Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Michael Myers is back, and with Laurie Strode mysteriously out of the picture you have to wonder what he is going to do for the next ninety minutes.

Well, Halloween II explained to us that Michael was after Laurie because she was his sister and this movie expands that to Michael being after all his relatives and it turns out Laurie had a little girl, so Michael knows what he has to do.

While being transferred from one mental hospital to another Michael overhears a doctor mentioning that Michael has got a niece somewhere out there and upon hearing this immediately kills that guy. It's really hilarious, I am talking immediately as in the second the guy says "blah blah niece" Michael flexes his hand and then before you know it his is driving his thumb into the guy's forehead! I guess Michael just really hates his family.

Michael heads back to Haddonfield to take out his little niece Jamie, and while he is expertly tracking her everywhere (regardless of the fact that in Halloween II he was shot in both eyes, then exploded, and then left to burn to death) it just so happens that there are a bunch of people around for him to murder graphically. Following Michael around is Dr. Loomis again, who survived the same gas-filled room explosion Michael lived through. Loomis is definitely feeling the effects of living through a massive fiery explosion- he sort of limps sometimes, and has a little patch of scar tissue on his right cheek.

As much as Halloween II was a huge step down from Halloween, Halloween 4 is even more a step down down the ladder of Halloween movies. There's just nothing much you can say about Michael Myers, and every time they try to fill in his background a little or give him a clearer reason to kill people it just ends up taking away from what made him an interesting villain in the first place (and consequently what made the first movie so good).

In the first movie, you cared about Laurie and her friends because they all seemed like good kids. Nearly every character in this movie is annoying and the dialog sounds like it was written by adults who have forgotten how they acted and talked when they were kids. At one point Jamie is bullied by some other little kids and she runs outside, rests against a tree and tells herself, "you're gonna be alright, you're gonna be alright." I don't think I've ever seen an adult say this, never mind an eleven-year-old kid. That's because people don't speak like this! It's movie dialog nonsense.

There is really nothing to recommend about this movie. Like Halloween II it trades the suspense and wonderful direction of the first movie with gory deaths and pointless background information. Just even more so.

Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (1964)

A bunch of gladiators, led by Rocca, are kicked out of the arena for arguing with their boss when some other troupe of gladiators is forced to kill each other even though they are all friends! Wandering around, they come upon a young lady being threatened by some goons and Rocca leaps into battle to save her. It turns out she (Deliah) is the daughter of Senator Varro, who welcomes the gladiators into his home in return for saving Deliah.

Shortly after, Varro mentions that his slave, Spartacus, has escaped and is preparing some kind of slave revolt and wonders if Rocca and his men might take care of things for them. They do, and of course they end up befriending Spartacus and his crew once they are told how irredeemably evil Varro is.

This turned out to be a pretty entertaining gladiator flick. Like most movies of this kind, the good guys are totally good in every way and the bad guys are totally despicable human beings. For an obviously low budget movie some of the battle scenes are pretty epic in size and the choreography is nice.

I think the most interesting thing about this movie is that while it deals with a bunch of guys who have no rights whatsoever and are forced to kill each other in battle in order to entertain a bunch of monsters, this movie is really lighthearted. While watching it, there were plenty of times that I forgot I was watching a movie about the cruelty of humanity, and instead it was about a bunch of beefy guys in short shorts horsing around. These are your new breed of fun-loving happy-go-lucky slave gladiators. Instead of screaming a lot and delivering dramatic speeches about how they will never fall to the combined might of all of Rome, these are the kinds of guys that will punch a soldier on the side of the head (doesn't matter that he is wearing a helmet), and then place his body on a pile of other soldiers and just laugh and laugh. If this movie came out in the 80s, I think they would then exchange high-fives.

So if you are in the mood to watch a movie about a bunch of gladiators who are just so happy they gotta smile, I think you could do no better than Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators!

Halloween II (1981)

Michael Myers, Laurie Strode, and Dr. Loomis are back in this gory but boring followup to the amazing Halloween. The film picks up right where the first ended, complete with a quick recap of that last few moments of the first film. Loomis shoots Michael a bunch of times, causing Michael to plummet from a balcony, seemingly to his death. Loomis runs outside to investigate but by the time he gets to the spot where Michael fell, the body is nowhere in sight! Laurie is taken to a local hospital so she can recover. Pretty soon, Michael shows up to finish what he started.

This is really a movie that should never have been made. It tries to have it both ways- it apes the style of the first movie, but there are a bunch of gory death scenes throughout, possibly inserted in order to compete with the increasingly gory horror movies released since Halloween. Surprisingly, the movie was written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill (who wrote the first movie) but this film is so lifeless and dull that it definitely came as a shock to me to find this out. Rumor has it that the gore scenes were shot and inserted by Carpenter himself after filming had finished. If this is true, it's very disappointing. Luckily, Carpenter went on to do some fantastic movies after this unfortunate debacle.

The suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this movie is probably impossible or at least dangerous to maintain throughout the running time. There is one part where you see Michael kind of just walking around doing his thing and then Loomis sees him and starts waving his gun around wildly, which cause Michael to go stand in the street, patiently waiting for a speeding cop car to come out of nowhere, slam into him, drag him into an ambulance that is just kind of parked in the middle of the street, causing the ambulance to explode! It's only a few minutes into the movie so you know something is up and sure enough it turns out it was just some kid dressed exactly as Michael Myers.

This was meant as the end of the whole Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga, and maybe with that in mind the ending could have at the time seemed triumphant and awesome, but in hindsight, you realize that both Michael and Loomis have survived their final battle- wherein Michael is shot point black in both eyes blinding him and then Loomis fills a room with gas and lights the room up exploding everything in it, Michael completely engulfed in flames to the point where you can see that his head is burning through his mask!- to go on to do multiple sequels. And that is just ridiculous, no one could have survived that explosion! And Michael is obviously blinded, he does that thing blinded people do in movies, where he is blindly swinging his scalpel in front on him even though no one is there. And yet in the next movie, he is going around hunting people like the Predator.

It's hard to recommend this movie considering how it compares with the previous one, but it is still better than your typical slasher.

Hercules and the Masker Rider (1963)

Don Juan comes back home a war hero only to find that his girlfriend/cousin Blanca is to marry the evil Don Ramiro in order to stop a war between Ramiro and her father, Don Francisco. Juan and Blanca decide to elope and are caught and Juan is banished from the land! He ends up getting mixed up with some crazy gypsies, and among the gypsies walks Hercules!

The best thing about this movie is that they don't explain why Hercules is there. Did he travel forward through time, arriving in 16th century Spain? Is he just some guy named Hercules (a very common name in Spain, back then)? The film doesn't tell you and you are left to decide on your own; the hallmark of a good film.

So I thought Don Juan would become Zorro or something, but he looks as much like Zorro as he does the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet or any guy whose costume is just whatever he was wearing that day with a tiny mask over his eyes. But he does ride around and get into a lot of sword fights and even cuts one guys pants, causing them to fall down, comically exposing his hilarious olde tyme underwear.

This is pretty much your typical Italian Hercules muscleman movie. The bad guy is totally evil and cowardly and the good guys are so good they won't even kill guys that are trying to kill them. The problem is there isn't much of anything going on in this movie and even the constant fight scenes are pretty boring and do nothing to keep your interest.

This is the first movie in the Warriors 50-movie set and I am hoping it is just a poor choice because I don't think I can take forty-nine more of these!

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973)

As far as I am concerned, this movie started out with two strikes against it. First, it's a vampire movie and I hate vampire movies (with one exception). Especially Dracula vampire movies. Second, this is a movie from famous British studio Hammer Film Productions, and I am not a fan of their movies at all.

A bunch of old guys have set up some kind of Dracula cult, of which most of the members are young 70s guys in fur jackets, riding motorcycles. We begin the movie with this one guy waking up in the cult headquarters and he makes a daring escape, winding up back at some kind of 1970s British X-Files organization, where he has just enough time to pass over his information before dying.

It turns out that a bunch of VIPs, ranging from politicians to rich guys, are trying to revive Dracula so they will have even more power. It is up to a bunch of secret agents and also Professor Van Helsing to fix all of this!

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride was originally titled The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but you know how we Americans are with our intense fear of satanic rites. It's too bad, because there are a lot of satanic rites in this film(the vampire bride is kind of an afterthought at the end of the movie) and I'm a big fan of movie titles that are honest, and also serve as concise plot summaries. They should have called this Dracula 1974... this would have been awesome because this movie is the sequel to a movie called Dracula AD 1972!

Sadly, this is not the Dracula movie that is going to win me over. It's boring and filled with your typical hissing vampires and even the cult aspect is not interesting. I will hand it to Hammer though, they are really good at making excellent looking films on low budgets. But then again, what kind of budget do you need for a vampire picture? Just throw a cape on a guy and tell him to hiss at everything. Most of your money is going to go towards getting those blood capsules so your vampire can bite people and syrupy blood can trickle out.

I've heard that Dracula AD 1972 is pretty excellent in how ridiculous it is, but this movie has none of that (maybe they decided to rein it in a bit this time), so I really can't recommend it unless you just really are in love with the concept of Dracula being resurrected and glaring at people.

Halloween (1978)

Halloween opens with a point of view sequence, where we follow a young woman up into her bedroom and then stab her to death. We run outside and there are the girl's parents, who unmask us... the camera pulls away and the murderer is a little kid, named Michael Myers! The murder victim: his big sister, Judith!

Years later we find that the kid has been institutionalized, under supervision of Dr. Loomis, who is desperate to not let Michael out onto the streets. According to Loomis Michael has spent the last fifteen years in a catatonic state so I don't even understand why he is concerned... do they routinely let psycho killers out who have spent the last fifteen years staring at a wall ("looking past the wall" as Loomis dramatically explains to anyone who will listen)? Anyway, Michael obviously manages to escape, or there wouldn't really be a movie would there? So Michael goes home on Halloween night, as prophesied in the movie poster, and he just really has this urge to kill a bunch of babysitters.

