ashley dreemurr

im writing this about a week or so after actually watching it because i had attempted to start writing and didnt get more than half a paragraph in. ill follow it up with part three shortly since i watched the next one today. for now, heres part two of bussyween, covering halloween ii (1981), directed by rick rosenthal. Keep reading

for starters im greatly impressed by the cinematography on several fronts. dean cundey outdid himself with a lot of the shots, and the hospital setting that most of the movie takes place in is shot with a beautifully claustrophobic feel. somehow they managed to make a tiny little hospital in the late 70s (more on that later) look good.

the other main reason im impressed with the cinematography is that while this was definitely shot and released three years after the original, it takes place literally on the exact same halloween night as the original. it picks up exactly where halloween leaves off and almost feels like more of a part two rather than just a sequel, and honestly aside from the obvious wig jamie lee curtis wears, it looks like it takes place on the exact same night. were it not for the wig and the drastically sonically different score i feel like you could edit these films together into one giant, 2.5 hour long cut, and someone who wasnt intimately familiar with these movies would probably be fooled into thinking it was one film.

speaking of the score, it leaves me with very mixed feelings. there arent a lot of particularly new compositions, most of it is comprised of newly recorded, much more synth heavy arrangements of the same themes composed for the original film. conceptually this doesnt bother me in the slightest but in terms of execution i think it could have been handled better. the classic theme sounds kinda goofy now that the piano has been replaced with a weirdly brassy sounding synth. its a sound design decision i dont really understand but if thats what carpenter and newcomer to the halloween series alan howarth (carpenters musical partner in the studio for most of the 80s) really wanted then good for them. the main exception is "the shape stalks again", which is a rearrangement of the stalking cue from the original, that is far more tense than its predecessor.

a notable difference between this film and the previous is that of the level of violence and gore featured. whereas the original is paced more like a thriller and uses that to its advantage instead of relying on extremely gory deaths, carpenter decided to reshoot some of the kills in this movie to make them more violent to compete with all of the clones that were popping up in the emerging slasher genre, most notably 1980s friday the 13th. i dont think this really detracts that much from the film, i think for the most part it ratchets up the tension nicely compared to the original. that said, i think some of them are somewhat unnecessary solely because of pacing reasons.

ive saved my thoughts on the films pacing and narrative for last because i wanted to get my more positive feelings out of the way up front. where i think this movie falls apart is in its pacing. scenes are drawn out far beyond where they need to be length wise and the whole film feels padded to hell. it isnt really until the last act that everything starts to flow really really well. the first act feels alright and sets things up well enough, even if i feel like the way they repeatedly have characters talk about how "that kid who killed his parents 15 years ago? yeah i heard he escaped" kinda cheapens things and just generally feels unnecessary.

the first act also sets up probably the least interesting part of the film: its new characters. mostly the trio of nurses who clearly only exist to pad out the films kill count. jimmy, the shy boy who develops a crush on laurie, is the only one with any real importance to the plot, and even he ends up being mostly irrelevant. the other two literally only exist to be killed off in admittedly a somewhat interesting and gruesome way.

the second act is easily the low point of the film, however. pointless scene after pointless scene attempting to flesh out characters that just arent anywhere near as interesting as the original films side cast. not to mention an arguably useless dr loomis, one of the standouts of the original, now reduced to wandering around town like an idiot looking for michael and giving exposition that leads to the eventual twist reveal in act three.

skip this paragraph if you dont want to be spoiled for a 40 year old movie, but this films main contribution to the series is the reveal that laurie is michaels long lost sister. i have to spoil this here because almost the entire rest of the series until the 2018 sequel is built off of this revelation, but i can imagine if youre reading this and have an interest in these movies already then you probably already know this. it is a central plot feature in seven other films including the two rob zombie-directed remake/reboot films, and is referenced extensively in those films, and it all started with this film when a bored john carpenter struggling with writers block decided "what if michael and laurie were siblings?"

