Halloween Ends: As well it should

Halloween Ends (2022) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for bloody horror violence, gore and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This is a sorry, tawdry excuse for a movie.

 

Producer Malek Akkad, whose family has owned the Halloween franchise since the first one back in 1978, obviously believes his property is bullet-proof.

 

Although Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) initially feels sorry for Corey (Rohan Campbell), 
because they're both social outcasts, she soon begins to see something troubling
in his eyes ... something very, very dark.

Meaning, that any gaggle of hack writers can be hired to throw together a flimsy excuse for a script, as long as it contains the obligatory number of slashed throats, smashed heads and other bodily mutilations.

This pathetic entry’s writers — Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green — deserve some sort of award, because their so-called storyline makes no sense, and is populated by numb-nuts characters who never once behave in a credible manner.

 

This is another textbook example of the “idiot plot” … which lurches forward, from one eye-rolling moment to the next, only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times.

 

The sole bright note — and the only reason this misbegotten junk gets even one star — is the gently flirty relationship, during the rare calmer moments, between franchise stalwarts Jamie Lee Curtis and Will Patton, as long-beleaguered Laurie Strode and protective Officer Hawkins. These moments feel real, and heartfelt.

 

The film opens with a brief prologue in 2019, as 21-year-old Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is hired to babysit the brat from hell. The evening doesn’t end well, effectively ruining Corey’s life.

 

Flash-forward to the present day, as we peer over Laurie’s shoulder, busily typing her magnum opus memoir of Life With The Boogeyman (a subplot that goes nowhere, I hasten to add).

 

Corey, equal parts taunted and haunted, has become a pariah in the long-beleaguered Illinois community of Haddonfield; he works part-time at the mechanic and wrecking shop owned by his sympathetic stepfather (Rick Moose). Corey is immediately targeted by a quartet of local bullies — two guys, two gals — led by Terry (Michael Barbieri); Laurie, knowing what it feels like to be an outsider, comes to Corey’s rescue.

Halloween Kills: Send it to an early grave

Halloween Kills (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for strong gory violence, grisly images, profanity and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

What. A. Stinker.

 

Unless I’m missing one, this is the 12th entry in the undead franchise that began with 1978’s Halloween, a modest little shocker that still out-performs all of its descendants.

 

Having barely survived what they felt was their final encounter with the murderous
Michael Myers (hah!), Karen (Judy Greer, left) and Allyson (Andi Matichak, right)
rush a badly wounded Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) to the hospital.

The series has been wholly re-invented at least twice, and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has been killed the same number of times … only to be resurrected by subsequent filmmakers anxious for her dwindling fan cred, who explained this away by insisting, “Oh, that one (or those several) didn’t count.”

Even by such increasingly contrived standards, in a textbook case of rapidly diminishing returns, director David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is an insufferable waste of time.

 

For starters, Curtis’ top-billed credit is a bait-and-switch; her Laurie Strode is present for only five, perhaps 10 minutes … and she spends the majority of that time moaning in a hospital bed.

 

Instead, our nominal “heroes” are Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), returning from 2018’s Halloween, the most recent re-boot, which kicked off a trilogy that’ll conclude (yeah, right) with next year’s Halloween Ends.

 

And while it’s nice that Green — along with co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride — have name-checked characters and events from John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, it would have been even better if they’d written a coherent script. Seriously, nothing that happens in this misbegotten flick makes any sense — except as a means to set up another welter of gory deaths — and every character’s dialogue is random, hysterical gibberish.

 

So okay: It’s fun to see the now-adult Kyle Richards, reprising her role as Lindsey Wallace, one of the kids Laurie babysat back in 1978; and Nancy Stephens, as Marion Chambers, the nurse accompanying Donald Pleasance’s Samuel Loomis (also glimpsed in fleeting flashbacks); and Charles Cyphers, as Haddonfield’s former Sheriff Leigh Brackett, who lost his daughter during the masked Michael Myers’ initial rampage.

 

But it would have been even more fun, if this new film gave them something intelligent to do.

 

Sigh.

 

By way of quick recap, the 2018 film concluded as Laurie, Karen and Allyson cleverly trapped Michael in a long-planned basement dungeon, and then set the entire house on fire. At long last, the demise of Michael Myers, right?

 

Of course not.

Halloween: All trick, little treat

Halloween (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence, gore, profanity, brief drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.19.18

You can’t go home again … but boy, the Hollywood sausage-grinders do keep trying.

Hollywood has unleashed 10 sequels, remakes or re-boots of John Carpenter’s modest — but undeniably ground-breaking — 1978 chiller, and not oneof them has anywhere near the original’s intensity or suspense. Instead, they’ve all succumbed to the ever-increasing gore quotient much more reminiscent of the deliberately disgusting Friday the 13th series that kicked off two years later.

As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has just discovered, not even a heavily fortified home
can stop a homicidal maniac crafty enough to punch through a window.

This one’s no exception.

The butchery here adheres to the usual formula: exercises solely designed to challenge the imaginations of make-up and special effects crewmembers. Of particular delight is the carving knife thwocked into the back of a woman’s skull, the blade’s front emerging between her agonized eyes; and the head that gets stomped into hamburger beneath a heavy boot. Tasty.

Carpenter must be of two minds. On the one hand, he’s likely pleased that every one of these misbegotten offspring have made his first film look ever better with time. On the other hand, he’s gotta be dismayed by what that film has wrought, and how it keeps getting blamed — unfairly — for all the gruesome “doomed teenager” franchises that have erupted in its wake.

The saddest part is that director/co-scripter David Gordon Green hasn’t even tried to make this new film halfway decent. He and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley merely introduce a sizable stable of one-dimensional doofus characters who exist solely to be slaughtered. I mean, really: With almost no exception, these are numbskulls who’d wander into night-time freeway traffic, in order to marvel at all the pretty headlights.

Factor in the first resort of lazy horror-franchise filmmakers — the idiot plot, which lurches forward only because each and every individual behaves like an idiot at all times — and there’s very little to recommend this early Thanksgiving turkey.

Green and his cohorts probably would argue that such behavior is expected of the characters in horror flicks, and that this adds a desired note of dark humor. In the first place, that’s nonsense; in the second, I’m not willing to credit them with that much insight. This is hack work, plain and simple.

This Halloween rebelliously insists that none of the other franchise entries existed, save Carpenter’s first film. (That’s somewhat essential, since Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was killed toward the beginning of 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, and yet here she is again.)

Forty years have passed — as actually is the case — during which the homicidal Michael Myers has been locked up in a reasonably comfortable mental facility, where he has been carefully studied by psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer, standing in for Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis, in the first film). Michael hasn’t spoken a word the entire time.