“Day of the Dead” begins in an all-white room that appears to have been made from cement blocks. There’s a person sitting against one wall as the credits roll.
And now the person looks up, and we know it’s a she, and not just an it. Though I suppose they could just be building to a twist, wherein the only men left in the world try to mate with the one remaining woman, and discover that “she” isn’t actually a she at all.
There’s an award-winning short him in there somewhere.
The woman looks at the opposite wall. There’s a calendar there, with every day crossed off in October. She goes to touch the calendar, and a bunch of undead arms burst through the wall. Dream sequence!
And now we’re in an awake sequence. We’ve got:
Dream woman, dude with a big beard, dude with a little beard, and black dude.
The woman appears to be in charge of the operation, and the operation is this: They’re flying over Florida in a helicopter, in an attempt to contact any survivors by radio. But no one is answering, so dude with the small beard wants to head back to their base.
The woman insists that they land, and tells John (the black dude) that they’re touching down. John says he’ll land, but he’s not stopping the engine and he’s not getting out of the helicopter, and at the first sign of trouble he’s taking the chopper back up.
The helicopter lands, and Big Beard and Dream Woman hop out of the chopper and go looking for people.
The streets are very, very, very empty. Big Beard yells out, using a bullhorn, asking if anyone is there.
At long last, we hear someone walking, and see the shadow. But it turns out that the “person” walking is super-duper dead.
As are the other various and sundry people we see. Although I can’t tell if the alligator is alive or undead.
In the chopper, Short Beard and John radio out to whoever is listening. John notes that it’s a dead place, and that you can hears the sounds of the dead.
In the city, Big Beard takes off, clearly determining that there’s nothing to be done here.
Later, the chopper flies right on back to base.
Base, in this instance, seems to be an actual base of some kind, with a large fence around it. The dead press against the fence, but don’t manage to push it over. That is some industrial-grade fencing right there.
John tells two dudes, who I guess are soldiers, to gas up the chopper. Dream Girl says to wait until dark, because there are too many of the dead things out there and having people in sight riles them up.
John disagrees – if they need to make a fast getaway, then the chopper needs to have fuel in it at all times.
They reach an impasse, and the soldiers, who don’t appear to like working very much anyway, opt to put off gassing up the helicopter.
Dream Girl opens the door of the chopper and talks to Big Beard, whose name is Miguel. Miguel is clearly freaked out, or at Dream Girl puts it, collapsing from stress. Miguel points out that everyone is collapsing from stress, except her, and gets super-defensive about it.
Then he storms out of the helicopter.
Dream Girl looks around and notices there’s a new grave nearby. John walks up to her and says, “And then there were twelve.” Also, he calls her Sarah.
Sarah notes that the burial must be why the dead outside are all riled up. Well, Sarah, you might be correct, but have you stopped to think that you’re the only food for something like 150 miles?
Frankly, if there was one Burger King sitting in the middle of nowhere, and I hadn’t eaten anything in a few weeks, I’d probably be pretty riled up, too.
John isn’t done yet. He points out that what they’re doing is crazy, and presents an alternative – they should hop onto the helicopter, take off, and use whatever time they have left to soak up some sunshine.
Which, as a romantic notion, sounds great. As a practical one, whatever time they have left would probably be cut pretty short by the lack of food available. Or maybe I just have a bad attitude.
No matter. The foursome gets onto a metal platform, Little Beard presses a button, and they all descend into the ground.
A solider yells out, “Another waste of time?”” as they get off the platform. John confirms that’s the case.
Another pair of soldiers pull up in what appears to be a golf cart, and ask if they found anything. Sarah says no, and tells him that they went 100 miles up the coast each way.
The other solider in the golf cart tells Sarah they need to go collect two more zombies. Sarah asks what “Logan” is going with them. So I guess we’ll meet him soon.
Sarah also asks if anyone else can go, and the solider points out that there isn’t anyone else – they’re it.
Sarah says they’ll go, and Miguel decides to join them.
The four people on collection duty drive around the underground bunker, passing, among other things, a whole bunch of boats. Man, would I love to know what those are doing down there.
I suppose it would be helpful to describe the bunker in general, but I have to say, it appears to be some kind of massive mine that’s been re-purposed. Rock walls, rock floor, rock ceiling. And a bunch of random flotsam lying around. So there isn’t much to describe.
Eventually, the group reaches the “end” of the mine, where a large wooden fence has been erected to block off a really wide hallway. Or whatever you call it when it’s a cave. Tunnel, maybe?
Either way, big wood fence.
Sarah notes that the list of zombies taken out from behind the fence doesn’t seem to have been updated recently. One of the soldiers says that sometimes, they forget to update the list. This makes Sarah upset, since they won’t know how many they have left if they don’t keep track of them.
I’d love to say I understand how crabby she is about it, but seriously – it’s not like they can’t collect a bunch from outside, right? I mean, I’m sure it’s tricky and all, but it can’t be all that rough.
The other solider starts screaming, alerting the zombies to their presence. But they’re really slow about coming for the solider.
The first solider points out that the zombies are scared – they’re worried about what “Dr. Frankenstein” will do to them.
Sarah points out that if they really are scared, it means the zombies are learning.
There’s some more taunting, because this is a low-budget movie and it helps to pad the running time a bit, and then Miguel goes to get up on the platform on top of the fence, along with one of the soldiers.
Sarah protests, since she knows Miguel is pretty much on the verge of losing it, and heated and somewhat sexist words are exchanged. Then Miguel goes on up.
The solider hooks one of the zombies using a pole, and then Miguel grabs it by the neck using a hook and collar contraption. They drag the zombie through a couple of gates, to keep it separate from the others, and then we’ve got:
A solider and Miguel up on a platform, each holding a zombie using a pole.
Sarah and another soldier are on the ground, getting ready to deal with the zombie who is already outside the gate.
The zombie Miguel is pole-holding suddenly yanks forward, and the pole comes out of his hand.
Sarah grabs the pole.
This causes the solider up top to freak out. He grabs Miguel by the collar and holds Miguel’s head over the zombie struggling in the pen below.
Sarah cocks her gun and tells the solider to let go, and the solider tosses Miguel to the floor.
Later, the two soldiers chain the zombies to a wall in a laboratory.
Elsewhere, Sarah, preps a sedative for Miguel, who angrily throws it against the wall and says he isn’t going to let Sarah dope him up. Sarah says that Miguel needs a sedative, and that he’s behaving dangerously.
Once again, Miguel says that Sarah hurt his feelings. Sarah walks towards him, and he tells her to stay away. Then he slaps her across the face. Twice.
Then he moves forward to get a hug.
Just a tip, dude – physically abusing the only female around is probably not the best course of action. He also does some crying.
Then Sarah jabs him with the dope. So he lies down on a cot and cries some more.
Elsewhere, a doctor talks to yet another soldier, explaining that they need sterile conditions.
The doctor tells the solider in charge – man, I’d kill for a name right about now – that Cooper promised…
But Head Dude says that Cooper is dead, and that the doc can work with what the doc has got.
Sarah shows up, and asks whey they can’t all just get along. Yes, she really does.
Sarah goes on to state that Miguel needs to be pulled off active duty, but Head Dude says Miguel can’t be spared. Then he offers to put Miguel in quarantine, so that the rest of the men might have a shot with the one available woman in the place.
There are a few more sexist and racist comments tossed out as well, but let’s just skip to the end of the scene:
Sarah tells the doctor, whose name is Ted, that they should leave. Head Dude says he’s calling a meeting at 7 PM, and that everyone needs to be there, including “Dr. Frankenstein and Your Boyfriend.”
Bad words are exchanged.
Sarah and Ted leave, and while walking down the corridor Ted tells Sarah to watch herself – Rhodes is dangerous. Rhodes would be the head dude, I guess.
Sarah asks where Logan is, and heads over to talk to him.
Dr. Logan is in his lab, with a bunch of dead bodies and body parts – and also a zombie with a chain around his neck.
There’s more back-and-forth chatter here, but long story short, Logan is trying to domesticate zombies. Which sounds like kind of an awesome idea, until you realize that there are just way too many of them for domestication to be a practical solution to anything.
While they’re talking, Sarah realizes that there’s a uniform on the floor that says Cooper. Logan took the newly-but-not-dearly-departed Cooper’s body to use as a specimen. He even notes that Cooper is more useful to them this way than he ever was before.
The person buried earlier that day was one of the zombies.
Which isn’t quite a continuity error, I guess. I mean, Sarah did say, “Oh, it must have been that freshly-dead body we buried that riled up all the ghouls outside the fence.” But since they buried a dead zombie, that clearly wasn’t the case.
So what did rile them up? Do they just really like helicopters?
Over on an operating table, one of the specimens breaks his manacle, and as he tries to roll off the table, his guts fall out. Logan takes a drill to the creature’s head, and kills it.
Over at the mess hall, the chopper pilots eat. Short Beard, whose name is McDermott, I guess, says he can’t raise anyone on the radio. Which I thought we already knew.
Which is when we realize that this is that 7 o’clock meeting thing that everyone was/is supposed to be at.
The soldiers berate McDermott for not trying harder, or doing a better job, and McDermott points out that much of what he’s using is World War II technology. When someone points out that they used to be able to reach Washington D.C., McDermott explains that they used to use relays, but now they’re just going over the air. He concludes this thought with: “You know the power’s off on the mainland now in case you haven’t heard, and all the shopping malls are closed.”
That’s called an in-joke.
Sarah asks if Rhodes wants anything else, and Rhodes says he doesn’t think the weekly reports mean anything. He wants to know, in simple terms, if the scientists are accomplishing anything.
The various soldiers spout some more racism and sexism, and Sarah stands up and gets ready to leave – only Rhodes stops her with a, “Sit down or so help me God I’ll have you shot.”
Sarah stops and turns around. More heated words are exchanged.
Ted tries to jump to Sarah’s defense, and Rhodes demands that one of the soldiers shoot Sarah. The solider yells Bang!
Rhodes stands up, pulls out his gun, and tells the solider that if the solider doesn’t shoot Sarah, the solider is going to be shot.
The solider prepares to shoot Sarah.
John stands up and indicates that Sarah should sit down before she gets shot.
The solider is just about to shoot Sarah, when Sarah decides that not dying would be much more awesome than dying and she goes to sit down.
Rhodes does some monologueing about how he’s in charge, and about how now that he’s in charge, this isn’t a science installation, it’s a military operation. And this is a war. And a bunch of other stuff along those lines.
He points out that their job is not to bring the creatures downstairs, next to where they sleep – their job is to shoot them in the head.
And then Logan appears, and points out that they don’t have enough ammunition to shoot them all in the head. The time to do that would have been at the beginning. Now they’ve been overrun.
The numbers are about 400,000 to 1, by Logan’s calculations.
Logan goes on to say he was unavoidably detained, and he asks if there’s any food.
Rhodes replies with one of the greatest unknown lines in the history of cinema: “I’m running this monkey farm now, Frankenstein!”
Rhodes wants to know what Logan is doing with his time. He asks what’s stopping them from killing all the remaining specimens, taking his men and leaving the scientists here to rot?
Logan asks: Where will you go?
Logan goes on to assert that there’s no way they can kill all of the creatures now – their only hope is to domesticate them.
Rhodes wants to know what that means.
Logan says they should have something to show them in a matter of weeks.
Sarah tries to backtrack, explaining that it could be months or years before they have something concrete.
The conversation starts to loop around again, and finally Rhodes declares: “You’ve got a little more time.” He adds, a moment later, “I ain’t sayin’ how much.”
Bottom line, he wants results, and nothing happens without him knowing about it.
The meeting breaks up, and John breaks it down for Sarah, and the audience. Rhodes won’t kill John, because he’s the pilot. He won’t kill McDermott because the man knows electronics. He won’t kill Logan, because Logan can talk him out of it.
But everyone else is expendable.
Later, Sarah sits on the floor of her office, and has a nightmare wherein Miguel rolls over on the cot and his guts fall out.
When she wakes up, Miguel tells her that she’s afraid, and she tells him to get out. Man, this is going to make mealtime seriously awkward. It’s not like she can hide out in the crowd of people in the mess hall.
Sarah goes to a water fountain to take some aspirin, and hears some grunting. She walks down the hall and all the soldiers, who have gotten into some strange sort of wrestling match, come shooting out the door.
Which is, I guess, what happens when there aren’t all that many women around.
McDermott arrives, and walks away quickly with Sarah in tow, hoping to protect her from whatever might happen. Once they’re in another hallway, he pulls out his ever-present flask and offers her some brandy.
She takes a pull, then a longer pull.
They grab a couple of helmets with lights on them, and head somewhere inside the cave, until they find a trailer marked, “The Ritz.” This is where John and McDermott live.
Sarah and McDermott go in, and Sarah finds that the trailer is nicely decorated. They head out the back door, where John and McDermott have laid out astroturf and lawn furniture.
John asks what’s on Sarah’s mind. At firs she’s reluctant to say, but then she states that John and McDermott never lift a finger to help anyone, even though they eat “their” food and drink “their” water.
John notes, correctly, that his job is to fly the helicopter, and that they don’t believe in what they – they being the scientists and the military – are doing. He holds up a binder, and points out that the cave contains all the important records of the United States of America: Fortune 500 companies, who owes who money, and a bunch of other things that NO ONE WILL EVER CARE ABOUT AGAIN.
The place is a 14-mile tombstone.
He continues: He thinks everything they’re doing is a waste of time, and time is all they have left. What they really need to do is go somewhere, anywhere, and start over. Make some babies. And tell the babies to never, ever come and dig up the relics of what’s pretty much already a lost civilization.
Sarah says, “Hmmm…”
There’s some more philosophical stuff after that, but it all boils down to this: Man, these people are full of speeches.
Later, Sarah sits in her lab, trying to figure out whatever it is they’re never going to figure out.
She stops to take some more aspirin, and sees Ted in his office, where he’s trying to teach a zombie to eat Beef Treats.
Logan shows up, talking about his theories about how zombies can be trained to be good little girls and boys, based on possible future rewards. Just like children can be trained.
He tells Sarah and Ted to follow him, and when the zombie in Ted’s office knocks over a table, Logan shuts off the lights, and says the zombie can just sit in the dark and think about what he’s done. In the background, the “Gonk” music, which played during the “zombies go mall-walking” segments of “Dawn of the Dead,” plays for a couple of bars.
I’m guessing it’s meant to be sort of a trombone “Wah-wah-waaaaah” sort of joke.
I was just going to sum up what Logan does next, but it’s so deeply disturbing as you’re watching it, I’m going to type out his dialogue verbatim. Keep in mind, he’s talking about a zombie here – at least at first:
“I call him Bub. That’s what the club fellows used to call my father. Can you imagine a surgeon called ‘Buuub?’ Nobody seemed to mind, though. He was rich. My father was rich. He used to say that I’d never be rich doing pure research. I’d never be rich. Bub’s been responding so well lately, I’ve let him live. But is he alive or dead? Well that’s the question these days, isn’t it? Well, let’s say that I let him continue to exist.”
Have I mentioned that Logan’s white coat is totally covered in blood?
Logan goes in the greet Bub, and gives him a toothbrush, a razor, and a copy of the novel “Salem’s Lot.”
Bub sort of tries to shave, and ends up scratching himself, which is icky. Then he picks up the book, and tries to “read” it.
Logan says that Bub remembers everything that he used to.
Ted points out that just because Bub “reads” a book, it doesn’t mean that Bub is smart. But then Sarah points something out – Bub isn’t trying to eat Logan.
Rhodes and another soldier arrive, asking what’s going on. Rhodes is going to shoot Bub, but Logan tells Rhodes that Bub is safe, and gives Bub a phone, and sorta-kinda gets Bub to say, “Hello, Aunt Alicia.”
Rhodes drops something on the floor, and Bub looks up – and salutes Rhodes.
(And here, I think is everything that’s either right or wrong with this movie. If you love Bub, if you want him to succeed, if you love the idea of a zombie retaining his humanity, the idea that some small part of us is still human even after we’re dead, you’ll love this flick.
If you’re just waiting for people to get eaten, well, it’s a bit of a hike until you get to that point – and there aren’t many action sequences in the meantime.)
Logan tells Rhodes to salute back, to see what happens. Rhodes decides this is not a good idea.
Logan has a solider take the bullets out of his pistol, which he then gives to Bub. Bub looks at the pistol -–and then yanks the slide. He points the pistol at Rhodes – and pulls the trigger.
Later, Rhodes has everyone in a meeting. He’s crabby because he thinks that the scientists just want to teach the zombies tricks. Whereas Rhodes just wants to see them all dead.
Logan explains that what they’re doing is the bare beginning of social, civilized behavior. And civility is what separates humans from the animals.
And then it’s even later, and the soldiers are pulling a couple more zombies out from behind the wooden barrier they’re storing them in.
The collar on one of the zombies breaks, and it tears the throat out of one of the soldiers.
Miguel tries to stop another escaping zombie, and it takes a bite out of his arm.
Miguel runs away, and Sarah gives chase.
The soldier with the missing throat asks another soldier to shoot him in the head. The soldier shoots him.
Sarah chases down Miguel, finally catching up to him in from of John and McDermott’s trailer. John grabs Miguel, and Sarah whacks him on the back of the head with a rock.
Sarah chops off Miguel’s arm using a machete, then creates a makeshift torch, and cauterizes the rather massive wound.
The moment that’s over, Rhodes and two other soldiers come running up, claiming that Miguel is the reason their friend is dead.
Sarah tells them that she amputated Miguel’s arm, and that he’ll be okay, and that if he isn’t, she’ll shoot him herself.
But it doesn’t matter – the solider still plans on killing Miguel, no matter what. Until John and McDermott pull out their guns.
This puts everyone at an impasse.
A lot of harsh words are exchanged, which happens a lot in the movie. Budget cuts, I guess. Words are, after all, cheap, whereas action sequences aren’t.
Final tally: Rhodes says, essentially, that the scientists aren’t getting anything from the soldiers any more. The soldiers are going to go to the corral and kill all the remaining zombies in there.
The soldiers leave.
Sarah is shaking, and crying, and freaking right out. She falls into John’s arms, and he holds and attempts to comfort her.
And then they’re putting Miguel into a bed.
Sarah says she’s going to need to go to the lab, to get some morphine. McDermott says he’s going with Sarah.
John says if they aren’t back in half an hour, he’s coming after them.
In Logan’s lab, McDermott basically goes, “What’s Logan been doing here?” Sarah collects whatever she thinks she’ll need.
McDermott presses play on Logan’s tape recorder, and Logan’s voice starts up, doing that babbling thing Logan does so well. McDermott realizes there’s fresh blood on his shirt, and he looks down, and sees a sheet covering something.
That something is the head of the solider who was just killed while collecting specimens. Apparently, the solider who shot the guy managed to miss the brain, and now the head is just sitting there, trying to eat people, even though it doesn’t have any way to process the food.
It’s just a head.
Sarah goes to shoot the head in the head, and McDermott tells her not to, since it will attract Rhodes and the remaining soldiers, which is not a good idea.
To say the least.
McDermott says they should get out of there – and that he’s starting to think they should take the helicopter before someone else does.
They go out into the hallway, and spot Logan, who is going to talk to Bub. Bub has headphones on, which Logan adjust to go over Bub’s ears.
And, wonder of wonders, Bub doesn’t try to eat Logan’s arm. Even after Logan turns on Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
Logan then tries to teach Bub how to operate the tape recorder that’s playing music for Bub.
Logan congratulates Bub on his hard work, and then offers Bub a reward. Fresh meat. Fresh people meat.
Sarah and McDermott take in all of this, but have to turn away at the people eating. Which is right when Rhodes shows up, and demands to know what Bub is eating.
They take Logan to the freezer, where they find the body of the dead solider. Then they shoot Logan. A lot.
Rhodes tells his soldiers to take all of the scientist’s guns.
At the trailer, John grabs a gun and heads out to find his friends.
At which point, Miguel wakes up, or snaps to, or otherwise regains focus.
John finds all the soldiers and scientists, and Rhodes tells John to drop his weapons or the scientists are all going to die.
You know something? Considering how talky this flick is I suspect that with a little work, this whole movie could totally be a stage play. I would go see that in a heartbeat. Get on that, folks with a lot of free time and stage blood.
John drops his weapons, and one of the soldiers takes his machete.
Rhodes tells John that they’re leaving. Now. Just John and the soldiers.
John says no.
Rhodes shoots Ted in the head.
Sarah give a good old-fashioned, “Nooo!”
Rhodes has the soldiers shove Sarah and McDermott into the corral with the zombies.
John pleads for their lives, stating that he won’t fly if Rhodes won’t free his friends.
Rhodes says he’s not making deals.
John tries to grab a gun from one of the soldiers, but it doesn’t work, and Rhodes tells one of the soldiers to beat some sense into John – but not to kill him.
McDermott grabs a board for a weapon, and he and Sarah run into the zombie-filled cavern, away from the gate, figuring it’s their only hope to find safety.
The zombies, of course, give chase.
John punches out a solider, and then gets a few punches to the face.
Rhodes tells John to fly. John says not a chance.
John is just about to get another beating, when everyone hears a noise. It’s the elevator.
Miguel is headed outside.
Deep in the dark caves, Sarah and McDermott try to find a way out – until they get attacked. They fight off the zombies with a board and a shovel. Zany fun kill: McDermott shoves the shovel into one of the zombie’s mouths, and pops off the top of its head – but it’s eyes keep moving, since he didn’t damage the center of the brain.
And now we’re back with Rhodes and John. Rhodes takes his eyes off John for a second, and John jumps Rhodes and knocks him out – but he doesn’t kill Rhodes.
Back in the lab, Bub accidentally releases the pin holding his chain in place. Bub is a free man. Um... thing.
The two soldiers sent to find Miguel discover that Miguel broke all the controls to the elevator. The only way to operate the elevator now is with the hand box, which is currently at ground level.
Rhodes and the previously unconscious soldier awaken to discover that John has taken all their weapons.
This makes Rhodes sad.
John, meanwhile, is running through the caves, armed to the teeth. Although it’s tough to tell which caves he’s in. He might have gone after his friends, but I can’t tell. A bat flies by him, and I can’t say what the significance of that is.
He calls to Sarah and McDermott, so I guess he’s headed after that.
Sarah calls to John, John shoots a few zombies, and McDermott stops drinking long enough to club a zombie in the head. This causes him to drop his flask. Looks like he just gave up drinking.
Outside, Miguel walks up to the fence and opens that bad boy up. Zombies come pouring into the compound.
Miguel then runs to the elevator platform, waits for the zombies to overpower him, and presses the down button.
Is it worth noting the zombie clown? Because there’s a zombie clown. Zombie clown!
The few remaining soldiers, who are all trying to fix the elevator, see the platform coming down with a WHOLE lotta zombies on it, and they run for it.
Rhodes grabs the golf cart and drives away, leaving all his companions behind.
He finds a door, jumps through it, and locks it behind him.
Elsewhere in the complex, Bub locates Logan’s dead body, and shows him that his chain has come undone. Then he realizes that Logan is, like, really, really, dead. Really. Bub is grief-stricken. Really.
Bub spots a couple of guns on the ground.
Out in the caves, zombies are everywhere, and the soldiers are on the run. But we’re running out of movie here, so it’s time for some people to die real bad.
The first one gets his head ripped off his body, but his jaw is still working as it’s pulled off.
One of the other soldiers just keeps on shooting at zombies, but fails to hit any of them in the head. So he ends up dead.
A third solider goes full automatic on the zombie hoard, but aims for their chest area, instead of their heads.
Frankly, I’m shocked all these people didn’t die a long time ago.
The solider encounters the door that Rhodes locked, and tries to open it – and when that doesn’t work, he shoots it open.
The solider heads in the door, and here come all the zombies – including the zombie clown again. I kind of love that guy.
The solider finds Bub, and Bub, who picked up a gun, shoots at the solider.
The solider sneaks into a room and hides behind the door, waiting for Bub. So he fails to see the other zombies who come up behind him and take a chunk out of his neck.
And then – more zombies! It’s a plethora of zombies! All at markdown prices!
But no clown. Seriously, y’all – I want to see the clown eat someone. Can you imagine the nightmares you’d have after seeing something like that?
No matter. The solider finally head-shots a few of the zombies, but it’s too little, too late. He knows he’s on his way out, so he sticks the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
In the caves, McDermott and Sarah encounter… even more zombies. Which I guess should be obvious by now, right? I mean, they aren’t going to get in a slap-fight with a tiger at this point. The word “Dead” is right in the title.
They get ready to fight, when finally, John catches up to them, hands out the guns, and they go to town.
They get all the way through the cave, and locate… another part of the underground bunker. Huh. All right then.
McDermott locates the elevator, which he notes is, “Temporarily Out of Service.”
So John sends Sarah up a ladder. McDermott and John follow, after John shoots another zombie in the head, and just avoids being bitten by another one.
You know what? I think they’re in a missile silo, or something. Though it could be anything, really.
And now, we’re back with Rhodes, who encounters Bub, who is still armed.
Bub shoots Rhodes. Rhodes calls Bub a bunch of bad names, and gets shot again. He ends up crawling along the floor as Bub slowly stalks towards him.
Rhodes yells out, “Come on!” He drags himself to his feet, and pushes himself along the wall, trying to find an open door.
He does, but it’s filled with zombies.
Rhodes screams and turns towards Bub.
Bub shoots him in the belly, and the zombies grab him.
Bub salutes. Rhodes falls to the ground, and they tear his legs off and eat ‘em up real good, as Rhodes yells out, “Choke on ‘em!”
Then there’s like three minutes of eating scenes, because I guess zombie fans like that kind of thing. Or maybe it’s a satire I’m just too subtle to understand. Sometimes that kind of thing goes over my head.
Above ground, Sarah, John and McDermott are now on the outside of the fence. They run to open the gate, and run to the helicopter, and John notes that he really hopes they filled the gas tank.
They run to the helicopter, Sarah opens the door, and screams as someone/something inside goes to grab her.
And then she wakes up.
She is/was asleep on a beach.
The helicopter is behind her.
John is fishing. McDermott is sitting on the beach, doing… I don’t know, some beach-sitting.
Sarah pulls out a handmade calendar, and marks off another day.
And that was pretty much the end of the trilogy, until years later, when George Romero was kinda-sorta forced out of zombie retirement.
Though I guess I should mention that, since this is an 80s movie, it features that staple of all 80s movies – the end credits song. And it’s a love ballad. No lie. With lines like, “Come take my heart, my soul, my life… Take me to the world inside your eyes.”
I’m not going to argue it’s a bad song, mind you. But wow, how astonishingly inappropriate.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Dawn of the Dead
“Dawn” breaks (sorry, sorry) with a shot of what looks like 1970s carpeting. Which is what it is, only the carpet is on the wall.
Which makes sense, because it’s a TV studio, so they’re trying to muffle the sound.
The camera pans down, and there’s a lovely blonde woman sitting on the floor, sleeping, then having a nightmare, then waking up.
Everything in the office is chaos. The blonde says, “I’m still dreaming.”
And then things get a little crazy, so here’s what you need to know:
The news is still on the air, but from inside the station, all you can hear is how the information they’re sending out is wrong.
Remember the so-called rescue stations everyone was going to try to get to at the end of “Night?” Well, at least half of them have been knocked out now, but they don’t have an updated list, so they’ve been using the wrong list for at least 12 hours.
The blonde demands that they stop showing the list of rescue stations until they get the new list up.
Her boss gets upset and demands that they keep showing the outdated list, because otherwise people might tune out. They argue, loudly, and more than likely on the air given the crazed nature of the newsroom.
If anyone ever wants to create a video essay on why people don’t trust the media, they could show this clip and slap “The End,” on it, and be good to go.
In the studio, one man interviews another man about what’s going on – and the guy being interviewed is not well liked, since he keeps telling people the truth: These things are getting up, and killing people, and the people they kill get up and kill more people.
A dark-haired man enters the studio, and goes to talk to the blonde, whose name is Fran. He tells her to meet him on the roof at nine o’clock – they’re getting out of there.
Which brings us to another scene of soon-to-be-chaos, which quickly becomes a scene of chaos.
A bunch of military types – a SWAT team? the army? the police? I have no idea – are trying to get the people located inside a massive apartment building to come out. This is probably related to the fact that martial law is in effect, and no one is allowed to stay in a private dwelling due to the fact that the dead are eating the living.
But no one actually says this. You have to use inference.
Finally, several people come out, carrying guns and firing, and they get shot at, or just plain shot, for their troubles.
The SWAT team, or whatever it is, fires off a few gas canisters and moves into the building, sending people outside as they go.
One of the guys, Willy, loses it completely, thanks to the fact that the people they’re moving out are various shades of not-white and Willy is nine kinds of racist. He runs along, killing people at random, until someone shoots him and brings him down.
Then the zombies come out, and the chaos just gets worse.
One of the SWAT team members opts to head to the basement, away from the horror upstairs.
Once he’s there, he runs to a sink to throw up – and discovers he’s not alone. Another SWAT team member asks him if he was in Willy’s group – and our blonde “I’m-getting-out-of-here” guy says he didn’t see how Willy died.
Both men stop pointing their guns at each other, which leaves us with Blonde Guy and Black Guy sitting around, having a smoke.
Blonde guy implies that he’s ready to run away. He asks if it’s right to run.
The answer is yes, Blonde Guy. If people are being eaten, and you don’t want to be one of them, running is a great way to go.
Suddenly, a priest comes out of another room. He tells the men that the people in the building are now willing to go quietly. He tells them that a bunch of not-dead people are locked up in the basement.
And he tells them: “You are stronger than us. But soon, I think they be stronger than you. When the dead walk, we must stop the killing, or lose the war.”
The SWAT team locates a portion of the basement that’s been boarded up, and attempt to clean out the dead. But they pretty much blow it, and are overrun by various and sundry people-eaters.
Black Guy and Blonde Guy locate a small pocket of undead, and shoot them in the head, one by one while the dead feast on various body parts.
And now we’re back with Fran, and her male friend, Stephen. And here comes Blonde Guy, who still doesn’t have a name, and Black Guy, whose name is Peter.
The four of them get into a helicopter loaded with a few supplies, and they take off.
Then it’s the next morning, and the helicopter is still flying, passing over a bunch of cops and rednecks who are drinking coffee and beer and killing zombies in what could be best referred to as a horribly unorganized manner.
The foursome lands at a small refueling station, where they discover that most of the fuel is already gone. They fill up as much as they can, while looking for more supplies.
I’m sorry, let me reiterate: Despite the fact that there are walking dead everywhere, four people with guns decide not to carefully watch out for each other, but instead opt to split up.
Peter goes into the office, where he hears a noise in a closet.
Outside, Fran and Stephen bump into a couple of zombies. Stephen kills one with a hammer blow to the head, then knocks the other one over.
Peter starts shooting the closet, to kills whatever is inside.
Stephen calls to Blonde Guy, whose name is Roger. Roger is being stalked by a zombie with a very tall forehead. This lasts until the zombie crawls up on a box, and gets his forehead cut off by the still-moving rotors on the helicopter.
Inside the office, Peter is attacked by two zombie children, who he shoots in the head.
Outside, Stephen keeps trying, and failing, to shoot various zombies in the head. Roger then moves Stephen’s gun out of the way and shoots the zombies in the head for him.
In the process of doing all this, Stephen almost shoots Peter accidentally. So once all the dead stop moving, Peter stomps out the door, goes up to Stephen, sticks a gun in his face and gives him a verbal beat-down.
And then it’s night again, and the helicopter is once again just about out of fuel. Arguments ensue – where to land, where to get fuel, whether it’s safe to land near a city, and finally, Peter just lays it all out: They’re a bunch of renegades in a stolen helicopter. They’re the bad guys.
The next morning, they spot a mall – with a helicopter landing pad on it. They land, and at first it seems like there are too many zombies around. But Peter and Roger figure out that all the stores are locked up tight, so if they can get in through the roof they should be safe.
Fran wonders what all the zombies are doing here.
Stephen replies: “Some kind of instinct. Memory. What they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”
That sounds logical, until you realize that really what most people would do if they “used to do” anything, is go to work and sit around in meetings. Which would be funny, but probably not satirical.
The foursome looks through all the windows on the roof of the mall, and finally locate a bizarre office with a bunch of boxes marked “Survival” on them. They head down into the office, and find out that there’s only one way in or out of it.
So they cover it with boxes and everyone gets some survival food (Spam!) and some sleep.
Or rather, Stephen gets some sleep, and Roger and Peter realize that the mall is basically a gold mine of supplies, that there aren’t that many zombies there yet, and that this could be a great place to hang out for a while.
So they give Fran a gun, and warn her that it has a kick, and Peter and Roger head downstairs. Leaving the dude who can’t hit a zombie in a head with a gun and the woman who can’t shoot at all alone to defend themselves.
Peter and Roger locate another office with a LOT of keys, and some walkie-talkies. Then they turn on the power to the entire mall, since they might need it.
This leads to several humorous moments with the zombies, as they fall into the fountain, trip on the escalator, and in general act like the brain-dead monsters they are. Or like *Insert a joke about your least-favorite political affiliates here.*
Fran wakes Stephen up so that Stephen can run down and try to “help” the other guys. Taking her gun in the process. What a great guy.
Downstairs, Peter and Roger go to the center of the mall, which is all boxed in via glass and doors and locks. They almost get eaten, but it’s a little early in the movie for one of our four main characters to die, so they make it out with no problems.
Upstairs, Stephen finds the office the other guys were just in, and locates a gun and a set of floor plans. So he doesn’t see the zombie go wandering by the window behind him. This man’s survival instinct has not at all been honed by the zombie apocalypse.
In the mall, Peter and Roger grab a wheelbarrow and throw a bunch of stuff in it, like a TV, and a radio, and maybe some food, and a jacket, and I have no idea what else.
Then they sneak over to the glass wall farthest away from where they need to go, which is downstairs, and they pound on it, attracting all the zombies away from where they want to go.
Then they run all the way to the upstairs part of the enclosure, unlock the door, and run back to the where they came from, complete with a wheelbarrow full of borrowed goods.
Stephen, meanwhile, has discovered his zombie friend, and chases him around in the dark for a while, finally shooting the zombie in the head at the very last second. It’s called, “Building Suspense,” as I understand it.
Stephen heads back to the stairway, only to be attacked by three more zombies, which he isn’t a good enough shot to deal with, even at point-blank range.
At that moment, Peter comes running up with the wheelbarrow. They all abandon the wheelbarrow and head back to the glassed-in part of the store.
The plan is to go back downstairs and get all the zombies down there again, but while they’re running along, Roger is attacked by a zombie who was just kinda sitting there, acting like a mannequin.
Since no one can shoot the zombie and avoid hitting Roger, Roger instead reaches for the tool belt of the attacking zombie, who I guess was a maintenance guy before he was dead. Roger pulls a screwdriver out of the zombie’s belt, then stabs the zombie in the brain – through its ear.
This sounds so awesome when you say it that way, but it raises a ton of questions. How did the maintenance guy end up in this part of the mall? Why does he only have one screwdriver? How did he die in here? Because he couldn’t have died in the mall and walked in, the enclosure was locked.
I guess you could concoct some strange scenario where a guy who doesn’t actually work at the mall gets his kicks by dressing up as a maintenance guy, so he dresses up in a costume and carries only one screwdriver and hides in the mall when they lock it up, only he has a heart attack and dies when the zombie apocalypse comes.
I’m willing to hear other suggestions, however.
Anyway, the trio heads back down the stairs and does the window-pounding thing, this time waiting a long, long while so all the zombies will come down and not find the door to their secret fortress.
Only one of the zombies finds the door to their secret fortress, and heads up towards Fran.
While this is happening, the dudes converse about maybe staying in the mall for a while, since it has all this stuff they can use. Stephen pulls out the binder with the map of the mall in it, noting that there’s a passageway that runs over all the stores.
The boys go up into the elevator shaft and locate the “shaft,” which is actually a heating vent. They unscrew the cover, and go through the shaft to their hideaway hallway.
Meanwhile, Fran, who was left without a gun because Stephen took hers, is found by a zombie. First she tries to delay him by sticking boxes in front of the door. Then she tries to scare him off with a flare, but as I noted in my “Night” writeup, zombies aren’t afraid of fire. The zombie does stand back in an attempt to not get torched, but he still tries to make a grab for Fran.
Fran drops her flare, and tries to go up the ladder to the roof. But… I don’t really know. She could climb all the way up, it looks like, but I guess there’s a lot more suspense in just having her dangle just within arm’s reach of the zombie.
The boys arrive just in time, and club the zombie in the head. The zombie dies. Fran cries. Roger and Peter take the zombie into the downstairs hallway and leave him there. Then they start hauling all their awesome loot up the stairs.
They get a test pattern on the TV, but no information.
The radio is not much help, either, though there is some information we can’t hear, and is therefore not important.
Peter notes that Fran looks sick, and Stephen confesses that she’s pregnant. Peter asks if Stephen wants to “take care of it.”
Stephen says no, then goes into another room, where Fran is on the floor, smoking, and wondering why her vote doesn’t matter.
Discussion is had. Are the four of them safe here? Can they sleep through the night, or should someone keep watch? Are they still planning on going to Canada?
The next morning, two things happen:
One, Fran declares that she wants a say in what’s going on. And that she’s not going to play Den Mother to all of them. And that she doesn’t want to be left without a gun again. And that she wants to learn to fly the chopper.
Two, the boys decide to use all the Eighteen-Wheelers parked nearby to block the doors, which they can then lock from the inside. This will keep the monsters from piling up and breaking into the mall.
So Stephen flies the boys down to the semis, and Roger hotwires a couple of them, and then they’re off and running, slamming into zombies as they go. It’s awesome, especially once you read the credits and realize they only had two stunt guys, which means they just kept hitting the same guys over and over and over again.
Once they get to the mall, Roger jumps out of his truck, and hops into Peter’s truck, and then they head on back to the truck stop, or whatever that place is, to grab another truck.
Now, of course, they’ve attracted some attention. The creatures come for Roger, who left his door open when he went to hotwire another truck. This is the kind of thing that gets you killed in zombie movies.
Roger tries to grab his rifle, but the strap gets stuck. There’s some suspense, but Peter and Roger manage to headshot the zombie attackers.
Roger pretends he isn’t shaken up by being attacked. Though he does go out of his way to run down even more zombie stuntmen.
Roger jumps from his truck to Peter’s truck, pausing to shoot a few zombies in the head. They drive away. Suddenly, Roger realizes he forgot his tool kit in his truck.
Peter grabs Roger by the collar and asks if Roger has his head screwed on straight. Roger insists he’s all there.
They head back to Roger’s truck, and get the toolkit. And also, Roger gets bitten. In the leg. And the arm.
He’s doomed.
Roger says, “There’s a lot to get done before you can afford to lose me.” Roger is not really in touch with his feelings, I fear.
And then it’s later. Fran bandages Roger up, and plans are made – it’s time to clean the zombies out of the mall.
Stephen and Peter head to the guns and ammo store (which you ALWAYS find in malls, of course) and get… lots of guns and ammo.
LOTS of guns and ammo.
And then everyone heads into the mall, loaded up with lots and lots of guns. And ammo. Peter pushes Roger around in the wheelbarrow.
Once again, they head to the glassed-in center of the mall, which they unlock and go into. They head to hardware and get a bunch of blowtorches. The plan is to run out of the glass enclosure and lock all the outside doors.
Fran suggests they use one of the cars sitting in the center of the mall.
The boys decide this is a swell idea, and escape out the door. Stephen almost forgets to leave the keys with Fran, but she yells to him, and there’s a tense moment where Stephen tries to get the keys off his belt while a single propane torch putting out the flame of maybe three matches protects him.
To call it silly is an understatement.
The men head right for the car, which seems like a good idea, until you realize that they’re all totally gunned up and should kill the twenty or thirty slow-moving zombies before bothering with the car, and then they’d have all the time in the world.
Two of these guys have a lot of gun training. It would probably take them maybe two minutes to kill everyone in the immediate area. Or am I being too logical?
Roger goes through the back of the hatchback car and starts hotwiring it, only a zombie grabs him by his injured leg and opens up his wound again.
Peter shoots the zombie attacking Roger.
Roger gets the car started, and they head to the first set of doors, locking and latching all of them, then setting the alarm.
Then they head to the next set of doors.
(Here’s a thought: People will tell you how thoughtful this movie is. How it’s a parody of consumer culture. How it’s got dark streaks of humor running through it. True? Sure.
But this movie is pretty much wall-to-wall action. That’s why people like it. They’re so busy thinking about all the ideas in the movie after watching it that they totally forget that something like every two minutes, someone’s sorry bottom is on the line.)
Later, all the work is done. The doors are locked, and every last zombie in the mall has been shot in the head.
And then it’s later again, and Stephen and Peter discuss putting up a false wall, which will hide the fact that the four of them are in the mall from anyone, zombie or living, who breaks in. By hiding the door to the upstairs, no one can possibly find them.
Unless they come in through the roof, of course.
Meanwhile, Roger’s leg is infected, and he’s a-gonna die. This makes the other three people in the crew alternately depressed or, for a change, more depressed.
Some time later, Stephen and Peter build the false wall while Fran has morning sickness, which she doesn’t want Stephen to see.
Peter notes that the bodies are all going to start rotting soon. So they take all the dead bodies and stick them in the walk-in freezers. Which is pretty astonishingly unsanitary.
Then the boys go to take some money from the bank. Peter states: “You never know…”
And then it’s a shopping montage. Or a stealing montage. Whatever you want to call it.
Followed by a scene where everyone plays video games.
Followed by the one scene everyone knows in the movie, where Peter says, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
Which leads to Roger writhing in pain as he dies. Roger asks if Peter will take care of him when he goes. Roger also notes that he’s going to try not to come back.
Time goes by. Roger zombies up. Peter shoots him in the head.
And on the TV, a scientist says people have to remain rational and logical.
Peter and Stephen bury Roger in a little park-looking thing in the mall.
Later, Stephen and Fran practice shootings mannequins.
Even later, Peter serves a romantic dinner to Fran and Stephen, then heads off to drink champagne and toast their fallen comrade.
Back at the dinner, Stephen offers to rings to Fran. Fran says, “We can’t Stephen, not now. It wouldn’t be real.”
That night, the two of them lie in bed, looking depressed. Especially Stephen, who has probably just realized that there’s exactly one woman around, and his chances of getting a mistress are pretty slim.
Time passes. Dates get marked off on the calendar. Fran looks more pregnant.
Also, their living space looks more like a living space, with furniture, and various other things I guess they dragged up the stairs somehow, even though they walled themselves in.
That night, the boys play poker while Fran cooks. They go to eat. Stephen refuses to turn off the TV, even though there hasn’t been a broadcast for three days. Fran turns the TV off. Stephen turns the TV back on.
Fran asks: “What have we done to ourselves?”
Fran clearly isn’t thinking about the alternative option, wherein she gets to be an especially rare rump roast.
Later, Stephen practices flying the chopper with Fran. She’s very excited to have learned how to fly, even though all they do is go up in the air about a foot, and come back down.
And anyway… it’s a bad thing.
Because there’s a gang of raiders not far away, who spots the moving chopper.
The raiders attempt to radio to the trio, first asking how many of them there are, and then telling them that they don’t like people who don’t share.
And here come the raiders. Complete with motorcycles and guns. Stephen notes that there are hundreds of creatures on the ground, and Peter notes that the gang is, basically, a professional army.
Stephen and Peter head downstairs to shut all the gates.
The bikers break in through the loading docks. Peter notes that the raiders are going to have their hands full, and probably won’t even notice Peter and Stephen.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. If it were me, I’d still hole myself up and keep low until it was all over.
The raiders come in, and steal… valuables. Which are pretty much not valuable at this point. I guess we could argue that this is meant to demonstrate that professional armies are populated with stupid people, but it’s tough to say what Romero was going for here.
And then – they start throwing pies in the faces of the zombies.
And spraying them with seltzer water.
The raiders continue looting. Stephen basically freaks out and starts saying, “It’s ours. We took it.”
Then Stephen starts shooting. Because he really doesn’t value his own life.
Either way, his cover is blown now.
And so is Peter’s.
Now it’s war.
And by war, I mean the mayhem factor goes up a bit, with raiders shooting at zombies, and running away from zombies, and cutting off the heads of zombies. While Peter and Stephen shoot at raiders. And raiders hunt for them.
Stephen heads for an elevator.
Peter heads up into the ceiling, to the shafts.
The lights go out. By which I mean the power goes out. By which I mean Stephen is trapped in the elevator.
Stephen goes up the elevator shaft. The power comes back on. The elevator goes down.
Stephen gets shot by raiders, who fire up into the elevator shaft.
Things start to fall apart.
Some of the raiders take off. Some of the raiders get eaten.
Stephen goes back to the elevator. Peter radios Stephen and says he’s coming to get him. Stephen tries to climb back onto the top of the elevator. But it’s too late. The elevator opens, and the zombies come for him.
Their bologna has a first name, and it’s S T E V E.
Peter escapes through the shafts and goes back to Fran. Fran figures Stephen is dead. Peter says he heard Stephen’s gun, so maybe Stephen is okay. They’ll just wait a while and see.
Later, Fran tells Peter that Stephen hasn’t answered the radio for hours, and that they should go.
In the mall, things are looking very crowded, in a zombie-type way.
And then the elevator opens, and there’s a very living-dead Stephen.
Here’s an interesting question: Why are the Valentine’s Day decorations up? How bored WERE these three?
Stephen, who might be dead but still has an awesome memory, finds the false wall that leads the upstairs, and breaks through it.
Peter knows the score and says it’s Stephen, and that the zombies are coming up.
Peter tells Fran to get out of there. Peter doesn’t want to go.
Zombie Stephen gets into the upstairs. Peter shoots him in the head.
Peter tells Fran to move, and Fran goes up the ladder to the roof.
Peter then heads into a different room and closes the door.
Fran starts the helicopter.
Peter sits in another room, with the door closed, while zombies climb up the ladder to the roof. Peter puts a gun to his head. It looks like this is it.
Fran opens the door of the copter and looks out at the zombies that are coming up on the roof.
And then: Triumphant Music! Peter fights his way through the zombies and up the ladder! He gets to the roof!
But wait! Fran has taken off!
But wait! Fran lowers the chopper just long enough for Peter to fight his way past the zombies so he can get in.
Peter asks: “How much fuel do we have?”
Fran: “Not much.”
Peter: “All right.”
And they fly away into the sunrise, giving the movie a really up and really down ending, all at the same time.
Then, as the credits play, we get to watch zombies walk around in the mall.
Feel free to speculate whether our two remaining heroes lived or died – because “Day of the Dead” isn’t going to tell you.
Which makes sense, because it’s a TV studio, so they’re trying to muffle the sound.
The camera pans down, and there’s a lovely blonde woman sitting on the floor, sleeping, then having a nightmare, then waking up.
Everything in the office is chaos. The blonde says, “I’m still dreaming.”
And then things get a little crazy, so here’s what you need to know:
The news is still on the air, but from inside the station, all you can hear is how the information they’re sending out is wrong.
Remember the so-called rescue stations everyone was going to try to get to at the end of “Night?” Well, at least half of them have been knocked out now, but they don’t have an updated list, so they’ve been using the wrong list for at least 12 hours.
The blonde demands that they stop showing the list of rescue stations until they get the new list up.
Her boss gets upset and demands that they keep showing the outdated list, because otherwise people might tune out. They argue, loudly, and more than likely on the air given the crazed nature of the newsroom.
If anyone ever wants to create a video essay on why people don’t trust the media, they could show this clip and slap “The End,” on it, and be good to go.
In the studio, one man interviews another man about what’s going on – and the guy being interviewed is not well liked, since he keeps telling people the truth: These things are getting up, and killing people, and the people they kill get up and kill more people.
A dark-haired man enters the studio, and goes to talk to the blonde, whose name is Fran. He tells her to meet him on the roof at nine o’clock – they’re getting out of there.
Which brings us to another scene of soon-to-be-chaos, which quickly becomes a scene of chaos.
A bunch of military types – a SWAT team? the army? the police? I have no idea – are trying to get the people located inside a massive apartment building to come out. This is probably related to the fact that martial law is in effect, and no one is allowed to stay in a private dwelling due to the fact that the dead are eating the living.
But no one actually says this. You have to use inference.
Finally, several people come out, carrying guns and firing, and they get shot at, or just plain shot, for their troubles.
The SWAT team, or whatever it is, fires off a few gas canisters and moves into the building, sending people outside as they go.
