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Pope Corky the IX posted:Am I loving crazy? I remember talk about the pandemic being incorporated into the storyline during interviews, but I don't remember anything being said about it at all in the movie itself.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:30
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Okay, just making sure. Because several people are talking about the time skip as though it's shown in the movie to be because of the pandemic.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:31
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moths posted:Weird that Michael observed quarantine. Remember, he had his own special cop-killing hole he held up in for the whole time. Only went out for essentials like victims to kill and probably eat.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:32
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Michael Myers eats dogs exclusively.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:35
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Okay, just making sure. Because several people are talking about the time skip as though it's shown in the movie to be because of the pandemic. This is the interview https://www.slashfilm.com/632387/halloween-ends-will-jump-forward-in-time-address-the-pandemic/ This is what he said david Gordon green posted:
Basically it’s meaningless and I don’t know why he even said it or did a time jump. I mean that’s fine I guess but idk.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:35
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Ends was a way more interesting movie than whatever they were trying to set up in Kills, so I'll take the time jump
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Jan 17, 2024 18:33
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Glancing through the plot summaries of the other sequels, I think that the root problem is that this series removed Michael and Laurie being long-lost siblings, the excuse used by all pre-2018 sequels and remakes to justify Michael continuing to menace the Strode family over the decades, and then it also discarded the excuse that Halloween Kills had set up in its original ending, of Laurie setting out to hunt down and kill Michael. But they still wanted to tell a story with Michael and the Strode family. They left in the part of Kills that established for sure that Michael has no special interest in Laurie, he just has a weird psychological connection to his childhood home. That at most justifies him staying in Haddenfield, so the surviving members of the Strode family have to stick around, and for the purpose of this story they have to let their guard down and so does the entire rest of the town only a few years after the events of Halloween Kills (because setting a film in the future would likely be infeasible, and even if they could Michael can only get so old before even a thin ambiguity over whether he has superhuman/supernatural abilities becomes unsustainable). The H20 set up, Laurie going into hiding in another town and Michael tracking her down, doesn't work at all because in this continuity Michael has zero reason to follow the Strode family if they leave town. I find myself wondering if the original intention was to keep Laurie's vendetta at the end of Kills and have Michael leave town after they bulldoze his childhood home. Then he ends up hiding in a totally different small town, gets involved with a new set of characters, and starts corrupting a local troubled teenage boy that has no previous connection to Michael or the Strode family whatsoever, and somehow Laurie gets word that Michael might be in this town and shows up at the end to kill him. Basically an inverse of the H20 setup, with Michael going into hiding and Laurie tracking him down. That's the most logical way that I can think of to tell a story like this following Halloween Kills and still have Laurie involved, but maybe the studio objected to a plot that would leave the Strode family completely absent for so much of the running time. I still think that the best course of action would have been to go the Christopher Nolan route: make a crowd-pleasing finale to close out the trilogy and make enough money to keep the studio happy, then use the clout gained to go on to make whatever projects you want. Including the idea that turned into Halloween Ends, which I think would have worked just fine as a standalone movie with the serial numbers filed off. Very little has to change if Michael is replaced by Generic Slasher Villain and they could have made their own backstory and characters to fit with the story. INH5 fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 20:14
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WattsvilleBlues posted:Can I also shout out again to the job done on Loomis in Halloween Kills - absolutely beautiful nostalgia to see such a faithful recreation of Donald Pleasence. You probably already know this but I just want to add because it's a distressingly common misconception: Dr. Loomis in Halloween Kills isn't special effects, he's just played by a good look-alike paired with a good sound-alike.
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Jan 18, 2024 20:04
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:You probably already know this but I just want to add because it's a distressingly common misconception: Dr. Loomis in Halloween Kills isn't special effects, he's just played by a good look-alike paired with a good sound-alike. Plus some make-up work including prosthetics, as shown in the the behind the scenes Special Features. But yes, no CGI as far as I can tell.
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Jan 18, 2024 21:38
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It was kismet, one of the crew members just happened to look just like him, or enough so to fudge it with makeup. I think the best way to make the trilogy go down smoother is to minimize Kills and absorb it into 2018, to make it a trilogy again. That can also fix the issue of having two movies named Halloween.
