The Long Halloween: Triangle

TRIANGLE
DIR: Christopher Smith
CAST: Melissa George, Michael Dorman, Henry Nixon,
Rachel Carpani, Liam Hemsworth



Beginning with the distinctly average Creep, British director Christopher Smith has now made three horror features. It’s almost impressive that from that less than brilliant start he’s managed to regress with each film.

Roger Ebert coined the term idiot plot, to describe movies whose central problem would be easy to solve if the characters weren’t idiots. Triangle has a classic idiot plot, and a collection of jaw-droppingly stupid people to go along with it. The setup is pretty sensible; a group of twenty-something friends go out on a yacht for the day, along for the ride is Jess (George), a waitress who the boat’s owner Greg (Dorman) has invited as an attempt at a first date. The boat is caught in a storm and capsizes. After some time a huge liner pulls up alongside the wrecked boat, and the group gets on board. That’s when it all goes to hell. Someone is stalking the group, killing them off one by one. We then find that the boat is stuck in a time loop, so we get to see the same events three times over.

What do you do when you’re stuck in a time loop and want to get out? Surely you change the sequence of events. Certainly if you’ve already tried twice (and discovered that you’ve probably tried a whole lot more times) doing things one way and failed, you change tack. That’s the problem at the heart of Triangle. Jess is a moron. Confronted with evidence that what she’s doing to escape this loop has failed on at least 50 previous occasions, she proceeds to do EXACTLY THE SAME FUCKING THING again. I don’t know how to sympathise with a horror heroine that dumb, and if you can’t sympathise with the final girl, that’s just death in a horror film.

Jess may be an idiot, but she does at least have a modicum of personality and depth, as well as a defined goal (getting back to her autistic son). The same can’t really be said of the other characters, who can all be reduced to a single trait. Greg: Goatee, Downey (Nixon): Tool, Victor (Hemsworth): Muscles… and so on. So we’re stuck on a boat, with five people, four of whom have no personality, watching pretty much the same thing happen three times over the course of an hour. Scary. It’s just so boring.

As a horror fan you accept that the plot usually comes second to the scares and kills, but you still expect that there will be a story. Triangle doesn’t really have a story, I’m not sure it even really has an idea - a coherent one anyway. This total lack of inspiration is evident in the fact that Smith’s script follows the idiot plot all the way, rather than letting Jess grow a brain, it’s evident in the endless repetition. It’s perhaps most evident in how, after he hits on what could have been a haunting ending, Smith hammers home a point that we - not being idiots - have already got with another 10 minutes of superfluous scenes. The final major problem with the screenplay is this: why? Why is any of this happening? The film doesn’t seem to know or care, it never even poses a theory. It’s just happening because that’s what the script says.

Melissa George gives a competent performance as Jess, but the acting is adequate at best, and the same goes for the direction. Christopher Smith isn’t a bad filmmaker; he’s just an utterly average one. There’s nothing here that stands out, except perhaps the look of the antagonist. Smith says that Triangle was written before he’d even heard of Timecrimes, and I believe him, I’d be interested to know if it was filmed before he heard of Nacho Vigalondo’s (considerably better) film though, because there is a real déjà vu when looking at Smith’s cloth bag masked killer.

I get so annoyed watching British horror these days, because when this, and Eden Lake and Tormented and Lesbian Vampire Killers are getting decent sized releases quality films like Mum and Dad are going direct to DVD and The Disappeared and The Daisy Chain haven’t even seen an official release yet. Triangle is nothing like as bad as, say, Halloween II, it’s just boring and lazy. Skip it.

The Long Halloween: The Complete NOES Part 2

A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)
Dir: Stephen Hopkins

Like The Dream Master before it, this fifth Nightmare has a decent central idea. This time Alice (a returning Lisa Wilcox) is pregnant, and Freddy is able to use the dreams of her unborn child - somehow - to infiltrate into the world when she and her friends are awake. You could almost call this inspired: the enemy quite literally within, and Freddy making the ultimate invasion into the body and consciousness of his nemesis. Unfortunately this fine idea is wrapped up in a near totally incoherent movie, which lurches from set piece to poorly executed set piece with all the grace of a 20 stone man attempting to do ballet.

The problem is that, again, it’s all too clear that the storyline is an afterthought, the least important aspect of a script whose real purpose is to provide Freddy with more opportunities to make winking wisecracks as he kills. Most of these sequences are as bereft of scares and inspiration as they are laughs, but one manages to be surprisingly effective. One character is, for no reason really, a comic book fan and so he’s sucked into a comic for his dream sequence and in a very cool touch he becomes a drawing and when Freddy kills him all the colour drains out, of course even this is undermined by a terrible one liner (Freddy: Told you comic books was bad for ya!)

