Retrospecticus: The Halloween series
12/09/2022
Synopsis
Instead of reviewing a single film as usual, I'm doing something a little different and reviewing the entire Halloween movie franchise (Spoilers for every movie ahead), which I watched recently for reasons that escape me.
Go to hell, my usual review structure!
- Halloween (1978)
- Halloween II (1981)
- Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
- Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
- Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
- Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
- Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
- Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
- Halloween (2007)
- Halloween II (2009)
- Halloween (2018)
- Halloween Kills (2021)
- Halloween Ends (2022)
Halloween (1978)
I think the original Halloween is deserving of its own later review so for now I’m just going to say my feelings toward it are complicated.
Halloween II (1981)
My first reaction: Slow, tedious, boring nonsense. It actually put me to sleep (much as the original often has), but the reveal that Laurie was Michael’s sister was interesting (though I’ve heard this was not a popular choice).
Mikey at the end: Burned to death by Dr. Loomis.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Going into this movie all I knew was that it was infamous, had something to do with television, was a wild ride, and was either the best or the worst of the series. Turns out it's neither because it's not a Halloween movie, like at all, and in fact Halloween is a movie in this movie.
It is indeed wild.
This man STEALS AN ENTIRE ROCK from Stonehenge and SMUGGLES IT TO CALIFORNIA????? Because it’s a moon rock or some shit? To do a nation-wide child-blood sacrifice through the TV? Because his masks all have little curse-transmitters on them that cause bugs and snakes to erupt from the mask???? WHAT???? HELP??? The general consensus (even said by Mustapha Akkad) is that it’s a good movie, but they shouldn’t have attempted to make an anthology series with the Halloween name attached when Halloween II already existed as an established sequel.
It’s absolute nonsense. I loved it.
Mikey at the end: No Michael, so no Michael death. Alas.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Well, they decided to kill off Laurie. I would have gone with a slightly more respectful explanation for her absence, but sure. She had a daughter before her offscreen death (Congrats to our new uncle!), and boy does this story go places. Keeping Laurie and Michael related opens up a new avenue of interpretation. The ending- which I very much liked- gives us an interesting explanation for Michael’s homicidal obsession with Jaime. Michael was always the Boogeyman, like not even a metaphor or anything, just literally the Boogeyman, but tying them by blood lets us look at generational trauma, genetic predispositions, and nature vs. nurture (which the franchise has always flirted with). Somehow the whole fucking town knows Jaime is Michael’s niece (why the fuck would anyone raise her in that town, lol); does knowing and getting teased about her relation to a near-mythical monster predispose her to evil? When she touches Michael’s hand is she affected by something supernatural or a more mundane understanding that she’s just looking at a dying man?
Highlights- The children mocking Jaime for being an orphan is so fucking funny to me.
- Michael goes from the roof of a three-story house to the ground floor door in 16 seconds (I counted). Sure, he’s infamously athletic, but I burst out laughing when he appeared because I pictured him just really hustling down those stairs and having to catch his breath before dramatically reappearing.
- Loomis’ “NO NO NO NO NOOOOO!” at the end, *chef kiss*. Shoot that small child, king!
- A group of like fifteen people just fucking unloading their guns into Michael and then the fucking ground collapsing and swallowing him is SO FUCKING FUNNY. They wanted/were hoping to make a sequel but they still ended it so hard. Like if I hadn’t looked it up I’d assume they were intentionally trying to make a sequel impossible.
- The only people who made a good decision in this movie was the posse when they just decide to leave.
Mikey at the end: A group of like fifteen fucking people unload their guns into him and then the fucking ground collapses beneath him and swallows him up. It's ArtTM, honestly.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Now we're really in the dark times.
Loomis is so fucking unhinged. Donald Pleasance is such a joy to watch. Jaime is even more annoying now that she can't speak. Shout out for the nightmare whisper-scream (taken straight from the Every Nightmare I've Ever Had) but all her vocalizations are torturous for me. Hate that they retconned the ending of 4. Michael bobbing along in the water is hilarious, with every second of screen time he becomes less and less threatening. "uncle bogeyman" was pretty sweet. Who the fuck was silver boots? Tina was pointless and I hated her. All the women in these movies do is giggle and die. Rachel felt so cheap. They didn't need her in this at all and keeping her in cheapened the end of 4. they could have so easily made this movie tolerable: Keep in the original ending from 4 with the stepmom murdered, Rachel understandably wouldn't want to see Jaime anymore which makes it far more understandable and natural for her to latch onto Tina, a surrogate older sister to replace the one that (from her perspective) has abandoned her. Boom. See how easy that was, whoever the fuck made this movie? You don't undo the genuine shock of 4's actually interesting ending and you don't have to kill off Rachel for no fucking reason and you still get to keep the sister dynamic in a more complex form. Why do these people get to write movies and I don't? It's bad, folks.
Mikey at the end: ?????
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
How was the one with the pagan baby-stealing cult the most boring? Put me to sleep. Only noteworthy as Paul Rudd's debut movie.
(He did poorly.)
Mikey at the end: I literally don't even remember.
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Hot take incoming: I think this is the best of the Laurie Strode Halloweens. It occupies this very strange space in the franchise, with movies 4-6 retconned away, but with Laurie and Michael still siblings and Laurie having moved on in a pretty realistic way: she moves across the country, has a kid, gets a good job, and becomes a functioning alcoholic. She's still traumatized, obviously, but in a way that feels much more grounded than the mess that is the reboot trilogy. She's overly-protective of her kid but doesn't keep him isolated in a fucking PTSD bunker. Her coping mechanisms are alcohol and repression, but she's capable of small amounts of trust and opening herself up to others when it's warranted.
The soundtracks
I hadn't planned on mentioning the soundtrack, honestly; the original stinger is so iconic and perfect that there's sort of nothing else one can say about it, especially since I'm not a musician nor do I know anything about music from a technical point of view.
That being said, once you hit the later Halloweens the absence of the iconic tune is so glaring and it becomes so obvious just how much of the heavy lifting that little song has done across the entire franchise. I don't think I'm the first person to say this, but I genuinely believe that if John Carpenter hadn't come up with that song, the original Halloween wouldn't have taken off like it did.