It was assignment crunch time, so I ended up watching fewer movies from the 10th to the 16th, so I've thrown them in with this week. I'm so tired.
253. The Predator (2018) - September 13th
Part of me hated it for what it was, part of me saw the pieces of what it could have been; it's bad, but made with decent parts, and I'm now genuinely curious to see some kind of director's cut, because as ridiculously campy as friendly Predators sounds, it's probably better than what we got. My full review can be found here. - 5/10
254. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) - September 15th
I decided to watch each and every Halloween movie I hadn't seen yet in preparation for the release of the new one, which to my knowledge retcons all of these anyway; this is totally to see how the Halloween movies degraded over the years, and I swear has nothing to do with the fact that its assignment crunch time and I need to pad my numbers, with assignments sucking out my usual enthusiasm for film, leaving me wanting only to watch cheap sequels who I'll feel less poorly about offering my full engagement. Are you convinced? Neither am I.
Anyway, Season of the Witch is the first and only Halloween movie to have nothing to do with Michael Myers: John Carpenter had originally intended this to be the start of an anthology based around, funnily enough, Halloween. Unfortunately, the film didn't do so well at the box office, and just like Friday the 13th, the Halloween series locked themselves in the same tired set of ideas time and again. But we'll get to that soon.
As far as Horror movies go, Season of the Witch is bad, but in the Halloween series it manages to be better than all of its successors bar two. It doesn't execute any of its ideas particularly well, and those ideas could be seen as offensive if taken seriously, but it's the one Halloween to have ideas that don't revolve around Michael Myers, free to come up with a combination of supernatural, sci-fi, and body horror that isn't well done by any means but gets points for creativity. It's also easier to stomach as a dark comedy that plays on genre expectations; rather than a virgin, the main character is a serial adulterer, instead of witchcraft or androids it's both, that sort of thing. It's such a mish-mash of other movie's ideas, with themes against everything from television to commercialisation to the Irish, all put together so bizarrely it's kind of hilarious. - 4.5/10
255. The Producers (1967) - September 15th
Before diving in to the rest of the Halloween franchise, I had a quick look at Mel Brooks' directorial debut. It's about what you'd expect from a film by him about two Jewish men putting on a play called Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden in order to get a guaranteed flop and make a lot of money off of investors: it's all in somewhat poor taste, but with such great execution that you can hardly care, especially with how the film pans out. It's great screwball comedy from start to finish. - 8/10
256. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) - September 15th
We're back to the Halloween franchise, and so is Michael Myers. Unfortunately, John Carpenter isn't back, so we've little hope for quality or understanding of what made the original film work. This is a copycat of the first, with a lot of the same story beats and overall structure, but without the same flow. There's no slow build-up before the nightmare, no chill before the thrill, and in general none of the same panache as the first, save for the ever-enjoyable performance by Donald Pleasence. He's silly and excessive in a way that hearkens back to 30s-era horror; I half-expect a theremin to start playing every time he finishes a sentence. There's really nothing here of note that stands out as unique about the film; it's the first without most of the good bits. - 4/10
257. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) - September 16th
I feel as if I watched the same movie twice by accident. Aside from the psychic connection stuff (which seems directly lifted from Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, but I don't think anyone remembers that exists), this is a lot of the same stuff from Halloween 4. I even had to double check that characters from the previous one were in fact still supposed to be alive. This whole thing blew right through me like its predecessor; I've watched both and I feel no real reason to care about them one way or another. At the very least, I know by film's end which is the lesser of the two, because the film's ending is some terrible, unexplained massacre that only gets worse when it gets discussed in Halloween 6. I wish I could say I was nearly done, but three more Halloween films feels much more difficult than it probably should. - 3.5/10
258. Mandy (2018) - September 17th
I need to find the time to re-watch this; it's so insane in terms of the visual design and raw emotion expressed on-screen, and the flow to its conflict escalation is fantastic. My full review can be found here. - 8/10
259. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) - September 17th
