In short: Love Letters (1983)

Anna (Jamie Lee Curtis) is an up-and-coming young radio DJ for the arty crowd. When her mother dies, she discovers a cache of intense love letters from a man who certainly isn’t her a father (Matt Clark), what with their total lack of passive-aggressive sentimentality turning into drunken abuse. Anna can only assume her mother was having a decades-long affair (and who could blame her once you’ve met her husband?).

When Anna meets the considerably older (and uglier) photographer Oliver (James Keach), she feels intensely drawn to him. The feeling’s mutual as well, even though Oliver is married with kids, and they begin an intense affair. How much of this is Anna trying to repeat her mother’s love affair as her psyche’s way to help her grief, and how much proper attraction is anybody’s guess. Anna for her part becomes increasingly obsessed with this man who only ever is as much in love with her as his convenient and pleasant for him.

One of the strengths of Amy Holden Jones’s Love Letters, the film she directed right after Slumber Party Massacre (and which is still produced by Roger Corman, though you wouldn’t really think so watching it) and before she mostly scripted family friendly affairs, is that it never drifts into the misogynist sensationalism of something like Fatal Attraction, which it prefigures in many ways. The film always teeters on the edge of turning into a thriller and Anna into an interesting and complex thriller villain, but Holden Jones holds it back in admirably controlled ways, turning this into a wonderfully intense drama that goes deep into the head of its protagonist. Much of the film is using Anna’s specific troubles to explore the feeling of being a young woman, the concrete, seldom directly expressed yet all the more stifling expectations for and threats to a young woman’s inner life, as well as the shittiness of guys who really should know and be better.

Curtis graces the film with a particularly strong performance, convincing us of the intensity of Anna’s doubts, obsession and grief without going over the top yet also without underplaying.

Halloween (2018)

Given the blockbuster success of David Gordon Green’s sequel to the original first Halloween, I’m rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the film. It’s not that I dislike big movies (frequent readers will remember me getting pretty excited about most Marvel movies, for example), but the mainstream horror movie franchises with the most mainstream success right now – The Conjuring and Insidious come to mind – really don’t do it for me.

Plotwise, like many of us probably like to do in our heads, too, the filmmakers pretend there were no Halloween movies made in between Carpenter’s original Halloween and this one, so there’s no idiotic non-mythology to cope with, no relation between Laurie Strode and Michel Myers, and certainly no Rob Zombie stripper-related backstory (hooray). Which, obviously, is the first thing about the film at hand that endears it to me.

As you can probably imagine, the encounter with Myers in the first movie and the ensuing trauma very much ruined Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) life, leaving her paranoid, suffering from PTSD and over prepared for every possible danger even decades after the fact. She somehow managed to get married and have a child despite all of this, but her crazy survivalist parenting style and her just being horribly difficult to live with because of how damaged she is have left the relationship between her and her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) in tatters.  Karen is having a teenage daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), herself now, and she’s obviously trying to not be her mother to a fault. Allyson has apparently turned out pretty alright despite all of this, and is doing her best to bridge the gap between her mother and her grandmother.

Which might even work out, if Michael, who has been kept in a picturesquely creepy and totally absurd movie mental “health” facility that seems to follow the Arkham Asylum rule book of patient treatment, didn’t use the opportunity offered by a transportation to what is apparently supposed to be an even worse facility, to break out and start right in with the killing again. This time, however, he seems purposefully drawn towards Laurie and her family.

Actually, I’m cheating a bit with this plot description, for I’m really describing the core of the Halloween sequel that intelligently uses ideas about Laurie from Halloween H20 but with more insight and less need to be a clever 90s style slasher, leaving out all the subplots and characters that the film grows around this core like weed. The script – credited to Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and Green though I suspect remains of a dozen other scripts and treatments being buried in it too – is messy to say the least, starting subplots that just stop when Michael needs to get another kill in, or dropping characters and their storyline half-way through the film when they’ve done their duty by, say, destroying Allyson’s handy. There are a few too many moments when the mechanics of the plot are really showing, too. Other elements included are just plain inexplicable, like the idiotic and pretty damn pointless evil mad psychiatrist subplot that seems to belong into Halloween V or thereabouts. Don’t even begin to think about why there’s a weird would-be Tarantino skit between two cops later on in the film.

