Classic Review: Halloween II

Another classic review by Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody. This time it's Halloween II, the anemic sequel to the godfather of the slasher boom. This one elicited a hostile comment from an anonymous reader. The grad school gibberish is strong, but doesn't really warrant the hostility.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

Halloween II (1981)

by Alec "Progress? We don’t need no stinkin’ progress!" Cizak

How can you tell when Hollywood has taken over a subgenre of films? One word: Explosions. Halloween II’s got two of them. Early in the film, when it’s clear that the whole exercise is nothing more than an unnecessary continuation of the first movie, a kid in a Shatner mask is blown up when a police car shoves him into a van. It’s Hollywood logic—two cars colliding automatically explode. It’s called production value. Need your movie to look bigger than it is? Hire a helicopter and shoot from the clouds. Or rig something to explode. Then, of course, there’s the big boom in the end, when both Mikey Myers and his goofy doctor go to hell together.

Now, the movie poster for Halloween II never promised anything other than ‘More of the Night He Came Home.’ John Carpenter has admitted that, while writing the script with the help of Budweiser, he realized he was crafting the same film as the original Halloween, only, “not as good.” Halloween II kicks off with a retread of the final three or four minutes of the original. The soundtrack is altered and we get a different angle of Mr. Myers dropping from the second floor with six slugs in him (seven, according to Halloween geeks who make me look completely sane). The big problem with Halloween II is that it is, from a narrative point of view, entirely pointless.

Halloween ends with some nice, nasty, Kentucky nihilism, courtesy of Carpenter and his bleak view of, well, everything. Michael Myers is evil. Evil never dies. End of story. Of course, the real reason Halloween II exists is because the first film spawned a gold rush of independent filmmakers splicing together Animal House and Halloween to cash in on Halloween’s success. Beginning with Friday the 13th, however, the element of danger—the stalker—became, momentarily, human. This demanded an explanation for the killer’s destructive hobby. The opening of Halloween, the murder of Judith Myers in 1963, morphed into some kind of ‘wrong’ committed against the eventual killer or someone close to the killer. Hence, Jason drowning and his mother then celebrating the (roughly) twentieth anniversary of that special event by killing some horny camp counselors. Every slasher from the golden age imitated F13’s misinterpretation of Halloween’s prologue.

The F13 template, I’m sure by accident, allowed ‘serious’ critics to view the killer as a symbol of reactionary forces from the past. That the heart of the civil rights movement generally sat between the inciting event and the “return of the repressed” allows an easy comparison to the return of right-wing zeal in the 1980s. Mind you, this was never, ever mentioned in any of the original slashers. It carries weight, however, because, as I have stated in previous reviews, it is appropriate to think of the kids who are stalked and killed as “the Other.” That’s correct, folks. Those smiling, middle class, ivory-faced teenagers (played by twenty and thirty-somethings) took on the burdens of every oppressed group in America and demonstrated their gains with their ‘hedonistic’ dismissal of authority (read as the status quo).

Most of these elements were included in the original Halloween. Carpenter and his buddy Debra Hill were young, most of the people working on the film were young. Judging by They Live, a film Carpenter made ten years later, these kids were not Republicans. It makes sense, thus, that their sympathies rested with the ‘progressive’ side of the neighborhood. But the larger issue of evil represented by a ‘shape’ lurking in darkness, toying with its victims before snuffing them, seemed to be lost on the imitators. Halloween, ultimately, was about death. Early in the film, Jamie Lee Curtis sits in a classroom listening to an instructor lecture about fate. “Fate never changes,” she says. That, I believe, was the only message John Carpenter ever intended his film to have: Try as you might, you cannot escape the grim equalizer.

The original theatrical trailer for Halloween II echoes the poster’s tagline—“More of the Night He Came Home.” The narrator of the trailer, however, goes on to promise “(t)here is no place to hide. He will always find you.” Whether conscious of it or not, Halloween II slammed the door on the golden age of the slasher by reiterating the fact that Michael Myers represented death and nothing—not a resourceful “final girl” or a demented knight in shining trench coat (Donald Pleasance and his useless pistol)—would stop him.

