HALLOWEEN (US - 2018) Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green. Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Haluk Bilginer, Rhian Rees, Jefferson Hall, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Toby Huss, Virginia Gardner, Dylan Arnold, Miles Robbins, Drew Scheid, Jibrail Nantambu, Omar Dorsey, Christopher Nelson, Brien Gregorie, Vince Mattis. (R, 106 mins) For the 40th anniversary of John Carpenter's iconic 1978 classic HALLOWEEN, the franchise retcons itself, wiping away everything that happened from 1981's HALLOWEEN II to 2002's HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION. It picks up in the present day, as Michael Myers (played by original "Shape" Nick Castle in fleeting glimpses before he dons the mask and James Jude Courtney takes over) is visited at an Illinois mental institution by Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees), a pair of British podcasters specializing in famous killers and cold cases. Dr. Sartain (WINTER SLEEP's Haluk Bilginer, the Turkish Rade Szerbedzija), a protege of the late Dr. Loomis (played in the 1978 original by the great Donald Pleasence, who died in 1995) has taken over Michael's care and reminds them that he hasn't spoken a word in 40 years. They get no reaction out of Michael, even after showing him his old mask. They get a similar response when they visit a standoff-ish Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a self-described "basket case" who's been hobbled by PTSD since that fateful Halloween night 40 years ago, leading to two failed marriages and a fractured relationship with her mostly estranged daughter Karen (Judy Greer), who was taken away at the age of 12 when the state deemed Laurie an unfit mother. Laurie lives in a gated compound on the outskirts of Haddonfield, in a house filled with alarms, locks, and booby-traps and with a heavily-fortified panic room in the basement, accessible by a secret passageway under a kitchen counter. Karen resents the doomsday-prepping memories of her childhood, but Laurie has never been able to shake the feeling that Michael would come for her again one day.
That day inevitably arrives following the most half-assed prison transport in recent memory, as Michael and some other psych patients are moved to another facility and the bus ends up crashing, because of course it does. You'd think with someone as dangerous as Michael Myers onboard, there'd be more than one officer on the bus, and maybe a couple of cruisers from the local sheriff's department might follow along as a precaution, and they might've picked a night other than the day before Halloween, which is the same night he escaped 40 years earlier, but hey, it is what it is. The bus crashes and Michael is loose once again, making his way to Haddonfield in time for Halloween, where he sees the podcasters visiting his sister's grave and then follows them to a gas station and kills them, reclaiming his mask in the process. Michael embarks on a murder spree across Haddonfield, a town where, depending on the scene, has either one cop on duty in Officer Hawkins (Will Patton), who was on duty the same night in 1978, or a ton of guys not really doing much of anything. Everyone is aware of the events of 40 years ago, yet no one really acts with much urgency considering the town's tragic history with this night. That is, other than Hawkins and Laurie, who's been following the calls on a police scanner and can't get in touch with her granddaughter, Karen's daughter Alyson (Andi Matichak), who just left a Halloween bash after dumping her boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold), who threw her phone in a punch bowl. As Michael heads to a fateful meeting with Laurie that seems like destiny, she finally convinces Karen and her husband Ray (Toby Huss) of the danger and they all end up at her secured fortress and wait for Hawkins to track down Alyson.
