Trick or Trailers: Halloween (2007)

Remaking Halloween is an idea that came one film too late for the series. Starting over after H20 would have made much more sense rather than trying to carry on. Still, in 2002 the idea of remaking Halloween would have likely been greeted as heresy. Remakes of movies from the olden times of the '50s or '60s, fans were cool with that. But to start remaking the iconic fright films of the '70s? No way. 

That just wasn't going to happen. 

Until it did. 

As the '00's went on, and horror exploded in the wake of films like Saw and Hostel with a renewed emphasis on the kind of hardcore, visceral thrills that defined much of  '70s horror, suddenly once unthinkable remakes of everything from Dawn of the Dead to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Hills Have Eyes became a reality. 

Once that dam burst, it was inevitable that the next step in reviving the Halloween franchise would be to reboot it. I forget what my reaction was to hearing that Rob Zombie would be directing the new movie. At that point, he had directed only House of 1,000 Corpses, which I absolutely hated, and The Devil's Rejects, which I thought was much better, even if it wasn't really my thing. If nothing else, Zombie was definitely a choice in perfect tune with where the genre was then. House, along with Cabin Fever and Wrong Turn, was one of the first films to start the trend towards a return to '70s style horror. 

But how would this guy handle a retelling of Halloween, a model of classic suspense? The answer is that he would just make it entirely in his own fashion and fuck it with even trying to ape Carpenter. 

 

Even though this is not that old, watching this trailer, it feels further in the past to me than Resurrection from '02 does. Maybe it's just that the style of horror from the mid to late '00s was so specific to that era that it's strange to revisit it and be reminded of that vibe.  

From the trailer, seeing Malcolm McDowell in action as Loomis, it's clear - as if anyone could doubt it - that casting him in that role was a killer move. You can't better Pleasance, no, but if you've got to go with a second choice, McDowell is perfect. Even in '78 he would have been great. 

As for Tyler Mane as Michael, well, I say it's a very on brand choice. Of course Zombie would cast Michael as a hulking monster. Nothing about Michael has ever been about his size. Here, though, it looks like he could stride through a cement wall without missing a step. 

When you see him holding a knife, it's laughable. It looks like a toy in his giant mitt. If you ever saw this guy coming at you, the knife would be the last thing you'd worry about.   

From the trailer there is also the reveal that even in this rebooted reality, Michael and Laurie are siblings. Why you wouldn't get away from that, given the opportunity, I don't know. Zombie has claimed that he came up with this idea independently, not remembering or knowing it had been introduced in Halloween II but I call bullshit. 

It's like Zombie wanted everyone to know that he was too cool to have the slightest awareness of what happened in any of the other lame Halloweens and yet here he was repeating the hackiest mistake of the sequels. Completely under his own inspiration, apparently. But whatever. 

Also, I had forgotten the Halloweens were still summer releases at this point. Of all the dumb moves that Dimension Films made with Halloween, putting them out in the summer might be the dumbest. 

Call me crazy but when Halloween is in your title and your movie takes place on Halloween, just put the movie out in October. Not September, not November, and certainly not in fucking August.  

For what it's worth, I believe the case can be made that this is the best Halloween to come from the franchise's Dimension Films years. 

As that's a group that also includes Curse and Resurrection, that might not be high praise but I do think this is a solid movie in its own right, even if it feels more like a curious snapshot of its particular era rather than a film that has endured beyond it. If Texas Chain Saw were to go trick or treating dressed as Halloween, this would be it. 

Trick or Trailers: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Unlike the Friday the 13ths, which saw new installments arrive almost every year, Halloween sequels were not churned out on a regular basis in the '80s but yet hot on the heels of Halloween 4 in '88, suddenly we had Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers in theaters the following October. After striking gold with 4, producers had a newfound urgency in getting Michael Myers back on screen. 

As it turns out, they really should've pumped the brakes and taken the time to put together a movie that was as well-crafted as 4. But hey, where's the fun in that? Better to rush through something shitty that will immediately blow up all the new momentum the series just got. 

