David Vining's Blog, page 36

Halloween (2018): A Second Look

David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies took a severe nosedive in appreciation after the first one which was generally well received. The second one became a meme almost immediately, and the third one was met with resistance because (I haven’t seen it yet, so I think) it pushed Michael Myer’s to the background for most of the running time before becoming Myers’ centric in the final act to jarring effect. Also, his Exorcist movie was an embarrassment.

Well, in the context of what the Hallowe...

Halloween II (2009)

Rob Zombie hated working with the Weinsteins on his first Halloween film, so…he came back and made a second one with them. His reasons don’t make sense. However, he did, and he proved once and for all that he doesn’t understand…the slasher genre in the least. Or Halloween. Or, potentially, horror at all. This is, at best, a hodgepodge of misery, something so unpleasant to look at that it makes one wonder how anyone considered it a good fit with the unintentionally goofy nonsense that had com...

Halloween (2007)

With the death of Moustapha Akkad at the hands of terrorists in Jordan, Dimension was able to give more control to the Weinsteins who brought in Rob Zombie to direct a remake. Makes sense, I guess. Having made a couple of well-received horror films that were nothing like the Halloween franchise, but having an obvious affinity for the material and film in general, Zombie wasn’t the worst choice. He’s at least trying to make an interesting series of decisions, even if I think the core of it is...

Halloween: Resurrection

Halloween fully becomes Friday the 13th, complete with idiotic, sex-craved teenagers doing stupid things while staying in a place they could easily escape from. Le sigh. It’s not the worst this franchise has gotten, the dumb lore of The Curse of Michael Myers has to be the low point, but this isn’t good. This is Moustapha Akkad discarding, again, the potential of tension in favor of tired slasher cliches, all while getting the director of II, Rick Rosenthal, to just embrace the direction ful...

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

Bringing in the talent who built the Friday the 13th franchise, Steve Miner, to direct the seventh installment of the Halloween franchise, a reboot of the franchise ignoring III through The Curse of Michael Myers, Moustapha Akkad found a way to make the best entry in the franchise since the beginning. I mean, it’s not quite good, but it’s practically there. It replicates the kind of tension that dominated the first film and hasn’t been touched since, has some very solid kills, and even an em...

Juror #2 – Trailer

Dammit, Clint. Not only did you make another movie after I had figured you to be done and ready for retirement (well into your 90s, mind you), but this looks pretty good too.

The amount of rejiggering I’m going to have to do to that definitive list is already giving me a headache.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

I often advocate for franchises stuck in a rut to go weird, and then when one actually does, I tend to reject it. Why? Well, I’m a bad person, but aside from that, the weirdness tends to be kind of terribly done. Think Jason Goes to Hell where all of the previous rules were tossed out in favor of disconnected weirdness that didn’t make sense. Well, this is that for the Halloween franchise, a film so disconnected from how it had begun, so consumed with creating lore to explain what should nev...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Hey, remember how Halloween 4 ended with an interesting moment where a little girl was going to become the next Michael Myers? Well, that’s too far for Moustapha Akkad, it seems, so everything gets pulled back because having a little girl become a slasher villain was a bit too much. Which is, to be fair, understandable if you’re going to refuse any sort of significant time jump, looking forward only a year so that your little girl actress was going to be the main character of the next film. ...

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Just in case you had the misapprehension that the owners of the Halloween franchise would make the terrible mistake of no slavishly following the rules of slashers that had come to dominate the horror world in the 80s, we assure you that Michael Myers is definitely back. It’s in the title. We swear. Mostly just putting on those slasher duds more comfortably than John Carpenter tried to do through his writing on II, 4 works better because it doesn’t try to strike this balance between Carpente...

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

John Carpenter‘s last involvement with the Halloween franchise where he handed off direct creative reins to Tommy Lee Wallace, a friend since film school who had been working on his films since Dark Star. Replicating the Carpenter look, this errant, black sheep entry in the franchise ends up feeling most like Prince of Darkness, just not as well written but just about as creepy. It’s Carpenter-like without Carpenter’s stronger sense of narrative (though, he did write Halloween II…).

Hallo...