31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 2: HALLOWEEN (1978)

A bad night for babysitting.

John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN emerged seemingly from nowhere to set the tropes of what we now know as the slasher movie genre in stone, and as it has been written about ad infinitum since its release, I had until now avoided commenting on it in my yearly essays. Now, I only seek to include it because it’s an iconic piece and a game-changer for horror, and also because I want to get around to citing as many of the all-time classics as possible.

In the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, on the night of Halloween in 1963, six-year-old Michael Myers, dressed in a clown costume, stabs his teenaged sister to death with a butcher knife. With no motivation evident, the boy is relegated to a sanitarium for the next fifteen years, eventually escaping in time to get his hands a William Shatner mask and a mechanic’s overalls just in time for an implacable murderous rampage on Halloween night. Silent and seemingly superhumanly powerful, Michael (Nick Castle) makes short work a group of the neighborhood teens, with only virginal bookworm Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in the role that would define her career) left to menace. Laurie’s babysitting a pair of kids, so when Michael comes calling she must fight for their lives as well as their own. As the bodies pile up, Michael is pursued by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), his former institutional psychiatrist, with Loomis bearing a deep understanding of exactly what Michael is: an unstoppable entity of purest, most unbridled evil, in short, Michael is the Boogeyman. That’s all the explanation given and that’s all we really need. Michael Myers is that primal childhood fear of a reasonless monster that exists for no reason other than to kill, and as such he is the essence of terror distilled down to its most basic and potent.

HALLOWEEN is simplicity itself, shot on a shoestring budget and crafted as nothing kore than a massive “BOO!!!” for an eager audience. It’s not deep and it features allegory or social commentary. It’s simply a blank-faced, silent killer stalking and bumping off teens without any hope of a challenge, until he meets Laurie and encounters her equally-dogged will to protect her charges and make sure they all survive. It’s a setup that is all too easy to relate to, even with its weird elements (Michael being apparently unkillable, for one), and that no-nonsense approach made HALLOWEEN one of the most successful independent films ever made, raking in a box office yield of $60-70 million bucks off of a budget of a reported $300-$350,000.

HALLOWEEN’s plot is nothing more than a stripped-down “girl in danger” yarn, but it’s the direction of John Carpenter, his now-iconic score, and its considerable visual artistry and editing that make it rise well above the pack. And its success did not go unnoticed by other filmmakers — most notably those responsible for FRIDAY THE 13^th two years later — and in no time studios were churning out slasher films in droves, ripping off many of the tropes established by HALLOWEEN, but bearing little or none of its craft or creativity. HALLOWEEN achieved horror perfection without a trace of gore. It's descendants... Not so much.

Though PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM (both released in 1960), can be considered precursors, HALLOWEEN is the true Ground Zero for the slasher genre. This is where it all started, and after exploding out of the gate with such a genuine work of cinematic art, there was nowhere else for slasher genre to go but down. This was lightning in a bottle and a proving ground for a director who would go on to craft a number of other landmarks of horror. Yes, there are a handful of subsequent slashers that possess merit, but this here is the gold standard.

Poster for the theatrical release.

 

From the 2018 Chiller Theatre Con in Parsipanny, New Jersey. She's a sweetheart and very, very funny.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 1: FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

                                                    She axed for it. (I'll show myself out.)

In the summer of 1980, eager movie fans were foaming at the mouth in anticipation of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, the first of the STAR WARS sequels, so when a humble low-budget gore flick quietly landed in the nation’s theaters, pretty much no one expected it to become one of that year’s most lucrative box office draws.

Blatantly biting off of John Carpenter’s seminal HALLOWEEN(1978), FRIDAY THE 13^th was made on the cheap and totally eschewed the artistry that made HALLOWEEN the classic that it is, as well as not giving a squirt of rat’s piss if it were actually scary or not (it isn’t). No, this film’s sole raison d’etre was concerned with absolutely nothing but turning the screen into a savage charnel house, accented with titties. In other words, the perfect brainless sex ‘n’ violence exploitationer that the youth audience would devour as celluloid fast food. But what no one foresaw was the film reaping so much money that sequels were inevitable, unintentionally creating a cheapjack franchise that ended up as an iconic horror cinema institution. Most of the films in the series were outright shit, but they were the standard-bearer of what became known as the “slasher” film, a genre that became emblematic of its ‘80’s moment in history.