For the love of God, please make it stop. Not only does this film have almost no sense of tension or style, it completely over-complicates Myers' backstory to include a literal Druid curse to explain why he's unkillable and evil. Gone is any sense of ambiguity about Dr. Loomis' character, no mystical understanding or potential insanity left up to the viewer, just unnecessary and convoluted explanation on top of the same tired affair. The only upside, apart from the same theatrical work from Pleasance and the scream queen work from Harris, is that Paul Rudd is in this, and no matter how much a film does to make me dislike it, he's inherently a saving grace, enough to stop this from being the worst Halloween in the series, if only retroactively. - 2/10
260. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) - September 18th
Trim the fat and keep the meet. As the new film will soon do to this, H20 works because it ignores all of the crap dished out by the previous three entries and acts simply as a closer to the story started by the first two Halloween movies. Because the film focuses on Laurie Strode and her connection to Michael (without following the Halloween 4 or Rob Zombie Halloween II copout), it can finish what was started around these two characters and bring the franchise back from the brink to be somewhat middling. This isn't anywhere near as good as the original, but after what I've seen, I'm more than happy with something that's passable, especially given the feminist subtext and the ending that comes with it that makes this one of the better resolutions to the idea of the 'final girl' as having value to the audience beyond being blameless. It's not a great or even particularly good film, but it has its fair share of awesome moments that make it worth watching. - 5.5/10
261. Halloween: Resurrection (2002) - September 18th
And I thought Curse was bad. After H20 trimmed the fat and made for a decent closer to the trilogy, Resurrection comes along to not only undercut the ending of its predecessor but also kill off the main character and go on to be completely worthless as a horror, with discussion of horror as experience and the influx of creative film techniques that's tired before it even starts. What's worst about it all is the title: Myers isn't even resurrected, he just wasn't killed by Laurie at the end of the previous one anymore and then disappeared after that. The culmination of Laurie's character, the first half-decent sequel in 17 years, and this film comes along to make it meaningless. Retcons are supposed to be used to make things better, not an excuse to do something infinitely worse. - 1/10
262. The Green Inferno (2013) - September 19th
I still can't get in to Eli Roth movies. This is my third one, and it's clear that his films have genuine talent put in to them, but their content is so aggressively nihilistic that I struggle to sit through them. I suppose his movies are, to me, what most horror movies are to many others; just as I have been told many times that people don't understand the kick I get from scary movies, I don't get the value of being frustrated or downright furious for two hours with no higher purpose as a form of escapism. I'm not writing the idea off completely, but as of right now it inherently puts all of his films in a poor starting position. Unfortunately, this gets worse, as The Green Inferno isn't quite Knock Knock or even Hostel. Trapped in the Amazon with hungry cannibals as a plot, combined with the solid effects make for a throwback to the likes of Cannibal Holocaust, and the aggressive irony in its messaging is funny some of the time, but as much as I give credit to the film for effectively grossing me out and playing a little with structural expectations, I can't take this sort of film. I think the skill clear in the film's craft makes this experience a little worse for me, because it seems clear to me that Roth could be working on something better. - 3.5/10
263. Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) - September 20th
Well, three chapters in and the Insidious series has yet to reach great heights or fall to the lowest depths; there's no Halloween among them, but there's also no Halloween: Resurrection. It's much the same style as its predecessors, silly spooky horror that takes itself slightly too seriously to be horror-comedy but isn't scary, haunting, or otherwise affecting enough to be great horror. At this point, the terrible jump scares have to deliberate; if they're some sort of joke between audience and filmmaker, I'm not in on it, the whole approach is just aggravating noise to me. The film otherwise has some neat build-up when it's reinforced by decent emotional beats, and the car accident scene is enough to make me question whether or not this is a horror comedy, but otherwise this is just more of the same stuff, which I'm not invested enough in to really parse through the differences in the details. - 5/10
264. Salvador (1986) - September 22nd
Well, at least I can end this fortnight on a positive note (I know I'm two films short, but I have neither the time nor the energy nor the enthusiasm right now).