But at the time, from the fan's perspective at least, it felt pretty cool to be getting a new Halloween movie so soon. After 4, there was every reason to feel like things were in safe hands so there wasn't the feeling yet of "Oh, here we go again with another shitty sequel." And things had been so dry on that front throughout the '80s that it didn't seem so bad that the producers were eager to make up for lost time. 

Halloween sequels in back to back years? Hell yeah, finally! 

And hey, we can all agree that the trailer looked pretty good:

   

Ok, this is great! Loomis is back, Jamie Lloyd is back. Michael's back. We're picking up from where 4 left off and everything is awesome. 

Then, of course the movie comes out and, well...

But hey. 1989 was a bad year for slashers all around with Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween all hitting rock bottom at once. It was probably the only way that the '80s could have ended, with all the big slasher franchises putting out their worst installments in one miserable year and everything collapsing into a trash heap. 

Just the same, as time has gone on, I've learned to savor every Halloween sequel that gave us more Donald Pleasence, the true lynch pin of the franchise, the cinematography is the most stylized of the old school sequels, KNB's FX work (as much as the MPAA allowed to pass through) is solid, and it has to be said that Danielle Harris was excellent in her final performance as Jamie Lloyd. So Halloween 5...not a complete wash, in my adjusted for nostalgia opinion. 

The craziest thing about 5 remains its cliffhanger ending. As much as it might've been a poorly planned move, I will attest that it really got the attention of my crowd back in '89. Who is this Man in Black? What the fuck is even going on? 

As much as I'm glad we now live in a time where there's much more forethought given to sequels and where storylines are mapped out far in advance, I will say there is something charmingly bullshit about the way things used to be done. 

I just wish that we had been able to get a Halloween 6 in 1990, with a still young Danielle Harris continuing as Jamie, Donald Pleasence still in good health and a more timely reveal for the Man in Black. 

It would have been pretty wild though, don't you think, if we had never gotten another Halloween and 5's ending was the last we saw of Michael. Man, what an end to the franchise that would've been. 

Trick or Trailers: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Even though the original Halloween was still regarded as the gold standard of the slasher genre, by the late '80s the competition had left Michael Myers behind. While the Halloween franchise had spent most of the decade languishing, Jason and Freddy had racked up body counts, sequels and multiple Fangoria covers. But for the tenth anniversary of Carpenter's classic, producer Moustapha Akkad was out to reestablish Michael's boogeyman cred. In the fall of '88, the long-awaited return of Michael Myers was finally due to hit theaters.

When the trailer was released, it had everything that fans had been waiting for, save for the return of Jamie Lee Curtis. The message was clear: Halloween was back, with none of that Silver Shamrock crap.  

 

After so long away, having a "real" Halloween movie again, with Michael back as the OG slasher was cause for celebration. While the fact that he kept coming back eventually made his return a case of "beware what you wish for," back then it was a legitimate thrill when 4 was released. All the better for the fact that 4 felt like it was assembled with real care rather than being just a crass cash in.  

After 4, the series frequently struggled to maintain the same level of quality but back in October of '88, it was exciting to be a Halloween fan. At the time, returning to what made Halloween work felt as natural as Loomis slipping back into his familiar trench coat again. 

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

John Carpenter's Halloween may have made the slasher franchises of the '80s possible, but by the mid-'80s, the slow-steppin' Michael Myers had been outpaced by the likes of Freddy and Jason. Showing an uncommon aversion to commerce, Carpenter and producer Debra Hill tried to end the Shape's saga with 1981's Halloween II and their stubborn attempt to continue the Halloween brand name without any of the familiar elements of the first two films - 1983's Halloween III: Season of the Witch - left fans outraged. But with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films being such reliable earners - for Paramount and New Line, respectively - it was inevitable that Michael Myers would be groomed to reclaim his throne as the slasher genre's premiere icon. Once producer Moustapha Akkad took control of the series again, plans to put Haddonfield back on the map in time for the ten-year anniversary of Halloween were made. For a brief moment in 1988, Slasher Nation had good reason to be happy.