By cashing in on the family ties bombshell that made The Empire Strikes Back (probably) the most effective sequel of all time, Halloween II accidentally predicted the movement of anti-authoritarian sentiment from external symbols (police, politicians, school deans, etc.,) to internal, family symbols. Less than ten years after Animal House, the teenagers in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club would identify their parents as the prime oppressors in their lives (even with the character of the school’s principal serving as a peripheral reminder that oppression is bred by institutionalized authority). This removed the young people/“Other” in the slashers and mainstream subversive comedies such as Caddyshack and Meatballs from the role of “the Other” and placed them in their proper, white, middle-class demographic. By ‘revealing’ that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a useless wig and hospital gown) and Michael Myers (wielding a tiny, useless medical scalpel) were siblings, Carpenter (and replacement director Rick Rosenthal) demeaned his mystic messenger of death from the status of primordial myth to human, all too human.

The fear of the status quo that fueled the great transgressive comedies and horror films of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, was a fear of death converted to a fear of change represented by women and ‘minorities’ demanding equal status in the culture. For whatever reason, bigots all across the land could not cope with the idea of competing for a job with someone whose skin color was not the same as their own. The status quo rested their hopes for a restoration of “order” with Ronald Reagan. The word ‘prosperity’ became code for ‘safety’ and ‘security’ which were, in turn, code for “the good old days.” Revenge movies would thrive under Reagan’s watch. A decade and a half of ‘restoration’ would bring us Forrest Gump, a movie that suggested success in America comes easiest to those who don’t think. Police and hospital dramas would dominate television. And on September 11, 2001, twenty years after Laurie Strode sought ‘security’ in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, President George Forrest W. Gump Bush would declare America “vulnerable” and call on the people of the United States to prepare for an endless war on an invisible enemy. A little outfit called The Department of Homeland Security would be formed and any hope for civil liberties surviving the reactionary forces of the right vanished.

Halloween II, for all its bigger budget trappings (explosions and the most awesome boobs in any slasher ever, courtesy Pamela Susan Shoop), makes one final stab at the illusion of safety and security. By setting the majority of the film in a hospital, Carpenter makes it clear that there is no such thing as security. Shortly after Laurie Strode is brought to Haddonfield Memorial, she begs the staff not to put her to sleep. The audience might echo that sentiment, partly because a “final girl” in a coma makes for an uninteresting film (which, for the most part, Halloween II is), and partly because that must have been what it felt like when Reagan and his regime took power and turned the clock backwards—those who slept through the 1950s, woke up for the ‘60s and ‘70s, surely must not have wanted to go back to sleep.

As in the first film, the “final girl” does not actually save herself. In a slight improvement, she ‘helps’ Dr. Loomis dispatch Michael Myers. In pure Carpenter cynicism that I believe is lost on most viewers, Laurie is wheeled out into the parking lot of the smoldering hospital and loaded into an ambulance that will take her to another hospital. No grand story arc here. Nothing learned. Nothing gained. Haddonfield Memorial created an illusion of security. Laurie Strode helped destroy it. For what? To be taken to another hospital, another illusion of safety.

1960=1980=2000=?

Classic Review: Graduation Day

Another classic review from Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody! This time he skewers one of the most laughable slashers every made, Graduation Day.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011