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Jan 18, 2024 23:11
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Yeah peeps, I know about the lookalike and the impressionist they used in H40. I was disappointed there wasn't something similar done in Halloween Ends, I love me some nostalgia.
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Jan 19, 2024 00:28
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Did they just keep forgetting they had cast someone as the sheriff? In each one he kind of shows up for a few lines but doesn’t actually do anything.
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Jan 19, 2024 00:41
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Did they just keep forgetting they had cast someone as the sheriff? In each one he kind of shows up for a few lines but doesn’t actually do anything. Mothman Cinematic Universe?
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Jan 19, 2024 01:07
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I decided to watch the non-infamously terrible entries in the "other Laurie Stroder sequel trilogy" (Halloween 2 1981 and H20), and it only strengthens my feeling that a lot of the issues with Kills and Ends stem from the creators of the new trilogy writing themselves into a corner by removing the long lost siblings twist. However you feel about that twist in by itself, there's a reason why even Rob Zombie kept it when he started with a totally blank canvas. Absent something along those lines there simply isn't any good reason for Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, or her descendants, to ever cross paths again after the first movie. And now that that twist has been cemented in popular memory by all of the pre-2018 sequels and remakes, making it clear that Laurie and Michael aren't related (as 2018 did even with the trailers) only to then introduce some other twist to explain why Michael wants to kill Laurie specifically would feel like cheating. 2018 was carefully written around this. Michael gets captured instead of just disappearing, so not only Laurie but also her daughter and grand-daughter stick around in Haddonfield and Haddonfield itself is unprepared for Michael's return. Laurie has reacted to the events of the first movie by turning her home into a fortress, so her family gathers there instead of skipping town when Michael does escape. And even then, they introduce the doctor who incorrectly believes that Michael is obsessed with Laurie to actually get the climactic showdown between the two. But that sort of construction only works for one movie, and then the studio asked them for two more movies. I think that likely Kills was designed to provide reasons why Laurie will go after Michael (he kills Karen) and, almost as importantly, why few other people would do the same (because a bunch of random townsfolk tried that and got massacred), and the whole plot was written backwards from there. Then they made a Part 3 that not only made those plot points superfluous, but actually makes less sense given the context. I'm still disappointed. It kind of feels like reading a book that abruptly ends mid-sentence. And even my two suggested alternatives above, either changing the ending of Kills to fit with the setup of Ends (so Michael is driven off and wounded by the mob and assumed dead) or changing the set up of Ends to better fit the ending of Kills (set it in a different town, Corey is a local unconnected to the Strodes, Laurie shows up at the end to hunt down and kill Michael), I don't think would lead to great series plotting. With the first, even if we assume that the Strodes are still living in Haddonfield while Michael is hiding in Haddonfield, it's still a pretty big coincidence that Allyson's sort-of-boyfriend just happens to be the one guy who ends up becoming Michael's sort-of-apprentice. With the second, regardless of how you try to shift the tone at the end of Kills in the editing room, we still end part 2 with, on a thematic level, Michael's greatest moment of triumph and then start Part 3 with Michael having run away and hid in a sewer for years. It'd be like if Return of the Jedi started with Han Solo back with the group, with a few lines of exposition tossed in about how he was rescued from carbonite off-screen. There's nothing impossible about that happening, but it would have felt pretty cheap, wouldn't it? And what we got, of course, has both of those problems in addition to the other ones that I've already mentioned in previous posts. ---- As to the actual quality of 1981 and 1998, the former was genuinely good if not quite reaching the levels of the first film (but what ever has?), the latter was decent, with an interesting somewhat different take on a lot of the same ideas that 2018 had, some well-staged action scenes near the end and a pretty great ending to that continuity if you ignore the existence of Resurrection. Speaking of which, the Wikipedia plot summary of Resurrection makes me morbidly curious, but for now I have better things to do with my time than deal with the technical issues of the Paramount Plus app just to watch what is near-universally considered a bad movie. I read about the behind-the-scenes fights that ended up with "okay, we make it look like Michael dies in this movie, then in the next one actually he switched clothes with a paramedic", and I will never understand why, given that Jamie Lee Curtis wasn't interested in appearing in more sequels at the time and future movies would have Michael slashing up randos anyway, they didn't just let Michael die in H20 and plan on making a prequel or 3 set in the twenty year gap in the timeline that H20 was going to open up? As a final note, in the process of renting Halloween 2 1981 I found that Halloween 2 2009, Rob Zombie's Part 2, is available for streaming rental in both the theatrical and Unrated Director's Cut versions. That movie made just $39.4 million at the box office. Yet they didn't do the same for Halloween Kills? From a money-grubbing perspective, I could maybe understand having one version exclusive to Peacock...but neither version of Kills is on Peacock anymore. Again, WTF? INH5 fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jan 19, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 05:43
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INH5 posted:As a final note, in the process of renting Halloween 2 1981 I found that Halloween 2 2009, Rob Zombie's Part 2, is available for streaming rental in both the theatrical and Unrated Director's Cut versions. That movie made just $39.4 million at the box office. Yet they didn't do the same for Halloween Kills? From a money-grubbing perspective, I could maybe understand having one version exclusive to Peacock...but neither version of Kills is on Peacock anymore. Again, WTF? The rights to the Halloween franchise are as convoluted as the series itself. The streaming rights to the movies also vary by country. Hollywood is really making a great argument for the preservation of physical DVD/Blu-ray.