Taking a straight-forward approach, Alan B. McElroy's Halloween 4 script (delivered under the gun of a writer's strike) is respectful towards the first film, eschewing II's attempts to explain Michael's supernatural abilities through the myth of Samhain (as in the first film, Michael is now simply regarded as Evil incarnate with no arcane explanations necessary) and director Dwight H. Little creates an efficiently scary mood, evoking the dark autumnal menace of the original with the proper Midwestern ambience (and composer Alan Howarth effectively reprises the famous Halloween theme). With Jamie Lee Curtis having gone on to A-list projects by this time, her character of Laurie Strode was written out of the new film (dead in a car crash, we're told) leaving a young daughter in her wake. In tribute to Curtis, her onscreen daughter is named Jamie (played by the appealing Danielle Harris) and Jamie lives in the care of her adopted family, the Carruthers, which includes an older sister named Rachel (Ellie Cornell).

While a comatose Michael is being transported from the sanitarium that he's been incarcerated in for the last ten years (this move is being attempted, of course, during a thunderstorm on the eve of Halloween - how about a pat on the back for whoever planned this fiasco!) an ambulance attendant who clearly takes his life for granted carelessly lets slip in Michael's presence that Michael has a niece alive and well back home. Mad Mike immediately emerges from his catatonia and does what he does best, slaughtering the ambulance crew. With Michael loose again, it's up to Dr. Loomis (the returning Donald Pleasence) to hunt down his old quarry. Given that Michael is famous for his one track mind, Loomis doesn't waste any time heading to Haddonfield.

As Loomis tries to stop Michael from reprising his rampage of ten years ago, Halloween 4 quickly reveals itself as an amped-up remake of the first film only now instead of Donald Pleasence simply crouching in the bushes with Charles Cyphers scaring kids away from the Myers' house, Loomis has some real back-up in place. Which is good, because Michael is pressing his attack harder than ever this time around. On the way to Halloween 4's climatic face-off, Little delivers several well-conceived action scenes, including an extended roof top chase and an attack on a speeding pick up truck. While some may feel scenes like these take some of the Boogeyman element out of Michael, there's still a number of moody scares to be found - in fact, Little stages one of the creepiest kills in the entire series featuring a bit of misdirection involving a rocking chair and a cop on late watch against Michael.

As much as this was billed as the Return of Michael Myers, this was also the Return of Loomis. Unlike Jason and Freddy, who squared off against succeeding rounds of disposable teen opponents, the Halloween series was always distinguished by Loomis' Ahab-like pursuit of Michael. Ever since Loomis uttered the lines "He's escaped! The Evil has escaped!", the chase was on and much of the appeal of the series lay in Pleasence's comfortingly hammy portrayal of Loomis. Having Loomis around to describe Michael as evil on two legs is what made Michael more than just a thug with a knife. This wasn't Charles Durning chasing Tony Beckley in When A Stranger Calls. You'd never hear Loomis talk about Michael in psychiatrict terms. From Day 1 Loomis was trying to send Evil Itself back to Hell - an element that turned what could've been mean-spirited set of films into something more akin to classic monster movies with Loomis serving as a determined Van Helsing. If the makers of Halloween 4 deserve credit for anything, it's for bringing Loomis back, when it would've been easy to just have let the character go.

Following Michael's latest spectacular demise, as he goes down in a hail of bullets (again making this film a more elaborate replay of the original - now instead of Loomis putting a few rounds into Michael, a entire firing squad is there to execute him), Halloween 4 offers an epilogue that for many may have seemed like an incredibly obvious turn of events but it managed to catch me off guard back in '88. And while some may have scoffed at this final scene as an obvious sequel set-up, I honestly think it could've functioned as a satisfying close to the series, bringing events full circle. If this had been the last Halloween, I would've been ok with that. It leaves the Loomis character in such a psychologically tortured place that it seems like a bitter but fitting end.

Like most sequels, Halloween 4 is largely a middle-of-the-road effort but in an age where most horror franchises now revolve around unlikable characters subjected to extreme torture (the current success of Saw V proving that this trend is far from over) and when even the Halloween series itself has taken an ugly turn (thanks, Rob Zombie!) it's worth appreciating what Halloween 4 represents - a time when even horror's heavyweights didn't have to be such jaded enterprises to prove their credibility.