One of the guys, Willy, loses it completely, thanks to the fact that the people they’re moving out are various shades of not-white and Willy is nine kinds of racist. He runs along, killing people at random, until someone shoots him and brings him down.
Then the zombies come out, and the chaos just gets worse.
One of the SWAT team members opts to head to the basement, away from the horror upstairs.
Once he’s there, he runs to a sink to throw up – and discovers he’s not alone. Another SWAT team member asks him if he was in Willy’s group – and our blonde “I’m-getting-out-of-here” guy says he didn’t see how Willy died.
Both men stop pointing their guns at each other, which leaves us with Blonde Guy and Black Guy sitting around, having a smoke.
Blonde guy implies that he’s ready to run away. He asks if it’s right to run.
The answer is yes, Blonde Guy. If people are being eaten, and you don’t want to be one of them, running is a great way to go.
Suddenly, a priest comes out of another room. He tells the men that the people in the building are now willing to go quietly. He tells them that a bunch of not-dead people are locked up in the basement.
And he tells them: “You are stronger than us. But soon, I think they be stronger than you. When the dead walk, we must stop the killing, or lose the war.”
The SWAT team locates a portion of the basement that’s been boarded up, and attempt to clean out the dead. But they pretty much blow it, and are overrun by various and sundry people-eaters.
Black Guy and Blonde Guy locate a small pocket of undead, and shoot them in the head, one by one while the dead feast on various body parts.
And now we’re back with Fran, and her male friend, Stephen. And here comes Blonde Guy, who still doesn’t have a name, and Black Guy, whose name is Peter.
The four of them get into a helicopter loaded with a few supplies, and they take off.
Then it’s the next morning, and the helicopter is still flying, passing over a bunch of cops and rednecks who are drinking coffee and beer and killing zombies in what could be best referred to as a horribly unorganized manner.
The foursome lands at a small refueling station, where they discover that most of the fuel is already gone. They fill up as much as they can, while looking for more supplies.
I’m sorry, let me reiterate: Despite the fact that there are walking dead everywhere, four people with guns decide not to carefully watch out for each other, but instead opt to split up.
Peter goes into the office, where he hears a noise in a closet.
Outside, Fran and Stephen bump into a couple of zombies. Stephen kills one with a hammer blow to the head, then knocks the other one over.
Peter starts shooting the closet, to kills whatever is inside.
Stephen calls to Blonde Guy, whose name is Roger. Roger is being stalked by a zombie with a very tall forehead. This lasts until the zombie crawls up on a box, and gets his forehead cut off by the still-moving rotors on the helicopter.
Inside the office, Peter is attacked by two zombie children, who he shoots in the head.
Outside, Stephen keeps trying, and failing, to shoot various zombies in the head. Roger then moves Stephen’s gun out of the way and shoots the zombies in the head for him.
In the process of doing all this, Stephen almost shoots Peter accidentally. So once all the dead stop moving, Peter stomps out the door, goes up to Stephen, sticks a gun in his face and gives him a verbal beat-down.
And then it’s night again, and the helicopter is once again just about out of fuel. Arguments ensue – where to land, where to get fuel, whether it’s safe to land near a city, and finally, Peter just lays it all out: They’re a bunch of renegades in a stolen helicopter. They’re the bad guys.
The next morning, they spot a mall – with a helicopter landing pad on it. They land, and at first it seems like there are too many zombies around. But Peter and Roger figure out that all the stores are locked up tight, so if they can get in through the roof they should be safe.
Fran wonders what all the zombies are doing here.
Stephen replies: “Some kind of instinct. Memory. What they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”
That sounds logical, until you realize that really what most people would do if they “used to do” anything, is go to work and sit around in meetings. Which would be funny, but probably not satirical.
The foursome looks through all the windows on the roof of the mall, and finally locate a bizarre office with a bunch of boxes marked “Survival” on them. They head down into the office, and find out that there’s only one way in or out of it.
So they cover it with boxes and everyone gets some survival food (Spam!) and some sleep.
Or rather, Stephen gets some sleep, and Roger and Peter realize that the mall is basically a gold mine of supplies, that there aren’t that many zombies there yet, and that this could be a great place to hang out for a while.
So they give Fran a gun, and warn her that it has a kick, and Peter and Roger head downstairs. Leaving the dude who can’t hit a zombie in a head with a gun and the woman who can’t shoot at all alone to defend themselves.
Peter and Roger locate another office with a LOT of keys, and some walkie-talkies. Then they turn on the power to the entire mall, since they might need it.
This leads to several humorous moments with the zombies, as they fall into the fountain, trip on the escalator, and in general act like the brain-dead monsters they are. Or like *Insert a joke about your least-favorite political affiliates here.*
Fran wakes Stephen up so that Stephen can run down and try to “help” the other guys. Taking her gun in the process. What a great guy.
Downstairs, Peter and Roger go to the center of the mall, which is all boxed in via glass and doors and locks. They almost get eaten, but it’s a little early in the movie for one of our four main characters to die, so they make it out with no problems.
Upstairs, Stephen finds the office the other guys were just in, and locates a gun and a set of floor plans. So he doesn’t see the zombie go wandering by the window behind him. This man’s survival instinct has not at all been honed by the zombie apocalypse.
In the mall, Peter and Roger grab a wheelbarrow and throw a bunch of stuff in it, like a TV, and a radio, and maybe some food, and a jacket, and I have no idea what else.
Then they sneak over to the glass wall farthest away from where they need to go, which is downstairs, and they pound on it, attracting all the zombies away from where they want to go.
Then they run all the way to the upstairs part of the enclosure, unlock the door, and run back to the where they came from, complete with a wheelbarrow full of borrowed goods.
Stephen, meanwhile, has discovered his zombie friend, and chases him around in the dark for a while, finally shooting the zombie in the head at the very last second. It’s called, “Building Suspense,” as I understand it.
Stephen heads back to the stairway, only to be attacked by three more zombies, which he isn’t a good enough shot to deal with, even at point-blank range.
At that moment, Peter comes running up with the wheelbarrow. They all abandon the wheelbarrow and head back to the glassed-in part of the store.
The plan is to go back downstairs and get all the zombies down there again, but while they’re running along, Roger is attacked by a zombie who was just kinda sitting there, acting like a mannequin.
Since no one can shoot the zombie and avoid hitting Roger, Roger instead reaches for the tool belt of the attacking zombie, who I guess was a maintenance guy before he was dead. Roger pulls a screwdriver out of the zombie’s belt, then stabs the zombie in the brain – through its ear.
This sounds so awesome when you say it that way, but it raises a ton of questions. How did the maintenance guy end up in this part of the mall? Why does he only have one screwdriver? How did he die in here? Because he couldn’t have died in the mall and walked in, the enclosure was locked.
I guess you could concoct some strange scenario where a guy who doesn’t actually work at the mall gets his kicks by dressing up as a maintenance guy, so he dresses up in a costume and carries only one screwdriver and hides in the mall when they lock it up, only he has a heart attack and dies when the zombie apocalypse comes.
I’m willing to hear other suggestions, however.
Anyway, the trio heads back down the stairs and does the window-pounding thing, this time waiting a long, long while so all the zombies will come down and not find the door to their secret fortress.
Only one of the zombies finds the door to their secret fortress, and heads up towards Fran.
While this is happening, the dudes converse about maybe staying in the mall for a while, since it has all this stuff they can use. Stephen pulls out the binder with the map of the mall in it, noting that there’s a passageway that runs over all the stores.
The boys go up into the elevator shaft and locate the “shaft,” which is actually a heating vent. They unscrew the cover, and go through the shaft to their hideaway hallway.
Meanwhile, Fran, who was left without a gun because Stephen took hers, is found by a zombie. First she tries to delay him by sticking boxes in front of the door. Then she tries to scare him off with a flare, but as I noted in my “Night” writeup, zombies aren’t afraid of fire. The zombie does stand back in an attempt to not get torched, but he still tries to make a grab for Fran.
Fran drops her flare, and tries to go up the ladder to the roof. But… I don’t really know. She could climb all the way up, it looks like, but I guess there’s a lot more suspense in just having her dangle just within arm’s reach of the zombie.
The boys arrive just in time, and club the zombie in the head. The zombie dies. Fran cries. Roger and Peter take the zombie into the downstairs hallway and leave him there. Then they start hauling all their awesome loot up the stairs.
They get a test pattern on the TV, but no information.
The radio is not much help, either, though there is some information we can’t hear, and is therefore not important.
Peter notes that Fran looks sick, and Stephen confesses that she’s pregnant. Peter asks if Stephen wants to “take care of it.”
Stephen says no, then goes into another room, where Fran is on the floor, smoking, and wondering why her vote doesn’t matter.
Discussion is had. Are the four of them safe here? Can they sleep through the night, or should someone keep watch? Are they still planning on going to Canada?
The next morning, two things happen:
One, Fran declares that she wants a say in what’s going on. And that she’s not going to play Den Mother to all of them. And that she doesn’t want to be left without a gun again. And that she wants to learn to fly the chopper.
Two, the boys decide to use all the Eighteen-Wheelers parked nearby to block the doors, which they can then lock from the inside. This will keep the monsters from piling up and breaking into the mall.
So Stephen flies the boys down to the semis, and Roger hotwires a couple of them, and then they’re off and running, slamming into zombies as they go. It’s awesome, especially once you read the credits and realize they only had two stunt guys, which means they just kept hitting the same guys over and over and over again.
Once they get to the mall, Roger jumps out of his truck, and hops into Peter’s truck, and then they head on back to the truck stop, or whatever that place is, to grab another truck.
Now, of course, they’ve attracted some attention. The creatures come for Roger, who left his door open when he went to hotwire another truck. This is the kind of thing that gets you killed in zombie movies.
Roger tries to grab his rifle, but the strap gets stuck. There’s some suspense, but Peter and Roger manage to headshot the zombie attackers.
Roger pretends he isn’t shaken up by being attacked. Though he does go out of his way to run down even more zombie stuntmen.
Roger jumps from his truck to Peter’s truck, pausing to shoot a few zombies in the head. They drive away. Suddenly, Roger realizes he forgot his tool kit in his truck.
Peter grabs Roger by the collar and asks if Roger has his head screwed on straight. Roger insists he’s all there.
They head back to Roger’s truck, and get the toolkit. And also, Roger gets bitten. In the leg. And the arm.
He’s doomed.
Roger says, “There’s a lot to get done before you can afford to lose me.” Roger is not really in touch with his feelings, I fear.
And then it’s later. Fran bandages Roger up, and plans are made – it’s time to clean the zombies out of the mall.
Stephen and Peter head to the guns and ammo store (which you ALWAYS find in malls, of course) and get… lots of guns and ammo.
LOTS of guns and ammo.
And then everyone heads into the mall, loaded up with lots and lots of guns. And ammo. Peter pushes Roger around in the wheelbarrow.
Once again, they head to the glassed-in center of the mall, which they unlock and go into. They head to hardware and get a bunch of blowtorches. The plan is to run out of the glass enclosure and lock all the outside doors.
Fran suggests they use one of the cars sitting in the center of the mall.
The boys decide this is a swell idea, and escape out the door. Stephen almost forgets to leave the keys with Fran, but she yells to him, and there’s a tense moment where Stephen tries to get the keys off his belt while a single propane torch putting out the flame of maybe three matches protects him.
To call it silly is an understatement.
The men head right for the car, which seems like a good idea, until you realize that they’re all totally gunned up and should kill the twenty or thirty slow-moving zombies before bothering with the car, and then they’d have all the time in the world.
Two of these guys have a lot of gun training. It would probably take them maybe two minutes to kill everyone in the immediate area. Or am I being too logical?
Roger goes through the back of the hatchback car and starts hotwiring it, only a zombie grabs him by his injured leg and opens up his wound again.
Peter shoots the zombie attacking Roger.
Roger gets the car started, and they head to the first set of doors, locking and latching all of them, then setting the alarm.
Then they head to the next set of doors.
(Here’s a thought: People will tell you how thoughtful this movie is. How it’s a parody of consumer culture. How it’s got dark streaks of humor running through it. True? Sure.
But this movie is pretty much wall-to-wall action. That’s why people like it. They’re so busy thinking about all the ideas in the movie after watching it that they totally forget that something like every two minutes, someone’s sorry bottom is on the line.)
Later, all the work is done. The doors are locked, and every last zombie in the mall has been shot in the head.
And then it’s later again, and Stephen and Peter discuss putting up a false wall, which will hide the fact that the four of them are in the mall from anyone, zombie or living, who breaks in. By hiding the door to the upstairs, no one can possibly find them.
Unless they come in through the roof, of course.
Meanwhile, Roger’s leg is infected, and he’s a-gonna die. This makes the other three people in the crew alternately depressed or, for a change, more depressed.
Some time later, Stephen and Peter build the false wall while Fran has morning sickness, which she doesn’t want Stephen to see.
Peter notes that the bodies are all going to start rotting soon. So they take all the dead bodies and stick them in the walk-in freezers. Which is pretty astonishingly unsanitary.
Then the boys go to take some money from the bank. Peter states: “You never know…”
And then it’s a shopping montage. Or a stealing montage. Whatever you want to call it.
Followed by a scene where everyone plays video games.
Followed by the one scene everyone knows in the movie, where Peter says, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
Which leads to Roger writhing in pain as he dies. Roger asks if Peter will take care of him when he goes. Roger also notes that he’s going to try not to come back.
Time goes by. Roger zombies up. Peter shoots him in the head.
And on the TV, a scientist says people have to remain rational and logical.
Peter and Stephen bury Roger in a little park-looking thing in the mall.
Later, Stephen and Fran practice shootings mannequins.
Even later, Peter serves a romantic dinner to Fran and Stephen, then heads off to drink champagne and toast their fallen comrade.
Back at the dinner, Stephen offers to rings to Fran. Fran says, “We can’t Stephen, not now. It wouldn’t be real.”
That night, the two of them lie in bed, looking depressed. Especially Stephen, who has probably just realized that there’s exactly one woman around, and his chances of getting a mistress are pretty slim.
Time passes. Dates get marked off on the calendar. Fran looks more pregnant.
Also, their living space looks more like a living space, with furniture, and various other things I guess they dragged up the stairs somehow, even though they walled themselves in.
That night, the boys play poker while Fran cooks. They go to eat. Stephen refuses to turn off the TV, even though there hasn’t been a broadcast for three days. Fran turns the TV off. Stephen turns the TV back on.
Fran asks: “What have we done to ourselves?”
Fran clearly isn’t thinking about the alternative option, wherein she gets to be an especially rare rump roast.
Later, Stephen practices flying the chopper with Fran. She’s very excited to have learned how to fly, even though all they do is go up in the air about a foot, and come back down.
And anyway… it’s a bad thing.
Because there’s a gang of raiders not far away, who spots the moving chopper.
The raiders attempt to radio to the trio, first asking how many of them there are, and then telling them that they don’t like people who don’t share.
And here come the raiders. Complete with motorcycles and guns. Stephen notes that there are hundreds of creatures on the ground, and Peter notes that the gang is, basically, a professional army.
Stephen and Peter head downstairs to shut all the gates.
The bikers break in through the loading docks. Peter notes that the raiders are going to have their hands full, and probably won’t even notice Peter and Stephen.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. If it were me, I’d still hole myself up and keep low until it was all over.
The raiders come in, and steal… valuables. Which are pretty much not valuable at this point. I guess we could argue that this is meant to demonstrate that professional armies are populated with stupid people, but it’s tough to say what Romero was going for here.
And then – they start throwing pies in the faces of the zombies.
And spraying them with seltzer water.
The raiders continue looting. Stephen basically freaks out and starts saying, “It’s ours. We took it.”
Then Stephen starts shooting. Because he really doesn’t value his own life.
Either way, his cover is blown now.
And so is Peter’s.
Now it’s war.
And by war, I mean the mayhem factor goes up a bit, with raiders shooting at zombies, and running away from zombies, and cutting off the heads of zombies. While Peter and Stephen shoot at raiders. And raiders hunt for them.
Stephen heads for an elevator.
Peter heads up into the ceiling, to the shafts.
The lights go out. By which I mean the power goes out. By which I mean Stephen is trapped in the elevator.
Stephen goes up the elevator shaft. The power comes back on. The elevator goes down.
Stephen gets shot by raiders, who fire up into the elevator shaft.
Things start to fall apart.
Some of the raiders take off. Some of the raiders get eaten.
Stephen goes back to the elevator. Peter radios Stephen and says he’s coming to get him. Stephen tries to climb back onto the top of the elevator. But it’s too late. The elevator opens, and the zombies come for him.
Their bologna has a first name, and it’s S T E V E.
Peter escapes through the shafts and goes back to Fran. Fran figures Stephen is dead. Peter says he heard Stephen’s gun, so maybe Stephen is okay. They’ll just wait a while and see.
Later, Fran tells Peter that Stephen hasn’t answered the radio for hours, and that they should go.
In the mall, things are looking very crowded, in a zombie-type way.
And then the elevator opens, and there’s a very living-dead Stephen.
Here’s an interesting question: Why are the Valentine’s Day decorations up? How bored WERE these three?
Stephen, who might be dead but still has an awesome memory, finds the false wall that leads the upstairs, and breaks through it.
Peter knows the score and says it’s Stephen, and that the zombies are coming up.
Peter tells Fran to get out of there. Peter doesn’t want to go.
Zombie Stephen gets into the upstairs. Peter shoots him in the head.
Peter tells Fran to move, and Fran goes up the ladder to the roof.
Peter then heads into a different room and closes the door.
Fran starts the helicopter.
Peter sits in another room, with the door closed, while zombies climb up the ladder to the roof. Peter puts a gun to his head. It looks like this is it.
Fran opens the door of the copter and looks out at the zombies that are coming up on the roof.
And then: Triumphant Music! Peter fights his way through the zombies and up the ladder! He gets to the roof!
But wait! Fran has taken off!
But wait! Fran lowers the chopper just long enough for Peter to fight his way past the zombies so he can get in.
Peter asks: “How much fuel do we have?”
Fran: “Not much.”
Peter: “All right.”
And they fly away into the sunrise, giving the movie a really up and really down ending, all at the same time.
Then, as the credits play, we get to watch zombies walk around in the mall.
Feel free to speculate whether our two remaining heroes lived or died – because “Day of the Dead” isn’t going to tell you.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Night of the Living Dead
Ah, “Night of the Living Dead,” the movie that says, “Hey, you know what’s cheap to shoot? A bunch of dudes eating a bunch of other dudes!”
And I guess roads are cheap to shoot as well, since the movie begins with a long shot of a car driving down the road, followed by another shot of a car driving down the road.
In there somewhere, you get the credits, and here’s something curious: The title of the movie is spelled like this: “night OF THE LIVING DEAD.” And the word night is a bunch of outlines of letters. So even the title is a kind of jump scare, wherein the creator of the titles whispers the first word, then yells the rest of it at you.
Subtle.
Also worth noting in the titles, the fact that the screenplay is not just by George Romero, but also by John Russo, who just for fun would go on to create a whole lot of movies that attempted to cash in on the fact that he was the “Night of the Living Dead” guy.
By the way, that whole driving along the road while the credits roll thing? That takes up two solid minutes of movie. They even drive past a sign that says they’re going into a cemetery, just in case you thought they were headed into Lawn Ornament World when you started seeing all those headstones.
Another curious fun fact – the screenplay is credited to George Romero, but the director is listed as George A. Romero. I wonder if those guys are related?
After more than two minutes, we finally meet some people: Johnny and Barbra (I know it looks funny. They spelled it that way in the credits). They’re brother and sister, and their mother has tasked them with driving to a graveyard three hours away to lay some flowers on a gravestone.
Johnny is very cranky about this, noting that the flowers say “We Still Remember,” even though he doesn’t remember the man. Who I guess is his dad. That man gave you life, Johnny – remember that!
Barbra and Johnny head into the cemetery, bickering all the while. Johnny is mad that they got there so late (it’s 8 PM, and it’s the Spring Forward part of Daylight Savings, something they keep pointing out, even though it means nothing at all).
They put down the flowers, and Barbra goes to say a prayer, while Johnny whines some more about how praying is for church.
Also, he sees some dude walking along in the cemetery.
And he puts on some driving gloves. Because that’s what you did in 1968.
Johnny starts reminiscing about the time he scared the poop out of Barbra in the cemetery. And also, about how scared of the cemetery Barbra used to be. Barbra tells him to quit talking about it, and Johnny says (come on horror fans, you know this one): “They’re coming to get you Barbra!”
Here’s a tip, folks. If you’re in a horror movie situation, don’t be a jerk. It’ll just cause people to cheer when you get your throat torn out.
Johnny keeps on taunting Barbra, pointing to the other dude in the cemetery, and joking that he’s getting out of there.
At which point, the other guy in the cemetery grabs Barbra.
Johnny, who may be a jerk, but who still doesn’t like it when people try to eat his sister, jumps on the man and tries to fight him off. A fight breaks out which would probably be pretty spectacular, if only the filmmakers could have afforded stunt men.
Finally, the zombie whacks Johnny’s head against a grave, and Johnny dies.
Or is knocked unconscious. Or is faking, because he’s decided he values his own life more than Barbra’s.
Either way, the creature gets up and lopes after Barbra.
You know, considering how much people complain about fast zombies in movies, this dude is pretty speedy. He might not make it all the way to an outright run, but he’s got the speedwalk/jog thing down.
Barbra runs away, tripping and falling, at which point she pulls off her high heels, making her the smartest horror movie heroine alive.
She hops into her car, locks the doors, and discovers that the keys are missing. The zombie catches up, and breaks the window glass with a rock.
Barbra releases the emergency brake, and the vehicle, which just happens to be parked at the top of the hill, rolls on down while the zombie gives chase.
Barbra crashes into a tree, because she’s driving a massive vehicle with no power steering, and she runs for it. She heads down the road, and spots a farmhouse off in the distance.
So she just keeps on running for it, with nary a shoe to her name.
It’s funny, though. She keeps running into things and then leaning over them in what I have to assume the actress thought was a dramatic fashion.
Finally, she gets to the house and tries to get in, only the front door is locked. She does not try knocking, instead opting to run off the porch. And fall down.
She heads around the house, pausing for another lean and react, and there’s an open door.
She runs in while thunder crashes in the background, despite the sunny skies outside.
Inside, it’s pretty dark, even though Barbra kept talking about how sunny it was outside.
Barbra grabs a knife from the kitchen and starts walking through the house. She does not call out to the owners. I guess she really takes the whole finders/keepers thing seriously.
Barbra keeps prowling around the inside of the house, while the zombie runs around outside. Among other things, he tears down a clothesline and the pole that holds it up.
Thing is the strongest zombie ever, I swear.
Barbra finds a phone and tries to call someone, but there’s no dial tone. Also, given the fact that Barbra hasn’t said anything for a while, I can only assume the folks making the film realized that she’s not much of an actress, and keeping her away from dialogue is the only responsible thing to do.
Barbra looks outside, where it was light just a minute ago, and it’s full-on dark, and there are a couple more zombies.
Barbra runs away from the window and heads up the stairs, where she finds a dude whose face has been chewed off.
She runs downstairs and is about out the front door, just in time for a tall black fellow to park his truck out front, and run into the house, dragging Barbra along with him while spouting exposition, like, his truck is almost out of gas, and the gas pump out front is locked.
He asks Barbra if there’s a key.
Barbra doesn’t say anything. He asks if she lives there.
She doesn’t say anything.
He tries the phone.
Barbra, meanwhile, wanders over to the stairs, so that the dude can see the dead guy, and the movie can get the full value for their props.
Dude decides to go looking for food, after noting that they need to go somewhere and find some more people.
Meanwhile, Barbra just keeps on wandering around, holding the knife and not saying anything.
Until she does. She opts to go for, “What’s happening?” Dude tries to do some more expositioning, and then it’s time for another action sequence, so a zombies breaks the dude’s headlights. For some reason. Perhaps light makes them angry.
Dude asks Barbra if there are any more of the creatures, and she says she doesn’t know at a really loud volume, so you’ll know she’s distressed.
So the dude goes out and bashes the zombie’s heads in with a tire iron. Just to show them who’s boss.
While this is going on, another zombie wanders into the house, and slowly ambles after Barbra, who is sitting on a chair, emoting.
Dude walks in just in time to save her bacon, by jamming the tire iron right into the dead dude’s head.
Dude runs to the open door, smacks another zombie in the face, and the zombie stumbles back so that the director can offer up a dramatic shot of all the other zombies ambling towards the house.
Dude closes the door.
Barbra is looking at the dead guy on the floor, which is freaking her out even more. Dude tells her not to look, and drags the dead guy outside. Then sets fire to him.
This causes the other zombies to stumble back, terribly afraid of the fire. This will mark the only time this trick will work at all in a “Dead” movie.
Dude goes back in the house, slams the door, and sticks a card table up against the door. Yeah. That’ll keep them safe.
Dude turns on the lights, and tells Barbra to turn more lights on in the house. He finds a couple of conveniently placed toolboxes and goes through them, grabbing a hammer. Then he goes looking for nails, finding a ton of them in the junk drawer.
He tells Barbra to go find some boards so they can nail the place up.
Barbra just keeps wandering around, freaked right out (or perhaps, thinking she’s a very talented actress) and Dude starts yelling, then decides to go with the, “Talk to her like she’s a scared toddler” method.
Barbra goes into the living room and, instead of looking for wood, starts up a music box, so that the director can do creepy music box shots.
Inside the kitchen, Dude locates as much wood as he can, often by tearing boards off of things like cabinets.
Barbra locates four tiny pieces of wood and brings them in, and then finally does something useful and holds onto one side of a loose door while Dude nails it across the door to the outside.
Dude then tasks Barbra with putting in some more nails, while he goes to nail up other doors and windows.
Later, Dude monologues a whole tale about a truck crashing into a gas pump, creatures encircling a diner, and how the truck out front isn’t his. While this is going on, a REALLY LOUD cricket plays on the soundtrack, to remind you that it’s nighttime.
Then Barbra takes a turn at the monologue trough, and tells the story of how she got to the farmhouse, even though we, the audience, saw that part already.
Really, there should have been a subtitle: Take Pee Break Here.
You know what’s funny? Even Dude looks sort of bored by the whole thing. So he opts to just keep on boarding things up. Oh, and he tosses out a, “Why don’t you just keep calm?”
This doesn’t work, and as Barbra concludes her story, which conveniently leaves out Johnny taking a whack to the noggin, she first says they need to wait for Johnny, then upgrades it to a Full-On, Community-Theater, “Please! We’ve got to go get Johnny!”
She stands up and runs at Dude, who tries to explain what’s going on outside. Barbra slaps him. He punches her. She doesn’t fall over, but does go unconscious.
He catches her before she falls, then places her gently on the couch and unbuttons her coat.
Later, Dude flips on the radio and tries to find information.
Since the world in mass chaos, the man on the radio basically says, “We don’t know what to look for…”
While exposition goes on the background, Dude looks out the window, and sees some of the creatures getting closer. So first, he lights a fire in the fireplace, in case zombie Santa Claus decides to come down the chimney bringing gifts and mayhem to all the edible girls and boys.
Then he throws a bunch of lighter fluid on a chair. He follows up this act by grabbing a curtain, yanking a strip off of it, tying it around a table leg, and then setting fire to his makeshift torch.
He runs to the front door, shoves the chair outside on the porch, sets fire to it, and shoves it off the porch.
The zombies back away, making unhappy noises. Which never happens in any of the other movies.
Dude goes back in and keeps on hammering away, at one point moving a door, revealing what appears to be a cellar door. The camera zooms in on it, so you know that it’s important.
He work finished, Dude lights up a cigarette.
Why worry about cancer when you’re probably going to get eaten?
Dude opens the closet and finds a gun. No, I don’t know what kind. Some sort of pump-action rifle, I guess. Does it matter?
While this is going on, Barbra wakes up. Then decides to stare straight ahead, saying nothing.
Dude tells her that the place is boarded up pretty well now, which is hilarious, because the window directly behind him isn’t boarded up at all. Dude also notes that they have a gun, and some bullets.
Did I mention he’s telling her all this while he’s putting some shoes on her that he found in the closet? Because he totally is.
He also points out that they have food and a radio, then tells her that he’s going to go upstairs, but that if something tries to break in, he’ll hear it and come down and take care of it.
Barbra just sits there through all of this, staring straight ahead, not saying or doing anything. It’s probably the most effective acting Barbra is going to do in this film.
Dude heads upstairs, where he finds the dead person, who it turns out is a female. He covers her in a rug and drags her away from the top of the stairs, but doesn’t do ii carefully enough that we can’t see that this person doesn’t look anything like the half-eaten face we saw earlier.
Downstairs, Barbra keeps on sitting and listening to the radio, where it’s revealed that the people doing the killing are also making a light snack of their victims. We get a minute of this, while the camera dramatically zooms in on Barbra, then the radio, then Barbra, then the radio…
And suddenly, a door shifts, and Barbra starts screaming, and two men come out of the cellar.
Upstairs, Dude hears the screaming and runs downstairs holding the gun.
The Bald Dude from the cellar says, “A radio!” And runs over to listen to the whole people-eating-people story.
Dude (wow, all these dudes are going to need monikers, because the movie isn’t giving us any… I guess it’s going to be Black Dude for a while) – Black Dude berates the two dudes from the cellar, asking why they didn’t come up and help him.
Bald Dude says that Black Dude “could have been one of those things…”
Black Dude gets seriously crabby about the fact that the people in the basement didn’t come upstairs to help him, first claiming they couldn’t hear, and then claiming that there was so much noise they thought the place was being ripped apart.
Young dude calls Bald Dude Mr. Cooper, so we’ve got a name for him. And Mr. Cooper calls Young Dude Tommy.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
Mr. Cooper tells Black Dude that “those things” turned over their car. He thinks that the cellar is the safest place for all of them, since there’s only one door they have to protect.
Black Dude says that the cellar is basically a death trap, because if the creatures come for them, then there’s no escape route.
Cooper says he’s going down there and boarding the place up, and not letting anyone in, so Black Dude and Tommy need to decide whether they’re coming down or not.
This makes Tommy crabby, because he wants to talk options first.
Tommy looks out the window, and says there are something like ten creatures out there.
Black Dude leads Tommy to the back window, noting that there are more of them out back.
Suddenly, the creatures jam their hands through the window. Black Dude sticks the gun through the holes in the boarded-up window, and shoots one of them in the chest. It staggers, but doesn’t die.
Tommy, meanwhile, grabs a kitchen knife and cuts at the creatures’ hands, chopping off a finger or two. Which doesn’t stop the beings from grabbing at them.
Downstairs, Mr. Cooper’s wife calls to Mr. Cooper, asking what’s going on.
Cooper says it’s all right, even though this is a total lie.
Black Dude fires again, hitting the same creature in the chest. The thing stumbles, but doesn’t fall over. So Black Dude shoots him again, this time in the head. The creature falls over, dead again.
Outside, more creatures are coming at the house. One of them, a female, grabs something that’s kind of hard to see, and eats it. I think it was a snail. So much for desperately wanting human flesh.
Inside the house, the argument escalates. Black Dude tells Mr. Cooper that if Cooper wants to be the boss, he can be the boss of the cellar. Black Dude is the boss up here.
Also, Cooper is told he can’t take any food or the radio or Barbra into the cellar.
When Cooper says that his kid is down there, and she can’t come up, Black Dude says it’s too bad that her dad is stupid.
Cooper heads for the cellar, with a whole, “Yeah, well, I’m not letting anyone play in my cellar-fort once I’m down there, so N’yeah!”
Just before Cooper gets his stomp-down-the-stairs on, Tommy calls to someone downstairs. It’s Judy, Teenaged Girlfriend.
Judy comes up. Cooper goes down. Then he puts one whole board in front of the door. Yes, a single board, fitted into little slots. They’re totally safe now. There no way anyone could get down there. Without kicking the door a little.
Tommy says that “The three of them” could board things up real good upstairs, if only Cooper would listen. Because, as we know, barricading a house is man’s work.
Cooper tells Mrs. Cooper that they’ll be safe, and the people upstairs are stupid.
Mr. Cooper asks how his daughter is. Little Cooper is lying on what appears to be a workbench. She’s unconscious.
Mrs. Cooper says she seems to be a little warm, and that it might be shock. Mr. Cooper lights up a cigarette and rants about how he can’t wait for the monsters to get in the house, and for the people upstairs to beg to come downstairs.
His wife points out how that’s really important to him – for him to be right and everyone else to be wrong.
Apparently, Mr. Cooper doesn’t get to be the boss down here, either.
Mrs. Cooper finds out there’s a radio upstairs, and demands that Mr. Cooper take the boards off the door. Mr. Cooper says no.
Mrs. Cooper says, “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”
Sadly, Mrs. Cooper is wrong. Dying together pretty much solves all their problems, and will be much cheaper than a divorce. I’m just saying.
Tommy calls down to Mrs. Cooper, and says they found a TV. Mrs. Cooper tells Tommy and if Judy comes down to watch the kid, who isn’t even awake, then the Coopers can come upstairs. What a fun trade!
And so, five minutes after giving multiple ultimatums, Mr. Cooper opens the door.
The Coopers come upstairs, and Mrs. Cooper sees Barbra for the first time. Barbra is staring at a doily on the couch.
Ben (Black Dude finally has a name too!) yells from another room that he needs help with the TV, and the menfolk go to assist him, while Mrs. Cooper sits in a chair and takes a long, hard look at doily girl.
Finally, Mrs. Cooper pulls out a cigarette, and Barbra kind of notices her. Mrs. Cooper says Barbra doesn’t have to be afraid of her.
Then here comes Mr. Cooper, who points out that there are a million weak spots in the house. He demonstrates by going to the window and pulling an admittedly weak little board, which bends.
Cooper then goes to his wife and demands a cigarette, which gives us a look at the ceiling, which has a really lame plaster job. I’m surprised Cooper hasn’t commented on that.
Mrs. Cooper reminds Mr. Cooper that Barbra’s brother was killed. Mr. Cooper goes back to complaining about the windows.
Mrs. Cooper asks why he doesn’t do something to help somebody.
Ben and Tommy arrive with the TV, which they set up on a couple of chairs.
Mr. Cooper shakes a finger at Barbra and tells her to pay attention to what’s going on when the TV comes on.
Mrs. Cooper asks if there’s anything she can do to help.
Ben ignores her and reminds Mr. Cooper that Ben, yes, BEN is giving the orders up here.
Tommy turns on the TV.
The news is on. The first couple minutes are a rehash of the whole people are eating people thing.
Then, a new report! The unburied dead are rising and attacking the living.
Also, there are now safe places to go, and instead of staying their houses, people are encouraged to go to rescue areas.
Ben says that they could escape in the truck, but there’s no gas. Tommy says there’s a pump outside, and Ben says they need the key to get into the pump.
The news continues: Apparently, space experts are being consulted, and the news reporter reminds everyone that recently, a satellite was sent to Venus, which then came back. But the science people had it destroyed in orbit because of dangerous levels of strange radiation.
News Guy then connects the dots between the exploded satellite and the recent “mass murders.” Because news guys aren’t paid to say, “We really have no idea what’s going on. Here’s a picture of an ocelot.” No, they need to spout theories, or people might CHANGE THE CHANNEL!
Now that the news guys have spoken, Ben thinks they need to get out of the house and go find safe harbor.
But wait! There’s more stuff on the news! A reporter has cornered some people who work for the government and he wants to know whether or not the satellite is responsible for the dead coming back to life and eating the living.
The government guys don’t agree with one another about whether this is the case or not.
So now it’s back to The Debate Show! Starring the people in the living room.
As stated before, Ben wants to get out of there – the TV just showed that there’s a safe house in Willard, which is only 17 miles away.
Cooper doesn’t think it’s possible to get there, what with them having to drag a sick kid along. And also, you know, women. Who are totally incapable of doing anything.
I’m amazed no one’s tossed him out the front door as bait yet.
Tommy figures this is as good a time as any to tell how he ended up at the house. It seems that he and Judy were going to go swimming, only they heard the news reports. So they came to the house, and found the dead person upstairs.
But opted to just leave ‘em lying there.
Point of order! Why didn’t the dead person upstairs get up and try to get herself a midnight snack? Maybe she isn’t dead?
Moving on.
Anyway, Tommy and Judy came to the house, and found the dead person. Then the Coopers showed up, so they all barricaded themselves in the basement, where thanks to a single two-by-four, they figured they would be safe.
Ben tells Mrs. Cooper to go downstairs and check on her kid, and to send Judy upstairs.
Judy comes up, and Ben tells her to go find some curtains or something, and to make strips of cloth.
Then the plan starts to come together:
Step one: Make molotov cocktails.
Step two: Make Cooper throw them from the second story, to scare off the creatures.
Step three: Ben and Tommy run for the truck, unlock the pump, and put gas in the truck.
Step four: Everyone runs out to the truck and hops in, and everyone drives away.
It’s a brilliant plan, with no flaws, and it should go off without a hitch. Right? Of course. It’s not like this is a horror movie… Uh…
Judy and Tommy start putting the molotov cocktails together, using jars from the fruit cellar. And also kerosene from the cellar. And rags made from curtains.
Judy is sad because the phone is down and she can’t call her parents and tell them what’s going on. She’s also not sure that they’re doing the right thing, trying to escape and get to the rescue station.
Tommy replies, “Well, the television said that’s the right thing to do. We’ve got to get to a rescue station.”
Yes, Tommy, the television said it’s the right thing to do. It’s a good thing you never lived to see infomercials. You’d own sixty-seven of those food dehydrators.
Judy is at least honest enough to admit she just really, really doesn’t want Tommy to be the one to have to drive the truck and unlock the gas pump. Finally, she gets herself a hug and kiss and everyone goes back to work.
You know what? This movie has been running for over and hour and no one has been eaten yet. Hack the first five minutes off the movie, and this could be a story about a bunch of folks who just really, really don’t want to have to talk to the Mormons walking through the neighborhood.
Mr. Cooper tells Ben that Barbra needs to go down in the cellar during their gas-and-go rescue mission, and Ben agrees. He tells Barbra that she needs to go downstairs, but that soon they’ll be able to leave.
Barbra almost has an emotion, and she and Judy head downstairs. Because she and Judy are just baggage to be hauled around, and not actual people.
Mr. Cooper heads upstairs and gets ready to throw the flaming cocktails.
Tommy and Ben pull the boards off the door, and Ben wishes Tommy good luck.
Outside, the creatures are just wandering around, not really headed for the house at all.
Mr. C tosses a couple of cocktails on the lawn, and the creatures yell and stumble away.
Ben and Tommy run outside, and Tommy almost gets attacked. But he makes it to the truck.
Judy yells out, “I’m going with him,” and she runs outside.
Now Tommy and Judy are in the cab of the truck, and Ben is on the back of it, waving another table-leg torch around.
Suddenly, it’s a lot brighter outside. Not the best job on the day-for-night photography there, Mister Director of Photography.
The trio makes it to the gas pump, and the gas pump key doesn’t work. Ben shoots the lock off the pump.
Tommy goes to put gas in the truck, and squeezes the pump too early, spraying gas on everything – including on the torch.
Fire abounds.
Tommy says they need to get away from the pump, and drives off with Judy still in the truck with him.
They realize, too late, that the truck is on fire. Tommy gets out, then goes back to help Judy, who is stuck, and BOOM! Flaming truck. Dead people.
Ben picks up his torch and uses it to ward off the creatures. He runs to the house, and knocks on the door, which Mr. Cooper locked after everyone went out the door.
Ben calls to Cooper, who is standing in the doorway to the cellar – maybe fifteen feet away.
Cooper does nothing to help, and Ben kicks the door in. He spots Cooper, and realizes that, yes, Cooper is going to experience no character arc in this movie. He’s going to start off as mean and unwilling to help his fellow man, and he’s going to end that way too.
Ben runs into the house, slams the door, and grabs a nearby freestanding door. Time to nail the front door back in place!
Cooper runs to help, and after everything is nailed back in place and everyone is relatively safe, Ben punches Cooper in the face a whole bunch of times. He concludes the pummeling with, “I ought to drag you out there and feed you to those things!”
Cooper almost looks chastised, but he’s not that good an actor.
Outside, the creatures go to the burned out truck: It’s eatin’ time! And hey, there’s some conveniently roasted meat. Flash-fried, if you will. This leads to a solid minute of creatures eatin’ people.
And a legendary film franchise is born.
There is some more discussion. It comes out that the Cooper’s car is at least a mile away, that the kid was bitten on the arm by “those things,” and that Barbra has pretty much lost it, as all she can contribute to the conversation is the Johnny has the keys to the car.
Ben offers to get to the car himself, only the Cooper’s car was turned over by the creatures, so that isn’t going to help.
And so, everyone goes back to watching the news.
There’s some more talk about “mysterious radiation,” and yet more information about how to handle what the news people are now calling “ghouls.”
It seems that if you shoot them in the head, or administer some blunt head trauma, that’ll be enough to kill (or re-kill, I suppose) the ghouls.
The nice newscaster asks a member of local law enforcement if they’ll be able to wrap up the problem in 24 hours. Something worth noting here: All the news guys are really calm about this whole thing. Almost painfully so. You wonder: Were they prepped to handle this kind of event at newscaster school?
If I were a reporter, I’d be all, “Dude, that guy just ATE that other guy. I’m out of here. I’m not being turned into Tender Vittles just so I can get a Pulitzer.”
But these guys? Totally unflappable.
Cooper goes to check the window. Ben looks at Cooper. And then the power goes out.
Ben goes to check to see if the fuse box is in the cellar. Mr. Cooper goes to his wife and says he has to get the gun away from Ben. After all, two people have already died, and things could get worse.
Mrs. Cooper is nonplussed.
Outside, the creatures start picking up heavy objects and whacking on the doors and windows.
Ben tries to hold a board in place, and drops the gun.
Mr. Cooper takes the gun, and tells his wife to get in the cellar.
Ben runs at Mr. Cooper, and takes the gun. He shoots Cooper right in the chest.
Mrs. Cooper, who is trying to hold the front door in place, is grabbed by several hands that have broken through the door.
Mr. Cooper stumbles down the cellar stairs. He collapses on the floor next to his daughter.
Upstairs, Barbra suddenly gets off the couch and goes to hold the front door shut. So Mrs. Cooper, who I guess doesn’t realize that isn’t a one-woman job, goes downstairs, where she discovers that her daughter has eaten her husband.
Mrs. Cooper panics and falls over, and her daughter grabs a trowel off the wall and comes after her mom with it. Time for a good old-fashioned trowel-disemboweling.
No, really. Mom just lies there and gets a trowel in the guts over and over and over again.
Upstairs, Ben tries to fight off an army of arms, while Barbra continues to pitch in. This works until Johnny breaks down the front door, grabs Barbra, and drags her, screaming, into the crowd of creatures.
Ben backs away from the window, and is almost bitten by the little girl from the cellar. He tosses her onto the couch and, irony of ironies, boards himself up in the cellar from which where is no escape.
The dead people come pouring into the house.
Remarkably, the cellar door holds.
Ben goes downstairs, where he finds Mr. Cooper, who is just getting up, having discovered his inner living dead guy.
Mrs. Cooper wakes up shortly thereafter.
Ben shoots them both in the head.
Then Ben gets into firing position and sits back from the stairs – he’s ready to put some more holes in heads.
Later, dawn breaks. A helicopter flies by overhead, zipping past rednecks with guns and various zombies.
The helicopter lands.
I have no idea what that had to do with anything.
Near the house o’ doom, the local long arm of the law and various other people with guns hang out. The local long-arm tells the local reporter-type that they should have things wrapped up in three or four more hours.
Then the local long-arm tells a couple of folks to check out a nearby house. And we all know which house that is.
In the cellar, Ben is asleep. He hears noise outside and wakes up.
Outside, the local long-arm walks by the burned up truck, and notes that someone, “Had a cookout here.”
As dark jokes go, that’s pretty dark.
Elsewhere, folks with guns shoot various and sundry people-eaters.
The local long-arm tells some folks to build him a bonfire.
Inside the house, Ben creeps to the window.
Outside the house, the local long-arm tells one of his buddies to shoot the “creature” inside the house right in the head.
Bang. Ben, who lived the whole night long, is now dead.
As the credits roll, a bunch of folks with meathooks pick up Ben, our now-dead hero, and toss him on the bonfire with all the other bodies that need burning.
And we go The End with a big, fat bonfire. How’s THAT for grim?
And I guess roads are cheap to shoot as well, since the movie begins with a long shot of a car driving down the road, followed by another shot of a car driving down the road.
In there somewhere, you get the credits, and here’s something curious: The title of the movie is spelled like this: “night OF THE LIVING DEAD.” And the word night is a bunch of outlines of letters. So even the title is a kind of jump scare, wherein the creator of the titles whispers the first word, then yells the rest of it at you.
Subtle.
Also worth noting in the titles, the fact that the screenplay is not just by George Romero, but also by John Russo, who just for fun would go on to create a whole lot of movies that attempted to cash in on the fact that he was the “Night of the Living Dead” guy.
By the way, that whole driving along the road while the credits roll thing? That takes up two solid minutes of movie. They even drive past a sign that says they’re going into a cemetery, just in case you thought they were headed into Lawn Ornament World when you started seeing all those headstones.
Another curious fun fact – the screenplay is credited to George Romero, but the director is listed as George A. Romero. I wonder if those guys are related?
After more than two minutes, we finally meet some people: Johnny and Barbra (I know it looks funny. They spelled it that way in the credits). They’re brother and sister, and their mother has tasked them with driving to a graveyard three hours away to lay some flowers on a gravestone.
Johnny is very cranky about this, noting that the flowers say “We Still Remember,” even though he doesn’t remember the man. Who I guess is his dad. That man gave you life, Johnny – remember that!
Barbra and Johnny head into the cemetery, bickering all the while. Johnny is mad that they got there so late (it’s 8 PM, and it’s the Spring Forward part of Daylight Savings, something they keep pointing out, even though it means nothing at all).
They put down the flowers, and Barbra goes to say a prayer, while Johnny whines some more about how praying is for church.
Also, he sees some dude walking along in the cemetery.
And he puts on some driving gloves. Because that’s what you did in 1968.
Johnny starts reminiscing about the time he scared the poop out of Barbra in the cemetery. And also, about how scared of the cemetery Barbra used to be. Barbra tells him to quit talking about it, and Johnny says (come on horror fans, you know this one): “They’re coming to get you Barbra!”
Here’s a tip, folks. If you’re in a horror movie situation, don’t be a jerk. It’ll just cause people to cheer when you get your throat torn out.
Johnny keeps on taunting Barbra, pointing to the other dude in the cemetery, and joking that he’s getting out of there.
At which point, the other guy in the cemetery grabs Barbra.
Johnny, who may be a jerk, but who still doesn’t like it when people try to eat his sister, jumps on the man and tries to fight him off. A fight breaks out which would probably be pretty spectacular, if only the filmmakers could have afforded stunt men.
Finally, the zombie whacks Johnny’s head against a grave, and Johnny dies.
Or is knocked unconscious. Or is faking, because he’s decided he values his own life more than Barbra’s.
Either way, the creature gets up and lopes after Barbra.
You know, considering how much people complain about fast zombies in movies, this dude is pretty speedy. He might not make it all the way to an outright run, but he’s got the speedwalk/jog thing down.
Barbra runs away, tripping and falling, at which point she pulls off her high heels, making her the smartest horror movie heroine alive.
She hops into her car, locks the doors, and discovers that the keys are missing. The zombie catches up, and breaks the window glass with a rock.
Barbra releases the emergency brake, and the vehicle, which just happens to be parked at the top of the hill, rolls on down while the zombie gives chase.
Barbra crashes into a tree, because she’s driving a massive vehicle with no power steering, and she runs for it. She heads down the road, and spots a farmhouse off in the distance.
So she just keeps on running for it, with nary a shoe to her name.
It’s funny, though. She keeps running into things and then leaning over them in what I have to assume the actress thought was a dramatic fashion.
Finally, she gets to the house and tries to get in, only the front door is locked. She does not try knocking, instead opting to run off the porch. And fall down.
She heads around the house, pausing for another lean and react, and there’s an open door.
She runs in while thunder crashes in the background, despite the sunny skies outside.
Inside, it’s pretty dark, even though Barbra kept talking about how sunny it was outside.
Barbra grabs a knife from the kitchen and starts walking through the house. She does not call out to the owners. I guess she really takes the whole finders/keepers thing seriously.
