John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween wasn’t the first “slasher” movie, but its huge sleeper popularity clinched that subgenre as the dominant future of horror cinema, almost immediately spawning imitations that in many cases started their own franchises. The Halloween one had actually been floundering for a while before 1998’s Halloween H20, which brought back Jamie Lee Curtis as the first film’s surviving prey Laurie Strode, now a middle-aged woman living in a constant state of clenched readiness and dread—for good reason, of course. Largely thanks to her (as well as an unusually higher-grade support cast include Michelle Williams, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, LL Cool J, and Janet Leigh), that movie was a solid cut above average for the series.
Which could not be said for its 2002 followup Halloween: Resurrection. Nor, five years later, Halloween and its sequel Halloween II, Rob Zombie’s disappointing (and Curtis-less) reboots/remakes/“reimaginings,” which attempted something semi-different he just didn’t have the skill to pull off. That flogged horse was starting to look pretty dead by the time David Gordon Green released his Halloween, a 2018 “direct sequel” to the original that brought back Curtis again, but ignored every other installment in the intervening four decades, and frankly didn’t make use of her (or the basic concept) half as well as H20 had.
Last year’s Halloween Kills was a cluttered followup, with too many characters and complications. Still, it did show some enterprise in depicting beleaguered burg Haddonfield’s fed-up citizenry as Trumpian vigilantes run amuck, 2nd Amendment-ing themselves into a frenzy more destructive even than that of their ostensible quarry, Unstoppable Killing Machine Michael Myers.
Green has stayed the course, completing his trilogy with the new Halloween Ends. You may well roll your eyes at that title—the series “ended” more than once before (most definitely with H20’s beheading of MM), but we all know nothing can die in Hollywood if it’s still profitable. The series rights simply revert to another owner after this entry, and surely they’re not going to let serial killer Myers RIP. Not when it’s already clear that it doesn’t matter whether Halloween movies are good, bad, or indifferent; the brand still makes money, sometimes a lot of money.
So the current chapter is fooling no one as any real “ending,” save to this particular phase of a franchise that seems to rewrite its own terms with every restart. (And frankly Green hasn’t even hewed to much consistency between his own three films.) Still, it might have been a rip-roaring sendoff to this phase, as well as to Curtis’ participation. Instead, Ends is memorable for the most unfortunate reasons: It may be the single worst Halloween movie ever, certainly in the sense of being the one that most nonsensically messes with the audience’s basic, uncomplicated expectations.
We expect Michael Myers to run amuck, and (at least within this sequence) for Curtis’ Laurie to do her best to stop him. But Halloween Ends aims so wide of an easy mark, it seems to forget about both those principal figures much of the time, or even that it’s a Halloween movie.
Instead, we get a primary focus on Corey (Roham Campbell), a nice local boy who’s stigmatized in Haddonfield after a child he’s babysitting accidentally dies, basically as a result of the brat’s own prank-gone-wrong. His once-bright prospects dimmed, Corey is scorned and bullied, till some awful teens gang up on him to near-fatal effect. This somehow gets him “rescued” by Michael Myers, who’s apparently been living undetected in drainage pipes all these years (we’re told four have passed since Kills’ events), and who recognizes Corey as a…fellow victim? Protegee? Since when is “The Shape” sympathetic to other people’s plights?
In any case, this interaction somehow imbues our resentful hero with a Myers-like propensity to stalk and slay, albeit only those who’ve wronged him. There are plenty of those, given the main carryover from Halloween Kills is that today’s Haddonfield is full of pushy assholes.
Meanwhile, Laurie is back living in town, finishing her memoirs, which means the soundtrack is full of voiceover passages about surviving trauma and “healing.” Yes, this Halloween movie wants to be inspirational. She’s discreetly wooed by Deputy Frank (Will Patton), a fellow survivor of guess-who’s attacks. Her daughter (played by Judy Greer) having not been so lucky last time around, Laurie now lives with grown-up grandchild Allyson (Andi Matichak), who begins discreetly wooing… Corey, Who is duly cute and sweet, until suddenly he’s not anymore.
