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.

The Fog (1980)

THE FOG (1980) **1/2
Fog has been a critical element in many horror movies and the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and The Return of the Vampire immediately leap to mind as films made definitely better from their use of fog effects to create a foreboding atmosphere.

Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40 in 1849 but his writing and his influence live on forever. Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?

Ghost stories around the campfire have been around longer than The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and I believe that’s how Washington Irving first heard about Ichabod Crane, Brom Bones, and the Headless Horseman.

John Carpenter directed, co-wrote, and scored the original Halloween in 1978, one of the great transcendent low-budget shockers with a boogeyman killer.

Carpenter’s The Fog, his first horror film after Halloween, combines the title character, a Poe quote before the opening credits, a ghost story around the campfire told by distinguished actor John Houseman, and some grisly murder set pieces that far surpass the relatively tame and nearly entirely bloodless Halloween, but I remain steadily down the middle of the road in my reaction to it.

I want to like it a lot more than I do, believe me, and maybe I will get there next time.

I liked it more during the most recent viewing of the film and I definitely understand why it’s developed a cult following and a much better reputation in recent years.

It does create quite the foreboding atmosphere at times, it bears all the trademarks of a Carpenter film with his penchant for great composition both in the sense of framing and the music present throughout, and I do like the story of this small California town celebrating their centenary with a dark secret about the founding discovered, discussed, and confronted during the film as the dead men return 100 years to the day for their revenge.

Still, all the same, it’s underwhelming.

I believe it’s mainly because I don’t particularly connect to any of the characters and thus, I don’t really care about their fates particularly all that much.

I come the closest to connecting with radio station owner and host Stevie (played by Carpenter’s former wife Adrienne Barbeau) and Father Patrick Malone (Hal Holbrook), but they’re not on the same level as Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode in Halloween, Kurt Russell’s characters in Escape from New York and The Thing, Keith Gordon’s Arnie Cunningham in Christine, Karen Allen’s and Jeff Bridges’ characters in Starman, and Roddy Piper’s George Nada in They Live, some of Carpenter’s best characters and best films.

While it is comforting to see Carpenter regulars like Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Nancy Kyes, and good old ‘Buck’ Flower, they’ll still all be remembered first for other characters in other Carpenter films.

We simply don’t get enough of any of the main characters.

The Fog lacks a certain something, energy perhaps first and foremost, to really take it over the top and into the stratosphere like Halloween.

All that said, The Fog still has some very good even almost great moments.

I especially like the scene when Father Malone reads four entries from his grandfather’s journal and then delivers the best line of the film, The celebration tonight is a travesty. We’re honoring murderers.

Speaking of a travesty, I watched the 2005 remake in a theater and I have to believe that it’s one of the 10 worst movies I’ve ever watched in a multiplex near you.

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

WHEN A STRANGER CALLS (1979) **
The 1979 psychological horror film When a Stranger Calls has developed a certain reputation in horror movie circles.

Or we should say the first 20 or so minutes of the movie have become legendary.

When a Stranger Calls starts with the babysitter and the man upstairs urban legend, or a teenage girl babysitter keeps receiving phone calls from a stalking stranger who repeatedly asks her to check the children.

The film revisits the babysitter and the man upstairs seven years later for the final 20 or so minutes.

In between, we have many, many, many scenes that left me wondering how exactly I am supposed to be reacting to this bilge. What a waste!

I found When a Stranger Calls predominantly a dull experience, and it kept me thinking about superior and much superior films like Black Christmas, Halloween, and Dog Day Afternoon during even the film’s best moments.

First of all, Carol Kane plays the babysitter and seven years later the married young adult Jill Johnson. When a Stranger Calls tries to make her out to be high school in the first 20 minutes. Of course, that’s a fine showbiz tradition, like the thirtysomething Norma Shearer and fortysomething Leslie Howard playing tempestuous teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet in the 1936 MGM version, but it’s simply not convincing in the slightest bit and jars considerably.

I mean, for crying out loud, Kane received a nomination for Best Actress at the 1976 Academy Awards for her performance in Hester Street. We have the feeling that she shouldn’t be playing meek, timid, and cowering, even if she lost to Louise Fletcher for her performance as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Black Christmas did this phone caller and psycho killer number and big THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE reveal not only before but also better than When a Stranger Calls. Fred Walton (director and co-writer) and Steve Feke (co-writer) basically remade their 1977 short film The Sitter for the first 20 minutes of When a Stranger Calls, only with a much-larger budget and big-name cast members, and it’s possible they weren’t inspired by Black Christmas.

Seven years after murdering both children Jill was babysitting for Dr. and Mrs Mandrakis, Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley) escapes from the psychiatric facility and Dr. Mendrakis (Carmen Argenziano) hires former police officer and current private detective John Clifford (Charles Durning) to find Duncan. We first see Clifford in an early shock moment.

Are we supposed to feel sympathy for Duncan in the film’s long middle passages?

I only ask because I’m not buying it one bit, especially after Clifford goes into explicit detail about Duncan’s child killings, After the coroner’s investigation the bodies were taken to the mortuary where the undertaker took one look at them and said their bodies couldn’t be reconstructed for the burial without six days of steady work. Then he asked what had been the murder weapon, because looking at the mess in front of him he couldn’t imagine what had been used. The coroner told him there had been no murder weapon. The killer had used only his hands.

Before that monologue, we get to watch two awkward scenes between Duncan and the 54-year-old Colleen Dewhurst’s Tracy. Their first scene together culminates in one of their fellow bar patrons beating Duncan to a pulp. Tracy feels sympathy for Duncan after that.

Clifford’s dogged pursuit and obsession with Duncan calls to mind Dr. Loomis in Halloween and the opening 20 and closing 20 minutes place When a Stranger Calls near both Halloween and Black Christmas.

It’s the roughly 50-55 minutes in between that mostly lose and frustrate me. Imagine Halloween if it ditched Laurie Strode after 20 minutes in only to rejoin her later in the movie and instead, we spent 50 minutes following mostly babysitter killer Michael Myers in mostly awkward and (seemingly) pointless scenes.

That’s right, it would be painful to watch and that describes When a Stranger Calls, an otherwise well-made movie, for most of its duration.