I was fifteen when FRIDAY THE 13^th arrived, and at the time all of us who were about to enter high school at the end of that summer saw gaining entrance to so outrageously gory of movie (for mainstream fare) as something of a rite of passage as we worked our often-confused way through coming of age during the Reagan era and the Cold War, a period in which ongoing fear of a nuclear conflagration was very real indeed. Horror movies were a means for coping, and though I had been a dyed-in-the-wool “horror kid” since age four, I had up to that point mostly been raised on content suitable for broadcast television, with the notable exceptions being DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) and ALIEN (1978), so I was in no way expecting something so extreme to run outside of a grindhouse. This was the kind of shit that could arouse the ire of censors and parental watchdogs of decency (which in some circles it did), but who gave a fuck what those squares thought? Us kids wanted to see what the big deal was, so we went in droves.

I had already seen HALLOWEEN, albeit in a version censored for broadcast on NBC during primetime, as well as proto-slasher PSYCHO (1960), so I was familiar with the basic tropes as set forth in films of genuine quality and merit, and my serious gore cherry had been popped by DAWN OF THE DEAD, but DAWN’s then-over-the-top gore, while quite shocking, worked perfectly within the apocalyptic context that it presented. It even offset a lot of its visceral nightmare with a blackly comedic sense of humor. FRIDAY THE 13^th, on the other hand, served up a bunch of ciphers that barely qualified as characters, and they were there to be chopped up and otherwise massacred for our amusement. At no point do we give a shit about any of them. It’s all about Tom Savini’s groundbreaking gore effects, baby. This sure as shit wasn't Kurosawa by any stretch of the imagination.

When my peers began seeing the movie and disseminating early reports on its content, many, including myself, were quite skeptical. It reminded me of all the times during elementary school when kids would describe details of “grownup” movies or TV shows during recess, and more often than not those details were over-inflated or straight-up lies in order to garner attention. (My go-to example of this phenomenon was a 4^th grade schoolyard incident the day after a network TV broadcast of ONCE UPON A MATTRESS, a musical retelling of THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA. Some kid claimed that it climaxed with a lot of farcical running around that saw the princess, who was reportedly hugely pregnant, having a bunch of mattresses topple onto her. The kid swore up and down that the pressure of the mattresses forced the baby to comically be fired from her nethers, complete with umbilical chord. Even at that tender age I knew bullshit when I smelled it, and from then on I looked askance at my peers’ “I swear to god this happens” tall tales.) Surely a movie showcasing nothing but repeated stabbings, mutilation, and dismemberment never be allowed to play at Westport’s classy and genteel Fine Arts 1 & 2…

The initial reports all emphasized the violence and gore while making no mention whatsoever of the plot. None of my peers gave a damn about plot or characterization, nor did anyone else in America’s moviegoing throng, apparently, and many times I heard the film earnestly assessed as “the scariest movie ever made.” (Which was also how they described POLTERGEIST a couple of years later.) When I finally saw the film for myself, I found the gore fun, but felt the film lacked in every other aspect. There’s no suspense, none of the characters inspire interest of caring, the script is awful the direction and cinematography are flat and uninspired, the jump scares swiftly become tedious, and when the killer finally revealed, it’s in no way believable because the person in question would not have had the physical wherewithal to perform some of the feats of brute strength depicted. In short, it’s a mindless spook show and nothing else.