aside from all these issues the last 40 or so minutes of the film improve drastically on the weaker middle, and from the moment laurie gets out of bed and starts running it is tense as fuck and i feel it almost outdoes the finale of the first film. the final few scenes are incredibly shot, and the last shot of the film in particular is such an effective shot to end a film on.

overall halloween ii is a good 60 minute part two to the original halloween, stretched out a bit too far to a 90 minute feature film. it clearly has almost as big a legacy as the original does, considering the only continuity in the series that does not acknowledge it in some way is the 2018 reboot timeline. were it tightened up just a bit i honestly think i might prefer it to the original as a standalone film, but as it stands i think the two work better together, as its sequel nature makes the less interesting parts marginally more tolerable.

join me next time on bussyween for a look at the franchises first and only attempt at branching out from the story of michael myers, halloween iii: season of the witch.

im eschewing the HTML posting for this one because i dont have the patience to sit here and format an entire review to look like its from deltarune or into the format of a pesterlog and i really dont think anyone would want to suffer thru reading something like that either. also because this is being posted to tumblr as well (minus this preface) so it just makes more sense to skip it.

bussyween is simultaneously a terrible idea on my part as well as an excuse for me to post more to non-twitter social media sites. as the name hopefully suggests, im slogging my way thru the entire halloween film series, all thirteen films, and posting reviews for each one. for this first installment, we have none other than the obvious first film in the series: 1978s halloween, directed by john carpenter.

of the thirteen films in this series this is one of only two that i have actually already seen before. ive seen it a small handful of times over the last few years and its easily one of my favorite films of all time. because of that i may have some bias towards this one but if you go into reading a review of a piece of media not expecting some kind of bias from the reviewer then you're probably an idiot.

the film opens with arguably one of its most effective scenes. following the beautifully presented opening credits we have a roughly four minute unbroken shot of a 6 year old michael myers sneaking back into his house and murdering his sister judith. you can see the extent to which carpenter and crew took advantage of their scant (at the time) budget, most notably in the way the first person perspective carefully hides the various crew members moving things around as needed while the young michael makes his way thru the house. theres also the wonderfully hammy "dying" movements that judith makes as shes stabbed to death, or the way the camera looks away from her while michael continues to stab so the crew can presumably cover the actress in blood. its sort of a microcosm of the entire rest of the film, with many more such examples occurring throughout the runtime.

the hamminess and somewhat cheap looking murders in this film dont particularly ruin the experience though. a notable aspect of this film that its many, many sequels and imitators dont really seem to get is that its ultimately not a particularly violent film. instead if anything its more of a thriller than the typical slasher film. so much of the film is focused on creating a tense, suspenseful atmosphere instead of shocking the viewer with endless gore and violence. its one of the many things about this movie that i feel help it continue to hold up nearly 45 years later.

another one of those aspects is how little explanation we get for michael. the sequels go out of their way to explain as many things about him and his motivation as they possibly can, but this movie keeps him a mystery. at most hes a random guy killing teenagers in his hometown. something like this could happen to just about anyone. thats why it feels so effective, so unsettling, even so many years later. granted part of that is i am a scared little bitch who has a hard time with horror movies, but still.

something else i appreciate about this film is just how good it looks. its shot so beautifully, and even though it really doesnt look remotely like the illinois suburb it claims to take place in, it still manages to give off the vibes of a chill little suburb. it feels believable. it feels like my little neighborhood. the shots are framed beautifully too. carpenter and cinematographer dean cundey make such incredibly effective use out of the wide frame they were working with, especially when it comes to michael himself. so many of the scenes he appears in thru the film, he occupies such a small amount of the frame as to almost be unnoticeable, and it makes him even more terrifying as a result.

im gonna end this here because i honestly cant think of anything else that hasnt already been said. this movie is almost 45 years old and almost every aspect of it has been covered to death. theres so many things id like to say about the music or the finale or other aspects but there doesnt feel like much else to be said. plus i wanna keep these fairly short, i dont feel like spending 8 years writing an entire novel. i still have 12 more movies to get thru, i dont have time to write too extensively.

tune in next time where we cover the very first in a long line of sequels, the aptly-named halloween ii.