As with The Dream Master, Freddy is the biggest problem with this film. Drop the ‘comedy’ and you might have something here, but with it the tone of the film is massively confused and Freddy lacks any value as either villain or bogeyman. It is easy to tell that the film was shot and edited in just 8 weeks. The performances are awful all round (Robert Englund looks like he wishes he were dead) and some of the cutting is really dreadful. Most of all though the trouble is that the film makes absolutely no sense, it’s just a bunch of scenes, there’s no sense of a progressing story and even if there were, the characters are all so bland that it wouldn’t matter, because why would you care?

The Dream Child should be a better film than it is, and the fact that it is so bad is purely a matter of greed. If someone had taken some time with this film, with this idea, it could have been one of the best of the series. Oh well, next time, right?


Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Dir: Rachel Talalay

You thought The Dream Child was bad? You thought it couldn’t get worse then Freddy’s Revenge? You were wrong, bitch. Once again a Nightmare film begins promisingly, this time with a caption: "Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground gives way under him, And the dream begins... ” - Friedrich Nietzsche. Amazingly, just 10 seconds later, all hope of a good film is pretty much lost, when that card is followed by this one: “Welcome to prime time, bitch” - Freddy Krueger. Kill me.

Even at their very worst, the previous Nightmares all had something interesting about them - a cool death scene here, an inexplicable homoerotic subtext there - Freddy’s Dead doesn’t. This abominably terrible film plays like somebody saw the worst stand up routine in history and decided to chop it up and insert it, line by line, into one of the worst horror films ever made. How bad is this film? Well, Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End isn’t the worst film Johnny Depp has been in, or the least coherent.

Where to begin? How about with Freddy? His first appearance in this film has him dressed as witch, riding a broomstick and saying: I'll get you, my pretty! And your little soul, too! That, sadly, may be one of his best one liners in this film. The other really sad thing about Freddy here is how awful he looks. David Miller returned to do Freddy’s make up, but was constrained to sticking with the commercial look established in Nightmares 4 and 5. The results are shocking. Freddy looks like he’s got egg on his face literally as well as figuratively. The effect is comical rather than horrific; indeed it’s the only funny thing in the film.

The acting is spectacularly terrible. Englund appears tired and bored; if he’s not actually reading his lines from cue cards then he’s doing a very good impression of someone who is. It sometimes seems as if the film has been written to give Englund lots of screentime, but as little as possible to do. One endless sequence sees him attempting to kill a victim through a video game, which allows Englund to spend about ten minutes just sitting in a chair cracking abysmal jokes. At times the film resembles a cartoon, especially when Freddy pops up on TV and hits Johnny Depp in the face with a frying pan. So, it’s like a bad stand up set, like the worst Looney Tunes ever made, what it is never like is a horror film. The other performers are barely worth discussing, except to note that I think Lisa Zane spent the entire production of this movie in a coma, and that Breckin Meyer was indeed always that irritating.

Director Rachel Talalay had worked in some capacity on all the previous films, so it made sense that she be given her shot at directing. The results are just embarrassing. Her best shots are solidly uninspired, but her worst are absolute abominations - check out the stunningly awful shot that rotates around Freddy and Lisa Zane endlessly, first in one direction, then another - it’s a shot that says ‘I’ve seen the prom scene in Carrie, look, I can copy it’. I’ve never seen the 15-minute last reel in 3D, but it’s all stuff pointing awkwardly at the screen. Freddy’s Dead is a hideous film to watch, because it is poorly shot, and because the editing is like a 90-minute car crash.

This really is one of the worst horror films I’ve ever seen.


Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Dir: Wes Craven

After six films in seven years, Freddy Krueger was pretty worn out. He’d gone from being a hideously burned ultimate bogeyman to a slightly melty-faced ‘comedian’ who killed. His creator, Wes Craven, had deserted him after being re-written on the third instalment, and, he felt, cheated out of a piece of the huge financial reward that New Line Cinema had reaped on the back of his work. New Nightmare came out of a discussion with New Line boss Bob Shaye, in which those money issues were addressed and Shaye asked Craven if he’d like to write one more Nightmare, saying that New Line ‘feared they had killed Freddy off too soon’.