But lack of a brain behind a film seldom stopped a movie from being a hit, so FRIDAY THE 13^th became the genre’s textbook template for the decade, with its innumerable knockoffs displaying even less creativity and artistry. Yes, there were some decent and entertaining slashers, but for the most part the genre was a cul de sac. That said, I freely admit to being a fan of this series purely because I’m amused by their escalating idiocy. The filmmakers are fully aware of exactly what they are churning out, and the audience is only too happy to turn up for the latest serving of blood sausage. It’s crap and we all know it, and sometimes one is just in the mood for junk food.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020: Introduction

 

How does one even write about horror in a year over-saturated with real world horrors?

Unless you have been fortunate enough to have resided under rock at the bottom of the ocean for the past seven months or so, you are no doubt aware of what an utter shit show 2020 has been. A global pandemic, disgraceful international politics, civil/social unrest, the United States standing unashamedly revealed as a racist cesspool (more openly than usual), basically everything but Mama Gorgo showing up in Manhattan. In short, the perfect climate in which to absorb scary movies in order to give our weary minds a respite from the real-life horrors that we endure every day.

This year’s entries will be all over the place in terms of quality and interest, and I hope you all have fun reading this stuff. Little it will be all that deep, but that’s the goal. Entertainment and diversion, so stay strong as we make our way to the 31^st, the first year that I can recall without a proper Halloween with the “little dead out in droves.” That truly bums me out, but better to err on the side of caution and common sense. We may love the macabre, but let’s not contribute ourselves and loved ones to the escalating body count, mmm-kay? Keep horror on the screen and the printed page, where belongs and is welcome.

BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC (2020)

Older and no wiser: the long-awaited and most welcome return of Bill S. Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) Theodore Logan.

Just finished watching BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC, and I found it to be considerably superior to the second entry in the series, BILL & TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY (1991), a film that is not without its supporters. And before we get to the review, the original BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) is still the best of the unintentional but very much a trilogy. This current entry brings everything full circle, and who of us who saw the original when it came out would have expected a return to our heroes some 31 years later?

The film finds our hapless heroes, still brought to life by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves — who slide back into the roles effortlessly — racing against the clock to simultaneously acquire the song that will unite humanity and save an unraveling universe, while also seeking to prevent their wives — 15th century princess, remember — from leaving them. Meanwhile, their daughters and female doppelgangers, Billie and Thea — they named their daughters after each other — go off on a trans-temporal adventure of their own as they assemble a band to play the song that their fathers are destined to craft, and in the process they set up "Bill & Ted: The Next Generation," should there be more of these.

 Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine): the next generation of time travelers?

Winter and Reeves return to their old characters deftly, having not lost a single step, and William Sadler returns as Death, reprising the role that was easily the best thing about BOGUS JOURNEY. Billie and Thea are basically Bill & Ted reborn as girls and they both work as distaff duplicates of their fathers, so they would be welcome if the torch is passed to them. Brigette Lundy-Paine is a standout as Billie, thanks to her nailing everything when it comes to a new embodiment of Reeves's Ted. She nails his manner of speech and his body language to an uncanny degree, and I would love to see more of her in the role. We also get Billie and Thea assembling an eclectic crew to travel through time with, including Jimi Hendrix, Luis Armstrong, Mozart, and others. It's a loony, convoluted mess that's a hoot to sit through, and it ends with quite an unexpected twist, actually...

There are no gags that went nowhere like in the previous film — one word: "Station," though station does briefly return as a nod to what came before — and the whole film is just a much-needed feel-good movie for this dire era. It's amusing on its own, but I think a lot of whether or not the viewer will enjoy it will be based on how much the viewer is already a Bill & Ted fan.

Bottom line: BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC is just what we need right now, and I feel good for having sat through it. If I had seen it in the theater at full price, I would have exited satisfied and in a good mood.

Lastly, illegal "party favors" are recommended for full enjoyment. Trust me on that one!

Poster for the theatrical release. 

RICK BAKER: METAMORPHOSIS Vol 1: 1950-1989, Vol 2: 1990-2019

Though I've had it since just after my birthday, I have finally sat down (during dialysis) and begun reading special effects makeup legend Rick Baker's enormous and comprehensive two-volume autobiography, METAMORPHOSIS.