Directed by indie darling-turned-journeyman David Gordon Green, who co-wrote the script with his buddies Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley (a writer on McBride's HBO series VICE PRINCIPALS), HALLOWEEN tries to position itself as both sequel and remake, with countless references and callbacks to other memorable scenes in the franchise, which reeks of trying to have it both ways by retroactively erasing all of the sequels but still re-staging well-known scenes from them. Remember when teenage Laurie looks out of her classroom window and sees Michael standing across the street looking at her? Green repeats that here with Alyson looking outside and seeing her grandmother. Remember when Loomis shoots Michael and he falls out of the window, landing on the ground and then they look down and he's gone? Repeat that here with Michael throwing Laurie out of a window, then looking down and seeing she's gone. Remember in HALLOWEEN II when Michael walks into a house and sneaks into the kitchen and steals Mrs. Elrod's butcher knife? That happens here, but in a way that emulates the re-edited TV version. Even a mid-film detour where Alyson's friend Vicky (Virginia Gardner) is babysitting a wisecracking kid (Jibrail Nantambu, who turns in the most entertaining performance) before her stoner boyfriend Dave (Miles Robbins) arrives only exists as a wink and a nod to a pair of murders from Carpenter's film. Once everyone ends up at Laurie's compound and she does a room-by-room search, we see she has a roomful of target-practice mannequins and dummies like the ones she's shown shooting out in the woods earlier. Why would she store these in a room in her house? A goddamn roomful of white-faced mannequins has no reason to exist in Laurie's house other than giving a masked Michael a way to camouflage himself among them in the darkness for a cheap, lazy jump scare. And why does she even leave the safety of the underground panic room in the first place? Oh, that's right. Because "I'm gonna finish this!"
Those are hardly the dumbest things in HALLOWEEN. You might ask "How does Michael even find Laurie's house?" and "How does he get past the gate?" and "What does Laurie do for a living, because this Batcave-like complex probably cost at least $1 million?" but nothing will prepare you for one ludicrous whopper of a third act plot twist which was when I just shook my head and muttered "Done" under my breath. For a film that sees fit to do away with the Laurie/Michael family connection established in HALLOWEEN II, which is a hokey development but it's still a movie that many people, myself included, really like, what arises with this reveal is right on par with all the Druid nonsense that came up in HALLOWEENs 5-6, which seemed at the time to be a backdoor way to somehow work in 1982's otherwise unrelated, Michael Myers-less HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (though Dr. Loomis used a story about Druids metaphorically in HALLOWEEN II). It's one thing to ask us to disregard everything that happened in all the sequels--including Laurie being killed off in a passing mention of a car accident in HALLOWEEN 4 and onscreen in HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION--but the big twist in HALLOWEEN from the masters of horror behind YOUR HIGHNESS and EASTBOUND & DOWN is so beyond the pale that it made me dismiss the entire project as egregiously ill-advised Michael Myers fan fiction on the part of Green, McBride, and horror assembly line production company Blumhouse.
That said, there's an undeniable sense of warm, nostalgic sentiment for fans to see Curtis in this role again, and she brings a credibly anguished weariness to a heroine who's been inextricably linked to an unstoppable madman and forever haunted by the events of 40 years ago. Matichak is appealing as her sympathetic granddaughter, though all the sequences with her obnoxious friends with "Dead Meat" stamped on their foreheads seem like superfluous padding (except for Cameron, who, like the kid Vicky's babysitting, just vanishes from the movie). The notion of three generations of Strode women teaming up to take on what's tantamount to a family curse is intriguing, but Green generates no scares, no suspense, and doesn't bring them together until very late in the game, and then blows it by giving the best moment not to Curtis, but to Greer. Don't get me wrong, it's a good moment, and Greer plays it perfectly, but shouldn't it have been Curtis'? After the two Rob Zombie hillbilly horror reboot debacles, I was willing to approach HALLOWEEN 2018 with an open mind, and it gets some things right--Michael's worn, weathered, and craggy-looking mask approximating the aging of a killer who's now 63 years old, John Carpenter returning to write an updated version of his instantly-recognizable theme, an audio recording of Dr. Loomis where the guy doing a dead-on Donald Pleasence impression just nails it, especially Pleasence's inimitable pronunciation of "evil"--but at the end of the day, this is just another HALLOWEEN sequel, and it's not even a very good one, with all the rave reviews and fanboy hype once again offering irrefutable proof that horror scenesters are the easiest lays in genre fandom. John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN is a landmark film that still terrifies and whose impact still resonates after 40 years. Will anyone in 2058 be looking back and wistfully reminiscing about the first time they saw David Gordon Green's HALLOWEEN 40 years ago? Will anyone even remember it 40 days from now?