The result is one that rewrites the rules of franchises. Artistically speaking returns are supposed to diminish as a series goes on, the seventh film in a franchise is not supposed to be the best. It just doesn’t happen. Except in this case. Craven ignores all the previous sequels, and instead reduces them to fodder for a film that is all too seldom given the credit it deserves as a truly groundbreaking piece of horror cinema.

New Nightmare takes place in the real world, and stars many of the key talents behind the series as themselves. Craven’s clever script posits the idea that Freddy was, in fact, an ancient evil, and that in creating Freddy he had trapped that evil inside the story of the Nightmare films, but now that the films are over that evil is attempting to escape, in the form of Freddy, into the real world. The one barrier? Heather Langenkamp; to escape, Freddy must defeat the actress who played the character who twice defeated him - the first to do so. Craven melds fact and fiction to brilliant effect. Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund and Craven all play themselves, and Langenkamp’s storyline is, to a degree and with her permission, drawn from her real life, in which she was stalked and telephoned by an obsessed fan, and is married to a special effects artist. This is very evident in Langenkamp’s performance, which is brilliant, especially as she becomes more and more unhinged as the film goes on.

Craven also resurrects the true Freddy Krueger. Here he’s genuinely frightening for the first time since the third film, and his make up is completely re-designed, again by David Miller, and the splitting skin look that he’s been given is really creepy, Miller regarded it as the definitive version, and up to this point I’d be inclined to agree with him. What really makes Freddy scary again though is Robert Englund’s performance; the actor really recaptures the utter evil of the character, and there are several genuinely scary sequences here, not least a brilliant reprisal of Tina’s death from the original film, only this time with Freddy visible as he kills Heather’s son’s babysitter (Tracy Middendorf). The whole film looks great, with the huge set for ‘Freddy Hell’ being especially impressive, along with some extremely memorable sequences with Freddy, not least when he appears in the sky, picking up Dylan (Miko Hughes) on one of his claws.

Craven really cuts loose with this film; it’s a confident, intelligent piece of work that he hasn’t come close to matching since. Scream got a lot of credit for introducing postmodern horror, but Craven did it first and best with New Nightmare which, as well as being gripping and scary, deconstructs both the horror genre and, through a doctor character, the rush to censorship. I wish Craven would get back to doing something this interesting with the genre.


Freddy Vs Jason (2003)
Dir: Ronny Yu

Freddy Vs Jason exists in a strange limbo. It doesn’t really belong to either the Nightmare franchise or the Friday the 13th franchise, and yet it is completely bound up with them. I wasn’t going to include it in this round up of the franchise, but on re-watching it I found it such an enormously fun guilty pleasure that I felt I had to cover it briefly.

I couldn’t claim that Freddy Vs Jason is a good film. The script is ropey, the characters are cardboard cutouts, the plot is beyond silly, and the acting is shockingly poor, all I know is that I enjoy the hell out of it anyway.

I think the key, at least looking at it as a Nightmare film, is that it has a respect for the history of the franchise (see the references to Hypnocil, established in Dream Warriors) and that, at last, it manages to square the circle of making Freddy both evil and funny. This is what Nightmares 4, 5 and 6 would have been like if they had worked. Freddy still has a cruel streak mile wide, but that is complemented, rather than leavened, by his jokes. It also helps that the make up has again been refined, and I think this is the best Freddy has ever looked.

Ronny Yu’s visuals are stylish and imaginative, making the violence as beautiful as it is brutal (witness Jason, on fire, stalking kids through a cornfield). There’s such viciousness to this film, and unlike most of the Elm Street sequels, it doesn’t shy from the bloodier images. Freddy and Jason tear literal chunks out of one another in a series of really painful looking fights. This may be a dimwitted film, but I challenge any fan of either franchise to fail to enjoy it.

The Long Halloween: The Complete NOES Part 1

I was going to write 8 full length reviews for this post, but as I watched the films it occurred to me that most of them simply didn’t warrant 1000 words or more consideration, that, and when the remake opens next year I’ll want to do a Versions post comparing Wes Craven’s film to Samuel Bayer’s. So here are some thoughts, in mini-review form, on this venerable series. However, I'm still going to post this in two parts, because apparently I think 500 words constitutes a mini-review.

I’m assuming that most people have seen these movies, and so there may be mild spoilers.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Dir: Wes Craven

The early 80’s was boom time for slasher films. People were hungry for horror and it was being delivered both at the cinema and on a new fangled technology called video. Hundreds of slashers were made, most now justly forgotten. There were a few gems though, and A Nightmare on Elm Street still stands out as one of the very best slasher films ever made. Wes Craven is a master of the genre, and in Freddy - or, as he’s known here, Fred - Krueger (played in all eight films reviewed here by Robert Englund) Craven created one of the screen’s great original monsters. Krueger is a child murderer, himself burnt to death by the parents of the children he murdered on Elm Street, and now stalking the remaining Elm Street children in their dreams, wielding a razor fingered glove as weapon.

