Reviews, movies restaurants and otherwise03:24 Sep 02 2007
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A Little HALLOWEEN History
Friday August 31 12:45 PM ET
In between the original Halloween and Rob Zombie's upcoming remake lie a half-dozen sequels as gruesome in their pursuit of cash as Michael Myers is for teenage flesh.
By Telly Davidson, FilmStew.com
A young man who killed his naked teenage sister with a butcher knife escapes from a mental hospital and returns to his affluent suburban hometown on the 15th anniversary of his crime. He zeroes in on three high school senior girls who remind him of his dead sister, who are out babysitting and having other more "grown up" adventures.
Later, in the first sequel, we find out that the central girl he was stalking was his younger sister, who was adopted out for her safety after his original crime – and is now the same age as his older sis was when he had offed her. The town's only bulwark against the building bloodbath is the sicko's pursuing psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (named in honor of a character from that other horror standard-setter, Psycho.)
Sounds like one hell of a horror movie! And was it ever. Back when the slasher classic Halloween was released almost three decades ago, it had a story and set-up that were ice-water-clear. Directed by John Carpenter, written with partner Debra Hill and starring Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween was horror cinema's equivalent of a 1970s Cadillac Seville or Mercedes 450, or a Joan Didion-Shana Alexander news article. Crisp, uncluttered and to the point.
It was this all-too-relatable psychological horror, combined with the masterstroke of setting the killing spree on the already spooky night of Halloween, which made the film an overnight commercial and critical success. (Remember, this was in the era of Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, John Wayne Gacy and Son of Sam.) By early 1981, it was clear that a sequel was inevitable, and "being good little capitalists" who hadn't seen as much of the first film's profits as they would have liked, Carpenter and Hill teamed up again to write and produce Halloween II.
Picking up precisely where the first one had left off, murderous monster Michael Myers breaks into the district hospital where heroine Laurie Strode is under sedation, and takes brutal advantage of the stainless steel surgical instruments to continue his killing spree. Halloween II was a bravura sequel, and by far the best and best remembered one in the series. But it was also clear that neither Carpenter nor Hill wanted to be married to Michael Myers for much longer. By the film's fiery final reel, The Shape appeared to have gone to hell, where he belonged.
To underscore the point, a year after Halloween II came a third sequel, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which had nothing to do with Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis or Laurie Strode. The obviously ultra low-budget effort, starring B-movie and TV veteran Tom Atkins, had to do with a sinister toymaker and the murders of several children. Not surprisingly, after the initial interest wore off, the movie sank like a stone at the box office, and didn't even come close to attaining the critical respect grudgingly afforded to the first two films.
But while Michael Myers lay dead, Jason Voorhees was busy making almost one movie every single year until temporarily retiring in 1993 with Part 10 - yes, the TENTH - sequel to Friday the 13th. And Freddy Krueger gave New Line Cinema nearly seven years of Nightmares with his hit franchise from 1984 to 1991. Determined not to be left out of the bursting slaughterhouse sweepstakes, by 1988 Halloween executive producer (and rights holder) Moustapha Akkad ordered the writing of a new script (with almost zero input from Carpenter and not much more from Hill) to revive the franchise. And after the total box office and critical failure of Season of the Witch, it had to be with Michael Myers as the killer. There was one little snag, though.
After she had formally retired her late 1970s "scream queen" crown with Halloween II, Jamie Lee Curtis had gone "legit" with choice parts in upscale movies like Trading Places, Perfect, A Fish Called Wanda and Blue Steel, not to mention her stint on the popular ABC sitcom Anything But Love. Curtis made it clear that returning to run around screaming with no clothes on wasn't gonna happen.
However, Donald Pleasance eagerly signed on to reprise his role as Dr. Loomis (who was seemingly killed alongside Michael at the end of Halloween II.) Now in his late sixties in a youth-obsessed MTV-era Hollywood, the veteran actor gratefully took the above-the-title billing and star salary that came with the revived franchise.
But with Jamie Lee out of the picture, the writers of 1988's Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers came up with a plot twist sure to betray and sadden longtime fans. They revealed that Laurie Strode had died in a car accident, leaving behind a young daughter (named Jamie, of course), and that Dr. Loomis cemented 1978's Stupidest Good Samaritan Award by ferrying Michael Myers' smoldering body into an ambulance before it was too late. When Michael overhears that has a surviving niece back in Haddonfield, he reawakes from his ten-year coma as if he'd merely been taking a nap, and sets out to eliminate the little girl and anyone else in his way.
