's sister, faked her car accident death, apparently either didn't ever have a daughter named Jamie or did and abandoned her, and has a teenage son. Stabbed to death by Michael after she decapitated the wrong dude
3. Laurie Strode *wasn't* Michael's sister, didn't die or pretend to die in a car accident, had no daughter named Jamie or teenage son (but did have one named Karen, whom she lost custody of.)

Stabbed to death by Michael after she decapitated the wrong dude

hate the first twenty minutes of resurrection so much (the remainder is entertaining trash)

Just started watching this, and obv. Green knows how to direct a movie, and the acting seems fine, but the script ... just dumb or annoying stuff happening every few minutes, from the lazy (like hokey info-dump exposition, as if anyone needs to be caught up - "you mean Michael Myers, who murdered those people 40 years ago this very day?!") to general incoherence (if he killed five or so people one night decades ago, that neither makes him a serial killer nor really explains him being characterized as "pure evil" or whatever; you need the context of years of sequels for that) to just ridiculous (like the British journalist taunting him in the mental ward by yelling at him and waving his mask, or Michael waiting in the back of an empty car to kill the kid when he gets back rather than just ... driving away in the car before the kid even comes back). I dunno, there are some things it's getting right, but that just sort of makes the things it's getting wrong or weird more curious. This is just the first 20 minutes or so, though, so I'll give it more time, even if I assume the rest of the movie stays pretty much on the predictable track.

I liked this better on rewatching. B+

Like I said, just diving in now, but B+ because it does anything new, or B+ as a Halloween sequel?

Latter

Eh, I would give this movie a C. It wants to have it both ways but ends up backed into a corner: the only way Michael Myers could be a plausible epitome of pure eeee-vil, the way he is treated and talked about in this film, is in the context of all those sequels as an unstoppable supernatural killing machine, but this movie discounts all those sequels, which leaves him a guy who who randomly murdered some people on Halloween and then was caught and has spent decades in prison, which doesn't seem enough to justify Jamie Lee Curtis's Full Sarah Connor transformation. What makes him so enigmatic and fascinating? As that other knife-fodder kid says, is that it? There are far worse things these days. And for someone who spent their entire life preparing for the return of Michael, Laurie seems weirdly ill-prepared, right down to glass windows in the front door. Or did they mean the entire set-up, the whole house, was designed as a trap, to lure him in? That's wacky. Which leads us to the contrivance of how they (the filmmakers) get him there in the first place, which was absolutely ridiculous.

Lots of little but distracting lampshading lines elsewhere, and those British "journalists" were the wooooorst. And the McBride banter ... eh. Clearly these cops did not get the memo that they were dealing with the ultimate evil.

Updated score gets an A, though!

he was described as evil by loomis in the first one

i mean the sequels do help that land but the groundwork is there

agreed that turning laurie strode into sarah conner is an unearned stretch

Loomis did call him evil in the first one, but of course the first one succeeded in part because he was so mysterious and enigmatic. Why was he pure evil? Because Donald Pleasance convincingly described him as such. This one coasts on him being iconic, but that only came with all the sequels, imo.

For example, instead of the stupid stuff with the British podcasters, they could have had a hearing about what to do with him, about his pure evilness, about all the shit he has been up to and why he needs be locked away somewhere else (why they waited until now to transfer him after all those years is just another contrivance in this film). It's more of the lampshading, but even Laurie Strode tells those dummies "there's nothing to learn, there is no mystery" or something like that. If there's nothing to learn and there's no mystery then there's no reason for this film to exist except as a retread of the original, which makes it just another gormless sequel. Which might have been fine, because there is deeper stuff in this film, whether smart (the virtually unexplored except in broad terms relationship between Laurie and her daughter, let alone victim and victimizer and revenge generally) or utterly stupid (the twist), which is why I'm disappointed the otherwise capable filmmakers involved didn't find a way to pursue something more compelling/original/interesting with those ideas, like they were hamstrung by the need to make their unstoppable killer kill people. (Body count in this one, btw, was apparently 16! Five in the first one, not including his older sister when he was a kid.)

Hold up, does the major character boyfriend in this just vanish? I'm surprised they didn't find a way to kill him, too.

The trauma stuff is tantalizing, but the script doesn't trust the audience to find the subtext, so we get a lot expository dialogue, including a literal "Time's Up." Greene is emphatically not a director of suspense: the film isn't scary or well-paced, and for all of the callbacks to the original, Greene has forgotten (or doesn't care) that the original gained its power through atmosphere, editing, and scoring rather than gore. Basically, another shitty Halloween sequel.

Wow, I was looking up Green's CV, and 1) I just realized I haven't seen any of his films between Pineapple Express and this one and 2) between the 7 films he's made between then and Halloween, I don't even recognize the titles of four of them. Stronger? Prince Avalanche? Joe? Manglehorn? Some big actors in these, but I don't even remember their release.