Barbra keeps prowling around the inside of the house, while the zombie runs around outside. Among other things, he tears down a clothesline and the pole that holds it up.
Thing is the strongest zombie ever, I swear.
Barbra finds a phone and tries to call someone, but there’s no dial tone. Also, given the fact that Barbra hasn’t said anything for a while, I can only assume the folks making the film realized that she’s not much of an actress, and keeping her away from dialogue is the only responsible thing to do.
Barbra looks outside, where it was light just a minute ago, and it’s full-on dark, and there are a couple more zombies.
Barbra runs away from the window and heads up the stairs, where she finds a dude whose face has been chewed off.
She runs downstairs and is about out the front door, just in time for a tall black fellow to park his truck out front, and run into the house, dragging Barbra along with him while spouting exposition, like, his truck is almost out of gas, and the gas pump out front is locked.
He asks Barbra if there’s a key.
Barbra doesn’t say anything. He asks if she lives there.
She doesn’t say anything.
He tries the phone.
Barbra, meanwhile, wanders over to the stairs, so that the dude can see the dead guy, and the movie can get the full value for their props.
Dude decides to go looking for food, after noting that they need to go somewhere and find some more people.
Meanwhile, Barbra just keeps on wandering around, holding the knife and not saying anything.
Until she does. She opts to go for, “What’s happening?” Dude tries to do some more expositioning, and then it’s time for another action sequence, so a zombies breaks the dude’s headlights. For some reason. Perhaps light makes them angry.
Dude asks Barbra if there are any more of the creatures, and she says she doesn’t know at a really loud volume, so you’ll know she’s distressed.
So the dude goes out and bashes the zombie’s heads in with a tire iron. Just to show them who’s boss.
While this is going on, another zombie wanders into the house, and slowly ambles after Barbra, who is sitting on a chair, emoting.
Dude walks in just in time to save her bacon, by jamming the tire iron right into the dead dude’s head.
Dude runs to the open door, smacks another zombie in the face, and the zombie stumbles back so that the director can offer up a dramatic shot of all the other zombies ambling towards the house.
Dude closes the door.
Barbra is looking at the dead guy on the floor, which is freaking her out even more. Dude tells her not to look, and drags the dead guy outside. Then sets fire to him.
This causes the other zombies to stumble back, terribly afraid of the fire. This will mark the only time this trick will work at all in a “Dead” movie.
Dude goes back in the house, slams the door, and sticks a card table up against the door. Yeah. That’ll keep them safe.
Dude turns on the lights, and tells Barbra to turn more lights on in the house. He finds a couple of conveniently placed toolboxes and goes through them, grabbing a hammer. Then he goes looking for nails, finding a ton of them in the junk drawer.
He tells Barbra to go find some boards so they can nail the place up.
Barbra just keeps wandering around, freaked right out (or perhaps, thinking she’s a very talented actress) and Dude starts yelling, then decides to go with the, “Talk to her like she’s a scared toddler” method.
Barbra goes into the living room and, instead of looking for wood, starts up a music box, so that the director can do creepy music box shots.
Inside the kitchen, Dude locates as much wood as he can, often by tearing boards off of things like cabinets.
Barbra locates four tiny pieces of wood and brings them in, and then finally does something useful and holds onto one side of a loose door while Dude nails it across the door to the outside.
Dude then tasks Barbra with putting in some more nails, while he goes to nail up other doors and windows.
Later, Dude monologues a whole tale about a truck crashing into a gas pump, creatures encircling a diner, and how the truck out front isn’t his. While this is going on, a REALLY LOUD cricket plays on the soundtrack, to remind you that it’s nighttime.
Then Barbra takes a turn at the monologue trough, and tells the story of how she got to the farmhouse, even though we, the audience, saw that part already.
Really, there should have been a subtitle: Take Pee Break Here.
You know what’s funny? Even Dude looks sort of bored by the whole thing. So he opts to just keep on boarding things up. Oh, and he tosses out a, “Why don’t you just keep calm?”
This doesn’t work, and as Barbra concludes her story, which conveniently leaves out Johnny taking a whack to the noggin, she first says they need to wait for Johnny, then upgrades it to a Full-On, Community-Theater, “Please! We’ve got to go get Johnny!”
She stands up and runs at Dude, who tries to explain what’s going on outside. Barbra slaps him. He punches her. She doesn’t fall over, but does go unconscious.
He catches her before she falls, then places her gently on the couch and unbuttons her coat.
Later, Dude flips on the radio and tries to find information.
Since the world in mass chaos, the man on the radio basically says, “We don’t know what to look for…”
While exposition goes on the background, Dude looks out the window, and sees some of the creatures getting closer. So first, he lights a fire in the fireplace, in case zombie Santa Claus decides to come down the chimney bringing gifts and mayhem to all the edible girls and boys.
Then he throws a bunch of lighter fluid on a chair. He follows up this act by grabbing a curtain, yanking a strip off of it, tying it around a table leg, and then setting fire to his makeshift torch.
He runs to the front door, shoves the chair outside on the porch, sets fire to it, and shoves it off the porch.
The zombies back away, making unhappy noises. Which never happens in any of the other movies.
Dude goes back in and keeps on hammering away, at one point moving a door, revealing what appears to be a cellar door. The camera zooms in on it, so you know that it’s important.
He work finished, Dude lights up a cigarette.
Why worry about cancer when you’re probably going to get eaten?
Dude opens the closet and finds a gun. No, I don’t know what kind. Some sort of pump-action rifle, I guess. Does it matter?
While this is going on, Barbra wakes up. Then decides to stare straight ahead, saying nothing.
Dude tells her that the place is boarded up pretty well now, which is hilarious, because the window directly behind him isn’t boarded up at all. Dude also notes that they have a gun, and some bullets.
Did I mention he’s telling her all this while he’s putting some shoes on her that he found in the closet? Because he totally is.
He also points out that they have food and a radio, then tells her that he’s going to go upstairs, but that if something tries to break in, he’ll hear it and come down and take care of it.
Barbra just sits there through all of this, staring straight ahead, not saying or doing anything. It’s probably the most effective acting Barbra is going to do in this film.
Dude heads upstairs, where he finds the dead person, who it turns out is a female. He covers her in a rug and drags her away from the top of the stairs, but doesn’t do ii carefully enough that we can’t see that this person doesn’t look anything like the half-eaten face we saw earlier.
Downstairs, Barbra keeps on sitting and listening to the radio, where it’s revealed that the people doing the killing are also making a light snack of their victims. We get a minute of this, while the camera dramatically zooms in on Barbra, then the radio, then Barbra, then the radio…
And suddenly, a door shifts, and Barbra starts screaming, and two men come out of the cellar.
Upstairs, Dude hears the screaming and runs downstairs holding the gun.
The Bald Dude from the cellar says, “A radio!” And runs over to listen to the whole people-eating-people story.
Dude (wow, all these dudes are going to need monikers, because the movie isn’t giving us any… I guess it’s going to be Black Dude for a while) – Black Dude berates the two dudes from the cellar, asking why they didn’t come up and help him.
Bald Dude says that Black Dude “could have been one of those things…”
Black Dude gets seriously crabby about the fact that the people in the basement didn’t come upstairs to help him, first claiming they couldn’t hear, and then claiming that there was so much noise they thought the place was being ripped apart.
Young dude calls Bald Dude Mr. Cooper, so we’ve got a name for him. And Mr. Cooper calls Young Dude Tommy.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
Mr. Cooper tells Black Dude that “those things” turned over their car. He thinks that the cellar is the safest place for all of them, since there’s only one door they have to protect.
Black Dude says that the cellar is basically a death trap, because if the creatures come for them, then there’s no escape route.
Cooper says he’s going down there and boarding the place up, and not letting anyone in, so Black Dude and Tommy need to decide whether they’re coming down or not.
This makes Tommy crabby, because he wants to talk options first.
Tommy looks out the window, and says there are something like ten creatures out there.
Black Dude leads Tommy to the back window, noting that there are more of them out back.
Suddenly, the creatures jam their hands through the window. Black Dude sticks the gun through the holes in the boarded-up window, and shoots one of them in the chest. It staggers, but doesn’t die.
Tommy, meanwhile, grabs a kitchen knife and cuts at the creatures’ hands, chopping off a finger or two. Which doesn’t stop the beings from grabbing at them.
Downstairs, Mr. Cooper’s wife calls to Mr. Cooper, asking what’s going on.
Cooper says it’s all right, even though this is a total lie.
Black Dude fires again, hitting the same creature in the chest. The thing stumbles, but doesn’t fall over. So Black Dude shoots him again, this time in the head. The creature falls over, dead again.
Outside, more creatures are coming at the house. One of them, a female, grabs something that’s kind of hard to see, and eats it. I think it was a snail. So much for desperately wanting human flesh.
Inside the house, the argument escalates. Black Dude tells Mr. Cooper that if Cooper wants to be the boss, he can be the boss of the cellar. Black Dude is the boss up here.
Also, Cooper is told he can’t take any food or the radio or Barbra into the cellar.
When Cooper says that his kid is down there, and she can’t come up, Black Dude says it’s too bad that her dad is stupid.
Cooper heads for the cellar, with a whole, “Yeah, well, I’m not letting anyone play in my cellar-fort once I’m down there, so N’yeah!”
Just before Cooper gets his stomp-down-the-stairs on, Tommy calls to someone downstairs. It’s Judy, Teenaged Girlfriend.
Judy comes up. Cooper goes down. Then he puts one whole board in front of the door. Yes, a single board, fitted into little slots. They’re totally safe now. There no way anyone could get down there. Without kicking the door a little.
Tommy says that “The three of them” could board things up real good upstairs, if only Cooper would listen. Because, as we know, barricading a house is man’s work.
Cooper tells Mrs. Cooper that they’ll be safe, and the people upstairs are stupid.
Mr. Cooper asks how his daughter is. Little Cooper is lying on what appears to be a workbench. She’s unconscious.
Mrs. Cooper says she seems to be a little warm, and that it might be shock. Mr. Cooper lights up a cigarette and rants about how he can’t wait for the monsters to get in the house, and for the people upstairs to beg to come downstairs.
His wife points out how that’s really important to him – for him to be right and everyone else to be wrong.
Apparently, Mr. Cooper doesn’t get to be the boss down here, either.
Mrs. Cooper finds out there’s a radio upstairs, and demands that Mr. Cooper take the boards off the door. Mr. Cooper says no.
Mrs. Cooper says, “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”
Sadly, Mrs. Cooper is wrong. Dying together pretty much solves all their problems, and will be much cheaper than a divorce. I’m just saying.
Tommy calls down to Mrs. Cooper, and says they found a TV. Mrs. Cooper tells Tommy and if Judy comes down to watch the kid, who isn’t even awake, then the Coopers can come upstairs. What a fun trade!
And so, five minutes after giving multiple ultimatums, Mr. Cooper opens the door.
The Coopers come upstairs, and Mrs. Cooper sees Barbra for the first time. Barbra is staring at a doily on the couch.
Ben (Black Dude finally has a name too!) yells from another room that he needs help with the TV, and the menfolk go to assist him, while Mrs. Cooper sits in a chair and takes a long, hard look at doily girl.
Finally, Mrs. Cooper pulls out a cigarette, and Barbra kind of notices her. Mrs. Cooper says Barbra doesn’t have to be afraid of her.
Then here comes Mr. Cooper, who points out that there are a million weak spots in the house. He demonstrates by going to the window and pulling an admittedly weak little board, which bends.
Cooper then goes to his wife and demands a cigarette, which gives us a look at the ceiling, which has a really lame plaster job. I’m surprised Cooper hasn’t commented on that.
Mrs. Cooper reminds Mr. Cooper that Barbra’s brother was killed. Mr. Cooper goes back to complaining about the windows.
Mrs. Cooper asks why he doesn’t do something to help somebody.
Ben and Tommy arrive with the TV, which they set up on a couple of chairs.
Mr. Cooper shakes a finger at Barbra and tells her to pay attention to what’s going on when the TV comes on.
Mrs. Cooper asks if there’s anything she can do to help.
Ben ignores her and reminds Mr. Cooper that Ben, yes, BEN is giving the orders up here.
Tommy turns on the TV.
The news is on. The first couple minutes are a rehash of the whole people are eating people thing.
Then, a new report! The unburied dead are rising and attacking the living.
Also, there are now safe places to go, and instead of staying their houses, people are encouraged to go to rescue areas.
Ben says that they could escape in the truck, but there’s no gas. Tommy says there’s a pump outside, and Ben says they need the key to get into the pump.
The news continues: Apparently, space experts are being consulted, and the news reporter reminds everyone that recently, a satellite was sent to Venus, which then came back. But the science people had it destroyed in orbit because of dangerous levels of strange radiation.
News Guy then connects the dots between the exploded satellite and the recent “mass murders.” Because news guys aren’t paid to say, “We really have no idea what’s going on. Here’s a picture of an ocelot.” No, they need to spout theories, or people might CHANGE THE CHANNEL!
Now that the news guys have spoken, Ben thinks they need to get out of the house and go find safe harbor.
But wait! There’s more stuff on the news! A reporter has cornered some people who work for the government and he wants to know whether or not the satellite is responsible for the dead coming back to life and eating the living.
The government guys don’t agree with one another about whether this is the case or not.
So now it’s back to The Debate Show! Starring the people in the living room.
As stated before, Ben wants to get out of there – the TV just showed that there’s a safe house in Willard, which is only 17 miles away.
Cooper doesn’t think it’s possible to get there, what with them having to drag a sick kid along. And also, you know, women. Who are totally incapable of doing anything.
I’m amazed no one’s tossed him out the front door as bait yet.
Tommy figures this is as good a time as any to tell how he ended up at the house. It seems that he and Judy were going to go swimming, only they heard the news reports. So they came to the house, and found the dead person upstairs.
But opted to just leave ‘em lying there.
Point of order! Why didn’t the dead person upstairs get up and try to get herself a midnight snack? Maybe she isn’t dead?
Moving on.
Anyway, Tommy and Judy came to the house, and found the dead person. Then the Coopers showed up, so they all barricaded themselves in the basement, where thanks to a single two-by-four, they figured they would be safe.
Ben tells Mrs. Cooper to go downstairs and check on her kid, and to send Judy upstairs.
Judy comes up, and Ben tells her to go find some curtains or something, and to make strips of cloth.
Then the plan starts to come together:
Step one: Make molotov cocktails.
Step two: Make Cooper throw them from the second story, to scare off the creatures.
Step three: Ben and Tommy run for the truck, unlock the pump, and put gas in the truck.
Step four: Everyone runs out to the truck and hops in, and everyone drives away.
It’s a brilliant plan, with no flaws, and it should go off without a hitch. Right? Of course. It’s not like this is a horror movie… Uh…
Judy and Tommy start putting the molotov cocktails together, using jars from the fruit cellar. And also kerosene from the cellar. And rags made from curtains.
Judy is sad because the phone is down and she can’t call her parents and tell them what’s going on. She’s also not sure that they’re doing the right thing, trying to escape and get to the rescue station.
Tommy replies, “Well, the television said that’s the right thing to do. We’ve got to get to a rescue station.”
Yes, Tommy, the television said it’s the right thing to do. It’s a good thing you never lived to see infomercials. You’d own sixty-seven of those food dehydrators.
Judy is at least honest enough to admit she just really, really doesn’t want Tommy to be the one to have to drive the truck and unlock the gas pump. Finally, she gets herself a hug and kiss and everyone goes back to work.
You know what? This movie has been running for over and hour and no one has been eaten yet. Hack the first five minutes off the movie, and this could be a story about a bunch of folks who just really, really don’t want to have to talk to the Mormons walking through the neighborhood.
Mr. Cooper tells Ben that Barbra needs to go down in the cellar during their gas-and-go rescue mission, and Ben agrees. He tells Barbra that she needs to go downstairs, but that soon they’ll be able to leave.
Barbra almost has an emotion, and she and Judy head downstairs. Because she and Judy are just baggage to be hauled around, and not actual people.
Mr. Cooper heads upstairs and gets ready to throw the flaming cocktails.
Tommy and Ben pull the boards off the door, and Ben wishes Tommy good luck.
Outside, the creatures are just wandering around, not really headed for the house at all.
Mr. C tosses a couple of cocktails on the lawn, and the creatures yell and stumble away.
Ben and Tommy run outside, and Tommy almost gets attacked. But he makes it to the truck.
Judy yells out, “I’m going with him,” and she runs outside.
Now Tommy and Judy are in the cab of the truck, and Ben is on the back of it, waving another table-leg torch around.
Suddenly, it’s a lot brighter outside. Not the best job on the day-for-night photography there, Mister Director of Photography.
The trio makes it to the gas pump, and the gas pump key doesn’t work. Ben shoots the lock off the pump.
Tommy goes to put gas in the truck, and squeezes the pump too early, spraying gas on everything – including on the torch.
Fire abounds.
Tommy says they need to get away from the pump, and drives off with Judy still in the truck with him.
They realize, too late, that the truck is on fire. Tommy gets out, then goes back to help Judy, who is stuck, and BOOM! Flaming truck. Dead people.
Ben picks up his torch and uses it to ward off the creatures. He runs to the house, and knocks on the door, which Mr. Cooper locked after everyone went out the door.
Ben calls to Cooper, who is standing in the doorway to the cellar – maybe fifteen feet away.
Cooper does nothing to help, and Ben kicks the door in. He spots Cooper, and realizes that, yes, Cooper is going to experience no character arc in this movie. He’s going to start off as mean and unwilling to help his fellow man, and he’s going to end that way too.
Ben runs into the house, slams the door, and grabs a nearby freestanding door. Time to nail the front door back in place!
Cooper runs to help, and after everything is nailed back in place and everyone is relatively safe, Ben punches Cooper in the face a whole bunch of times. He concludes the pummeling with, “I ought to drag you out there and feed you to those things!”
Cooper almost looks chastised, but he’s not that good an actor.
Outside, the creatures go to the burned out truck: It’s eatin’ time! And hey, there’s some conveniently roasted meat. Flash-fried, if you will. This leads to a solid minute of creatures eatin’ people.
And a legendary film franchise is born.
There is some more discussion. It comes out that the Cooper’s car is at least a mile away, that the kid was bitten on the arm by “those things,” and that Barbra has pretty much lost it, as all she can contribute to the conversation is the Johnny has the keys to the car.
Ben offers to get to the car himself, only the Cooper’s car was turned over by the creatures, so that isn’t going to help.
And so, everyone goes back to watching the news.
There’s some more talk about “mysterious radiation,” and yet more information about how to handle what the news people are now calling “ghouls.”
It seems that if you shoot them in the head, or administer some blunt head trauma, that’ll be enough to kill (or re-kill, I suppose) the ghouls.
The nice newscaster asks a member of local law enforcement if they’ll be able to wrap up the problem in 24 hours. Something worth noting here: All the news guys are really calm about this whole thing. Almost painfully so. You wonder: Were they prepped to handle this kind of event at newscaster school?
If I were a reporter, I’d be all, “Dude, that guy just ATE that other guy. I’m out of here. I’m not being turned into Tender Vittles just so I can get a Pulitzer.”
But these guys? Totally unflappable.
Cooper goes to check the window. Ben looks at Cooper. And then the power goes out.
Ben goes to check to see if the fuse box is in the cellar. Mr. Cooper goes to his wife and says he has to get the gun away from Ben. After all, two people have already died, and things could get worse.
Mrs. Cooper is nonplussed.
Outside, the creatures start picking up heavy objects and whacking on the doors and windows.
Ben tries to hold a board in place, and drops the gun.
Mr. Cooper takes the gun, and tells his wife to get in the cellar.
Ben runs at Mr. Cooper, and takes the gun. He shoots Cooper right in the chest.
Mrs. Cooper, who is trying to hold the front door in place, is grabbed by several hands that have broken through the door.
Mr. Cooper stumbles down the cellar stairs. He collapses on the floor next to his daughter.
Upstairs, Barbra suddenly gets off the couch and goes to hold the front door shut. So Mrs. Cooper, who I guess doesn’t realize that isn’t a one-woman job, goes downstairs, where she discovers that her daughter has eaten her husband.
Mrs. Cooper panics and falls over, and her daughter grabs a trowel off the wall and comes after her mom with it. Time for a good old-fashioned trowel-disemboweling.
No, really. Mom just lies there and gets a trowel in the guts over and over and over again.
Upstairs, Ben tries to fight off an army of arms, while Barbra continues to pitch in. This works until Johnny breaks down the front door, grabs Barbra, and drags her, screaming, into the crowd of creatures.
Ben backs away from the window, and is almost bitten by the little girl from the cellar. He tosses her onto the couch and, irony of ironies, boards himself up in the cellar from which where is no escape.
The dead people come pouring into the house.
Remarkably, the cellar door holds.
Ben goes downstairs, where he finds Mr. Cooper, who is just getting up, having discovered his inner living dead guy.
Mrs. Cooper wakes up shortly thereafter.
Ben shoots them both in the head.
Then Ben gets into firing position and sits back from the stairs – he’s ready to put some more holes in heads.
Later, dawn breaks. A helicopter flies by overhead, zipping past rednecks with guns and various zombies.
The helicopter lands.
I have no idea what that had to do with anything.
Near the house o’ doom, the local long arm of the law and various other people with guns hang out. The local long-arm tells the local reporter-type that they should have things wrapped up in three or four more hours.
Then the local long-arm tells a couple of folks to check out a nearby house. And we all know which house that is.
In the cellar, Ben is asleep. He hears noise outside and wakes up.
Outside, the local long-arm walks by the burned up truck, and notes that someone, “Had a cookout here.”
As dark jokes go, that’s pretty dark.
Elsewhere, folks with guns shoot various and sundry people-eaters.
The local long-arm tells some folks to build him a bonfire.
Inside the house, Ben creeps to the window.
Outside the house, the local long-arm tells one of his buddies to shoot the “creature” inside the house right in the head.
Bang. Ben, who lived the whole night long, is now dead.
As the credits roll, a bunch of folks with meathooks pick up Ben, our now-dead hero, and toss him on the bonfire with all the other bodies that need burning.
And we go The End with a big, fat bonfire. How’s THAT for grim?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Halloween: Resurrection
The “Halloween” series manages to pull something off that I really think is worth noting – it takes just six movies and creates three trilogies.
In theory, the series is at least three movies short of the tri-trilogy experience, but sure enough, there they all are.
First, there’s the Myers Family Trilogy, which consists of parts 1, 2, and 4. The first film opens with Michael Myers killing his sister, and ends with the evil inside Michael passed to Jamie, who kills her foster mother while dressed in a clown suit that looks just like Michael’s.
People may argue the merits of part 4, but for better or for worse, it closes off the series with a nice twist and completes the character arcs of everyone involved. Michael is dead, but the evil inside him is triumphant and ongoing. And Loomis, who spent the last several years keeping the evil inside Michael off the streets, will probably spend the rest of his life trying to do the same for Jamie.
It’s a downer of a conclusion to be sure, but it works.
The second trilogy would be the Jamie trilogy, which uses movies 4, 5, and 6. Of the three trilogies, this one is the weakest and the least satisfying, because our main heroes all die (both Jamie and Loomis are, presumably, not coming back) and our villain just sort of survives because of some strange cult thing that doesn’t make any sense.
Since H20 doesn’t pick up where 6 left off, the story just ends, with Michael out and about. There are no twists, no ironies, and in the end whatever ideas the series has introduced up this point are null and void.
Even the strong ending of part 4 is painfully muted, as Jamie doesn’t really go on to do much of anything except run, and scream, and ultimately end up kidnapped and deceased.
There are probably those that would argue that part 4 couldn’t really exist without parts 1 and 2, but I don’t think that’s the case. Loomis enters the story of the original “Halloween” much the way he enters 4 – with a history that we learn about through his frequent monologues.
And really, everything you need to know to enjoy part 4 is laid out for you as the movie wears on. Granted, watching the movies this way weakens the story, but honestly, it wasn’t that great to begin with.
Finally, there’s the Laurie Trilogy, which tracks our heroine from the day she meets Michael to the day she cuts off his head, twenty years later via 1, 2, and H20.
The obvious question is, of course, whether or not this Trilogy is better than the Myers family trilogy.
If you want my honest assessment… the answer is no.
Take the movies at face value, the ending of H20 ties up the story fairly completely. Myers has had his head cut off, and so is therefore very dead. And Laurie, having separated Michael from his head, can finally allow the nightmares in her mind to die.
Which leaves just one problem – Loomis is still dead.
This is an aspect of the story that the Jamie trilogy got right, though they fumbled the ball badly in part six. Loomis is a part of the “Halloween” story, and an extremely important one. He was part of what made the Halloween movies better than the average slasher tale. Unlike most movies of this ilk, which involve people dying one by one with no knowledge that something is even wrong, Loomis is on the case from the word, “Go,” in the “Halloween” movies.
To some extent, the movies were more suspenseful because it wasn’t just a case of, “Who will Michael kill next?” Instead, we had Loomis to root for, as he tried to stop Michael before Michael could do any more harm.
But H20 just took on the standard slasher formula – Michael kills, and we wait to see whom he’s going to kill next.
H20 had a lot of ways they could have dealt with this. Loomis’s nurse, instead of dying, could have lived and used Loomis’s work to locate and stop Michael. One of the cops could have figured out that Michael was the root cause of the deaths early in the movie, and gone on a Michael hunt, essentially filling in the Loomis role.
For that matter, if one of the cops had called Laurie and told her to be on her guard, she could have been preparing for what might come starting in the early minutes of the movie.
But no.
In the end, the only satisfaction that comes from H20 is the knowledge that Laurie has fought and defeated the demon that’s plagued her for the last 20 years.
There’s only one problem: She didn’t actually kill him.
I think if the series had actually coasted to a stop with the death of Michael in H20, you could make a stronger case for Laurie Trilogy. But with the awareness that H20 isn’t the end, fans of the series are denied a real win. And so is Laurie.
Instead, we get another movie, “Halloween: Resurrection,” and whatever good was created in H20 is rendered moot.
As “Resurrection” opens, we get a nice long credits sequence, which goes on and on and on and doesn’t feature a pumpkin, or flashes from the rest of the movie, or anything really. It’s just a bunch of words.
Then the credits fade out, and we’re in a long tunnel, and Laurie’s voice says, “You’ve heard of the tunnel.”
This particular tunnel?
Guess not. Laurie continues: “The one we all go through? At the end there’s a door. And waiting for you on the other side of that door is either heaven or hell.”
As Laurie is saying this, we actually move from the tunnel, wherever that was, into a hospital corridor.
She concludes: “This is that door.”
And then, there we are, with Laurie in the hospital. Her hair is long again, and since it wasn’t this long in the last movie, we must assume she’s been in the hospital for a while. Oh, sorry, “Grace Andersen Sanitarium,” according to the sign out front.
Inside, two nurses yammer back and forth, filling us in on just how, exactly, a movie series with a dead villain can have another movie.
In short, the paramedic who went to go get the dead Michael Myers all by himself found out that Michael wasn’t dead. Michael crushed the paramedic’s larynx, slapped his Michael mask on the guy, traded clothing with him, and then wandered off into the woods.
Laurie, in turn, chopped the head off of the paramedic.
I’m torn between wanted to applaud the guy who came up with that explanation, as it alllmost works… or tearing it apart.
Because the movie shows us Michael, wearing a paramedic uniform, walking through the crowd of people and into the woods. Which means no one stopped him and went, “Hey, YOU’RE NOT BOB!”
Even though he’s carrying a massive kitchen knife.
On top of that, the paramedic had a minute or two where he could reach out to Laurie, appearing to plead for his life. You know what you do in that situation? You take off your mask. That pretty much clears up the whole Who I Am issue pretty well.
But, whatever. Points for trying really hard.
The two nurses go into Laurie’s room. She hasn’t said a word in years, say the nurses. She’s a suicide threat, they’ve found her on the roof before, and so on and so forth and she’s all crazy-like.
The shove a couple pills in her mouth and head out the door.
At which point, Laurie spits the pills out, and stuffs them inside the doll she’s holding in her lap.
She stands up, looks outside, and there’s Michael, standing on the lawn.
Oh wait, he’s not there anymore. So maybe we’re seeing Laurie’s delusions again.
Outside, a security guard comes across a gate that’s open, even though it’s clearly NOT supposed to be open, based on the large lock hanging off of it.
The guard, who deserves whatever he gets, does NOT radio in and let everyone know that the gate is open. Instead he yells out, “Anyone out there?” When no one answers, he lights up a cigarette.
And there’s a dude with a clown mask behind him. The guard jumps, then asks Harold how he got out, and who Harold is supposed to be.
Harold replies that he’s John Wayne Gacy, and then goes on to talk some more about John, he crimes, and when he was put to death. The kindly guard starts walking Harold somewhere. Maybe back to the hospital. Maybe not.
Out in the woods, Michael is standing there, wearing his mask.
Here’s a thought – how does Michael keep finding the same mask, over and over again?
To be fair, in this continuity, the first two movies take place over one night. So that makes sense. But his mask had to have gotten some severe damage in the fire at the end of 2. But if he got up and walked away, there was probably time to pick up another mask that looked the same as the one he stole previously.
Which I guess he then held onto for 20 years. So it made sense that he’d still have the mask in H20.
But he stuck that mask on the paramedic, so where did he get this new one? Ebay? Did he use his own credit card?
Back inside the hospital, another security guard points out to our previous security guard that he sees someone in the basement. They both assume it’s Harold, of course, and head down to locate him.
No, of course it’s not Harold.
As the two guards wander the basement, they pass a snack machine. The Worst Guard Ever says that he skipped dinner, and stops to get a tasty snack. The Other Guard heads into the next room to find Harold.
WGE gets his snack, and as he starts eating, he hears his now-dead buddy screaming. So WGE heads into the next room, once again not calling for help, using his radio, pulling a gun, or even looking for a heavy object to fight with.
He does, however, hold onto his snack cake. Possibly to bribe the murderer with.
WGE sees a load of laundry in the dryer, and stops the dryer to investigate. Maybe he needs a napkin.
Instead he finds a head, so he panics, backs up, and trips over the body of his dead cohort. Which I guess he didn’t see lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Meanwhile, behind him, Michael lowers himself from the ceiling. I have never in my life seen a basement with such high ceilings. It’s no wonder the residents of the building are crazy, they’re living an in M.C. Escher drawing.
Michael kills WGE, and then goes a-wandering, at one point passing by what I at first thought was Harold’s room, but which I guess is actually an office. I have no idea. Either way, Harold is in there.
Harold sees Michael go wandering by, and Harold puts his clown mask back on.
Michael goes to Laurie’s door, pounds on it a couple of times, and then walks through it. Literally. Like he just walks through it and it crumbles around him. I have no idea what to say to that.
Once he’s in Laurie’s room, Michael looks at Laurie’s bed. Her doll and a couple of pillows are sitting there. Michael raises his knife, I guess to stab the empty bed, and Laurie clocks him with a lamp.
Laurie runs out the door and down the hall, while Michael stalk-walks after her.
Laurie heads to the roof, and then we don’t see her, and then we see Michael, and Michael sees Laurie’s robe hanging over the edge of the roof. So he walks over there, and then turns around, and sees Laurie, who says, “Hello, Michael.”
She presses a button, and a winch that’s on the roof for some reason loops around Michael’s ankle and lifts him in the air.
Laurie says, “I knew you’d come for me sooner or later. What took you so long?”
Hey, here’s a question – why in the world wasn’t every police force in existence looking for Michael? It’s been three years, surely someone should have encountered him, right?
Laurie picks up Michael’s knife, which fell on the ground, and says, “You failed, Michael. Want to know why? Because I’m not afraid of you. But what about you? Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid to die, Michael?”
Laurie starts cutting the rope that’s holding Michael in the air, and Michael starts pulling at his mask. Laurie says she has to be sure, so she reaches for his mask and gives it a tug.
Michael lets her pull for a second, then grabs her hand.
The rope snaps. Michael and Laurie go over the edge of the roof. Michael grabs the edge of the roof, holding them both in the air, and stabs Laurie with the knife.
Laurie kisses Michael on the mask, then lets go and falls.
She lands on the ground maybe two or three stories below.
I’ve gotta be honest. Her cunning plan was pretty weak. We’ve already seen Michael take six bullets to the chest and fall two stories… at which point he got back up and continued his murder spree. I seriously doubt three stories would have done the trick.
Michael heads back through the hospital, passing by Harold, who is still reading while wearing his clown mask. Michael opens up Harold’s door and hands Harold the bloody knife. Harold starts reciting Michael’s history, from the first movie up until the last few minutes, while we watch Michael walk off down the basement hallway.
Harold ends his speech with, “Now he’s back,” and here comes the title: “Halloween: Resurrection.”
You know, I’ve got to interject two thoughts here:
The first: If this were a short film that someone put together, just to give the series a better sendoff, this wouldn’t be half-bad. For that matter, if they wanted to re-release H20 with this as the ending, it might even make for a reasonably satisfying experience.
But it’s not. It’s the start of a new something-or-other, and now Michael is about to head out and, what? If he follows his normal patterns, he should head out and locate John, Laurie’s son from the last movie.
But I’m going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t going to happen.
So instead, Michael just killed Laurie. And, it should be noted, not on Halloween night. So now he’s off to kill… who? Just some random people?
What’s the point?
Ah well.
The movie heads off to Haddonfield University, where we get to watch part of a psychology class, concluding with a girl named Sara answering a question about something in our inner psyche that’s called, “The Shadow.” I’d transcribe the whole thing, but really, are we going to pretend this movie has themes? Probably not.
Later, Sara is driving along on a little scooter, while some girl calls out to her to wait up. This is Jen. Sara asks Jen what Jen signed them up for. Jen says they need to find Rudy.
Which they do. Rudy is, I guess, taking a cooking class. Which means at the end of the scene, he gets to jam a knife into a pumpkin.
Jen has Sara read Sara’s email, where we finally get to find out just what is going on. It seems that the three of them are going to be part of a Dangertainment (their word, not mine) team, where I guess they’re going to investigate something.
Ah. Some creepy dude has just come on and informed us via a monologue that they’ll be in the Myers house.
Sara says she needs to send a quick email. It goes to Deckard, who I guess she met in a chat room somewhere. He’s a high school student. He has a friend named Scott, who hassles Deckard about the fact that he and Sara have never met, and informs Deckard that he does not have an actual relationship with Sara.
Scott is correct, even though Deckard tries to convince him otherwise.
Oh, sorry, Deckard’s real name is Myles. Deckard is just a screen name. Okay then.
And now it’s later, and Jen, Sara, and Rudy, and three other people are told that they’re going to investigate Michael Myers’s house, because they’ve been selected. But first, Tyra Banks interviews them so we can know why they’re doing it.
Oh, and there’s, like, a host of the show, which is going to be broadcast on the Internet. Wow. The Internet. Everyone knows how many people just sit around, watching live broadcasts on The Internet. For a web site that no one has ever heard of.
I’d talk about why they’re doing it, but really, three of these dudes don’t even have names yet, and we met Sara first. Which means she’s going to live, everyone else is going to die, and all I’m really going to be doing for the next hour is rattling off a death order.
While Sara is being interviewed, a photographer knocks over a light, which explodes. Sara screams, and a glass across the room shatters.
This makes The Host very happy. For some reason.
Later, at the hotel, The Host watches a Kung Fu movie. He’s kind of put out when there’s a knock on his door, and it’s Sara, who wants to drop out. The Host tries to convince her that everyone else is a poser, and she’s real, and that’s what the Internet audience wants.
He also says some stuff about being famous, and the American dream. And fear. Do you care? No? Very well. I guess we can get excited over the fact that we learn that The Host’s name is Freddie. Does that help? No?
The next day, Sara and Jen and one of the other contestants go shopping. While trying on a shirt, Sara looks in a mirror, and sees… Michael Myers! She jumps and turns around. Michael isn’t there.
In his room, Myles pulls up Sara on the Internet and looks at her video from the day before. He tells Scott that he needs to stay home and watch Sara’s first episode.
Scott tells him that they really need to go to some epic party. Myles finally agrees.
And now it’s exposition time! Freddie explains to the “reporters” that they will each have a little camera attached to them, and the Internet audience can choose whichever camera they want to watch. So if they want to be seen, they had better be interesting.
You know, if you could swap between viewpoints while watching “Halloween: Wasn’t This About Family At One Point?” or watch everyone at once, like the movie “Timecode,” this could be really interesting. Alas.
Okay, so, we’re in the Myers house. The camera guy is rigging cameras, while Tyra Banks hassles him remotely. Eventually, Tyra gets bored and goes to have some coffee.
Inside, Michael walks past a “camera,” which I guess is supposed to make this movie more creepy, because it’s shot using low-resolution video footage.
Michael picks up the camera, and somehow arranges the tripod, which has sharp, stake-y feet, so that you can see the camera dude get stabbed in the throat. While, of course, Tyra Banks just happens to be looking somewhere else.
(Tyra Banks has the character name Nora, by the way. But we’re going to keep calling her Tyra Banks, because up to this point, no one has called Tyra anything at all.)
At any rate, having stabbed the camera dude and dragged him away, Michael leaves the camera lying on the floor, and Tyra, who is finally looking at the bank of video monitors again, compliments the camera guy on his choice of camera angles. She neglects to mention the fact that the legs of the tripod are also in the shot, and are probably a tripping hazard.
The Dangertainment van pulls up. Freddie is driving. Oh yeah, this is a high-class endeavor.
For some reason, the press is there. Or rather, clearly the press is there so that Freddie doesn’t sound stupid talking to himself as he explains that this is going to be totally, “real,” that nothing in the house has been tampered with, and that no one is allowed to leave until the show is over.
So, the opening of Halloween was, what, maybe ten minutes long? Tops? To go in the house, go to the kitchen, get a knife, go up the stairs, stab the sister to death, and go out again.
And we’ve got six people going into the house. So unless they literally scout every single nook and cranny for possible loose change, everyone should be out in… twenty minutes? Tops?
Oh, I guess I should mention that Michael is in the window upstairs. Since we, the audience, are already aware that he’s hanging out in his house (and man, I hope he stopped to grab a dog for lunch) everyone should be dead in the next three minutes.
This is going to be one short movie.
All the reporters gear up, Freddie blows an air horn, and we, the audience, get to go into nausea mode, as the movie slips between regular film, “video,” people-cams, and a couple of times, yep, they do go into a four-quadrant screen so you can see everything and everyone at once.
Man, I got a question already – the house is rigged with a few cameras, right? So how is it that no one has spotted Michael, yet?
Everyone walks in, and various opinions on what to do next are spouted.
Sara, Jen, and Rudy think they should do some actual exploring.
Rudy notes that the house probably has a huge kitchen. Which is why I guess they showed him in a cooking class, earlier. Does that count as character development? Really?
Rudy opens up the spice rack and smells the fennel. Yes, he really does note that he’s smelling the fennel, and not some other spice picked at random. This is important people. He is NOT smelling the mint, or the celery salt. It’s fennel, and don’t you forget it.
He makes Sara smell it as well, and they both note that it smells fresh.
Which means, what, exactly? That Michael, dog-eatin’ “he got hungry” Michael, opted to steal some fresh spices when he decided to hide out in his old house.
Michael Myers. He loves killing his relatives. And fresh fennel?
Rudy also finds a big knife, but Sara points out that the knife Michael used to murder his family should be in an evidence locker somewhere. Yeah, Sara? You want to start making sense now?
Okay, pop quiz: Where’s is Laurie Strode’s son?
Yeah. I thought so.
Sara opens up a pantry door and she and Rudy find… duh-DUH-DUUUH. A high chair. Everyone piles into the room to comment on how Michael’s family probably used to feed Michael in that chair.
Well, maybe. But it’s probably more likely that Laurie was using that chair last. You know? Laurie? Died at the start of the picture? Sister of Michael? She has a son that Michael isn’t looking for, even though it’s Halloween?
I mean, I get that this flick as abandoned the continuity of the other movies, but now it seems like it can’t remember things that happened less than an hour ago, timetable-wise.
Over at another house, a party rages, and Myles and Simon wander around dressed like characters from Pulp Fiction.
Myles, who clearly isn’t all that interested in the party, wanders off and finds an office with a computer and a really, really, really big wall-mounted monitor. So he fires up the ‘puter so he can see his imaginary online girlfriend, Sara.
(I must note, however, the oddest thing. As Myles heads into the office, the camera lingers on two dudes, dressed up as football players. They dance together for several seconds, with no women to speak of anywhere in sight. Then they leap in the air and bump chests. This would never happen in any version of reality, ever.)
The movie then hops over to nighttime. It seems that darkness has fallen rather suddenly, and a bunch of trick-or-treaters are walking up to the Myers house for some reason.
Oh. The reason is to put a lit pumpkin on the porch. Okay.
Inside the dark house, everyone lights candles and lanterns and flashlights.
Jen and one of the other guys go up the stairs, and head into Michael’s older sister’s room. The boy describes exactly what happened on the opening of the first Halloween, and tries to get Jen to flash his camera.
Jen stands up and moves for her shirt, slowly easing it up while Michael peeks in the doorway. Then she stops, in order to taunt the audience, who just want something – anything – to happen.
Back at the party, Myles is still watching the webcast, and he says, “There was someone in the hall,” in case people were sleeping during that bit.
Some dude and the girl he’s fooling around with launch themselves into the room, and Myles asks if they want to watch with him. The guy says no. The girl says yes.
Back at the Myers house, we get to watch Guy We Don’t Care About and Girl We Don’t Care About banter about the fact that they aren’t going to fool around.
Downstairs, Rudy and Sara talk until a girl screams upstairs. They both run up, trying to locate Jen, and Rudy manages to NOT see Michael in one room.
Then they locate Jen, who was Just Kidding, so everyone gets sort of mad at her.
Out in the van, Freddie and Tyra Banks are drinking wine and toasting themselves for their genius idea, which has probably generated no money, as I don’t see any sort of advertising going on. Freddie feels they are very successful, though what it is they are successful at doing, besides sticking a bunch of teenagers in an old house, I have no idea.
Inside, Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him tells a mirror (well, and the camera attached to his head, I guess) that he’s going to “Get her back for that.” At which point, Michael bursts through the mirror and grabs him, and he screams like a little girl with a skinned knee.
In the van, Freddie and Tyra toast, while the Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him gets a knife to the head. Freddie and Tyra miss the knife going in, but do his that his camera goes out. So they find a new camera view to follow and then toast, “To Dangertainment.”
Jen, Sara, and Rudy, who I guess didn’t hear their now-dead companion die, sit in a bedroom while Jen notes, “This must be the bed where he was conceived.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that.
Sara goes into the closet, encounters a mask, freaks out, and traps herself in the closet. Somehow. Rudy breaks in, in a moment that’s meant to remind us of the original Halloween. Only it mostly reminds us how lame this movie is.
Sara comes out of the closet, and behind her, we see that the Halloween mask is on a mannequin inside the closet. Oookaaay.
In the basement, the people we don’t care about almost make out, but don’t.
Upstairs, Rudy finds coloring books that are scribbled on in a manner that suggests Michael was, like, way disturbed. Then he notes that this is way too easy, and that this stuff should be missing.
He asks Sara to figure out why it’s all still there.
Jen asks where Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him went, and then determines he’s probably planning to scare her.
In the basement, the People We Don’t Care About find a giant locked door in the floor, which the guy unlocks with a massive metal key everyone found in the kitchen earlier.
(I suppose I should take a second to note that while all this has been going on, over at the party, Myles has had more and more people join him in the computer room, where they all sit around watching the Michael Myers Internet Program.)
The People We Don’t Care About head down into the door in the floor, and they find a large cement room with a doll lying down there, and a bunch of chains. The girl describes the room thusly: “This whole place looks like some sort of sadistic playpen.”
The girl realizes that because of the fact that they’re in a locked subbasement with chains on the walls, there aren’t any cameras. Except, of course, for the cameras they’re wearing.
So she pulls off his camera, and her camera, and makes her move, because there is something seriously wrong with her.
Making out ensues.
At the folks at the party where Myles continues to rock the computer give out a cry of joy.
Back in the subbasement, the people we don’t care about continue to fool around, when suddenly a wall crumbles behind them and a bunch of body parts and skeletons pour out.
In the van, Freddie and Tyra cheer.
In the basement, the guy and girl freak out, right up until the guy picks up an “arm,” and sees a tag on it that says, “Made in Taiwan.”
Somewhere else in the house, Michael continues to wander around, not running into anyone else despite the fact that there are five other people and it is just not a large house at all.
And then, suddenly, behind Michael, we see another Michael. So Michael One turns around, and it turns out that Michael One is actually Freddie, dressed up like Michael.
Michael two is, of course, Michael. Only Freddie thinks it’s the camera guy, so he berates Michael, VERY loudly, and tells him that it’s going to ruin the effect if people see them together.
He demands that “the camera guy” go out and help Tyra in the van.
Sadly, Michael does not stab Freddie over and over and over again until Freddie shuts up. Instead, Michael heads out to the van to do some stabbing on Tyra. Poor Tyra, who finally gets called by her character name, Nora. I still don’t care. They waited this long to give her a name, she gets to be Tyra. I’m pretty sure she’ll be dead the next time we see her, regardless.
Down in the subbasement, the boy and girl we don’t care about decide they need to go find Freddie, which should be the easiest thing in the world. All they have to do is pick up their cameras and threaten to blow the whole hoax wide open. But never mind.
The guy heads out of the basement, but the girl sees all the way through the wall, to yet another hole in the wall. Through which is some kind of underground chamber.
That’s a terrible explanation. Let’s try to get it to make sense.
Okay, first you have the house. Then there’s a basement under the house. Then there’s a subbasement chamber under the basement.
That subbasement chamber is contained inside a really, really, really, really massive chamber that has, I guess, been sitting directly under the Myers house for years. And, surprisingly, despite the fact that it has had pretty much no upkeep, the Myers house has managed not to fall into it.
The girl wanders around the underground chamber, which has living rats in it. And dead rats in it. And half-eaten rats in it.
Along with a dirty mattress, a little doll with nails through its eyes, and a portable stove with cooking pots and a half-eaten, but still living, rat on it.
The girl freaks out, turns around, and hey! There’s Michael! Or Freddie! Which, come to think of it, might have been meant has a horror movie in-joke.
So I guess Michael didn’t go to the van after all. Instead, after being berated he headed to the basement for some reason. Perhaps to take a nap and cry?
Regardless, Michael slowly stalks after the girl we don’t really care about, while she runs away, eventually stopping when she gets to the end of a short passage in the chamber, which is closed off by a gate that’s been locked up.
One of the gate’s bars has been pulled down, so that it points outward, looking like a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Michael walks up behind her, grabs her, and shoves her onto the broken bar.
Back at the party, Scott says, “That was so fake!” while Myles claims that it was real, and the girl just really died.
Everyone else at the party laughs.
Upstairs at the Myers house, Rudy and Jen take hits off a bong. On camera. All right then.
In another room, Sara is paging through something, when Michael appears right behind her. She runs and finds Rudy and Jen. Well, okay, she just finds Rudy, and drags him back downstairs. Where the murderer supposedly is.
So, what, is Rudy bait? Sara is not a good friend. No sir.
Rudy and Sara look around, but Michael is gone. No, wait! Michael comes out of nowhere, and grabs Sara. It looks like our primary hero is going to die (what a twist, eh?) but then, no. Dude we don’t care about runs up behind Michael and hits him with the Arm from Taiwan.
Michael falls over, and starts complaining in Freddie’s voice. About the fact that he just got hit.
Freddie tells everyone to turn off their cameras, and then explains to them that the whole thing was faked because, “America don’t like reality, first of all.”
He goes on to state that he’s set things up so that everyone can get some decent money on “the back end,” whatever that means. I can honestly say I can think of no way he can set up another revenue stream for Dangertainment. No one is going to buy DVDs of a show that was pretty lame and available for free on the Internet in the first place. Which means no one is going to want merchandise. Or a soundtrack. Or a film based on the exploits of Dangertainment. Or a book.
Okay, let’s go ahead and try to get to the end of this thing, before all available logic just plain crumbles. Or crumbles some more.
(How much money did he sink into this thing, anyway? He had to buy the house, furnish the house, make everything in the house look like it hadn’t been touched in forty years, build a subbasement… the mind just boggles.)
Freddie tells Sara, Rudy, and the guy we don’t care about that they can leave if they want to, but that they should think about the money. And Freddie heads off to scare some more people, unaware that two of the three other “victims” are already dead.
Jen, meanwhile, finds the string for the stairs to the attic, pulls it, and sees the dead body of First Victim lying on the stairs.