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Jan 19, 2024 21:17
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I read the big Making Of coffee table art book about the new trilogy. Tons of interviews with DGG, writers, producers, actors, etc. Really awesome makeup and fx breakdowns. They said their original idea was Halloween 2018 -> Halloween Ends, but when they got a trilogy instead they added Kills in the middle to have a fast paced crowd pleasing slasher with more kills and gore. Their Aliens to H'18's Alien. That does seem to make more sense and Michael having to go into hiding after basically burning to death makes a lot of sense, as does Laurie moving on because she thinks he's dead. I thought they had said all three movies were supposed to take place in one night but I guess not? Not sure how much is legit and how much may be retconning things. Also, regarding the missing sheriff, the actor had prior commitments during filming of the third movie so they had to write him out. The sister (who says "How dare you!" to Laurie in the parking lot) of the black woman who survives Kills but is now mute and in a wheel chair was originally cast as his wife, so to still use her they made her that character instead. During reshoots he became available for a short time so he has basically a cameo during the end procession.
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Jan 21, 2024 20:39
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Violator posted:They said their original idea was Halloween 2018 -> Halloween Ends, but when they got a trilogy instead they added Kills in the middle to have a fast paced crowd pleasing slasher with more kills and gore. Their Aliens to H'18's Alien. That does seem to make more sense and Michael having to go into hiding after basically burning to death makes a lot of sense, as does Laurie moving on because she thinks he's dead. I thought they had said all three movies were supposed to take place in one night but I guess not? Not sure how much is legit and how much may be retconning things. I suspect what's going on here is that DGG and the studio wanted different things for the sequel(s) and what we ended up getting was a messy compromise. Something to keep in mind is that before the release of 2018 they had no idea how successful it was going to be, which meant that they had no idea what kind of budget would be available for any sequel. The basic premise for Halloween Ends is something that could have easily been done on a low budget, especially since they would have already had Michael's mask and other costumes and props left over from 2018. They could have easily reduced the role of any of the actors that appeared with a visible face in 2018 if need be, Michael's sort-of-apprentice didn't have to be Allyson's sort-of-boyfriend, and maybe some people could have just moved away. And if the sequel ends up taking a while to get greenlit, as often happens, then that wouldn't be a major problem either since the premise would work fine with a gap of several years. And yes, if Michael disappears at the end of 2018 then the reaction makes sense. By that point his most improbable moments would have been getting shot and falling off a two-story balcony in 1978, but he was wearing dark clothing in a dark room so maybe Loomis just had bad aim and Michael just happened to land on a patch of soft dirt or something, and surviving getting hit by a car in 2018 which wouldn't be impossible to explain away either. So yes, weird that they didn't find a charred body when they cleaned up the debris of Laurie's house, but stabbed, shot in the face with a rifle, locked in a burning building for who-knows-how-long and he doesn't show up next Halloween, and he is after all in his 60s? Yeah, he's probably gone even if there's no real closure. It would work thematically too. Laurie spent most of her life preparing to face and defeat the Bogeyman...and it almost works. Almost. Here's what we know: After the release of the 2018 movie to great financial and critical success the studio asked for 2 sequels shot nearly back-to-back, with Halloween Ends (title was decided on before Covid) originally scheduled to start filming in Summer 2020. And here's the really interesting part: according to available accounts the test screenings of Halloween Kills used the Extended Cut ending. And I'm pretty sure that DGG's first public statements about Ends taking place 4 years after Kills were in an interview published right around the release of Kills. Correct me if I'm wrong and he said stuff along those lines earlier than that. My guess for what happened behind-the-scenes is that when sequels were greenlight the plan was for Part 2 and Part 3 to take place on the same night, and while DGG was never really happy about it that plan held right up until the 2021 test screenings. Then feedback from test screenings plus "we're going to be shooting in 2022 anyway" won the studio over enough that they agreed to re-edit the ending to provide some flexibility, and then disappointing early critical reviews for Kills led the studio to agree to go with DGG's original sequel idea for the third movie. The thinking might have been: "with not-great reviews like this Part 2 might disappoint in terms of revenue too, which means we won't want to spend a lot of money on Part 3, and we have to make a decision now so that DGG has something to say in interviews." And then, based on the marketing for Ends among other things, the studio likely tacked on additional asterisks to the agreement later on. No proof of any of that, of course, but overall this smells to me like a "too many cooks" situation.