Graduation Day (1981)

by Alec "Foiled Rotten" Cizak

The class of the slasher genre emerged in 1981. Not that these movies were that great or classy. They were among the last “spam in a cabin” flicks, as Joe Bob Briggs once referred to them, to uphold some basic tenets of late ‘70s/very early ‘80s subversive cinema. In the case of the slasher, the youngsters represented the Other. This was reinforced any time an adult was present. Adults and especially authority figures, such as police or deans or politicians, were generally safe from the killer because they represented the old order, which was threatened by the new order. There are numerous essays and books that attempt to explain other aspects of the genre. Most of them focus on the idea that sexual activity was the prime cause for the kids being punished. If you watch the majority of the slashers released in 1980 and 1981, which unfortunately, I have, it’s obvious that this wasn’t really true across the board. Terror Train, for example, came the closest to proving the gender critics’ theory about the old switcheroo taking place between the killer and the final girl (i.e., the killer is effeminate, the final girl is masculine). But even Terror Train doesn’t dwell on the notion that sex will get you killed. Jamie Lee Curtis does not play a “virginal-type” in Terror Train or Prom Night. I would go so far as to argue that her character in Halloween is not all that pure either. She smokes a joint, after all, on the way to her babysitting gig.

But I digress. You’ll notice throughout this piece that I digress frequently. I’m a digresser. Things might be different were I reviewing any other movie.

The slasher genre was already dying by 1981. It was clear that no filmmaker trying to cash in on Halloween’s success understood why John Carpenter’s template worked. A few films got the suspense part, but failed to create any characters worth caring about, so that when the characters got killed, the audience’s emotional response was hinged to the cleverness of the murder or the believability of the gore (which was not a part of Halloween). By 1981, the genre was subjected to “deconstructionist” experiments, such as The Burning and Slumber Party Massacre. And the genre was ready to be outright spoofed. Student Bodies was an example of a film removing any remaining elements of horror and suspense and demonstrating that the genre had become a joke. Quite by accident, ex-rabbi Herb Freed co-wrote, co-produced and directed the silliest slasher ever made, Graduation Day. The title, thus, is more appropriate than Freed might have intended. Graduation Day marked the end of any possibility of taking the genre seriously. After 1981, very few slashers were worth watching, let alone discussing in any critical manner.

Graduation Day is bad. It approaches Ed Wood-bad. Throughout the film, a flash-editing technique is employed to no dramatic effect at all. The result is annoying. The opening sequence is a great example of this. The event from the past that will cause the eventual stalk and slaughter of teenagers occurs amidst a flurry of flash cuts between a track meet, the track coach, and the crowd in the bleachers. Most of this is set to a disco song called “Everybody Wants to be a Winner,” which is appropriate considering everybody who imitated Halloween did so not out of respect for the style John Carpenter employed, but the profits the film earned. The winner of the track meet drops dead at the finish line, which is also appropriate, and off we go on an adventure of cinematic incompetence that’s not even coherent enough to warrant the ridicule of an audience at a midnight movie.

Things are suspect right away. Paula, the eventual final girl who spends the majority of the film off-screen, has hitch-hiked with a truck driver wearing a purple shirt and yellow ascot. The driver tries to feel her up, tells her he has “enough tongue” for the both of them, and then accuses her of being a “lesbo” when she refuses. She is set up as the first red-herring when she gets out and walks through a forest where the first killing will take place. The killer uses a stop-watch to commemorate the confusing track meet from the beginning of the film. The first victim, like everyone who is actually murdered in the film, is an anonymous member of the track team the audience is never allowed to get to know and generate sympathy for. The coach is then set up as another red-herring in one of many terrible musical sequences in the film. As he walks across campus, we get a "meet the crazy kids!" montage cross-cut to a heavy metal tune called, for absolutely no logical reason, “Lucky Strike.” Oh, yeah: half the “crazy kids” we meet have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot.

Crammed in among all the nonsense and moronic killings (after the first victim, the killer, for no apparent reason, adopts a fencing foil as his or her weapon of choice), we manage to learn that a character named Kevin, who looks like he’s thirty-five-years-old and belongs in a Lord of the Rings movie, was in love with Laura, the girl who dropped dead at the track meet in the beginning of the film. So much for red-herrings. So much, also, for the film maintaining its rep as a piece of subversive cinema. The moment the killer in a slasher turns out to be one of the “crazy kids,” the notion of the teenagers being the Other is pretty much snuffed.