She runs to the top of the stairs and screams a bunch, and Sara and Rudy basically go, “You’re not scary, Jen,” and then Michael Myers comes out of somewhere-or-other, and chops Jen’s head off.
And Sara and Rudy kind of look at it, as if to go, “Whaaa?”
And at the party, someone says it was all done digitally, while Myles is all no way you guys she was really killed. So he picks up a phone and calls 911.
Sara, Rudy, and the dude who maybe I should have tried to figure out his name, since he isn’t dead yet, try to get out the back door, only it’s locked. From the outside. Somehow.
Meanwhile, Jen’s head is just lying there on the floor, looking exceptionally fake.
The three still-living kids run into the next room, and Rudy tries to break through the window, which is boarded over.
The dude I guess we kind of care about now picks up a camera and tries to fight off Michael with the tripod. Michael, in turn, stabs his knife into the wall, picks up the kid by the head, and crushes his skull.
Which is a move we haven’t seen since Halloween III, which didn’t have Michael in it as the villain. It’s confusing, really, as Michael’s never really been one for the slow death. Perhaps he changing things up for the cameras?
Rudy and Sara run, and Sara heads up the stairs – one of which breaks under her feet.
Michael starts walking towards her, swinging his knife, and Rudy walks up behind Michael and starts taunting him, trying to get Michael to walk away from Sara. Which is noble, but sort of dumb.
Michael walks after Rudy, and Sara escapes from the broken stair, goes upstairs, and locks herself into a room, then piles furniture up against the door.
Downstairs, Rudy runs into the kitchen. First he grabs a rolling pin and whacks Michael with it. But he’s not smart enough to KEEP doing that. Instead, he grabs a random spice and throws it in Michael’s eyes.
Don’t use fennel, dude! It’s the source of all his power!
Then he grabs a couple of knives and starts slashing the air, trying to intimidate a dude who, frankly, has a pretty impressive body count and a really high pain threshold and, lest we forget, has been shot many, many times and survived being on fire.
At the party Myles is on the phone with 911, trying to explain that he is not hoaxing the police.
Back in the kitchen, Rudy tries to fight Michael off, until Michael grabs his arms, lifts Rudy up, and stabs the knives through Rudy. And a door. Then he goes to get the knife Rudy referenced way earlier in the film, and stabs it through Rudy’s heart. And a door.
Which leaves Sara as the only current survivor.
Oh, except maybe for Tyra, who I guess is still sitting in the van, watching all this happen, and wondering how Freddie is pulling off all these special effects on-camera. Which reminds me – where did Freddie go, exactly?
Sara, trapped in a room, runs to the camera on the wall and starts begging for help.
Myles starts sending her messages through her phone, which appear one character at a time. Which is not how text messages work at all.
So now we get a bunch of little intercuts where, for example, someone at the party says, “Michael is coming up the stairs!” So Myles sends Sara a message that says, “Michael is coming up the stairs! Don’t scream.”
Then Sara screams.
Michael is headed for the door, so Myles tells Sara to go out the window, which she was, I guess, too stupid to think of before.
Sara heads out the window. Michael goes through the room, and pokes his head out the window, and starts slashing at Sara, who should have really jumped off the roof by now.
Instead she first kicks Michael, and then instead of kicking him a bunch more times, she goes UP the roof, to the attic. Where she finds the dead camera guy.
Myles sends her a message telling her that Michael has gone to his room, and that she should try to escape now.
So she heads down the attic stairs, which still have a dead body on them. She goes down the hallway, and Freddie grabs her and pulls her into the shadows, noting that, “Everybody’s dead.”
Dude. You have the keys. LEAVE AND CALL THE COPS.
Freddie goes on to ask Sara where Michael is. She says she doesn’t know. Except she does. Myles just told her.
Freddie says they need to go. I’m not even going to dignify that statement with a joke.
They head for the stairs, but Michael pops out and stops them. They all end up in a bedroom.
Freddie says, “You want to be on Dangertainment? Let’s see what you got.” And, no lie, he starts trying to pull Kung Fu moves on Michael. This works a grand total of once, and then Michael grabs him.
Meanwhile, Sara has grabbed a camera off the wall. She tries to use the camera cable to strangle Michael.
Here’s a thought, Sara – maybe you should have thought of the “rope” angle when you were trapped in a room on the second floor of the house.
Michael release Freddie, and throws Sara off his back.
Freddie despite being in the doorway and much closer to freedom, opts to start making Kung Fu noises. And then Kung Fu kicks Michael out the window.
Turns out, the camera cable was still wrapped around Michael’s neck. So Michael flies out the window, bounces off the roof, and then is hung by the cable wrapped around his neck.
Sara and Freddie head downstairs. Freddie notes that he “had no idea,” and that he “saw Michael’s room,” and that Michael must have been living down there, “for the last 20 years.”
You know what I’d kill for at this point? A timeline. Freddie clearly built the fake subbasement chamber, which means he had to have gone down into the larger chamber at some point. Where he should have noticed all the trash down there, and called the cops.
Only I guess he didn’t think it was important, or something. And where was Michael while they were building? Was he just out that whole time?
You could argue that Michael was off killing Laurie, but that took all of one night, and making that little chamber and rigging up the house with furniture and such had to take weeks. Where was Michael during all of that? Disneyland?
Myles sends Sara a message that Michael is still alive. He cut the cable he was hanging from.
Sara asks Myles where Michael is, and he messages them, “In the House!”
So, of course, Sara and Freddie turn around, and THERE’S MICHAEL, RIGHT THERE!
Michael stabs Freddie. A lot. Freddie dies.
Sara runs away, trying to get out all the doors, which are still all locked from the outside, however that works.
So she heads to the basement, where there is literally no chance of escape. Then she goes to the subbasement. Then into the chamber, where she finds the dead girl.
She turns around, and THERE’S MICHAEL!
So she finds a set of rungs, and climbs up them, and opens what looks like a manhole cover but I guess is pretty light, and she tries to get out, but Michael slashes her across the back of the leg.
So she kicks him and goes up anyway, which leads her to… you know, I have no idea. It looks like the garage, and there are a bunch of computer monitors in there. Oh, and Tyra’s dead body, which is hanging from the ceiling.
I guess I should mention that Sara throws a couple of objects on top of the manhole cover, or whatever it is. And one of them is leaking fluid. Which is probably gas. Which will probably be important in a minute or three.
About four seconds pass, while Sara looks at the computer monitors, which show a bunch of dead people.
Then she hears the squeak of a knife outside.
Um… how fast is Michael? Because he just ran through the large chamber, into the subbasement, went up the ladder to the basement, went up the basement steps, and then out of the house and into the yard in about fifteen seconds.
Dude should be in the Olympics.
Sara tries to get out the back door, which is locked. So instead she hides in a random corner.
So I guess maybe this is, what? A shed, instead of a garage? Which I guess is logical, but what is up with the manhole cover that leads into that massive underground chamber? Was the original owner using it for extra storage?
Michael looks at the bank of monitors, and sees that one of the monitors is showing him.
He goes to pull away some debris, and Sara pops out with a chainsaw, which immediately comes to life. That thing has a pretty impressive starter, I must say.
Sara screams out, “This is for Rudy. This is for Jen. This is for all of them!” You see? Even she didn’t think it was worth learning everyone’s name.
Sara starts stabbing Michael with the chainsaw. She accidentally cuts an electrical cable, which, yep, sparks on some gasoline and sets everything on fire.
Suddenly, her chainsaw stalls, and she tries to start it again. And it actually is one of those chainsaws that starts by yanking a cord, which makes her starting it earlier make even less sense than it did to begin with.
She can’t get it to work, so she just sort of throws it at Michael, who falls over. No wait. I’m sorry.
They BOTH fall over when the gasoline-powered mower explodes.
Sara wakes up first, only she’s trapped under random electronics.
Michael wakes up, grabs his knife, and gets ready to do some stabbing.
Freddie, who is less dead than I thought, bursts in, and calls out, “Trick or Treat,” followed by a dirty word. Which I guess is supposed to sound really cool, but it actually made me roll my eyes back in my head so far I could see part of my brain standing up, grabbing its hat, and yelling out, “That’s it! I’m out of here!”
Freddie grabs a shovel off the wall, and hits Michael with it.
The handle snaps in half, leaving Freddie with a long, pointed stick.
Seriously, y’all. Sara gets to be the final girl, but Freddie is the hero. That is just not okay.
Don’t get me wrong. I guess it’s sort of progressive to have a black man be the hero of a horror movie, but he’s pretty much the slimiest character ever.
Michael grabs Freddie and throws him into a wall, and it looks like Freddie might be down for the count… but no. Freddie pulls an electrical cable out of a nearby device, and shocks Michael with it.
Michael falls backward, ending up standing in a puddle of blood that appears to be about 1/8th of an inch deep. Which I guess is enough to do damage, as Freddie tosses his still-sparking cable into the puddle and Michael starts convulsing.
Freddie pulls all the electronics off of Sara, and they exit the shed with, “Hey Mikey! Happy Expletive Halloween!”
Yeah, I know, he doesn’t actually say the word Expletive. But trust me, the moment is no less silly. Remember, they’re leaving a garden shed, while Michael kind of hangs out, propped up on some cables. While the shed burns.
As drama goes, it’s kind of a non-starter.
Later, Sara is standing around a bunch of cop cars, when reporters show up. Myles send Sara a message that she’s alive, and they can see her on the news. Reporters start asking Sara for quotes, and she says, “Thank you Deckard. You saved my life.”
Everyone at the party congratulates Myles on saving two people out of a possible eight.
Reporters continue to hassle Sara, when Freddie appears, noting that Dangertainment is off the air. They ask him what happened to Michael Myers, and he replies: “Michael Myers is not a sound bite, a spin-off, a tie-in, some kind of celebrity scandal. Michael Myers is a killer shark in baggy overalls, that gets his kicks off of killing everything and everyone that he comes across. That’s all. We’re done dancing for these cameras.”
Someone asks how Freddie is feeling, and he says, “Feel this.” And then breaks a camera.
Later, Sara, who is still standing around and is not in an ambulance driving away for some reason, walks over to a fireman and points at a body bag. She wants to see Michael’s face.
He says, “I want to warn you ma’am, it’s not a pretty sight.”
He opens the bag, the director denies the audience the chance to see anything, and Freddie comes over and says, “You’re looking a little crispy over there, Mikey.”
He caps it off with, “Well, may he never, ever, rest in peace.”
Later, at what I’m guessing is the morgue, two dudes in white take the body to the autopsy doctor, and tell her she has a celebrity on her hands: Michael Myers.
She unzips the body bag, leaving the other body in the room to just lie around. Also, where did all the other dead people from the Myers house go, if not here? Do they think they can attach Jen’s head again?
We get to see – Michael’s mask, which is still on, but sort of melted. Which means that Sara didn’t get to see his face. So what was the point of that whole scene?
The doctor keeps on unzipping, and goes to pull off Michael’s mask, when Michael’s eyes pop open.
So, no one ever actually checked for a heartbeat, then?
And that’s the end of the series.
Which is probably for the best, because ultimately if the series had gone on, it would have been about Michael going to find John. And how Freddie, our new and way-unimproved Dr. Loomis, went to track him down.
In theory, the series is at least three movies short of the tri-trilogy experience, but sure enough, there they all are.
First, there’s the Myers Family Trilogy, which consists of parts 1, 2, and 4. The first film opens with Michael Myers killing his sister, and ends with the evil inside Michael passed to Jamie, who kills her foster mother while dressed in a clown suit that looks just like Michael’s.
People may argue the merits of part 4, but for better or for worse, it closes off the series with a nice twist and completes the character arcs of everyone involved. Michael is dead, but the evil inside him is triumphant and ongoing. And Loomis, who spent the last several years keeping the evil inside Michael off the streets, will probably spend the rest of his life trying to do the same for Jamie.
It’s a downer of a conclusion to be sure, but it works.
The second trilogy would be the Jamie trilogy, which uses movies 4, 5, and 6. Of the three trilogies, this one is the weakest and the least satisfying, because our main heroes all die (both Jamie and Loomis are, presumably, not coming back) and our villain just sort of survives because of some strange cult thing that doesn’t make any sense.
Since H20 doesn’t pick up where 6 left off, the story just ends, with Michael out and about. There are no twists, no ironies, and in the end whatever ideas the series has introduced up this point are null and void.
Even the strong ending of part 4 is painfully muted, as Jamie doesn’t really go on to do much of anything except run, and scream, and ultimately end up kidnapped and deceased.
There are probably those that would argue that part 4 couldn’t really exist without parts 1 and 2, but I don’t think that’s the case. Loomis enters the story of the original “Halloween” much the way he enters 4 – with a history that we learn about through his frequent monologues.
And really, everything you need to know to enjoy part 4 is laid out for you as the movie wears on. Granted, watching the movies this way weakens the story, but honestly, it wasn’t that great to begin with.
Finally, there’s the Laurie Trilogy, which tracks our heroine from the day she meets Michael to the day she cuts off his head, twenty years later via 1, 2, and H20.
The obvious question is, of course, whether or not this Trilogy is better than the Myers family trilogy.
If you want my honest assessment… the answer is no.
Take the movies at face value, the ending of H20 ties up the story fairly completely. Myers has had his head cut off, and so is therefore very dead. And Laurie, having separated Michael from his head, can finally allow the nightmares in her mind to die.
Which leaves just one problem – Loomis is still dead.
This is an aspect of the story that the Jamie trilogy got right, though they fumbled the ball badly in part six. Loomis is a part of the “Halloween” story, and an extremely important one. He was part of what made the Halloween movies better than the average slasher tale. Unlike most movies of this ilk, which involve people dying one by one with no knowledge that something is even wrong, Loomis is on the case from the word, “Go,” in the “Halloween” movies.
To some extent, the movies were more suspenseful because it wasn’t just a case of, “Who will Michael kill next?” Instead, we had Loomis to root for, as he tried to stop Michael before Michael could do any more harm.
But H20 just took on the standard slasher formula – Michael kills, and we wait to see whom he’s going to kill next.
H20 had a lot of ways they could have dealt with this. Loomis’s nurse, instead of dying, could have lived and used Loomis’s work to locate and stop Michael. One of the cops could have figured out that Michael was the root cause of the deaths early in the movie, and gone on a Michael hunt, essentially filling in the Loomis role.
For that matter, if one of the cops had called Laurie and told her to be on her guard, she could have been preparing for what might come starting in the early minutes of the movie.
But no.
In the end, the only satisfaction that comes from H20 is the knowledge that Laurie has fought and defeated the demon that’s plagued her for the last 20 years.
There’s only one problem: She didn’t actually kill him.
I think if the series had actually coasted to a stop with the death of Michael in H20, you could make a stronger case for Laurie Trilogy. But with the awareness that H20 isn’t the end, fans of the series are denied a real win. And so is Laurie.
Instead, we get another movie, “Halloween: Resurrection,” and whatever good was created in H20 is rendered moot.
As “Resurrection” opens, we get a nice long credits sequence, which goes on and on and on and doesn’t feature a pumpkin, or flashes from the rest of the movie, or anything really. It’s just a bunch of words.
Then the credits fade out, and we’re in a long tunnel, and Laurie’s voice says, “You’ve heard of the tunnel.”
This particular tunnel?
Guess not. Laurie continues: “The one we all go through? At the end there’s a door. And waiting for you on the other side of that door is either heaven or hell.”
As Laurie is saying this, we actually move from the tunnel, wherever that was, into a hospital corridor.
She concludes: “This is that door.”
And then, there we are, with Laurie in the hospital. Her hair is long again, and since it wasn’t this long in the last movie, we must assume she’s been in the hospital for a while. Oh, sorry, “Grace Andersen Sanitarium,” according to the sign out front.
Inside, two nurses yammer back and forth, filling us in on just how, exactly, a movie series with a dead villain can have another movie.
In short, the paramedic who went to go get the dead Michael Myers all by himself found out that Michael wasn’t dead. Michael crushed the paramedic’s larynx, slapped his Michael mask on the guy, traded clothing with him, and then wandered off into the woods.
Laurie, in turn, chopped the head off of the paramedic.
I’m torn between wanted to applaud the guy who came up with that explanation, as it alllmost works… or tearing it apart.
Because the movie shows us Michael, wearing a paramedic uniform, walking through the crowd of people and into the woods. Which means no one stopped him and went, “Hey, YOU’RE NOT BOB!”
Even though he’s carrying a massive kitchen knife.
On top of that, the paramedic had a minute or two where he could reach out to Laurie, appearing to plead for his life. You know what you do in that situation? You take off your mask. That pretty much clears up the whole Who I Am issue pretty well.
But, whatever. Points for trying really hard.
The two nurses go into Laurie’s room. She hasn’t said a word in years, say the nurses. She’s a suicide threat, they’ve found her on the roof before, and so on and so forth and she’s all crazy-like.
The shove a couple pills in her mouth and head out the door.
At which point, Laurie spits the pills out, and stuffs them inside the doll she’s holding in her lap.
She stands up, looks outside, and there’s Michael, standing on the lawn.
Oh wait, he’s not there anymore. So maybe we’re seeing Laurie’s delusions again.
Outside, a security guard comes across a gate that’s open, even though it’s clearly NOT supposed to be open, based on the large lock hanging off of it.
The guard, who deserves whatever he gets, does NOT radio in and let everyone know that the gate is open. Instead he yells out, “Anyone out there?” When no one answers, he lights up a cigarette.
And there’s a dude with a clown mask behind him. The guard jumps, then asks Harold how he got out, and who Harold is supposed to be.
Harold replies that he’s John Wayne Gacy, and then goes on to talk some more about John, he crimes, and when he was put to death. The kindly guard starts walking Harold somewhere. Maybe back to the hospital. Maybe not.
Out in the woods, Michael is standing there, wearing his mask.
Here’s a thought – how does Michael keep finding the same mask, over and over again?
To be fair, in this continuity, the first two movies take place over one night. So that makes sense. But his mask had to have gotten some severe damage in the fire at the end of 2. But if he got up and walked away, there was probably time to pick up another mask that looked the same as the one he stole previously.
Which I guess he then held onto for 20 years. So it made sense that he’d still have the mask in H20.
But he stuck that mask on the paramedic, so where did he get this new one? Ebay? Did he use his own credit card?
Back inside the hospital, another security guard points out to our previous security guard that he sees someone in the basement. They both assume it’s Harold, of course, and head down to locate him.
No, of course it’s not Harold.
As the two guards wander the basement, they pass a snack machine. The Worst Guard Ever says that he skipped dinner, and stops to get a tasty snack. The Other Guard heads into the next room to find Harold.
WGE gets his snack, and as he starts eating, he hears his now-dead buddy screaming. So WGE heads into the next room, once again not calling for help, using his radio, pulling a gun, or even looking for a heavy object to fight with.
He does, however, hold onto his snack cake. Possibly to bribe the murderer with.
WGE sees a load of laundry in the dryer, and stops the dryer to investigate. Maybe he needs a napkin.
Instead he finds a head, so he panics, backs up, and trips over the body of his dead cohort. Which I guess he didn’t see lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
Meanwhile, behind him, Michael lowers himself from the ceiling. I have never in my life seen a basement with such high ceilings. It’s no wonder the residents of the building are crazy, they’re living an in M.C. Escher drawing.
Michael kills WGE, and then goes a-wandering, at one point passing by what I at first thought was Harold’s room, but which I guess is actually an office. I have no idea. Either way, Harold is in there.
Harold sees Michael go wandering by, and Harold puts his clown mask back on.
Michael goes to Laurie’s door, pounds on it a couple of times, and then walks through it. Literally. Like he just walks through it and it crumbles around him. I have no idea what to say to that.
Once he’s in Laurie’s room, Michael looks at Laurie’s bed. Her doll and a couple of pillows are sitting there. Michael raises his knife, I guess to stab the empty bed, and Laurie clocks him with a lamp.
Laurie runs out the door and down the hall, while Michael stalk-walks after her.
Laurie heads to the roof, and then we don’t see her, and then we see Michael, and Michael sees Laurie’s robe hanging over the edge of the roof. So he walks over there, and then turns around, and sees Laurie, who says, “Hello, Michael.”
She presses a button, and a winch that’s on the roof for some reason loops around Michael’s ankle and lifts him in the air.
Laurie says, “I knew you’d come for me sooner or later. What took you so long?”
Hey, here’s a question – why in the world wasn’t every police force in existence looking for Michael? It’s been three years, surely someone should have encountered him, right?
Laurie picks up Michael’s knife, which fell on the ground, and says, “You failed, Michael. Want to know why? Because I’m not afraid of you. But what about you? Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid to die, Michael?”
Laurie starts cutting the rope that’s holding Michael in the air, and Michael starts pulling at his mask. Laurie says she has to be sure, so she reaches for his mask and gives it a tug.
Michael lets her pull for a second, then grabs her hand.
The rope snaps. Michael and Laurie go over the edge of the roof. Michael grabs the edge of the roof, holding them both in the air, and stabs Laurie with the knife.
Laurie kisses Michael on the mask, then lets go and falls.
She lands on the ground maybe two or three stories below.
I’ve gotta be honest. Her cunning plan was pretty weak. We’ve already seen Michael take six bullets to the chest and fall two stories… at which point he got back up and continued his murder spree. I seriously doubt three stories would have done the trick.
Michael heads back through the hospital, passing by Harold, who is still reading while wearing his clown mask. Michael opens up Harold’s door and hands Harold the bloody knife. Harold starts reciting Michael’s history, from the first movie up until the last few minutes, while we watch Michael walk off down the basement hallway.
Harold ends his speech with, “Now he’s back,” and here comes the title: “Halloween: Resurrection.”
You know, I’ve got to interject two thoughts here:
The first: If this were a short film that someone put together, just to give the series a better sendoff, this wouldn’t be half-bad. For that matter, if they wanted to re-release H20 with this as the ending, it might even make for a reasonably satisfying experience.
But it’s not. It’s the start of a new something-or-other, and now Michael is about to head out and, what? If he follows his normal patterns, he should head out and locate John, Laurie’s son from the last movie.
But I’m going to take a wild guess and say that isn’t going to happen.
So instead, Michael just killed Laurie. And, it should be noted, not on Halloween night. So now he’s off to kill… who? Just some random people?
What’s the point?
Ah well.
The movie heads off to Haddonfield University, where we get to watch part of a psychology class, concluding with a girl named Sara answering a question about something in our inner psyche that’s called, “The Shadow.” I’d transcribe the whole thing, but really, are we going to pretend this movie has themes? Probably not.
Later, Sara is driving along on a little scooter, while some girl calls out to her to wait up. This is Jen. Sara asks Jen what Jen signed them up for. Jen says they need to find Rudy.
Which they do. Rudy is, I guess, taking a cooking class. Which means at the end of the scene, he gets to jam a knife into a pumpkin.
Jen has Sara read Sara’s email, where we finally get to find out just what is going on. It seems that the three of them are going to be part of a Dangertainment (their word, not mine) team, where I guess they’re going to investigate something.
Ah. Some creepy dude has just come on and informed us via a monologue that they’ll be in the Myers house.
Sara says she needs to send a quick email. It goes to Deckard, who I guess she met in a chat room somewhere. He’s a high school student. He has a friend named Scott, who hassles Deckard about the fact that he and Sara have never met, and informs Deckard that he does not have an actual relationship with Sara.
Scott is correct, even though Deckard tries to convince him otherwise.
Oh, sorry, Deckard’s real name is Myles. Deckard is just a screen name. Okay then.
And now it’s later, and Jen, Sara, and Rudy, and three other people are told that they’re going to investigate Michael Myers’s house, because they’ve been selected. But first, Tyra Banks interviews them so we can know why they’re doing it.
Oh, and there’s, like, a host of the show, which is going to be broadcast on the Internet. Wow. The Internet. Everyone knows how many people just sit around, watching live broadcasts on The Internet. For a web site that no one has ever heard of.
I’d talk about why they’re doing it, but really, three of these dudes don’t even have names yet, and we met Sara first. Which means she’s going to live, everyone else is going to die, and all I’m really going to be doing for the next hour is rattling off a death order.
While Sara is being interviewed, a photographer knocks over a light, which explodes. Sara screams, and a glass across the room shatters.
This makes The Host very happy. For some reason.
Later, at the hotel, The Host watches a Kung Fu movie. He’s kind of put out when there’s a knock on his door, and it’s Sara, who wants to drop out. The Host tries to convince her that everyone else is a poser, and she’s real, and that’s what the Internet audience wants.
He also says some stuff about being famous, and the American dream. And fear. Do you care? No? Very well. I guess we can get excited over the fact that we learn that The Host’s name is Freddie. Does that help? No?
The next day, Sara and Jen and one of the other contestants go shopping. While trying on a shirt, Sara looks in a mirror, and sees… Michael Myers! She jumps and turns around. Michael isn’t there.
In his room, Myles pulls up Sara on the Internet and looks at her video from the day before. He tells Scott that he needs to stay home and watch Sara’s first episode.
Scott tells him that they really need to go to some epic party. Myles finally agrees.
And now it’s exposition time! Freddie explains to the “reporters” that they will each have a little camera attached to them, and the Internet audience can choose whichever camera they want to watch. So if they want to be seen, they had better be interesting.
You know, if you could swap between viewpoints while watching “Halloween: Wasn’t This About Family At One Point?” or watch everyone at once, like the movie “Timecode,” this could be really interesting. Alas.
Okay, so, we’re in the Myers house. The camera guy is rigging cameras, while Tyra Banks hassles him remotely. Eventually, Tyra gets bored and goes to have some coffee.
Inside, Michael walks past a “camera,” which I guess is supposed to make this movie more creepy, because it’s shot using low-resolution video footage.
Michael picks up the camera, and somehow arranges the tripod, which has sharp, stake-y feet, so that you can see the camera dude get stabbed in the throat. While, of course, Tyra Banks just happens to be looking somewhere else.
(Tyra Banks has the character name Nora, by the way. But we’re going to keep calling her Tyra Banks, because up to this point, no one has called Tyra anything at all.)
At any rate, having stabbed the camera dude and dragged him away, Michael leaves the camera lying on the floor, and Tyra, who is finally looking at the bank of video monitors again, compliments the camera guy on his choice of camera angles. She neglects to mention the fact that the legs of the tripod are also in the shot, and are probably a tripping hazard.
The Dangertainment van pulls up. Freddie is driving. Oh yeah, this is a high-class endeavor.
For some reason, the press is there. Or rather, clearly the press is there so that Freddie doesn’t sound stupid talking to himself as he explains that this is going to be totally, “real,” that nothing in the house has been tampered with, and that no one is allowed to leave until the show is over.
So, the opening of Halloween was, what, maybe ten minutes long? Tops? To go in the house, go to the kitchen, get a knife, go up the stairs, stab the sister to death, and go out again.
And we’ve got six people going into the house. So unless they literally scout every single nook and cranny for possible loose change, everyone should be out in… twenty minutes? Tops?
Oh, I guess I should mention that Michael is in the window upstairs. Since we, the audience, are already aware that he’s hanging out in his house (and man, I hope he stopped to grab a dog for lunch) everyone should be dead in the next three minutes.
This is going to be one short movie.
All the reporters gear up, Freddie blows an air horn, and we, the audience, get to go into nausea mode, as the movie slips between regular film, “video,” people-cams, and a couple of times, yep, they do go into a four-quadrant screen so you can see everything and everyone at once.
Man, I got a question already – the house is rigged with a few cameras, right? So how is it that no one has spotted Michael, yet?
Everyone walks in, and various opinions on what to do next are spouted.
Sara, Jen, and Rudy think they should do some actual exploring.
Rudy notes that the house probably has a huge kitchen. Which is why I guess they showed him in a cooking class, earlier. Does that count as character development? Really?
Rudy opens up the spice rack and smells the fennel. Yes, he really does note that he’s smelling the fennel, and not some other spice picked at random. This is important people. He is NOT smelling the mint, or the celery salt. It’s fennel, and don’t you forget it.
He makes Sara smell it as well, and they both note that it smells fresh.
Which means, what, exactly? That Michael, dog-eatin’ “he got hungry” Michael, opted to steal some fresh spices when he decided to hide out in his old house.
Michael Myers. He loves killing his relatives. And fresh fennel?
Rudy also finds a big knife, but Sara points out that the knife Michael used to murder his family should be in an evidence locker somewhere. Yeah, Sara? You want to start making sense now?
Okay, pop quiz: Where’s is Laurie Strode’s son?
Yeah. I thought so.
Sara opens up a pantry door and she and Rudy find… duh-DUH-DUUUH. A high chair. Everyone piles into the room to comment on how Michael’s family probably used to feed Michael in that chair.
Well, maybe. But it’s probably more likely that Laurie was using that chair last. You know? Laurie? Died at the start of the picture? Sister of Michael? She has a son that Michael isn’t looking for, even though it’s Halloween?
I mean, I get that this flick as abandoned the continuity of the other movies, but now it seems like it can’t remember things that happened less than an hour ago, timetable-wise.
Over at another house, a party rages, and Myles and Simon wander around dressed like characters from Pulp Fiction.
Myles, who clearly isn’t all that interested in the party, wanders off and finds an office with a computer and a really, really, really big wall-mounted monitor. So he fires up the ‘puter so he can see his imaginary online girlfriend, Sara.
(I must note, however, the oddest thing. As Myles heads into the office, the camera lingers on two dudes, dressed up as football players. They dance together for several seconds, with no women to speak of anywhere in sight. Then they leap in the air and bump chests. This would never happen in any version of reality, ever.)
The movie then hops over to nighttime. It seems that darkness has fallen rather suddenly, and a bunch of trick-or-treaters are walking up to the Myers house for some reason.
Oh. The reason is to put a lit pumpkin on the porch. Okay.
Inside the dark house, everyone lights candles and lanterns and flashlights.
Jen and one of the other guys go up the stairs, and head into Michael’s older sister’s room. The boy describes exactly what happened on the opening of the first Halloween, and tries to get Jen to flash his camera.
Jen stands up and moves for her shirt, slowly easing it up while Michael peeks in the doorway. Then she stops, in order to taunt the audience, who just want something – anything – to happen.
Back at the party, Myles is still watching the webcast, and he says, “There was someone in the hall,” in case people were sleeping during that bit.
Some dude and the girl he’s fooling around with launch themselves into the room, and Myles asks if they want to watch with him. The guy says no. The girl says yes.
Back at the Myers house, we get to watch Guy We Don’t Care About and Girl We Don’t Care About banter about the fact that they aren’t going to fool around.
Downstairs, Rudy and Sara talk until a girl screams upstairs. They both run up, trying to locate Jen, and Rudy manages to NOT see Michael in one room.
Then they locate Jen, who was Just Kidding, so everyone gets sort of mad at her.
Out in the van, Freddie and Tyra Banks are drinking wine and toasting themselves for their genius idea, which has probably generated no money, as I don’t see any sort of advertising going on. Freddie feels they are very successful, though what it is they are successful at doing, besides sticking a bunch of teenagers in an old house, I have no idea.
Inside, Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him tells a mirror (well, and the camera attached to his head, I guess) that he’s going to “Get her back for that.” At which point, Michael bursts through the mirror and grabs him, and he screams like a little girl with a skinned knee.
In the van, Freddie and Tyra toast, while the Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him gets a knife to the head. Freddie and Tyra miss the knife going in, but do his that his camera goes out. So they find a new camera view to follow and then toast, “To Dangertainment.”
Jen, Sara, and Rudy, who I guess didn’t hear their now-dead companion die, sit in a bedroom while Jen notes, “This must be the bed where he was conceived.”
I don’t even know how to respond to that.
Sara goes into the closet, encounters a mask, freaks out, and traps herself in the closet. Somehow. Rudy breaks in, in a moment that’s meant to remind us of the original Halloween. Only it mostly reminds us how lame this movie is.
Sara comes out of the closet, and behind her, we see that the Halloween mask is on a mannequin inside the closet. Oookaaay.
In the basement, the people we don’t care about almost make out, but don’t.
Upstairs, Rudy finds coloring books that are scribbled on in a manner that suggests Michael was, like, way disturbed. Then he notes that this is way too easy, and that this stuff should be missing.
He asks Sara to figure out why it’s all still there.
Jen asks where Dude Who Wanted Jen to Flash Him went, and then determines he’s probably planning to scare her.
In the basement, the People We Don’t Care About find a giant locked door in the floor, which the guy unlocks with a massive metal key everyone found in the kitchen earlier.
(I suppose I should take a second to note that while all this has been going on, over at the party, Myles has had more and more people join him in the computer room, where they all sit around watching the Michael Myers Internet Program.)
The People We Don’t Care About head down into the door in the floor, and they find a large cement room with a doll lying down there, and a bunch of chains. The girl describes the room thusly: “This whole place looks like some sort of sadistic playpen.”
The girl realizes that because of the fact that they’re in a locked subbasement with chains on the walls, there aren’t any cameras. Except, of course, for the cameras they’re wearing.
So she pulls off his camera, and her camera, and makes her move, because there is something seriously wrong with her.
Making out ensues.
At the folks at the party where Myles continues to rock the computer give out a cry of joy.
Back in the subbasement, the people we don’t care about continue to fool around, when suddenly a wall crumbles behind them and a bunch of body parts and skeletons pour out.
In the van, Freddie and Tyra cheer.
In the basement, the guy and girl freak out, right up until the guy picks up an “arm,” and sees a tag on it that says, “Made in Taiwan.”
Somewhere else in the house, Michael continues to wander around, not running into anyone else despite the fact that there are five other people and it is just not a large house at all.
And then, suddenly, behind Michael, we see another Michael. So Michael One turns around, and it turns out that Michael One is actually Freddie, dressed up like Michael.
Michael two is, of course, Michael. Only Freddie thinks it’s the camera guy, so he berates Michael, VERY loudly, and tells him that it’s going to ruin the effect if people see them together.
He demands that “the camera guy” go out and help Tyra in the van.
Sadly, Michael does not stab Freddie over and over and over again until Freddie shuts up. Instead, Michael heads out to the van to do some stabbing on Tyra. Poor Tyra, who finally gets called by her character name, Nora. I still don’t care. They waited this long to give her a name, she gets to be Tyra. I’m pretty sure she’ll be dead the next time we see her, regardless.
Down in the subbasement, the boy and girl we don’t care about decide they need to go find Freddie, which should be the easiest thing in the world. All they have to do is pick up their cameras and threaten to blow the whole hoax wide open. But never mind.
The guy heads out of the basement, but the girl sees all the way through the wall, to yet another hole in the wall. Through which is some kind of underground chamber.
That’s a terrible explanation. Let’s try to get it to make sense.
Okay, first you have the house. Then there’s a basement under the house. Then there’s a subbasement chamber under the basement.
That subbasement chamber is contained inside a really, really, really, really massive chamber that has, I guess, been sitting directly under the Myers house for years. And, surprisingly, despite the fact that it has had pretty much no upkeep, the Myers house has managed not to fall into it.
The girl wanders around the underground chamber, which has living rats in it. And dead rats in it. And half-eaten rats in it.
Along with a dirty mattress, a little doll with nails through its eyes, and a portable stove with cooking pots and a half-eaten, but still living, rat on it.
The girl freaks out, turns around, and hey! There’s Michael! Or Freddie! Which, come to think of it, might have been meant has a horror movie in-joke.
So I guess Michael didn’t go to the van after all. Instead, after being berated he headed to the basement for some reason. Perhaps to take a nap and cry?
Regardless, Michael slowly stalks after the girl we don’t really care about, while she runs away, eventually stopping when she gets to the end of a short passage in the chamber, which is closed off by a gate that’s been locked up.
One of the gate’s bars has been pulled down, so that it points outward, looking like a tetanus shot waiting to happen. Michael walks up behind her, grabs her, and shoves her onto the broken bar.
Back at the party, Scott says, “That was so fake!” while Myles claims that it was real, and the girl just really died.
Everyone else at the party laughs.
Upstairs at the Myers house, Rudy and Jen take hits off a bong. On camera. All right then.
In another room, Sara is paging through something, when Michael appears right behind her. She runs and finds Rudy and Jen. Well, okay, she just finds Rudy, and drags him back downstairs. Where the murderer supposedly is.
So, what, is Rudy bait? Sara is not a good friend. No sir.
Rudy and Sara look around, but Michael is gone. No, wait! Michael comes out of nowhere, and grabs Sara. It looks like our primary hero is going to die (what a twist, eh?) but then, no. Dude we don’t care about runs up behind Michael and hits him with the Arm from Taiwan.
Michael falls over, and starts complaining in Freddie’s voice. About the fact that he just got hit.
Freddie tells everyone to turn off their cameras, and then explains to them that the whole thing was faked because, “America don’t like reality, first of all.”
He goes on to state that he’s set things up so that everyone can get some decent money on “the back end,” whatever that means. I can honestly say I can think of no way he can set up another revenue stream for Dangertainment. No one is going to buy DVDs of a show that was pretty lame and available for free on the Internet in the first place. Which means no one is going to want merchandise. Or a soundtrack. Or a film based on the exploits of Dangertainment. Or a book.
Okay, let’s go ahead and try to get to the end of this thing, before all available logic just plain crumbles. Or crumbles some more.
(How much money did he sink into this thing, anyway? He had to buy the house, furnish the house, make everything in the house look like it hadn’t been touched in forty years, build a subbasement… the mind just boggles.)
Freddie tells Sara, Rudy, and the guy we don’t care about that they can leave if they want to, but that they should think about the money. And Freddie heads off to scare some more people, unaware that two of the three other “victims” are already dead.
Jen, meanwhile, finds the string for the stairs to the attic, pulls it, and sees the dead body of First Victim lying on the stairs.
She runs to the top of the stairs and screams a bunch, and Sara and Rudy basically go, “You’re not scary, Jen,” and then Michael Myers comes out of somewhere-or-other, and chops Jen’s head off.
And Sara and Rudy kind of look at it, as if to go, “Whaaa?”
And at the party, someone says it was all done digitally, while Myles is all no way you guys she was really killed. So he picks up a phone and calls 911.
Sara, Rudy, and the dude who maybe I should have tried to figure out his name, since he isn’t dead yet, try to get out the back door, only it’s locked. From the outside. Somehow.
Meanwhile, Jen’s head is just lying there on the floor, looking exceptionally fake.
The three still-living kids run into the next room, and Rudy tries to break through the window, which is boarded over.
The dude I guess we kind of care about now picks up a camera and tries to fight off Michael with the tripod. Michael, in turn, stabs his knife into the wall, picks up the kid by the head, and crushes his skull.
Which is a move we haven’t seen since Halloween III, which didn’t have Michael in it as the villain. It’s confusing, really, as Michael’s never really been one for the slow death. Perhaps he changing things up for the cameras?
Rudy and Sara run, and Sara heads up the stairs – one of which breaks under her feet.
Michael starts walking towards her, swinging his knife, and Rudy walks up behind Michael and starts taunting him, trying to get Michael to walk away from Sara. Which is noble, but sort of dumb.
Michael walks after Rudy, and Sara escapes from the broken stair, goes upstairs, and locks herself into a room, then piles furniture up against the door.
Downstairs, Rudy runs into the kitchen. First he grabs a rolling pin and whacks Michael with it. But he’s not smart enough to KEEP doing that. Instead, he grabs a random spice and throws it in Michael’s eyes.
Don’t use fennel, dude! It’s the source of all his power!
Then he grabs a couple of knives and starts slashing the air, trying to intimidate a dude who, frankly, has a pretty impressive body count and a really high pain threshold and, lest we forget, has been shot many, many times and survived being on fire.
At the party Myles is on the phone with 911, trying to explain that he is not hoaxing the police.
Back in the kitchen, Rudy tries to fight Michael off, until Michael grabs his arms, lifts Rudy up, and stabs the knives through Rudy. And a door. Then he goes to get the knife Rudy referenced way earlier in the film, and stabs it through Rudy’s heart. And a door.
Which leaves Sara as the only current survivor.
Oh, except maybe for Tyra, who I guess is still sitting in the van, watching all this happen, and wondering how Freddie is pulling off all these special effects on-camera. Which reminds me – where did Freddie go, exactly?
Sara, trapped in a room, runs to the camera on the wall and starts begging for help.
Myles starts sending her messages through her phone, which appear one character at a time. Which is not how text messages work at all.
So now we get a bunch of little intercuts where, for example, someone at the party says, “Michael is coming up the stairs!” So Myles sends Sara a message that says, “Michael is coming up the stairs! Don’t scream.”
Then Sara screams.
Michael is headed for the door, so Myles tells Sara to go out the window, which she was, I guess, too stupid to think of before.
Sara heads out the window. Michael goes through the room, and pokes his head out the window, and starts slashing at Sara, who should have really jumped off the roof by now.
Instead she first kicks Michael, and then instead of kicking him a bunch more times, she goes UP the roof, to the attic. Where she finds the dead camera guy.
Myles sends her a message telling her that Michael has gone to his room, and that she should try to escape now.
So she heads down the attic stairs, which still have a dead body on them. She goes down the hallway, and Freddie grabs her and pulls her into the shadows, noting that, “Everybody’s dead.”
Dude. You have the keys. LEAVE AND CALL THE COPS.
Freddie goes on to ask Sara where Michael is. She says she doesn’t know. Except she does. Myles just told her.
Freddie says they need to go. I’m not even going to dignify that statement with a joke.
They head for the stairs, but Michael pops out and stops them. They all end up in a bedroom.
Freddie says, “You want to be on Dangertainment? Let’s see what you got.” And, no lie, he starts trying to pull Kung Fu moves on Michael. This works a grand total of once, and then Michael grabs him.
Meanwhile, Sara has grabbed a camera off the wall. She tries to use the camera cable to strangle Michael.
Here’s a thought, Sara – maybe you should have thought of the “rope” angle when you were trapped in a room on the second floor of the house.
Michael release Freddie, and throws Sara off his back.
Freddie despite being in the doorway and much closer to freedom, opts to start making Kung Fu noises. And then Kung Fu kicks Michael out the window.
Turns out, the camera cable was still wrapped around Michael’s neck. So Michael flies out the window, bounces off the roof, and then is hung by the cable wrapped around his neck.
Sara and Freddie head downstairs. Freddie notes that he “had no idea,” and that he “saw Michael’s room,” and that Michael must have been living down there, “for the last 20 years.”
You know what I’d kill for at this point? A timeline. Freddie clearly built the fake subbasement chamber, which means he had to have gone down into the larger chamber at some point. Where he should have noticed all the trash down there, and called the cops.
Only I guess he didn’t think it was important, or something. And where was Michael while they were building? Was he just out that whole time?
You could argue that Michael was off killing Laurie, but that took all of one night, and making that little chamber and rigging up the house with furniture and such had to take weeks. Where was Michael during all of that? Disneyland?
Myles sends Sara a message that Michael is still alive. He cut the cable he was hanging from.
Sara asks Myles where Michael is, and he messages them, “In the House!”
So, of course, Sara and Freddie turn around, and THERE’S MICHAEL, RIGHT THERE!
Michael stabs Freddie. A lot. Freddie dies.
Sara runs away, trying to get out all the doors, which are still all locked from the outside, however that works.
So she heads to the basement, where there is literally no chance of escape. Then she goes to the subbasement. Then into the chamber, where she finds the dead girl.
She turns around, and THERE’S MICHAEL!
So she finds a set of rungs, and climbs up them, and opens what looks like a manhole cover but I guess is pretty light, and she tries to get out, but Michael slashes her across the back of the leg.
So she kicks him and goes up anyway, which leads her to… you know, I have no idea. It looks like the garage, and there are a bunch of computer monitors in there. Oh, and Tyra’s dead body, which is hanging from the ceiling.
I guess I should mention that Sara throws a couple of objects on top of the manhole cover, or whatever it is. And one of them is leaking fluid. Which is probably gas. Which will probably be important in a minute or three.
About four seconds pass, while Sara looks at the computer monitors, which show a bunch of dead people.
Then she hears the squeak of a knife outside.
Um… how fast is Michael? Because he just ran through the large chamber, into the subbasement, went up the ladder to the basement, went up the basement steps, and then out of the house and into the yard in about fifteen seconds.
Dude should be in the Olympics.
Sara tries to get out the back door, which is locked. So instead she hides in a random corner.
So I guess maybe this is, what? A shed, instead of a garage? Which I guess is logical, but what is up with the manhole cover that leads into that massive underground chamber? Was the original owner using it for extra storage?
Michael looks at the bank of monitors, and sees that one of the monitors is showing him.
He goes to pull away some debris, and Sara pops out with a chainsaw, which immediately comes to life. That thing has a pretty impressive starter, I must say.
Sara screams out, “This is for Rudy. This is for Jen. This is for all of them!” You see? Even she didn’t think it was worth learning everyone’s name.
Sara starts stabbing Michael with the chainsaw. She accidentally cuts an electrical cable, which, yep, sparks on some gasoline and sets everything on fire.
Suddenly, her chainsaw stalls, and she tries to start it again. And it actually is one of those chainsaws that starts by yanking a cord, which makes her starting it earlier make even less sense than it did to begin with.
She can’t get it to work, so she just sort of throws it at Michael, who falls over. No wait. I’m sorry.
They BOTH fall over when the gasoline-powered mower explodes.
Sara wakes up first, only she’s trapped under random electronics.
Michael wakes up, grabs his knife, and gets ready to do some stabbing.
Freddie, who is less dead than I thought, bursts in, and calls out, “Trick or Treat,” followed by a dirty word. Which I guess is supposed to sound really cool, but it actually made me roll my eyes back in my head so far I could see part of my brain standing up, grabbing its hat, and yelling out, “That’s it! I’m out of here!”
Freddie grabs a shovel off the wall, and hits Michael with it.
The handle snaps in half, leaving Freddie with a long, pointed stick.
Seriously, y’all. Sara gets to be the final girl, but Freddie is the hero. That is just not okay.
Don’t get me wrong. I guess it’s sort of progressive to have a black man be the hero of a horror movie, but he’s pretty much the slimiest character ever.
Michael grabs Freddie and throws him into a wall, and it looks like Freddie might be down for the count… but no. Freddie pulls an electrical cable out of a nearby device, and shocks Michael with it.
Michael falls backward, ending up standing in a puddle of blood that appears to be about 1/8th of an inch deep. Which I guess is enough to do damage, as Freddie tosses his still-sparking cable into the puddle and Michael starts convulsing.
Freddie pulls all the electronics off of Sara, and they exit the shed with, “Hey Mikey! Happy Expletive Halloween!”
Yeah, I know, he doesn’t actually say the word Expletive. But trust me, the moment is no less silly. Remember, they’re leaving a garden shed, while Michael kind of hangs out, propped up on some cables. While the shed burns.
As drama goes, it’s kind of a non-starter.
Later, Sara is standing around a bunch of cop cars, when reporters show up. Myles send Sara a message that she’s alive, and they can see her on the news. Reporters start asking Sara for quotes, and she says, “Thank you Deckard. You saved my life.”
Everyone at the party congratulates Myles on saving two people out of a possible eight.
Reporters continue to hassle Sara, when Freddie appears, noting that Dangertainment is off the air. They ask him what happened to Michael Myers, and he replies: “Michael Myers is not a sound bite, a spin-off, a tie-in, some kind of celebrity scandal. Michael Myers is a killer shark in baggy overalls, that gets his kicks off of killing everything and everyone that he comes across. That’s all. We’re done dancing for these cameras.”
Someone asks how Freddie is feeling, and he says, “Feel this.” And then breaks a camera.
Later, Sara, who is still standing around and is not in an ambulance driving away for some reason, walks over to a fireman and points at a body bag. She wants to see Michael’s face.
He says, “I want to warn you ma’am, it’s not a pretty sight.”
He opens the bag, the director denies the audience the chance to see anything, and Freddie comes over and says, “You’re looking a little crispy over there, Mikey.”
He caps it off with, “Well, may he never, ever, rest in peace.”
Later, at what I’m guessing is the morgue, two dudes in white take the body to the autopsy doctor, and tell her she has a celebrity on her hands: Michael Myers.
She unzips the body bag, leaving the other body in the room to just lie around. Also, where did all the other dead people from the Myers house go, if not here? Do they think they can attach Jen’s head again?
We get to see – Michael’s mask, which is still on, but sort of melted. Which means that Sara didn’t get to see his face. So what was the point of that whole scene?
The doctor keeps on unzipping, and goes to pull off Michael’s mask, when Michael’s eyes pop open.
So, no one ever actually checked for a heartbeat, then?
And that’s the end of the series.
