Why in the world did we need another entry in the exhausted “Halloween” franchise? The studio can give you 253 million reasons.
That was the box office tally of the newest Michael Myers slasher flick, and the first one to feature Jamie Lee Curtis since “Halloween: Resurrection” 17 years ago. It completely retcons the series, banishing all the movies since the second one from its memory -- the sequels, the reboots, the remakes -- and taking us back to square of the smart, tenacious girl and the masked psycho who wants to slash her to bits.
Except, of course, both Laurie Strode (Curtis) and Myers aka The Shape (played this time by Nick Castle) are both grandparent age by now. Indeed, Myers spends more time chasing Strode’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak) than Laurie, who has become a pistol-packin’ grandma and recluse who seems to have done little over the past 40 years but wait for Myers to get out of prison.
Supporting characters include Will Patton as a veteran cop in Haddonfield, the fictional city where all the mayhem takes place; Judy Greer as Laurie’s estranged daughter; and Haluk Bilginer as Dr. Sartain, the oddball psychiatrist who’s been treating Myers without much success, just as Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis did.
The new “Halloween” has a creative team from a comedy background: director David Gordon Green and his fellow screenwriters, Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley. It’s not a total yuk-fest, but they do slip in some comedic moments to lighten the mood.
Me? I likes my scary movies pure scary.
Bonus features are decent. They include seven deleted or extended scenes and the following documentary shorts:
“Halloween” is a decently energetic horror flickershow. But it doesn’t pass the basic litmus test of, “Does this movie need to exist?”
As you know, this film reunites Jamie Lee Curtis, in her most seminal role as Laurie Strode, with Michael Myers, with white-masked, silent killer who tried unsuccessfully to off her in the original movie of the same title from 40 years ago. It’s essentially a reunion.
But then, they already held this party in 1998 for “Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.” She managed to whack off Michael’s head with an axe in that one, Lizzie Borden-style. Undeterred, he reappeared a few years later for “Halloween: Resurrection,” and returned the favor by killing Laurie.
And this doesn’t even take into account the Rob Zombie reboot and its own sequel a few years back, or the various Laurie-less sequels of the 1980s and ‘90s. “Halloween III” didn’t even bother with featuring Michael or Laurie, making television the villain, or something.
The point is, it’s impossible to take this franchise seriously any longer. It’s been rebooted and remade and retconned to hell and back again. There is no sense of consequences because anybody who dies can just be brought back for the next iteration by the next round of filmmakers. Rinse and repeat.
This 40th anniversary reunion is part homage to the original and part new story jag. It requires us to ignore all the previous Halloween movies since the second one. It even asks us to forget that Laurie and Michael are supposed to be brother and sister -- a key piece of the franchise’s iconography for five decades.
In this telling, Michael Myers has been rotting in a mental institution for the past 40 years, never speaking a word to anyone. Meanwhile, Laurie seems to have done little in the years between other than arming herself and preparing for the eventual day he would come after her again.
There’s another creepy, vaguely European doctor trying to puzzle his way into Michael’s brain, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer). Laurie takes on look at him and cuts to the chase: “You’re the new Loomis,” she says, referring to Donald Pleasance’s psychiatrist, whose obsession turned from curing Michael to ending him. I think Pleasance has actually been in more Halloween movies than Curtis.
Judy Greer plays Laurie’s estranged adult daughter, who was raised under the threat of Michael’s return, and has her own teen daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). She goes off to a Halloween party with her friends, and soon finds herself stalked by her grandmother’s not-brother.
Will Patton turns up as Frank Hawkins, a veteran cop in the fictional town of Haddonfield, who reputedly was the first one on the scene for the 1978 murders. He putters around here and there, discovering the bodies Michael leaves in his wake, killing time until his own inevitable offing.
Nowhere in the movie is it ever mentioned that Michael would have to be close to 70 years old now. You’d think at some point even maniacal serial killers would segue from slicing horny teenagers to Metamucil and a nice day in the park.
Directed by David Gordon Green, who comes from a comedy background and co-wrote the screenplay with funnyman Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, “Halloween” contains a smattering of funny moments, such as two police officers comparing their lunches while sitting in their patrol car waiting to be stabbed.
How very different the horror genre has gotten in the last 40 years. I don’t think the original “Halloween” would’ve become anything like the iconic film it is with this sort of verbal diarrhea and passing attempts at levity.
John Carpenter knew that when you’re trying to scare people, concentrate on the scaring.
Sasha Lane sashays through “American Honey” with confidence and verve. Literally plucked off a beach by writer/director Andrea Arnold with no acting experience whatsoever, she plays the teenage protagonist in a rambling, nearly 3-hour-long contemplation of wastrel youth living and partying on the road.
