Hurricane Sandy's signification as a pre-apocalypse harbinger recalls 1982, as does Shout's new blu-ray of HALLOWEEN II. 1982 was the year this sad sequel made it to cable, where it hung around like the smell of a flooded cellar. It gets a bad rap even before people see it since it can't possibly match the original but like JAWS 2, HALLOWEEN II ain't bad on its own. After all, in each case the original had an advantage: it didn't have to match anything. There was no pressure to be a masterpiece of horror. If the sequel took as many liberties as the original it might have been better but it wouldn't have been a sequel. It would be HALLOWEEN III, which confounded expectations with a title granted it for no apparent reason except the loose attachment of Carpenter's name and its chosen diegetic holiday.
The best sequels such as GODFATHER 2 transcend expectations, disappointing on an existential level at first, until its own different (darker, broader) brilliance shines through. HALLOWEEN 2 goes the reverse and delivers "a-too-a much-a." Imitating the imitators of John Carpenter's original (such as Friday the 13th) instead of zeroing in on the method rather than just the madness. Director Rick Rosenthal brings in a cross section of stock characters more or less set up to be slaughtered, some of whom are, alas, rather gross (the goomba EMT) but some of whom we come--in the short time we have before their slaughtered--to like, which just makes their clumsy offing sad rather than terrifying. The two holdovers from the original, Jamie Lee and Donald Pleasance struggle to transcend this stale nightmare they're locked into; they're like the only awake people in one of those feverish afternoon dreams where you spend the whole time trying to find the bathroom and everyone ignores you. Feverishly, you navigate mazes of institutional gray halls.... slowly bursting from within. And on reflection, the idea that a mass murder would go on and the hospital not be stocked with cops and press seems ridiculous.
I mention all this to point out that the elements that survive in a sequel aren't what made the original successful as a film but what made it successful as a playground oration, i.e. a myth. In the pre-VHS era, only the myth survived. Carpenter's original is nearly all build-up--long POV shots of teens walking around the neighborhood, long conversations with Annie about Laurie's sexual anxiety, constantly ringing phones-- and the minutiae of Halloween babysitting, overheard as if from across the block. By the time the killings actually start there's only twenty minutes or so left in the movie! Carpenter knows that once the knife actually goes in and the light in the eye goes out, the suspense ceases. It's almost a relief, in fact, since we suddenly remember the person is just an actor. The original was a long, hot date that ends in great petting on the couch that we remember with a delirious swoon; the sequel is one-night-stand sex, exactly what we thought we wanted, but we're soon subsumed by hungover emptiness and self-loathing.
But as kids don't know what kind of work it took to make the original killings so keenly 'felt' in their retellings, hack directors can only mirror the remembered myth, which is diluted by the 'telephone': the score's eerie piano theme is revamped to less effect as an Emerson Lake-style synthesizer; the William Shatner mask is given a tacky blonde hair paint job; the eerie jack-o-lantern behind the opening credits is now somehow less scary with rounder edges on the eyes; the Steadicam POV shots go nowhere; Jamie Lee Curtis hobbling around on a bad foot and Carpenter's creepy atonal piano music are the only worthwhile elements. Additions from FRIDAY THE 13TH are brought in: the hospital staff includes the aforementioned foulmouthed Italian American douchebag paramedic and his cute shy college boy paramedical partner; the bossy but concerned African American nurse and her assistant, a candy stripe hottie, and the fat security guard (the same one from TERMINATOR 2!)... all set up just to get knocked down before the ball even comes back up the chute.
There are some great little new touches: an angry mob pelting the Myers' house with rocks as Dr. Loomis and the sheriff drive slowly past; the confusion when the security guard is watching NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD on a hospital's black and white security monitor, which switches to the hospital exterior with Myers walking around the rear so smoothly you don't realize which is which; there's an unspoken but creepy idea that the kid in the blonde mask might have been somehow brainwashed or lobotomized by Myers into dressing like him. There's a break-in to the local elementary school with the name SAMHAIN scrawled in blood on the blackboard, hinting at some excuse for Myers' indestructibility.
The opening, which includes the last few minutes of the end of the first film, starts strong with elaborate tracking shots through the neighborhood night. The wounded Myers steals a knife out of a kitchen while an old lady's back is turned, but he doesn't kill her... she's not young or on the phone with her boyfriend, unlike her neighbor. But Myers' killing for the rest of the film is more focused. He just wants to kill everyone at a public hospital night shift. We see a kid come in to the hospital with his mom, a razor-blade stuck in his mouth, reminding one of the time when anyone would accept anything, even unwrapped, from any Mansonesque hippie in their neighborhood on Halloween, as long as they cut it into wedges first to make sure it was un-razored, rather than instantly calling the cops like they would today, if the kids are even allowed to go out at all.