Which is probably for the best, because ultimately if the series had gone on, it would have been about Michael going to find John. And how Freddie, our new and way-unimproved Dr. Loomis, went to track him down.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Halloween: H20: Twenty Years Later
Once again, it’s worth taking a minute or five to address questions that were not answered at the end of Part 6 that may or may not get answered here.
What happened to Jamie’s child? I assume Tommy didn’t just run off with it.
What happened to Dr. Loomis? Is he dead? Alive?
What’s going on with the… uh… Thorn people? Michael killed quite a few of them – are there any left?
Now that Tommy faced down the monster who scared him so badly as a kid, is he going to pursue a normal life now?
What about Danny? Danny was hearing “The Voice” since he was a child. Now that the Thorn is gone, has the voice gone away? Or is he still a little murderer-in-waiting? And are Danny and Kara the last of the Strodes? And does Michael have to kill them now, or were they really just collateral damage?
And away we go.
“Halloween: H20,” starts up with Mr. Sandman, the song that started and ended Part II…
Uh-oh.
Didja see all those questions up there? Forget about them. The answers aren’t coming, methinks. Iiit’s retroactive continuity time!
But let’s forget about that for the second. As the credits fade up, we get a knife, which jams into a pumpkin. A mom and a bunch of kids are gathered around a table outside, making a Jack O’Lantern.
But pretend you didn’t see them either, because camera pans right down the street, while a burn-in informs us that we’re in Langdon, Illinois.
A nurse steps out of her car, smoking a cigarette, and another burn-in tells us that it’s October 29, 1998.
The nurse walks up to her front door, and sees broken glass on the ground. She looks up and sees that her outside light has been smashed. She opens her door, which creaks ominously.
But this nurse is no dummy. She goes next door, rings the doorbell, and pounds on the front door. She hears a noise nearby, and goes to investigate, and, STING NOISE! It’s a kid in a hockey mask.
Just, like, a standard kid, though. The nurse tells the kid her house was broken into.
They all head into another house (I guess it belongs to the kid) and the kid calls the cops to tell them something is up. They say they’ll be there in 15 minutes.
It turns out that the kid, whose name is Jimmy, is an idiot. He wants to go check out the house. So the nurse, and another kid, and Jimmy head to the house. The other kid sticks with the nurse, while Jimmy heads into the house, hockey stick in hand.
I should note that Jimmy mocks the other kid for not going in. You may have a name, buddy, who you weren’t over the credits. Jimmy might be your first name, but your middle name is expendable.
Jimmy goes into the house, yelling to alert anyone who might be there that he’s around.
He checks out the nurse’s office, which has been ransacked. Then he heads to the kitchen, takes a bite out of a cookie, and steals a few beers.
You know, come to think of it, so far the nurse has been smoking a whole bunch, and she also just went ahead and let this kid go into her broken-into-house on his own. Isn’t a nurse supposed to value human life?
Whatever. One of those little closets with an ironing board behind it falls open, and the kid freaks and smashes a bunch o’ kitchen stuff.
He heads outside, where it is suddenly REALLY dark and tells the nurse everything is fine, though her office is a mess. And so is her kitchen.
The kids take off, and the nurse goes into the house with a, “So much for the cops.” And she seemed so bright, you know?
The nurse goes to turn on the lights, which don’t work. She goes to check the main fuse box, but she can’t get the power back on. So she grabs a flashlight and goes to look at her office.
She finds a picture of Dr. Loomis, which is in black and white, and a file folder labeled Laurie Strode, which is empty.
She hears a noise, and goes to check the front door, which is open. So she sees that the back door is open. So she runs out of the house. Finally wising up.
She goes next door to find Jimmy and his buddy – only Jimmy is dead. He has a hockey skate through his head. His friend is dead as well.
And then Michael walks into the house, as the nurse runs away. She grabs a fireplace poker and starts whacking Michael, while trying to get out the door.
The cops show up, but of course they go to her house, not Jimmy’s. So she’s yelling at the window, trying to get the cops to look over at Jimmy’s house, when Michael cuts her throat, while she yells out, “Andy, he’s not dead.”
Andy is one of the cops, I think. Or she’s calling out to Andy Griffith. Which is about as effective as anything else she’s tried that this point.
The cops step out of the nurse’s house, and one of them glances over and sees the window the nurse shattered. He figures it’s another break-in, and alerts his cop buddy.
As they walk over to the house, the camera gliiides over, as a car pulls out of the driveway. Looks like Michael is making a clean getaway. Or the pizza guy didn’t want to get involved.
Later – like, apparently the next morning later, since it’s light out again – a couple of people you can’t see are yacking, and we learn that the dead nurse is Marion Wittington. She was Loomis’s nurse.
Okay, you know what? I get that the audience needs to be reminded who people are, but a person who worked for someone twenty years ago is not remembered for that. This nurse was not William Shatner playing Captain Kirk on Star Trek. Seeing as how Loomis has been dead for quite some time, I’m guessing she worked for some other people in the meantime.
Unless she just likes wearing a nurse’s uniform.
Okay, wait, maybe she didn’t. The voice, which eventually turns into a detective, goes on:
“He was the shrink who died a few years ago. He lived here. She took care of him.”
Oh yeah. It’s retcon land.
In this version of reality, the sky is still blue, but it tends to get dark suddenly and quickly. And also, Loomis survived the huge explosion in the hospital, but Michael hasn’t been seen in 20 years – they never found his body.
The detective, who the movie has decided is not an idiot, calls up to Haddonfield to warn them, despite the fact that his partner thinks that idea is silly.
The detectives exit the room, additional credits start to fade up, and the camera slooowly pans (this is getting to be a habit, I can tell) around the room, showing us all the newspaper clippings that the nurse left up in Loomis’s office after he died. And I guess that was Loomis’s picture of himself sitting on the table earlier.
On the bright side, in this version of reality, Loomis died thinking he killed Michael 20 years ago. So that’s nice for him.
As the credits continue, we get Loomis’s voiceover, talking about how evil Michael is. This despite the fact that both Loomis the character and the actor who played him are deceased.
I guess the producers just really like those speeches.
As we continue to paaan along, we pause on a newspaper clipping that says, “Survivor of Halloween Murders Killed in Auto Accident” – and there’s a picture of Laurie next to it. So I guess she’s still dead, along with her husband.
Only the article says her name is still Strode. Maybe she kept her last name?
Oh, who am I kidding? I think we all see where this is headed.
Anyway, now we’re in a gothic-looking hallway, but we’re sort of gliding around, so I’m guessing dream sequence. We go into a door, which leads to a classroom, with a picture of teenage boy on the desk.
Then we pan over to a closet, which folds, which if you think back, is sort of like the closet Laurie was trapped in when she was fighting Michael.
Oh, but in case you forgot that, the movie cuts to footage from the original Halloween, with Laurie in the closet, under attack from Michael.
Then we’re back in the classroom, and the movie pans back to the desk, and the teenage boy’s picture has a knife in it, and the blackboard now has the name Laurie Strode written on it.
And then Laurie Strode wakes up, screaming.
The boy in the picture runs in, comforts his mom, and she asks him to get her some medication. He goes to medicine cabinet, which is stuffed full of medication bottles. He pulls one out, shakes out a few pills and heads off to dope mom up for the day.
And then the movie moves outside, and tells us we’re in Summer Glen, California. Oh, and it’s October 31st. So we’re moving right along. Oh, wait. There’s another burn-in, which says, Halloween. Thanks for insulting my intelligence, movie.
The movie paaans past a gate, and a sign, which reads Something Something High School. I mean, it doesn’t really read that, but the font is really small, and all curvy, and I really can’t decipher it. I guess the movie wants us to know it’s a private school, but not WHICH private school.
And now we’re back with Laurie and Son. Son says he’s making toast, which is odd, because he’s eating cereal. I can only assume he’s really hungry. Laurie hands him the mail, which comes amazingly early where they live.
It’s a birthday card from Laurie’s son’s dad (um, hey movie, wanna give us a name, here?), and it’s “only two months late.” But there’s cash in it, which Son wants to use to go to Yosemite.
Laurie says he can’t go. Son says that he thinks today is the day that Laurie will realize that he’s 17 years old. I guess today is NOT the day he’ll find out that he has a sister. Or used to, anyway, back in some other lifetime.
He also notes that his dad would let him go, and Laurie refers to dad as “an abusive, chain-smoking, methadone addict.” Son points out that dad left her.
Then she calls him John, so, yay, a name! She points out that John is going too far with his smart mouth, which she notes comes from “her side of the family.”
To which I say, “And which family would that be?” Laurie’s birth parents are dead, and they’ve been dead since she was, what? Four? So even if her particular brand of sarcasm came from one of them, how would she know?
We could presume that her smart mouth comes from her adoptive parents, but that would be nurture instead of nature, right? Plus she faked her death almost twenty years ago, so her memory of them is probably pretty flaky as well.
I’m thinking what she really should have said is, “It’s pretty much my fault that you can’t speak to your own mother with respect.”
John, in turn, says he deserves some space, and that all the Halloween stuff is really, truly, over. Only on this alternate timeline, John.
Later, John tells his friends that he’s not going to Yosemite, and his girlfriend now feels that she must get out of Yosemite, because it’s lame.
In a nearby building, Laurie looks out a window, and we see Michael’s reflection in the window, only it’s not really there. So I guess what we’re seeing is Laurie’s hallucination. Which will probably open up some fascinating interpretations of just what happens in this movie.
After all, if we can see what Laurie sees, even when it isn’t really there, who is to say this entire movie isn’t just Laurie’s fever dream?
I mean, her part of the movie did start with a nightmare, right? Sure. So maybe Laurie is just dreaming this whole other world where she doesn’t have a daughter… Sure. Doesn’t make any less sense that the cult of the Thorn.
Back with John and pals, John walks up behind some blonde girl and gives her a hug from behind, so maybe she’s his girlfriend. I have no idea.
Blonde complains that her dad flaked on her financial aid again, so now she can’t go to Yosemite. How much does that trip cost, exactly?
John’s male friend, who I’m guessing is NOT his girlfriend, but I couldn’t say for sure, says that the four of them should ditch Yosemite and throw a Halloween party at the school – just the four of them.
That sounds amazingly lame.
Guy Friend suggests a roving orgy. With four people. His girlfriend (ah, first girl is NOT John’s girlfriend – so why was she so mad that John wasn’t going to Yosemite, exactly?) says that she, “loves this man.” I guess she’s a big fan of orgies. Roving ones.
And we now move over to a highway, which a helpful burn-in informs us is Highway 139 Northern California. Some fellow is driving an old truck down the highway.
No, wait, it’s actually a woman, who is driving with her kid, who has to go potty. Which is why they’ve stopped at a rest stop.
They get out of the vehicle, and head up to the bathrooms, walking by another car with a blown-out front tire. Is it the car Michael was driving a couple of days ago? Oh, probably.
The ladies head to the ladies’ room, but it’s locked. So mom takes her little girl to the men’s room. She yells inside, but there’s no one there. She tries the lights, but they don’t work. So she props the door open with a rock.
Mom has her daughter go into one stall, and mom takes another. There’s no toilet paper, so she passes some tissues to her kid and leaves her purse on the ground.
The door to the outside slams shut.
Mom’s purse is taken by a manly hand. With no scars on it. So it’s not Michael.
No, wait. The woman looks through the crack in the door, and it is Michael, who apparently healed completely, despite being on fire. I guess he spent all those missing years undergoing massive plastic surgery. Michael walks away, and the woman sits looks nervous until she hears her little girl scream. She gets up from the toilet and runs to the next stall, and her little one yells out, “Spiders.”
Then Michael drives away with their truck, leaving them lost in the middle of nowhere with no purse, and therefore no cell phone or change to call anyone with. Death is imminent for them.
Question: How did Michael drive all the way from Illinois to California in less than two days? I realize he’s an inhuman monster, but the guy is 40. He’s gonna feel pretty tired after driving almost two straight days.
Back at the school, Laurie tells the assembled students that the bus for Yosemite is leaving at 4:15 sharp, and that the kids should try to uphold the standards of Hillcrest. Which I’m guessing is the name of the school.
John and his three friends are sitting in the assembly, and they all list their reasons they won’t be able to go to Yosemite. Because we care.
Then Laurie heads to her office, and it turns out her new last name is Tate. Not that it matters. She’s walking with the guidance counselor, and they head to her office, stopping briefly to chat with Laurie’s receptionist/assistant.
In the office, Laurie and the guidance counselor make out a bit, and make plans for a lunch at 1.
The movie decides to move on to the security guard, who is reading a dirty story to someone over the phone. It turns out the someone is his wife, who says that his writing career is never going to take off, and that they’re married now and they have to get serious.
John shows up and asks the security guard, whose name is Ronny, to let him and Guy Friend out for a bit. Ronny says no, because Laurie will fire him. John begs, saying he wants to get something for Molly. Which I guess is his girlfriend. (I realize that I’m saying, “I guess,” a lot, but this movie asks you to fill in a lot of blanks.)
Ronny agrees to “accidentally” hit the gate button, so the boys can sneak out, but he doesn’t want to know about it.
He hits the button, and they exit.
Out in town, Laurie pulls her vehicle to a stop, gets out, and looks around. She window-shops at a jewelry store, when, THERE IN THE WINDOW, BEHIND HER! She turns around. It’s not Michael after all. It’s Will, the guidance counselor.
I wonder if Will is going to die the same way Laurie’s high school crush did. Drunk, wearing a Michael mask, crushed between two cars, which then explode, setting him on fire.
I guess we can always hope.
Will and Laurie finish up lunch, and Laurie confesses that she thinks she’s losing John, and also that she has a backstory, which she doesn’t want to share with Will just yet.
Will heads to the bathroom, and Laurie asks the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay, even though she hasn’t finished her first one. The waiter brings her a second glass, Laurie slams down her first, and then takes the second glass, so that Will won’t be any the wiser.
While she’s slamming her drink down, a girl with “bloody” clothes is attacked by a “Grim Reaper” outside the “window,” because we haven’t had a “scare” for the last few minutes.
The movie then kicks us over to John and his friend Charlie, who finally gets a name, and who have just shoplifted a bottle of something alcoholic. Charlie asks John why John doesn’t just take some of his mom’s booze, and John refers to his mom as a functioning alcoholic who keeps close tabs on her hooch.
At that moment, the functioning alcoholic catches them in the act of not being on school grounds. Harsh words are exchanged, but it’s pretty much just a rehash/reminder that Laurie is afraid of Michael Myers coming back, even though she saw him burn to death and it’s been 20 years and no one has heard anything (except in an alternate universe where Laurie’s grandchild is being cared for my the boy Laurie used to babysit).
Laurie takes John and Charlie back to the school in her vehicle. And of course, as they pull away, there’s the truck that Michael Myers stole, just sitting in the right place at the right time.
Michael follows them to the school.
At the school, Laurie asks Ronny how the boys got out, and gets mad when Ronny averts his eyes. Ronny knows he’s in trouble.
And then we’re off with Molly, who is in a tiny, tiny kitchen, I guess cleaning dishes to help pay for her tuition. Or something. I’m just making this up. For all I know, it’s her meth lab. Let’s go ahead and pretend it is.
Molly hears a knocking sound, and she tells “Dennis,” whoever that is, not to send any more down, because she’s got to go to class.
Yep, it’s a meth lab.
Molly is about to leave, but “Dennis” send a dumbwaiter down. Molly opens it up, and there are roses and a map to somewhere-or-other.
Dennis is something of a romantic, I guess. Or the meth is hidden in the roses.
Here’s a pertinent question: Assuming Dennis is not the flower-giver, and John is, where did he get the flowers? We just saw him at the store, and he did not have flowers. Did he steal them from someone at the school?
It appears that John gave her the flowers, because she follows the map and finds John. There’s some romantic babble, but it’s not worth talking about.
(I feel like I’m being unfair to the movie at this point. It’s easy to complain about how movies never set up relationships, or anything else to make you care about the characters. This movie is clearly trying to do that. But it’s failing. What does John care about? Molly. Do we know anything else about John? Deadbeat dad, and he’s the nephew of a serial killer. This is not really enough to hang a hat on.)
A short while later, Laurie is teaching an English class, which has John and Molly in it. She’s asking questions about the book, which in this case is “Frankenstein.”
Molly is not really paying attention. She’s looking out the window, and there, just beyond a door with a hole in it just large enough to see a head through, she sees Michael Myers’s head.
Laurie addresses Molly directly, and Molly spouts off a bunch of stuff meant to demonstrate that, no, really, this Halloween movie has themes and stuff, just like Frankenstein did! The general gist being: It wasn’t until Dr. Frankenstein’s Elizabeth was killed that Victor was able to confront his monster, because Victor had nothing left to lose.
The bell rings, and everyone leaps up and prepares to leave for Yosemite.
The sound you hear in the background is all the producers slapping five, because they don’t have to pay the extras to show up any more to pretend to be students.
John goes to talk to Molly, and Laurie calls him over. She hands him a folded piece of paper – it’s a permission slip. He can go to Yosemite.
John catches up to Molly in the hallway. She asks if he’s going to Yosemite. He says, “I wouldn’t say that.”
A little later, Laurie watches as the buses, loaded with students, pull away. Her helper-elf person says that everyone has tragedy in their life, and that the important thing is to concentrate on today.
(Okay-dokey lads and lassies, I’m going to do something nice for everyone who ever hopes to win some money on Jeopardy. Everyone ready? The two actresses on the screen are Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh. Janet is Jamie’s mother. Janet also starred in the movie “Psycho,” which has been referenced a few times in this film already – Ronny calls Laurie a psycho, Charlie tells John that if his mom isn’t going to let him off the chain, he’s going to end up running a hotel, and yeah, the whole, “bad things happen” is an in-joke as well. Okay filmmakers, we’re wise to your hipster ways. Can we move along now?)
The buses leave the school, and as they ease on down the road, the truck Michael stole flips on its lights – it’s headed towards the school. Where it probably already was, a while ago, since Molly saw Michael through that door earlier.
Back at the gate, Ronny continues to read his new “book” to his wife over the phone. Michael’s truck pulls up at the gate. Ronny goes out to the gate and calls to the truck. When the dude in the truck doesn’t answer, Ronny opens up the gate, and walks out to meet the truck.
Short of stabbing himself with a pointy stick, I’m not sure if Ronny could be a worse security guard. The man needs remedial guarding lessons at the very least.
Though I expect he’s about to get one.
Ronny walks out to the van. No one is in it. As he shuts the car off, Michael walks by, directly behind him.
Ronny walks back through the gate and closes it, then tells his wife he’ll need to call back. Just outside the window, Michael is visible.
I guess we’re supposed to feel some sort of suspense here, but mostly I just get the felling that Ronny is really, really stupid. Feeling pity for the guy would take too much energy.
There’s a tap on the window, and Ronny turns around. But Michael has just walked out of sight.
The phone goes dead in Ronny’s hand.
Ronny does not think to arm himself, or pull out a cell phone, or call for help via a radio of some kind. Instead he wanders into the darkness.
Elsewhere, Laurie locks up her office and heads out for the night. She hears a noise, and sees Michael walking towards her. She closes her eyes and tries to shake the image away, but he’s still there. She does it again. No effect. She does it again. No effect.
Concerned that the movie is about to start picking up the pace, the director throws us another false scare, in the guise of Will the Counselor. Will is making his rounds and checking on the kids.
Laurie and Will agree to meet up in twenty minutes.
Laurie heads home. Wills sees someone walking away in the distance, it looks like he’s going to check it out, but instead he heads to Molly’s room, where the other girl also is. Her name is Sarah. They have some banter.
Moving on.
Later, John and his friends sneak into some window somewhere. John hears a noise and looks around, but there’s nothing there, so he heads into the window.
Back at her home, Laurie has some gin. Then she has some mouthwash to hide the gin. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Will. He’s brought a pumpkin. He says, “I thought we’d do this right.”
So many possible jokes.
Over in the room that John made Molly locate with that map earlier, the foursome get a bunch of food and prepare to eat. Sarah wants to open the booze, so Charlie goes to get a corkscrew.
Over at Laurie’s place, Will and Laurie fool around. Laurie tells Will that her name is not Keri Tate. Whoa, what? She changed her first name, too? Why am I just now finding this out?
Laurie lays out the whole story for Will. At first, he thinks she’s playing some kind of romantic game, because I guess the guy is into some seriously strange stuff. But eventually he figures out she’s serious.
Laurie mentions that Michael killed her sister when she was 17. Then came after Laurie when she was 17. Then Laurie looks up at the birthday card on the mantle, which reminds her that John is also 17.
She tries to call John, only her phone is dead. So she tries another one. Dead. So she goes to his room, and finds all his camping stuff still there. So she grabs a gun and prepares to go on a Michael hunt.
Will thinks it’s nuts.
Laurie goes to the front door, and THERE’S A GUY THERE. Oh wait. It’s just Ronny, who fills Laurie in on stuff we already know.
Laurie goes to look for John, while Ronny goes to fix the phones. Here’s a question: Why doesn’t Ronny have a gun? What’s he going to fight Michael off with? His writing-dulled pencil?
Back at the kitchen, Sarah goes searching for Charlie, who found some glasses but no corkscrew. So Charlie gets into the dumbwaiter to pull himself upstairs in search of said corkscrew.
Charlie exits in yet another room that looks like a kitchen. He finds a corkscrew, but accidentally knocks it into the garbage disposal. He turns on the garbage disposal, so that everyone can see that there are, like, blades and stuff and it’s a bad idea to stick your hand in there.
Then he shuts off the garbage disposal, but doesn’t bother to, say, unplug it.
Off in the corner, Michael appears.
Charlie reaches in to grab the corkscrew, glancing over to the switch on the wall to verify that it isn’t going to flip by itself.
Finally, he pulls the corkscrew out, and turns around, and there’s Michael. Charlie says, “Hi.”
Back in the other room, Sarah waits for Charlie. She turns on some lights, and they die. Then all the lights go out.
She goes to the dumbwaiter, because she hears a rattle. And hey, there’s Charlie. With a big slash through his throat.
Sarah turns to run, and Michael is in the doorway. Not sure how he got there, really.
Sarah jumps into the dumbwaiter, and presses a button to go up. Michael stabs Sarah as the dumbwaiter heads up and away.
Question: If all the lights aren’t working, because Michael did something to the power, how does the dumbwaiter continue to function?
Michael waits for the dumbwaiter to reach the top of its climb, then he cuts the rope to the dumbwaiter and Sarah tries to jump out. The dumbwaiter falls, catching Sarah’s foot – the one on her mangled leg.
Sarah pulls her foot out, and the dumbwaiter crashes in front of Michael.
Down on the lower level, John and Molly hear all the noise and head up to investigate.
Upstairs, Sarah drags herself along the floor until Michael catches her and stabs her to death.
John and Molly arrive in the dark kitchen and find a long, bloody trail on the floor. John says, “This is a sick joke.” Despite the fact that John knows his family history, John seems to have no sense of self-preservation.
John flips on the lights in the pantry, and discovers that the light is… you know what? I can’t tell what I’m seeing here. It kind of looks like Michael jammed one of those hanging lights you find in closets through Sarah’s chest, so that the bulb is sticking out of her and she’s kind of hanging in the air.
Molly and John turn around, and there’s Michael. Sadly, John doesn’t opt to introduce his girlfriend to his long-lost uncle. Kids today have no sense of respect for their elders.
John and Molly run. They escape out the window they snuck into the building with.
They pause for breath on the walkway heading towards the dorm, and John says they’re going to go to the dorms and call the cops.
Then Michael grabs Molly, and prepares to make with the stabbing. Only John punches Michael in the face.
This proves to be not helpful, as Michael knocks him down and stabs John in the leg.
Michael is going to do even more stabbing, but Molly grabs a rock and conks Michael on the head with it. Hard.
But she’s not smart enough to realize she needs to KEEP doing that, so she grabs John by the hand, and tells him to run. Easy for her to say – she doesn’t have a massive gash in her limb.
They run, and Michael gets up and gives chase.
They get to the front gate. There’s some key fumbling. Molly finally gets them in the gate, but drops her keys, which fall outside the gate.
Michael reaches the gate, and Molly and John stand trapped between the gate and the door, while Michael shoves his hand through the gate and tries to do some stabbing.
Finally, Michael realizes it’s time to try the keys, and he starts sorting through them, while Molly and John pound on the door, begging to be let in.
Michael has just about selected the right key, when Laurie and Will get to the door, open it up, and let John and Molly in. Laurie closes the door JUST in time to look through the glass porthole that’s on the door – for dramatic moments just like this one, I guess – and face Michael for the first time in 20 years.
Laurie reaches into her pants to pull out her gun, and when she looks back, Michael is gone.
All of them run up the stairs, where they discover that a bunch of windows are wide open.
Laurie puts John and Molly in a room, and tells them to barricade the door, and Laurie and Will head down the hall.
Laurie says she won’t leave John, and Will says he won’t leave Laurie, who he keeps calling Keri.
Suddenly, Will sees a dark shape at the end of the hall, so he grabs Laurie’s gun and fires at it, over and over. A guy falls to the ground. Kind of early in the movie yet, so I’m guessing Ronny just bought the farm.
Yep. Ronny.
Laurie and Will are saddened at this turn of events. They drop their guard, and Michael walks through the door, stabs Will, and lifts him into the air using his knife.
Laurie runs to a nearby door, and discovers that it’s a closet. She says a bad word.
Michael walks up to the door, and stabs it a bunch of times, and then Laurie comes up behind him and hits him with a fire extinguisher.
Once again, she’s not smart enough to KEEP hitting him. Seriously. I realize it’s not a great weapon, but enough blows to the head couldn’t hurt, right? Come on, guys, let’s keep trying.
Laurie runs away, and tells Molly and John to come out of the room she left them in, and then they keep on running while Michael gets up off the floor and comes after them.
They should cut those head blows together and, like, make a Nuprin commercial, now that I think about it. That would be pretty great.
Laurie and John and Molly get in Laurie’s vehicle, which won’t start until Michael is RIGHT THERE. They drive to the front gate, and Laurie punches in the code.
Laurie gets ready to drive away, only, no, wait. She tells Molly and John to drive down the street to the Becker’s and call the police and an ambulance.
I’m guessing this is supposed to sort of echo when Laurie told Tommy and Laurie to go down the street and get some help. On the down side, it’s a pretty stupid move. On the up side, last time we got a sequel out of it, plus the whole Samhain thing, which no one in this movie seems to recall.
I do have one really basic question, though. Just where, exactly, has Michael been hanging out for the last 20 years? The man doesn’t talk, and he’s not what you’d call a people person, so… what’s he been up to? Really? This is going to plague me.
Molly hops into the driver’s seat, and she drives away with John in the backseat, slowly bleeding out.
Laurie closes the gate, then destroys the little electronic gate-opening panel with a rock. So much for a last-minute rescue for Will or Ronny.
Laurie smashes one of those “In case of emergency, break glass” things and yanks out of fire axe.
She screams Michael’s name out twice and heads for the dorms.
Inside the dorm, she yells out to him again, and moves down the hallway. Just behind her, Michael lowers himself from the ceiling, where he was dangling from a pole set up for basketball players to practice their chin-ups.
Again, I’m making that up. I have no clue why that pole was there.
Laurie turns around and swings the axe into Michael’s shoulder. Michael slashes Laurie’s arm.
Laurie runs.
Michael pulls the axe out of his arm and throws it into the floor, opting to keep his knife as his weapon of choice.
Laurie runs into what looks like the dining room, and Michael stalks after her.
Laurie hides under one of the tables. Michael walks past her, so Laurie keeps on crawling, moving under other tables.
And there’s Michael, on top of the table she’s under. She kicks a chair to distract him, then tries to sneak off the other way.
So Michael gets down and starts throwing tables around.
Laurie grabs a flagpole and jabs it in Michael’s belly. Michael falls over.
Laurie runs to the kitchen, and pulls out a drawer full of knives. She throws them at Michael as he walks in, but never hits him, though she does stick one in the door.
At the last second, she lifts up the drawer to keep Michael from stabbing her. It works. Then she knees him in the groin, which seems to have little or no effect.
Laurie runs again, pulling the knife out of the door and taking it with her. She also grabs one off the floor.
Michael comes after her, but doesn’t see her in the hallway. He walks by a window, and she jumps out from behind the curtains and stabs him with alternate knives, over and over, until he falls through an opening in the wall that leads to the dining room, which is one story down.
Laurie peers down at Michael, waiting for him to get back up again. She drops the knife she’s still holding and WALKS AWAY, because she hasn’t learned a thing after surviving being attacked my Michael on multiple occasions.
Seriously, y’all. It’s a pretty stupid moment.
She gets down the dining hall, and much to my surprise, Michael is still lying there. So Laurie pulls the knife out of his chest, and stands up, and prepares to administer a killing blow or eighty.
Only Ronny, who isn’t dead, stops her, telling her that, “He’s dead.”
Ronny. Dude. If Michael is dead, a little more stabbing isn’t going to hurt him. Let the girl do some cutting. She’s earned it.
Later, Ronny calls his wife and tells her that he’s going to write a romantic thriller. Awesome. If Ronny doesn’t die in this movie, can we put in a request for him to eat it in the next one? Please?
Oh, and there’s an ambulance there, and also a bunch of cops, and some other authority figures, plus John and Molly, even though John should really, really, really be in the hospital with that leg wound. Why in the world is he back at the school?
A couple of medic-types load Michael into a body bag, then stick him into a van.
Laurie grabs a cop’s gun and steals the van, and also an axe. Then she drives away, watching the rearview mirror, waiting for Michael to move. He doesn’t. Then he doesn’t. Then he does.
Laurie keeps on driving, watching Michael struggle to get out of the body bag.
She slams on the brakes, throwing him through the windshield.
She waits for him to get up.
He does.
She hits the gas, runs into him, and drives the van, with herself in it, over a cliff.
She’s thrown from the vehicle. Which is dramatic, but really dumb.
Michael is pinned between the van and a tree.
Laurie picks up the axe, and walks over to where Michael is pinned.
She calls out his name, and he looks up, apparently surprised to be alive.
He reaches out his hand, and I have to admit, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel at this particular moment. I guess it could be, like, a moment where you’re supposed to feel a sort of sympathy for him, or maybe this is like a magical brother/sister moment.
Laurie almost touches his hand, but then opts to cut off Michael’s head with an axe. The head rolls away, and we get a final shot of Laurie standing there, with her nightmare all over and done and such.
Or maybe she’s wondering what happened to her daughter. Or possibly why they got some sound-alike guy to do Loomis’s lines over the opening credits, instead of finding and using the original voice tracks with some digital cleanup.
Or possibly why they decided to play a Creed song over the closing credits. Or why the title is so long. I mean, really: “Halloween: H20: 20 Years Later.” What do you even do with that?
Or perhaps she’s wondering how there could possibly be another sequel after this – because there is.
What happened to Jamie’s child? I assume Tommy didn’t just run off with it.
What happened to Dr. Loomis? Is he dead? Alive?
What’s going on with the… uh… Thorn people? Michael killed quite a few of them – are there any left?
Now that Tommy faced down the monster who scared him so badly as a kid, is he going to pursue a normal life now?
What about Danny? Danny was hearing “The Voice” since he was a child. Now that the Thorn is gone, has the voice gone away? Or is he still a little murderer-in-waiting? And are Danny and Kara the last of the Strodes? And does Michael have to kill them now, or were they really just collateral damage?
And away we go.
“Halloween: H20,” starts up with Mr. Sandman, the song that started and ended Part II…
Uh-oh.
Didja see all those questions up there? Forget about them. The answers aren’t coming, methinks. Iiit’s retroactive continuity time!
But let’s forget about that for the second. As the credits fade up, we get a knife, which jams into a pumpkin. A mom and a bunch of kids are gathered around a table outside, making a Jack O’Lantern.
But pretend you didn’t see them either, because camera pans right down the street, while a burn-in informs us that we’re in Langdon, Illinois.
A nurse steps out of her car, smoking a cigarette, and another burn-in tells us that it’s October 29, 1998.
The nurse walks up to her front door, and sees broken glass on the ground. She looks up and sees that her outside light has been smashed. She opens her door, which creaks ominously.
But this nurse is no dummy. She goes next door, rings the doorbell, and pounds on the front door. She hears a noise nearby, and goes to investigate, and, STING NOISE! It’s a kid in a hockey mask.
Just, like, a standard kid, though. The nurse tells the kid her house was broken into.
They all head into another house (I guess it belongs to the kid) and the kid calls the cops to tell them something is up. They say they’ll be there in 15 minutes.
It turns out that the kid, whose name is Jimmy, is an idiot. He wants to go check out the house. So the nurse, and another kid, and Jimmy head to the house. The other kid sticks with the nurse, while Jimmy heads into the house, hockey stick in hand.
I should note that Jimmy mocks the other kid for not going in. You may have a name, buddy, who you weren’t over the credits. Jimmy might be your first name, but your middle name is expendable.
Jimmy goes into the house, yelling to alert anyone who might be there that he’s around.
He checks out the nurse’s office, which has been ransacked. Then he heads to the kitchen, takes a bite out of a cookie, and steals a few beers.
You know, come to think of it, so far the nurse has been smoking a whole bunch, and she also just went ahead and let this kid go into her broken-into-house on his own. Isn’t a nurse supposed to value human life?
Whatever. One of those little closets with an ironing board behind it falls open, and the kid freaks and smashes a bunch o’ kitchen stuff.
He heads outside, where it is suddenly REALLY dark and tells the nurse everything is fine, though her office is a mess. And so is her kitchen.
The kids take off, and the nurse goes into the house with a, “So much for the cops.” And she seemed so bright, you know?
The nurse goes to turn on the lights, which don’t work. She goes to check the main fuse box, but she can’t get the power back on. So she grabs a flashlight and goes to look at her office.
She finds a picture of Dr. Loomis, which is in black and white, and a file folder labeled Laurie Strode, which is empty.
She hears a noise, and goes to check the front door, which is open. So she sees that the back door is open. So she runs out of the house. Finally wising up.
She goes next door to find Jimmy and his buddy – only Jimmy is dead. He has a hockey skate through his head. His friend is dead as well.
And then Michael walks into the house, as the nurse runs away. She grabs a fireplace poker and starts whacking Michael, while trying to get out the door.
The cops show up, but of course they go to her house, not Jimmy’s. So she’s yelling at the window, trying to get the cops to look over at Jimmy’s house, when Michael cuts her throat, while she yells out, “Andy, he’s not dead.”
Andy is one of the cops, I think. Or she’s calling out to Andy Griffith. Which is about as effective as anything else she’s tried that this point.
The cops step out of the nurse’s house, and one of them glances over and sees the window the nurse shattered. He figures it’s another break-in, and alerts his cop buddy.
As they walk over to the house, the camera gliiides over, as a car pulls out of the driveway. Looks like Michael is making a clean getaway. Or the pizza guy didn’t want to get involved.
Later – like, apparently the next morning later, since it’s light out again – a couple of people you can’t see are yacking, and we learn that the dead nurse is Marion Wittington. She was Loomis’s nurse.
Okay, you know what? I get that the audience needs to be reminded who people are, but a person who worked for someone twenty years ago is not remembered for that. This nurse was not William Shatner playing Captain Kirk on Star Trek. Seeing as how Loomis has been dead for quite some time, I’m guessing she worked for some other people in the meantime.
Unless she just likes wearing a nurse’s uniform.
Okay, wait, maybe she didn’t. The voice, which eventually turns into a detective, goes on:
“He was the shrink who died a few years ago. He lived here. She took care of him.”
Oh yeah. It’s retcon land.
In this version of reality, the sky is still blue, but it tends to get dark suddenly and quickly. And also, Loomis survived the huge explosion in the hospital, but Michael hasn’t been seen in 20 years – they never found his body.
The detective, who the movie has decided is not an idiot, calls up to Haddonfield to warn them, despite the fact that his partner thinks that idea is silly.
The detectives exit the room, additional credits start to fade up, and the camera slooowly pans (this is getting to be a habit, I can tell) around the room, showing us all the newspaper clippings that the nurse left up in Loomis’s office after he died. And I guess that was Loomis’s picture of himself sitting on the table earlier.
On the bright side, in this version of reality, Loomis died thinking he killed Michael 20 years ago. So that’s nice for him.
As the credits continue, we get Loomis’s voiceover, talking about how evil Michael is. This despite the fact that both Loomis the character and the actor who played him are deceased.
I guess the producers just really like those speeches.
As we continue to paaan along, we pause on a newspaper clipping that says, “Survivor of Halloween Murders Killed in Auto Accident” – and there’s a picture of Laurie next to it. So I guess she’s still dead, along with her husband.
Only the article says her name is still Strode. Maybe she kept her last name?
Oh, who am I kidding? I think we all see where this is headed.
Anyway, now we’re in a gothic-looking hallway, but we’re sort of gliding around, so I’m guessing dream sequence. We go into a door, which leads to a classroom, with a picture of teenage boy on the desk.
Then we pan over to a closet, which folds, which if you think back, is sort of like the closet Laurie was trapped in when she was fighting Michael.
Oh, but in case you forgot that, the movie cuts to footage from the original Halloween, with Laurie in the closet, under attack from Michael.
Then we’re back in the classroom, and the movie pans back to the desk, and the teenage boy’s picture has a knife in it, and the blackboard now has the name Laurie Strode written on it.
And then Laurie Strode wakes up, screaming.
The boy in the picture runs in, comforts his mom, and she asks him to get her some medication. He goes to medicine cabinet, which is stuffed full of medication bottles. He pulls one out, shakes out a few pills and heads off to dope mom up for the day.
And then the movie moves outside, and tells us we’re in Summer Glen, California. Oh, and it’s October 31st. So we’re moving right along. Oh, wait. There’s another burn-in, which says, Halloween. Thanks for insulting my intelligence, movie.
The movie paaans past a gate, and a sign, which reads Something Something High School. I mean, it doesn’t really read that, but the font is really small, and all curvy, and I really can’t decipher it. I guess the movie wants us to know it’s a private school, but not WHICH private school.
And now we’re back with Laurie and Son. Son says he’s making toast, which is odd, because he’s eating cereal. I can only assume he’s really hungry. Laurie hands him the mail, which comes amazingly early where they live.
It’s a birthday card from Laurie’s son’s dad (um, hey movie, wanna give us a name, here?), and it’s “only two months late.” But there’s cash in it, which Son wants to use to go to Yosemite.
Laurie says he can’t go. Son says that he thinks today is the day that Laurie will realize that he’s 17 years old. I guess today is NOT the day he’ll find out that he has a sister. Or used to, anyway, back in some other lifetime.
He also notes that his dad would let him go, and Laurie refers to dad as “an abusive, chain-smoking, methadone addict.” Son points out that dad left her.
Then she calls him John, so, yay, a name! She points out that John is going too far with his smart mouth, which she notes comes from “her side of the family.”
To which I say, “And which family would that be?” Laurie’s birth parents are dead, and they’ve been dead since she was, what? Four? So even if her particular brand of sarcasm came from one of them, how would she know?
We could presume that her smart mouth comes from her adoptive parents, but that would be nurture instead of nature, right? Plus she faked her death almost twenty years ago, so her memory of them is probably pretty flaky as well.
I’m thinking what she really should have said is, “It’s pretty much my fault that you can’t speak to your own mother with respect.”
John, in turn, says he deserves some space, and that all the Halloween stuff is really, truly, over. Only on this alternate timeline, John.
Later, John tells his friends that he’s not going to Yosemite, and his girlfriend now feels that she must get out of Yosemite, because it’s lame.
In a nearby building, Laurie looks out a window, and we see Michael’s reflection in the window, only it’s not really there. So I guess what we’re seeing is Laurie’s hallucination. Which will probably open up some fascinating interpretations of just what happens in this movie.
After all, if we can see what Laurie sees, even when it isn’t really there, who is to say this entire movie isn’t just Laurie’s fever dream?
I mean, her part of the movie did start with a nightmare, right? Sure. So maybe Laurie is just dreaming this whole other world where she doesn’t have a daughter… Sure. Doesn’t make any less sense that the cult of the Thorn.
Back with John and pals, John walks up behind some blonde girl and gives her a hug from behind, so maybe she’s his girlfriend. I have no idea.
Blonde complains that her dad flaked on her financial aid again, so now she can’t go to Yosemite. How much does that trip cost, exactly?
John’s male friend, who I’m guessing is NOT his girlfriend, but I couldn’t say for sure, says that the four of them should ditch Yosemite and throw a Halloween party at the school – just the four of them.
That sounds amazingly lame.
Guy Friend suggests a roving orgy. With four people. His girlfriend (ah, first girl is NOT John’s girlfriend – so why was she so mad that John wasn’t going to Yosemite, exactly?) says that she, “loves this man.” I guess she’s a big fan of orgies. Roving ones.
And we now move over to a highway, which a helpful burn-in informs us is Highway 139 Northern California. Some fellow is driving an old truck down the highway.
No, wait, it’s actually a woman, who is driving with her kid, who has to go potty. Which is why they’ve stopped at a rest stop.
They get out of the vehicle, and head up to the bathrooms, walking by another car with a blown-out front tire. Is it the car Michael was driving a couple of days ago? Oh, probably.
The ladies head to the ladies’ room, but it’s locked. So mom takes her little girl to the men’s room. She yells inside, but there’s no one there. She tries the lights, but they don’t work. So she props the door open with a rock.
Mom has her daughter go into one stall, and mom takes another. There’s no toilet paper, so she passes some tissues to her kid and leaves her purse on the ground.
The door to the outside slams shut.
Mom’s purse is taken by a manly hand. With no scars on it. So it’s not Michael.
No, wait. The woman looks through the crack in the door, and it is Michael, who apparently healed completely, despite being on fire. I guess he spent all those missing years undergoing massive plastic surgery. Michael walks away, and the woman sits looks nervous until she hears her little girl scream. She gets up from the toilet and runs to the next stall, and her little one yells out, “Spiders.”
Then Michael drives away with their truck, leaving them lost in the middle of nowhere with no purse, and therefore no cell phone or change to call anyone with. Death is imminent for them.
Question: How did Michael drive all the way from Illinois to California in less than two days? I realize he’s an inhuman monster, but the guy is 40. He’s gonna feel pretty tired after driving almost two straight days.
Back at the school, Laurie tells the assembled students that the bus for Yosemite is leaving at 4:15 sharp, and that the kids should try to uphold the standards of Hillcrest. Which I’m guessing is the name of the school.
John and his three friends are sitting in the assembly, and they all list their reasons they won’t be able to go to Yosemite. Because we care.
Then Laurie heads to her office, and it turns out her new last name is Tate. Not that it matters. She’s walking with the guidance counselor, and they head to her office, stopping briefly to chat with Laurie’s receptionist/assistant.
In the office, Laurie and the guidance counselor make out a bit, and make plans for a lunch at 1.
The movie decides to move on to the security guard, who is reading a dirty story to someone over the phone. It turns out the someone is his wife, who says that his writing career is never going to take off, and that they’re married now and they have to get serious.
John shows up and asks the security guard, whose name is Ronny, to let him and Guy Friend out for a bit. Ronny says no, because Laurie will fire him. John begs, saying he wants to get something for Molly. Which I guess is his girlfriend. (I realize that I’m saying, “I guess,” a lot, but this movie asks you to fill in a lot of blanks.)
Ronny agrees to “accidentally” hit the gate button, so the boys can sneak out, but he doesn’t want to know about it.
He hits the button, and they exit.
Out in town, Laurie pulls her vehicle to a stop, gets out, and looks around. She window-shops at a jewelry store, when, THERE IN THE WINDOW, BEHIND HER! She turns around. It’s not Michael after all. It’s Will, the guidance counselor.
I wonder if Will is going to die the same way Laurie’s high school crush did. Drunk, wearing a Michael mask, crushed between two cars, which then explode, setting him on fire.
I guess we can always hope.
Will and Laurie finish up lunch, and Laurie confesses that she thinks she’s losing John, and also that she has a backstory, which she doesn’t want to share with Will just yet.
Will heads to the bathroom, and Laurie asks the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay, even though she hasn’t finished her first one. The waiter brings her a second glass, Laurie slams down her first, and then takes the second glass, so that Will won’t be any the wiser.
While she’s slamming her drink down, a girl with “bloody” clothes is attacked by a “Grim Reaper” outside the “window,” because we haven’t had a “scare” for the last few minutes.
The movie then kicks us over to John and his friend Charlie, who finally gets a name, and who have just shoplifted a bottle of something alcoholic. Charlie asks John why John doesn’t just take some of his mom’s booze, and John refers to his mom as a functioning alcoholic who keeps close tabs on her hooch.
At that moment, the functioning alcoholic catches them in the act of not being on school grounds. Harsh words are exchanged, but it’s pretty much just a rehash/reminder that Laurie is afraid of Michael Myers coming back, even though she saw him burn to death and it’s been 20 years and no one has heard anything (except in an alternate universe where Laurie’s grandchild is being cared for my the boy Laurie used to babysit).
Laurie takes John and Charlie back to the school in her vehicle. And of course, as they pull away, there’s the truck that Michael Myers stole, just sitting in the right place at the right time.
Michael follows them to the school.
At the school, Laurie asks Ronny how the boys got out, and gets mad when Ronny averts his eyes. Ronny knows he’s in trouble.
And then we’re off with Molly, who is in a tiny, tiny kitchen, I guess cleaning dishes to help pay for her tuition. Or something. I’m just making this up. For all I know, it’s her meth lab. Let’s go ahead and pretend it is.
Molly hears a knocking sound, and she tells “Dennis,” whoever that is, not to send any more down, because she’s got to go to class.
Yep, it’s a meth lab.
Molly is about to leave, but “Dennis” send a dumbwaiter down. Molly opens it up, and there are roses and a map to somewhere-or-other.
Dennis is something of a romantic, I guess. Or the meth is hidden in the roses.
Here’s a pertinent question: Assuming Dennis is not the flower-giver, and John is, where did he get the flowers? We just saw him at the store, and he did not have flowers. Did he steal them from someone at the school?
It appears that John gave her the flowers, because she follows the map and finds John. There’s some romantic babble, but it’s not worth talking about.
(I feel like I’m being unfair to the movie at this point. It’s easy to complain about how movies never set up relationships, or anything else to make you care about the characters. This movie is clearly trying to do that. But it’s failing. What does John care about? Molly. Do we know anything else about John? Deadbeat dad, and he’s the nephew of a serial killer. This is not really enough to hang a hat on.)
A short while later, Laurie is teaching an English class, which has John and Molly in it. She’s asking questions about the book, which in this case is “Frankenstein.”
Molly is not really paying attention. She’s looking out the window, and there, just beyond a door with a hole in it just large enough to see a head through, she sees Michael Myers’s head.
Laurie addresses Molly directly, and Molly spouts off a bunch of stuff meant to demonstrate that, no, really, this Halloween movie has themes and stuff, just like Frankenstein did! The general gist being: It wasn’t until Dr. Frankenstein’s Elizabeth was killed that Victor was able to confront his monster, because Victor had nothing left to lose.
The bell rings, and everyone leaps up and prepares to leave for Yosemite.
The sound you hear in the background is all the producers slapping five, because they don’t have to pay the extras to show up any more to pretend to be students.
John goes to talk to Molly, and Laurie calls him over. She hands him a folded piece of paper – it’s a permission slip. He can go to Yosemite.
John catches up to Molly in the hallway. She asks if he’s going to Yosemite. He says, “I wouldn’t say that.”
A little later, Laurie watches as the buses, loaded with students, pull away. Her helper-elf person says that everyone has tragedy in their life, and that the important thing is to concentrate on today.
(Okay-dokey lads and lassies, I’m going to do something nice for everyone who ever hopes to win some money on Jeopardy. Everyone ready? The two actresses on the screen are Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh. Janet is Jamie’s mother. Janet also starred in the movie “Psycho,” which has been referenced a few times in this film already – Ronny calls Laurie a psycho, Charlie tells John that if his mom isn’t going to let him off the chain, he’s going to end up running a hotel, and yeah, the whole, “bad things happen” is an in-joke as well. Okay filmmakers, we’re wise to your hipster ways. Can we move along now?)
The buses leave the school, and as they ease on down the road, the truck Michael stole flips on its lights – it’s headed towards the school. Where it probably already was, a while ago, since Molly saw Michael through that door earlier.
Back at the gate, Ronny continues to read his new “book” to his wife over the phone. Michael’s truck pulls up at the gate. Ronny goes out to the gate and calls to the truck. When the dude in the truck doesn’t answer, Ronny opens up the gate, and walks out to meet the truck.
