Tag: Anthony Michael Hall

Halloween Kills (2021, David Gordon Green)

Halloween Kills is a fascinating sequel. It’s a terrible movie—though probably better than the previous one just because there’s so much less Jamie Lee Curtis, so you’re not watching her embarrass herself the entire time (though she’s got some really embarrassing moments). But given it’s the ninth Halloween sequel and the second remake of Halloween II… a lot is going on in what the filmmakers do and don’t do. And if you’ve suffered through the other twelve movies or whatever… as a viewer, you too can see the creative choices in context.

So fascinating.

And terrible.

It’s so bad. At least the first forty-five minutes are a gory, cruel, humor-drained riff on a fan service sequel. Then, after establishing Will Patton didn’t die last time and then flashing back to the original Halloween and doing a non-Halloween II sequel in flashback—how they missed a Curtis in the hospital joke is beyond me, but I’m not sure I’d feel good if I felt simpatico with Kills’s makers—the movie brings back supporting cast from the first movie. Not Halloween H40 first movie—we’ve established everyone’s back already—but Halloween 1978 first movie. Nurse Nancy Stephens is back, plus little kid grown up Kyle Richards. Anthony Michael Hall appears as the other little kid grown up, as does Robert Longstreet, but Longstreet’s so indistinct it seems like a retcon. Because Halloween movies need retcons in 2021.

Charles Cyphers is also back, but later in the movie and entirely coincidentally—fatefully? Also returning are Michael Smallwood and Carmela McNeal as the disposable Black couple. They were in the last movie but apparently not memorably enough. And Dylan Arnold as Andi Matichak’s boyfriend (and Longstreet’s son). This Halloween is the one where we get the Elm Street parents going after Freddy, basically. Though not emphasizing the teenagers in danger because… well, why do teenagers when you can do stunt cameos and then little kids. Though the little kids in danger stuff turns out to be a Season of the Witch: Halloween 3 reference, which is kind of the only thing actually cool in the movie. Like, they do a solid job working it in.

Oh, and there’s also some good gore animatronics. Kills’s Michael Myers is cruel and gross, basically doing anatomy experiments, and there are occasionally good gore animatronics. The rest of the time, it’s just gross for gross’s sake, but they do an actual fine job at least twice.

Some of John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies’s score is good. Mainly in the first forty-five when it’s the not-funny spoof of itself. During those moments, it seems like making a good Halloween escaped director Gordon Green and his co-writers, Scott Teems and Danny McBride, with them knowingly avoiding past tropes only for it to fail.

It’ll turn out Gordon Green, Teems, and McBride have some big ideas to work out in the second half of the movie, so no, it was just them killing time before their “unjust, lawless mob” plotline, which isn’t the movie but also is the movie. It’s this movie; it’s just this movie is actually only set up for the next movie. Not doing a “Michael Myers Will Return in HALLOWEEN ENDS” is actually the filmmakers’ worst move, and they don’t make a single good one. They just don’t let the film acknowledge itself because they’re pretending it’s serious. And we get to see how Gordon Green does serious with Halloween, and it stinks. It’s embarrassing and silly, and you can tell they tried real hard.

Anyway.

Lots of bad and middling performances. Judy Greer looks really underwhelmed her sequel option got picked up. Curtis and Patton, who bond in their own Halloween II pseudo-remake, are bad. Hall’s not good, but it’s also a lousy part. The supporting cast ranges. Occasionally there will be some effective slasher sequences, possibly thanks to Timothy Alverson.

It’s hard to tell if anything’s good about Kills, production-wise, because Gordon Green makes an absurd choice every thirty seconds, and it distracts, but Alverson’s editing seems good, actually. Whereas Michael Simmonds’s photography is just not incompetent. Also not sure about Richard A. Wright’s production design. Is it terrible, or is it bad at making South Carolina look like Illinois, or is it referencing the Rob Zombie redneck Halloween remakes? Or is it all three?

Again, it’s a fascinating sequel.

Shitty movie, though. Just an utterly shitty movie.

Sixteen Candles (1984, John Hughes)

I enjoy throwing odd ones up occasionally, whether they’re inexplicable (Transporter 2) or heavily based in nostalgia (any Godzilla film). Sixteen Candles is somewhat both, though renting it was the fiancée’s idea. My freshman year of college, I did one of my presentation on racism in John Hughes’ films. Sixteen Candles has some great examples–not just the Chinese exchange student frequently referred to as “the Chinaman,” and played by the obviously ethnically Japanese Gedde Watanabe–it also makes fun of the physically handicapped. Great stuff there. I also remember it being one of my favorite Hughes films. It’s hard to have a favorite Hughes film because none of them are any good, but after this viewing, I think I can safely say Sixteen Candles is my favorite. In fact, it’s the only one I’d watch again.

Immediately after this film, Hughes started infusing his films with social commentary (usually about the poor boy and the rich girl or the poor girl and the rich boy) and it was pretty bad. For the first half of Sixteen Candles, I was going to decry Hughes as the forebear of shitty Hollywood story structure. Molly Ringwald–the lead of the film–disappears for about twenty minutes, maybe more, and the film’s only ninety minutes long. In her absence, there are these great scenes with Michael Schoeffling and Anthony Michael Hall–and I realized why I liked Sixteen Candles so much. The film makes no claims at reality–it speaks directly to the viewer on a few occasions, something Hughes later milked in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off–and there’s no real dramatic tension. It’s an incredibly light comedy and taken as such, it’s a pleasant diversion.

Oddly (given National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation), Sixteen Candles fails the most in the simple family situation. Hughes doesn’t know what to do–he gives Ringwald an asshole little brother and a doped-up sister. He can’t even give Paul Dooley anything to do. Ringwald holds a lot of the film together, but it’s Schoeffling and Hall who really have the most to do. I’d never been particularly impressed by Hall–never had any idea why, for instance, Kubrick wanted him for Full Metal Jacket–but he does a good job in an impossible role. His character completely changes–in the viewer’s perception–in a six or seven minute scene. It’s good work. Schoeffling never really went anywhere. However, according to one website, endless numbers of baby boys born in the mid-1980s were named Jake after his character. He has even more impossible role of being the perfect guy and turns it into a deep performance. There’s none of that serious Hughes teen angst in this one, so the actors aren’t given anything impossible to pull off. Their only job is to make the viewer enjoy the film.

As for Hughes the director… well, Sixteen Candles has got to be his best looking film. The cinematography is incredibly lush in this one. It’s not as far removed as Technicolor, instead a welcoming, idealized reality (there’s also little damaging violence inflicted on the film’s many “geeks,” another bit of that idealization).

Sixteen Candles is not a great film. Even without the bigotry, there’s the incredible shallowness. However, it’s acceptance of that shallowness is exactly what makes it an enjoyable experience.