Straight-up the most expensive book I have ever purchased as a new edition, this tome is worth its weight in gold to Baker's fans, something I have counted myself as since the 1970's, and upon cracking it open and thumbing through it I felt like I had not spent a dime. This an exhaustive retrospective that stuns with every page, providing candid info on Baker's career, straight from the man himself, warts and all.

I brought Volume One with me to dialysis and began reading; introductions from frequent collaborator John Landis and director/fanboy Peter Jackson were heartfelt, but I was riveted from page 1 of Baker's recollections, beginning with his childhood years of encouragement from parents who pretty much allowed him to turn their little house into a makeup effects lab (his dad was a frustrated artist of considerable talent whose parents did not think being an artist was a real job), chronicling his teen years and early gigs (including working on GUMBY and DAVEY AND GOLIATH), then on to his first meeting with mentor and effects makeup god Dick Smith, followed by chapters on the making of OCTAMAN and SCHLOCK and other low-budget fare before being tapped to do makeup effects for the eighth James Bond film, LIVE AND LET DIE. Right now I'm absorbing his account of his time serving as Dick Smith's assistant on THE EXORCIST, and while I thought I knew pretty much everything about making of that film, I somehow never knew Baler had been involved, as the (deserved) lion's share of the kudos went to Smith.

I cannot wait to resume reading, as what have read so far made the 3.5 hours of dialysis just fly by. In short: If you can spare the hefty price, order your copy before it goes out print and becomes an even pricier collector's item. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.

THUNDERBALL (1965)

Let's talk about THUNDERBALL (1965), the James Bond film released during the height of the 1960's super-spy boom, and the 007 movie released the year I was born.

Thanks to the unexpected runaway success of the third Bond outing, GOLDFINGER (1964), the next Bond film was afforded a then-massive budget of $9,000,000 and was shot in widescreen, with much of the action taking place in picturesque Jamaican locations. If the public wanted more 007, then that's what the studio would give them, so THUNDERBALL featured more violence, more sexy women, more outrageous gadgets, more quipping, more you name it, all crammed into two hours plus. Too bad they paid little or no attention to providing a decent script, fine-tuned editing, and a pace faster than that achieved on a belly full of Lorazepam.

With all of that said, let's go through the movie with my observations, culminating in a final verdict.

 

• THUNDERBALL sports my favorite Bond theme song. My go-to for karaoke, I nail the rest of the song surprisingly beautifully, but nailing that final note and sustaining it? Yeah, I am NOT Tom Jones. (Alas.)