Liked Prince Avalanche for what it was: two guys working a highway project in the middle of nowhere, talking, talking, talking. Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch, recommended if you're a fan of theirs, or low-key films of guys working towards adulthood and responsibility.

Watching Halloween II (original).

I love how Ben Treamor gets flambeed and then they just leave him there still on fire and drive off

What's up with comedians/comic actors making horror movies?

Danny McBride
Jordan Peele
Chris Rock

I actually wish Myers hadn't worn that shitty mask in Halloween 4, a bandaged Michael killing people woulda ruled. as did his first three murders.

I will admit to not loving 4 but outside of the first three, 2018, and maybe H20, it's one of the few i'll watch.

they ruined the ending by revealing that Jamie didn't actually kill her foster mother at the end of 4 though. it's like what if in the original Halloween, Michael had only punctured his sister's lung

also what the fuck problem does he have with mom and pop restaurants and auto body stores is Michael anti-small business? is this what drives him? is he trying to make his stock go up a few points?

then he destroys Loomis's car. someone was making payments on that still!

every time I watch an 80s slasher I'm convinced that only 4 facial shapes existed in the 80s

also did Michael actually stop in a Halloween store to get his new mask

did he pay for it or did he just kill the owners like usual

lol i forgot they show him grabbing it. duh.

the image Jamie has of young Michael in his mask is actually very good

halloween 4 is dope especially when they cut the power, it’s not og halloween but what is. i prefer it to 2

something is unsettling about seeing houses in 80s slasher films. houses were so boring back then.

just realizing that if somehow Laurie dies in Halloween Kills or Halloween Ends, this will be the third fucking time she died in the series.

the reversal of jamie as killer in 5 is the worst thing about it, though 5 is also kind of like watching the mounting psychic damage of attempting to write and shoot a fifth halloween sequel, so i let it get away with a lot

i think the h20 continuity presses on the ambiguity of laurie having “died” in 4, as she basically assumed a completely different life

her only true death is in resurrection and it’s the worst 10 minutes of the entire franchise

let me have this third death plz

I have a weird fascination with horror franchsies, like, good or bad, if your series goes like 7 or 8 movies, I'll have an interest in watching them all.

except Saw. fuck Saw.

actually, i stand corrected, as laurie technically dies at the end of the director’s cut of rob zombie’s halloween 2

which i remembered but rob zombie’s halloween movies belong to like an alternate dimension version of this franchise and i have trouble associating them

holy fuck, she's like Groundkeeper Willie on that Treehouse of Horrors

Cops Do It By the Book

always amazed how people in movies can fucking HEAR news reports in a crowded bar.

Sometimes they tell everyone to shush and ask the bartender to turn it up, and everyone respectfully quiets down so they can focus on what's happening.

I only saw the first Saw but I was extremely shocked by how much I liked it

not enough to watch the sequels, mind you

first saw is a good movie. i haven’t watched any of the sequels either lol

First one has bad acting but a great twist and fresh premise. Sequels veer hard into torture porn and a pointlessly tangled mythology. Well, not pointless. The point is to prolong the franchise.

First Saw is good.

Second one is decent but eyerolly

Third one is hilarious

Not in a good way, mind

I've lost track of the number of stories and reviews that have cited the bodycount and brutality of this installment as a series high, but I find it really hard to believe this one is more "brutal" than the Zombie one(s).

some reviews make this movie sound like it's "what if Funny Games was a Halloween movie" which um, no thank you

It's very brutal but not like.... anything that will shock genre aficionados

Reviews on this are generally scathing

I just don't get it. I skimmed a couple of reviews and ... sigh. All they have to do is make it scary and not stupid and it will work. Like, the Freddy movies, after the first one or maybe two, they're just FX camp, so the focus is on that. Jason, they're just dumb and mechanical, so the focus is on that. The first Halloween perfected the moody, slow and steady wins the race template, which is what made it an iconic masterpiece. Who needs more bullshit larded on? This one sounds like its predecessor, with a bunch of half-assed psychology and pointlessly convoluted plot gymnastics. But when the fulcrum of your franchise is an unstoppable, unkillable, faceless murder-machine that doesn't even speak, that ultimate blank canvas shouldn't be license to fill every corner with bullshit. Michael Myers is enough! The first Halloween was like Jaws. The sequels have pretty much all been Jaws 4. "Oh shit, the shark has followed me down to the Caribbean from New England because it has a mythical vendetta against me and my family!" Or whatever. That doesn't make the shark scarier, that makes the movie silly.

Like the twist from the last one? That was such a groaner just to get to a point where for sure these clever filmmakers could have found some other way to get. How hard can it be to just make a scary movie about a scary man doing scary things?

BTW, how many times now has Anthony Michael Hall been brought in as a beefed up bully? "Edward Scissorhands," "Community," "Hysteria - The Def Leppard Story" ...