Three Films Make A Post: Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.

Young Adult (2011): On one hand, I have complete respect for Jason Reitman’s willingness to make a film about a woman hitting a tough spot and returning to her small town home that doesn’t espouse small town virtues as the be all and end all of “true” life and adulthood. On the other hand, the resulting film is then - quite consequently – about a character who experiences things but never learns anything from them, who doesn’t change for better or for worse, the only point seeming that some people can’t change, even if they are shitty and broken enough to need it, which is neither news nor particularly interesting to me. Sure, there is a lot to be said against all those movies about the cleansing power of returning home, but replacing hope with nothing isn’t a terrible convincing proposition either, however well Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt are selling this (Patrick Wilson is his usual nonentity, which might be a purposeful casting decision here).

Prince Avalanche (2013): Also not exactly to my tastes is this one, directed by David Gordon Green, in which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch at least do make something out of their experience of doing – sometimes – road work on a godforsaken road. I’m not terribly convinced by the tone of the affair, though, Green desperately trying to elevate the pretty bare script into something universal but never quite succeeding for me. But then, I usually have the problem with Green’s more serious-minded films of not seeing that he’s actually saying those as much about life, love and the rest he seems to think his films do. That might just be me, though.


Freaks (2018): Let’s finish on this film by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (of Leprechaun: Origins “fame”) which first casts what turns out to be a really bad X-Men movie as an intriguing and atmospheric mystery about a little girl (Lexy Kolker) building the wrong picture of a complicated world her father (hey, it’s Emile Hirsch again) doesn’t bother even attempting to explain to her. The more the film explains about what is actually going on with and in the world here, the more stupid it gets, though, reaching a sort of apex of awkward dialogue, bizarre writing choices and characters who will do any damn shit because it is in the script in a climax that has to be seen to be believed. And to think that much of what’s happened could have been avoided if any of the grown-ups here had at least attempted to explain the world to Chloe, the kid character, something like “some of us have special powers, bad people hunt those with special powers; we have special powers, therefor we must hide, yes, even from ice cream vans and the lady next door”.

Past Misdeeds: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: spoilers will happen, yet little will make sense anyhow.

This write-up is based on the theatrical cut of the film, because it’s the one I’ve got. Given what I’ve read about the producer’s cut, it should actually improve heavily on some of the problems of the theatrical version when it comes to the whole cult/druid/whatever angle but seems to be cursed with an ending that would annoy the living crap out of me, and might drag considerably.

Apparently, not only was everyone’s favourite slasher movie killer Michael Myers freed by the mysterious man in black who shot up the police station where Mickey was being held in in the last film but he and his brethren – all belonging to some sort of cult seemingly only populated by people of the medical profession(?) that wants to help Michael finish his murder spree because druids or something - also kidnapped the Mickster’s niece Jamie. Six years later, Jamie (grown up to be J.C. Brandy because the production apparently couldn’t afford the 5000 dollars needed to get Danielle Harris back) escapes her captors together with a baby that is clearly supposed to be Michael’s child. Michael follows her and manages to kill his Jamie after a bit of stalking, but not before she can hide away her daughter.

Remember little Tommy Doyle from the first movie? He has grown up to be played by Paul Rudd, and has turned into quite the Michael Myers conspiracy theorist. Thanks to a call for help Jamie left in a Howard Stern style asshole radio personality show before she left the franchise forever, Tommy manages to find the child. Listening to the radio isn’t Tommy’s only hobby either. He lives right across the street from the old Myers house where now a bunch of Strodes (whose actual connection to Laurie Strode remains uncertain) make their home, and spies on them, or guards the family, or the house, or whatever. The only family members that need interest us (aka the only ones in the film to not just be killed off as soon as a kill scene is needed) are Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan) and her little son Danny (Devin Gardner), because both will soon – and rather improbably – fall in with Tommy and therefore become particularly interesting not just to Michael but also to the cult that is helping him. Nature and sense of this cult this version of the film never really explains. We learn their interest in Michael has something to do with seeing him as continuing an ancient Celtic tradition of blood sacrifices of one’s own family, but the film never makes clear why these people want to be involved in that sort of thing, what they get out of it, or why they are also dabbling in incest.

As if that wasn’t enough, Doctor Loomis (still Donald Pleasence, again sadly underused as well as cursed with the true curse of Michael Myers, a bad script) – now retired, friendly, without facial scars and not once pushing his burned hand into somebody’s face while explaining the horrible price he had to pay for hunting Michael – has also heard Jamie’s call for help and involves himself in the whole affair too. Oh, and certain young people in Haddonfield want to instate Halloween again, which was banned after the events of the last five minus one movies, and who could blame the authorities?

Now, reading over what I’ve just written, one might ask oneself what exactly Halloween number six is about, apart from Michael hunting a baby, and really, I haven’t mentioned abortive sub-plots like the one about Kara’s abusive father which, in classical slasher sequel fashion all end in deaths before anything about them is resolved on a dramatic level, and for whose inclusion there seems to be little reason. Sure, you could see these things as attempts to give Kara more character than just “the newest female lead” but if that was the plan, it doesn’t really work, and instead just adds another bit of ballast to a film that really could have used losing some.