Craven said that his intent with Krueger’s backstory was to create the most corrupt monster he could imagine, and with Englund’s help he succeeds. In this first outing Freddy is a true monster; there’s no sympathy, little humour, and absolutely no pity in the way he acts. Put together with the character’s look - a fantastic, horrific, burn make up by David Miller - Englund’s performance creates a genuinely unnerving villain. Craven and DP Jacques Haitkin use a very small budget ($1.8 million) to create some truly memorable and haunting, if low tech, visuals. Some of the simplest effects in the film would now be realised with CGI, but Freddy’s extending arms (which were on fishing poles) and his face coming through the wall (which was made of spandex) still impress because they are obviously real.

In addition to Englund the cast, composed mainly of young newcomers, generally does well. Heather Langenkamp has worked mainly in TV since Nightmare, but she’s a strong lead, and gives Nancy resourcefulness and toughness of a kind rare in ‘final girls’ of the 80’s. She also has to carry some of the weightier dramatic scenes in the film, and does so with aplomb. Amanda Wyss is engaging as Tina, and that makes the reversal that Craven pulls on you when he kills her off early (in perhaps the film’s most startlingly visceral and truly nightmarish scene) genuinely shocking. Johnny Depp, who makes his debut as Nancy’s boyfriend, seems ill at ease, and overacts at times, certainly there’s nothing here to suggest the sort of masterful subtlety we’d see in Edward Scissorhands just six years later. The adults are a bit of a mixed bunch, John Saxon is good as Nancy’s cop father, while as her mother Ronee Blakley fumbles her big dramatic scene, when she has to tell Nancy about what the parents did to Krueger.

The rough edges are certainly there, but they don’t really matter, because Craven’s concept is so strong, and the film gains such momentum, that it is carried over the rough patches. The only real problem is the ending, which is extremely anticlimactic after such a strong build up. Still, A Nightmare on Elm Street entirely deserves a place in the pantheon of horror classics.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)
Dir: Jack Sholder

The Nightmare franchise opened with a massive mis-step in the shape of this very strange sequel. It’s set five years after the original, but takes place in an extremely obvious 1985 - witness the costumes, the music and the Kate Bush poster in the main character’s room. It completely changes the main idea behind Freddy Krueger who, instead of attacking kids in their dreams possesses Jesse (Mark Patton) so that he can attempt to cross over into the real world. This isn’t a bad idea in and of itself, but the execution is incredibly sloppy.

First off the script, assuming such a document existed, is flat out terrible. Wes Craven had a cast of well-rounded characters to kill off; these kids (most of whom look about 30) couldn’t muster a rounded personality between them. Most of them may as well not have names as you learn so little and care so little about them that they could just be grouped together in the credits as ‘corpses in waiting’. Sholder’s shooting is unhelpful; he shrouds the film in darkness, but lends it little atmosphere. This means that we never get to admire Kevin Yagher’s first go at the Freddy make up, and also that when the viscera should begin to fly we can’t really see it, it’s the worst of all worlds really.

These problems, however, are small beer compared to that of the casting. I’m willing to accept that Kim Myers - a cute Meryl Streep lookalike who plays Lisa, Jesse’s would be girlfriend - may be able to act and is defeated by the screenplay. Mark Patton is another thing entirely. First he doesn’t have the look of a horror lead; he’s too soft, girlish almost. This is borne out in his voice, or more specifically in his scream, which we hear a great deal of and which never ceases to be funny. Patton gives an outrageously camp performance, but also manages to set his face in a single expression, which is something akin to ‘huh?’ and never alter it for the film’s entire running time.