Short of stabbing himself with a pointy stick, I’m not sure if Ronny could be a worse security guard. The man needs remedial guarding lessons at the very least.
Though I expect he’s about to get one.
Ronny walks out to the van. No one is in it. As he shuts the car off, Michael walks by, directly behind him.
Ronny walks back through the gate and closes it, then tells his wife he’ll need to call back. Just outside the window, Michael is visible.
I guess we’re supposed to feel some sort of suspense here, but mostly I just get the felling that Ronny is really, really stupid. Feeling pity for the guy would take too much energy.
There’s a tap on the window, and Ronny turns around. But Michael has just walked out of sight.
The phone goes dead in Ronny’s hand.
Ronny does not think to arm himself, or pull out a cell phone, or call for help via a radio of some kind. Instead he wanders into the darkness.
Elsewhere, Laurie locks up her office and heads out for the night. She hears a noise, and sees Michael walking towards her. She closes her eyes and tries to shake the image away, but he’s still there. She does it again. No effect. She does it again. No effect.
Concerned that the movie is about to start picking up the pace, the director throws us another false scare, in the guise of Will the Counselor. Will is making his rounds and checking on the kids.
Laurie and Will agree to meet up in twenty minutes.
Laurie heads home. Wills sees someone walking away in the distance, it looks like he’s going to check it out, but instead he heads to Molly’s room, where the other girl also is. Her name is Sarah. They have some banter.
Moving on.
Later, John and his friends sneak into some window somewhere. John hears a noise and looks around, but there’s nothing there, so he heads into the window.
Back at her home, Laurie has some gin. Then she has some mouthwash to hide the gin. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Will. He’s brought a pumpkin. He says, “I thought we’d do this right.”
So many possible jokes.
Over in the room that John made Molly locate with that map earlier, the foursome get a bunch of food and prepare to eat. Sarah wants to open the booze, so Charlie goes to get a corkscrew.
Over at Laurie’s place, Will and Laurie fool around. Laurie tells Will that her name is not Keri Tate. Whoa, what? She changed her first name, too? Why am I just now finding this out?
Laurie lays out the whole story for Will. At first, he thinks she’s playing some kind of romantic game, because I guess the guy is into some seriously strange stuff. But eventually he figures out she’s serious.
Laurie mentions that Michael killed her sister when she was 17. Then came after Laurie when she was 17. Then Laurie looks up at the birthday card on the mantle, which reminds her that John is also 17.
She tries to call John, only her phone is dead. So she tries another one. Dead. So she goes to his room, and finds all his camping stuff still there. So she grabs a gun and prepares to go on a Michael hunt.
Will thinks it’s nuts.
Laurie goes to the front door, and THERE’S A GUY THERE. Oh wait. It’s just Ronny, who fills Laurie in on stuff we already know.
Laurie goes to look for John, while Ronny goes to fix the phones. Here’s a question: Why doesn’t Ronny have a gun? What’s he going to fight Michael off with? His writing-dulled pencil?
Back at the kitchen, Sarah goes searching for Charlie, who found some glasses but no corkscrew. So Charlie gets into the dumbwaiter to pull himself upstairs in search of said corkscrew.
Charlie exits in yet another room that looks like a kitchen. He finds a corkscrew, but accidentally knocks it into the garbage disposal. He turns on the garbage disposal, so that everyone can see that there are, like, blades and stuff and it’s a bad idea to stick your hand in there.
Then he shuts off the garbage disposal, but doesn’t bother to, say, unplug it.
Off in the corner, Michael appears.
Charlie reaches in to grab the corkscrew, glancing over to the switch on the wall to verify that it isn’t going to flip by itself.
Finally, he pulls the corkscrew out, and turns around, and there’s Michael. Charlie says, “Hi.”
Back in the other room, Sarah waits for Charlie. She turns on some lights, and they die. Then all the lights go out.
She goes to the dumbwaiter, because she hears a rattle. And hey, there’s Charlie. With a big slash through his throat.
Sarah turns to run, and Michael is in the doorway. Not sure how he got there, really.
Sarah jumps into the dumbwaiter, and presses a button to go up. Michael stabs Sarah as the dumbwaiter heads up and away.
Question: If all the lights aren’t working, because Michael did something to the power, how does the dumbwaiter continue to function?
Michael waits for the dumbwaiter to reach the top of its climb, then he cuts the rope to the dumbwaiter and Sarah tries to jump out. The dumbwaiter falls, catching Sarah’s foot – the one on her mangled leg.
Sarah pulls her foot out, and the dumbwaiter crashes in front of Michael.
Down on the lower level, John and Molly hear all the noise and head up to investigate.
Upstairs, Sarah drags herself along the floor until Michael catches her and stabs her to death.
John and Molly arrive in the dark kitchen and find a long, bloody trail on the floor. John says, “This is a sick joke.” Despite the fact that John knows his family history, John seems to have no sense of self-preservation.
John flips on the lights in the pantry, and discovers that the light is… you know what? I can’t tell what I’m seeing here. It kind of looks like Michael jammed one of those hanging lights you find in closets through Sarah’s chest, so that the bulb is sticking out of her and she’s kind of hanging in the air.
Molly and John turn around, and there’s Michael. Sadly, John doesn’t opt to introduce his girlfriend to his long-lost uncle. Kids today have no sense of respect for their elders.
John and Molly run. They escape out the window they snuck into the building with.
They pause for breath on the walkway heading towards the dorm, and John says they’re going to go to the dorms and call the cops.
Then Michael grabs Molly, and prepares to make with the stabbing. Only John punches Michael in the face.
This proves to be not helpful, as Michael knocks him down and stabs John in the leg.
Michael is going to do even more stabbing, but Molly grabs a rock and conks Michael on the head with it. Hard.
But she’s not smart enough to realize she needs to KEEP doing that, so she grabs John by the hand, and tells him to run. Easy for her to say – she doesn’t have a massive gash in her limb.
They run, and Michael gets up and gives chase.
They get to the front gate. There’s some key fumbling. Molly finally gets them in the gate, but drops her keys, which fall outside the gate.
Michael reaches the gate, and Molly and John stand trapped between the gate and the door, while Michael shoves his hand through the gate and tries to do some stabbing.
Finally, Michael realizes it’s time to try the keys, and he starts sorting through them, while Molly and John pound on the door, begging to be let in.
Michael has just about selected the right key, when Laurie and Will get to the door, open it up, and let John and Molly in. Laurie closes the door JUST in time to look through the glass porthole that’s on the door – for dramatic moments just like this one, I guess – and face Michael for the first time in 20 years.
Laurie reaches into her pants to pull out her gun, and when she looks back, Michael is gone.
All of them run up the stairs, where they discover that a bunch of windows are wide open.
Laurie puts John and Molly in a room, and tells them to barricade the door, and Laurie and Will head down the hall.
Laurie says she won’t leave John, and Will says he won’t leave Laurie, who he keeps calling Keri.
Suddenly, Will sees a dark shape at the end of the hall, so he grabs Laurie’s gun and fires at it, over and over. A guy falls to the ground. Kind of early in the movie yet, so I’m guessing Ronny just bought the farm.
Yep. Ronny.
Laurie and Will are saddened at this turn of events. They drop their guard, and Michael walks through the door, stabs Will, and lifts him into the air using his knife.
Laurie runs to a nearby door, and discovers that it’s a closet. She says a bad word.
Michael walks up to the door, and stabs it a bunch of times, and then Laurie comes up behind him and hits him with a fire extinguisher.
Once again, she’s not smart enough to KEEP hitting him. Seriously. I realize it’s not a great weapon, but enough blows to the head couldn’t hurt, right? Come on, guys, let’s keep trying.
Laurie runs away, and tells Molly and John to come out of the room she left them in, and then they keep on running while Michael gets up off the floor and comes after them.
They should cut those head blows together and, like, make a Nuprin commercial, now that I think about it. That would be pretty great.
Laurie and John and Molly get in Laurie’s vehicle, which won’t start until Michael is RIGHT THERE. They drive to the front gate, and Laurie punches in the code.
Laurie gets ready to drive away, only, no, wait. She tells Molly and John to drive down the street to the Becker’s and call the police and an ambulance.
I’m guessing this is supposed to sort of echo when Laurie told Tommy and Laurie to go down the street and get some help. On the down side, it’s a pretty stupid move. On the up side, last time we got a sequel out of it, plus the whole Samhain thing, which no one in this movie seems to recall.
I do have one really basic question, though. Just where, exactly, has Michael been hanging out for the last 20 years? The man doesn’t talk, and he’s not what you’d call a people person, so… what’s he been up to? Really? This is going to plague me.
Molly hops into the driver’s seat, and she drives away with John in the backseat, slowly bleeding out.
Laurie closes the gate, then destroys the little electronic gate-opening panel with a rock. So much for a last-minute rescue for Will or Ronny.
Laurie smashes one of those “In case of emergency, break glass” things and yanks out of fire axe.
She screams Michael’s name out twice and heads for the dorms.
Inside the dorm, she yells out to him again, and moves down the hallway. Just behind her, Michael lowers himself from the ceiling, where he was dangling from a pole set up for basketball players to practice their chin-ups.
Again, I’m making that up. I have no clue why that pole was there.
Laurie turns around and swings the axe into Michael’s shoulder. Michael slashes Laurie’s arm.
Laurie runs.
Michael pulls the axe out of his arm and throws it into the floor, opting to keep his knife as his weapon of choice.
Laurie runs into what looks like the dining room, and Michael stalks after her.
Laurie hides under one of the tables. Michael walks past her, so Laurie keeps on crawling, moving under other tables.
And there’s Michael, on top of the table she’s under. She kicks a chair to distract him, then tries to sneak off the other way.
So Michael gets down and starts throwing tables around.
Laurie grabs a flagpole and jabs it in Michael’s belly. Michael falls over.
Laurie runs to the kitchen, and pulls out a drawer full of knives. She throws them at Michael as he walks in, but never hits him, though she does stick one in the door.
At the last second, she lifts up the drawer to keep Michael from stabbing her. It works. Then she knees him in the groin, which seems to have little or no effect.
Laurie runs again, pulling the knife out of the door and taking it with her. She also grabs one off the floor.
Michael comes after her, but doesn’t see her in the hallway. He walks by a window, and she jumps out from behind the curtains and stabs him with alternate knives, over and over, until he falls through an opening in the wall that leads to the dining room, which is one story down.
Laurie peers down at Michael, waiting for him to get back up again. She drops the knife she’s still holding and WALKS AWAY, because she hasn’t learned a thing after surviving being attacked my Michael on multiple occasions.
Seriously, y’all. It’s a pretty stupid moment.
She gets down the dining hall, and much to my surprise, Michael is still lying there. So Laurie pulls the knife out of his chest, and stands up, and prepares to administer a killing blow or eighty.
Only Ronny, who isn’t dead, stops her, telling her that, “He’s dead.”
Ronny. Dude. If Michael is dead, a little more stabbing isn’t going to hurt him. Let the girl do some cutting. She’s earned it.
Later, Ronny calls his wife and tells her that he’s going to write a romantic thriller. Awesome. If Ronny doesn’t die in this movie, can we put in a request for him to eat it in the next one? Please?
Oh, and there’s an ambulance there, and also a bunch of cops, and some other authority figures, plus John and Molly, even though John should really, really, really be in the hospital with that leg wound. Why in the world is he back at the school?
A couple of medic-types load Michael into a body bag, then stick him into a van.
Laurie grabs a cop’s gun and steals the van, and also an axe. Then she drives away, watching the rearview mirror, waiting for Michael to move. He doesn’t. Then he doesn’t. Then he does.
Laurie keeps on driving, watching Michael struggle to get out of the body bag.
She slams on the brakes, throwing him through the windshield.
She waits for him to get up.
He does.
She hits the gas, runs into him, and drives the van, with herself in it, over a cliff.
She’s thrown from the vehicle. Which is dramatic, but really dumb.
Michael is pinned between the van and a tree.
Laurie picks up the axe, and walks over to where Michael is pinned.
She calls out his name, and he looks up, apparently surprised to be alive.
He reaches out his hand, and I have to admit, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel at this particular moment. I guess it could be, like, a moment where you’re supposed to feel a sort of sympathy for him, or maybe this is like a magical brother/sister moment.
Laurie almost touches his hand, but then opts to cut off Michael’s head with an axe. The head rolls away, and we get a final shot of Laurie standing there, with her nightmare all over and done and such.
Or maybe she’s wondering what happened to her daughter. Or possibly why they got some sound-alike guy to do Loomis’s lines over the opening credits, instead of finding and using the original voice tracks with some digital cleanup.
Or possibly why they decided to play a Creed song over the closing credits. Or why the title is so long. I mean, really: “Halloween: H20: 20 Years Later.” What do you even do with that?
Or perhaps she’s wondering how there could possibly be another sequel after this – because there is.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
I think there were enough open-ended questions in “Halloween 5” that we should probably take a moment to lay them all out.
So here we go:
Is Jamie a killer? While it turns out that she did NOT kill her mother at the end of part 4, she did stab foster mom just a whole lot, and they haven’t really dealt with that yet.
Is Dr. Loomis alive? He looked mostly dead at the end of part 5, but it was pretty much a given that he burned to death at the end of part II. So. Maybe, maybe not.
Who is the man in the silver-toed boots, and why did he (she? it?) spring Michael from the clink?
Now that Jamie can talk again, is she going to move back in with her foster parents? Or get new foster parents?
Seriously, who in the world is going to work for the cop shop, now that every single officer of the law has been killed twice in the last two years?
Just what, exactly, is up with that symbol on Michael? And why was it on the wall of the Myers house? And why did the Myers house look totally different?
These and many more questions will probably be ignored or forgotten as we journey on. Let’s find out.
Just before the credits roll, we get one line: “Michael, please don’t hurt me,” and then a bunch of shots that look like they’re probably from the movie we’re about to see. As opposed to the movies we’ve already seen. Not sure what that’s about.
There’s a short credit sequence, so you know what movie you’re watching, and then we’re watching some girl on a hospital gurney being wheeled down a hallway by a bunch of medical types in surgical masks.
There’s a bunch of screaming from the girl, who might have entered into woman territory. It’s tough to say.
The medical types keep on wheeling her down the hall, and they finally take her into some sort of chamber, with a bunch of candles and sconces and what looks like at least one dude in a sort of monk-type robe, with a hood.
A short time later, a woman dressed as a doctor helps the woman give birth while yelling out, “Jamie, push.” Ah. It’s our girl Jamie (now played by a different actress), and she’s giving birth.
The movie jumps forward a minute or three, and the nurse, or the doctor, or whoever it is, is holding the baby while Jamie continues to lie on the gurney, mostly because she’s tied to it.
A man wearing an outfit very similar to silver toes’s from part 5 comes in, and the nurse/doctor/orderly hands the baby to him, which does not please Jamie one little bit.
In the next scene, a bunch of people in hooded robes, standing in a dark room lit only by a lot of candles, do some sort of ceremony. At the same time, a helpful but unseen narrator fills us in on all the backstory of Michael Myers.
He does add some helpful information, however – it seems that six years have passed since the last movie and this one, and according to the narration, both Michael and Jamie vanished.
So I guess Jamie sat around crying until silver toes came back for her. All right then.
The ceremony and narration continues. The narration speculates that maybe the group of people who ran off with Michael Myers wants to control him. Though it points out that you can’t control evil.
The scene concludes with one of the robed guys standing over the baby, who now has the Michael-mark drawn on his belly in bled. And yes, it’s a boy. The lack of diaper helps to confirm that.
Back in Jamie’s chamber, Jamie is sleeping on her gurney, when suddenly the nurse/doctor/orderly/nice woman in a smock/veterinarian shows up, and tells Jamie that they need to go right now if they want to save Jamie’s baby.
She hands the baby to Jamie. I’d love to know how to she got ahold of it in the first place. Perhaps crazy monk-types are really trusting.
Jamie and the baby and the doctor go running back down the halls we saw just a few short minutes ago. The doctor points to a door and tells Jamie it’s the way out. Jamie heads for the door while the doctor goes back down the hall she just came from.
Um, really?
You know, the thing is, doctors are supposed to be smart, right? I mean, there’s a ton of studying that goes into becoming a doctor. Or a nurse. Or anything in the medical profession, really. But this idiot, who knows that the baby is in some kind of danger, opts to head directly back into the pit full of cobras that she just left.
The doctor enters a hallway, and hears a loud thud. She calls out for Jamie, but no. It’s Michael. Who picks her up, and jams her head onto a large pointy thing that’s jutting out from the wall. For no reason.
No kidding. It’s just a big, jagged point. It doesn’t look like it’s decorative, or part of the overall scheme of how the walls are made. It’s just there in case someone with exceptional arm strength needs to kill someone else.
And they happen to be standing in the hall at that very moment.
Michael takes a second to examine his victim, and it’s clearly supposed to echo the way he looked at one of his victims in the first movie. Only he just looks sort of stupid. Who knew that staring at a dead person required acting ability?
Somewhere else in the building, Jamie runs up a spiral staircase, still carrying her baby. Eventually she emerges into what appears to be a construction site. She runs through a gap in a nearby fence, and spots a truck.
She hops in, and despite the fact that there’s a loud storm going on, she can still hear the guy standing several yards away, who yells out, “What are you doing to my truck?”
Jamie points somewhere while screaming, and the dude yells out, “What?” Then Michael grabs his head and twists it off his neck.
So I guess the truck belongs to Jamie now, based on the rules of the high seas. She starts the truck and drives away as fast as she can.
Man, she didn’t even look for a vehicle with a baby seat in it. She’s violating all kinds of laws.
Elsewhere, at some house, we see a Sold sign that says, “Strode Realty.”
Inside the house, a creepy dude dressed like Silver Toes says, “Danny, kill for him.” The Danny in question is a little blonde-haired boy who abruptly sits up in bed and yells for his mom.
Dude, you’re in a horror movie. You’re going to need to man up a little bit.
Mommy comes running in, and Danny says, “The Voiceman, he’s here. He says things. Bad things.”
Mommy says, “Like what?” Less than a second later, she says, “Okay.” Then she leaves.
You know how, sooner or later, every kid pulls out the whole, “You’re the worst mommy in the world,” gambit. If this kid ever does that, it will be tough to argue that he’s wrong.
As mommy leaves the room, she accidentally knocks one of Danny’s drawings off the wall. She picks it up and walks out.
In another room, mommy looks closer at the drawing, which looks just like the Michael-mark.
In the background, talk radio blares, so that the audience can hear that tomorrow night, they’ll be broadcasting from Haddonfield, “the town that banned Halloween in 1989.”
A woman calls in who claims to have a thing for Michel – she wants to know what’s under the mask. Depends on the movie, lady.
In the meantime, the worst mommy in the world has stripped down to her bra and panties. She looks out the window, and sees that someone in another house has trained a camera with a telephoto lens vaguely in the direction of her home.
To which I say, um, lady, that’s what shades are for. Maybe you should leave them shut.
The movie apparently doesn’t like girls very much, so it opts to jump over to the dude with the telephoto lens.
Dude walks over to the phone and calls the radio station, and we get to watch him tell the people out there in radio-land that he saw Michael Myers. So that would make him… Tommy? Worth a shot.
The flick then abandons maybe-Tommy and heads over to a lovely office, where an older fellow is typing away on a typewriter. You can’t quite see his face, but it looks like…
The man on the radio says, “Whatever happened to that psychiatrist of his, Loomis? I heard the old quack was dead.”
And Loomis, the older dude we’re looking at, turns to the camera and says, “Not dead. Just very much retired.”
Yes, folks, Dr. Loomis has just addressed the wall. Or a camera he keeps in his room. Or possibly something or someone else. Regardless, it’s pretty obvious that the guy is even more cracked than the last time we saw him.
Of course, the last time we saw him, he looked dead.
A few minutes later, Loomis lets in a visitor, who complains about the roads.
And then we’re back with Jamie, who parks her stolen truck, and goes into a bus station, still dressed in a hospital gown and carrying her baby. There’s no one in the building, so she goes to a pay phone and dials Hadddonfield Emergency Services. Because it’s pouring rain outside, Jamie gets an “All circuits are busy,” message.
Meanwhile, the radio continues to blare, even in the bus station, so that the audience knows that Haddonfield Junior College will be throwing a Halloween party the next night. Oh, and the DJ is going to be there.
The movie jumps back over to Dr. Loomis and pal. Pal wants Loomis to come back to Smith’s Grove, despite the fact that they just toasted retirement.
Suddenly, over the radio, Jamie’s voice emerges, announcing that Michael Myers is coming, and begging for help. She even goes so far as to ask for help from Dr. Loomis.
She then hangs up on Barry, the DJ, who goes off on a rant about how Halloween brings out all the wackos. Something tells me Barry isn’t going to make it to the end of this movie.
The baby starts to cry, so Jamie takes him to the bathroom and comforts him.
Here’s a thought, Jamie. Feeding him would probably be a good idea.
Suddenly, nothing happens, and Michael appears for pretty much no reason. Jamie does some whimpering (really, the subtitles say as much) and she goes to hide. She gets inside a stall and crouches down.
Michael goes into the bathroom, and the director tries to wring some suspense from Michael opening one stall door. Then opening another stall door. Then opening the last stall door… only Jamie isn’t there. But the window behind the stall is wide open.
Never mind that that Jamie was in the stall less than three seconds ago, and there was no way should could have gotten out carrying a baby, and she would have made a ton of noise going out the window.
Fine. Whatever.
In the next shot, Jamie is back in her stolen truck, driving down the road as fast as she can. Another vehicle comes up behind her and rams her off the road. She crashes, but her injuries are minor enough for her to get out of the truck, and walk into a nearby barn.
She hears a noise, turns around, there’s a flash of lightning, and there’s Michael standing in the shadows.
But rather than, say, running away, she instead opts to continue walking slowly through the barn. Michael walks up behind her, grabs her around the neck, and impales her on some sort of farming machine.
Jamie gasps out, “You can’t have the baby, Michael.”
Only he probably can, because the kid is more than likely still in the truck. Unless Jamie just left him somewhere. In which case, death is pretty much imminent anyway.
Michael turns the farming machine on, so Jamie can do some dramatic screaming while Michael heads out to the truck, where he finds the baby blanket with a towel tucked inside it.
Yep, Jamie’s final act as a mother was to abandon her kid to the elements.
Okay. A bunch of stuff happens in the next little snippet of movie, but it takes about five minutes for the flick to explain who anyone is, which is kind of headache inducing.
So here we go: Danny’s mom? Her name is Kara. And while the movie previously implied that they live together alone, the movie has decided that just isn’t going to work.
Instead, the next little sequence starts out with Kara’s dad, who is out on the lawn in his robe. A bunch of local kids have put up a cardboard standup of Michael Myers, which makes dad really angry. He chops “Michael” down with an axe and tells the kids to get off his property.
No lie.
Kara, meanwhile is sitting at the breakfast table with Danny, her brother, and her mom. Her dad comes in and gets all huffy about how kids today have no respect. Kara’s mom tries to make her eat, because she’s got a psychology test. Kara says that living in the house is enough to drive anyone crazy.
Exposition time! It seems that Kara moved out and vanished for a while, only to show up after five years with Danny in tow. This makes dad very angry, and you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
Harsh words are exchanged, and dad slaps Kara across the face, then says a few more mean things. Sadly, because this is a horror movie, he will not be seeing the error of his ways. Instead, the movie has just painted a big old target on his back and said, “Okay, when THIS guy dies, you’re allowed to cheer.”
Daddy suddenly looks down, and realizes that Danny is pointing a kitchen knife at his belly. Kara gently takes the knife from him, and they leave the house.
Outside, Kara bumps into Beth and her boyfriend. Beth and crew are the ones organizing the big Halloween gathering at the junior college.
Kara turns to Danny and says, “I love you Danny. Please remember that when you stab grandpa to death, to make it look like an accident.” Okay, maybe the last part was more implied.
Over at the mental hospital, Loomis’s buddy tells the records-keeper to pull all of the files on Michael Myers. She immediately says she heard something about Jamie.
Back with Kara Company, as they drive down the street, Kara asks Beth about the weird guy who’s always staring out his window. She says that it’s Tommy. Tommy! It is you! Seeing as how he’s looking out windows at girls, I’m guessing things didn’t work out with Lindsey.
Kara is informed that, “On a weirdness scale of one to ten, he rates about a 13.”
Okay, a couple more notes, and then we’re moving on. Beth yells to a little old lady, then notes that she’s basically deaf. So try to remember that the landlady is deaf, because they clearly want you to know this.
Also, Kara stated that she lived in the Strode household.
Okay, well, Laurie Strode was obviously in the first two movies, but she died between movie two and movie four. Then her daughter went to go live with a foster family, because… I don’t know. Jamie would, you would think, go to live with a member of her extended family before she just got flung into foster care, right?
Unless Angry Mr. Strode was the only living relative. He seems like the kind of guy who would be all, “What? The kid’s mom is dead? Do I get anything in the will? No? Foster care for you!”
Right. Anyway. Just an odd little issue that causes the movie to make even less sense.
While Tommy is being declared a loony toon by the locals, he’s standing upstairs listening to a recording he made of the radio program everyone was listening to the night before. He listens to Jamie’s phone call, then backs it up and listens a second time – and this time, he hears someone on the loudspeaker of the bus station.
So now he knows where Jamie was.
Tommy heads to the bus station, and asks a man behind a desk if a bus arrived from Pontiac last night. The guy confirms it, so Tommy knows he’s in the same bus station that Jamie was in.
He walks over to a bank of pay phones, sits down by one of the phones, and looks at the floor, where he sees a pretty sizeable puddle of blood.
Just another day at the bus station, folks.
Or maybe the janitors are on strike. Tommy sees that there’s more blood on the floor, forming a trail that leads off somewhere.
Tommy follows the trail to the bathrooms, where he finds more blood in the sink. He hears a baby crying.
He cracks open a cabinet with some cleaning products in it, and there’s Jamie’s baby. Who has been sitting in a bus station for several hours, all alone, wrapped only in a blanket, with no food of any kind.
Did I mention the cleaning products?
Tommy picks up the kid, and tells the baby it’s okay. Only it really, really isn’t okay. That kid needs to eat. And unless it’s wearing a REALLY impressive diaper, that blanket has to be soaked through several times over.
Meanwhile, over at the barn that Michael finally iced Jamie in, Loomis and his pal show up to take a look. Michael’s mark is burned into the hay bales.
Loomis’s friend wants to know what it means. “It’s his mark. He’s come home,” says Loomis, whose brain is apparently so fried that he doesn’t realize he isn’t in Haddonfield yet.
Oh, and Loomis’s friend’s name is Wynn. Thanks, subtitles. You’re way more helpful than the actual movie.
At the college, Beth, Beth’s boyfriend Tim (who is also Kara’s brother), and Kara are walking across campus while Kara looks for her term paper. She accidentally drops all her books, and Beth picks up a drawing.
Kara explains that Danny has been having nightmares. Danny’s picture features a bunch of stick figures with knives in their bellies, next to a large black thing that’s labeled Thorn.
And just in case you weren’t sure who the people in the picture are, their names are written down, too: Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Tim, and Mommy.
Over at the local emergency room, Tommy runs in and says there’s a problem with “his” baby, and he needs to see a doctor, now.
Then he walks away from the front desk, and goes over to talk to Loomis, who just happens to be there.
Aaand: Exposition time again! Sigh.
Tommy tells Loomis who he is, then informs him that the family that adopted Laurie, the Strodes, have relatives in town. Oh, and Jamie’s not the last of Michael’s bloodline. And he has a theory about Michael.
Then security shows up.
So Tommy runs off, still carrying a hungry naked baby. He tells Loomis, as he leaves to meet him at the campus gathering at 9 O’clock.
Back at the Strode house, Kara’s mom brings in a bin of wood, and also an axe. She heads to the basement just in time to hear the washing machine die. She flips a really massive fuse, which fixes nothing, and suddenly a bunch of water pours out onto the floor.
Where it’s coming from is a mystery. Is there a hole in the bottom of the machine, or what?
Grandma heads upstairs, where she hears a noise. Loomis is in the house. I guess he just walked in there. He says he came there to help the Strode family. I’m sure if some random old dude wandered into my house and told me the same thing, I’d probably find the nearest blunt object and hit him with it.
Tommy, in the meantime, has gone back to the boardinghouse where he lives, which is run by the kindly deaf lady. Which works out well for her, because the kid is STILL naked and STILL starving and STILL screaming.
Tommy names him Steve (really) and finally wipes the Michael mark off of Steve’s chest. I guess being slightly less dirty makes the kid happy, because instead of freaking right out and demanding to be fed, Steve starts cooing.
I suppose it’s possible I’m wrong, but I get the feeling that the people who made this movie have never seen a living baby in their lifetime. FEED THE KID, TOMMY, OR IT WON’T BE NECESSARY FOR MICHAEL TO KILL HIM.
Okay, I’m feeling better now.
Back at the Strode house, Loomis tries to convince grandma that Michael is really, really evil, and that all of Michael’s memories are locked up in the Myers/Strode house.
Out on the street, Danny is walking to somewhere-or-other, while a truck drives by, announcing the fact that Barry the DJ is going to be at the Halloween party that night.
As it rounds a corner, Danny looks up, and see Silver Toes, who is standing on the next block. And here we all thought the movie had forgotten about him.
Danny, who is distracted, almost runs into Tommy. This causes Danny to drop his pumpkin, which shatters on the ground.
Tommy apologizes.
Back at the Strode house, Grandma Strode calls Grandpa Strode and says that she’s taking the kids and getting out of the house. Also that they moved into the house because Grandpa’s brother couldn’t sell it – which I guess makes him Jamie’s great-uncle. So that’s all tidied up, now.
Meanwhile, in the background, we can see Michael, who is stalking up to Grandma. Until Grandma turns around and there’s no one there.
Minutes later, Grandma is hauling a suitcase downstairs. She sees a bin that should have an axe in it lying on the floor. The axe is gone.
The phone rings. Grandma picks it up, and a creepy voice on the other end of the line says, “We want the child.”
Grandma turns around, and Michael is standing just a few feet away.
She runs out of the house, trips, and drops her glasses, so she can have a Scooby-Doo moment on the ground.
She puts on her glasses, looks up, and there’s Michael, with the axe. The axe comes down, and blood artfully sprays across a clean white sheet.
A short while later, Kara arrives home, and discovers that the door is locked. She unlocks the door and opens it – but there’s a chain on the door, and she can’t get in. So she walks around to the back, where she sees laundry drying on the lines.
Man, the back steps could really use some paint.
Kara goes into the house, and wanders around going, “Mom? Mom?” Then she shakes things up a bit by calling to Danny. He’s not there either.
(You know, I have to say, as an adoptive parent – it’s nice that Michael thinks of the people who adopted his sister as family. You just don’t see that kind of acceptance in the motion picture industry all that often.)
Kara heads upstairs, calling out for her mom.
Finally, she goes into a room – and there’s Danny, playing a handheld video game. While Tommy sits on the bed next to him.
Danny. Dude. When your mom calls for you, answer her.
Kara starts to get upset with Tommy, who is now carrying Steve around in a different blanket. Tommy asks Kara if knows whose room this used to be.
Tommy takes Kara and Danny back to his room at the boarding house. Kara asks what they’re supposed to do in Tommy’s room.
Seeing as how she already has a kid, I would think she could figure out what a boy wants when he invites a girl up to his room.
But no, Tommy wants Kara to watch the Myers house through the window. He notes that you can see everything. He does not point out the camera sitting in the window, because he’s classy like that.
Danny takes a peek out the window, and there’s Michael, standing on the lawn. He calls out to his mom, and Kara says, “Not now, Danny.” So she doesn’t get to see the killer standing on the lawn, since Danny opts not to be all that insistent.
Tommy, meanwhile seems to have finally figured out that babies needs to eat, and he heats up a bottle for Steve in the microwave. Which you aren’t supposed to do. Hot spots. Yeah, whoever made this movie hasn’t even met a baby.
Tommy tries to feed Steve, who refuses to eat. Probably because the formula is scalding his insides. For all the good Tommy is doing, he should have left the kid in the bathroom. Maybe punched it in the face once or twice.
Kara takes the baby from Tommy, and the kid finally calms down a bit. Now the kid is just hoping he doesn’t get another scalding mouthful of liquid.
Later, Tommy pulls up a bunch of runes on his computer, and explains to Kara that runes are a kind of early alphabet. And that they were, “symbols carved out of stone or pieces of wood, used in pagan rituals.”
He goes on: “Among the ancient druids, Thorn represented a demon that spread sickness, brought death to hundreds of thousands of people. According to Celtic legend, one child from each tribe was chosen to be inflicted with the curse of Thorn, to offer blood sacrifices of its next of kin on the night of Samhain.”
Kara helpfully interjects: “Halloween.”
Thanks, Kara. Everyone who missed “Halloween II,” and is also incapable of making even tiny leaps of logic, appreciates you spoon-feeding us.
Tommy continues: “The sacrifice of one family meant sparing the lives of an entire tribe. For years, I’ve been convinced there must be some reason, some method behind Michael’s madness. The druids were also great mathematicians and astronomers, but the Thorn symbol is actually a constellation of stars that appears from time to time on Halloween night. Whenever it appears, he appears. Coincidence?”
I don’t know whether to be impressed or not just how far the writer had to reach up his own rear end to pull that explanation out. Though I have to admit, “Oh, this symbol appears from time to time on Halloween night,” is pretty chuckle-worthy.
Whatever. We’re going to go with it.
Tommy concludes by alluding to the fact that the reason people are looking for Steve is so they can kill him, and wipe out the bloodline. Which makes no sense, really. They had Jamie for years. All Michael had to do was kill her, and the bloodline would have come to an end. Why wait around for six years?
Tommy sets Steve down to sleep, and prepares to leave. Kara asks where he’s going, and he says he’s headed out to get help from the only man who can stop Michael.
I guess we have to assume that he’s talking about Loomis. Though I feel compelled to rehash my argument that Loomis is pretty much a big, fate failure when it comes to stopping Michael.
Suddenly Kara realizes that Danny isn’t anywhere to be seen. She freaks out and heads out of Tommy’s room, calling out to Danny. Who didn’t answer his mom last time she yelled to him, so why would he start now?
The moment of suspense comes to a crashing halt when Kara and Tommy get downstairs and find Danny watching TV with the landlady.
Tommy heads out, warning Kara and Danny not to go back to their house, no matter what.
Over at the hospital, a doctor tells Loomis and his buddy that they found placental fluid during Jamie’s autopsy. Loomis says he thinks he knows where the baby is.
Here’s a question for you, Loomis. Where did all your scar tissue go?
At the Halloween festival, Tommy wanders around.
Back at Tommy’s boarding house, the landlady, who suddenly seems to hear okay, because she asks Danny what Halloween is all about, and when he says candy, she doesn’t say, “Speak up, son,” decides to tell Danny the true story of Halloween, and how a long time ago, “It was a night of great power.”
And then blah-blah-blah. Until finally Kara, who is upset that she doesn’t get to spoon-feed the audience exposition any more, tells Danny to say goodnight.
The landlady suddenly says, “He hears the voice, you know. Just like the other boy that lived in that house.”
Is there more? Yes, there’s more: “I was babysitting with him that night. Little Mikey Myers that lived across the street. And that’s when the voice came, the night he murdered his sister.”
(Little Mikey Myers? Boy does that sap some of his mystique.)
Kara asks, “Michael heard a voice?”
The landlady replies, “It told him to kill his family.”
I realize I’ve been interjecting a lot, but, wow. Let’s take this whole scene apart, for just a moment.
Okay, regardless of whether or not her story makes a lick of sense, she’s the worst babysitter ever. At the very start of “Halloween,” here’s what happens (I’m quoting myself, here):
It seems it’s Halloween in 1963, and here we were in a little old point-of-view shot, first walking up to a house, then peeking through the windows inside the house, so we can watch a teenaged girl and a teenaged boy make out for a bit.
The girl and boy head upstairs, where I’m sure they’re going to engage in a wholesome activity of some kind.
Then “we” run around to the back of the house, open a drawer in the kitchen, and pull out a rather large knife. Perhaps “we” just want some more Halloween turkey?
No, it seems like “we’re” going to head upstairs, pausing and hiding when the boyfriend, who is tucking his shirt in and leaving a minute after “we” saw him head upstairs.
“That was quick” doesn’t seem to cover it.
“We” head upstairs, where we find a little clown mask and put it on. So now we’re looking through eye slits as we head into the girl’s room and stab her to death. She calls out “our” name – Michael.
“We” head outside, the shot reverses, and a dad-and-mom looking couple pull off “our” mask and inquire, “Michael?”
Okay. Quick quiz: Where was the babysitter in this scenario? If Michael was staying at her place, how did he leave the house without her knowing? He was gone quite a while. Also, his mask was at his house. Did the babysitter just tell him to go get it?
If Michael’s sister was at home, why wasn’t SHE babysitting Michael? Most parents I know shove their teenage kids into free servitude as frequently as they can. It’s not like his sister was doing anything. Er, except her boyfriend.
Let’s forget all that for a second, though.
How did the landlady know that Michael heard voices in his head telling him to kill his whole family? And why didn’t she ever tell anyone? Did she just hate all of the Myers clan, and tell little Mikey, “You know, you SHOULD kill your family?”
And how does she know that Danny hears voices as well. Did Danny tell her? And seeing as how Michael has gone on to kill a whole slew of people, why isn’t she freaking out a bit more that Danny hears the same voices Michael does?
All these questions, and more, will probably not be answered by the end of this motion picture.
Over at the Myers house, Grandpa pulls into the driveway. He is quite drunk.
He wanders into the house, where he drunkenly calls out to Grandma. Only of course, she’s dead. Then all the lights go out.
Grandpa grabs a flashlight and jokes that it must be the boogeyman. Then he hears the broken washer thumping downstairs.
He heads down to the basement to check it out, noting that the power is off. He shuts off the washer (how? The power is off!) and opens it up. It’s filled with bloody sheets. Grandpa turns around, and there’s Michael.
Michael stabs grandpa in the belly, picks him up, and shoves the knife into the power box. Grandpa’s head explodes.
At the Halloween festival, Barry-the-DJ interviews Beth about how awesome it is that they’re having a Halloween gathering.
Well, okay, actually what’s happening is that Beth is telling the world that the man can’t keep them down anymore, and that they’ll totally have a Halloween party if they want it.
In the midst of all her babbling, Beth points out that Tim, her boyfriend, lives in the Myers house. Tim clearly was not aware of this fact.
Barry thinks this is like, so cool. “You mean,” he says, “to tell me you actually live in the house of the most brutal mass murderer in history?”
Barry decides they’re going to take the show on the road, and head to the Myers house to continue the broadcast.
Tim and Beth head over to the house.
Barry heads over to his van, yammering on his phone about how they should have been at the Myers house in the first place. He’s not happy, which causes him to say several mean things so that when Michael ices him, the audience will be sort of happy.
Barry gets to his van, gets inside, and Michael stabs him to death.
I guess he wasn’t a fan? (Sorry. That’s a terrible joke. But I don’t feel like picking apart the logic problems at this point. Honestly, why is Michael in the van? Was he just waiting for Barry to show up? How long was he going to wait? Doesn’t he have family to kill?)
Tim and Beth arrive at the house, and discover that the lights won’t turn on. Tim calls out to his family members, who aren’t there. He asks Beth whether it’s really true that he lives in the Myers house.
Tough to say, dude. Your house doesn’t look anything like the house in part 5, that’s for sure. It’s fairly close to the house in part 1, though. So, you know. Maybe.
Beth finishes telling Tim the story that I already retold you a second ago, and then Tim says that they should get the candles. Beth says, “Just a minute.” Making out starts to ensue. Beth has no idea how accurate the word “minute” was in that statement.
Back with Tommy as the festival, Tommy hears a little girl say, “Mommy, it’s raining red. It’s warm.”
He looks up in a tree, and sees Barry’s dead body. Which Michael apparently found the time to stuff up there. Without anyone seeing it.
A tree branch breaks. Barry’s body falls to the ground. There is some screaming and running.
Loomis races over to Tommy, allowing us to see that, yeah, his hand scars are also missing. Apparently his retirement fund allowed him to afford massively expensive plastic surgery.
Loomis asks Tommy where the baby is.
Back at the Myers house, Tim and Beth have wrapped up their tryst. Beth notes that Kara wouldn’t be happy if Kara found out they used her bed. No, probably not.
Tim decides to go take a shower.
Minutes later, he’s finished with his shower, and he asks Beth for a towel. He doesn’t notice that the hand giving him the towel has the Thorn mark on it. Michael just handed him a towel. What a pal. Maybe he’ll help Tim scrub his back next.
Tim gets out of the shower and wipes off the mirror, and Michael cuts his throat. I’m willing to field any and all theories why he waited for Tim to get out of the shower first.
Meanwhile, Kara has noticed a light on in her room. She calls her house, and Beth picks up. Kara tells Beth to grab Tim and get out of the house.
Next to Kara, Danny hears “the voice” again.
Kara looks through the telephoto lens on Tommy’s camera, and sees Michael. She tries to warn Beth, but it’s too late. Michael stabs Beth to death.
Kara freaks out, and looks away from the window – to the ground, where Danny is walking to the house.
Kara turns around to confirm that Danny is gone. Yep. He’s missing.
Kara runs over to the Myers house, and in the front door, just in time to see Danny heading up the stairs. She grabs a poker from the fireplace and goes looking for Danny.
Kara walks to her room, where she sees Beth lying under the covers. She goes to lift the blanket, because she apparently has the brain of a goldfish and has already forgotten that she just watched Michael give Beth a whole lot of stabbings.
Tim is under the cover, all dead and bloody.
Kara jumps back and gasps, then turns around and sees Danny in his room, staring off into space. She tells him it’s okay.
Only it isn’t, because Michael is right behind Kara. She tells Danny to run, and he goes down the hall and down the stairs. Kara slams the door in Michael’s face, then backs down the hall slowly.
Grandma tumbles down from the ceiling. Somehow. I don’t even care why or how at this point.
Kara screams and runs down the stairs.
Michael follows, and Kara, who was hiding out of sight on the stairs, clocks him with the fire poker.
Outside, Tommy and Loomis pull up in Tommy’s jeep.
Inside, Kara heads down the stairs, slowly, holding the poker on Michael. He’s just lying on the floor.
Kara gets to the floor, and sees Danny standing on the opposite side of Michael. She tells Danny not to move, she’s going to come get him. She steps over Michael, picks up Danny, and Michael grabs her ankle and squeezes.
She hits his hand with the poker, grabs Danny by the arm, and they run out the front door.
Tommy and Loomis, meanwhile, are standing in Tommy’s room pondering where the baby might have gone.
Kara and Danny pound on the front door, and Tommy lets them in and locks it.
A short discussion ensues, which basically goes, “Hey, where’s the baby?” Tommy asks Loomis who else knew where the baby went? Loomis says the only people who knew were him and…
Suddenly, the voice in Danny’s head pipes up: “Danny, come to me.” Only it isn’t just in Danny’s head, because everyone else hears it too.
Danny starts walking away.
Everyone follows after a moment, and there’s Danny, sitting with Silver Toes. Who is, of course, Wynn.
A bunch of “monks” in hooded robes walk up. Wynn says, “Careful with the girl.” Kara runs away, and goes upstairs. Instead of out the front door. She finds the landlady, who has the baby. And a knife. And a creepy look on her face.
So Kara jumps out a window.
Fade to black.
Tommy and Loomis talk on the lawn. They’ve been drugged, and Kara is gone. Tommy wants to know why they didn’t just kill Loomis and himself.
Loomis says, “It’s his game, and I know where he wants to play it.”
Kara wakes up on a bed, dressed all in white, inside an empty room.
Loomis and Tommy head wherever Wynn likes to play his games. Ah. Smith’s Grove. I guess they didn’t want to build a set and not get the full value out of it.
Loomis tells Tommy to stay back in one of the hallways until Loomis comes to get him. Great plan, Loomis. Send the old man with a gun to solve this problem. Don’t worry about having backup or anything.
Loomis goes to Wynn’s office. Wynn is happy to see him. For some reason.
Tommy, still in the hallway, hears a woman screaming. He walks slowly towards the noise, concerned he might have to help someone. He’s kind of sleepy now, so he’d like to avoid having to assist someone if he can help it.
Loomis asks Wynn, “Why… now?”
Wynn replies: “Because you were the first one to see it. And you recognized its power. Evil. Pure. Uncorrupted. Ancient.”
He asks Loomis to join him.
Loomis says, “I thought Michael was a monster. But you…” then someone clubs him in the back of the head. Probably to keep him from talking about how evil Michael is again. It’s been five movies, Loomis. We get the picture.
Tommy opens an unlocked door labeled Maximum Security. He keeps on walking, until he hears a door open nearby. “Kara?” he asks.
There’s a scream, and Tommy turns around and falls over. A really freaky-looking woman with bad teeth says, “He walks amongst us, brother. He’s come back, and… he’s very angry.” She indicates the big bloody rip in her hospital gown. Then she dies.
Kara yells out to Tommy, and Tommy grabs a fire extinguisher and tries to break her door open. Michael appears down a nearby hall, and Tommy makes a bunch of odd faces. I’m going to pretend that these bizarre facial tics were supposed to be intercut with shots of a young Tommy running away from Michael in terror, because otherwise, he looks like he’s trying to scare Michael off using his Don Knotts impersonation.
Tommy finally breaks through the door at the very last second, and he yanks Kara out, and they run. They go through a door made of standard issue prison bars, and Michael reaches through it and grabs Kara around the neck.
Tommy runs away, looking for a weapon. He finds a large-ish gun and shoots Michael in the chest, point-blank. Michael goes flying.
Tommy and Kara go down another hall, with lots of pipes on the wall.
Moments later, they’re back in a normal hospital corridor, and they see Wynn and crew getting ready to do something surgical to the baby, who is in a well-lit room. Oh, and there’s Danny, about three feet away from the baby.
Kara says, “There’s Danny,” then Tommy grabs her and pulls her over a sink.
A nearby door squeaks open, and Michael walks through it. And past them. Without looking slightly to the side. Yay for Halloween masks which obstruct your vision.
As he walks into another hall, there’s a clunk, and Michael turns around to investigate the noise. Only, of course, Tommy and Kara are now hiding somewhere else, so Michael doesn’t see them.
Michael picks up what looks like a machete. What on earth is that in the hospital for? Just in case?
Tommy looks around the corner to see what’s going on in the “surgery” room, and a bloodied nurse smashes into a nearby window.
Then Michael takes his recently located machete and slices up every single person in the surgery room.
Full, brutal, honesty here folks. I have no idea why Michael just cut everyone up. I really don’t. None at all. I’d like to help you, but I can’t.
I guess we’ll just go ahead and move along to the ending, here.
Tommy grabs Steve, and Kara grabs Danny, and they all make a run for it.
Down the hall, random extra #22 runs away from Michael, who is right behind him.
Everyone runs down the hall o’ pipes from a minute ago. Michael’s doing that walking thing all horror movie icons do, because running is beneath them.
Tommy and pals run through a door made up of bars, and close it, and keep running.
Random extra #22 reaches the door, and Michael comes up behind him and pounds #22’s head into the door until the door falls over.
Tommy and crew run all the way back to the Maximum Security door, and keep on going. Michael gets ahead of them somehow, so they run down another hall, and another, and finally they run into another room and lock the door from the inside.
Kara looks around and sees a bunch of… fetuses? Babies? I have no idea. They’re all in what look like backlit fish tanks. The camera pans over to show us some DNA strand picture, with some words.
Then Michael punches a hole in the door, so he can reach the locks.
Tommy and gang run and hide. Kara picks up a big old pipe and gets ready to swing it at Michael.
Tommy steps out from behind somewhere Kara is not, holding the baby blanket. “Michael, you’ve won.” Tommy laughs, all crazy-like. “He’s yours.”
Tommy offers the “baby” to Michael, who goes to take it. Only the baby, who is NOT in the blanket, cries from some other part of the room.
Tommy reaches into the blanket and pulls out four syringes, filled with who knows what, and injects Michael.
Michael tosses Tommy across the room.
Kara pops out of hiding, and starts clubbing Michael in the head with the pipe she’s got in her hands. This goes on for a few seconds, until Michael grabs Kara by the head, throws her on the table, and starts choking her.
Danny calls out, “Leave her alone,” and Michael does, dropping Kara on the floor. Michael walks towards Danny, who is holding Steve.
