Finale Girls: HALLOWEEN ENDS

The trick to making the umpteenth entry in a long-running series is getting the exact right balance of new ideas and old familiar ones. David Gordon Green’s been tinkering with that balance for reviving Halloween for three movies now. His first attempt as director and co-writer had one great new idea: bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis and making her original slasher survivor Laurie Strode a doomsday prepper awaiting the inevitable return of her masked killer, Michael Myers. The rest of the movie was content to retread the series’ usual stalk-and-slash set pieces. Green’s second effort, Halloween Kills, was even worse, a procession of characters making stupid decisions in a mindless slaughterhouse of a picture. Third time’s the charm. Halloween Ends dutifully doles out violence, but is also concerned with the effects of all this slasher film violence on the people involved. Instead of trotting out trite therapy talk or easy metaphor, it sits in their discomfort. Curtis and her granddaughter (Andi Matichak) are trying to mourn and move on with their lives, but they, and the entire town of Haddonfield, can’t escape the shadow of the killing sprees in their past. Even with Myers missing for years, the survivors don’t shake the feeling he’ll be back. They still live with the consequences. Early in the movie, Laurie is confronted with a scarred, mute victim from the previous entry whose family blames the Strodes for provoking these attacks. How can anyone ever fully recover when the scars remain? The movie settles into a sensitive groove, watching these women try to make new friends and keep the old, while the menacing shadow of their past looms larger as the eponymous holiday draws near. Because the movie takes its time drawing us into their lives, and the cast of characters surrounding them, the inevitable bloody murders inflicted upon the ensemble will sting a little more than usual.

Green also cleverly makes this a movie about the sick fascination with violence—the grim allure of the potential power it brings, the false sense of control it can lend to the lonely and dispossessed, the nasty curiosity of seeing bodies torn apart—that movies like this (or real life mass death, for that matter) can draw out of some troubled people. He introduces a new character of a young man (Rohan Campbell) who suffers a terrible mishap in the opening scene—one of the film’s best shocks, and the one with the longest-lasting effects. The poor guy then barely recovers to scrape by after such a life-altering incident. Perhaps because of this trauma, in addition to the social ostracism it brought him, he finds himself drawn to dark thoughts. As he gets entangled in the lives of the Strodes, one can see the potential for redemption through shared connection with the ugliest aspects of their pasts. But one also sees an ominous potential for further destruction. Because of the series to which this story belongs, you can make a good guess about where it’s going. And, indeed, the plot’s painted into a corner in its final moments, with only one excessively nasty way out. (The final frames of Myers in this one are especially stupid.) But Green admirably keeps the ideas simmering, and the sympathy flowing, even as bodies start to pile up. Here’s an agreeably mournful slasher picture, that largely keeps the slashing to a few well-chosen moments throughout before a bloody finale. The technical details—a casually blocked scope frame, a sinister score from John Carpenter riffing on his original work, teeth-grindingly convincing gore effects—are impeccable. But it’s the compelling mood and genuine human interest in its ideas that keeps it a cut above the usual pulp.

Mere Universe:EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

There’s little wonder why the multiverse is a concept everyone’s all in on these days. Who wouldn’t want to imagine there’s a slightly better version of reality just outside our reach? That’s clearly the juice giving the little sci-fi action dramedy Everything Everywhere All at Once its buzz. The picture has a mainstream Marvel-sized hook animating its wiggly, fanciful character-based scamper. With the likes of the latest Spider-Man, Marvel is just using the idea of parallel universe-hopping to smash their action figures together—and cross-promote, of course. Here co-writers and co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert use the comic book conceit as a stage for some great performers to act out while the style around them goes wild. It’s a hodgepodge movie of fun and varied styles. But it goes on and on, and achieves less and less. For all the giddy befuddlement and constant whimsical invention, it’s ultimately in pursuit of nothing more than a greeting card’s worth of insight and sentiment. Some audiences will walk out dazed, thinking they’re not smart enough to get it. They may be right. But others of us may catch on quick, and feel the grinding repetitions, and the gnawing void of nothingness at its center—sometimes literally visualized, a convenient metaphor.