• Next to MOONRAKER's skydiving sequence, THUNDERBALL features the best  of the series'  pre-credits mini-adventures. Bond killing the in-drag and allegedly dead Colonel Bouvard is a realistic and savage fight that ends in what can only be called cold-blooded murder. It's the Bond of the novels. 
• The direction by Terence Young is pedestrian at best. (No, I will NOT go into the whole story about Kevin McClory's involvement with this film and the legal battles connected to it. There's actually an entire book on the whole convoluted mess.) 
• The SPECTRE briefing after the opening looks fantastic, and set the standard for all such scenes in cinema going forward. The Ken Adam set design is a big reason for this. 
• Our villain, Emilio Largo, explains part of SPECTRE's plot to steal two nuclear warheads, and the details are filled in as we see the operation, which is tediously depicted with setup involving SPECTRE agents engaging in shenanigans with 007, who's conveniently at a health spa located next to a military base, and the first of many, MANY slow-moving underwater sequences. 
• Bond's relentless sexual harassment of spa physiotherapist Molly Peters is annoyingly, obnoxiously laddish and absolutely unacceptable in the year 2020, but the fact that he blackmails her into having sex with him places Bond firmly in the category of sexual predator. (Do NOT get me started on the barn scene in GOLDFINGER. I'll just leave it at "That was rape.") 
• The pacing of the entire film is turgid. 
• John Barry's score is one of the film's few saving graces. Very moody and evocative. 
• With the exception of a few scenes, this is where Connery's Bond is at his blandest. Surpassed in this respect only by his performance in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, where it's obvious he'd rather be anywhere else. 
• I had not seen this film in its entirety in a while, so for decades Emilio Largo held the title as my favorite Bond villain, simply because he's just so suave, cool, and old school Italian. Looking at him today, he doesn't really do much and is rather a personality-void bore. His sense of menace is nowhere near what I remembered it being. 
• Bond arriving late to the massive 00 briefing on Operation: Thunderball at MI-6 headquarters and M's reaction is classic. 
• Among the other agents at the briefing, a female can clearly be seen. Fuck this boring slog, what's her story? What would the adventures of a female 00 agent in the 1960's be like? I WANT THAT MOVIE. 
• The MI-6 briefing on Operation Thunderball is boring and, worse, it's totally redundant, as we, the audience, witnessed Largo's crew pull off the nuclear heist. WE know all of the details before the good guys do, so it's now the good guys catching up with us. 
• The mission itself must be accomplished within four days, and does not actually begin until well over a half-hour into the film. The setup to get to it is all just boring and could have been told in five minutes so we can get to the point. I get that they wanted to take advantage of the new widescreen format and colossal budget, but give us a meaty story to fill up the time instead of a load of bullshit. 
• Once the story's action shifts to Jamaica, the film has the look and feel of a bland travelogue or someone's vintage home movies of their summer vacation. 
• Domino, while a feast for the eyes, has zero personality. 
• How the hell do you fuck underwater in a coral reef with full scuba gear on? Seriously, exactly HOW THE HELL DOES THAT WORK? 
• There's a hell of a lot of nothing going on once we get to Jamaica. 
• Luciana Paluzzi as SPECTRE femme fatale Fiona Volpe is arguably the best and liveliest character in the entire film. Too bad she was stuck in this specific entry. 
• I liked Rik Van Nutter as Felix Leiter, but he has little to do here, and the character was recast for his next appearance anyway. 
• Martine Beswick as Paula, Bond's assistant in Jamaica, is wasted, as her character quite literally has no reason to be in the story other than to look stunning. (Beswick was last seen as one of the two battling gypsy chicks in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, the second and best James Bond film ever made.) 
• THUNDERBALL really only gets by because it stars Sean Connery as Bond. If any of the other Bond actors had swapped places with him in this film, it would universally rank toward the bottom of the roster. 
• Gratuitous items: the beloved Aston-Martin DB-5 (seen at the beginning), a ridiculously-placed rocket pack (how did it get there with no one noting Bond hauling it up to that exact, necessary location?), Largo's pet sharks, loads of boring flying around in helicopters, Bond's pointless super-scuba tank. 
• Clocking in at two hours and ten minutes, THUNDERBALL was the first of the lavish, bloated Bonds, and could easily have been trimmed by 45 minutes without losing anything of narrative value. 
• The sequence at the junkanoo is chaotic and feels like it was edited with a weed whacker. Too much going on and no real cinematic management of the parade's chaos. Consequently, though Bond is clearly in danger, there is zero suspense. 
• How Bond disposes of Fiona's corpse is a classic gag. Bond's dispatching of Vargas and the subsequent one-liner. (chef's kiss) 
• The famous underwater melee between MI-6 (in orange scuba gear) and Largo's forces (in black) is a boring mess and visual nightmare, as dozens of agents kill each other beneath the waves. Due to how we land creatures move when hampered by being submerged, everything is sloooooow. The presence of a random shark or lobster does nothing to liven the proceedings. 
• ANIMAL CRUELTY ALERT: During the underwater fight, there's a moment where a shark enters the fray and a SPECTRE frogman wrestles a speargun away from an MI-6 agent to shoot the deep-sea predator. We see — for real — the speargun discharge and send a spear through the shark's head and out the other side. It's an odd angle but there it is. We see other sharks get speared but this was a through-the-head shot. This was the 1960's, when this kind of thing could be included in a movie without a second thought. Poor wee sharks... 
• The climax takes forever and, no matter how hard it tried, it just wasn't thrilling. Maybe in 1965, but definitely not now. 
• Dud sequence or not, the Disco Volante is a cool yacht. 
• Largo's right hand man's heel turn comes from out of nowhere, and he was such a minor character that the viewer could be forgiven for having no idea who the hell he is when he releases a tied-up Domino.

