Halloween Ends

Despite the poster space dedicated to the twin pillars of this franchise, Halloween Ends is not particularly focused on either Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode or Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney's Michael Myers. Instead the film largely revolves around Rohan Campbell's Corey, a hapless babysitter who has become the town pariah following the accidental death of a child in his care. Corey's lot in life as an aimless twentysomething is so diminished that he is routinely set upon by a group of teenagers that, judging by their clothing, are members of the local school's marching band. He doesn't even rank high enough to attract the ire of nearby jocks. Intimidation and violence instead coming from the layer of secondary school most likely to suffer bullying themselves. Even the misfits hate Corey. 

This unusual bubble of cruelty is emblematic of the ways in which Ends attempts to define the concept of evil and its potential to be transmitted. Michael Myers is portrayed here as a malignant root that has grown into the earth, polluting Haddonfield and everyone within it. The town itself hasn't moved on from the killer's recent sprees; even going as far as blaming Strode and her family for provoking Myers' violence. Buildings within Haddonfield have visibly decayed too, no longer resembling the dreamy Californian suburbs of the original John Carpenter film - this ancestral imagery clearly important to director David Gordon Green as a point of contrast since it is threaded into the framing device that follows the Halloween III: Season of the Witch inspired credit sequence. Instead of a comfortable incubator for the American middle-class, Ends gives us a division expressed spatially; terrifyingly vertical McMansions at one end of town and a poverty row junk yard at the other. Corey, the film's transformational component, employing the machinery of the latter to exorcise the trauma he has experienced thanks to the former. 

Green's film then, co-written with Danny McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan, offers up hints that it intends to be a character piece, one not dissimilar to the damned path beaten by Rob Zombie and Scout Taylor-Compton in their excellent Halloween II. Although an unexpected diversion for a sequel whose ad campaign demands it be received as a conclusion, Corey's hold on the film, and his increasing willingness to wield violence as a way of getting what he wants is, at least, a kind of development for Green's misfiring sub-series. Unfortunately, Corey's halting hold over the desiccated Shape is neither definitive nor lasting, allowing the subterranean memory to bubble up out of the ground and resume their own slaughter. Given the rejection of Terminator: Dark Fate by YouTube's finest film critics, it's unlikely that anyone bankrolling a series that relies on nostalgia will want to see their legacy toys subordinated by new characters or ideas but, that said, there's nothing else in this film as good as a brief interlude in which we see a manic Corey mugging a mummified Myers and, triumphantly, seizing his mask to go on his own killing spree. Youthful, sexually actualised venom finally overcoming the virginal corpse who has become the black mould in the water pipes.  

Halloween

Halloween doesn't mess around. Once we pass through a jack-o'-lantern's eye we are immediately deposited inside the head of Michael Myers, the supernatural murderer who batters John Carpenter's film forward. We are helpless passengers; party to his crimes and slowly being instructed in the structural rhythms that will underline this piece. Halloween presents threat as something intertwined with a sustained, voyeuristic perspective - violence as an actualisation of leering masculinity. If we stay in this space, contextualising the remainder of the film through the lens of these moments, then Halloween's opening - a famous, (fairly) unbroken point-of-view sequence that takes us inside a house then up the stairs to commit a murder - is clearly the defining moment in Myers' young life. It's the night he seized upon his bubbling desires then, clumsily, trespassed into a realm of satisfaction. 

This first murder seems, in as much as this deliberately vague film allows us to ascribe a motive, to be about jealousy and obsession: a very young Myers struggling with the idea that his sister has a life that does not solely revolve around him. We are given no real clue about the interpersonal make-up of this household but, unlike Rob Zombie's revision, this Myers family don't seem especially desperate or emotionally violent. Indeed, the shock of the scene is rooted in its mundanity. There is a senseless aspect to the murder. Judith Myers isn't seen to rebuke or scold her little brother; her boyfriend neither mocks nor embarrasses him. Michael's justification (whatever it is) is private, an act born out of the singular, secret desire to take a kitchen knife then plunge it into his sister's naked chest. It's key then that Carpenter places this sequence upfront. It isn't recapped once Myers escapes or when the bodies start turning up, it's presented as the film's inciting incident. 

Myers' subsequent life appears to revolve around the events of that night, the murders that follow positioned as fragments of his first, perfect kill. There's a sense that Myers has spent the intervening years turning these seconds over and over in his mind, dissecting then reassembling that night, thinking of new ways to tackle the same problem: women (in this instance a group of babysitters) who neither notice nor desire him. Myers has grown physically, to manhood, but his emotional landscape has withered, stuck on the same stunted compulsions. This preoccupation with realising fantasy is evident in the massacre he generates later. Each of Michael's killings are orchestrated to satisfy some sort of desire, perhaps a need for variation to exert itself within his first experience? This obviously lends his murderous actions an uncomfortable, sexual dimension. The women he slays are objects to him, unfeeling pieces for this killer to exhaust himself upon. Dolls to be rearranged then pulled apart. 

Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie is our way through this madness, her perspective eventually just as important to the film as Michael's. Sequels (re)arranged Laurie into the role of a younger sister for this sitter slasher, making her something closer to an always relevant objective that can be chased in perpetuity. Laurie then functioning as quarry across as many films as Curtis was prepared to sign on for. In this first film though the connection between the two characters is based purely on observation. Michael watches Laurie, following her around her neighbourhood. He sizes Laurie up in a way that goes beyond simply marking her as a potential target. She's special to him in some way; her murder will be a crescendo. Crucially, Laurie notices him too. She stares back at Michael, catching him before he's had a chance to dart away, puncturing the spectral anonymity that Myers otherwise seems to possess. In her friendship group, Laurie is the most innocent and least experienced. While her friends have steady boyfriends and are both sexually active, Laurie frets about Ben Tramer even knowing that she's interested in him. In this sense Laurie has not yet fully assumed the self-involved detachment or general passivity associated with adulthood in this film. She survives Michael's attacks because she's still able to tap into the childlike wits we see demonstrated elsewhere, most notably by Brian Andrews' Tommy Doyle, who clocks Nick Castle's The Shape repeatedly. She believes in The Bogeyman. 

Halloween Kills

With Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode counted out of this instalment - thanks to injuries suffered during the previous episode - the hysteria that drives Halloween Kills is that of Anthony Michael Hall's buffoonish Tommy Doyle, the child Ms Strode spent her evening looking after in John Carpenter's original film. Having grown into a drearily solemn raconteur, Doyle seizes on the opportunity presented by a new spate of murders, clumsily attempting to make himself the solution to the recurring problem of Michael Myers and win some form of approval from his slumbering former babysitter in the process. Doyle is self-important and not short on confidence; a red-faced eye-bulger who hurries from incident to incident, vomiting up a leadership routine that barely extends beyond a tumultuous chanting. He's a farcical figure. A one-note fantasist gumming up the works of a slasher film that is already disinclined to generating pity. 

David Gordon Green's second Halloween sequel, co-written with Scott Teems and Danny McBride, is structured to spend long stretches of time in the company of unlikable, middle-aged, cretins. The film is assembled in a style much closer to that of a comedy, with its various pieces working towards blunt, graceless, murder as if it carried the same dramatic inevitability, or entertainment, as a punchline. Halloween Kills is the horror film as a litany of quick, unsatisfying, releases rather than any sustained attempt to sculpt tension. The audience always knows more than the film's mindless throng too, so no sense of trepidation is never allowed to creep into our minds. A brief sequence in which a hospital, packed with the bereaved and panicking, suddenly goes into meltdown at the suggestion that Myers has begun to attack the building could work if the viewer was left in some doubt as to what was actually happening. We're always two or three steps ahead though. We know it isn't Myers, so we're just watching headless chickens piling on and over each other. 

As with Green's previous effort, Myers is calibrated to be an engine of violence, mechanically brutalising any body he come across. This lack of methodology - Myers seemingly killing people to pass the time on his way back to his childhood home - isn't helped by his constantly stressed invincibility or a cast of characters who, largely, fail to deviate from Green and McBride's well documented gift for ugly (but crucially not absurd in this instance) caricature. There's no sincerity or empathy in how Kills handles its victims. No consistent, creative level, decisions that indicate that the filmmakers have any interest in the brew they are concocting beyond wheel spinning. The film's better moments then are either happy accidents - a video stream briefly sputtering during a rare gooey kill in such a way that it recalls the blurring censorship visited on the animated Fist of the North Star movie - or strange little orphans in search of purchase. A closing segment built around Laurie's daughter Karen - played by the indefatigable Judy Greer - catching a glimpse of a child's image seared into a window pane elicits a strange supernatural sadness but, by then, it's too little too late. 

Blue Steel

Blue Steel gives Kathryn Bigelow and Jamie Lee Curtis the opportunity to deliver a fresh take on the kind of wild card policing popular in the big deal action films of the 1980s. Instead of exploring something typical, like how a well-trained killing machine might fit into day-to-day law enforcement, Bigelow and co-writer Eric Red use gender identity to power their conflict. Curtis plays Megan Turner, a rookie cop surrounded by men who make repeated, verbal objections to her mere existence.

This conflict is an ever-present stress on Turner. At home, Turner's oafish father beats her peacemaker mother whenever his daughter isn't around. When she drops by he swills cheap beer and rants about the shame her career has brought on the family. At work even would-be allies, like Clancy Brown's Detective Nick Mann, make it their business to comment on her attractiveness and spin ribald tales about severed manhoods. Bigelow frames these situations in terms of territorial markers; established men communicating their indifference to Turner's presence, and any attendant (or expected) social niceties, by being deliberately vulgar. There will be no concessions for Turner based on her sex, she is treated as an interloper who must do all the adjusting in this new, hostile environment.

After gunning down Tom Sizemore's wild-eyed armed robber, Turner is unable to locate the criminal's pistol. It's been pocketed by Eugene Hunt, a gibbering commodities trader played by Ron Silver. Hunt becomes obsessed with Turner, he talks about her and her act of violence in terms of revelation. She has, quite accidentally, revealed something mind-blowing to this maniac. He attempts to court her as a civilian, taking her to expensive restaurants and charting impromptu helicopter rides, then emulates her in private by blasting holes through the hapless citizens of New York City. Blue Steel staggers a number of conclusions, each detailing how Turner copes with the bizarre responsibilities that have been thrust upon her.

Hunt looms large come the finale but Turner also finds time and space to resolve the situation at home. After another bruise appears on her mother's arm, Turner beats her father prone then threatens to turn him in. He repents and communicates his failings - he feels weak sometimes. Although she has overpowered her father physically Turner is still able to listen to and understand his flawed emotional needs. Unlike similar scenes in umpteen other, male dominated, action films the act of intervention is soothing and corrective rather than just nakedly assertive. Bigelow and Red are able to breath new life into a stale genre by using their female lead as a perspective (rather than a cheap device) that informs then reconfigures every aspect of their plotting.