At least it’s an actor’s showcase that’s not totally swamped by its concept. To the extent it hangs on to some understandable, and moving, ideas, it finds them in its cast. The solid center is Michelle Yeoh, the martial arts powerhouse—everything from Police Story 3 to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to a James Bond movie—who is introduced here as a harried proprietor of an aging laundromat. She buries her usual steely resolve and glamorous confidence in a disgruntled melancholy rut. It’s a good reminder that she does putting-on-a-false-front and indescribable-yearning as well as anyone. Her business is strained, her small apartment is stuffed with homey clutter, she’s being audited, her ailing father (James Hong) has flown in from China, her wishy-washy sweetie husband (Ke Huy Quan) is contemplating divorce, and her grown daughter (Stephanie Hsu) has brought her girlfriend (Tallie Medel) home. Yeoh and the others sell the early down-to-earth scenes’ introductory plate-spinning as the characters’ complications stir, culminating in the group turning up for a meeting with a frumpy auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) in a dreary cubicle. The cast sells the initial complications with heart and spirit—it’s a sly Sundance comedy bristling with fine character details and dilemmas, a story of first-generation immigrants and marriage and mid-life crisis and family stress and small business owners and a drive for acceptance of oneself and others. There’s much to admire in its setup.

But soon the hurry-scurry anything-is-possible of the hook erupts, and then starts to wear thin. Everything goes wild—everywhere, all at once—when Yeoh’s husband suddenly snaps to attention, inhabited by a warrior from Alpha Universe with a cryptic message. (Here’s where Quan’s performance, his first leading role since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, proves every bit as formidable, charismatic, and shape-shifting as Yeoh’s.) The screen fractures. Suddenly we’re in two worlds, and told the fate of all possible worlds hangs in the balance. Doubles of others are crawling out of the woodwork, converging on their divergent prey at the behest of a mysterious (and sassy) inter-dimensional supervillain intent on hunting Yeoh down. (She has her reasons.) This kicks off a flurry of capable action and attempted comedy that rarely lets up, as Yeoh hops through the skills and memories of all manner of possible hers. She’s a movie star, a chef, a sign-spinner, a martial artist, a maid, a woman with long, wiggly, frankfurter-shaped fingers, and a rock. In the process, though the meek laundress never leaves the IRS building, the action grows wilder and more elaborate as office supplies and stylistic surprises become weapons, gags, or, often, both. There’s some fun to be found as it hops around, and in its glimpses of other worlds the filmmakers clearly enjoy mixing up the look. I quite liked their Wong Kar-Wai-inspired step-printed tale of missed opportunity amid the neon lights of a theater district, and the flattest, driest jokes subtitled from the canyon of silence amid some stones. But I couldn’t shake the question of why, if this movie could go anywhere and do anything, it chose to limit itself to repetitive silliness. The joy of its invention grows thin when it finds no new notes to play after a while.

The Daniels, still best known for the beguiling bodily contortions and room-smashing dance moves of the “Turn Down For What” music video, if not the grotesquely cute ambulatory corpse fantasy Swiss Army Man, make full use of their visual imaginations. Bodies flip and flail, fantasy erupts and contracts, aspect ratios shrink and grow, and characters become doubled, tripled, quadrupled in personality and fashion sense. Along the way, the actors somehow never quite lose the throughlines that make their characters tick. (The noticeable affection between Yeoh and Quan goes a long way there.) It grounds the proceedings in something understandable, even while a concept that can go anywhere and do anything slowly reveals its genre constraints. The movie’s not interested in radical mind-sharing like the Wachowskis’ Sense8 or souls adrift in time and space like Cloud Atlas. But nor is its spirited, monotonous kung fu acrobatics interested in dumb chops and kicks. (The movie adores them to excess, gilding them with glitter and blood, even unto some tasteless anal retentive gags.) Instead, it’s an everything bagel of genre tropes pushed to the brink and emotionally narrow. As it drags on and on well past the two hour mark, finding only endless repetition of its bag of tricks, it draws to a climactic flourish of mawkish sentiment and bumper sticker philosophizing. Sure, it’s theoretically sweet to see the fate of the universe comes down to learning to love and accept friends and neighbors, and appreciating the life you have instead of the dreams you don’t, and just hugging your daughter and accepting her girlfriend because it’s the right thing to do. But for all the half-imagined sci-fi rigamarole, and the admirable work of a fine cast, you’d think it’d find conclusions that are as clever as they are self-impressed.