One could write a book on the disjointed elements of Graduation Day—there is an inexplicable acoustic “jam” in the middle of the movie. Some guy who has nothing to do with the other characters cross-breeds Elvis and T. Rex for a god-awful performance of a god-awful song called “Graduation Day Blues.” Most notable is the eventual killer singing back up and “jamming” along with a harmonica. Then there is the most notorious musical number in the film—some horrific New Wave band called Felony plays a song called “Gangster Rock” for seven and a half minutes. By the time it’s over, the song’s annoying refrain is stuck in your head for the rest of the movie. Finally, the film’s most memorable line of dialogue is uttered near the end when a detective who is barely connected to the plot asks the final girl, Paula, “Who are you? What’s your stake in all this?” It’s a question that could be presented to every character in the movie.

But I digress. Again.

It’s my job to extract some sort of meaning from this mess, to come up with a clever take that suggests there is more going on than just an embarrassing narrative failure that still managed to rake in nearly twenty-four million dollars. It took me three miserable viewings to figure out what’s really going on in Graduation Day. Then, of course, in a half-waking state, I realized that the gold nugget of wisdom Graduation Day offers is this:

Life ends after high school.

For most of the conformist, yuppie clones that litter the American landscape, nothing could be more true. High school is it. Life never gets more glorious than scoring a winning touchdown on Friday night or “finger-banging old Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purty pink panties” in the back of a beat up Chevy on a Saturday night. It’s no accident that the killer and victims in Graduation Day are athletes (save Linnea Quigley, who gets killed simply because she showed her famous tits to her music teacher. But I digress). These are the shining jewels of every high school, and in most cases, as we all know, they go on to get married; work mindless, routine office jobs; put their fluids together to pump out one or two replacement clones and die without ever having established any meaning to their lives. Depressing? Of course. That’s why God invented suicide. But they don’t even have the guts to do that. So, enter Kevin, the goofy thirty-five-year-old with a goofier white-boy afro.

Herb Freed wants us to think Kevin is avenging the death of his true love, Laura. In fact, he is saving his classmates and teammates from entering the adult world and becoming one of the half-dozen jaded, corrupt, dishonest authority figures lurking in and around the high school. Folks like the music teacher, who dresses like Jerry Lewis, talks like Liberace and bangs young girls “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.” Folks like the principal and his secretary (played by a healthy, pre-bulimia Vanna White), who banter back and forth about doing work, particularly the bothersome task of explaining to parents where their children might have gone off to, before agreeing to meet up later to drink and screw. The worst kind of adult these kids can become (and a great many athletes do, in fact, become) is a law enforcement officer. The school cop is a smarmy fuck who threatens to throw the kiddies in jail for smoking weed before lighting up a joint for himself (read: Adults are hypocrites). The detective who shows up late in the movie to look for the students who have been murdered is the worst of them all. He has no interest in doing his job. When asked where his badge is, he shrugs and says, “Must have lost it.” And he harbors no illusions about his feelings towards the youth (thus, the Other) when he tells the principal, “I hate schools.”

The one adult the movie tries to set up for a ninth-inning Gatorade shower of sympathy is the track coach. The film fails, however, for several reasons. The coach is a red-herring right up until the very end. Also, he’s played by the bad guy from El Dorado, Christopher George (who ended his career pretty much the same way Bela Lugosi did, in one bad horror movie after another), who looks like a mean old fuck even when he’s smiling.

Nope. There’s nothing attractive about growing up and becoming “mature.” Adults are just teenagers who are allowed to get away with their bad behavior. The message of Graduation Day is difficult to find, but it’s there:

Trust no one over the age of twenty.