These distractions also take valuable time away from the film’s examination of the way Laurie’s encounter with Myers has not only destroyed her possibly bright future but has indirectly made the life of three generations of women worse, with the youngest appropriately trying to fix the damage Myers has done. It’s easy to read this as a timely bit of #metoo commentary, yet it works just as well as something somewhat less beholden to contemporary politics and speaking to all kinds of trauma that have troubled all kinds of people for – one fears – as long as humanity has done horrible things to each other.

Given how often the film distracts from this part of its plot, it’s actually a bit of a surprise it does indeed work as well as it does, but the script isn’t just messy and peculiarly loaded with subplots, it also does its best – very much in the spirit of the original Halloween - to turn at least half of Michael’s victims into likeable or semi-likeable human beings we don’t actually want to see killed in the pleasantly horrible ways Michael uses here, lending much of the body count actual impact beyond a bit of the old red stuff.


As a director Green is genuinely great at setting up suspense scenes, sometimes using the audience’s knowledge of genre conventions against us, and often demonstrating a talent for visual storytelling that rubs weirdly against the often confused narrative of the script. In fact, Green’s direction is strong enough, and the emotional core surrounding the Strode women so involving, I find the film’s flaws much greater in theory than they are in practice.

In short: Prom Night (1980)

A few years before the start of the film, and therefore pre-DISCO, a quartet of children kinda-sorta accidentally murdered one of their own. Being kids and all, they just run and pretend it didn’t happen, even when an innocent man is blamed for their crime and is horribly injured in a car chase. The supposed murderer has spent the last six years in a mental institution, but now he’s broken out, and he may or may not be out for vengeance.

He’s just in time for the anniversary of the death, too. Well, that and for prom night in the high school the now older kids go to. And look at that, someone wearing a glittering ski mask is carving a violent path through the kids and a couple of innocent bystanders! But is it truly that guy or someone else the film hasn’t spent more than a minute on before doing the deeds? And will the dead girl’s sister Kim – who didn’t have anything to do with the death – do what characters played by Jamie Lee Curtis in slasher movies do?

To be frank, no, she won’t exactly, for Paul Lynch’s Prom Night might want to drink from the money well of the slasher (there is such a thing, yes), yet is only beholden to parts of the more traditional slasher tropes. It’s a bit of a shame the film does eschew an actual final girl scene while keeping the obsession with the virginity of its characters (even though virgins die here too), but what can you do? In other regards, it’s a pretty typical slasher in form and function, though one that doesn’t go for much gore. One is nearly tempted to call the film classy, but then the next virginity discussion comes around, and I’m more tempted to call it fluctuating between squeamish and exploitative. So, it is a typical slasher.

Despite that, and the expected at times sloppy writing, the film still belongs in the upper third of films of the early slasher boom, mostly on the strength of some decent acting, a cast of characters you don’t necessarily want to see die in horrible ways, and first and foremost some damn good stalking scenes that make it a double shame the film doesn’t have a true final girl fight in the end. Lynch – assisted by Robert C. New’s cinematography and a string-heavy score by Paul Zaza and Carl Zittrer – shows himself highly adept at the classical suspense notions these scenes live on. The movement of characters into ever more tight and threatening spaces can hardly be done more effective than in the scene where Anne-Marie Martin kicks the bucket.

If that’s just not enough for a discerning viewer, Prom Night also recommends itself with a mind-blowing scene of disco dancing Mithun Chakraborty would be proud of, yet no words could describe appropriately, and a little finale between axe murderer and victims also set to the oh so appropriate tones of DISCO!

