Movie Meltdown: Michael Myers: Judgment Day
This week we sit down for an extended discussion of David Gordon Green’s Halloween. The latest in the series is sort of an attempt to be both a sequel and a reboot… but does it end up being successful at either?
And while we try to decide if we ourselves are suffering from PTSD from watching so many horror movies over the years, we also address… Tales from the Hood 2, survivor guilt, Fright, Judy Greer, new Loomis, Rob Zombie, comments from the audience, creepy mental asylum, what was great about the one woman that he killed that had the baby, becoming urban legend, missteps and poor choices, Black Christmas, the post-credits monster we’ve created, Snoop Dogg, amazingly well choreographed, it’s like breathing for the rest of us, Donald Pleasence, it’s not for the development of the characters it’s for the development of the screenplay, John Carpenter, Andi Matichak, little kids watching horror movies, Jamie Lee Curtis, a killing machine, Trick ‘r Treat, well-funded podcasts, the Scream rules, P.J. Soles, this is just become way more interesting movies that could have happened – and didn’t, it makes sense that she would be broken, Terminator 2, old ladies with short hair, we need this guy in that mask to go stab at her, VHS, a story based on more of the mythology and the legacy more so than trying to create a direct continuation of the story, the cult and green goo comes out of his eyes.
Spoiler Alert: Full spoilers for the new Halloween from David Gordon Green and probably a few from Carpenter’s original movie… so just go watch both of them before you listen.
“There’s so much potential every twenty minutes in this movie.”
In the original film, Michael Meyers had spent years in an asylum without killing anyone. It seems similarly plausible to me that he’s been just as catatonic in the time between then & the recent film.
Mike Meyers did not coincidentally come across the gas station with the podcasters. Instead he went to the cemetery (just as he did in the original film after escaping), and because they were there as well, he recognized & followed them.
I absolutely disagree with you about Terminator 2 being better than the original. In that first film, Sarah Connor has an arc where she goes from a hapless audience surrogate to the legendary savior of humanity she could hardly reconcile with her own self-image at the beginning of the film. In the sequel, the T-800 sent back survives the whole way through to eliminate the T-1000 and the future is prevented (even though that makes the original film logically impossible), both of which remove the need for any character arc on behalf of the Connors.
I agree that it would have been better to remove the podcasters, perhaps by having Dr. Sartain carry the mask with him on the bus so Michael can get it that way. The teenagers were mostly a waste of time, but despite the granddaughter’s boyfriend being dislikeable I didn’t need for him to be killed. It might have been better to just have Laurie hunting Michael the whole time rather than having him brought to her house (I really hated the Sartain twist), which would have been a quite different movie. I enjoyed the last act in Laurie’s house enough for me to enjoy the movie. I really hated the plot point in Halloween II were they were revealed to be siblings (even Carpenter, who wrote it while drunk, has contempt for that) and how that sidelined Laurie, so this is clearly above that for me. It is something of a retread of H20, which did some things better (like emphasizing Laurie’s alcoholism and having her flee the state), but on the whole I liked this more.