Scare tactics
(Warning: plot points of both the 2018 Halloween and 2021 Halloween Kills discussed in explicit and gory detail)
"I come to bury Caesar not praise him," Marc Antony once said standing over Caesar's corpse, making brutal appreciation of his former friend; I know how he feels. Lay David Gordon Green's Halloween Kills across the autopsy table and you're forced to agree with most critics: this is not a pretty sight. I mean--long character expositions sutured to grotesque murders of said characters; loud thumping music stretched to cover entire missing sections of narrative and huge gaps in logic; conventions from different genres stuffed like so many makeshift organs into the film's carcass in the hope that the mess will come to life, rough thread punched in and out of festering leather in a parody of stitching. If this unholy assembly ever manages to lurch off the table and stumble across the bloodslicked floor the audience will shriek--more at the sheer gracelessness of the filmmaking, I imagine, than any violence actually depicted.
And yet there's a pulse in there somewhere--mainly the persistent suspicion that David Gordon Green might have ever been an appropriate choice to resurrect the franchise. That's what drew me to the first Halloween: the director of George Washington--a delicate tale of a boy growing up in backwater North Carolina--directing horror? That's a train wreck I wanted to watch. I did like Pineapple Express--also a stretch, but stoner comedies don't need much subtlety or finesse either, and Green did fine (I laughed a lot.). Why not horror?
The first sequel squared the circle that was Carpenter's near-perfect genre exercise, this second explores the ripple effect of Michael Myer's killing spree across the pond that is Haddonfield. Green's parable on the dangers of mob rule is about as subtle as the mob itself, and the hapless Lance Tivoli (Ross Bacon as the less malevolent version of Michael a.k.a. The Shape) might as well wear crosshairs with the words PLOT FUNCTION printed across his back, but the tragedy isn't so much his fate (which Bacon pantomimes with effective directness) as it is the fact that people we've come to know are involved in his fate--Tommy Doyle, the cute kid back in 1978, now a bitter old man in 2021. Anthony Michael Hall was awkward fun when he was The Geek in Sixteen Candles--what happened to that fun thirty-seven years later? Pose that question to Tommy's friend and fellow survivor Lindsey (Kyle Richards, reprising her 1978 role), or Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens, also reprising), or the town itself and you see the horrorshow equivalent of funhouse mirrors, distorting one's image back at you to laugh at or cringe from in recognition.
Hall's Tommy is the film's MVP; Laurie looks at him the way Harry Callahan looks at the motorbiked sunglassed patrolmen gazing back in Magnum Force: as a reflection or parody or perversion of her own vigilante self. Will she heed the warning or ignore it? Will Green explore the issue or drop it? We don't get answers here, might--or might not--in the third sequel.
That's not my favorite touch tho. There's Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), terrifying rowdy kids with stories of Michael Myers, then being terrified themselves by the real thing; there's Sondra (Diva Tyler) and Phil (Lenny Clarke) trying to pilot a little copter drone in their home when something swats it out of the air. Genre purists may wonder why Green wastes his time trying to humanize human fodder while a few might realize that this is why Green took on the assignment (aside from the promise of a huge paycheck). It's not about the kills, which are middling inventive (after the Saw and Final Destination franchises, churning out inventive deaths may be a loser's game); it's about the fodder, which Green insists on trying to humanize, coax into some semblance of three dimensionality.
Carpenter's opening shot in the 1978 classic is an inimitable stunner, the camera peering through Michael's masked eyes as he glides into the house up the stairs into his sister's room; Green's camera is considerably more clumsy but flips the perspective, looking through a firefighter's goggles as Michael skewers his head with a Halligan bar. When Tommy and company come upon a playground and Green's camera lingers over a slowspinning playground roundabout, there's a mournful tone to his imagery--we were rooting for these people; we hoped they might survive. Green celebrates the marginalia, to some extent at the expense of the foreground stuff; genre purists or those that insist on a recognizable Syd Field three-act structure script might protest, but the rest of us (well some) appreciate the change.
And Laurie? Sidelined. O she gets to step out for maybe a minute after stabbing herself with morphine (the film's biggest laugh), but she's meant to lie in her hospital bed doing the skullwork while it's the rest of the town's turn to fight or die. What she comes up with doesn't make much sense or not enough (Gist: Michael's evil) but that's what I assume Halloween Ends is for, a way of tying together most if not all the loose ends or at least making some kind of sense out of Laurie's closing monologue. Will Green stick the landing or crash even harder than naysayers say he has? That's a question that inspires more suspense than anything in the film itself.
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