A part of the reason for the confused state of plot and logic of this version of Curse of Michael Myers is one of those horrifying production histories that starts with a different script to the one the actors signed up for actually being shot and continues through various struggles between producers, director Joe Chappelle (who had a bright future in TV with shows like The Wire and Fringe before him) and who knows who else that seem to have left various people involved hating each other to this day, which does of course also make anything they say about each other utterly dubious. The push and pull behind the scenes resulted in a film that does not at all seem to know what it is about beyond Michael Myers looking for a baby and randomly killing off characters, be they actually involved in the plot or not. Even here, I still have no idea why Michael kills the shock jock, for example, a character he hasn’t met and who is only just planning to go to the Myers house, particularly since the film shows Michael to be somewhere else right before the murder. Or, as already mentioned, what the cult wants with “pure, uncorrupted [huh!?] evil”, or why anybody involved in the theatrical cut thought it was a good idea to neither think about these things nor to provide an actual ending to the proceedings. And let’s not even mention how the film does the typical slasher sequel thing of first hinting at something really interesting - like the way Tommy Doyle’s childhood encounter with Michael shaped his future - and then not doing anything interesting with it at all.


Having said all that, I now have to come to the point where I need to admit I enjoy (at least this version of) Curse of Michael Myers quite a bit, not as a dignified sequel to Halloween but as a pretty and illogical bit of 90s horror that seems closer related to Italian horror of the 80s in how it mixes bizarre randomness with violence, in its insistence of not using logic even when that might turn out well for it, in its generally highly moody photography, and in direction (or editing) that might not be able to stitch single scenes together to a coherent whole but that sure as hell can make these single non-cohering scenes work very well as a series of nightmare pictures about blood, murdering shapes, and threatened babies with a bit of nonsense about druids thrown in. Of course, the best of the Italian films also knew how to apply a degree of thematic coherence to their dream-like worlds, so a film as clueless about anything as Curse of Michael Myers isn’t quite on their level. However, for a production this troubled, managing to get this close to actual class is some sort of an achievement I believe.

Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.

Three Films Make A Post: Your favorite fire-breathing monster... Like you've never seen him before!

Uncle John (2015): I feel a bit like a barbarian saying this, but despite being well-acted, beautifully shot, and all-around well-made, Steven Piet’s sort of crime drama, kind of romance, US post-mumblecore indie does very little for me thanks to pacing so glacial, calling it slow would be like pretending it is fast. There are quite a few scenes that are brilliant, clever, and effective but a viewer has to pay for them by suffering through long, long scenes of the characters very poignantly doing little of interest. I just found myself losing my patience watching it. It’s not only the slowness that bugged me, really, but that quite a few scenes seem to be only in the film to reiterate points about its characters it has already made twice before. As it stands, the film could lose a good twenty minutes of runtime and not say less but actually say what it has to say more effectively instead of dragging it out. I really blame the influence of mumblecore as well as a certain type of arthouse movie and their inherent unwillingness to edit things here.

Lone Star (1996): John Sayles does of course belong to an earlier generation of US indie filmmaking, and having spent his times in the (sometimes gold) mines of more commercial filmmaking quite obviously taught the man things about getting to the point of any given scene. Or rather, the points, for this – one of his best films perhaps even his best – is a film that speaks about a Texas border town and its history by way of its people, explores the idea and practice of real, metaphorical and ethical borderlines, the shaping of history and our stories about it, and understands how to draw complex characters and show complicated situations without ever feeling the need to show us every single interaction its characters have in excruciating detail. While it is a highly shaped tale, Lone Star still feels as if its storytelling came about naturally, by the by; there’s no grasping for moments of truth here, they just come, or don’t, as is their wont.


How Do You Know (2010): Theoretically, this is a light, fluffy and not terribly pointed romantic comedy deep from the Hollywood mills featuring Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd as two people finding one another in a time of personal crises, but because it’s written and directed by James L. Brooks, it is also a film that has a lot of fun with just letting (often wickedly funny) dialogue flow, knows how to shape the ensemble surrounding its stars into more than just a backdrop (which would be a waste of for example a very funny and ambiguous performance by Jack Nicholson). It is also a film about grown-ups growing up more instead of the sort of romantic comedy that pats its characters on the back for learning not to be complete tools, as well as one that comes by its emotional moments the honest way – by being about well-written and well-acted characters going through things that feel like movie-enlarged versions of experiences people might actually go through. I’m afraid real life does not have dialogue this good nor the appropriate happy end, alas.

On ExB: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Oh yes, or rather OH NO!, not even the venerable and classy Exploder Button is spared my seasonal slasher mania, so just click on through to read quite a few words more than you ever wanted to read about Halloween 6.

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