There is one thing about Nightmare 2 that is interesting - utterly misplaced, but interesting - and that’s the homoerotic undertone that runs through the film. One dream sequence begins in a leather bar, and ends with Jesse’s coach tied up, naked, in the school showers being whipped to death by a towel wielding ‘Freddy’. Then of course there’s the whole issue of Freddy trying to possess Jesse’s body “Fred Krueger!... He's inside me... and he wants to take me again!” You could even read the film as a fight between good (straight, personified by Lisa) and evil (gay, personified by Krueger and the Gym teacher) lifestyles, and Lisa’s final battle with Freddy as her attempt to rescue Jesse from homosexuality. I’ve spent too much time in film studies classes, clearly, but seeing Freddy's Revenge in this way does at least distract from how dreadful a film it is at every possible level.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Dir: Chuck Russell

It is to New Line Cinema’s credit that, even though Freddy’s Revenge made more at the box office than the original Nightmare on Elm Street, they realised that the abrupt change of direction that made that film the strange beast it is was a misstep. To put the franchise back on track they turned to its creator. They asked Wes Craven to write and direct Nightmare 3, but he was already contracted for another film. He did write a script though, and gets a co-writing credit here. His big contribution was twofold. First, his screenplay brought back original heroine Nancy Thompson (again played by Heather Langenkamp), now a grad student training as a therapist and specialising in sleep disorders. Second, the central concept of the Dream Warriors - kids in a sleep clinic who find that in their dreams they have powers that can be used to fight Freddy - was Craven’s, and would power the franchise for a loose trilogy of sequels beginning here.

Craven’s screenplay was heavily re-written, and it is pretty easy to see the joins. In Freddy’s Revenge the process of leavening Freddy’s initial menace with some humour had begun, but it is in Dream Warriors that we first begin to see the seeds of what Freddy was ultimately to become; a shitty stand up comic with knives. The one-liners are perhaps less forced and painful here than they would become, but they still sound odd, and negate the essential menace of the character. Between these and other moments of silliness (the kids powers really can be painful, especially when one character declares himself the wizard master) there are some fantastic shock scenes.

After some seriously uninspired death scenes in Nightmare 2 this film really ups the ante when it comes to invention. Dream Warriors contains some of the series’ strongest nightmare sequences, with standouts including Kristen’s (Patricia Arquette) dream involving a huge Freddy snake and perhaps the series single coolest and most painful looking death in which Freddy rips a characters arteries out of his arms and legs and uses him as a puppet. Here, and in several more sequences, director Chuck Russell really outdoes himself, showing a talent for both visceral moments and tension. Russell also manages to draw good performances from his cast. Arquette and Langenkamp make for good feisty heroines, while John Saxon also reprises his role to good effect. As Freddy Robert Englund is as good here as he ever was. He seems to have more pure fun with the part in this instalment than any other, but he’s also still scary and evil.

Dream Warriors isn’t a great film by any means, and there are a lot of moments that clunk horribly, but when it comes together this is fun and engaging horror cinema and easily the best of the true Nightmare films not directed by Wes Craven.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Dir: Renny Harlin

I find The Dream Master a disappointing sequel to Dream Warriors. Nightmare 3 was hit and miss, but it hit a good portion of the time, had some fine acting and several startling nightmare sequences, all wrapped in a story that, while not exactly great literature, held together. The Dream Master really marks the beginning of a precipitous fall in the quality of the Nightmare films. That’s especially disappointing because the idea behind The Dream Master, which runs with the themes of Dream Warriors, is a pretty good one.

The film introduces a new nemesis for Freddy. Alice (Lisa Wilcox) is a friend of dream warrior Kirsten (now played by the rather unfortunately named Tuesday Knight) who finds that she can acquire all her friends dream powers, and use them to become the dream master, making her a match for Freddy. Incidentally, one thing the Nightmare series has always done right is present a strong, smart and self reliant heroine who is match for a monster, and Alice certainly belongs to that tradition. The problem is less with the story than it is with the script, which lacks colour, character and coherence. More than ever there is a feeling that the script was built around ideas for Freddy gags. ‘Gags’ is a metaphorical term; what effects artists call their work, but here, sadly, it’s also a literal term. The Freddy sequences have now become little more than a setup for the character’s dreadful one-liners. He began as the most evil thing Wes Craven can think of, but just four years later Freddy has become a vaudeville act with fake blood. Take this for example: Dan: Krueger! Freddy: Well, it ain't Dr. Seuss. They’re all that bad.

Antoher problem with film is the acting. Robert Englund does still seem engaged, but the feel of Freddy has changed so much that Englund can’t make him threatening any more. Tuesday Knight is a decent facsimile of Patricia Arquette, but a poor substitute. She’s got the look but lacks the talent, and Kristen, too, feels like a different character. The rest of the kids have pretty minor roles, and are all pretty wooden while waiting to be killed off. Lisa Wilcox does have a big role though, and Alice is probably the best-written and most rounded character in the film, but Wilcox can’t quite pull it off. She’s fine in the earlier part of the film, but when she has to go and fight Freddy she lacks the necessary steel, and that means that despite fine effects work from Kevin Yagher and Screaming Mad George - which results in some of the series’ most striking make up designs - the finale doesn’t really come off.