I guess being #13 (among this series’ features) really is unlucky. But luck had nothing to do with the problems afflicting End’s script, which is credited to four writers, but often feels spliced ’n’ diced together from four separate screenplays with entirely conflicting ideas. Much of the cluttered content drifts towards vaguely Twin Peaks-y soap operatics amongst troubled characters in a town with a “dark heart.” But the hectic progress, and sometimes laughable dialogue (that mouldy chestnut “If I can’t have her, no one will!!” is spoken not once but twice), make that stuff come off as pure hokum.
Green has never evinced much talent for suspense or violence—the whole raison d’etre for this series—so apart from a prologue that captures a bit of the original film’s pervasive dread, this is again a not-very-scary “scary movie.” The most ridick aspects of all are that Curtis gets shuffled to supporting status in what was supposed to be her glorious goodbye to the role, and Michael Myers (with James Jude Courtney here as the man behind the mask) becomes an afterthought. He doesn’t even really appear until an hour in, or become the main threat until later still. One might understand if the idea was to “pass the torch” to a new killer for future episodes. But… well, let’s just say Corey’s flame gets permanently doused before the fadeout here.
What were they thinking? That is the level on which Halloween Ends is most entertaining—as a WTF exercise in baffling, counterintuitive artistic decisions. This movie should be called Halloween Digresses. While technically competent (Green continues to mimic the general look of John Carpenter’s original, also retaining that multi-talent as score composer), it’s so convolutedly wrong-headed it generates its own fascination as one of those immortal testaments to Hollywood group-thinking gone awry—the slasher genre’s very own Bonfire of the Vanities, Howard the Duck, or Cats.
Fortunately, there are other, better scary (or at least creepy) movies on tap for your Halloween season enjoyment:
Gialloween IV
The slasher genre really began with the (mostly) Italian gialli that were made between the mid-60s and the mid-80s, their popularity peaking around the early 1970s. Their “yellow” monicker taken from the term for likeminded pulp paperbacks, they were murder mysteries whose increasingly gory slant drew them closer to horror terrain, despite the lack of supernatural elements. Their scripts were often nonsensical, but the best of them transcended that by virtue of high style—and the worst were often entertainingly trashy.
The latest incarnation of the Roxie’s annual giallo-fest digs deep for some of the form’s more obscure titles. Among the four vintage features being shown this week and next, the standout is definitely Aldo Lado’s 1972 Who Saw Her Die? (Mon/24), which stars George Lazenby (who’d just been a one-shot James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) as a father searching for a serial child killer after his daughter is slain during their trip to Venice. Weighted by parental anguish, it’s an unusually serious, well-crafted giallo with a particularly eerie Ennio Morricone score.
The other selections are more variable, but all have some allure of novelty. The 1969 Perversion Story aka One On Top of the Other (Thurs/27) is from Lucio Fulci, later well-known for his supernatural horror films. It has great Bay Area location photography, even if the interiors were shot in Italy. It’s sort of Swinging Vertigo, with Jean Sorel as a San Francisco doctor perplexed when his sickly late wife is seemingly reincarnated as a North Beach stripper. There’s too much telling and not enough showing (including that bane of gialli, the long 11th-hour “Let me provide the preposterous explanation for this convoluted plot” monologue), but the view of SF as a playground for immorality is datedly colorful.
Another filmed-abroad thriller is Flavio Mogherini’s 1977 The Pyjama Girl Case (Tues/18), based on a real-life unsolved murder in Australia several decades earlier. As such it has more of a true-crime feel than a giallo one. But compensations in this tale of marital infidelity and violent jealousy include two memorably terrible songs by louche Eurodisco queen Amanda Lear, with lyrics like “Because you’re a woman/loving free/so exciting.”