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Jan 22, 2024 00:55
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was the Corey stuff part of the original version of ends? Is that in the book? I feel like Corey is this Hail Mary gently caress it idea that you only get when you’re feeling your project is getting kinda stale
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Jan 22, 2024 03:33
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CelticPredator posted:was the Corey stuff part of the original version of ends? Is that in the book? The two obvious motivations that I can see are if you wanted a premise that could be filmed on a low budget and/or if you wanted to leave the door open for continuing the franchise in a way that wouldn't fall off of the tightrope they were walking with Michael's seemingly inhuman abilities simply on account of Michael's increasing age. Though the second one only works if Corey/whatever his name is survives the movie, but but DGG has said in interviews that that was something that they had considered. So it would make some sense to me as a contingency plan thought up around the production of 2018 in case that movie wasn't very successful and the best they could hope for a sequel would be a low-budget sequel. A la Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Except that in this case for whatever reason it got brought back for Part 3, even though Part 3 ended up with a larger production budget than the first 2 parts combined. But I, too, would be interested in learning if the coffee table book says anything more specific. INH5 fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 07:35
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Here's some quick quotes I found while skimming the ~80 pages about Ends. There's a lot more detail and other notes scattered throughout the other movie chapters about it but I thought these were relevant. Phone typing so there might be typos:quote:DGG says he had conceptualized Ends before Kills. "Kills felt like it would be a fun and rambunctious Michael-based chapter, so we penciled in what we were going to do with him, and then came back to Ends."
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Jan 22, 2024 14:39
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To me, it really feels like there should have been a fourth movie. Not after Ends, but BETWEEN Kills and Ends, to better set up the concepts of 'Michael can corrupt people' and how he went from seemingly walking off the mob scene and killing everyone, suggesting that he's somehow becoming something more than human through his acts of murder like in the first film timeline, to hiding and rotting in a sewer; yeah he's still 'alive', and stuff not made clear in the film shows that he's still incredibly dangerous, in that he's probably killed people who stumbled over him and that the homeless man outside the grate entrance is basically his brain-enslaved lapdog who has brought people to Michael to kill (and eat. This is all in, or hinted at, in the novelization)...but it's still jarring after a presentation of "YOU CANNOT KILL THIS THING" at the end of Kills and then next film he's so weak that his most recent slave can overpower him and take his 'mantle' for a bit. Or an easier thing: just cut the bit at the end of Kills when he gets up and massacres the crowd. Just have him disappear like at the end of the OG film. Voila, now him rotting in a sewer and needing a proxy fits much better. I still say Ends is much better than most think, but even I think it's better in a 'you can do all sorts of interesting analysis here that you couldn't do with say, the Maniac Cop trilogy' sense, when it really should have been primarily concerned with being better as a slasher film and a climax in the battle between Laurie and Michael. As IHN5 said, the final film in a trilogy where the main villain finally wholly dies and is guaranteed dead, which didn't happen in either the first or second timelines is really not a place to experiment. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 04:34
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DGG over thought this whole thing and that’s I think what kind of ruined it.