Renny Harlin does what he can, but he's pretty much hobbled by his material. Visually Nightmare 4 doesn't lack for style, but narratively it is broken. On the whole, if the original Nightmare on Elm Street was a scary night of theatre, The Dream Master strays dangerously close to pantomime.

The Long Halloween: Fuck you, Rob Zombie

HALLOWEEN II (2009)
DIR: Rob Zombie
CAST: Tyler Mane, Scout Taylor-Compton,
Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif



Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween was, make no mistake, awful, bad enough that to call it his ‘best’ film would be to insult things that are actually good, it was his least worst film though. He’s regressed.

There are, of course, plenty of horror films worse than Halloween II, endless amounts of shitty horror films made on a camcorder in someone’s back yard have inexplicably found their way to a video release, but that’s not what Halloween II is. This film cost $15 million, it has a writer/director who has made three successful horror films before, it is produced by a major Hollywood studio. It may not be worst horror film ever made, but Halloween II is certainly one of the worst studio horror films in a very long time.

Zombie’s story sees Michael Myers returning to Haddonfield (why? Because, that’s why) after apparently wandering around America knifing people for a year, while growing a mountain man beard that makes him look like a 7-foot, dirt encrusted, member of ZZ Top. Anyway, he comes back and sticks his knife in a bunch of teenagers and other minor characters. It’s the same ‘story’ as every other bad slasher. To be fair Zombie does try to inject a little depth into the film, unfortunately what he comes up with a series of jaw-droppingly pretentious dream sequences involving Young Michael (now played by a slightly less freaky, but still completely charisma and talent deficient child actor) his Mother (The beautiful, but entirely wooden Sheri Moon-Zombie) and, for some reason, explained on an opening title card and yet still utterly obscure, a white horse. He also tries to establish a connection between Myers and Scout Taylor Compton’s Laurie Strode, but does so using little more than graphics and editing techniques that look like they were lifted from a bad music video by a terrible metal band in 1995.

The story is one thing, but what is truly abominable is the screenplay. If you counted every ‘fuck’ in this film I believe the total would be higher than the total amount of words that aren’t ‘fuck’. I mention this not because I’m offended by bad language (I actually don’t believe in bad language), but because it demonstrates beautifully just how tedious Zombie’s writing is. He has an absolute inability to create individual voices for his characters, so they all spout the exact same profanity riddled invective. The characterisation of Laurie Strode is a particular problem. In the original films she is a perfectly average, even slightly mild-mannered, teenager. Here every second word out of her mouth is fuck, she’s hostile and unlikable, and there’s a toughness about her, which undermines the sequences where she’s supposed to be threatened because, little though she is, there’s a sense that this girl can really look after herself. Even this is inconsistent though, given that Laurie is also prone to nightmares and endless fits of crying. In a better film this would pass for layered characterisation, a character hiding her vulnerability behind outward toughness. Unforunately neither Zombie nor Taylor-Compton have the ability to pull this off, and so it just seems confused and inconsistent. This seriously undermines what are supposed to be the scares, because not only do you not get the sense that there is any real threat but you also don’t care if there is. Personally I would have liked Michael to put a knife straight through Laurie’s head and have done with it.

The same problem exists with all the characters. I could believe that Zombie just wrote a few lines and then had the actors pick their dialogue out of a hat, in fact I have trouble believing that such personality free, identical sounding, cardboard cut outs could be created any other way. Perhaps Zombie’s worst offence when it comes to the characters is in his depiction of Loomis. Loomis was always brittle, but here he’s just an utter prick, the kind of man you want to punch in the face the second he speaks. When he was Donald Pleasance Loomis at least exuded some expertise and insight into Michael, there’s none of that here. Indeed the character is completely pointless in the context of the film, serving only to swan around like an arsehole, being rude to all and sundry, before yelling some useless psych 101 crap at Michael to no real purpose.