In short: Terror Train (1980)

Usually, I’m all for slasher movies mixing things up a bit and straying from the very small path the genre generally strolls around on until somebody takes the machete to it, but then I want these detours to go into interesting, exciting, possibly even clever and meaningful directions, and not encounter a film that replaces twenty minutes of slashing and stalking with twenty minutes of frigging David Copperfield doing magic tricks – and not just because this also means more than twenty minutes of Copperfield failing at acting.

Unfortunately, Roger Spottiswood’s Terror Train does exist, and does indeed contain that much Copperfield. To my genre definitions, it’s barely even a slasher at all, and rather a bad giallo imitation by a director who doesn’t have the style to pull it off and ends up with a pretty boring murder mystery on a train with – sporadic – body parts rolling around and Jamie Lee Curtis screaming a lot to cash in on the early slasher wave. Only the finale – what would be the final girl sequence – hews close to the better side of the slasher, what with it attempting to ape Halloween as well as it can without directly ripping it off beyond Curtis, sharp objects, and train conductor Ben Johnson standing in for Donald Pleasence. It also came much too late to get me interested in the film again.

Apart from the slashing getting the short thrift, there’s also very little to the mystery that replaces it – which has a total giallo solution just not pulled off with the correct panache and style – so much of the film is spent on various soap operatics concerning who sleeps with whom and who’s an asshole (all of ‘em), and David Copperfield, with the last being particularly onerous. Turns out card tricks really don’t film very well, a fact that nobody involved seems to have cared about. Frankly, while there are of course a few things camp aficionados will find camp (the conclusion of the “making of a slasher killer” sequence certainly will hit that spot), most of the film is rather draggy and boring, and Spottiswoode is much too bland a director to enliven things through visual magic of his own, even though the highly capable John Alcott is listed as the director of photography.The problem might be there’s just nothing very interesting to photograph in Terror Train at all.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,american movies,slasher,horror,roger spottiswoode,jamie lee curtis

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

So, what does a film do when its main bad guy has been decapitated on camera in its predecessor? Well, I don’t know what an actual film would do, but the entity known as Halloween: Resurrection concocts an idiotic excuse involving Michael fucking Myers dressing an ambulance driver up in his beloved mask, conveniently crushing his larynx so he can’t speak, and pretending Laurie Strode wouldn’t know the difference between the Shape and a guy with a beer belly. But hey, at least the film starts as idiotic as it is going to continue.

Anyway, because of murdering the ambulance dude, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis looking so pissed off she must have read the script) has now been in a closed mental institution for three years or so, when one night Michael comes for a visit and murders a few people and then her. Lucky woman.

The rest of the film has little to do with the beginning, except for the coming degree of suckage. We follow the misadventures of a group of six students (final girl Bianca Kajlich, a pre-Kara-Thrace Katee Sackhoff whose acting here is as bad as that of everyone else, and some other people) who have been chosen to star in an internet reality TV show produced by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and one Nora (Tyra Banks). They’ll spend a night locked in the old Myers house to, ahem, find clues regarding the reason for Michael’s murderous nature. Of course, Freddie is sneaking around the house dressed up as Michael, of course he and his – tiny – crew have dropped fake clues of ritual child abuse around the house (stay classy, Halloween: Resurrection), and of course the real Michael (Brad Loree) has been living under the house since 1978 (yeah, I’m sure Dr Loomis wouldn’t have copped to that, but what do you expect of a film that doesn’t even get the number of Michael’s victims in the first film right) and doesn’t like house guests. Alas, this being a film very much in love with his smarmy, flat and boring idea of media satire, he takes his dear time killing them, and will suffer from indignities like being kung fu kicked by Busta Rhymes, or, you know, being killed – as much as he can be killed – by the very same acting disabled personage who spouts dialogue like “Trick or treat, motherfucker!”. So at least this thing gives me a new appreciation for the Rob Zombie remake of the first film.

Look, I’m the last one to wish anything bad on the people who made any movie. After all, they didn’t strip me to chair and made me watch it, but a film like Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween: Resurrection makes a boy think bad thoughts, because, frankly, it’s atrocious, inexcusable and crap in all the expected and many unexpected ways. On the plus side, I really can’t complain about boring competence this time around, because competence and this thing have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Hooray for that, I guess.