Serialized Killers: HALLOWEEN KILLS andPARANORMAL ACTIVITY: NEXT OF KIN

A big part of loving a horror franchise is often loving the movies even when you don’t like them. I think that’s probably what’s happening with fans of Halloween when looking at Halloween Kills. This sequel to 2018’s reboot once again finds the masked Michael Myers stalking the streets of Haddonfield on Halloween night, this one picking up mere seconds after the last ended with his perpetual final girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) seemingly trapping him in a burning building. This new one has a great early scene in which the Strodes, weeping and exhausted in the back of an escaping truck (a la Texas Chain Saw Massacre), see a fleet of firetrucks speed by in the opposite direction. “Let it burn!” Laurie howls. Chilling stuff. Will the masked killer escape the building, slaughter the first responders, and keep on stabbing? What do you think? Of course the audience, having seen all the other movies that the new ones pretend didn’t happen—namely Halloweens two through eight—knows that Myers is nigh unkillable and a total psychological blank. These folks, having only experienced the terror in the classic original, would have a much more limited view of his danger. That’s why it’s funny to see this movie build back up the mythos, like it’s speed-running the ones it previously ignored. It finds a town gripped with certainty that Myers is a totem of unstoppable evil and must be hunted down, to the point where survivors of the ’78 film are now much older and prowling around looking to confront the monster and kill him themselves, whipping up frenzies and gathering hunting parties before inevitably walking right into their own slaughters.  

This is an idea director David Gordon Green (now on his fourth filmmaking identity after art house indie darling, stoner comedy helmer, and star-driven based-on-a-true-story maker) uses to make a commentary on mob mentality, which is weirdly undercut by the fact that, given the franchise’s evidence so far, Myers really is the rare guy who should be taken out. He’ll just keep stabbing otherwise. The movie, then, asks us to root against the people who want to stop him and enjoy the extravagantly bloody kills as sharp objects jab into people quickly established for the purpose of feeling a little bad as the gore geysers. It’s entirely confused, and ends with an hour-long chain reaction of inscrutable decisions on the part of everyone on screen. Best and worst is that it sidelines Curtis in a hospital for the entire runtime, keeping her almost completely separated from the main action and never really in danger. At least she didn’t have to get involved in all this violent nonsense. It’s funny that a series that started with John Carpenter’s stone-cold genre classic and was immediately ripped off by hundreds of filmmakers has never been able to approach that level of skill again, and, in fact, has only made sequels worse than the best of the rip offs. I’ll give Halloween Kills this, though. It’s definitely a Halloween. There’s even a neat flashback prologue where Jim Cummings plays a Haddonfield deputy on the original night. For fans, that, and the return of all the old signifiers of the series, might be enough.

For my money, Paranormal Activity is one of the main horror series for which weak entries have yet to dim my affection. I love the whole project, even when individual films within it are bad, which they are about half the time. Par for the course, I suppose. Final Destination. Friday the 13th. Scream. Nightmare on Elm Street. Chucky. The great horror series are all so iconoclastic that the ideas and imagery push fans through all kinds of subpar stuff. With Paranormal Activity movies, I like the slow and steady feature-length crescendos, and the ways in which the scares come not from any recurring slasher but from the filmmaking techniques. Here’s a franchise that teaches the audience to study the frame and the angle to be able to predict from where the unsettling qualities will creep in. The characters are always trying to figure out what exactly is going on in the setting, with strange bumps in the night and eerie circumstances escalating slowly but surely.