Last and least, there’s The Police Are Blundering in the Dark (Wed/19), a movie released three years after completion, and given its title solely because by then police action flicks were more popular than gialli. It’s definitely the latter, however, as a series of topless glamour girls are slain by a mystery assailant in the countryside. This low-budget oddity, whose performers largely never acted again, was the sole credit for director “Helia Colombo,” reportedly a pseudonym for a pop musician and producer. His weird script manages to incorporate a machine that “photographs thoughts,” a sinister lettuce patch, and the immortal line “It was what she feared. Erotomania in a hypomaniac state.” No police, though. For info on the whole Roxie series, to go here.
Hunted
Also looking backward in a sense is this new British thriller, which has been given a more generic US title than its apt original Hounded. It’s the umpteenth variation on “The Most Dangerous Game,” a short story by Richard Collier that will be one hundred years old in 2024. There have probably been at least a hundred screen versions by now, most of them giving no credit to the original source (which is in the public domain now anyway). It certainly does have a basic premise that catches attention and is adaptable to just about any setting: “Big-game” hunters set up a safari-like situation in which they stalk supposedly “the most dangerous” prey of all. Like Soylent Green, of course, it’s People.
The last version of note was The Hunt (another reason why this latest’s title change is a bad idea), which had the ill luck to be released right before COVID shutdown, and the dubious logic to be a paranoid conservative fantasy in which armed “liberal elites” hunted down Trumpy extremist “rednecks.” Hunted is also a crude political allegory. Here, a quartet of young working-class London “chavs” break into an expansive country estate to steal a few valuables on behalf of a crooked antiques dealer.
Alas, the owners are not absent as expected. Our protagonists find themselves tased, bound, roughed up, and dumped in a field. Wondering how they’ll get home, they soon realize they have far worse things to worry about. A bugle announces the arrival of a hunting party in full dress, with pack of dogs. “I thought fox hunting was banned,” one character says. “It is,” another replies. Uh-oh.
Editor Tommy Boulding’s first directorial feature is a decent-enough if not particularly inspired thriller. One problem is that the most sympathetic among our heroes is the first to be offed. Another is that this barn-door-broad indictment of Tory toffs makes them too caricatured to be menacing, with arch performances and groaner lines like the imperious Lady Catherine (Samantha Bond, Miss Moneypenny in the Pierce Brosnan 007s) harrumphing “Do YOU have the audacity to look down on ME?!?” God knows the UK class struggle is as real as ever, what with the fiasco of Brexit and all… but this movie paints those divisions with a trowel. Hunted opens in limited theaters this Friday, arriving on digital and VOD formats Oct. 25.
Earwig
Unlike most of the above films, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s latest scores major points for originality—as have all the films in a slim filmography (excluding ongoing collaborations with her husband, the much better-known Gaspar Noe). The French writer-director’s debut feature in 2004 was Innocence, a stunning, cryptic fable set at a most peculiar girls’ boarding school, based on a story by Spring Awakening author Frank Wedekind. It took another 12 years for her to produce a followup, 2015’s Evolution, another fantastical and mysterious coming-of-age tale.
This third feature is cut from the same distinctive cloth: It’s an elegant yet sinister story of ritualized child development, vaguely Gothic-surreal, set in a self-contained world that looks like the turn of the century—the 19th century, that is. In a dank, sparsely furnished house interior, a man (Paul Hilton) is conscientiously but dispassionately caring for a little girl (Romane Hemelaers). There are weird obligations regarding her teeth (or lack thereof), and when we learn she “must get used to going outside,” it appears she has never been—nor worn a coat, or shoes—outside these walls before. Her keeper is not a father or a kidnapper, but an employee frustrated by his own elusive minders. He commits a shocking assault (on another adult) midway through this foggy narrative. Why? Who knows.
With her cabinet-of-curiosities sensibility somewhere between the Brothers Quay and Edward Gorey—albeit without much humor—Hadzihalilovic invariably casts a spell in immaculately realized aesthetic terms. The haunted atmosphere she conjures is fascinating, though whether this very assured, slow, enigmatic film will ultimately mean anything more to you than a two-hour cipher may depend on individual taste, or mood. Earwigis now streaming on arthouse-cinema platform MUBI.