IN DARKNESS might be of interest to GAME OF THRONES superfans, as it stars three series alumni--Natalie Dormer, Ed Skrein, and James Cosmo--and is co-written by Dormer with her fiance, veteran British TV director Anthony Byrne (RIPPER STREET, PEAKY BLINDERS). It begins as an intriguing throwback to "blind woman in peril" standard-bearer WAIT UNTIL DARK, but Dormer and Byrne's script starts trying too hard by throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Dormer is Sofia McKendrick, a London-based pianist who's been blind since she was five. Self-reliant and a bit of a quiet loner, Sofia's world is turned upside down when she hears some loud thuds above, followed by upstairs neighbor Veronique (Emily Ratajkowski) taking a dive out of her window to her death. Only with the resulting media attention does Sofia learn that Veronique is the estranged daughter of Zoran Radic (Jan Bijvoet as Rade Serbedzija), a powerful Serbian businessman and reputed Bosnian War criminal with a shady charity foundation and ties to (of course) the Russian mob. Radic has a sibling henchmen duo--Marc (Skrein) and Alex (Joely Richardson)--tasked not only with killing Veronique but also with getting an incriminating USB stick out of her apartment. The cops rule Veronique's death a suicide, but Marc was in the building and in her apartment with her and came face to face with Sofia while she was getting on an elevator. Believing Sofia to be a witness, he attempts to befriend her with the intent of killing her, but backs off when he realizes she's blind and couldn't have seen him. That's not good enough for Alex or for Radic, who wants all loose ends tied up and needs whatever vital info is on the USB, with all parties are unaware that Veronique secretly stashed it with Sofia before her death.
The basic set-up of IN DARKNESS might've made for an old-fashioned nailbiter, but then it decides to get "tricky." It's fairly early in the film when it's revealed that Sofia is the only survivor of a Bosnian family brutally slaughtered by Radic 25 years earlier. We also learn that she's spent her entire life plotting to kill Radic and she intentionally sought out Veronique and got an apartment in the same building in the hopes that it would get her closer to her target, all under the watchful eye of caring and now-terminally ill adoptive father figure Niall (Cosmo). But that's just the beginning of IN DARKNESS' wildly improbable twists and turns. It gets more contrived with each passing scene, with some details left frustratingly vague--the film never does establish exactly what Marc and Alex do for Radic, nor does it adequately explore their strange relationship, where it's at least hinted that Alex is jealous when she finds out her brother has slept with Veronique. That's a shame because, while Skrein is bland and forgettable, an invested Richardson seems game for some perverse weirdness that never comes to fruition. Neil Maskell does an alright job as the rumpled, perpetually stubbled detective investigating Veronique's death, getting his inevitable wide-eyed Chazz Palminteri-in-THE USUAL SUSPECTS moment of realization when he finally pieces everything together. And it's a lot to piece together, as Dormer and Byrne can't stop piling up the surprise reveals with reckless abandon in the third act. One is so thuddingly obvious that you'll call it long before Sofia figures it out, and other is one of those that pretty much negates the entire movie and convincingly makes its case for the dumbest twist ending of 2018. (Unrated, 101 mins)
FLOWER
(US - 2018)
You know a movie's trying way too hard to be edgy when it opens with its 17-year-old heroine blowing the local sheriff, who asks "Where'd you learn to give a hummer like that?" and her reply is "Middle school." FIGHT CLUB already did a similarly tacky joke exponentially better (Helena Bonham Carter's immortal "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school"), but everything about FLOWER feels like you've seen and heard it years ago. If you can imagine Gregg Araki making a belated JUNO knockoff, then you'll have an idea what this has to offer. Directed and co-written by Max Winkler (Henry's son) and produced by the EASTBOUND AND DOWN and OBSERVE AND REPORT team of David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Jody Hill, FLOWER stars 23-year-old Zoey Deutch (Lea Thompson's lookalike daughter) as Erica Vandross, a teenage sociopath in a small California suburb who has a lucrative secret gig blackmailing local guys by giving them blowjobs in parked cars while her best friends Kayla (Dylan Gelula) and Claudine (Maya