David Gordon Green's 2018 Legacy Sequel Halloween Is a Mesmerizing Return to Form
This will come as a terrible shock I'm sure but I am not always as efficient as I could be. I’m that one person with ADHD whose habits are self-defeating, crazy-making, yet fiendishly difficult to change.
For example, when I stopped drinking alcohol and smoking pot. I expected all of my problems to go away. I also expected to ascend to a higher level spiritually and evolutionarily, but mostly my skin just got clearer, and I now feel morally superior to everybody who does drink. Because you know what? I don't drink. I guess I'm just better and stronger than all of the lushes and rummies out there who, unlike me, need the bottle as a crutch.
True, I'm not exactly setting the world on fire professionally or financially, or in any other way, but I've stayed off the sauce for something like two years now.
Because my energies can be a little scattered, and my focus a little lacking, it sometimes takes me a while to get around to writing about a movie after I see it. That was the case with Halloween, the 2018 David Gordon Green-co-written and directed legacy sequel that brought Jamie Lee Curtis back into the fold for the second time, and in a second timeline that ignores everything after the 1978 original, though the trilogy is filled with reverent nods to the many Halloween movies it deems non-canon.
I just watched Halloween Kills, which lives up to and down to the mediocrity of its reputation, but I've also seen and written up One Battle After Another and Gaby's Dollhouse: The Movie. I know many people are treating themselves to a double feature of the two movies that only seem dissimilar, but I saw them on consecutive days.
I was pleasantly surprised by Gaby’s Dollhouse: The Movie. The uncredited script doctoring work Robert Towne did was sublime, but I was deeply moved by One Battle After Another.
I was struck by the unexpected commonalities between Halloween and One Battle After Another. They’re both about scarred survivors who train endlessly to be prepared for the moment, which may or may not come, when they’ll be called upon to take up arms against their aggressor, even if it costs them their lives and the lives of their families.
There are several crucial differences. The outlaws and revolutionaries of One Battle After Another take on the fascist American war machine as embodied by the stern scowl and unnerving rasp of a killer military man played by an unsmiling Sean Penn. The battle-scarred survivors of Halloween, meanwhile, have PTSD from their encounters with serial killer and enemy of sexy, pot-smoking babysitters everywhere, Michael Myers.
Green’s Halloween, which he co-wrote with working-class funnyman Danny McBride, borrows elements from the schlocky sequels whose continuity it ignores but improves upon them.
For example, in the piss-poor but fun Halloween: Resurrection, Jamie Lee Curtis’ iconic Laurie Strode begins the movie in a nuthouse, crazy with guilt after accidentally killing a random paramedic, with three children no less, who she mistakenly thought was Michael Myers.
To give her credit, he was wearing the serial slaughterer's signature William Shatner mask and not talking, but like a real maroon, she decided to make extra sure that she's killing the right person, and not a heroic first responder with a family, so she yanked his mask off, which affords him an opportunity to murder her.
Every element of this opening is disappointing, from the Home Alone-style traps to its wild-eyed conception of Laurie Strode as a pill-stashing maniac to the exceedingly dumb way the Final Girl dies so that the film can focus on what it really cares about: online competitions and the blustery charisma of rapper-actor Busta Rhymes.
As in the earliest scenes in Halloween: Resurrection, the Laurie Strode of Green’s Halloween legacy sequel is pathologically obsessed with preparing for the inevitable day when the boogeyman will reappear to finish what he began on October 31st, 1978, in terms of murdering her and anyone who gets in the way of his prey.
Michael Myers is over sixty in Halloween. His bones ache. His arthritis throbs. He can feel in his knees if it's going to rain. After he escapes captivity, the first thing he does is head down to the pharmacy to steal Ben Gay and orthopedic shoes.
I’m yanking your chain! Though he is a senior citizen eligible for early bird specials and membership in the AARP, Michael Myers kills with the hunger and intensity of a man half his age.
You'd figure at some point he'd throw out his back because of all his furious exertions, but he seems less elderly than super-human.