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Jan 23, 2024 05:27
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Laurie getting evil Covid and having to isolate Bro come on
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Jan 23, 2024 05:30
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Good posts y'all.
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Jan 23, 2024 08:58
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The theme of Michael as a corrupting influence was pretty much obliterated conceptually when Laurie became a cozy homemaker. They danced around the concept from the onset - the other inmates' behavior, Loomis's decaying rationality, the podcasters' irrational risks, and Laurie becoming a survivalist wacko all point to the idea that Michael is a psychic toxin. Exposure and extended contemplation of him just leads to "madness." Corey should have been the apex of this, but the bullies and his pariah status just cut the legs off. Laurie bouncing back didn't help, either. Just a thematic mess. It all feels like compromised themes and contradictory ideas.
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Jan 23, 2024 18:00
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moths posted:The theme of Michael as a corrupting influence was pretty much obliterated conceptually when Laurie became a cozy homemaker. A fair point, but you could probably also produce an analysis that, like how some people in history who exposed themselves to small doses of poison actually built up an immunity, or at least a resistance to it, that's what happened with Laurie. The nightmare events of 2018 and Kills finally pushed her past the point of any of it having any effect on her, while instead the rest of Haddonfield started to suffer from 'the poison of Michael Myers'. Cory's status could also be interestingly examined in a 'Michael is a truly unique anomaly, you cannot recreate him, you can only approximate him for a successor'. I mean, based on the 2018 timeline, Michael is simply, innately, pure evil; one day his soul died and he killed his sister and then all he wanted to do after 15 years of waiting around was 'Go home, kill everyone on the way, then just keep killing everyone he could, just cause.' Much like in real life, that sort of thing is so rare that you have no choice but to go with the 'A child rejected by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth'.
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Jan 24, 2024 06:33
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Cornwind Evil posted:Cory's status could also be interestingly examined in a 'Michael is a truly unique anomaly, you cannot recreate him, you can only approximate him for a successor'. I mean, based on the 2018 timeline, Michael is simply, innately, pure evil; one day his soul died and he killed his sister and then all he wanted to do after 15 years of waiting around was 'Go home, kill everyone on the way, then just keep killing everyone he could, just cause.' Much like in real life, that sort of thing is so rare that you have no choice but to go with the 'A child rejected by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth'. The main theme of the newer Halloween movies is that hate begets hate, as exemplified that Michael Myers keeps getting more evil the worse people treat him, and since people keep retaliating harder against his murders it forms a destructive feedback loop. 'Kills' shows us specifically in flashbacks that Myers has changed since we last saw him in 1978: he did not used to just kill anybody and everybody (he ignored Lonnie, implying he didn't kill kids back then, but 2018 Myers gladly hunts down the little shits). Keep treating someone like they're evil incarnate and sooner or later they'll oblige. If we take Corey to be a sort of mirror image of Myers - Corey a sitter whose "original sin" was having a child die on his watch, while Myers was a child who killed the sister responsible for him - we can extrapolate that young Myers may not have intended to kill Judith; he went in her room to scare her for ditching him in favor of her boyfriend, and he freaked out when he caught her naked (a common trope of old scary urban legends is that youngsters being exposed to sex unexpectedly are liable to be instantly traumatized to the point of insanity) and in his furious and manic state he went and stabbed her a bunch of times for real; this impulsive murderous act further shocking the young Myers into a mute. Give the kid a doctor, himself having a loose screw or two, who after some years not appearing to make any progress with Myers, just ups and decides the kid must be completely hopeless, pure evil even, and this isn't exactly a scenario that helps Myers get better at all. Finally becoming an adult, Myers busts out in order to demonstrate why he killed his sister, by doing it again but this time putting the victim(s) on display with a sign (Judith's tombstone) to draw the comparison and lead to the conclusion: he killed his sister (and this new victim(s)) because they ditched the kids in their care in order to get drunk and have sex. 'Kills' continues and shows that no one got the message, Dr. Loomis and the cops proceed to beat him and even attempt to personally execute him. Myers gets worse and so does the town, and when years later when both are physically worn down, the lingering hate starts anew with Corey who goes on a path that parallels Myers'.