So we’ve established that writer/director Rob Zombie can’t write. He also can’t direct. He certainly can’t direct actors. When I say that Brad Dourif gives the ‘best’ performance in Halloween II I mean it much the same way as when I said that Halloween was Rob Zombie’s ‘best’ film. It’s not good (check out the hilariously poor scene in which Doruif’s Sheriff Brackett brings home a pizza for his, Annie’s (Danielle Harris) and Laurie’s supper) it is, however, slightly preferable to spending the same amount of time stabbing yourself in the leg with a pair of compasses. The same cannot be said of the rest of the… I hesitate to call it acting, but for want of a better word. Scout Taylor-Compton, for example, baffles me. She’s got a girl next door prettiness in real life, which would work for Laurie, but here Zombie has her looking raddled and ugly, and however good a physical fit she may or may not be, Compton lacks any sort of acting ability. If Zombie had cast a Speak n’ Spell machine as Laurie he couldn’t have got a performance that was any less expressive and emotional. How, when there are huge amounts of talent out there, does someone as staggeringly awful as Taylor-Compton get even extra work, let alone a lead in a studio film? Malcolm McDowell should also be in contention for next year’s Razzies for his scenery chomping work as Loomis. However, nobody really had much of a shot at being good in this movie, given the material.

In previous films Rob Zombie has demonstrated that he’s a bit of a magpie, stealing shots left, right and centre from other films, but he’s usually managed to make a film that looked at least okay. Until now; Halloween II is a horrible, horrible mess to look at. First of all most of the film takes place in near total darkness, meaning that during a great deal of the film we can’t see what’s going on (ah, small mercies), and are essentially sitting squinting at a black screen for minutes on end. At other times there is light, and it is as ineptly handled as the darkness. During one scene on a deserted road there is a brilliant white light throughout the scene, which serves to silhouette Michael. Where’s the light coming from? Who cares, it looks ‘cool’, right? In fact it looks more like a UFO from The X-Files is about to land behind Michael and is amateurish in the extreme. Then there are the music video moments, in which Zombie tries to pummel us into submission with cuts upon cuts upon cuts of ‘symbolism’ that only a 12 year old could see as profound or cool. The biggest fuck you though, is reserved for the film’s very last shot, which is a direct steal of the last shot of Psycho. I swear, even over the music, I could hear Hitchcock begin to rotate in his grave. If I ever meet Rob Zombie I’m going to punch him in the face for that shot.

I’ve now written 1200 words about a Halloween movie without discussing Michael Myers. Part of that is down to how unimportant Michael is to this film, and part of it to how unlike Michael he seems. I was always against Tyler Mane as Michael, because it makes the threat he poses so different. The original Michael was a threat mainly through tenacity (and, yes, a supernatural inability to die, but why split hairs), rather than power. Mane’s Michael is just a hulk. Yet by demystifying Michael, Zombie has also removed another of the things that made him truly scary, the point behind that blank mask is that who Michael is doesn’t matter, what his name is doesn’t even matter (remember that in John Carpenter’s original he was ‘The Shape’), Michael isn’t a person, he’s living, breathing evil. That’s scary, a big tramp with a mask isn’t. Michael’s kills are extremely boring, and all executed in a very similar manner. Zombie loves to dwell on overkill (another thing that Michael never really engaged in), and so we get scenes where Michael stabs a victim repeatedly for about 20 seconds, pauses, then keeps right on stabbing. Annoyingly for gorehounds, though Halloween II is very bloody, we actually get to see very little of the violence. Blows usually land off screen, or in such pitch darkness that we can’t make them out, and the violent scenes appear to have been shot and cut by an epileptic on crack.

The dream sequences that recur throughout the film are absolutely awful. The imagery is so cliché that it’s just hilarious, and the acting by Sheri Moon-Zombie and new Young Michael Chase Vanek is torturously stilted. They are also hugely pretentious, it makes me laugh that people have lately accused films like Antichrist and Martyrs of being pretentious. Those people clearly haven’t seen this movie. Oh, how I envy them. Perhaps the thing that most irritated me in this film though is the reveal of the first dream sequence, at which I actually sat up in my seat and said, “you’ve got to be fucking kidding”.

I really hate the trend for remakes in mainstream horror. Hopefully this staggeringly inept entry in the cycle brings us at least close to its absolute nadir (though Zombie’s next is a version of The Blob, God help us). Halloween II is an inexcusably awful film, by a filmmaker who has said that this excremental production represents his vision. That being the case he should get his eyes tested and have his DGA card taken away. If you have even a passing interest in good horror movies, skip this one and get your fix with Thirst on October 16th.

The Long Halloween: Part 1

One of the pictures in this post contains nudity. If you're going to be offended by that, please read another post. Thanks.

THE MUMMY ['32]
DIR: Karl Freund
Reviewed here.

