Throwing Copper

I had been waiting for this one for a long time and was pretty excited about the director and the good reviews.

I was disappointed. It wasn't a bad movie, but it was just OK, IMO. Had I known, I would have waited for home video.

It wasn't scary at all, and I don't know where all this supposed humor was either.

3 stars

Mike86

The humor was all throughout the film and distractingly so. Not sure how you could have missed it. That's actually something else that brings the film down a few pegs for me. It was cringey humor that either was just stupid like the dad going on about peanut butter on his penis or used poorly such as the kid being watched by the babysitter. He had moments where he waa funny sure, but funny when Myers is killing the babysitter and he's still cracking jokes? Not so much.

abe55

What's funny is as flawed and overhyped as this movie is, it's still the only somewhat passable Halloween sequel, and the only one that even attempted to be an actual legitimate sequel to the original.

Two things I hated about this movie was how they made Michael an indestructible Terminator clone just like every other Halloween sequel, starting with Halloween 2. The other being the subplot with the doctor being so obsessed with Michael, he was willing to kill for it. I like that they ignored the sister angle, even if they could have done a better job in this movie bringing Michael and Laurie face to face again.

Why So Blu?

Uh, so did part 2 considering it was still the same night.

Mike86

That statement doesn’t even make sense. All the sequels follow off the original in some way. It’s not like each one just disregards the events of the original. The only ones that don’t follow it are Season of the Witch and the two Zombie films.

Throwing Copper

I thought Rob Zombie's Halloween II was awful. But I actually liked his first Halloween film quite a bit.

Mike86

The first isn’t as bad but neither are good. I just don’t like Rob Zombie as a filmmaker. Not a fan of the white trash style that oozes from his films.

DaveyJoe

It's actually very common for people to react to stress with amusement. I don't necessarily think Julian's reaction to Michael was intended so much to get a laugh from the audience, it's just his character. He absolutely strikes me as someone that would use his sense of humor as a coping mechanism. And when these situations happen it's often because the person is in a state of denial about the situation.

Watch some CCTV videos on YouTube and you'd be amazed how many people have a non-reaction to situations where they are in danger. I actually thought it was more realistic that not every character reacted to Michael in the cliche scream queen way. There are a ton of slasher movies in my Blu-ray collection, I'm a big fan of the genre. But the most annoying thing is how often the worse ones devolve into loud, incessant screaming. The fact is that real people react to fear in many different ways and I thought this movie did a good job fleshing out minor characters in small amounts of screentime. Julian's reaction was totally in line with his character.

And aside from his scene, I think a lot of the humor was dark comedy in the vein of Pineapple Express and Vice Principles. When I think of the funniest moment in the film, it wasn't a conversation, it was when the little boy is approaching the bus, we know Michael is lurking somewhere, and the doctor jumps up saying don't shoot and the kid immediately pops him in the shoulder. That was a great way to relieve the tension and also give the viewers a laugh they almost feel guilty about.

DaveyJoe

I think after 40 years we have to ask ourselves what possible ways would Laurie and Michael cone face-to-face organically? How dumb would it be if Laurie lived on the same street as the original killings? And how silly would it look to see Michael pull a Terminator and look up Laurie Strode in the phone book?

With the way Laurie has had to manage her trauma it makes sense that she'd live in an isolated area she can fortify. And to return to the Primal terror of the original movie, Laurie turned out to be a random target of Michael, he has no reason to seek her out. The only logical outcome is that they are ruinited through some outside human interference. And again this is challenging the audience to think about whether this was ultimately fate or circumstance.

Mike86

I realize you’re putting a lot of thought into why it should work, but I think taking out the logical explanations it doesn’t work well in the actual film. I think the film is too jokey for its own good personally. I’m sure a lot of that is down to David Gordon Green and Danny McBride coming from comedy backgrounds, but I feel like they infused a bit too much comedy in at inappropriate times. I dunno just didn’t work for me.

DaveyJoe

Well yeah if you take out logical explanations things tend to not work. I don't understand what you mean here.

I think if you look at recent trends in movies you see a lot more genre bending and less attempts to strictly box a film into one tone. You've got the rise of dramedy through Wes Anderson films and Green/McBride's work on Pineapple Express successfully blended humor with action, while Vice Principals was a comedy that featured a lot of pathos in the character development and a ton of 80s thriller elements.

I think Halloween is bringing the slasher more into a modern tone where everything isn't just 90 minutes of dread but some lighter moments that help develop the characters. And I don't think anything feels more egregious than stuff from the original like 'totally charted territory', 'hey Lonny, get your ass away from there,' 'hey jerk, speed kills,' 'he must've found a hot date,' 'what's the matter, something got your ghost?' etc.

Mike86

I guess what I’m saying is I don’t always need logical explanations for every aspect of a film or psychological reasoning for why a character acts the way that they do. Sometimes just because an explanation works in real life doesn’t translate to it working film. I’m not looking for everything to be exactly like real life when I’m watching a movie and suspend some disbelief. In my opinion even though your explanations are probably accurate I don’t think they worked in the case of the film’s use of comedy. That’s just me though. I don’t hate this film I just don’t think it’s all that great personally. It’s sort of just middle of the road for me.