Laurie’s obsession with preparing for an inevitable showdown with a mute, masked maniac who is no longer her brother has cost her seemingly everything. She's been divorced twice. Her obsessiveness, paranoia, and alcoholism led to her daughter being taken from her when she was twelve.
Curtis’ iron-willed vigilante is estranged from daughter Karen (Judy Greer, terrific as always), who understandably resented the darkness of her mother’s worldview and her need to infect her with her all-consuming fear, paranoia, and dread.
Karen feels the need to protect her own teenage daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) from her mother and her legacy of madness and murder, but Laurie’s granddaughter wants to have a relationship with her, even if Karen is convinced, not without reason, that Laurie will only let her down.
We open with feisty sexagenarian Michael Myers being visited by a pair of earnest podcasters investigating the Haddonfield babysitter murders of 1978. They bring Michael Myers his old mask in the hope that it will jog his memory and get him to start jibber-jabbering about the good old days.
“Oh my God!”, they apparently envision him saying, "This brings back so many memories! I killed so many people while wearing this! Where did you get it?"
You saved my mask! You shouldn’t have!
Instead, Michael Myers continues to give people the strong, silent, psychotic treatment. This is a rare instance of podcasting being depicted authentically. In a world where the events of the 1978 film occurred, it’d be a huge true crime story. Every big true crime podcast would devote at least an episode to it. It'd probably lead to a Netflix docuseries and possibly even inspire a horror movie, or thirteen.
This also helps explain how Michael got his mask back. He retrieves his trademark accessory back when he kills the podcasters for being annoying and exploitive, and takes his revenge trip back to his hometown of Haddonfield with murder on his mind.
Comic genius Danny McBride collaborated with his old pal, David Gordon Green, on the screenplay, along with Jeff Fradley. That's not as incongruous as it may seem because Halloween is a very funny movie.
It's darkly funny in a decidedly different way than the broad, outrageous social satire of Eastbound & Down and The Righteous Gemstones. It’s character-based comedy that feels rooted in improvisation.
It's full of lovely little moments that feel genuine and authentic, lending the film both verisimilitude and emotional depth. For example, before they come across the crashed bus Michael Myers escapes from, a son gently tries to let his father know that while hunting trips might be important to him, and an essential familial bonding experience, he is more passionate about dance.
A lesser, crueler movie would play up the culture clash comedy by making the boy preeningly effeminate and the father a homophobic neanderthal, but Halloween underplays it in a way that makes it easy to become emotionally invested in characters with three minutes of screentime.
Halloween is full of characters and performances that make a huge impression in only a scene or two. This includes habitual scene stealer Toby Huss of Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, who is terrific as Laurie Strode’s big-hearted goofball son-in-law, Karen’s loving husband, and Alyson’s father.
When Laurie learns that Michael Myers is on the loose and excited to see/murder her, she’s terrified but also enthused, because it affords her an opportunity to achieve her life’s goal: killing Michael Myers in a way that leaves no possible doubt that he’s dead, and certainly will not return for increasingly dire sequels.
That’s the strange duality of doomsday preppers: on some level, they want the world to devolve into madness, darkness, and chaos so that their years, even decades, of preparation do not go to waste.
Like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Laurie has undergone a remarkable transformation from a damsel in distress hunted by an unfeeling murder machine to a badass, gun-toting warrior eager to go to war with the boogeyman haunting her nightmares.
Curtis is the archetypal scream queen, but she’s also a great dramatic actress and, for the first time since the 1978 original, Laurie Strode is a terrific role.
Halloween feels like a real movie in a way that many, if not most, of the sequels do not. It’s the rare legacy sequel that justifies its existence by being genuinely scary, yet also funny and relatable.
Green and his gifted collaborators shocked the world with a late-in-the-game sequel that’s a worthy follow-up to Carpenter’s iconic original. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the second and third entries in Green’s trilogy, which turn the gamut from mediocre to spectacularly, insultingly stupid.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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