Halloween established, among many other conventions of the slasher genre, the contempt for authority. When Annie’s (Nancy Loomis) father fails to recognize the stench of marijuana in his daughter’s car, the audience knows he’s useless. When he blames the break in at the hardware store on teenagers, the audience knows he’s an enemy. Like most so-called conventions of the slasher genre, this element is used and abandoned throughout the canon of films that picked up the loose dollars Halloween left in its wake. Friday the 13th opens with a truck driver who won’t take a camp counselor all the way to Crystal Lake. That allows Mrs. Voorhees to pick up the unlucky gal and slit her throat in the forest. Like most slasher conventions, the contempt for authority gets twisted around in movies such as Terror Train, where the authority figure is a senior citizen whose demeanor is so friendly the audience can’t help but sympathize with him. This, of course, ruins the convention as it was originally intended. Some films incorporate authority into the band of kids being stalked, an example being The Prowler. The point here, before I digress again, is that the conventions of slasher films, as they have been defined by critics and theorists, are barely conventions since they don’t play out the same way on a consistent basis from film to film.

Graduation Day, however, bears the honor of taking the useless, corrupt authority figure to a campy, inept extreme. The film’s cynical portrayal of all adults is, in fact, its only redeeming feature.

The Myth of the Final Girl

One of the first things I’d like to address is the “Final Girl.”  Many critics have dealt with this subject (it seems to be one of the only things anyone has to talk about when it comes to slashers), most of them parrot the same misguided interpretations that were spawned by the likes of Carol Clover and Vera Dika back in the early 1980s, when slashers were first recognized as a genre.

The old criticism works like this:  The Final Girl is virginal.  She possesses matriarchal attributes that conflict with modern, feminist objections to motherhood being a mandatory role for women.  She doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t drink.  She’s basically a church girl and that affords her the power to thwart the killer (or, at least, survive until someone else can help her).  Criticism of the Final Girl has fueled overall criticism of the genre, claiming it is a conservative genre (this misinterpretation was even embraced by Ralph Reed, who once called John Carpenter’s Halloween the greatest film ever made).

I’m not going to go into whether or not these films are conservative.  At least, not today.  When we look at the early wave (1974-1981), it’s very difficult to convince anyone capable of critical thinking that these are across-the-board conservative narratives.  For this first post, I would rather address the conception of the original Final Girls—from Jess (Olivia Hussey), in Black Christmas, to Pam MacDonald (Vicky Dawson), in The Prowler—the last major slasher released in 1981.

The contention that the Final Girl is “pure,” or virginal, does not hold up well when compared to the evidence.  In Black Christmas, arguably the first real slasher, all the women exhibit post-feminist traits—they cuss, they drink, they smoke weed, and they like sex.  The Final Girl, Jess, is actually pregnant and in the process of convincing her boyfriend to go along with her decision to get an abortion.  Now, I’m not a doctor or anything, but I think once a woman is carrying a child in her womb, she’s going to have a tough time convincing anyone she’s a virgin.  Add the abortion to the mix, and you’ve got one extremely hip young woman.  The ink on Roe v. Wade was still wet when Black Christmas was filmed.  What separates Jess from the other girls in her house is, quite simply, she’s a tad more intelligent than the rest of them.

The same can be said for Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), often referred to (erroneously) as the original Final Girl (Halloween).  Laurie isn’t quite as “advanced” as Jess.  She’s still in high school.  Is it a horrible crime that she might still be a virgin at seventeen?  No matter, because nowhere in the film is it suggested that she is a virgin.  While smoking a joint on the way to her babysitting gig (Hello, marijuana! Not exactly the sort of thing a “pure” little girl does!), she reveals to her friend Annie  (Nancy Loomis) that she likes Ben Tramer.  While this may be stated in high school terms (“likes,” verus “lusts after”), the implication is that she wants to get down with Mr. Tramer at the dance and, possibly, after the dance.  She is the Final Girl attributed with “motherly” traits feminist critics find so reprehensible.  Paying careful attention to the film reveals, however, that she is actually the only responsible adult in the film.  This hardly warrants the charge that she may be exhibiting old fashioned mother-like behavior.  Someone in the movie needs to stop Michael Myers.  Even the good Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) requires a signal sent by Laurie (telling the kids to go down the street to a neighbor’s house) before he can try to save the day.  The only criticism I would have of Laurie Strode is that she does require someone to show up with a (useless) gun.  Other than that, I don’t see her as all that different from her friends who end up dead.