The original was a resourceful $15,000 homemade project from some self-taught amateurs that was such a scary use of its found-footage concept. It gives these films a queasy semi-real intimacy that makes, say, the sudden slamming of a door in the middle of the night truly spine-tingling. When the frame is a static shot of a bedroom, or the screen cycles through security feeds, or the camera is placed on an oscillating fan, the very predictability of the pattern has an audience leaning in to spot the unsettling details that may or may not emerge. It plays on that typical horror film idea that we do and do not want to see what’s hiding just…around…that…dark…corner. This makes for great scares throughout the series, and the best (1, 3, and 5 in my book, with some good sequences in 2 and 4, too) pass the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck lights-on-in-the-house-that-night test.

After some downtime following a largely unsatisfying 3D effort back in 2015, Paramount has brought back the little franchise that could for a Halloween treat. The new idea is Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, and it’s barely connected to the mythology built up before. Instead of a close-quarters haunted house experience, it changes up the setting to a wide-frame wintry fields-and-forests vision. The grey sky and chilled air—and vast silent stretches of isolated nowhere—builds the same sense of paranoia and unease. The film follows a young woman (Emily Bader) whose boyfriend (Roland Buck III) goes with her to upstate New York to meet the family she never knew. Discovering that she was adopted after her birth mother, an Amish teenager fleeing her family, left her out-of-wedlock baby at a hospital, she decides to make a documentary about her reunion. Hence an excuse for another movie of self-shot footage. (It also looks a little too slick for the series’ usually rougher effect. Once or twice I even had to ask myself what in-story camera got certain angles.) The family live in a tiny village with a few houses, an enormous barn, and a mysterious locked church in the middle of the woods. While our protagonists settle in for a week’s stay, we start to get the sense that the Amish family isn’t quite on the level. And just before you start to wonder if it’s all a bit insensitive in its folk-horror spin on a real religious minority, you’ll probably guess these cultists aren’t really Amish.

The setting is novel for these movies, and the lead performance is appealing, but the shivers it tries to spin are, after some time, all tired echoes of previous tricks. That gives more time to wonder why characters do what they do. By the time I’d discovered the possibly haunted room directly above the guest quarters, or the hidden cultist passages under the ground, or the hidden supply closet of [spoilers], I think I wouldn’t stay that last night. Nonetheless, director William Eubank (whose deep-sea Alien riff Underwater made good use of economical dark corners) and the series’ regular screenwriter Christopher Landon (whose Happy Death Days and Freaky are crowd-pleasingly clever horror treats) do what they can to wring suspense. There are some shadowy secret passages, a deep hole in the ground, and a fiery climax, including a genuinely funny thrill when a couple characters go through hell to get to their van and realize they left the keys back at the beginning of the escape sequence. But overall it’s mostly a long wait for a meager pay off, as the worst of these so often are. It’s a pleasant enough sit to be back in the creepy vibes and shaggy conversations and low-fi effects for a while, though. I’ll be hyped for another one. Guess that makes me a fan.

The slightly more satisfying trip down memory lane for my fellow fans might be Unknown Dimension: The Story of Paranormal Activity. Now streaming on Paramount+, it is a decent promotional retrospective documentary—closer to the sort of thing that would’ve been a DVD special back in the day than longer, more in-depth efforts like Crystal Lake Memories, a nearly seven-hour look at Friday the 13ths' creation—that shows the ingenuity and cleverness behind the series’ construction. It interviews all the principal creatives of cast and crew and is honest about some of the mistakes that were made in growing the series. (Producer Jason Blum admits “4 and 6 are the weakest.”) It’s nice to see clips and remember the context for each entry while hearing the thought processes and negotiations behind their makings. (I never tire of hearing that Steven Spielberg was so freaked out by the original that he returned his screener in a garbage bag.) It’s enough to make this viewer want to revisit the whole series. That it ends with an uncritical ad for the new feature is just something horror fans have to be used to by now. There’s no great idea that can’t be done again and again and again, for better and worse. And we’ll show up for it.