FINAL VERDICT: After careful consideration, and even taking into account that it was for some reason a favorite during my youth, I have to rank THUNDERBALL somewhere among the weakest efforts in the series. It has too much going for it to consider it a total loss, but this is the exact moment when the Bond films became lavish, bloated, overlong, and, in many cases, tedious. They also became beat-for-beat remakes of GOLDFINGER, with the corporate thinking being "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," which led to Bond movies mostly becoming rote self-parodies with wildly-varying degrees of quality.

If one approached THUNDERBALL without any prior knowledge of James Bond, Sean Connery, or the cultural impact of the franchise and observed it from a purely objective standpoint, it's a middling thriller at best, whose over-length and dreary directing are its undoing. I won't be returning to it again, and my DVD will join the stack of films eventually to be sold off for cash or Japanese import toys at Book-Off in Midtown.

SAVAGE STREETS (1984) 2-Disc Special Edition

I saw SAVAGE STREETS when it came out back in 1984, and for no good reason I've held it in considerable esteem ever since. It's a pretty much by-the-numbers revenge exploitation flick about a bunch of overage-looking high school "bad" girls led by Linda "cross up the snatch" Blair who run afoul of a cheesy gang of thugs called the Scars. This bunch of meatheaded dudes drive around and antagonize the general public for kicks while influencing a nebbishy nice kid (Johnny Venocur) who joins their ranks in an attempt at becoming "cool," but the young man's journey takes a disturbing turn when his Alpha male cohorts decide to revenge themselves upon Blair and her girlfriends by kidnapping her adorable and innocent deaf younger sister (scream queen Linnea Quigley) and violently gang-raping and beating her on a grungy high school bathroom floor (not a sequence for the faint of heart or easily offended). Once Linda finds out what's happened to her sister (to say nothing of the sadistic murder of her soon-to-be-married best friend), she gears up in a black jumpsuit, gets her hands on a crossbow and goes a-huntin' for the testosterone-drenched gang scum. Needless to say, their fate ain't pretty.

SAVAGE STREETS is a garden variety and ever-so-'80's revenge opus made notable by its ludicrous dialogue, flagrantly too-old "teenagers," an incredibly bleak and nasty tone, and the presences of a slumming Linda Blair and John "Dean Wormer" Vernon, and while I find it fun for its sheer crassness value, there are certainly much better examples of the revenge flick genre to be had (the original DEATH WISH comes to mind). So why put it out in a 2-disc special edition? I have no idea, and the extra material is in no way worthy of a second disc. There's a so-so "making of" segment that has some fun insight from Blair (commenting on what I believe was her first topless scene) and Quigley (whose character endures one of the worst rape scenes this side of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE , a sequence that had to be considerably trimmed to garner an R rather than an X rating), but the commentaries are pretty uninteresting, particularly the one featuring the incredibly annoying wishes-he-were-as-amusing-as-he-thinks-he-is Johnny Venocur.

So if you do decide to pick up SAVAGE STREETS, skip the second disc and watch it the way it was meant to be seen: in a dank basement, surrounded by a gaggle of liquored-up and like-minded sleaze junkies. You could do a lot better, but you could also do a hell of a lot worse. And unless she's made of very stern stuff, DO NOT convince your girlfriend to sit through this one. That rape scene's a potential relationship-ender, and if you ask me the revenge doesn't even come close to being severe enough for the damage done to a cutesy-sweet girl who looks like she should be a regular on SESAME STREET.