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.

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.

Silent Rage (1982)

SILENT RAGE (1982) ***
Michael Miller’s 1982 feature Silent Rage combines several American movie hallmarks into one barely coherent package: Chuck Norris, a small Texas town (never sleepy when Norris plays Sheriff), a madman killer, mad scientists, shots borrowed straight from John Carpenter’s Halloween, two love scenes, Stephen Furst basically playing his character from Animal House again, bar fights, roundhouse kicks, biker gangs, breasts (inc. Norris but not Furst), and a schizophrenic musical score, not in any particular order.

We also have at least five wildly different acting styles for the price of one. We’ve already covered Norris and Furst, then there’s Ron Silver and he’s playing it straight in easily the best dramatic acting that one can find in anything starring Chuck Norris. Silver plays the voice of reason and let’s do the right thing scientist, whereas his colleagues played by Steven Keats and William Finley are variants on Universal horror archetypes updated for a new generation. Keats, of course, wants to push science further than any one ever before even when it’s not prudent and Finley, best known for his roles in Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper films Phantom of the Paradise and Eaten Alive, occupies the middle ground between Silver and Keats. Brian Libby’s madman killer continues in the proud screen tradition of Frankenstein’s Monster and Michael Myers, especially after our mad scientists flat out turn him posthumously into an indestructible killing machine whose stalking does all the talking. I wanted Dr. Loomis to show up and say THIS ISN’T A MAN. Bummer that it didn’t happen.

Norris battles the mad killer and later the virtually indestructible mad killer in the opening and concluding scenes. Otherwise, he alternates between mentoring and supporting unsure and unsteady rookie cop Furst, rekindling his romance with a former lover played by Toni Kalem, and questioning Silver and Keats. For Norris fans, apparently the scariest parts of Silent Rage involved Kalem’s bare breasts and Norris favoring jazz music because our favorite roundhouse specialist returned to only love scenes between men for the rest of his career, barring his rolling around in the mud with the sultry Barbara Carrera in the 1983 Walker, Texas Ranger precursor Lone Wolf McQuade. I for one like Silent Rage because it’s nice to see more chests on display than just Chuck’s for a change.

Silent Rage unfortunately drags at two main points. The death of Silver’s wife literally feels like it takes forever, like one of the filler killings in a Friday the 13th sequel. Ditto for the bar fight, which are drags both in real life and in the movies. A couple moments in this otherwise humdrum bar fight sequence redeem it, just barely though. If you’ve seen Silent Rage, you know exactly what I mean.

The poster for Silent Rage rates with Breaker! Breaker as the best Norris film poster. There’s really no arguing with a mini-Norris roundhouse cracking the movie’s title and the promotional hype Science created him. Now Chuck Norris must destroy him. He’s an indestructible man fused with powers beyond comprehension. An unstoppable terror who in one final showdown, will push Chuck Norris to his limits. And beyond.

Once upon a review, I believe I wrote that I wanted to see Chuck Norris vs. Jason Voorhees and Silent Rage is the closest that I will ever get to seeing that dream come true.

Halloween (2018)

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HALLOWEEN (2018) Two stars
Our word for today is “retcon” or “retroactive continuity,” which means to “revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events.”

This word often gets filed alongside “Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome.”

Anyway, retconning happens frequently not only in soap operas but also manga, serial dramas, movie sequels, cartoons, professional wrestling, video games, and radio series.

Retconning helps explain HALLOWEEN 2018 — the 11th HALLOWEEN movie, the 10th to feature serial slasher Michael Myers, and the third in the series to use that very same title.

HALLOWEEN 2018 pretends the eight other HALLOWEEN movies featuring Michael Myers before it never existed. As tempting as that might sound, though, especially given the appalling quality of several of those movies, HALLOWEEN 2018 complicates that by recycling plot elements from, let’s see here, HALLOWEEN II (1981) and HALLOWEEN 4, for example.

If you recall HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, idiots make the mistake of transferring Michael Myers from one hospital to another. Convenient, yes. Stupid, yes. Guess it never happened, though, and so I guess we should not have recalled it.

At the end of HALLOWEEN II, Michael Myers burns up real good. For that matter, so does Dr. Loomis. Of course, they both return in HALLOWEEN 4, even if the title only made room for one. Yeah, I know, right, never happened, so let’s move past it. We shall overcome.