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Jan 27, 2024 00:49
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SidneyIsTheKiller posted:The main theme of the newer Halloween movies is that hate begets hate, as exemplified that Michael Myers keeps getting more evil the worse people treat him, and since people keep retaliating harder against his murders it forms a destructive feedback loop. 'Kills' shows us specifically in flashbacks that Myers has changed since we last saw him in 1978: he did not used to just kill anybody and everybody (he ignored Lonnie, implying he didn't kill kids back then, but 2018 Myers gladly hunts down the little shits). Keep treating someone like they're evil incarnate and sooner or later they'll oblige. I wish posts here had a Like button. Interesting take.
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Jan 27, 2024 20:16
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I went ahead and watched the Thorn Trilogy, and with that done decided that I might as well watch Resurrection too. I've now watched all of the Halloween movies that consider 1978 canonical. I have to say that I'm even more convinced that a lot of the issues with the 2018-2022 trilogy stem from the creators writing themselves into a corner by removing the twist of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode being long-lost siblings. 2, 4, 5, and H20 all had very simple setups because all the filmmakers had to do to justify why Michael is in this location doing this stuff is say that he's trying to get to a Strode family member. 6 is complicated because of deliberate choices on the part of the film-makers. And Resurrection found itself in a situation where the family connections were made irrelevant for the main plot, because Jamie Lee Curtis was only willing to appear if she would be killed off in the first 10 minutes, they clearly weren't able to get Josh Hartnett back either, and Donald Pleasance had of course died years ago. And if they just did Michael Myers killing random people in a random place for no particular reason then why bother making a Halloween film? The result, of course, was a premise even more ridiculous than 6's nonsense about an ancient cult and scientific experiments and dead fetuses in flasks, where we're supposed to believe that Michael spent 24 years hiding out in the very first place where people would think to look for him and was never found, even after he repeatedly reappeared and killed people in a way that left zero doubt that he was responsible, and some people thought it would be a good idea to do a reality show in Michael's childhood home on Halloween only a year after his most recent killing spree. There are absolutely less bad premises they could have used, but the fact is that removing that family connection makes it difficult to justify Halloween sequels. In regards to what I thought of the movies themselves, 4 and 5 were enjoyable in a B-movie sort of way, elevated by Donald Pleasance's performance and some nicely atmospheric sequences. 6 was an incredibly confusing mess that I couldn't follow at all by the end, and Donald Pleasance was barely in it (if I understand it right, because the movie was extensively reshot after he had passed away), so even he couldn't save the trainwreck. And Resurrection was exactly as dreadful as it's reputation makes it out to be, with only one mildly amusing scene where Busta-Rhymes-dressed-as-Michael-Myers runs into actual-Michael-Myers and mistakes him for a wayward crew member. And I continue to be baffled by Resurrection's very existence. Consider the situation that the producers were in after the release of H20: * Jamie Lee Curtis would only agree to be in a sequel if she was killed off within the first 10 minutes. * They couldn't get Josh Hartnett back either. * Donald Pleasance, again, wasn't available, and in any case H20 already established Dr. Loomis as dead in-universe. * The above meant that any future movies would inevitably be Michael killing randos we've never seen before. * If Michael came back for a sequel after getting his head chopped off on-screen, no one would ever believe him to be dead in any future movies, so there would be zero suspense over whether Michael would survive any sequels. * By retconning away 4-6, H20 had opened up a 20-year gap in the timeline. So why not leave Michael dead at the end of H20 and just make some prequels? You could tie all sorts of scenarios into Michael's 20-year search for his sister. Just about anyone Michael ran into would be characters that didn't show up in H20 anyway, so you could have suspense over which ones of them might live, which is the only thing you'd be able to have suspense over in any case. And as a bonus you wouldn't need to worry about the difficulties that increasingly widespread cell phone ownership ended up creating for the horror genre from the 2000s onward, because the movies would all take place before 1998. Instead we got a ridiculous retcon and ridiculous sequel premise all to present in theaters...Michael Myers getting his butt kicked by Busta Rhymes. Absolutely baffling. I'm honestly starting to appreciate the Saw series more as a non-explicitly-supernatural villain-based horror movie franchise that after 20 years and 10 movies still has a single continuity where the main villain died and stayed dead (don't think that needs a spoiler at this point, it's all over the trailers for the later movies). Later entries in the series ended up with an absurd number of flashbacks and secret apprentices, and they're now just rushing to make prequels while Tobin Bell is still alive, but that still seems like much better storytelling than what happened to Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. INH5 fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Feb 5, 2024 01:14
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i don't agree with that entirely. I thought h18 was perfect in that Mike had no motivation. He just loved killing. That's it. Laurie put all this power on this guy that really couldn't give a poo poo about her personally. That was really cool. It's just the others for some reason didn't feel like doing that. Idk why.