Trevor

Downpour has the audio version of the new novelization on sale for $2.95, probably only until midnight. It’s about 9 hours long, so maybe fleshes out the story a bit.
https://www.downpour.com/digital-deals

Supermallet

DaveyJoe, I’m loving your takes on this film.

Bluelitespecial

I saw it last night, and I thought it was pretty good. It ranks high among the sequels for me. I only have one nitpicking error, but how did everyone get inside Lori's compound at the end. I thought it was completely fenced off.

Ranger

How many kills did Myers have in each Halloween movie?

dex14

http://halloween-films.wikia.com/wiki/Body_Count

dsa_shea

I think DaveyJoe has thought more about the underlying themes in this movie than the writers did. I really don't think they approached it the way he is thinking. I understand that he really likes the movie, but there are things that could have been done in a much more reasonable and realistic way.

DaveNinja

I dont know if they said or not, but I figured they left the gate open because they were waiting for the cop with the granddaughter to get to the compound before locking it down.

Why So Blu?

I may end up buying the novelization. It's 384 pages, so that's like 3-times the length of the film. There's definitely more material in there that was not in the film. The Kindle version is only $5.99 and the paperback is $7.99 on Amazon.

Mike86

Agreed. I think that’s giving McBride and Gordon-Green a bit too much credit. If you can find those themes in the film great, but I don’t think the film is that clever.

DaveyJoe

You get out of a movie when you put into it. I love films as art and get enjoyment from thinking about why filmmakers made certain decisions and in what ways they tried to challenge the viewer. If you want to watch films strictly on a surface level, that's fine, but if you don't think the director of George Washington and Undertow tried to add a little depth to his first horror film, I don't know what to tell you.

Perhaps it's a coincidence that the movie uses the lecture on fate from the original movie then has incredible circumstances bring Laurie and Michael face-to-face again. Perhaps it's a coincidence that the teenagers reference real world acts of violence and the film focuses strongly on Laurie's PTSD. Perhaps it's a coincidence that Allison is trapped between Laurie and Karen's diametrically opposed worldviews in a film that features both horror and comedy.

But I don't think good filmmakers just make things happen without thinking about them. When you watch stuff like Vice Principals it's clear that Green and McBride are huge fans of genre cinema from the 80s and 70s, and they're smart enough to know how critical a fanbases like this will be of a new film. If they were lazy writers like some are suggesting, they wouldn't have bothered to retcon all of the sequels. That's a hugely polarizing concept for the fanbase. The only reason they would do something like that is if they were trying to make the best film possible, something more substantive than the other sequels.

And the themes I've talked about have all been consistent to explain some of the more controversial decisions. It's not like I'm pulling some wacky 'everything was in Harry Potter's mind' stuff out of my butt. These are pretty basic thematic elements that motivate the character arcs, and I'm far from the only person talking about the film's focus on trauma on the internet.

It's disappointing that a movie discussion board puts so little effort into sussing out meaning in films.

Mike86

I just don’t think the film does anything to re-invent the genre. It pays homage well to the franchise and the original film especially. It’s not terribly clever or original though. I just didn’t get what you did out of the film. If you liked it that’s cool and like I say I don’t mind it. It’s competently made and is watchable. Definitely not trash or anything and better than some of the sequels and sequels of other horror franchises. I just don’t necessarily think it’s full of deeper meaning based on the majority of the work I’ve seen from McBride and Gordon-Green. I haven’t seen Vice Principals so I can’t comment on that, but Gordon-Green I find very hit and miss as a director (his best is probably Joe to me) and McBride is fine for what he does if you’re into his style of comedy.

Supermallet

I agree with you, I think Gordon-Green and McBride has more on their minds than the average slasher writer/director and those elements are very clearly in the film.

Brian T

I'm also with DaveyJoe on this one. If nothing else, this Halloween certainly increased my opinion of Danny McBride as a writer. Not that I haven't enjoyed some of his prior work, but I think I've been guilty of letting his characters and portrayals -- which I'm not always fond of -- overshadow the thought processes he puts into them. Obviously his aren't the only fingerprints on Halloween, but when watching it I never felt like anything in it was just random or lazy "point A to B" screenwriting (including the podcasters and their antics, the treatment of which in less rigorous hands in a different film would not likely been so cutting). As much as the Sartain thing irked me at TIFF, I couldn't really envision any inherently better way of moving the plot along, and DaveyJoe's musings in that regard have convinced me that the writers employed it with a more thoughtful purpose than I was willing to grant them on first viewing, so hung up was I on the surface level "come on, seriously?" nature of it. But the clues were there in retrospect. Personally, I still rank this as #2 in the series, quite some distance ahead of the others. That's not to discount them entirely -- I've been very casually and randomly working my way through the big Scream Factory box for years now -- but I'm content to have "78-->18" be my "official" canon now while accepting that others folks will prefer the original run.