Eshet) sneak up and record her finishing them off. Kayla and Claudine spend their cut of the take on clothes, but Erica is stashing hers away to bail her father out of jail, where he's been sitting awaiting trial after trying to rob a casino. Erica's mother Laurie (Kathryn Hahn) has moved on and is dating doofus nice guy Bob, aka "The Sherm" (Tim Heidecker), who's about to move in, much to Erica's disapproval. Coming along as part of the "Sherm" package is his troubled son Luke (Joey Morgan), a withdrawn, overweight outcast who's been in rehab for a year trying to kick an oxy addiction. He has a panic attack his first night out of the facility but rejects Erica's offer for a blowjob to help calm him down. The two later grab a burger at the bowling alley, where Luke has another anxiety attack after spotting Will (Adam Scott), a regular at the lanes who's dubbed "Hot Old Guy" by chronic daddy issues case Erica. It turns out that Will used to be a high school teacher who lost his job three years earlier after allegations that he fondled a 15-year-old boy. The accuser? Luke.
ALIEN: COVENANT (US - 2017) Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by John Logan and Dante Harper. Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Guy Pearce, James Franco, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Goran D. Kleut. (R, 120 mins) Despite the pre-release tap-dancing around the issue, it was obvious that 2012's PROMETHEUS was Ridley Scott's return to the universe he created with the 1979 classic ALIEN. After PROMETHEUS' ultimate reveal as a prequel, Scott has returned with no illusions about what's going on with ALIEN: COVENANT. Picking up ten years after the events of PROMETHEUS, COVENANT centers on a colonization mission on the space vessel Covenant, with a crew of 15 carrying 2000 colonists and 1000 embryos on a seven-year, hypersleep mission to an oxygenated planet known as Origae-6. They're under the watchful eye of "Mother," the ship's computer, as well as Walter (Michael Fassbender), a synthetic in charge of maintaining the ship. A "neutrino burst" causes significant damage to the ship, killing some sleeping colonists and forcing Walter to bring the crew out of stasis. Second-in-charge Oram (Billy Crudup) is forced to assume command when mission leader Branson (a barely-seen and uncredited James Franco) is killed in a freak explosion when his pod won't open. They're still seven years from Origae-6, and Branson's wife Daniels (Katherine Waterston, Sam's lookalike daughter), who's also on the crew, voices her objection when Oram decides to investigate a signal (someone singing John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," in a garbled audio transmission that's effectively creepy in an EVENT HORIZON way) from a previously unseen planet just a few weeks away that's showing even better habitability figures than their intended destination.
I guess Daniels is the only one who's ever seen an ALIEN movie or an ALIEN ripoff, since this is obviously a decision worthy of a Bad Idea Jeans commercial. While the Covenant and pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride) stay in orbit with two other crew members, a smaller vessel piloted by Tennessee's wife Faris (Amy Seimetz) takes Oram and the rest of the crew to the surface. They split up, with Oram's biologist wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo) collecting samples with soldier Ledward (Benjamin Rigby), who unknowingly stirs some alien spores that enter his ear and go undetected, taking root in his brain. Meanwhile, Oram and the others discover the wreckage of the spacecraft in which Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and synthetic David (also Fassbender) escaped at the end of PROMETHEUS. When a soldier in that group, Hallett (Nathaniel Dean), also gets infected by spores, they head back to the docked vessel where a creature has already burst out of Ledward's back and killed Karine, eventually leading to an explosion that kills Faris. A creature erupts out of Hallett's mouth and soon, others similar to the franchise's signature xenomorphs start attacking until the whole group is rescued by David (also Fassbender), who's been living alone in what appears to be the ruins of a Pompeii-like civilization. Dr. Shaw was killed in a crash landing ten years earlier, and when David isn't weeping at a shrine he's set up in her memory, he's been surviving on his own. He clearly has other intentions, as evidenced by his barely-contained enthusiasm upon being told that there's 2000 hibernating colonists and 1000 embryos aboard the still-orbiting Covenant.
