#for anyone wondering what the silly w his kid is: in a livestream they did on popverse

[ethersierra]

The McElroys make me SO happy. Like I know that's an obvious thing for a TAZ blog to say but they just bring so much joy ! Like the fuckin Mario playthrough or even just watching back on this one interview where Justin talks about a silly thing with his daughter. Just all the goofs and genuine heartfelt sort of nature make my day better all the time

[poresorpixels]

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)/

Halloween 5: The Revenge of

Michael Myers (1989)

gluishtuuks: return/revenge flick, Pleasence in extremis, creepy uncle, seasonal afflictive disorder, Haddonfield follies, formula soluable

This review is tougher to justify than the Ms. 45 one, which at least I hadn't seen. These two I am somewhat well acquainted with, and am pretty sure are more bad than good. Not to mention Wham City's pseudo-interactive livestreamed call-in melodrama (The Call of Warr) is back on Adult Swim for the next few days. If it's as scary, hilarious, demented and original as last year's The Cry of Mann (they even did a fantastically vapid accompanying show-about-a-show parody called Tanking Mann), then there is next to no reason to be wasting my time with these crummy sequels.

But I made this arbitrary October commitment, so I'm gonna go ahead and shovel some overdue dirt on this sorry pair and pat it down.

First of all, there's Donald Pleasence. He don't look so good. Particularly in Revenge, it seems as though the movie itself is trying to kill him as we watch on, bemused and more than a little bored. Danielle Harris is Laurie Strode's daughter Jamie, who is now a foster child, but her uncle strides past the Videodrome-for-dummies corporate death conspiracy (easily the best sequel, both because of and despite its crazy Michael-less storyline, for starters) and death itself to cut that family line. Harris was great as Furry Tom and the thorn in her McClane-redux-daddy's side in The Last Boyscout. She's solid here too, conveying more believable traumatized intensity than either film earns.

I was ten when I first got steeped in these sorts of movies, and the ruthlessly simple machinery just worked. The mockery of the more silly elements (though more so with the Friday/Elm Street movies) was often over-eager, barely containing the rising dread. That the anticipation dulls with age is a phenomenon often fixed on the viewership, but I'd argue that the blame lies more with cynically crude bottom-lining, crass presumptions of audience by the money. Horror is a genre with merit beyond watching people get butchered, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who'd go too far to attest to as much. No matter what you're watching, exploitation is the name of the game. But if you're producing, as is the case here, purely rote content, who can blame a viewer for glazing over till the killing starts?

Depsite some nice flourishes here and there, the Jamie saga portion of this franchise is as dull as it is anti-climactic. Particularly regarding the kills, which are all flat. The original and naturally best of the series wasn't particularly gory, but it had a lot more on the ball than anything that came after. It was working within budget constraints, but its perfect score and naturally winning cast (namely Curtis, PJ Soles and Nancy Kyes) and masterfully scored autmnal atmosphere made it work. These two films strive to recapture that original spark, but wind up feeling like drab, minor, tv movie-slight variations.

At a glance they may seem classier than the Friday the 13th stuff, but that's kind of what makes them obnoxious. They're slashers with delusions of thematic heft. The fact that they manage to stick some of their stylistic landings only seems to make this pretense worse. In Return there is a droning minimalist credit sequence comprising a series of drab, desolate country exteriors. It is a great mood setter, but when we leave these outskirt locations for the suburbs, it seems superfluous. All the best stuff happens outside of Haddonfield. Loomis gets nearly blown up at a sevice station, then hitches a ride with the boxcar hobo from Pee Wee's Big Adventure (still boozin' his cares away, but with a somehow worse singing voice and a sweet gig as a turn of the century fire and brimstone preacher). Sam actually smiles in this bit, and the unPleasence of this is mitigated by the fact that its a small relief to see the man take a brief siesta from the ceaseless wide-eyed flailing.

After that (and this holds for Revenge as well) it seems as though aping the highschool crush mini-drama of the original and endless hallucinatory false scares is supposed to suffice. Loomis would be hilarious in his stumbling mania were it not for the fact that he seems more horrific to poor Jamie than her stabby Uncle Mike. It doesn't help that, as has oft been remarked, they kept fucking with the mask to worse and worse effect, leaving one to wonder if it was ever scary to begin with. One thing's for sure, "humanizing" Michael (apparently what they were going for in Revenge) was never the fucking point! He was called "the shape" for good reason.

Even if they're roughly the same ratioed templates, Revenge squeaks ahead in the quirky teen dept. Though its anachronistic greaser boyfriend in Revenge pales in comparison to those rat-a-tat-tooie boys in the fifth Friday movie (and we have to spend considerably less time with them). But Jamie's friend (foster sister? who fuckin' cares) Tina is actually kinda charming and smarter seeming than her ditsy lines and misguided notions (including ones of neon-hearted love w/r/t the aforementioned greaser) would suggest.

Sadly, it looks like Tina's Wendy Kaplan may've never went on to anything more substantial. But here's as good a place as any to remind people that there's much more to Donald Pleasence than this babbling shrink with a gun (or the Bond villain, Blofeld). Despite having some decently budgeted technical chops (most exemplified in Jamie's nerve shredding, claustrophobic knife/laundry chute sequence in Revenge), these two are not the beat use of one's viewing time. So why not check out the 1971 film Wake In Fright? Directed by Ted Kotcheff (First Blood), its a nasty, sweaty, drunken trip set in the outback with a lively Pleasence, unhinged as you've never seen him. And if you've seen it, see it again. It's better than both of these movies combined, with a lot of room to spare.

Halloween movies ranked:

10/11

Halloween 1/2 (Rob Zombie has too much money and no/dumb ideas. shoulda just stuck with that rusty rutabega mudflap metal what made him famous)

9

Halloween: Resurrection (reality tv premise bites hard, though that similarly plotted Tales from The Crypt ep with Morton Downey Jr.* was a hoot)

8

Halloween: The Curse of MM (Paul Rudd is wonderful and all, but he cannot begin to save this tedious exercise in myth padding - but here's a clip anyway.)

7

Halloween 5 (roman numerals...

6

Halloween [2018] (I can remember nothing about this, except that I don't see myself watching it again. i guess it was loud and expensive, and wasted Judy Greer and Toby Huss. Just another cash-grab reboot nail in imagination's coffin.)

5

Halloween 4 ...are for squares, man!)

4

Halloween II (creepy enough, strangely dreary, but more than a bit sluggish)

3

H20 (the boarding school setting works and its slick cast and production values don't smooth over the grit. plus there's the weird kid from The Ice Storm that Christina Ricci deflowers)

2

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Tom Atkins, heads exploding into bugs and snakes, mustard-bleeding robuts and a catchy jingle. Bites off more than it manages to chew, but in an uncommonly satisfying way)

1

Halloween (best John Carpenter film after The Thing and one of the best horror films period)

* "Television Terror"/S02/E16/1990