I’ve already hit on some of Halloween: Resurrection’s failures while going through the plot, so let’s just repeat for clarity: this one’s the Halloween film where the final fifteen minutes consist of Busta Rhymes being the kind of hero even a 90s direct to DVD action movie would be embarrassed by and the supposed final girl screeching and cringing (like anyone involved with this film would do).

Well, okay, there’s also a script that permanently pats itself on the back for its supposedly smart media satire while missing out on any and all opportunities to actually be one, where characters flat even for a slasher movie are played by actors who just seem embarrassed by the whole thing (who can blame them?), where the whole Internet reality show angle in practice is only a way to prolong the film with more scenes during which nothing of interest happens, where no idea is embarrassing and awkward enough not to be included. And don’t even get me started on replacing the traditional final girl with action movie Busta Rhymes (and does that mean the producers couldn’t even afford Ice-T?), replacing one of horror film’s more pleasant clichés with a much more rote one. Plus, as nice as I suspect the guy to be, an actor he ain’t.

I could add equally ecstatic words on Rosenthal’s direction, the aesthetically utterly clueless way in which he includes the pseudo found footage movie elements from the cameras our internet heroes are wearing, his inability to stage even a single decent fright scene, the bad pacing, the dubious blocking and so on, and so forth, but really, what’s the use with a film that contains not a single worthwhile moment, at this point effortlessly kicking Jason Takes Manhattan from its podium place of the worst movie I’ve lived through during my perhaps ill-advised pre-Halloween slasher film sequel binge. Surely, none of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels will be quite this bad? Please?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,slasher,jamie lee curtis,busta rhymes,bianca kajlich,katee sackhoff,rick rosenthal

In short: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

So, it seems that in this part of the Halloween franchise, films number one and two did happen (Michael-less number three always will have happened, fortunately), but the original final girl Laurie Strode (still Jamie Lee Curtis) later faked her death in a car accident that doesn’t seem to be the same one that left Jamie Strode an orphan in film four and onwards, or else we’d have to believe Laurie to be able to leave her little daughter behind in Haddonfield, and that doesn’t at all jibe with the over-protective mother we see here.

She’s now living under the name of Keri Tate as the headmaster of a secluded private school in California with her teenage son John (Josh Hartnett). John is increasingly bothered by his mother’s functional alcoholism, the pills and the effects her PTSD has on her behaviour and her ideas of the proper way to treat a seventeen year old, but when Michael finds out she’s still alive, the brittle woman might be all that stands between him and a knife. And Laurie might just rise to the occasion again.

Ironically, despite it – thanks to Scream and the following interest in up-market slasher movies by companies like Miramax - being higher budgeted as well as classier than the Halloween sequels I’ve talked about during the last few days, Steve Miner’s H20 is also the least interesting of the films for me, with little going on in it you couldn’t imagine after having read the film’s basic set-up, with no surprises and no obvious signs of any actual creativity.

I do approve of the PTSD angle to Laurie’s future development but there’s nothing at all happening on screen that wouldn’t also have happened to a happier and luckier woman, and too little effort put into giving the characters more than the pretence of emotional depth, so the film can turn its nose up at the exploitation movies director Miner himself started out with without having to put the actual effort needed to actually be deeper than them. Which isn’t just a problem with H20 but with most of the films of the mainstream slasher wave it belongs to, films that replaced the honest greed and nastiness of exploitation with hypocrisy and various degrees of smarmy superiority usually not justified by their actual achievements.

When it comes to the stalking and the slashing, H20 is suffering from the curse of basic competence – it’s not good enough to actually hold you in suspense, or to scare you, or to make you think or feel, and it’s not bad enough to either annoy you, or to win your heart, or to even make you laugh (and I’m sure as hell not going to laugh about the lame comedy bits with LL Cool J). There’s just not enough of anything here for any strong reaction.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,slasher,steve miner,jamie lee curtis