HALLOWEEN 2018, why it’s the third occasion for bringing back Michael Myers to multiplexes in a year that ends with ‘8,’ a magic number since John Carpenter’s classic original came out in 1978.

We had first HALLOWEEN 4 (1988) and then HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER, Jamie Lee Curtis’ big return highlighted by a final showdown between cinematic siblings. Well, you guessed it, in HALLOWEEN 2018, that never happened, Laurie Strode did not take on an assumed name or become the dean of a private school in Northern California or have a biological son played by Josh Hartnett. No, instead, HALLOWEEN 2018 Laurie’s a lot like what happened to Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY.

I strangely remember seeing H20: 20 YEARS LATER in theaters when it came out. Apparently that never happened. That’s it, I want a refund, but wait, how can I get a refund for a movie I never saw? I feel like a relative of George Orwell should be writing this review.

And, yes, Michael’s not Laurie’s brother, since that plot twist and great big revelation late in a movie never happened in the brave new world created by HALLOWEEN 2018.

Of course, you might also remember or at least you think you remember that Michael killed Laurie early on during HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (2002). Well, you guessed it, that’s been retconned and never happened, even though investigators can find the infamous scene on YouTube. Might want to delete that evidence.

See, it’s real knee-slapping funny, Laurie (and we in the audience) thought she beheaded Michael in H20: 20 YEARS LATER, but we’re told in RESURRECTION that she killed a paramedic with whom her brother swapped out clothes. Oops, hate when that happens.

H20: 20 YEARS LATER, you see, it’s a retcon itself that pretended only the first two HALLOWEEN movies existed. Well, hell, guess you can just retcon a retcon if you so desire another sequel in a long assembly line of sequels.

Rob Zombie directed two HALLOWEEN movies, titled HALLOWEEN and HALLOWEEN II. Yes, all that never happened, so Zombie’s reboots are retconned.

Man, I am so confused.

In a 1984 interview, Carpenter touched on HALLOWEEN II and HALLOWEEN III. (Has this interview been retconned?)

“There are two sides to when you work in the movie business,” he said. “One is as an artist. You think of yourself as a creative person, and the other side is the business person. I let my producer’s side come out when they offered me the sequels to HALLOWEEN. They offered a nice sum of money. I also had a lot of hope for giving new directors a chance to make films as I had been given a chance with low-budget films. The directors who did 2 and 3 — Rick Rosenthal and Tommy Wallace — what they were given was a budget and in some cases a script. ‘OK, here are the rules of the game, make your movie, nobody’s going to bother you.’ It doesn’t always work.

“I thought HALLOWEEN III was excellent. I really like that film because it’s different. It has a real nice feel to it. I think he’s a talented director (Wallace). On the other hand, I think HALLOWEEN II is an abomination and a horrible movie. I was really disappointed in it. The director (Rosenthal) has gone on and done some other films and I think his career is launched now. But I don’t think he had a feel for the material. I think that’s the problem, he didn’t have a feeling for what was going on.”

Carpenter took on a role as composer, executive producer, and creative consultant for HALLOWEEN 2018.

HALLOWEEN 2018 director David Gordon Green’s career, especially his first two films, suggests that he would not exactly have a feeling for the material. It’s a long way in nearly two decades from a feature debut like GEORGE WASHINGTON to HALLOWEEN 2018, from an independent release made for $42,000 to a major release for $10-15 million.

HALLOWEEN 2018 became a huge hit, especially for a horror movie, so that must already mean a sequel’s in the works. Will they dare call it HALLOWEEN II?

That brings us kicking and screaming back to the HALLOWEEN muddle. Let’s see, HALLOWEEN 2018 pretends none of the other sequels ever happened and that would make it the second HALLOWEEN movie. Not so fast. Where oh where does HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH fit in, since it ventured away from Michael, Laurie, and Loomis and exists separately other than using HALLOWEEN as part of its title? That would make HALLOWEEN III really HALLOWEEN II and HALLOWEEN 2018 really HALLOWEEN III. I’ve not been this confused since right before I threw away my Rubik’s Cube.

On a basic level, retconning means that one can just do whatever they want. It seems to reflect a fundamental contempt for the audience: We can get away with murder.

That’s basically what they do in HALLOWEEN 2018.

Just remember that you cannot spell retcon or confusion without “con.”