ALIEN: COVENANT is consistently interesting, but it's still a hot mess. The biggest obstacle that it can't overcome--and it didn't seem apparent to me until I considered it and PROMETHEUS as a whole piece--is that knowing the backstory to the events of ALIEN and the whole Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) saga is completely unnecessary. When the actual H.R. Giger-designed xenomorphs finally appear in the last half hour or so, we see entirely too much of them, and in their sleek new CGI incarnation, pinballing all over the screen like sprinting zombies in 28 DAYS LATER, they lack the sense of tangible menace like the aliens in ALIEN and its equally great 1986 sequel ALIENS. This whole saga of PROMETHEUS and COVENANT ultimately feels like little more than ALIEN fan fiction that does nothing to enhance the movies we've been watching for going on 40 years now. Scott throws in enough bizarre and unexpected elements that COVENANT has always got your attention even when it's stumbling--the whole midsection of the film, showing David's routine around the ruins of the society he's adopted as his home, is another example of the director's occasionally insane side making its presence known. But in the end, it doesn't go far enough, like a lobotomized Ray Liotta eating his own sauteed brain in HANNIBAL or Cameron Diaz fucking a car in THE COUNSELOR. Before long, we once again start getting that PROMETHEUS feeling that Scott realizes he needs to appease the studio and abandons the project's unique ideas in favor of rushing through the last 30 or so minutes because he seems to suddenly remember he's making an ALIEN movie. In other words, almost right down to the minute, the same flaws in PROMETHEUS are repeated in COVENANT, with the added detriment of a laughably predictable twist ending and an attempt to turn David into a quipping, synthetic android Freddy Krueger.
Fassbender is fine in both roles, especially as David, with his gentlemanly sinister demeanor and erudite line delivery recalling Peter Cushing not just in his performance, but also in the echoes of Cushing's Nazi mad scientist living on a deserted island among his aquatic zombie creations in 1977's SHOCK WAVES (instead of CGI-ing Grand Moff Tarken in ROGUE ONE, they should've just hired Fassbender to do his Cushing impression). ALIEN: COVENANT feels like three movies in one, all of them tonally different (a late shower kill with gratuitous T&A as an apparently pervy xenomorph peeps in on a cavorting couple feels like it belongs in an '80s slasher movie or, at best, a Roger Corman ALIEN ripoff like GALAXY OF TERROR). Waterston makes a tough, gritty heroine, but elsewhere, there's too much distracting stunt casting, whether it's McBride coming off as "Kenny Powers in space" and not selling lines like "That's one hell of an ionosphere!" or Franco turning in his finest performance in years as a burnt corpse (Guy Pearce also appears as evil CEO Peter Weyland in a prologue). It's intriguing that the crew is almost entirely made up of married couples, with some sociopolitical commentary in Oram being established as conservative and bitching that his faith has held him back in his career, or that Hallett and badass security head Lope (Demian Bichir) are a gay couple, but it's never really explored other than as transparent thinkpiece-bait. Ridley Scott owes no explanations to anyone, and it's great that the 79-year-old legend is still full of piss and vinegar and able to work so much in his emeritus years, but like others in his age bracket such as Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, his average of a new film every year or year-and-a-half is an indication that maybe a break and a recharging wouldn't be a bad thing. Scott is just spinning his wheels here, and so is the ALIEN franchise.