James Woods is a terrific actor and gives one of the best performances of his career in Salvador. Oliver Stone's film feels like a suitable continuation to the work he did on Platoon, and while this isn't as good (few things are), it still offers an interesting character study and discussion of partisan politics that reflects the culture at the time and makes for an interesting parallel to today, all carried by Woods' work, ironically enough (not to say anything about him as a person one way or another; I just heard about this film because people were contrasting the man's personal politics with that of the character he portrays here). The film is powerful in how the experience transforms Woods' character over the course of the film; this idea that such up close and personal perspective of war can change you as a person has a direct through-line to Platoon, the same ideas put forward only a few years on. He's so improbable, yet so human; at once you find it hard to believe that he hasn't received this sort of change in perspective before, given his credentials, but at the same time the events of the film put forward this idea that it has, and that the futility of his actions at every turn, this breaking of the individual against the system, is as much a drive for why his character would improve as why he would regress. Wrapping that up in discussion of the politics that drive the system works, and allows for the film's stressed yet idyllic pace, as it fluctuates between reality, the attempts to escape from it, and the attempts to confront it. - 7.5/10
Re-watches
55. The Predator (2018) - September 13th
Yes, I re-watched this the same day I saw it for the first time. No, I did not do it because I particularly loved or hated the movie. I see movies with different people, sometimes there's overlap. This happened with Suicide Squad, which I absolutely hated, and The Last Jedi, which I loved; I can re-watch any movie just as easily as I can the first time.
That said, the second viewing is interesting to see if any of my opinions changed between viewings or if I noticed anything new, and in this case the two viewings were too close together for me to really be sure. I think I disliked it more the second time, but I was also exhausted and just wanted to tune out, and even with a double dose of its pro-autism message I don't think they handled the idea any better; making it a super power just seems patronising rather than supportive, especially when by movie's end you've equated the kid with the 'precocious genius' cliche, and a few lines of dialogue suggesting "the next stage of evolution" and claiming "true warrior" status aren't enough to make things work when the film is such a tonal nightmare.
*Note: I get in to some really geeky stuff from here on out, so just skip to the end if you don't care about Predator or Alien lore.
Beyond that, the over-complication of Predator lore when you're already incorporating films whose canon conflicts with the ideas about the Predator species that you're trying to convey is one thing that got to me. This isn't really criticism of the movie, since it has little to do with anything other than an Easter egg in the film that makes the two Alien vs. Predator movies canon to the Predator film series (although that gets murky as the last two Alien films have all but de-canonised those, so the Alien is canon to the Predator series but the Predator is not canon to the Alien series, which isn't anything new; the Alien skull was an Easter egg in Predator 2, but no Alien film has had anything to mention of the Predators). Including that Easter egg has implications about the species, some that fit and some that don't. The idea that humanity was a race that was uplifted by the Predators makes their genetic incorporation of humanity sort of make sense; they played the long game because they saw potential in human DNA, perhaps, hunting humans now and then to see how they've progressed. This even incorporates the Aliens, because they as a species genetically re-combine to form in the first place. That said, the fact that the humans were uplifted for the purpose of Alien hunts also needs to be glossed over a little, as the whole 'traditionalist hunters who choose to limit themselves against their opponents for sport' is at odds with the 'super progressive geneticists whose hunt is largely utilitarian in nature'. It fits better when you incorporate ideas from Predators, with multiple castes with different perspectives on how to progress as a species; honour versus survival being the primary conflict. It all sort of fits, but at the same time de-mystifies the monster, so the nerd in me who loves the Predator concept is intrigued, but the rest of me just wants this all to stop, because this stuff is all introduced through a movie that I like even less than Alien vs. Predator.
*Okay, no more of that.
Anyway, one other thing I appreciated about the re-watch was making sure of what happened to Sterling K. Brown's Traeger. He's the main human villain of the film, but he has a literal 'blink and you'll miss it' death that I had forgotten had happened by the end of the movie and had to piece together in my head how it happened as haphazardly as the people who edited this film. Munn's Casey calls out his name, he turns to look in her direction, his plasma caster goes off as it's facing the back of his head, head explodes. Even from the second viewing, I'm not even sure the plasma caster was charging up, or if he intended to fire at all, or how the plasma caster turned that far with his head, or if there's even a shot of his body crumpling (I... think there is). This feels like another one of Shane Black's jokes that got destroyed in the editing room, just like everything else in this movie worth talking about. - 5/10
Published September 24th, 2018
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