Danny calls out for his mommy. Time to man up, dude. Running is probably optimal at this point.
Suddenly, Tommy appears and stabs Michael with yet another syringe, because that worked so well the first time. Then Tommy starts clubbing Michael over the head with a pipe.
Kara and Danny and the baby run for it. Loomis finds them in the hall. Loomis shoots at the panel that operates one of the barred doors, so Kara and Danny can get out, and then tells Danny and Kara to get in the elevator. They do.
Meanwhile, Tommy just keeps on pounding Michael in the head.
Eventually, some kind of goo covers Michael’s head. Tommy looks like he’s going to walk away, then he changes his mind and keeps on pounding. Good job, Tommy.
Eventually, Michael looks very dead, so Tommy walks away. Dude. No. Turn around and set fire to the guy, and stay there until you can stir his ashes.
Outside, Tommy, Kara, Danny, and the baby are in Tommy’s vehicle. They ask Loomis to come with them.
Loomis says he has some business to attend to. Pee in the bushes, Loomis, and get out of there. You should know better by now.
Everyone except Loomis drives away.
The movie cuts to a shot of the lab where Michael just took a bunch of whacks to the head. It pans down, and there’s Michael’s mask, lying on the floor. With no Michael in it.
There’s a scream, which sounds something like Loomis, but really, it could be anyone.
The movie cuts over to a shot of the Myers house, with a lit Jack O’Lantern on the doorstep. The end.
Seriously. That’s it. Hope y’all weren’t attached to closure. You’re not getting any, because the movie does not like you.
I’m sure this will all get cleared up in part seven, right? Right?
So here we go:
Is Jamie a killer? While it turns out that she did NOT kill her mother at the end of part 4, she did stab foster mom just a whole lot, and they haven’t really dealt with that yet.
Is Dr. Loomis alive? He looked mostly dead at the end of part 5, but it was pretty much a given that he burned to death at the end of part II. So. Maybe, maybe not.
Who is the man in the silver-toed boots, and why did he (she? it?) spring Michael from the clink?
Now that Jamie can talk again, is she going to move back in with her foster parents? Or get new foster parents?
Seriously, who in the world is going to work for the cop shop, now that every single officer of the law has been killed twice in the last two years?
Just what, exactly, is up with that symbol on Michael? And why was it on the wall of the Myers house? And why did the Myers house look totally different?
These and many more questions will probably be ignored or forgotten as we journey on. Let’s find out.
Just before the credits roll, we get one line: “Michael, please don’t hurt me,” and then a bunch of shots that look like they’re probably from the movie we’re about to see. As opposed to the movies we’ve already seen. Not sure what that’s about.
There’s a short credit sequence, so you know what movie you’re watching, and then we’re watching some girl on a hospital gurney being wheeled down a hallway by a bunch of medical types in surgical masks.
There’s a bunch of screaming from the girl, who might have entered into woman territory. It’s tough to say.
The medical types keep on wheeling her down the hall, and they finally take her into some sort of chamber, with a bunch of candles and sconces and what looks like at least one dude in a sort of monk-type robe, with a hood.
A short time later, a woman dressed as a doctor helps the woman give birth while yelling out, “Jamie, push.” Ah. It’s our girl Jamie (now played by a different actress), and she’s giving birth.
The movie jumps forward a minute or three, and the nurse, or the doctor, or whoever it is, is holding the baby while Jamie continues to lie on the gurney, mostly because she’s tied to it.
A man wearing an outfit very similar to silver toes’s from part 5 comes in, and the nurse/doctor/orderly hands the baby to him, which does not please Jamie one little bit.
In the next scene, a bunch of people in hooded robes, standing in a dark room lit only by a lot of candles, do some sort of ceremony. At the same time, a helpful but unseen narrator fills us in on all the backstory of Michael Myers.
He does add some helpful information, however – it seems that six years have passed since the last movie and this one, and according to the narration, both Michael and Jamie vanished.
So I guess Jamie sat around crying until silver toes came back for her. All right then.
The ceremony and narration continues. The narration speculates that maybe the group of people who ran off with Michael Myers wants to control him. Though it points out that you can’t control evil.
The scene concludes with one of the robed guys standing over the baby, who now has the Michael-mark drawn on his belly in bled. And yes, it’s a boy. The lack of diaper helps to confirm that.
Back in Jamie’s chamber, Jamie is sleeping on her gurney, when suddenly the nurse/doctor/orderly/nice woman in a smock/veterinarian shows up, and tells Jamie that they need to go right now if they want to save Jamie’s baby.
She hands the baby to Jamie. I’d love to know how to she got ahold of it in the first place. Perhaps crazy monk-types are really trusting.
Jamie and the baby and the doctor go running back down the halls we saw just a few short minutes ago. The doctor points to a door and tells Jamie it’s the way out. Jamie heads for the door while the doctor goes back down the hall she just came from.
Um, really?
You know, the thing is, doctors are supposed to be smart, right? I mean, there’s a ton of studying that goes into becoming a doctor. Or a nurse. Or anything in the medical profession, really. But this idiot, who knows that the baby is in some kind of danger, opts to head directly back into the pit full of cobras that she just left.
The doctor enters a hallway, and hears a loud thud. She calls out for Jamie, but no. It’s Michael. Who picks her up, and jams her head onto a large pointy thing that’s jutting out from the wall. For no reason.
No kidding. It’s just a big, jagged point. It doesn’t look like it’s decorative, or part of the overall scheme of how the walls are made. It’s just there in case someone with exceptional arm strength needs to kill someone else.
And they happen to be standing in the hall at that very moment.
Michael takes a second to examine his victim, and it’s clearly supposed to echo the way he looked at one of his victims in the first movie. Only he just looks sort of stupid. Who knew that staring at a dead person required acting ability?
Somewhere else in the building, Jamie runs up a spiral staircase, still carrying her baby. Eventually she emerges into what appears to be a construction site. She runs through a gap in a nearby fence, and spots a truck.
She hops in, and despite the fact that there’s a loud storm going on, she can still hear the guy standing several yards away, who yells out, “What are you doing to my truck?”
Jamie points somewhere while screaming, and the dude yells out, “What?” Then Michael grabs his head and twists it off his neck.
So I guess the truck belongs to Jamie now, based on the rules of the high seas. She starts the truck and drives away as fast as she can.
Man, she didn’t even look for a vehicle with a baby seat in it. She’s violating all kinds of laws.
Elsewhere, at some house, we see a Sold sign that says, “Strode Realty.”
Inside the house, a creepy dude dressed like Silver Toes says, “Danny, kill for him.” The Danny in question is a little blonde-haired boy who abruptly sits up in bed and yells for his mom.
Dude, you’re in a horror movie. You’re going to need to man up a little bit.
Mommy comes running in, and Danny says, “The Voiceman, he’s here. He says things. Bad things.”
Mommy says, “Like what?” Less than a second later, she says, “Okay.” Then she leaves.
You know how, sooner or later, every kid pulls out the whole, “You’re the worst mommy in the world,” gambit. If this kid ever does that, it will be tough to argue that he’s wrong.
As mommy leaves the room, she accidentally knocks one of Danny’s drawings off the wall. She picks it up and walks out.
In another room, mommy looks closer at the drawing, which looks just like the Michael-mark.
In the background, talk radio blares, so that the audience can hear that tomorrow night, they’ll be broadcasting from Haddonfield, “the town that banned Halloween in 1989.”
A woman calls in who claims to have a thing for Michel – she wants to know what’s under the mask. Depends on the movie, lady.
In the meantime, the worst mommy in the world has stripped down to her bra and panties. She looks out the window, and sees that someone in another house has trained a camera with a telephoto lens vaguely in the direction of her home.
To which I say, um, lady, that’s what shades are for. Maybe you should leave them shut.
The movie apparently doesn’t like girls very much, so it opts to jump over to the dude with the telephoto lens.
Dude walks over to the phone and calls the radio station, and we get to watch him tell the people out there in radio-land that he saw Michael Myers. So that would make him… Tommy? Worth a shot.
The flick then abandons maybe-Tommy and heads over to a lovely office, where an older fellow is typing away on a typewriter. You can’t quite see his face, but it looks like…
The man on the radio says, “Whatever happened to that psychiatrist of his, Loomis? I heard the old quack was dead.”
And Loomis, the older dude we’re looking at, turns to the camera and says, “Not dead. Just very much retired.”
Yes, folks, Dr. Loomis has just addressed the wall. Or a camera he keeps in his room. Or possibly something or someone else. Regardless, it’s pretty obvious that the guy is even more cracked than the last time we saw him.
Of course, the last time we saw him, he looked dead.
A few minutes later, Loomis lets in a visitor, who complains about the roads.
And then we’re back with Jamie, who parks her stolen truck, and goes into a bus station, still dressed in a hospital gown and carrying her baby. There’s no one in the building, so she goes to a pay phone and dials Hadddonfield Emergency Services. Because it’s pouring rain outside, Jamie gets an “All circuits are busy,” message.
Meanwhile, the radio continues to blare, even in the bus station, so that the audience knows that Haddonfield Junior College will be throwing a Halloween party the next night. Oh, and the DJ is going to be there.
The movie jumps back over to Dr. Loomis and pal. Pal wants Loomis to come back to Smith’s Grove, despite the fact that they just toasted retirement.
Suddenly, over the radio, Jamie’s voice emerges, announcing that Michael Myers is coming, and begging for help. She even goes so far as to ask for help from Dr. Loomis.
She then hangs up on Barry, the DJ, who goes off on a rant about how Halloween brings out all the wackos. Something tells me Barry isn’t going to make it to the end of this movie.
The baby starts to cry, so Jamie takes him to the bathroom and comforts him.
Here’s a thought, Jamie. Feeding him would probably be a good idea.
Suddenly, nothing happens, and Michael appears for pretty much no reason. Jamie does some whimpering (really, the subtitles say as much) and she goes to hide. She gets inside a stall and crouches down.
Michael goes into the bathroom, and the director tries to wring some suspense from Michael opening one stall door. Then opening another stall door. Then opening the last stall door… only Jamie isn’t there. But the window behind the stall is wide open.
Never mind that that Jamie was in the stall less than three seconds ago, and there was no way should could have gotten out carrying a baby, and she would have made a ton of noise going out the window.
Fine. Whatever.
In the next shot, Jamie is back in her stolen truck, driving down the road as fast as she can. Another vehicle comes up behind her and rams her off the road. She crashes, but her injuries are minor enough for her to get out of the truck, and walk into a nearby barn.
She hears a noise, turns around, there’s a flash of lightning, and there’s Michael standing in the shadows.
But rather than, say, running away, she instead opts to continue walking slowly through the barn. Michael walks up behind her, grabs her around the neck, and impales her on some sort of farming machine.
Jamie gasps out, “You can’t have the baby, Michael.”
Only he probably can, because the kid is more than likely still in the truck. Unless Jamie just left him somewhere. In which case, death is pretty much imminent anyway.
Michael turns the farming machine on, so Jamie can do some dramatic screaming while Michael heads out to the truck, where he finds the baby blanket with a towel tucked inside it.
Yep, Jamie’s final act as a mother was to abandon her kid to the elements.
Okay. A bunch of stuff happens in the next little snippet of movie, but it takes about five minutes for the flick to explain who anyone is, which is kind of headache inducing.
So here we go: Danny’s mom? Her name is Kara. And while the movie previously implied that they live together alone, the movie has decided that just isn’t going to work.
Instead, the next little sequence starts out with Kara’s dad, who is out on the lawn in his robe. A bunch of local kids have put up a cardboard standup of Michael Myers, which makes dad really angry. He chops “Michael” down with an axe and tells the kids to get off his property.
No lie.
Kara, meanwhile is sitting at the breakfast table with Danny, her brother, and her mom. Her dad comes in and gets all huffy about how kids today have no respect. Kara’s mom tries to make her eat, because she’s got a psychology test. Kara says that living in the house is enough to drive anyone crazy.
Exposition time! It seems that Kara moved out and vanished for a while, only to show up after five years with Danny in tow. This makes dad very angry, and you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
Harsh words are exchanged, and dad slaps Kara across the face, then says a few more mean things. Sadly, because this is a horror movie, he will not be seeing the error of his ways. Instead, the movie has just painted a big old target on his back and said, “Okay, when THIS guy dies, you’re allowed to cheer.”
Daddy suddenly looks down, and realizes that Danny is pointing a kitchen knife at his belly. Kara gently takes the knife from him, and they leave the house.
Outside, Kara bumps into Beth and her boyfriend. Beth and crew are the ones organizing the big Halloween gathering at the junior college.
Kara turns to Danny and says, “I love you Danny. Please remember that when you stab grandpa to death, to make it look like an accident.” Okay, maybe the last part was more implied.
Over at the mental hospital, Loomis’s buddy tells the records-keeper to pull all of the files on Michael Myers. She immediately says she heard something about Jamie.
Back with Kara Company, as they drive down the street, Kara asks Beth about the weird guy who’s always staring out his window. She says that it’s Tommy. Tommy! It is you! Seeing as how he’s looking out windows at girls, I’m guessing things didn’t work out with Lindsey.
Kara is informed that, “On a weirdness scale of one to ten, he rates about a 13.”
Okay, a couple more notes, and then we’re moving on. Beth yells to a little old lady, then notes that she’s basically deaf. So try to remember that the landlady is deaf, because they clearly want you to know this.
Also, Kara stated that she lived in the Strode household.
Okay, well, Laurie Strode was obviously in the first two movies, but she died between movie two and movie four. Then her daughter went to go live with a foster family, because… I don’t know. Jamie would, you would think, go to live with a member of her extended family before she just got flung into foster care, right?
Unless Angry Mr. Strode was the only living relative. He seems like the kind of guy who would be all, “What? The kid’s mom is dead? Do I get anything in the will? No? Foster care for you!”
Right. Anyway. Just an odd little issue that causes the movie to make even less sense.
While Tommy is being declared a loony toon by the locals, he’s standing upstairs listening to a recording he made of the radio program everyone was listening to the night before. He listens to Jamie’s phone call, then backs it up and listens a second time – and this time, he hears someone on the loudspeaker of the bus station.
So now he knows where Jamie was.
Tommy heads to the bus station, and asks a man behind a desk if a bus arrived from Pontiac last night. The guy confirms it, so Tommy knows he’s in the same bus station that Jamie was in.
He walks over to a bank of pay phones, sits down by one of the phones, and looks at the floor, where he sees a pretty sizeable puddle of blood.
Just another day at the bus station, folks.
Or maybe the janitors are on strike. Tommy sees that there’s more blood on the floor, forming a trail that leads off somewhere.
Tommy follows the trail to the bathrooms, where he finds more blood in the sink. He hears a baby crying.
He cracks open a cabinet with some cleaning products in it, and there’s Jamie’s baby. Who has been sitting in a bus station for several hours, all alone, wrapped only in a blanket, with no food of any kind.
Did I mention the cleaning products?
Tommy picks up the kid, and tells the baby it’s okay. Only it really, really isn’t okay. That kid needs to eat. And unless it’s wearing a REALLY impressive diaper, that blanket has to be soaked through several times over.
Meanwhile, over at the barn that Michael finally iced Jamie in, Loomis and his pal show up to take a look. Michael’s mark is burned into the hay bales.
Loomis’s friend wants to know what it means. “It’s his mark. He’s come home,” says Loomis, whose brain is apparently so fried that he doesn’t realize he isn’t in Haddonfield yet.
Oh, and Loomis’s friend’s name is Wynn. Thanks, subtitles. You’re way more helpful than the actual movie.
At the college, Beth, Beth’s boyfriend Tim (who is also Kara’s brother), and Kara are walking across campus while Kara looks for her term paper. She accidentally drops all her books, and Beth picks up a drawing.
Kara explains that Danny has been having nightmares. Danny’s picture features a bunch of stick figures with knives in their bellies, next to a large black thing that’s labeled Thorn.
And just in case you weren’t sure who the people in the picture are, their names are written down, too: Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Tim, and Mommy.
Over at the local emergency room, Tommy runs in and says there’s a problem with “his” baby, and he needs to see a doctor, now.
Then he walks away from the front desk, and goes over to talk to Loomis, who just happens to be there.
Aaand: Exposition time again! Sigh.
Tommy tells Loomis who he is, then informs him that the family that adopted Laurie, the Strodes, have relatives in town. Oh, and Jamie’s not the last of Michael’s bloodline. And he has a theory about Michael.
Then security shows up.
So Tommy runs off, still carrying a hungry naked baby. He tells Loomis, as he leaves to meet him at the campus gathering at 9 O’clock.
Back at the Strode house, Kara’s mom brings in a bin of wood, and also an axe. She heads to the basement just in time to hear the washing machine die. She flips a really massive fuse, which fixes nothing, and suddenly a bunch of water pours out onto the floor.
Where it’s coming from is a mystery. Is there a hole in the bottom of the machine, or what?
Grandma heads upstairs, where she hears a noise. Loomis is in the house. I guess he just walked in there. He says he came there to help the Strode family. I’m sure if some random old dude wandered into my house and told me the same thing, I’d probably find the nearest blunt object and hit him with it.
Tommy, in the meantime, has gone back to the boardinghouse where he lives, which is run by the kindly deaf lady. Which works out well for her, because the kid is STILL naked and STILL starving and STILL screaming.
Tommy names him Steve (really) and finally wipes the Michael mark off of Steve’s chest. I guess being slightly less dirty makes the kid happy, because instead of freaking right out and demanding to be fed, Steve starts cooing.
I suppose it’s possible I’m wrong, but I get the feeling that the people who made this movie have never seen a living baby in their lifetime. FEED THE KID, TOMMY, OR IT WON’T BE NECESSARY FOR MICHAEL TO KILL HIM.
Okay, I’m feeling better now.
Back at the Strode house, Loomis tries to convince grandma that Michael is really, really evil, and that all of Michael’s memories are locked up in the Myers/Strode house.
Out on the street, Danny is walking to somewhere-or-other, while a truck drives by, announcing the fact that Barry the DJ is going to be at the Halloween party that night.
As it rounds a corner, Danny looks up, and see Silver Toes, who is standing on the next block. And here we all thought the movie had forgotten about him.
Danny, who is distracted, almost runs into Tommy. This causes Danny to drop his pumpkin, which shatters on the ground.
Tommy apologizes.
Back at the Strode house, Grandma Strode calls Grandpa Strode and says that she’s taking the kids and getting out of the house. Also that they moved into the house because Grandpa’s brother couldn’t sell it – which I guess makes him Jamie’s great-uncle. So that’s all tidied up, now.
Meanwhile, in the background, we can see Michael, who is stalking up to Grandma. Until Grandma turns around and there’s no one there.
Minutes later, Grandma is hauling a suitcase downstairs. She sees a bin that should have an axe in it lying on the floor. The axe is gone.
The phone rings. Grandma picks it up, and a creepy voice on the other end of the line says, “We want the child.”
Grandma turns around, and Michael is standing just a few feet away.
She runs out of the house, trips, and drops her glasses, so she can have a Scooby-Doo moment on the ground.
She puts on her glasses, looks up, and there’s Michael, with the axe. The axe comes down, and blood artfully sprays across a clean white sheet.
A short while later, Kara arrives home, and discovers that the door is locked. She unlocks the door and opens it – but there’s a chain on the door, and she can’t get in. So she walks around to the back, where she sees laundry drying on the lines.
Man, the back steps could really use some paint.
Kara goes into the house, and wanders around going, “Mom? Mom?” Then she shakes things up a bit by calling to Danny. He’s not there either.
(You know, I have to say, as an adoptive parent – it’s nice that Michael thinks of the people who adopted his sister as family. You just don’t see that kind of acceptance in the motion picture industry all that often.)
Kara heads upstairs, calling out for her mom.
Finally, she goes into a room – and there’s Danny, playing a handheld video game. While Tommy sits on the bed next to him.
Danny. Dude. When your mom calls for you, answer her.
Kara starts to get upset with Tommy, who is now carrying Steve around in a different blanket. Tommy asks Kara if knows whose room this used to be.
Tommy takes Kara and Danny back to his room at the boarding house. Kara asks what they’re supposed to do in Tommy’s room.
Seeing as how she already has a kid, I would think she could figure out what a boy wants when he invites a girl up to his room.
But no, Tommy wants Kara to watch the Myers house through the window. He notes that you can see everything. He does not point out the camera sitting in the window, because he’s classy like that.
Danny takes a peek out the window, and there’s Michael, standing on the lawn. He calls out to his mom, and Kara says, “Not now, Danny.” So she doesn’t get to see the killer standing on the lawn, since Danny opts not to be all that insistent.
Tommy, meanwhile seems to have finally figured out that babies needs to eat, and he heats up a bottle for Steve in the microwave. Which you aren’t supposed to do. Hot spots. Yeah, whoever made this movie hasn’t even met a baby.
Tommy tries to feed Steve, who refuses to eat. Probably because the formula is scalding his insides. For all the good Tommy is doing, he should have left the kid in the bathroom. Maybe punched it in the face once or twice.
Kara takes the baby from Tommy, and the kid finally calms down a bit. Now the kid is just hoping he doesn’t get another scalding mouthful of liquid.
Later, Tommy pulls up a bunch of runes on his computer, and explains to Kara that runes are a kind of early alphabet. And that they were, “symbols carved out of stone or pieces of wood, used in pagan rituals.”
He goes on: “Among the ancient druids, Thorn represented a demon that spread sickness, brought death to hundreds of thousands of people. According to Celtic legend, one child from each tribe was chosen to be inflicted with the curse of Thorn, to offer blood sacrifices of its next of kin on the night of Samhain.”
Kara helpfully interjects: “Halloween.”
Thanks, Kara. Everyone who missed “Halloween II,” and is also incapable of making even tiny leaps of logic, appreciates you spoon-feeding us.
Tommy continues: “The sacrifice of one family meant sparing the lives of an entire tribe. For years, I’ve been convinced there must be some reason, some method behind Michael’s madness. The druids were also great mathematicians and astronomers, but the Thorn symbol is actually a constellation of stars that appears from time to time on Halloween night. Whenever it appears, he appears. Coincidence?”
I don’t know whether to be impressed or not just how far the writer had to reach up his own rear end to pull that explanation out. Though I have to admit, “Oh, this symbol appears from time to time on Halloween night,” is pretty chuckle-worthy.
Whatever. We’re going to go with it.
Tommy concludes by alluding to the fact that the reason people are looking for Steve is so they can kill him, and wipe out the bloodline. Which makes no sense, really. They had Jamie for years. All Michael had to do was kill her, and the bloodline would have come to an end. Why wait around for six years?
Tommy sets Steve down to sleep, and prepares to leave. Kara asks where he’s going, and he says he’s headed out to get help from the only man who can stop Michael.
I guess we have to assume that he’s talking about Loomis. Though I feel compelled to rehash my argument that Loomis is pretty much a big, fate failure when it comes to stopping Michael.
Suddenly Kara realizes that Danny isn’t anywhere to be seen. She freaks out and heads out of Tommy’s room, calling out to Danny. Who didn’t answer his mom last time she yelled to him, so why would he start now?
The moment of suspense comes to a crashing halt when Kara and Tommy get downstairs and find Danny watching TV with the landlady.
Tommy heads out, warning Kara and Danny not to go back to their house, no matter what.
Over at the hospital, a doctor tells Loomis and his buddy that they found placental fluid during Jamie’s autopsy. Loomis says he thinks he knows where the baby is.
Here’s a question for you, Loomis. Where did all your scar tissue go?
At the Halloween festival, Tommy wanders around.
Back at Tommy’s boarding house, the landlady, who suddenly seems to hear okay, because she asks Danny what Halloween is all about, and when he says candy, she doesn’t say, “Speak up, son,” decides to tell Danny the true story of Halloween, and how a long time ago, “It was a night of great power.”
And then blah-blah-blah. Until finally Kara, who is upset that she doesn’t get to spoon-feed the audience exposition any more, tells Danny to say goodnight.
The landlady suddenly says, “He hears the voice, you know. Just like the other boy that lived in that house.”
Is there more? Yes, there’s more: “I was babysitting with him that night. Little Mikey Myers that lived across the street. And that’s when the voice came, the night he murdered his sister.”
(Little Mikey Myers? Boy does that sap some of his mystique.)
Kara asks, “Michael heard a voice?”
The landlady replies, “It told him to kill his family.”
I realize I’ve been interjecting a lot, but, wow. Let’s take this whole scene apart, for just a moment.
Okay, regardless of whether or not her story makes a lick of sense, she’s the worst babysitter ever. At the very start of “Halloween,” here’s what happens (I’m quoting myself, here):
It seems it’s Halloween in 1963, and here we were in a little old point-of-view shot, first walking up to a house, then peeking through the windows inside the house, so we can watch a teenaged girl and a teenaged boy make out for a bit.
The girl and boy head upstairs, where I’m sure they’re going to engage in a wholesome activity of some kind.
Then “we” run around to the back of the house, open a drawer in the kitchen, and pull out a rather large knife. Perhaps “we” just want some more Halloween turkey?
No, it seems like “we’re” going to head upstairs, pausing and hiding when the boyfriend, who is tucking his shirt in and leaving a minute after “we” saw him head upstairs.
“That was quick” doesn’t seem to cover it.
“We” head upstairs, where we find a little clown mask and put it on. So now we’re looking through eye slits as we head into the girl’s room and stab her to death. She calls out “our” name – Michael.
“We” head outside, the shot reverses, and a dad-and-mom looking couple pull off “our” mask and inquire, “Michael?”
Okay. Quick quiz: Where was the babysitter in this scenario? If Michael was staying at her place, how did he leave the house without her knowing? He was gone quite a while. Also, his mask was at his house. Did the babysitter just tell him to go get it?
If Michael’s sister was at home, why wasn’t SHE babysitting Michael? Most parents I know shove their teenage kids into free servitude as frequently as they can. It’s not like his sister was doing anything. Er, except her boyfriend.
Let’s forget all that for a second, though.
How did the landlady know that Michael heard voices in his head telling him to kill his whole family? And why didn’t she ever tell anyone? Did she just hate all of the Myers clan, and tell little Mikey, “You know, you SHOULD kill your family?”
And how does she know that Danny hears voices as well. Did Danny tell her? And seeing as how Michael has gone on to kill a whole slew of people, why isn’t she freaking out a bit more that Danny hears the same voices Michael does?
All these questions, and more, will probably not be answered by the end of this motion picture.
Over at the Myers house, Grandpa pulls into the driveway. He is quite drunk.
He wanders into the house, where he drunkenly calls out to Grandma. Only of course, she’s dead. Then all the lights go out.
Grandpa grabs a flashlight and jokes that it must be the boogeyman. Then he hears the broken washer thumping downstairs.
He heads down to the basement to check it out, noting that the power is off. He shuts off the washer (how? The power is off!) and opens it up. It’s filled with bloody sheets. Grandpa turns around, and there’s Michael.
Michael stabs grandpa in the belly, picks him up, and shoves the knife into the power box. Grandpa’s head explodes.
At the Halloween festival, Barry-the-DJ interviews Beth about how awesome it is that they’re having a Halloween gathering.
Well, okay, actually what’s happening is that Beth is telling the world that the man can’t keep them down anymore, and that they’ll totally have a Halloween party if they want it.
In the midst of all her babbling, Beth points out that Tim, her boyfriend, lives in the Myers house. Tim clearly was not aware of this fact.
Barry thinks this is like, so cool. “You mean,” he says, “to tell me you actually live in the house of the most brutal mass murderer in history?”
Barry decides they’re going to take the show on the road, and head to the Myers house to continue the broadcast.
Tim and Beth head over to the house.
Barry heads over to his van, yammering on his phone about how they should have been at the Myers house in the first place. He’s not happy, which causes him to say several mean things so that when Michael ices him, the audience will be sort of happy.
Barry gets to his van, gets inside, and Michael stabs him to death.
I guess he wasn’t a fan? (Sorry. That’s a terrible joke. But I don’t feel like picking apart the logic problems at this point. Honestly, why is Michael in the van? Was he just waiting for Barry to show up? How long was he going to wait? Doesn’t he have family to kill?)
Tim and Beth arrive at the house, and discover that the lights won’t turn on. Tim calls out to his family members, who aren’t there. He asks Beth whether it’s really true that he lives in the Myers house.
Tough to say, dude. Your house doesn’t look anything like the house in part 5, that’s for sure. It’s fairly close to the house in part 1, though. So, you know. Maybe.
Beth finishes telling Tim the story that I already retold you a second ago, and then Tim says that they should get the candles. Beth says, “Just a minute.” Making out starts to ensue. Beth has no idea how accurate the word “minute” was in that statement.
Back with Tommy as the festival, Tommy hears a little girl say, “Mommy, it’s raining red. It’s warm.”
He looks up in a tree, and sees Barry’s dead body. Which Michael apparently found the time to stuff up there. Without anyone seeing it.
A tree branch breaks. Barry’s body falls to the ground. There is some screaming and running.
Loomis races over to Tommy, allowing us to see that, yeah, his hand scars are also missing. Apparently his retirement fund allowed him to afford massively expensive plastic surgery.
Loomis asks Tommy where the baby is.
Back at the Myers house, Tim and Beth have wrapped up their tryst. Beth notes that Kara wouldn’t be happy if Kara found out they used her bed. No, probably not.
Tim decides to go take a shower.
Minutes later, he’s finished with his shower, and he asks Beth for a towel. He doesn’t notice that the hand giving him the towel has the Thorn mark on it. Michael just handed him a towel. What a pal. Maybe he’ll help Tim scrub his back next.
Tim gets out of the shower and wipes off the mirror, and Michael cuts his throat. I’m willing to field any and all theories why he waited for Tim to get out of the shower first.
Meanwhile, Kara has noticed a light on in her room. She calls her house, and Beth picks up. Kara tells Beth to grab Tim and get out of the house.
Next to Kara, Danny hears “the voice” again.
Kara looks through the telephoto lens on Tommy’s camera, and sees Michael. She tries to warn Beth, but it’s too late. Michael stabs Beth to death.
Kara freaks out, and looks away from the window – to the ground, where Danny is walking to the house.
Kara turns around to confirm that Danny is gone. Yep. He’s missing.
Kara runs over to the Myers house, and in the front door, just in time to see Danny heading up the stairs. She grabs a poker from the fireplace and goes looking for Danny.
Kara walks to her room, where she sees Beth lying under the covers. She goes to lift the blanket, because she apparently has the brain of a goldfish and has already forgotten that she just watched Michael give Beth a whole lot of stabbings.
Tim is under the cover, all dead and bloody.
Kara jumps back and gasps, then turns around and sees Danny in his room, staring off into space. She tells him it’s okay.
Only it isn’t, because Michael is right behind Kara. She tells Danny to run, and he goes down the hall and down the stairs. Kara slams the door in Michael’s face, then backs down the hall slowly.
Grandma tumbles down from the ceiling. Somehow. I don’t even care why or how at this point.
Kara screams and runs down the stairs.
Michael follows, and Kara, who was hiding out of sight on the stairs, clocks him with the fire poker.
Outside, Tommy and Loomis pull up in Tommy’s jeep.
Inside, Kara heads down the stairs, slowly, holding the poker on Michael. He’s just lying on the floor.
Kara gets to the floor, and sees Danny standing on the opposite side of Michael. She tells Danny not to move, she’s going to come get him. She steps over Michael, picks up Danny, and Michael grabs her ankle and squeezes.
She hits his hand with the poker, grabs Danny by the arm, and they run out the front door.
Tommy and Loomis, meanwhile, are standing in Tommy’s room pondering where the baby might have gone.
Kara and Danny pound on the front door, and Tommy lets them in and locks it.
A short discussion ensues, which basically goes, “Hey, where’s the baby?” Tommy asks Loomis who else knew where the baby went? Loomis says the only people who knew were him and…
Suddenly, the voice in Danny’s head pipes up: “Danny, come to me.” Only it isn’t just in Danny’s head, because everyone else hears it too.
Danny starts walking away.
Everyone follows after a moment, and there’s Danny, sitting with Silver Toes. Who is, of course, Wynn.
A bunch of “monks” in hooded robes walk up. Wynn says, “Careful with the girl.” Kara runs away, and goes upstairs. Instead of out the front door. She finds the landlady, who has the baby. And a knife. And a creepy look on her face.
So Kara jumps out a window.
Fade to black.
Tommy and Loomis talk on the lawn. They’ve been drugged, and Kara is gone. Tommy wants to know why they didn’t just kill Loomis and himself.
Loomis says, “It’s his game, and I know where he wants to play it.”
Kara wakes up on a bed, dressed all in white, inside an empty room.
Loomis and Tommy head wherever Wynn likes to play his games. Ah. Smith’s Grove. I guess they didn’t want to build a set and not get the full value out of it.
Loomis tells Tommy to stay back in one of the hallways until Loomis comes to get him. Great plan, Loomis. Send the old man with a gun to solve this problem. Don’t worry about having backup or anything.
Loomis goes to Wynn’s office. Wynn is happy to see him. For some reason.
Tommy, still in the hallway, hears a woman screaming. He walks slowly towards the noise, concerned he might have to help someone. He’s kind of sleepy now, so he’d like to avoid having to assist someone if he can help it.
Loomis asks Wynn, “Why… now?”
Wynn replies: “Because you were the first one to see it. And you recognized its power. Evil. Pure. Uncorrupted. Ancient.”
He asks Loomis to join him.
Loomis says, “I thought Michael was a monster. But you…” then someone clubs him in the back of the head. Probably to keep him from talking about how evil Michael is again. It’s been five movies, Loomis. We get the picture.
Tommy opens an unlocked door labeled Maximum Security. He keeps on walking, until he hears a door open nearby. “Kara?” he asks.
There’s a scream, and Tommy turns around and falls over. A really freaky-looking woman with bad teeth says, “He walks amongst us, brother. He’s come back, and… he’s very angry.” She indicates the big bloody rip in her hospital gown. Then she dies.
Kara yells out to Tommy, and Tommy grabs a fire extinguisher and tries to break her door open. Michael appears down a nearby hall, and Tommy makes a bunch of odd faces. I’m going to pretend that these bizarre facial tics were supposed to be intercut with shots of a young Tommy running away from Michael in terror, because otherwise, he looks like he’s trying to scare Michael off using his Don Knotts impersonation.
Tommy finally breaks through the door at the very last second, and he yanks Kara out, and they run. They go through a door made of standard issue prison bars, and Michael reaches through it and grabs Kara around the neck.
Tommy runs away, looking for a weapon. He finds a large-ish gun and shoots Michael in the chest, point-blank. Michael goes flying.
Tommy and Kara go down another hall, with lots of pipes on the wall.
Moments later, they’re back in a normal hospital corridor, and they see Wynn and crew getting ready to do something surgical to the baby, who is in a well-lit room. Oh, and there’s Danny, about three feet away from the baby.
Kara says, “There’s Danny,” then Tommy grabs her and pulls her over a sink.
A nearby door squeaks open, and Michael walks through it. And past them. Without looking slightly to the side. Yay for Halloween masks which obstruct your vision.
As he walks into another hall, there’s a clunk, and Michael turns around to investigate the noise. Only, of course, Tommy and Kara are now hiding somewhere else, so Michael doesn’t see them.
Michael picks up what looks like a machete. What on earth is that in the hospital for? Just in case?
Tommy looks around the corner to see what’s going on in the “surgery” room, and a bloodied nurse smashes into a nearby window.
Then Michael takes his recently located machete and slices up every single person in the surgery room.
Full, brutal, honesty here folks. I have no idea why Michael just cut everyone up. I really don’t. None at all. I’d like to help you, but I can’t.
I guess we’ll just go ahead and move along to the ending, here.
Tommy grabs Steve, and Kara grabs Danny, and they all make a run for it.
Down the hall, random extra #22 runs away from Michael, who is right behind him.
Everyone runs down the hall o’ pipes from a minute ago. Michael’s doing that walking thing all horror movie icons do, because running is beneath them.
Tommy and pals run through a door made up of bars, and close it, and keep running.
Random extra #22 reaches the door, and Michael comes up behind him and pounds #22’s head into the door until the door falls over.
Tommy and crew run all the way back to the Maximum Security door, and keep on going. Michael gets ahead of them somehow, so they run down another hall, and another, and finally they run into another room and lock the door from the inside.
Kara looks around and sees a bunch of… fetuses? Babies? I have no idea. They’re all in what look like backlit fish tanks. The camera pans over to show us some DNA strand picture, with some words.
Then Michael punches a hole in the door, so he can reach the locks.
Tommy and gang run and hide. Kara picks up a big old pipe and gets ready to swing it at Michael.
Tommy steps out from behind somewhere Kara is not, holding the baby blanket. “Michael, you’ve won.” Tommy laughs, all crazy-like. “He’s yours.”
Tommy offers the “baby” to Michael, who goes to take it. Only the baby, who is NOT in the blanket, cries from some other part of the room.
Tommy reaches into the blanket and pulls out four syringes, filled with who knows what, and injects Michael.
Michael tosses Tommy across the room.
Kara pops out of hiding, and starts clubbing Michael in the head with the pipe she’s got in her hands. This goes on for a few seconds, until Michael grabs Kara by the head, throws her on the table, and starts choking her.
Danny calls out, “Leave her alone,” and Michael does, dropping Kara on the floor. Michael walks towards Danny, who is holding Steve.
Danny calls out for his mommy. Time to man up, dude. Running is probably optimal at this point.
Suddenly, Tommy appears and stabs Michael with yet another syringe, because that worked so well the first time. Then Tommy starts clubbing Michael over the head with a pipe.
Kara and Danny and the baby run for it. Loomis finds them in the hall. Loomis shoots at the panel that operates one of the barred doors, so Kara and Danny can get out, and then tells Danny and Kara to get in the elevator. They do.
Meanwhile, Tommy just keeps on pounding Michael in the head.
Eventually, some kind of goo covers Michael’s head. Tommy looks like he’s going to walk away, then he changes his mind and keeps on pounding. Good job, Tommy.
Eventually, Michael looks very dead, so Tommy walks away. Dude. No. Turn around and set fire to the guy, and stay there until you can stir his ashes.
Outside, Tommy, Kara, Danny, and the baby are in Tommy’s vehicle. They ask Loomis to come with them.
Loomis says he has some business to attend to. Pee in the bushes, Loomis, and get out of there. You should know better by now.
Everyone except Loomis drives away.
The movie cuts to a shot of the lab where Michael just took a bunch of whacks to the head. It pans down, and there’s Michael’s mask, lying on the floor. With no Michael in it.
There’s a scream, which sounds something like Loomis, but really, it could be anyone.
The movie cuts over to a shot of the Myers house, with a lit Jack O’Lantern on the doorstep. The end.
Seriously. That’s it. Hope y’all weren’t attached to closure. You’re not getting any, because the movie does not like you.
I’m sure this will all get cleared up in part seven, right? Right?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Halloween 5
Ah, good old Revenge, with its need to be served less then lukewarm. It seems that even Revenge will have to have revenge by the end of this movie, because on all the boxes and posters and such, the movie is listed as “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers,” but in the opening credits, the movie is just called “Halloween 5.”
When you can’t even get your marketing people and your moviemaking people on the same page, trouble is brewing.
And speaking of the credits, as the movie opens we’ve got orange text and a black background, intercut with quick little shots of light glinting off a kitchen knife. There seems to be a puddle of water involved too.
And a pumpkin.
As the credits close, we get a shot of a Jack O’Lantern, which I guess was carved using a knife. So there’s the knife connection, anyway.
The credits conclude, and we’re thrust back into the final minutes of “Halloween 4,” with Michael clinging to the top of the truck, getting flung off the top of the truck, then hit with the truck, then shot a bunch of times until he falls down a well, which then collapses on top of him.
We get a shot that was not in the last movie, with Loomis holding Jamie while they stare at the hole Michael just tumbled into.
And now: New material!
It turns out that it wasn’t a well at all, just an old mine shaft, and not a very deep one at that. Michael is at the bottom of the shaft, crawling down a tunnel into darkness. One of the cops runs over and throws a grenade down the shaft, but it’s too late… Michael has already crawled out a hole in the bottom of the mine, and slipped into the current of a nearby river.
He floats along for a minute, then pulls himself out using a dock.
In a nearby shack, an old fellow living in shack-like squalor near the river hears a noise, steps outside to investigate, then steps back in because he didn’t see anything outside. Michael is there, naturally, and he grabs the old dude by the throat… and collapses to the floor.
The old dude kneels down on the floor, notices the blood on Michael, and we faaade out.
We fade back up on a burn-in – “Halloween Eve: One Year Later.” Plus a bonus burn-in: “Children’s Clinic. Haddonfield, Illinois.”
I guess that would mean it’s time for Jamie to head out and find another relative to kill. Assuming that this movie remembered the big, fat twist at the end of the last movie.
Let’s find out!
Lil’ Jamie is lying on her bed in the Children’s Clinic, with a monitor wrapped around her head that’s reading her brainwaves. We get into dream sequence mode, and we get to see Jamie in her clown suit again. Then we get the clown mask point-of-view shot, with Jamie’s foster mom getting stabbed and falling into the tub.
Non-dream-sequence Jamie wakes up, screaming, only there’s no noise. A nurse runs up and tells her it was another horrible nightmare, and asks Jamie if Jamie wants the nurse to call “her mom.”
So it looks like they’ve decided to “it was all a dream” away the last few minute of part 4. I’m guessing someone said, “I don’t really WANT to make a movie about a killer kid. Why don’t we go ahead and get rid of that bit…”
Jamie continues to not-scream, and we cut to a shot of her hand flexing on the bed.
Then we cut to a shot of Michael’s hand, which appears to be lying on some kind of rock with paint or chalk drawings on it.
Michael’s hand flips over, and we can see a tattoo on his wrist, which looks kind of like a triangle.
Now we get a lot of intercutting. Jamie starts staring at her own hand, and then the nurse takes off, and she writes, “He’s Coming for Me” on a little chalkboard she has.
Michael wakes up, sans mask, and he looks around, and we sorta-kinda get to look at his face for the first time since the end of part I. He pulls on his mask.
Jamie, meanwhile, mimes putting on a mask.
Michael goes over to the old guy who saved his life, and kills him.
Jamie flips out and goes into a seizure of some kind. Other people arrive, and they wheel her out of her room and into another room, where they hold her down with a towel and prepare to cut open her trachea.
Only Dr. Loomis is there, to tell them not to do that. Jamie spontaneously stops choking. Looms follows this up with, “She has something to tell us.”
Is it worth mentioning that his burn makeup looks different? Because it does.
And now it’s the next morning, and Rachel is kind of sleeping in a chair next to Jamie. They both wake up, and sort of communicate their love by having Jamie tell Rachel that her makeup is smeared, only she doesn’t say it out loud.
A dark-haired teenage girl pounds on the window, demanding to be let in. She’s got a dog with her. The dog comes in, and Jamie gets all happy to see the dog.
Rachel tells the brunette, “She can’t even remember,” while the audience goes, “Uh, is anyone going to tell us who just came in the window?”
A Halloween costume is brought out. There are lots of hugs, and other cutesiness-and-dopiness.
Then Loomis walks in, and everyone calms down, and the brunette goes to lead the dog out, and everything is subdued, and then…
CRASH. A rock with a note on it comes through the window. Loomis picks it up and reads it: The Evil Child Must Die!
Outside moments later, Rachel and Loomis chat about this. Rachel wants to know why people won’t leave it alone. Loomis says that people know she’s related to Michael, and that she attacked her stepmother.
So I guess it wasn’t a dream after all. Jamie is still a serial killer, just not a very successful one.
Rachel expresses guilt over the fact that she’s heading out of town for two days. Loomis says that someone will take care of Jamie.
Rachel heads home, and it turns out that the dog belongs to their household. The dog starts barking at a branch that’s moving. Rachel, who hasn’t yet learned the value of paranoia, pulls the dog away and takes him inside.
As she heads in, we get a shot of what’s behind the trees. It’s Michael, in his mask.
Dude. Seriously. By this point, if someone sees a guy in that mask, lurking in some bushes – any bushes at all – the police need a jingle. It’s broad daylight. What is wrong with people?
Rachel heads upstairs to the shower, while Michael lurks around outside.
Jamie, who is currently in art class, freaks out, grabs some markers and starts scribbling on the wall. Someone says her name and she turns around and starts “yelling” in sign language about Max, the dog.
Rachel, still in the shower, hears the phone ring. She throws on a towel and answers it. Loomis is on the other end, asking about Max.
Rachel heads downstairs to check on him. Michael can be seen in another room as Rachel runs to the door – which is open.
She grabs the phone and says that Max is gone, and Loomis tells her to get out of the house. She runs outside and finds a neighbor, who is more than willing to help her because she’s an attractive young female dressed in a towel.
A little later, two cops come out of the house, accompanied by comedic music. They didn’t find anything. Rachel starts to apologize, when suddenly Max comes running down the sidewalk, dead animal in jaws.
The cops say it’s their job to, “Rescue cats,” and, “Find dogs.” Based on the musical accompaniment, this is obviously supposed to be hilarious. But considering the fact that every cop except two was slaughtered one year ago, the funny is slightly dulled. No wonder all the cops were killed: They were dopes.
We get more zany music to let us know that the Krazy Koppers have finished their routine, and the scene comes to a close.
Rachel calls Jamie to tell Jamie that she’s okay, and they hang up the phone.
Jamie gets upset, clearly concerned for her sister, and Loomis tells Jamie’s friend Billy (the kid who asked if she was okay earlier) that Jamie needs some rest.
Loomis waits for Billy to leave the room, then goes to Jamie with a marker and some paper and demands that Jamie write down what she knows. Jamie resists. Or maybe doesn’t resist. She’s not talking, and her head motions are kind of vague.
Back at Rachel’s place, Rachel takes off the robe she borrowed from her neighbor, and goes to her closet with no clothing to hinder her. She tries to pick out something to wear, and a hand reaches up and fondles the bar of her closet.
Then we get a reverse shot of the closet with Rachel standing in it, and we realize: There is NO WAY a human being could fit in that thing and not be seen. It’s about four feet deep and four feet wide, light is practically pouring into the thing, and the door is completely opened inward.
Where, exactly, is Michael hiding?
No matter. Rachel steps out of the closet, and moments later, Michael peeks his head out. As Rachel slips the sweater (and nothing else) on, she can hear Max barking.
Michael, meanwhile, randomly wanders out of the room.
Rachel turns around and walks out of the room, and into the hallway. She looks out the window and realizes that Max is outside, barking. She hears a noise in the room next to her.
She goes in, and finds a framed picture of Jamie lying on the floor. The glass is cracked, and there’s a bloody mess on the picture near the top of Jamie’s head.
Rachel picks up the picture, hears a noise, and turns around.
And finally, there’s Michael, who stabs her with a pair of scissors.
Back in the hospital, Jamie has yet another seizure.
Elsewhere, Loomis confronts the sheriff about Michael, trying to convince the sheriff of… something. That Michael is evil, I guess, because he goes off on one of his speeches, concluding with, “I prayed that he would burn in hell. But in my heart, I knew that hell would not have him.”
Another cop arrives, calling out, “Sheriff. They want you down at the cemetery.”
Back at the ex-Rachel’s house, Brunette Friend shows up, bearing groceries. No one answers the front door, so she uses the keys to let herself into the back door.
Michael-cam alerts us to the fact that Michael is still around, while Brunette Friend wanders around yelling out, “Rachel. Rachel?” Oh, and she also discovers that a record has ended, but has been left on the player.
I don’t recall any music playing in earlier scenes, so this would suggest that Michael killed Rachel, then headed downstairs to listen to some music.
Brunette Friend takes the needle off the record and heads upstairs, giggling. Which is her default.
Upstairs, she heads into the room that I think Rachel was just in, only the director doesn’t bother to establish any geography. Instead, he holds the camera on Brunette Friend while she picks up a stuffed bear, hugs it, then lies down on the bed for a while, then gets up and sees the picture frame with the crack in the glass, only there’s no picture of Jamie any more.
Where’s Rachel? And why is the picture gone? It isn’t like Michael doesn’t know what Jamie looks like, right? And it’s doubtful that her current address is listed on the back. What’s the deal? It’s like the people making this didn’t even attempt to have it make sense.
The doorbell rings, and Brunette Friend goes downstairs, only there’s no one at the door.
I guess Michael ding-dong-ditched the house. What a jerk. Killing people, fine, but that’s going too far.
Then we get ye olde fake care, as Blonde Friend We’ve Never Seen Before accidentally-on-purpose scares Brunette Friend. They yammer about having the house all to themselves.
