Tag: Halloween III: Season of the Witch

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982) ***
Coming across the beloved cult film that was once not so beloved just might be the biggest hazard of movie spectatorship these days.

You better not ride on the general train of thought from the film’s original release or you just might get bludgeoned in the comments section by devotees of the cinematic item under discussion.

You have no taste! You’re an idiot! You just don’t get it! You’re too stupid to understand the undeniable genius! Blah blah blah!

I am thinking first and foremost about films like Halloween III, Howard the Duck, Sleepaway Camp, and Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Maybe you are reading my confession why I had not watched The Slumber Party Massacre until very recently.

I finally caught up with it on Halloween night 2022, I liked it well enough, and I can definitely understand why it’s held in such high esteem in some quarters though I certainly don’t like it as much as others so enthusiastically do.

The Slumber Party Massacre took a while to get started, packed with so many false alarms and jump scares that I began losing patience early on and it was not until the 45- or 50-minute mark that I became enveloped in suspense. The final 25-30 minutes are especially well-made and filled with plenty of impacting moments, so much so that I almost bumped The Slumber Party Massacre up to three-and-a-half stars even after the mixed reaction to the first two-thirds of the film.

All slasher films, whether it be the good, the bad or the ugly, have their gimmicks, be it their setting or their killer in everything from the favorite weapon of choice down to style.

The Slumber Party Massacre sold a good amount on the fact that it has a female director (Amy Holden Jones) and a feminist screenwriter (Rita Mae Brown), something not common for the horror genre overall and specifically the subgenre of the slasher.

Jones shows definite talent in her directorial debut, and it’s no surprise she later directed Love Letters, Maid to Order, and The Rich Man’s Wife and received screenwriting credits on Love Letters, Maid to Order, Mystic Pizza, Beethoven, Indecent Proposal, The Getaway (1994), and The Relic. She also married acclaimed cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Fugitive) in 1980 and stayed his wife until his death in September 2020.

Brown intended The Slumber Party Massacre to be a satire of the slasher genre, but Jones filmed it as straight horror.

However, satirical traces remain throughout The Slumber Party Massacre.Virtually all the male characters are super horny creeps and more than one female character survives all the murder and mayhem, for example.

Never mind that escaped serial killer Russ Thorn (Michael Villella) walks around in plain sight without a mask from the first scene on. He’s also one of a select few slasher film killers with quotes on the Internet Movie Database. Eat your heart out, Jason and Michael!

Also, never mind Thorn’s weapon of choice that could possibly be some kind of metaphor. Yes, it’s a power drill and I’m not sure of the symbology there! I also don’t believe there’s any greater meaning in the ways he meets his inevitable demise at the end of the movie.

The local radio station announces Thorn’s escape more than once, yet nobody seems to notice let alone care until it’s (almost) too late. I seem to remember one of the characters shutting off her car radio in the middle of one of the announcements.

Nearly all the characters are too preoccupied with their pursuits of pleasure at this very moment in time, just like the characters in any Friday the 13th film, to be concerned about some homicidal maniac on a rampage.

These satirical traces make The Slumber Party Massacre a good deal more interesting than, let’s say, Madman and The Prowler.

It works as both a satire and a straight horror film nearly 15 years before Scream came out.

In fact, not that I want to shout about it or anything, The Slumber Party Massacre works better than Scream.

Halloween Ends? Surely, They Can’t Be Serious! They’re Not But Please Don’t Call Me Shirley!

HALLOWEEN ENDS? SURELY, THEY CAN’T BE SERIOUS! THEY’RE NOT BUT PLEASE DON’T CALL ME SHIRLEY!
I have not yet seen Halloween Ends, the latest and 13th overall installment that has now passed Friday the 13th (12) and long passed A Nightmare on Elm Street (9), but I have watched and read a great many reviews of the film.

Based on the early returns, Halloween Ends just might go down in history as the most divisive Halloween film since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, you know the one without Michael Myers absolutely hated for many years before it developed a cult following in recent years, like the 1985 tandem A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.

Currently, Halloween Ends has a 5 out of 10 score on IMDb, 39 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and 47 percent on Metacritic.

General audiences seem to hate it even more than critics, interestingly enough for a horror film.

Google returns a 1.9 score for the film, based on 3,266 ratings with the vast majority giving it one.

Probably in the shape of an upraised middle finger.

By comparison, Season of the Witch returns a 3.3 audience rating and both Freddy’s Revenge and A New Beginning score 3.5.

They were hated back in the day, especially Season of the Witch and A New Beginning since they do not feature Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees.

You can bet the initial audience feedback on them would have read or sounded like the furor now over Halloween Ends.

The enraged are treating Halloween Ends like a betrayal of the faith and the spirit of Halloween and Michael Myers.

Seriously, could anything in Halloween Ends possibly be worse than EVIL DIES TONIGHT in Halloween Kills, the White Horse and Michael talking in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, the white trash back story and mommy issues for Michael in Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Busta Rhymes kicking Michael’s ass in Resurrection, the Dawson’s Creek-meets-Scream flavor of H20, the Thorn cult in The Curse and The Revenge of Michael Myers, no Michael in Season of the Witch, and the revelation that Michael and Laurie are brother and sister in Halloween II?

I don’t like Season of the Witch very much at all, but it’s not because it doesn’t feature Michael Myers.

I like a lot of the ideas behind Season of the Witch, but I feel they are poorly executed.

The majority of Halloween fans seem to want just one more Halloween sequel with a Michael Myers silently stalking and slashing his way through a series of disposable teenagers and disposable adults or corpses-in-waiting for 90-95 minutes.

They could probably take or leave Laurie Strode, but it’s obvious they want more of the same and they don’t want something different when it comes to a Halloween movie.

On the other hand, I wish the Halloween series ended many, many, many years ago, but I don’t think anybody’s foolish enough at this point to believe that it’s the end for Michael Myers or Laurie Strode. The Halloween films have always seemed much smarter than Friday the 13th and even to a lesser degree A Nightmare on Elm Street, because they never featured ends or final or dead in any of their titles until Halloween Ends.

This franchise has returned more times from the dead than any other.

I didn’t want to watch Halloween Ends after Halloween 2018 and especially Halloween Kills where all the gruesome kills in the world cannot make up for some of the worst characters we’ve ever seen in a Halloween movie … even in this series. Evil might (or might not) have died tonight, it might not have since they made another movie, but my desire to watch another new Halloween film seemingly died with Halloween Kills.

I’m just so damn sick and tired of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, whether or not they’re brother and sister or just two strangers passing in the night and no matter how many times they’ve been retconned, rebooted, and repackaged for maximum consumption.

I love the original from 1978 directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis. It remains one of the all-time greats, absolutely essential viewing for the Halloween season.

I liked H20 when I first watched it on the big screen in 1998, but it has not aged well and it has fallen in my estimation, and Halloween II, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 2007, and Halloween 2018 each have their moments, but the rest of the sequels that I have seen are bloody terrible.

I don’t see how Halloween Ends could possibly be any worse a movie than Season of the Witch or Halloween 5 or Halloween 6 or Resurrection.

Maybe one day soon I’ll give it a chance and find out for myself.