The new Shout blu-ray gives these corridors of the hospital a 3-D clarity: the gleaming wax of the institutional floors and overhead florescent lights make a subtextual commentary on the aesthetic barrenness of cash-in sequels like this one (until that is, Michael cuts the power). So there are some great tracking shots as the night crew of the hospital come into work, walking through the long corridors like they've done a hundred times before, to sign in and deal with their mundane tasks. The wounded Laurie Strode is admitted; the killer moseys over; Donald Pleasance does his quivering voiced 'this isn't a man, it's a demon!" business but never thinks to hang out at the hospital.
Getting back to Halloween razor blade side bit, let us use it as a segue back into discussing the year of 1982 when--fueled by an alarmist press and helped in no small part by the tide of slasher movies imitating HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, now available also on video and premium cable as well as theaters--parents and small children began to feel really spooked by imagining that everyone but them were getting off on seeing teenage girls butchered. Suddenly the papers were alive with tales of suburban Satanic pedophiles rings! Your whole town could be one Satanic cult and you the only one left out! We kids trembled in our beds and kept butcher knives by our sides at night, and the freedom my generation enjoyed in the 70s-- when we were expected to go roaming unsupervised throughout the neighborhood once we turned the ripe age of seven --was gradually, through media bandwagon hysteria, eliminated, in favor of the helicopter play date supervision we have now. Of course the worries about things like pedophile rings turned out to be false recovered memories, and the razors in the apples was a downright myth perpetrated by Ann Landers:
Despite the falsity of these claims (the razor apple bit - EK) the news media promoted the story continuously throughout the 1980s, with local news stations featuring frequent coverage. During this time cases of poisoning were repeatedly reported based on unsubstantiated claims or before a full investigation could be completed and often never followed up on. This one sided coverage contributed to the overall panic and caused rival media outlets to issue reports of candy tampering as well.
By 1985, the media had driven the hysteria about candy poisonings to such a point that an ABC News/Washington Post poll that found 60% of parents feared that their children would be injured or killed because of Halloween candy sabotage.
Advice columnists entered the fray during the 1980s and 1990s with both Ann Landers and Dear Abby warning parents of the horrors of candy tampering
"In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy. It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers." –Ann Landers
"Somebody's child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade." –Dear Abby
This collective fear also served as the impetus for the "safe" trick-or-treating offered by many local malls --- (Wiki)
As someone who loved trick-or-treating but had by 1982 grown too old for it, I would drive around the neighborhood on Halloween, bored and restless, noticing with horror how the amount of trick or treaters by 1983 had trickled off to a few scattered throngs--and everyone was finished before dark. Just a few years earlier my crew and I would race around unsupervised until all hours and even our parents would tell us it wasn't kosher to start out until after dinner and it had gotten dark.
But one door never closes without another opens. We may have lost our freedom to go outside but it was concurrent with the arrival of VHS and cable, which acted as the partial cause of --and cure for --this Halloween depression. I sulked through the rest of my tweenage life with only the VCR as a life preserver and though I never liked it, HALLOWEEN II was just on HBO all the time, over and over. Whenever I hear "Mr. Sandman / build me a dream" I see Michael's mask burning in the exploded hospital room. But until this blog I had no one to tell my horror to. The cable / VCR double threat made most any film available to see anytime, at home; the need and/or desire to 'tell' a film to someone else vanished accordingly. And just like the sequel only reproduces the remembered killings and loses all the unique aspects Carpenter brought to bear to make the film truly scary, so too we don't think we're losing anything by scrapping telling scary stories to each other by firelight, since we don't need imagination to see the killings now. But hearing them from our friends just fueled our imagination and made them both scarier and less traumatizing than seing the films, for the imagined unknown that is never traumatic. Once we actually saw the films, they never measured up to our envisioning, and yet left us feeling that stale, wretched one-night-stand loss of faith in humanity
Now, the big climax of HALLOWEEN 2 should have been a moment of triumph for Laurie Strode, crawling across cement expanses protected by only hair, hospital gown, and gumption. But her Annie Oakleyistic monkey-in-the-middle with nitrous and outer shell game at the climax was more silly than scary, and pointless. Though we don't get any indication Myers is still alive at the end of this one, of course he would be back. Twenty years later and Curtis returned to finally and forever kill him--until he came back, of course. Today the eyes are gone but the blonde hair remains, super long, and Michael slashes to the latest Zombie beatz, but in the early 1980s, the tangy smell of my little (blonde) brother's garage mechanic grime and cold oil from the garage and mom's at-home perms despoiling my nose, watching HALLOWEEN II (the only film my brother Fred ever taped) over and over, the sheer hopelessness of ever truly killing the evils of suburbia evaporating; that terrifying Chordettes song echoing through the house; all dissolving into a lurching day glo spandex headband aerobics and Betamax decade; the 70s iron-straight blonde hair gone perm-pouffy; the hope of a Beatles reunion gone to Yoko's national moment of silence; friendly human contact gone to media crucifixion over a single lewd wink; a hundred thousand flamboyant dancing devils gone to sobering AIDS angels; mischief night and trick-or-treating gone to the video tape. Rewind all you want, but you'll never see the like again.
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