The same formula repeated itself in 1989's inevitable Halloween V, with homages to the then-current hit stage play Phantom of the Opera and a storyline introduced of a Mysterious Stranger who is monitoring Michael's, er, "progress." The Stranger firebombs the Haddonfield police station when Michael is finally captured to set him free once again, but it wouldn't be for another five years until we knew why.
In 1994, Moustapha Akkad & Co again cranked up the engine to film Halloween VI, in which little Jamie – now a teenage mother – is finally killed by her evil uncle (in a particularly sadistic scene with a threshing machine). The method to Michael's madness is then revealed as having been part of a pseudo-government experimentation program on young children with overtones of Satanism and Druid worship, overseen by an evil doctor colleague of Dr. Loomis' (played to the hilt by B-movie veteran Mitchell Ryan).
But an all-too-real death seemed to seal the fate of the Halloween franchise, when just weeks after completing his role, Donald Pleasance died at the start of February in 1995. (Even if Pleasance had a few more years, at age 75 and in poor health, it was clear this installment would be his swan song.)
Then, just one year later, Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox let out a Scream. Suddenly, horror was (blood) red-hot again. Scream scribe Kevin Williamson had a sequel commitment and a development deal for other indie features practically before the credits rolled. And he knocked it out of the park by creating the star-making Dawson's Creek, which put the new WB network on the map along with its horror-themed companion, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Williamson had the Tinseltown clout to realize a dream that would have been almost inconceivable just three years before – to write a treatment outline for the penultimate Halloween sequel, Halloween: H20 – to be released in the late summer of 1998 as a "celebration" of the franchise's 20th anniversary. And this time, Jamie Lee Curtis was ready, able, and willing to come back to the part that had made her a star.
Prudently considering the soap-opera storylines and Druidical mumbo-jumbo of the non-Jamie Lee-John Carpenter Halloweens, Williamson ignored everything after Halloween II. Michael Myers hadn't been rescued at the last minute when he burned (to death?) at Haddonfield Hospital – but his body had never been found, either. Laurie Strode was now running an elite prep school in California and had changed her name, the only nod to the late '80s sequels being that she had indeed faked her car-crash death. But instead of a daughter, she had a son who was very much alive, played by an unknown young actor named Josh Hartnett, who was turning seventeen that fall – the same age as Laurie had been when Michael paid her a visit exactly twenty years ago.
Needless to say, Michael planned a bloody good "family reunion" that year – but this time, Laurie was ready. At the very end of H2O, Laurie Strode confronted her malevolent brother, pinned between her van and a tree trunk, and knocked his head off with an axe – inspiring the biggest cinematic cheers since Sigourney Weaver sent the Mother Alien into outer orbit. That should have been the end – and was announced by all concerned as being exactly that, the final and fitting coda to the Halloween series.
Of course, they lied. Just four years later, Jamie Lee Curtis (who had announced herself the "guardian" of Laurie Strode), allowed herself to be killed off by her resurrected brother in Halloween: Resurrection. (In an ironic similarity to her situation a decade or so before, "son" Josh Hartnett had graduated to bigger and better things and had no intention of reprising his role – necessitating that Laurie be abandoned in a mental hospital for her cameo at the picture's beginning.)
Since it had been made clear that the sequel was going to go on with or without her, Curtis consoled herself that she had given the role the only "closure" that she could. But now that Michael had finally succeeded in killing his sister – what was left for our now middle-aged boogeyman to do?
A far greater monster than even Michael Myers answered that question, when in the late summer of 2005, Moustapha Akkad and much of his family were murdered in a terrorist hotel bombing in Jordan. Earlier that year, Michael Myers' movie "mother", Debra Hill, had also tragically lost her battle with breast and ovarian cancer.
So now we have come full circle, going back to the future with no Jamie Lee, no Donald Pleasance, no John Carpenter or Moustapha Akkad or Debra Hill. Just this year's version of the psycho killer in the spray-painted Shatner mask, and the "re-imaginings" of punk rocker Rob Zombie and Scream sultans Dimension Films. And with all the cast changes and murderous mutations, the advance buzz surrounding the latest Halloween seems to come down to, 'They sure as hell don't make 'em like they used to!"
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