Jamie Lee Curtis would go on to help jumpstart the genre by starring in two Canadian-made slashers released in 1980—Prom Night and Terror Train.  In both films, she is a party girl.  Her survival hinges on her intelligence, nothing else.  One aspect of early slasher criticism, however, could apply to her character Alana, from Terror Train.  One of the more moronic theories set forth by Carol Clover is the notion that the Final Girl is masculine.  For evidence, she suggests that all the early Final Girls had masculine names and physical attributes.  The killer, she says, possesses more feminine traits (see Clover’s sex-drenched book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, for more whacky fantasies designed to reduce the horror genre to nothing more than an ongoing insult to women, perpetrated by repressed filmmakers).  Thus, you have Alana, a women with a man’s haircut and variation on the name Alan, facing off against Kenny Hampson (Derek MacKinnon), the most effeminate villain ever put on screen.  This is, however, one film in the genre.  These attributes are not repeated in other films of the first wave.

Alice (Adrienne King), from the original Friday the 13^th, is a great example of a Final Girl who meets none of the early critic’s expectations.  First of all, Alice is a woman’s name.  The character in the film is actually involved with two of the males at the camp.  When asked if she wants to accompany some of the men to check on the generator, she declines (a “masculine” woman would be all over such a task).  She drinks beer, smokes pot, and plays strip Monopoly.  Words that come to my mind when thinking about a woman like Alice: Fun, adventurous, feminine, intelligent.  Notice how the word “pure” didn’t make my list.  Alice is the first Final Girl to kick the shit out of the killer on her own.  I believe she, more than the Jamie Lee Curtis Final Girls, set the standard for the golden age slashers.

If we accept 1981 as the true end of the golden age, a quick rundown of the Final Girls in the slashers released that year will reveal more similarities with Alice, from Friday the 13^th, than the virginal, old-fashioned girl critics would prefer these women acted like.  The first example comes from My Bloody Valentine.  Sarah (Lori Hallier)—not a very masculine name, oh by the way—juggles two men throughout the film.  She’s sexy and confident and intelligent enough to survive the massacre.  Then there’s Ginny (Amy Steel), from Friday the 13^th part 2 (possibly the best slasher of that year).  The filmmakers make no attempt to portray her as virginal.  She carries on what looks to be a healthy relationship with a man and demonstrates astute awareness of the killer’s psychological foibles when she convinces him that she is his mother.  In The Prowler, the Final Girl works with a police officer she obviously has the hots for (she gets jealous when he dances with another woman).

Of course, there are exceptions to all rules—the folks who made Happy Birthday to Me named their Final Girl Virginia (oh, weren’t they just clever?).  The criticism had already started to creep into our collective consciousness by then, so it makes sense that some filmmakers would adhere to the criticism like sheep, just as the general public continues to do so when discussing these films.  Happy Birthday to Me is an oddball anyway, considering the producers and distributors tried to market the film as a thriller instead of a slasher.  And then there’s the hideous attempt to completely subvert the genre by having a Final Boy instead of a Final Girl (The Burning).  But these films are exceptions, and a look at their box office performances reveals that audiences didn’t buy it.  By taking away the power of the Final Girl (making that character male, or mocking her by playing along with the critics’ misconceptions), these filmmakers pulled the rug from what should be considered a positive, post-feminist genre of horror. 

The Final Girl, ultimately, represents strength and intelligence.  I’ve yet to meet a feminist who would argue that those aren’t desirable traits for any woman to possess.

Photos courtesy of Paramount Studios, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures (Sony), and A-Film Home Entertainment