Seriously, y’all, I have no idea what’s going on or who these people are. Rachel made some sort of comment about “moving out,” so I guess these could be her roommates, but no one is bothering to establish who anyone is or what they’re doing. The brunette could be Lindsay, from the last movie, but I have no idea who the blonde is.
They talk about Rachel going to the country with her friends. Aren’t THEY her friends?
I guess I should just pipe down and realize that this whole “in the country” thing is just a lazy screenwriting excuse to keep people from looking for a very dead Rachel.
Either way, the two friends leave, and we get a shot of Michael in the window to let us know that Michael is still in the house.
Blonde and Brunette go for a walk, yammering about you know, boys, and how they enjoy having adult relations with them. Eventually, Brunette’s boyfriend, who is named Michael, pulls up in a car and the girls get in.
Great. An extra Michael. From how on, he’s called Brunette’s Boyfriend. Brunette, by the way, does not appear to be Lindsey, but I refuse to try to figure out her name, because the movie really doesn’t care.
Back in the hospital, Jamie starts to freak out again. She runs to the window to look outside, and there’s Michael.
Jamie runs out the door and heads out into the hallway. At the end of the hall is a door outside. She sees a shadow through the glass in the door, and runs away, which is dumb, because she’s on the SECOND floor, not the first.
She runs back the opposite way and heads downstairs, which is REALLY stupid, because Michael is currently outside, so this takes her closer to him, instead of farther away.
I’m puzzled, though, because no one else seems to be around. At all.
Jamie runs down some more stairs, to the basement, and into a large room with a bunch of clotheslines. Sheets are hanging down from them, and there aren’t a lot of lights.
She races around, not sure where she’s going, and finally gets into another room. She sees a window well and climbs up a chair and into the window well.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, when she got to the basement, a shadowy figure who looked like Michael was Just a Few Steps Behind Her.
Let’s lay out a few more logic flaws, while we’re here. Where is everyone? Why are they hanging sheets in the basement? Don’t they have a dryer? How did Michael get into the building? Is there no security at all?
Jamie hides in the VERY well-lit window well, and here comes… The Janitor! Jamie signs at him frantically and then here comes… The Nurse! Who asks what’s wrong.
They pick her up and take her back to her room.
In her room Loomis confronts Jamie. He tells Jamie she has to help him. They both know that Michael is alive (uh, in the last movie he said that Michael was dead… time to take a senility test, I suppose). And Jamie knows where he is, and nothing will prevent Michael from finding her.
He goes on to say that someone dug up a coffin in the graveyard, then throws in a few more pleas for help.
The nurse is there, and she does not approve of Dr. Loomis’s methods of counseling.
Elsewhere a bus pulls to a curb, and a man wearing boots with silver tips steps off of it. He sort of kicks a dog out of the way, and a kid looks at him funny, and there’s ominous music, so I guess it’s important.
Some other place, Loomis pulls a gun out from under his coat and heads into a house. I guess it’s the Myers house, but it looks nothing like the Myers house. He calls out to Michael, because I guess his death wish is growing.
He keeps talking. “Have you come home, Michael? I know what you want from her.”
He goes upstairs. He checks the laundry chute. He walks on. Right behind him is… the man with the silver-toed boots. The camera pans up to show us the symbol tattooed on his wrist, which looks quite a bit like the symbol on Michael’s wrist.
Dr. Loomis heads to the basement, and tries to turn on the lights. Which is stupid, because the house has been free of occupants for more than a decade.
He opens up the laundry chute from the bottom, and a dead animal falls out.
Out on the street, Brunette’s Boyfriend runs a cloth over his car, while Michael looks on from a distance. Brunette scares him with a mask. They get in the car and make out.
Blonde friend appears. Blonde’s Boyfriend steps out of a nearby store. Brunette and Blonde go into the store. Blonde’s Boyfriend tells Brunette’s Boyfriend that they can get three cases (of what, they don’t say) and that he needs to pull around back.
Brunette’s Boyfriend goes around back, tires all a-squeal.
Michael looks on.
Blonde’s Boyfriend loads up the car with three cases of… I have no idea. No one will tell me. What, am I too young to know? Is it not important? Why does no one tell me anything? I’m old enough. I’ll understand.
Blonde’s Boyfriend goes back into the store. Brunette’s Boyfriend decides to sit for a minute and look at himself in the car’s mirror. Behind him, in the mirror, he sees a hand take a garden implement and damage the paint job on his shiny, shiny car.
This makes him angry. And you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Or sleepy. Or hungry. Really, there’s no reason to like the guy at all. So when he ends up dead in like a minute, I think everyone is a winner.
BB goes to confront Michael, who grabs him by the neck, chokes him, then jams the garden implement into his head. BB lies there for a second, dying, and Michael drags his body away.
Over at the place where the kids with mental problems stay, Jamie is all dressed up in her princess outfit, and Bobby comes over to give her some flowers. And a bracelet that he wears all the time. He says it’s for good luck.
She kisses him on the cheek.
I’d make a crack about young love, but really, this write-up needs that like a gardening implement in the face.
Everyone lines up to show off their costumes for the yearly costume pageant. Awesome idea. Take a bunch of mentally unstable kids and have them compete. Perhaps they could toss a live grenade into the crowd while they’re at it.
Back at Rachel’s house, Silver Toes is on the prowl. Brunette’s Boyfriend pulls up in his car, only that guy is dead, so you have to presume that Michael is driving. Or the car is driving itself.
In a movie filled with totally disconnected plotlines, a sentient car doesn’t seem all that crazy.
Inside the house, Brunette is dressed up like… I don’t even know. She doesn’t look all that different that she did before. She just went from wearing a short black dress to a short white one.
Ah. She has a black and red cape. She’s a vampire of some kind. Tee-hee.
She goes to the car and tells Michael (who she thinks is her boyfriend) to open the door. Even more tee-hee.
Michael opens the door, and Brunette gets in. Michael is wearing the mask that Brunette scared her boyfriend with earlier.
All this is intercut with Jamie freaking out and going into a seizure, which once again is supposed to indicate someone is in danger. Everyone tries to help her, except Loomis, who keeps asking Jamie to tell him where Michael is.
Brunette tells Michael she wants a pack of cigarettes, and she gets mad that, a) Her “boyfriend” is giving her the silent treatment, and b) He’s driving around like a psycho. Apparently both these things are common with her boyfriend. The garden implement to the skull was too good for him, really.
Michael drops her off to get her cancer sticks.
At the hospital, Jamie spits out words. She describes the sign on the front of the store there Brunette has just walked in.
In the car, Michael takes off his mask, picks up a knife, and puts on His Mask.
The girl walks out the door, sirens scream, and a gaggle of cop cars pull up telling her that if she’s Tina, she needs to stop where she is.
Oh, hey! A name. Tina. That took long enough.
The cops tell Tina she needs to go see Jamie, and Tina goes to tell her “boyfriend” what’s happening… only his car is gone. No surprise there.
Tina goes to see Jamie, and Jamie says, “Tina!” She can speak again. Hooray! Tina is very happy.
Tina tucks Jamie into bed and Tina says she has to go to the party. Tina is a moron. And a heartless one at that.
Loomis tries to stop Tina from leaving, explaining that Jamie, who is crying a LOT in the other room, thinks that Tina is in danger.
Oddly, Jamie referred to Michael as The Boogeyman again, which makes no sense whatsoever. Everyone knows his name now. He’s a public figure. On the record. A part of local lore.
Tina leaves, proclaiming, “I’m never sensible if I can help it!” Loomis calls out to two cops to stop her, but unfortunately, it’s the Keystone Koppers, and they don’t do anything. Again.
Assuming Tina is going to die, and I do, that means they are indirectly responsible for the deaths of two people on the same day.
Loomis gets ready to go off on a rant about how if Tina dies, it will be All Their Fault, and they go to tail her. They get outside and explain that, yep, they’re following her, and she tells them to give her a ride to the party.
I guess she really does have vampire powers, because they agree to take her to the party.
Jamie stares out her window as the cop cars drive away – and right behind them is Michael, in his stolen car.
Jamie freaks out a little bit.
Moments later, the nurse appears, crying out that no one can find Jamie. Loomis prepares to go after Jamie when the sheriff arrives. Loomis tells him that Jamie is gone.
Outside, Jamie is wandering around. She runs into Billy, who says that he knows where Tina is. The Tower Farm. That’s wonderful. Now they just have to learn how to boost and drive a car.
At The Tower Farm, the party is in full swing. The Keystone Koppers are sitting outside, waiting for something to happen.
Michael drives up in his car, and the Koppers decide that it isn’t a life-threatening situation. They opt to play cards.
Inside the party, Blonde Friend tells Tina she has a “great” idea. I’ll bet.
Tina and Blonde Friend run outside, screaming. Michael gives chase behind them. The Koppers get out of their car, drawing their guns.
Michael pulls off his mask, revealing that he’s actually Blonde’s Boyfriend. The Koppers chastise them for this prank, pointing out that someone could have gotten hurt. “Fortunately, we’re lousy cops,” says one of them.
Seriously, did someone accidentally drop some pages from a “Police Academy” movie into this script? More or less at random?
Blonde Friend finds a kitten, and she, Tina, and Blonde’s Boyfriend run into a barn. Because it’s a farm, you see.
Ah, I get it now. They’re looking for kittens. They find a bunch, and Tina chases after one that opts to run away from the stupid people. On the other side of the barn, Michael walks in the door and prepares to do some damage.
Tina loses the kitten in the dark, and then, WHAM! Kitten attack! No, I’m kidding. I’m just depressed that this movie is lame enough to use the “cat jumps out of the dark and scares everyone” tactic.
I mean, really.
Tina gets up and goes to rejoin her friends. She sees something in the dark, and jumps a little bit. She resumes the search for her buddies, and something almost falls on her. It’s a hay bale, dropped by Blonde’s Boyfriend.
Tina leaves B and BB (er… BB2?) to do, like, whatever. Only BB2 ain’t there neither. B starts to freak out a bit. She thinks she sees her man-friend, only he vanishes, and then she thinks she sees him again, only it’s Michael, who stabs her.
No, wait, it’s her boyfriend again, wearing the mask and fake stabbing her. She gets super-angry, but then – kissing.
Man, remember when Halloween used to develop characters, at least a little bit? I miss those days.
Things progress. Blondie is going to get some action on a hay bale. This is going to be itchy.
She finally protests, pointing out that she doesn’t have any protection. But her boyfriend does. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any protection from pitchforks, and as things get a little more… uh… heated? Yeah. Michael comes up and gives him a pitchfork in the back.
Michael then casually walks away while the boyfriend dies. However, his impaling didn’t extend through the boyfriend and into Blondie, so she decides to go the standing up and screaming route.
They say you never forget your first time, but I have to say it’s particularly true, in this case.
(Okay, I need to pause for a second and address something. This movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. None. None at all.
Let’s take the first Halloween. Michael kills his sister. Okay. Then he kills another dude for some clothing (logical) and then three babysitters attract his attention when they yell at him on the street. It’s a wrong place, wrong time thing.
Then we learn that Laurie is his sister, and he’s actually back to kill off the rest of his family. A little screwball, sure, but it still gives us a little logic to hang with.
Part four, he’s still after family members. Fine. All well and good. Some people get in the way, and he seems to have really elaborate plans on how to accomplish his task, which somehow involve killing all the power in town, but still. Dude had a goal.
This time, though. What’s his deal? Killing Rachel, okay, Rachel can be viewed as family by adoption. Killing Jamie, fine. The psychic connection thing is more-or-less out of nowhere, but we’ll run with it.
Why on earth is Michael tracking down and killing Rachel’s friends? He’s never met them. They didn’t taunt him. And it’s taking a LOT of work to kill ‘em, because unlike the first movie, where they’re all in one place, he has to drive to the middle of nowhere to do some killin’.
Michael needs a game plan, folks. Anyone want to hand the dude a life coach?)
Back to Blondie. She backs away from Michael, who has now located a scythe. She yanks the pitchfork out of her boyfriend, and attacks Michael. Michael dodges, and kills her with the scythe.
We don’t get to see how. Probably to avoid an X rating. Who knows?
Outside, the Keystone Koppers finally notice that the screaming going on seems sort of genuine, so they get out of the car to check things out.
Michael comes out the barn, carrying the pitchfork. The cops point out that, “Someone is going to get hurt with that thing.” They get ready to get all authoritative.
Back at the party, one of the guys tries to convince Tina to come skinny-dipping. Tina says she can’t just leave her friends.
As everyone else heads out for a night of debauchery, Tina goes to the barn and starts yelling to her now-dead buddies. She looks around and spots a kitten, covered in blood.
At the same time, Jamie and Billy finally make it to the farm. How they got there, and how long it took them, and why no one felt compelled to help out some kids running around in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess.
At the barn, Tina picks up the bloody kitten. She spots the bloody scythe, and her dead friends tumble from atop the hay bales.
She runs outside, calling for help, just as everyone drives away.
She goes to the cop car, but the Koppers are dead.
She looks over and spots her boyfriend’s car, only Michael is behind the wheel.
Jamie and Billy suddenly arrive and yell to Tina.
Michael fires up the car and goes to run down Tina. Tina runs away.
Jamie and Billy yell at the car, telling Michael to come for them. Michael figures, okay, sure, and chases them.
He hits Billy, who rolls to safety. He’s hurt, but I’m sure he’ll be okay, because most movies don’t have the guts to kill a kid. Unless cancer gets them. That’s okay.
Michael chases Jamie in the car until he crashes into a tree. The car goes up in flames, but of course Michael is unharmed. He gets out of the car and comes for Jamie. But Tina runs into his path and gets stabbed.
Billy runs up, and grabs Jamie, and they walk away. Slowly. With Michael maybe behind them. I think.
He doesn’t catch them, as Loomis suddenly appears out of nowhere and brings the kids to the cops.
Tina and the two kids are loaded up into ambulances, and Loomis asks Jamie if she’s willing to help him.
“Can you kill him?” asks Jamie.
“I think so,” says Loomis. Who, up to this point, has failed a LOT at the whole killing Michael thing.
The various cops and ambulances drive off, and Loomis stands alone out by the farm, and yells into the woods, and tell Michael that someday his anger will destroy him too. “You have to fight it!” says Loomis. “In the place it all began.”
Ah. Everyone is headed back to the Myers house. Where they stick a nine-year-old girl in Michael’s sister’s room, and have her brush her hair, the same way that Michael’s sister did, only less post-coitally.
Jamie and a cop practice their signal for when Michael shows up. Things seem to be all set to go. When suddenly, Jamie starts to seize up, crying, “Billy! Billy!”
The cop shouts for Loomis, who is downstairs walking past some fresh graffiti on the wall. The graffiti in question is, of course, the symbol tattooed on Michael and Silver Boots.
Loomis pages the sheriff, and tells him that Michael is at the clinic. The sheriff sends all mobile units to the clinic.
Then he radios to Loomis that they’re going to take Jamie to the police station, where she’ll be safer. Sure.
And Loomis says, “Now you’ll come, won’t you Michael?”
Upstairs, Jamie’s cop buddy, whose name is Charlie, confronts Loomis, who says they aren’t going anywhere.
Outside, another cop radios to Charlie that there’s a cop car approaching. The car rams into his vehicle, then the driver shoves a hand through his window, chokes him, and beats his brains out on the steering wheel. Is it Michael? You get one guess.
Inside, Loomis tells Charlie to watch Jamie, and he heads downstairs.
Loomis wanders the ground floor until he finds Michael, and then Loomis gets to monologueing, telling Michael that he knows that, “The little girl can stop the rage inside you.”
He tells Michael that “the little girl” is in the middle of the house, and says, “Let me take you to her.” It seems like it’s going to work, but then, no. Michael stabs Loomis, smashes him into a window, then throws him over a banister onto the floor a half-story below.
Charlie and Jamie, meanwhile, try to escape out the window using a rope ladder that came from somewhere-or-other.
Michael breaks through the door, and Charlie shoots him a lot. But it’s no good. Jamie runs away.
Charlie, however, gets hung on his own rope ladder.
Over at the clinic, kids are fleeing what I guess is a fire. No one actually says it is a fire, but there seems to be smoke. Or mist. I have no idea what’s going on there.
Back at the Myers house, Jamie finds the laundry chute and decides the best course of action is to go down it. Strangely, Michael, who just broke through another door like it was nothing, has a lot of trouble getting through the door just behind her.
Once he breaks through. Michael checks the laundry chute right away, spots his niece, and tries to grab her. She lets go, and falls all the way down to the bottom, which is locked.
Michael goes to the basement, finds the bottom of the chute, and tries to open the door. It sticks.
Jamie tries to climb back up the chute, while Michael frees the door and tries to reach up the chute. Then he tries to shake the chute. Then he starts stabbing into the chute.
Jamie, meanwhile, manages to pull herself up and out of the chute.
Out on the street, cop cars drive somewhere, fast, lights blazing.
Jamie heads to the attic, which is not the best decision she could have made, and there she finds several things: some blazing candles. Her large school photo which was formerly property of Rachel. Brunette’s Dead Boyfriend. And Dead Max the Dog. And Dead Rachel.
Jamie cries out, “No!” and then hears footsteps behind her. Michael is coming up the stairs. And there he is.
Jamie climbs into something that looks like a coffin, and lies down. (It is a coffin. Michael dug it up earlier. I guess it’s nice that this totally random act has a payoff.) Michael gets ready to stab her, and she says, “Uncle? Boogeyman? Let me see?”
Michael lowers his knife and takes off his mask. We don’t really see his face, but we see a single tear roll down his cheek.
“You’re just like me,” says Jamie. “Let me?” And she goes to wipe away his tear. Michael freaks, puts on his mask, and goes back to stabbing, but Jamie has already run away.
She goes downstairs, and finds Loomis who is quite alive. Loomis picks up Jamie, and yells out, “You want her! Here she is! Come and get her!”
But he keeps walking backwards, leading Michael downstairs, to the middle of the living room. Suddenly, Loomis pulls a rope on the wall, and a net made of heavy chains falls on him. Then Loomis shoots him twice with a dart gun of some kind. Then he beats Michael with a two-by-four, yelling out, “Die! Die! Die!”
Finally, Michael falls to the floor. Loomis collapses on top of him, eyes open. Maybe dead, but probably not, because this series has three more movies to go.
Red-and-blue lights show outside. The cops have arrived. I have no idea who called them.
Later, Michael is locked up in a prison cell. The sheriff declares, “The National Guard will take him to a maximum security facility. Where he’ll stay ‘til the day he dies.”
(Um, why is his mask still on? Is it normal to leave masks on a serial killer, after he’s captured?)
Jamie says, “He’ll never die.”
The sheriff tells the other cops to take her back to the clinic. For being sassy, I guess. The cops lead her away.
Outside, Silver Toes stamps out a cigarette, and walks into the police station.
Nearby, a cop puts Jamie into his car, when suddenly there’s an explosion in the police station.
A barred door, red light behind it, silhouettes Silver Toes, who appears to be shooting with a machine gun.
The cop with Jamie says, “Wait in the car,” and runs in to see what’s going on. Jamie, of course, gets out of the car and heads into the police station. All the cops are dead. Again.
All the police in town killed on Halloween, two years in a row. Recruitment for the next round is going to be rough.
Jamie finds the cell Michael is supposed to be in, only the door has been blown off of its hinges. As has the door to the outside world.
Jamie starts to cry, softly stating, “No. No.”
Really, movie? That’s how you’re leaving things? With some dude in silver-toed boots and a cowboy hat and a flappy kind of coat thing breaking Michael out of jail?
Yep, that’s how they’re leaving things.
When you can’t even get your marketing people and your moviemaking people on the same page, trouble is brewing.
And speaking of the credits, as the movie opens we’ve got orange text and a black background, intercut with quick little shots of light glinting off a kitchen knife. There seems to be a puddle of water involved too.
And a pumpkin.
As the credits close, we get a shot of a Jack O’Lantern, which I guess was carved using a knife. So there’s the knife connection, anyway.
The credits conclude, and we’re thrust back into the final minutes of “Halloween 4,” with Michael clinging to the top of the truck, getting flung off the top of the truck, then hit with the truck, then shot a bunch of times until he falls down a well, which then collapses on top of him.
We get a shot that was not in the last movie, with Loomis holding Jamie while they stare at the hole Michael just tumbled into.
And now: New material!
It turns out that it wasn’t a well at all, just an old mine shaft, and not a very deep one at that. Michael is at the bottom of the shaft, crawling down a tunnel into darkness. One of the cops runs over and throws a grenade down the shaft, but it’s too late… Michael has already crawled out a hole in the bottom of the mine, and slipped into the current of a nearby river.
He floats along for a minute, then pulls himself out using a dock.
In a nearby shack, an old fellow living in shack-like squalor near the river hears a noise, steps outside to investigate, then steps back in because he didn’t see anything outside. Michael is there, naturally, and he grabs the old dude by the throat… and collapses to the floor.
The old dude kneels down on the floor, notices the blood on Michael, and we faaade out.
We fade back up on a burn-in – “Halloween Eve: One Year Later.” Plus a bonus burn-in: “Children’s Clinic. Haddonfield, Illinois.”
I guess that would mean it’s time for Jamie to head out and find another relative to kill. Assuming that this movie remembered the big, fat twist at the end of the last movie.
Let’s find out!
Lil’ Jamie is lying on her bed in the Children’s Clinic, with a monitor wrapped around her head that’s reading her brainwaves. We get into dream sequence mode, and we get to see Jamie in her clown suit again. Then we get the clown mask point-of-view shot, with Jamie’s foster mom getting stabbed and falling into the tub.
Non-dream-sequence Jamie wakes up, screaming, only there’s no noise. A nurse runs up and tells her it was another horrible nightmare, and asks Jamie if Jamie wants the nurse to call “her mom.”
So it looks like they’ve decided to “it was all a dream” away the last few minute of part 4. I’m guessing someone said, “I don’t really WANT to make a movie about a killer kid. Why don’t we go ahead and get rid of that bit…”
Jamie continues to not-scream, and we cut to a shot of her hand flexing on the bed.
Then we cut to a shot of Michael’s hand, which appears to be lying on some kind of rock with paint or chalk drawings on it.
Michael’s hand flips over, and we can see a tattoo on his wrist, which looks kind of like a triangle.
Now we get a lot of intercutting. Jamie starts staring at her own hand, and then the nurse takes off, and she writes, “He’s Coming for Me” on a little chalkboard she has.
Michael wakes up, sans mask, and he looks around, and we sorta-kinda get to look at his face for the first time since the end of part I. He pulls on his mask.
Jamie, meanwhile, mimes putting on a mask.
Michael goes over to the old guy who saved his life, and kills him.
Jamie flips out and goes into a seizure of some kind. Other people arrive, and they wheel her out of her room and into another room, where they hold her down with a towel and prepare to cut open her trachea.
Only Dr. Loomis is there, to tell them not to do that. Jamie spontaneously stops choking. Looms follows this up with, “She has something to tell us.”
Is it worth mentioning that his burn makeup looks different? Because it does.
And now it’s the next morning, and Rachel is kind of sleeping in a chair next to Jamie. They both wake up, and sort of communicate their love by having Jamie tell Rachel that her makeup is smeared, only she doesn’t say it out loud.
A dark-haired teenage girl pounds on the window, demanding to be let in. She’s got a dog with her. The dog comes in, and Jamie gets all happy to see the dog.
Rachel tells the brunette, “She can’t even remember,” while the audience goes, “Uh, is anyone going to tell us who just came in the window?”
A Halloween costume is brought out. There are lots of hugs, and other cutesiness-and-dopiness.
Then Loomis walks in, and everyone calms down, and the brunette goes to lead the dog out, and everything is subdued, and then…
CRASH. A rock with a note on it comes through the window. Loomis picks it up and reads it: The Evil Child Must Die!
Outside moments later, Rachel and Loomis chat about this. Rachel wants to know why people won’t leave it alone. Loomis says that people know she’s related to Michael, and that she attacked her stepmother.
So I guess it wasn’t a dream after all. Jamie is still a serial killer, just not a very successful one.
Rachel expresses guilt over the fact that she’s heading out of town for two days. Loomis says that someone will take care of Jamie.
Rachel heads home, and it turns out that the dog belongs to their household. The dog starts barking at a branch that’s moving. Rachel, who hasn’t yet learned the value of paranoia, pulls the dog away and takes him inside.
As she heads in, we get a shot of what’s behind the trees. It’s Michael, in his mask.
Dude. Seriously. By this point, if someone sees a guy in that mask, lurking in some bushes – any bushes at all – the police need a jingle. It’s broad daylight. What is wrong with people?
Rachel heads upstairs to the shower, while Michael lurks around outside.
Jamie, who is currently in art class, freaks out, grabs some markers and starts scribbling on the wall. Someone says her name and she turns around and starts “yelling” in sign language about Max, the dog.
Rachel, still in the shower, hears the phone ring. She throws on a towel and answers it. Loomis is on the other end, asking about Max.
Rachel heads downstairs to check on him. Michael can be seen in another room as Rachel runs to the door – which is open.
She grabs the phone and says that Max is gone, and Loomis tells her to get out of the house. She runs outside and finds a neighbor, who is more than willing to help her because she’s an attractive young female dressed in a towel.
A little later, two cops come out of the house, accompanied by comedic music. They didn’t find anything. Rachel starts to apologize, when suddenly Max comes running down the sidewalk, dead animal in jaws.
The cops say it’s their job to, “Rescue cats,” and, “Find dogs.” Based on the musical accompaniment, this is obviously supposed to be hilarious. But considering the fact that every cop except two was slaughtered one year ago, the funny is slightly dulled. No wonder all the cops were killed: They were dopes.
We get more zany music to let us know that the Krazy Koppers have finished their routine, and the scene comes to a close.
Rachel calls Jamie to tell Jamie that she’s okay, and they hang up the phone.
Jamie gets upset, clearly concerned for her sister, and Loomis tells Jamie’s friend Billy (the kid who asked if she was okay earlier) that Jamie needs some rest.
Loomis waits for Billy to leave the room, then goes to Jamie with a marker and some paper and demands that Jamie write down what she knows. Jamie resists. Or maybe doesn’t resist. She’s not talking, and her head motions are kind of vague.
Back at Rachel’s place, Rachel takes off the robe she borrowed from her neighbor, and goes to her closet with no clothing to hinder her. She tries to pick out something to wear, and a hand reaches up and fondles the bar of her closet.
Then we get a reverse shot of the closet with Rachel standing in it, and we realize: There is NO WAY a human being could fit in that thing and not be seen. It’s about four feet deep and four feet wide, light is practically pouring into the thing, and the door is completely opened inward.
Where, exactly, is Michael hiding?
No matter. Rachel steps out of the closet, and moments later, Michael peeks his head out. As Rachel slips the sweater (and nothing else) on, she can hear Max barking.
Michael, meanwhile, randomly wanders out of the room.
Rachel turns around and walks out of the room, and into the hallway. She looks out the window and realizes that Max is outside, barking. She hears a noise in the room next to her.
She goes in, and finds a framed picture of Jamie lying on the floor. The glass is cracked, and there’s a bloody mess on the picture near the top of Jamie’s head.
Rachel picks up the picture, hears a noise, and turns around.
And finally, there’s Michael, who stabs her with a pair of scissors.
Back in the hospital, Jamie has yet another seizure.
Elsewhere, Loomis confronts the sheriff about Michael, trying to convince the sheriff of… something. That Michael is evil, I guess, because he goes off on one of his speeches, concluding with, “I prayed that he would burn in hell. But in my heart, I knew that hell would not have him.”
Another cop arrives, calling out, “Sheriff. They want you down at the cemetery.”
Back at the ex-Rachel’s house, Brunette Friend shows up, bearing groceries. No one answers the front door, so she uses the keys to let herself into the back door.
Michael-cam alerts us to the fact that Michael is still around, while Brunette Friend wanders around yelling out, “Rachel. Rachel?” Oh, and she also discovers that a record has ended, but has been left on the player.
I don’t recall any music playing in earlier scenes, so this would suggest that Michael killed Rachel, then headed downstairs to listen to some music.
Brunette Friend takes the needle off the record and heads upstairs, giggling. Which is her default.
Upstairs, she heads into the room that I think Rachel was just in, only the director doesn’t bother to establish any geography. Instead, he holds the camera on Brunette Friend while she picks up a stuffed bear, hugs it, then lies down on the bed for a while, then gets up and sees the picture frame with the crack in the glass, only there’s no picture of Jamie any more.
Where’s Rachel? And why is the picture gone? It isn’t like Michael doesn’t know what Jamie looks like, right? And it’s doubtful that her current address is listed on the back. What’s the deal? It’s like the people making this didn’t even attempt to have it make sense.
The doorbell rings, and Brunette Friend goes downstairs, only there’s no one at the door.
I guess Michael ding-dong-ditched the house. What a jerk. Killing people, fine, but that’s going too far.
Then we get ye olde fake care, as Blonde Friend We’ve Never Seen Before accidentally-on-purpose scares Brunette Friend. They yammer about having the house all to themselves.
Seriously, y’all, I have no idea what’s going on or who these people are. Rachel made some sort of comment about “moving out,” so I guess these could be her roommates, but no one is bothering to establish who anyone is or what they’re doing. The brunette could be Lindsay, from the last movie, but I have no idea who the blonde is.
They talk about Rachel going to the country with her friends. Aren’t THEY her friends?
I guess I should just pipe down and realize that this whole “in the country” thing is just a lazy screenwriting excuse to keep people from looking for a very dead Rachel.
Either way, the two friends leave, and we get a shot of Michael in the window to let us know that Michael is still in the house.
Blonde and Brunette go for a walk, yammering about you know, boys, and how they enjoy having adult relations with them. Eventually, Brunette’s boyfriend, who is named Michael, pulls up in a car and the girls get in.
Great. An extra Michael. From how on, he’s called Brunette’s Boyfriend. Brunette, by the way, does not appear to be Lindsey, but I refuse to try to figure out her name, because the movie really doesn’t care.
Back in the hospital, Jamie starts to freak out again. She runs to the window to look outside, and there’s Michael.
Jamie runs out the door and heads out into the hallway. At the end of the hall is a door outside. She sees a shadow through the glass in the door, and runs away, which is dumb, because she’s on the SECOND floor, not the first.
She runs back the opposite way and heads downstairs, which is REALLY stupid, because Michael is currently outside, so this takes her closer to him, instead of farther away.
I’m puzzled, though, because no one else seems to be around. At all.
Jamie runs down some more stairs, to the basement, and into a large room with a bunch of clotheslines. Sheets are hanging down from them, and there aren’t a lot of lights.
She races around, not sure where she’s going, and finally gets into another room. She sees a window well and climbs up a chair and into the window well.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, when she got to the basement, a shadowy figure who looked like Michael was Just a Few Steps Behind Her.
Let’s lay out a few more logic flaws, while we’re here. Where is everyone? Why are they hanging sheets in the basement? Don’t they have a dryer? How did Michael get into the building? Is there no security at all?
Jamie hides in the VERY well-lit window well, and here comes… The Janitor! Jamie signs at him frantically and then here comes… The Nurse! Who asks what’s wrong.
They pick her up and take her back to her room.
In her room Loomis confronts Jamie. He tells Jamie she has to help him. They both know that Michael is alive (uh, in the last movie he said that Michael was dead… time to take a senility test, I suppose). And Jamie knows where he is, and nothing will prevent Michael from finding her.
He goes on to say that someone dug up a coffin in the graveyard, then throws in a few more pleas for help.
The nurse is there, and she does not approve of Dr. Loomis’s methods of counseling.
Elsewhere a bus pulls to a curb, and a man wearing boots with silver tips steps off of it. He sort of kicks a dog out of the way, and a kid looks at him funny, and there’s ominous music, so I guess it’s important.
Some other place, Loomis pulls a gun out from under his coat and heads into a house. I guess it’s the Myers house, but it looks nothing like the Myers house. He calls out to Michael, because I guess his death wish is growing.
He keeps talking. “Have you come home, Michael? I know what you want from her.”
He goes upstairs. He checks the laundry chute. He walks on. Right behind him is… the man with the silver-toed boots. The camera pans up to show us the symbol tattooed on his wrist, which looks quite a bit like the symbol on Michael’s wrist.
Dr. Loomis heads to the basement, and tries to turn on the lights. Which is stupid, because the house has been free of occupants for more than a decade.
He opens up the laundry chute from the bottom, and a dead animal falls out.
Out on the street, Brunette’s Boyfriend runs a cloth over his car, while Michael looks on from a distance. Brunette scares him with a mask. They get in the car and make out.
Blonde friend appears. Blonde’s Boyfriend steps out of a nearby store. Brunette and Blonde go into the store. Blonde’s Boyfriend tells Brunette’s Boyfriend that they can get three cases (of what, they don’t say) and that he needs to pull around back.
Brunette’s Boyfriend goes around back, tires all a-squeal.
Michael looks on.
Blonde’s Boyfriend loads up the car with three cases of… I have no idea. No one will tell me. What, am I too young to know? Is it not important? Why does no one tell me anything? I’m old enough. I’ll understand.
Blonde’s Boyfriend goes back into the store. Brunette’s Boyfriend decides to sit for a minute and look at himself in the car’s mirror. Behind him, in the mirror, he sees a hand take a garden implement and damage the paint job on his shiny, shiny car.
This makes him angry. And you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. Or sleepy. Or hungry. Really, there’s no reason to like the guy at all. So when he ends up dead in like a minute, I think everyone is a winner.
BB goes to confront Michael, who grabs him by the neck, chokes him, then jams the garden implement into his head. BB lies there for a second, dying, and Michael drags his body away.
Over at the place where the kids with mental problems stay, Jamie is all dressed up in her princess outfit, and Bobby comes over to give her some flowers. And a bracelet that he wears all the time. He says it’s for good luck.
She kisses him on the cheek.
I’d make a crack about young love, but really, this write-up needs that like a gardening implement in the face.
Everyone lines up to show off their costumes for the yearly costume pageant. Awesome idea. Take a bunch of mentally unstable kids and have them compete. Perhaps they could toss a live grenade into the crowd while they’re at it.
Back at Rachel’s house, Silver Toes is on the prowl. Brunette’s Boyfriend pulls up in his car, only that guy is dead, so you have to presume that Michael is driving. Or the car is driving itself.
In a movie filled with totally disconnected plotlines, a sentient car doesn’t seem all that crazy.
Inside the house, Brunette is dressed up like… I don’t even know. She doesn’t look all that different that she did before. She just went from wearing a short black dress to a short white one.
Ah. She has a black and red cape. She’s a vampire of some kind. Tee-hee.
She goes to the car and tells Michael (who she thinks is her boyfriend) to open the door. Even more tee-hee.
Michael opens the door, and Brunette gets in. Michael is wearing the mask that Brunette scared her boyfriend with earlier.
All this is intercut with Jamie freaking out and going into a seizure, which once again is supposed to indicate someone is in danger. Everyone tries to help her, except Loomis, who keeps asking Jamie to tell him where Michael is.
Brunette tells Michael she wants a pack of cigarettes, and she gets mad that, a) Her “boyfriend” is giving her the silent treatment, and b) He’s driving around like a psycho. Apparently both these things are common with her boyfriend. The garden implement to the skull was too good for him, really.
Michael drops her off to get her cancer sticks.
At the hospital, Jamie spits out words. She describes the sign on the front of the store there Brunette has just walked in.
In the car, Michael takes off his mask, picks up a knife, and puts on His Mask.
The girl walks out the door, sirens scream, and a gaggle of cop cars pull up telling her that if she’s Tina, she needs to stop where she is.
Oh, hey! A name. Tina. That took long enough.
The cops tell Tina she needs to go see Jamie, and Tina goes to tell her “boyfriend” what’s happening… only his car is gone. No surprise there.
Tina goes to see Jamie, and Jamie says, “Tina!” She can speak again. Hooray! Tina is very happy.
Tina tucks Jamie into bed and Tina says she has to go to the party. Tina is a moron. And a heartless one at that.
Loomis tries to stop Tina from leaving, explaining that Jamie, who is crying a LOT in the other room, thinks that Tina is in danger.
Oddly, Jamie referred to Michael as The Boogeyman again, which makes no sense whatsoever. Everyone knows his name now. He’s a public figure. On the record. A part of local lore.
Tina leaves, proclaiming, “I’m never sensible if I can help it!” Loomis calls out to two cops to stop her, but unfortunately, it’s the Keystone Koppers, and they don’t do anything. Again.
Assuming Tina is going to die, and I do, that means they are indirectly responsible for the deaths of two people on the same day.
Loomis gets ready to go off on a rant about how if Tina dies, it will be All Their Fault, and they go to tail her. They get outside and explain that, yep, they’re following her, and she tells them to give her a ride to the party.
I guess she really does have vampire powers, because they agree to take her to the party.
Jamie stares out her window as the cop cars drive away – and right behind them is Michael, in his stolen car.
Jamie freaks out a little bit.
Moments later, the nurse appears, crying out that no one can find Jamie. Loomis prepares to go after Jamie when the sheriff arrives. Loomis tells him that Jamie is gone.
Outside, Jamie is wandering around. She runs into Billy, who says that he knows where Tina is. The Tower Farm. That’s wonderful. Now they just have to learn how to boost and drive a car.
At The Tower Farm, the party is in full swing. The Keystone Koppers are sitting outside, waiting for something to happen.
Michael drives up in his car, and the Koppers decide that it isn’t a life-threatening situation. They opt to play cards.
Inside the party, Blonde Friend tells Tina she has a “great” idea. I’ll bet.
Tina and Blonde Friend run outside, screaming. Michael gives chase behind them. The Koppers get out of their car, drawing their guns.
Michael pulls off his mask, revealing that he’s actually Blonde’s Boyfriend. The Koppers chastise them for this prank, pointing out that someone could have gotten hurt. “Fortunately, we’re lousy cops,” says one of them.
Seriously, did someone accidentally drop some pages from a “Police Academy” movie into this script? More or less at random?
Blonde Friend finds a kitten, and she, Tina, and Blonde’s Boyfriend run into a barn. Because it’s a farm, you see.
Ah, I get it now. They’re looking for kittens. They find a bunch, and Tina chases after one that opts to run away from the stupid people. On the other side of the barn, Michael walks in the door and prepares to do some damage.
Tina loses the kitten in the dark, and then, WHAM! Kitten attack! No, I’m kidding. I’m just depressed that this movie is lame enough to use the “cat jumps out of the dark and scares everyone” tactic.
I mean, really.
Tina gets up and goes to rejoin her friends. She sees something in the dark, and jumps a little bit. She resumes the search for her buddies, and something almost falls on her. It’s a hay bale, dropped by Blonde’s Boyfriend.
Tina leaves B and BB (er… BB2?) to do, like, whatever. Only BB2 ain’t there neither. B starts to freak out a bit. She thinks she sees her man-friend, only he vanishes, and then she thinks she sees him again, only it’s Michael, who stabs her.
No, wait, it’s her boyfriend again, wearing the mask and fake stabbing her. She gets super-angry, but then – kissing.
Man, remember when Halloween used to develop characters, at least a little bit? I miss those days.
Things progress. Blondie is going to get some action on a hay bale. This is going to be itchy.
She finally protests, pointing out that she doesn’t have any protection. But her boyfriend does. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any protection from pitchforks, and as things get a little more… uh… heated? Yeah. Michael comes up and gives him a pitchfork in the back.
Michael then casually walks away while the boyfriend dies. However, his impaling didn’t extend through the boyfriend and into Blondie, so she decides to go the standing up and screaming route.
They say you never forget your first time, but I have to say it’s particularly true, in this case.
(Okay, I need to pause for a second and address something. This movie doesn’t make a lick of sense. None. None at all.
Let’s take the first Halloween. Michael kills his sister. Okay. Then he kills another dude for some clothing (logical) and then three babysitters attract his attention when they yell at him on the street. It’s a wrong place, wrong time thing.
Then we learn that Laurie is his sister, and he’s actually back to kill off the rest of his family. A little screwball, sure, but it still gives us a little logic to hang with.
Part four, he’s still after family members. Fine. All well and good. Some people get in the way, and he seems to have really elaborate plans on how to accomplish his task, which somehow involve killing all the power in town, but still. Dude had a goal.
This time, though. What’s his deal? Killing Rachel, okay, Rachel can be viewed as family by adoption. Killing Jamie, fine. The psychic connection thing is more-or-less out of nowhere, but we’ll run with it.
Why on earth is Michael tracking down and killing Rachel’s friends? He’s never met them. They didn’t taunt him. And it’s taking a LOT of work to kill ‘em, because unlike the first movie, where they’re all in one place, he has to drive to the middle of nowhere to do some killin’.
Michael needs a game plan, folks. Anyone want to hand the dude a life coach?)
Back to Blondie. She backs away from Michael, who has now located a scythe. She yanks the pitchfork out of her boyfriend, and attacks Michael. Michael dodges, and kills her with the scythe.
We don’t get to see how. Probably to avoid an X rating. Who knows?
Outside, the Keystone Koppers finally notice that the screaming going on seems sort of genuine, so they get out of the car to check things out.
Michael comes out the barn, carrying the pitchfork. The cops point out that, “Someone is going to get hurt with that thing.” They get ready to get all authoritative.
Back at the party, one of the guys tries to convince Tina to come skinny-dipping. Tina says she can’t just leave her friends.
As everyone else heads out for a night of debauchery, Tina goes to the barn and starts yelling to her now-dead buddies. She looks around and spots a kitten, covered in blood.
At the same time, Jamie and Billy finally make it to the farm. How they got there, and how long it took them, and why no one felt compelled to help out some kids running around in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night is anyone’s guess.
At the barn, Tina picks up the bloody kitten. She spots the bloody scythe, and her dead friends tumble from atop the hay bales.
She runs outside, calling for help, just as everyone drives away.
She goes to the cop car, but the Koppers are dead.
She looks over and spots her boyfriend’s car, only Michael is behind the wheel.
Jamie and Billy suddenly arrive and yell to Tina.
Michael fires up the car and goes to run down Tina. Tina runs away.
Jamie and Billy yell at the car, telling Michael to come for them. Michael figures, okay, sure, and chases them.
He hits Billy, who rolls to safety. He’s hurt, but I’m sure he’ll be okay, because most movies don’t have the guts to kill a kid. Unless cancer gets them. That’s okay.
Michael chases Jamie in the car until he crashes into a tree. The car goes up in flames, but of course Michael is unharmed. He gets out of the car and comes for Jamie. But Tina runs into his path and gets stabbed.
Billy runs up, and grabs Jamie, and they walk away. Slowly. With Michael maybe behind them. I think.
He doesn’t catch them, as Loomis suddenly appears out of nowhere and brings the kids to the cops.
Tina and the two kids are loaded up into ambulances, and Loomis asks Jamie if she’s willing to help him.
“Can you kill him?” asks Jamie.
“I think so,” says Loomis. Who, up to this point, has failed a LOT at the whole killing Michael thing.
The various cops and ambulances drive off, and Loomis stands alone out by the farm, and yells into the woods, and tell Michael that someday his anger will destroy him too. “You have to fight it!” says Loomis. “In the place it all began.”
Ah. Everyone is headed back to the Myers house. Where they stick a nine-year-old girl in Michael’s sister’s room, and have her brush her hair, the same way that Michael’s sister did, only less post-coitally.
Jamie and a cop practice their signal for when Michael shows up. Things seem to be all set to go. When suddenly, Jamie starts to seize up, crying, “Billy! Billy!”
The cop shouts for Loomis, who is downstairs walking past some fresh graffiti on the wall. The graffiti in question is, of course, the symbol tattooed on Michael and Silver Boots.
Loomis pages the sheriff, and tells him that Michael is at the clinic. The sheriff sends all mobile units to the clinic.
Then he radios to Loomis that they’re going to take Jamie to the police station, where she’ll be safer. Sure.
And Loomis says, “Now you’ll come, won’t you Michael?”
Upstairs, Jamie’s cop buddy, whose name is Charlie, confronts Loomis, who says they aren’t going anywhere.
Outside, another cop radios to Charlie that there’s a cop car approaching. The car rams into his vehicle, then the driver shoves a hand through his window, chokes him, and beats his brains out on the steering wheel. Is it Michael? You get one guess.
Inside, Loomis tells Charlie to watch Jamie, and he heads downstairs.
Loomis wanders the ground floor until he finds Michael, and then Loomis gets to monologueing, telling Michael that he knows that, “The little girl can stop the rage inside you.”
He tells Michael that “the little girl” is in the middle of the house, and says, “Let me take you to her.” It seems like it’s going to work, but then, no. Michael stabs Loomis, smashes him into a window, then throws him over a banister onto the floor a half-story below.
Charlie and Jamie, meanwhile, try to escape out the window using a rope ladder that came from somewhere-or-other.
Michael breaks through the door, and Charlie shoots him a lot. But it’s no good. Jamie runs away.
Charlie, however, gets hung on his own rope ladder.
Over at the clinic, kids are fleeing what I guess is a fire. No one actually says it is a fire, but there seems to be smoke. Or mist. I have no idea what’s going on there.
Back at the Myers house, Jamie finds the laundry chute and decides the best course of action is to go down it. Strangely, Michael, who just broke through another door like it was nothing, has a lot of trouble getting through the door just behind her.
Once he breaks through. Michael checks the laundry chute right away, spots his niece, and tries to grab her. She lets go, and falls all the way down to the bottom, which is locked.
Michael goes to the basement, finds the bottom of the chute, and tries to open the door. It sticks.
Jamie tries to climb back up the chute, while Michael frees the door and tries to reach up the chute. Then he tries to shake the chute. Then he starts stabbing into the chute.
Jamie, meanwhile, manages to pull herself up and out of the chute.
Out on the street, cop cars drive somewhere, fast, lights blazing.
Jamie heads to the attic, which is not the best decision she could have made, and there she finds several things: some blazing candles. Her large school photo which was formerly property of Rachel. Brunette’s Dead Boyfriend. And Dead Max the Dog. And Dead Rachel.
Jamie cries out, “No!” and then hears footsteps behind her. Michael is coming up the stairs. And there he is.
Jamie climbs into something that looks like a coffin, and lies down. (It is a coffin. Michael dug it up earlier. I guess it’s nice that this totally random act has a payoff.) Michael gets ready to stab her, and she says, “Uncle? Boogeyman? Let me see?”
Michael lowers his knife and takes off his mask. We don’t really see his face, but we see a single tear roll down his cheek.
“You’re just like me,” says Jamie. “Let me?” And she goes to wipe away his tear. Michael freaks, puts on his mask, and goes back to stabbing, but Jamie has already run away.
She goes downstairs, and finds Loomis who is quite alive. Loomis picks up Jamie, and yells out, “You want her! Here she is! Come and get her!”
But he keeps walking backwards, leading Michael downstairs, to the middle of the living room. Suddenly, Loomis pulls a rope on the wall, and a net made of heavy chains falls on him. Then Loomis shoots him twice with a dart gun of some kind. Then he beats Michael with a two-by-four, yelling out, “Die! Die! Die!”
Finally, Michael falls to the floor. Loomis collapses on top of him, eyes open. Maybe dead, but probably not, because this series has three more movies to go.
Red-and-blue lights show outside. The cops have arrived. I have no idea who called them.
Later, Michael is locked up in a prison cell. The sheriff declares, “The National Guard will take him to a maximum security facility. Where he’ll stay ‘til the day he dies.”
(Um, why is his mask still on? Is it normal to leave masks on a serial killer, after he’s captured?)
Jamie says, “He’ll never die.”
The sheriff tells the other cops to take her back to the clinic. For being sassy, I guess. The cops lead her away.
Outside, Silver Toes stamps out a cigarette, and walks into the police station.
Nearby, a cop puts Jamie into his car, when suddenly there’s an explosion in the police station.
A barred door, red light behind it, silhouettes Silver Toes, who appears to be shooting with a machine gun.
The cop with Jamie says, “Wait in the car,” and runs in to see what’s going on. Jamie, of course, gets out of the car and heads into the police station. All the cops are dead. Again.
All the police in town killed on Halloween, two years in a row. Recruitment for the next round is going to be rough.
Jamie finds the cell Michael is supposed to be in, only the door has been blown off of its hinges. As has the door to the outside world.
Jamie starts to cry, softly stating, “No. No.”
Really, movie? That’s how you’re leaving things? With some dude in silver-toed boots and a cowboy hat and a flappy kind of coat thing breaking Michael out of jail?
Yep, that’s how they’re leaving things.
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