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Feb 5, 2024 01:21
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I do like the head canon that Michael's head tilt when he sees Laurie again in 2018 is a "oh, hey, it's you."
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Feb 5, 2024 03:38
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I watched the Rob Zombie movies (theatrical versions for both of them, because that was what was available to stream for free). I've now watched every Michael Myers movie. My take on them is that they're pretty good horror movies if you accept them as their own distinct thing separate from the rest of the franchise. I liked Part 1 better overall but I loved Weird Al's cameo in Part 2. I'll get to Halloween 3 at some point but I'm in no particular rush. Relevant to the above discussion, Zombie was in the position of remaking Halloween from scratch knowing that the studio was going to want at least one sequel, and he not only kept the brother-sister twist but gave it more emphasis than any previous movies had. I think that it all comes back to Halloween gave rise to an entire film genre which proved so popular that even by 1981 the premise of "some guy in a mask with no distinctive personality traits kills random people in a random place for no particular reason" was already getting pretty tired. If the rights had been owned by a major film studio, then they might have just slapped the brand on some of the generic slasher movies that they were going to make anyway, but the Akkad family ended up with some of the rights from the very beginning, and they wanted to do something more than make yet more dime-a-dozen generic slasher movies with the IP that was far more valuable than anything else that they owned. Maybe John Carpenter could have figured out a way for Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis to cross paths again without the brother-sister twist or otherwise giving Michael a special reason to target Laurie. Rob Zombie absolutely could have, because again he was starting over from scratch. But 3 returning characters is better than 2, and even in a remake you want to use names that the audience will recognize and get them to pay attention to that particular character. So John Carpenter came up with that twist when he couldn't think of anything else while hunched over the typewriter drunk one night and Rob Zombie chose to keep it but better incorporate it into the plot of Part 1. It'll be interesting to see what Miramax does if they do create a TV/streaming show, which I personally expect that they will because there's basically nowhere left to go for the franchise at this point. In a TV show they'll have more time to introduce the audience to new characters so who knows, maybe they could make it work with Dr. Loomis chasing after Michael Myers, even from town to town as a FBI consultant or whatever if the series goes on long enough, and Laurie Strode only shows up for a relatively short time. I guess we'll find out eventually. Oh and one weird thing that I noticed about the Rob Zombie films: do the teenage characters just not have cell phones? Multiple times where characters go into another room to call 911, Laurie doesn't call the cops when she gets kidnapped by Michael or runs off into the woods, etc. Was there a moment where they were shown to have cell phones, with explanations for why they couldn't or wouldn't use them in those particular moments, that I just forgot? I guess this might tie into to the movies' general vagueness on when exactly they take place, with IE the flashback sequences to Michael's childhood looking more like the 1970s than the 1990s. INH5 fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 04:17
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Not everyone had phones back then. A decent amount of my friends did but I remember calling people at their house to get a hold of them. It wasn’t as wide as it was a few years later
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Feb 8, 2024 04:29
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CelticPredator posted:Not everyone had phones back then. A decent amount of my friends did but I remember calling people at their house to get a hold of them. I thought of that, but I looked it up and apparently by 2006 more than 80% of American 17-year-olds owned cell phones. But again, they never do specify in which precise year the movies are set.
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Feb 8, 2024 04:49
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Dawgstar posted:I do like the head canon that Michael's head tilt when he sees Laurie again in 2018 is a "oh, hey, it's you." Didn't you stab me? I feel like you stabbed me.
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Feb 8, 2024 06:54
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The Danielle Harris death and reveal in the extended cut of Zombie's H2 is one of the most effective and heart breaking kills in any slasher I've ever seen. Very inventive and emotional. Edit: I love how Michael is a giant hobo who wants to be left alone and puts on his mask like he's Murder Batman.