The film is the spiritual successor to the oeuvre of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine -- films like “Kids” that essentially just follow young people around, observing their wild behavior without commentary. Here they are lost souls riding a bandwagon to oblivion, a dozen or so youngsters crammed into a huge van traveling from town to town, knocking on doors to sell magazine subscriptions.
You’ve probably seen these kids at your doorstep, talking about hard times they’ve been through and how you can help them reach their dreams by helping them earn “points” toward a college scholarship. Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is the oldest and savviest player in this game, donning an old sport coat and whipping up a new tale of woe based on how he reads each person answering the door.
Star (Lane) is stuck in some hillbilly town caring for a pair of kids while their mother spends her days in a stupor in a honkey-tonk bar, and the father makes increasingly disturbing sexual overtures. When she spots the magazine crew of free spirits, she hitches along on a whim.
It’s an eclectic mix of losers and wannabes, most of whom remain in the background as a sort of Greek chorus. There’s the goth girl, the surfer dude, the buff guy who never wears a shirt and has a tendency to take his junk out and wave it at people for laughs.
The main dynamic is between Jake, Star and Krystal (Riley Keough), the hardcase young woman running the show. She treats the members of the crew like lost puppies she picks up by the side of the road, and discards just as easily if they don’t play by her rules and earn money. At the end of a run, the two lowest-earning people have to square off in a fight at the “Losers’ Ball.”
Jake is her plaything, exuding an attitude of independence and brashness, but ready to serve as her chauffeur or bed partner as Krystal demands. Clearly enamored with Jake, Star is soon at odds with the boss-lady.
Things play out from there, carefree encounters punctuated by long spells inside the van, cruising along, getting high and rockin’ to some tunes. The most memorable episode is Star taking off with a trio of middle-aged rich cowboys, the type who wear 10-gallon hats and big belt buckles, but probably haven’t done any manual labor in 20 years.
I didn’t mind Arnold’s unstructured narrative, though many people may find it languid. I did wish it would round out to something more consequential than a simple love triangle. But the tour goes on, some faces disappear without warning and new ones show up to replace them.
Soon Star is now longer the newbie, but a veteran of the rainbow troupe. She finds herself by losing herself, I guess you’d say. “American Honey” is a whirlwind of a film, a harsh breeze of chaotic energy that doesn’t really have any purpose or direction, but kicks up quite a ruckus along the way.
Bonus features are deplorably lacking, consisting entirely of an interview with Keough and Lane.
When he was a younger man, Pierce Brosnan played James Bond and was quite good at, to my mind. Now he’s around 60 and too old to play a run-of-the-mill spy, but of just the right vintage to segue into the burgeoning Geezer Spy genre -- now dominated by Liam Neeson (“Taken”) but also populated by the likes of Kevin Costner (“3 Days to Kill”) and Denzel Washington (“The Equalizer.”)
These movies all tend to resemble each other, to wit: our hero is an efficient, ruthless killer who has now retired from the game/faked his death, but is recruited/forced to take on One Last Job which, of course, goes horribly awry and thus he must wade through a veritable army of bad guys who mock him for his decrepitude, until he shows them what a supreme badass he still is.
The whole thing is an exercise in aging Baby Boomer fantasy, which doesn't necessarily mean the movie won't be very good, though that is in fact the case with "The November Man."
The plot is a nigh-incomprehensible mish-mash of gunfights, car chases and distressed damsels, with Brosnan as an ex-CIA man who finds himself facing off with some of his old crew, plus some new whippersnappers.
He's brought in to sneak out a high-level source, who is then assassinated in the middle of the operation. Soon he's laying waste to Russian mafia, various assorted goons and his own CIA handlers/turncoats.
The action scenes are crisp and engaging, but any time people start talking the movie slows to a crawl.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the ideas of geriatrics pulverizing their younger competition. Until they can come up with some fresher stories, though, best to leave the oldsters in retirement.
Extra features are pretty good, though you'll have to spring for the Blu-ray edition to get them -- the DVD version comes with zilch.
There's a making-of documentary, featurettes on shooting in Belgrade and Brosnan's comeback, plus a feature-length commentary with Brosnan, director Roger Donaldson and producer Beau ST. Clair.
"You can be a human being or a killer of human beings, but not both. Sooner or later, one of those will extinguish the other."
So says Peter Devereaux, and he should know. After more than three decades as a top CIA operative, he left a trail of bodies so long it earned him his unofficial codename, from which the movie "The November Man" takes its title. That's because after he comes through a place, one of his grizzled old handlers relates, nothing is left alive.
