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.

Minari: An unfinished symphony

Minari (2020) • View trailer

3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for thematic elements and a fleeting rude gesture

By Derrick Bang

At its core, writer/director Lee Isaac Chung’s gentle drama is the classic saga of one man’s pursuit of the American dream.

 

It’s also a study of fitting in: finding peace as a family, and as immigrants coming to terms with their place in an unfamiliar land.

 

Jacob (Steven Yeun, left) and his family — clockwise from left, grandmother Soonja
(Yuh-Jung Youn), wife Monica (Yeri Han) and their children Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and
Davis (Alan S. Kim) —contemplate the challenge of transforming native Arkansas
landscape into an operational fruit and vegetable farm.

The setting is the 1980s. Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) has just moved his family from California to a 50-acre plot of farmland in rural Arkansas, purchased with all the money that he made during 10 years as a chicken sexer. Mindful of the ever-increasing arrival of Korean immigrants to this part of the United States, Jacob envisions a soon-to-be-thriving business growing and selling fresh Korean fruits and vegetables.

 

His wife Monica (Yeri Han) thinks he has lost his mind.

 

Chung opens his film as Jacob slowly leads his family down a country road; Monica is behind him, driving the truck with all their belongings. Jacob turns into an open field, and parks in front of a large mobile home where they’re now to live. Monica makes no effort to conceal her dismay. Her reaction is magnified by the absence of steps leading to the front door that stands four feet above the ground: a droll touch that deftly amplifies the insanity of what Jacob has gotten them into.

 

(The place does have electricity, although this detail is glossed over. Chung is occasionally sloppy that way.)

 

Worse yet — as they discover a few days later, during a torrential rain — a mobile home isn’t the smartest dwelling in a region known for tornadoes.

 

This cuts to the heart of Jacob’s personality, and his determination to By God Make This Work, despite being wholly ignorant of the region and so many other things. He’s also heedless of the fact that the land’s previous tenant — presumably a better-informed local — went bankrupt trying. 

 

Ergo, as but one example, Jacob refuses to spend money on a dowser, insisting that he can find a well on his own.

 

There’s a certain nobility to Jacob’s stubbornness, and Yeun exudes an aura of quiet dignity and unyielding persistence. Han’s performance, in turn, is richly nuanced: On the one hand, she admires and loves her husband, and clearly wants to have faith in his grand plan … but, on the other hand, she feels it’s foolish, reckless and possibly even hazardous to their children. She’s also anxious about their isolation, and where her own life and marriage go, moving forward.

 

Conversely, Jacob holds firm to the notion that ultimately their children will benefit from his dream. 

 

Eventually. Once the dust settles.

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.

Megan Leavey: A doggone good tale

Megan Leavey (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence, dramatic intensity and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.9.17

Next time my parents grouse that movies aren’t like they used to be, I’ll point them toward this one.

Newly deployed in Fallujah, Iraq, Cpl. Megan Leavey (Kate Mara) and her explosives-
sniffing dog, Rex, are assigned to detect the improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
hidden in and alongside the road on which their vehicles need to travel.

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Megan Leavey is a straight-ahead drama with plenty of heart, told in the uncomplicated manner that marked family-friendly movies back in the day ... and I mean that as a compliment. Scripters Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt tell this story efficiently and poignantly, without needless emotional angst, and Cowperthwaite ensures that the narrative doesn’t slide into manipulative bathos.

Best of all, this is a true story: one likely to be remembered by those who followed the saga’s final chapter in 2012. While events have been compressed — as often is the case, with big-screen adaptations — Cowperthwaite and her collaborators hit the essential high points; the result is a thoroughly engaging and deeply poignant drama. And if you’re not moved by the final scene, you’re truly made of stone.

On a sidebar note, it also marks a solid star turn by Kate Mara, who has spent the last decade impressing TV viewers with memorable supporting roles in 24, American Horror Story and House of Cards. She hasn’t been as lucky with big-screen work — and probably wishes that 2015’s Fantastic Four hadn’t happened — but this new film should enhance her profile, and deservedly so.

Her Megan Leavey is introduced here in 2003, as an aimless, desperately unhappy 20-year-old New Yorker taking up space in her bedroom. Her mother, Jackie (Edie Falco), has become disgusted by this daughter who, we can assume, probably has been a nightmare child for many years. Then again, Jackie is no prize; Falco makes her such a believably horrid shrike that Leavey’s actual mother might have grounds for character assassination.

At low ebb and with no other plans, Megan impulsively joins the Marines, surviving boot camp and subsequently attending military police school at San Diego’s Camp Pendleton. But her “wild child” tendencies haven’t quite been eradicated; an ill-advised night of misbehavior results in a week of scut detail in the camp’s kennel unit ... and the promise of a dishonorable discharge, if she screws up one more time.

Not to worry. Megan is immediately fascinated by the K9 unit, and particularly by a massive, apparently unruly German shepherd named Rex. Gaining permission to have anything to do with this dog, however, means buckling down in all sorts of ways, before the K9 unit’s gruff Sgt. Gunny Martin (Common) will give her even a second glance.

The November Man: Who can be trusted?

The November Man (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, rape, profanity, sexuality and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.29.14

I always enjoy a well-crafted spy thriller, and this one’s a romp.

Australian director Roger Donaldson knows the territory, having delivered a twisty espionage thriller back in 1987, with his adaptation of Kenneth Fearing’s No Way Out. It remains one of star Kevin Costner’s best early films, thanks in great part to its didn’t-see-that-coming finale.

Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan, left) delights in setting up fight-or-flight "scenarios" for junior
partner Mason (Luke Bracey), which the latter finds a bit tiresome. And insulting. Which
rather misses the point, because the cocky Mason definitely needs to enhance his ability
to analyze a situation before it whirls out of control.

Donaldson’s handling of The November Man is cut from similar cloth, with scripters Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek delivering an engaging spin on a cherry-picked entry in the late journalist-turned-novelist Bill Granger’s 13-book Devereaux series, which began with 1979’s The November Man and concluded with 1993’s Burning the Apostle. This film’s title notwithstanding, however, it’s based not on Granger’s first Deveraux book, but on the seventh, There Are No Spies.

That said, Finch and Gajdusek’s screenplay more honestly is “flavored” by Granger’s book, with numerous changes obviously intended to satisfy action-oriented audiences. The result is reasonably entertaining in a fast-paced “airplane movie” sort of way, with star Pierce Brosnan ideally cast as a cynical, world-weary spy dragged out of semi-retirement to fix another mess involving the CIA, a corrupt Russian presidential candidate, a lethal assassin, and a possible traitor within the CIA’s highest echelons.

Although obviously aiming for the cerebral atmosphere of 1960s cold-war movie classics such as The Ipcress File and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Donaldson doesn’t hit that target too often; he more frequently mines the who-can-be-trusted territory of 1975’s Three Days of the Condor, with a strong nod toward the mentor/protégé relationship at the heart of 2001’s Spy Game.

And heck, we’ve got a cast that include a former James Bond (Brosnan) and a former Bond babe (Olga Kurylenko, from Quantum of Solace). How can it miss?

Mostly, it doesn’t. With a few stiff caveats.

Devereaux and junior partner David Mason (Australian up-and-comer Luke Bracey) are introduced in a 2008 prologue, working a mission that goes pear-shaped when the younger operative fails to heed his mentor’s stern instructions. The anguish and disappointment are clear on Devereaux’s face; the kid has blown it, obviously dashing the older agent’s faith in him.