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Feb 8, 2024 16:18
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CelticPredator posted:I thought h18 was perfect in that Mike had no motivation. He just loved killing. That's it. Laurie put all this power on this guy that really couldn't give a poo poo about her personally. That was really cool. INH5 posted:Halloween gave rise to an entire film genre which proved so popular that even by 1981 the premise of "some guy in a mask with no distinctive personality traits kills random people in a random place for no particular reason" was already getting pretty tired. This is slightly oblique to what you guys are talking about, but I've been seeing people just casually drop phrases like "slashers (and Michael Myers in particular) are blank slates who kill random people for no reason" for long enough now that I'm at a point where I gotta call a time out and make sure we haven't all forgotten this was a popular fan headcannon retcon, right? It was formed in reaction to Carpenter's own Myers sibling retcon, as well as to objections from moral guardians and feminists. The majority of early 80s slashers are explicitly aggrieved victims of sexually-related scorn or humiliation who bear a disproportionately murderous grudge against a group of people of varying specificity, whose penchant for sex at inappropriate moments leaves them vulnerable to murder and/or triggers the killer outright. And these slasher movies all did this because they were copying Halloween. "Michael Myers punishes babysitters who have sex on the job and their slutty friends who enable them" was the consensus interpretation of the movie's plot in the early 80s, and I do mean the plot, not subtext (the main subtext to Halloween, that Carpenter wanted to lean into, is that Myers represents the spirit of All Hallow's Eve and/or Samhain). There's room for interpretation, and I think the specific focus on sex was a bit of an overreach (Carpenter would remark that he didn't see it as sex for its own sake but more about the victims' negligence and lack of awareness). In fact the initial objection to Halloween II wasn't that it gave Michael Myers a motivation at all, but rather that Myers' motivations should remain ambiguous and not made so literal, and it evolved from there. I don't think there's a single Halloween movie where "Michael Myers kills for no reason" holds up under scrutiny without willfully ignoring how we usually make sense of movies. If Halloween '78 wanted to tell us Myers' MO was random, it would show him being random instead of him spending the whole movie stalking victims who resemble his sister in multiple ways and putting what looks for all the world like some kind of plan into motion. Halloween is pretty much The Terminator except Dr. Loomis is not from the future so he doesn't know what Myers' ultimate goal is, he only knows that it's no good and that Myers is the ultimate killing machine. In Halloween 2018, Myers is definitely on a rampage and is indeed killing most anyone he comes across, but even here it's evident he's been triggered by the encounter with the podcasters in the first scene; either because they remind him that the people of Haddonfield only regard him as a pure evil monster and it ignites his hatred for them, or because the mask itself harbors the evil supernatural essence of the Halloween holiday. This film comes closest to fulfilling the fan retcon, but what I get from the film is that if Myers had not met those podcasters, he would not have gone on his rampage. Anyhow, if you've read all this you're probably thinking, "good lord people are just using shorthand for 'slasher movies typically have thin pretexts for their mayhem' or whatever" but I think it's worth pointing out that "Michael Myers/slasher villains have no motivation" is a cannon that people have mostly just spoken into existence out of personal preference, and I think it's interesting to talk about how that came to be.
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Feb 9, 2024 00:30
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Gonna be straight with you. Halloween isn’t my favorite carpenter and myers is my least favorite slasher and I didn’t really like him much until 2018 So I’ll say you’re probably right idk lol
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Feb 9, 2024 02:02
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It's probably worth noting that Carpenter himself regrets the 'slashers prey on the promiscuous' thing that spun out of Halloween because in his view Michael did it because that's when people are most vulnerable, not because he was punishing them or something.
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Feb 9, 2024 02:07
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| # ? May 14, 2024 01:46 |
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When it comes to giallo and just the overall majority of slasher movies, the villain usually explains their motivations pretty explicitly at some point during the movie. So Michael Myers does stand out in that the audience is left to interpret what his goals and motivations really were. It's probably the thing that connects Halloween so clearly to Black Christmas as two of the godfathers of the slasher but also two films there were never really duplicated. Even Jason had his mother to speak for him at first.
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Feb 9, 2024 03:09
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