That analogy doesn't really make any sense -- of course plenty of things are still alive after November; that's how we get spring -- but then neither does much of the rest of the movie. It's a frenetic mish-mash of shootouts and bombastic dialogue, with some damsels in distress and vague geopolitical outcomes in the balance.
Pierce Brosnan optioned the rights to the book series by Bill Granger right around the time he was given the boot as James Bond in 2005. It's too bad they didn't actually make this movie back then, because it would've seemed a lot fresher.
Stop me if this sounds familiar: a past-his-prime spy is forced into taking One Last Job, but things go bad and he is forced to wade through a quagmire of thugs and bosses of uncertain loyalties, all the while sternly lecturing the whippersnappers about what a badass he is, before providing them a demonstration.
Liam Neeson, Kevin Costner and other have already taken their stab at this premise, with varying degrees of success. (Up next: Denzel Washington with this fall's "The Equalizer.") Now it's Brosnan's turn, and while he makes for a nicely creased, convincing geezer spy, the story never becomes coherent enough to land any real emotional punches.
The setup is that someone has a very big secret about Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), a Russian pol in line to take over the presidency. It seems he was a bad boy during the Chechnyan uprising, executing people and even taking a young girl named Mira as his personal sex slave. So Federov wants to take out anyone who knows anything about it, while the Americans (Will Patton and Bill Smitrovich are the senior spooks on the scene) want to leverage Mira against him.
Trouble is, no one can find her. So they settle for the next best thing, Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko), an advocate against sex trafficking who counseled Mira. Devereaux gets brought in to do a simple "exfil" -- that's "sneak somebody out" in spy talk -- of Federov's assistant, who has the goods on him. Alas, nasty things happen, setting off a chain reaction in which everybody is after Alice, and Devereaux becomes the only one she can trust.
There are a couple of X factors, both in the forms of younger, lean and hungry assassins. Alexa (Amila Terzimehić) works for Federov, has the body of a ballet dancer, the beak of a hawk and the stare of a killer. David Mason (Luke Bracey) is a CIA stooge who used to be Devereaux's protégé, until an op went bad and they became antagonists.
Much of the screenplay by Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek -- too much, really -- is concerned with a chess match of wits between Devereaux and Mason, with the young guy better at rough-and-tumble skills while the older chap plays the superior long game. It's the old "teacher still has a few lessons to impart to the student" shtick.
But then the movie morphs into a relationship story between Devereaux and Alice, with her bearing a terrible secret (which I figured out around the 45-minute mark). Neither dynamic gets enough air to survive on its own, and both end up suffocating.
Director Roger Donaldson has made some terrific thrillers, including "No Way Out," which ratcheted up the tension inch by inch. But "The November Man" ends up as a lot of gunfights interspersed with confusing dialogue.
Or to put it another way: "You can have a revenge saga or a May/November romance, but not both."
The title of "The Fourth Kind" refers to a scale established to measure human contact with extra-terrestrials. The first kind is observation, and the second is physical evidence. The third kind is actual contact -- as in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" -- and the fourth is when humans are abducted.
Yes, it's one of those kinds of movies.
"The Fourth Kind" is written and directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, and claims to be based on real events that happened in remote Nome, Alaska, in October of 2000. In fact, star Milla Jovovich introduces herself at the beginning and says that she'll be playing Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist investigating the strange phenomena plaguing the townsfolk.
Taking things several steps further, there is voluminous video footage of the real Abigail Tyler, audio recordings of police interviews, etc. Osunsanmi frequently cuts back and forth between the shaky archival footage and the recreation with actors, and sometimes even plays them side-by-side in split screens.
It's all a hoax, though.
How do I know? Start with the fact that the woman who supposedly is Abigail Tyler is shown being interviewed on a television show hosted by ... Olatunde Osunsanmi.
But beyond that, if actual video and sound recordings like this were authentic, you wouldn't need to pay Milla Jovovich and a bunch of other actors millions of dollars to make pretend, because the real stuff would stand up on its own.
I wouldn't mind having the blanket pulled over our eyes if "The Fourth Kind" were any kind of a good movie. But it's a dreadful bore.
Tyler is haunted by the recent death of her husband, who was (she believes) stabbed to death in their bed. Her agitation is amplified by several of her patients all having the same delusion about a white owl watching them at night.
The troubling visions grow violent while Tyler has them hypnotized and ... Oh, wait, didn't I tell you? In addition to alien abductions, the movie also uses hypnosis as a major plot device.
About the only cliché the film doesn't employ is waking up and finding it was all a dream. Or, more accurately, a nightmare, and one inflicted on the audience.