Cutting Class: KNIVES OUT

One of writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest qualities is his ability to surprise without sacrificing his trustworthiness as a storyteller. His films are idiosyncratic without being unduly erratic, thoughtfully engaged with their chosen genres without stepping outside of their tropes, capable of grand loop-de-loops surprising audience expectations while making the outcome beautifully air-tight inevitable. He’s a mainstream filmmaker — recently with appealing sci-fi spectacles like moody time-travel assassin thriller Looper and the soulful, satisfying Last Jedi — aware of both the necessary elephantine expressions of recognizable story mechanics and burrowing termite interest of carefully selected specific details. He can take us effortlessly into places we’d never expect, because at every step of the way, we know we’re in good hands. He’s as clever as he is knowledgeable. His new film, Knives Out, is a wickedly well-done murder mystery, indebted indisputably to hundreds of detectives stories of yore, and yet plays out its story so fluidly and delightfully that it feels fresh nonetheless. As the movie begins, an elderly millionaire mystery author (Christopher Plummer) has been found in his study with his throat slit and a knife in his hand. The local cops (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) are prepared to call it a suicide when a well-known detective (Daniel Craig, with a melodious Southern accent) steps in to consult on the case. He’s prepared to look at every detail again, and scrutinize every member of the dead writer’s squabbling, privileged family. Sure, the case appears open-and-shut, but he just wants to see it with his fresh eyes, eliminating no possibilities and no suspects. Holmes and Poirot and Dupin would be proud. In Johnson’s hugely entertaining screenplay, bristling with witty asides, barbed feints, and prickly offhand political resonance, the family members are interviewed, with plenty of brisk, bantering back-and-forth editing into and out of interlocking flashbacks sketching in the moments leading up to the mysterious death. So many have motives, and so many witnesses weave in and out of other’s stories, that it’ll take a while to untangle the knotty web, to winnow the suspects' bratty rich-kid motives from those capable of murderous intent.

It’s a terrific ensemble, perfectly cast, every person on screen, down to the smallest one-scene roles, quickly, expertly characterized with energetic shorthand and snappy individualism. There’s the regal real estate mogul daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), her duplicitous husband (Don Johnson), and their entitled grown boy (Chris Evans); a business-manger son (Michael Shannon) and his glowering alt-right offspring (Jaden Martel); a shallow daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her differently-shallow daughter (Kathryn Langford); and, in the center of the madness, a home health aide (Ana de Armas) whose sweetness and good heart made her a kind companion to the late old man, but leaves her on the outside looking in as the vultures circle. Whodunnit is of course the primary question, but as Johnson unravels his tale, the why’d-they-dunnit becomes as interesting. As in all good detective stories, the personalities and the accumulation of clues are as deeply pleasurable as the eventual reveals where the puzzle snaps into place, and Johnson places each new piece on the table with stylish verve. The whip-smart cutting and pace stays just ahead of the characters and just behind the mystery’s solution, while never going out of its way to hide its cards or throw up false tangents to shake off the scent. It all falls into place with a logical snap, each payoff set up, even when you didn’t realize it at the time. The production design — a big house full of creaky staircases and teetering bookshelves and morbid knickknacks — is a handsomely cozy setting, fitting such a tale. As one investigator quips, the old man lived in a Clue board. The camera work is energetic and inspired — and, oh, so beautifully textured — without distracting from the cool logic of the proceedings, while the characters are broad yet warm, at once caricatures yet imbued with all-too-understandable humanity. It’s richly developed, never just a film of pawns in a master-mystery-mind’s game. That’s how well this game is played. This is the best film of its kind in quite some time.