MARTYRS
DIR: Pascal Laugier


I’ve now seen Martyrs three times, and each time I become more convinced that Pascal Laugier’s second film is a true masterpiece of the horror genre. Point of fact I think it may well be the single finest horror film of the past decade. Martyrs isn’t for everyone, it is brutal beyond belief, and deeply difficult and upsetting but what lifts it out of the ordinary is the fact that brutality is not what the film is about. Laugier’s expert direction and the astounding performances of Morjana Alaoui and Mylene Jampanoi ensure that this is a film with ideas, a film that asks questions, a film that demands engagement from an audience. You can read my full review of Martyrs here.

THIRST
Reviewed here.

THE HOWLING
DIR: Joe Dante
I want to like The Howling, it is by one of my favourite directors; the witty, talented, and much underrated Joe Dante, and it is generally seen as something of a classic of 80’s horror. Unfortunately I found it extremely boring. It takes forever to get going, and as you wait for the werewolf based fun to start there’s really nothing to hold the attention, other than spotting the usual Joe Dante company (Dick Miller, Robert Picardo etc). Rob Bottin’s transformation effects are well realised, but this film lacks the sense of fun that is present in its director’s other work, and is considerably less engaging for that.


FROM BEYOND
DIR: Stuart Gordon
After making the classic Re-Animator, Gordon reunited Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton for another gooey, gory, Lovecraft adaptation. He adds genre legend Ken Foree to the mix, which is fun, though I could do with a little less of him walking around in nothing but orange Y-Fronts. Overall though, this just doesn’t stack up to Re-Animator. Even at 81 minutes the story, which sees Combs help invent a machine that taps into people’s pineal glands, somehow making latex monsters appear, is very slight. It also doesn’t help that Crampton - stunningly beautiful though she is - makes for one of the three least convincing ‘brilliant scientists’ in movie history. Still, there’s much to enjoy: John Carl Beuechler’s creatures, Crampton in revealing leather and Combs’ overating. Overall, From Beyond is dumb fun for horror nuts.


MASTERS OF HORROR

DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
DIR: Stuart Gordon
More Lovecraft from Gordon, this time as a rather average episode of Mick Garris’ hit and miss anthology series. The story is fun enough - a witch appears to be attempting to get a grad student (from, of course, Miskatonic University) to sacrifice his attractive neighbour’s baby - and Gordon handles the imagery of the dreams well. Sadly he’s let down by some poor performances and a rather creaky script, still, it’s fun to look at.



CHOCOLATE
DIR: Mick Garris
Easily the worst of the MOH episodes I’ve seen. Garris’ tale of possession is incredibly boring and padded with many completely superfluous scenes. It also happens to suffer from some truly awful acting, in which everyone appears to be in a different film. Henry Thomas is doing intense psychological work, really, really badly. Matt Frewer is in an awful comedy and Lucie Laurier, well, I’m not sure she’s even alive, so little expression does she register. The only positive here is Garris’ very apparent fondness for naked women with fantastic breasts.

DEER WOMAN
DIR: John Landis
From the worst of MOH to the best. I wish Deer Woman had been a feature. It is stupid as all hell, but the movie knows it, the characters know it, and Landis pokes fun at the entire enterprise in almost every scene. There’s an excellent leading performance by Brian Benben, as a cop who can’t quite believe where his latest case is going (the scene where he thinks through possible scenarios is a classic). This is, quite simply, what all comedy horror should be like; each feeds into and complements the other (another great scene is an hysterical play on the cliché of a person hearing footsteps following them). Landis' direction is strong, but the real star here is his son Max, who wrote the fantastic, hugely funny, screenplay. One to seek out.


THE STEPFATHER ['87]
DIR: Joseph Ruben
The horror film, and even the slasher, does command more critical respect today than it used to, but even now, though it is well rated by those who have seen it, The Stepfather is a film that exists under the radar. That’s a real shame, because Joseph Ruben’s film is a minor genre classic. It’s a simple setup; ‘Jerry Blake’ (Terry O’Quinn) is obsessed with finding the perfect family, and whenever the family he is with disappoints him, he kills them off and starts over. This time his new step-daughter (Jill Schoelen) begins to suspect him. Ruben’s camera work is excellent, with particularly stylish use of shadow at the film’s climax.
What really makes The Stepfather great though, unusually for the genre, is the acting. Schoelen was 23 at the time of shooting, but looks like a convincing teenager, and gives a strong, sympathetic performance. It’s a real shame that this pretty, talented actress has been almost completely absent from screens since 1996. However, this is Terry O’Quinn’s film, and he eats up the title role, giving it a depth and a reality that comes as a truly welcome surprise. He’s genuinely scary, especially in the film’s brilliant opening scene. The Stepfather is a great film, make sure you see it before the remake pollutes a cinema near you next month.