Everyone who knows anything about horror movies knows about this movie and realizes that this is a classic of the genre. I've watched it many times, and this last time I decided to try to figure out why this movie in particular is lauded, while something like Friday the 13th or Nailgun Massacre is seen as exploitative trash.

It's a difficult question to answer. Halloween is a formulaic slasher, but it basically created the sub genre so we can't hold that against it. But the fact of the matter is I have probably seen Halloween six times in my life, and the sixth time I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time, perhaps even more. Whereas with something like A Nightmare on Elm Street, every time I watch it I hate it a little more.

Slashers are generally slow movies, with lots of suspense building, jump scares, false starts, red herrings, and what have you. The suspense works because you don't know what to expect... so your second time through the movie, the suspense building is just kind of annoying. But Halloween works because it has so much to show you. The photography is fantastic and whereas with lesser slashers you would be fast forwarding through all the slow parts, with Halloween no matter how many times you watch this thing the wonderful photography, the masterful direction, it all draws your interest. The sixth time I watched this movie I had a book with me assuming that I would want something to do during the slow parts, but I could not tear my eyes away from the screen.

The characters are all interesting and likable, and the dialog (for the most part) sounds natural and you have to wonder how much of it was written beforehand (apparently all of it), and how much was made up on the spot (apparently none of it). The girls all give you the impression that they are friends, and it almost doesn't matter that they are all 20 year olds pretending to be high school girls. Unfortunately there aren't just 20 year old high school girls in this movie. Dr. Loomis and the sheriff have some outrageously corny lines to deliver, and no matter how talented they are there is no way to say, "DEATH... has come to your little town, sheriff" and not sound ridiculous.

But the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad, and I would happily watch this movie a seventh time.

Martin (1977)

I hate vampire movies. They aren't scary, they aren't cool, and the whole concept is boring. Vampires are like sexy zombies that aren't gross and violent. I just can't get behind that. I want my monsters to be hideous. Lacking that, I want my villains to be extremely violent, leaving hallways full of gore behind them as they pursue that one last girl.

However, every time I watch Martin, I can't help but to be impressed with it. This was George Romero's first horror movie after the classic The Night of the Living Dead, and it is absolutely amazing.

We open with a train speeding through the night. A young boy sneaks into some woman's cabin, holding a kit complete with syringes and other things. He bursts in to find her in the restroom. Waiting patiently by the door, he strikes the minute she steps into the room, injecting her with something. "I won't hurt you. It's so you'll fall asleep. So you won't feel anything!" he explains, though she is of course panicking. They struggle and she eventually succumbs to the drug, whereupon the young man slits her wrists with a razor and starts drinking her blood. This young man is Martin and he may be a vampire.

Martin has been sent to Philadelphia to live with his insane cousin Cuda, who upon meeting the young boy tells him, "I will save your soul. Then I will destroy you." Interestingly, while Cuda is an old man Martin appears to be extremely young- under twenty definitely. At first you will think, "that makes no sense" but trust me, it will be explained to you later.

Cuda escorts Martin from the train, hissing "nosferatu" at him. When they arrive home, Martin meets cousin Christina, who is in some kind of unhappy relationship with Arthur, who due to the poor economy in the area is unable to pursue his dream of becoming an auto mechanic. Cuda has set up his house with all the traditional anti-vampire stuff: crosses, garlic, what have you. None of it has any effect of Martin, who at one point corners a cowering Cuda in his bedroom, takes a dramatic bite of garlic and spits out, "There is no magic."

Cuda continues to antagonize Martin, while Martin is content to adjust to his new neighborhood. He works in Cuda's shop delivering groceries, and eventually meets up with lonely housewife Ms. Santini, who is really lonely. It turns out there are a lot of lonely housewives in this neighborhood, and the interesting thing is that this is not just a means to provide Martin with victims. A decent portion of the script concerns how the economy has ruined the neighborhood and sometimes it feels like all the vampire stuff is secondary to this. In fact, Romero spends a lot of his time behind the camera showing us slow shots of various run down buildings. The town is as much a character in this as Martin or Cuda is.

So this is a really fascinating movie. I find it a little hard to review, first of all because it is so good, and second of all because in my reviews if I mention the name of a movie I bold it and this is really strenuous since the title of the movie is also the name of the main character. There aren't any stupid lines to make fun of, and there aren't really any plot holes to point out. If I really want to be mean I could mention how the flashbacks that Martin experiences seem pretty cheesy, but they have their reason for being in the movie.

Martin is a fantastic horror film that is not afraid of taking its time to show you what it wants you to see, and on top of that you get an amazing ending that comes at you suddenly, but you definitely won't feel cheated or tricked. The best vampire movie I have ever seen.

Werewolf Woman (1976)

A young woman, driven crazy by being molested as a child (described in this movie as "an unfortunate incident"), thinks she is a werewolf and goes around, guys trying to force themselves on her absolutely everywhere, and then she bites those guys to death. You read this summary and immediately you think, "this must be an Italian movie from the 70s" and you would be right.

This movie starts out pretty interesting, with that fantastic overacting and poor dubbing and fountains of blood you'd expect from a movie of this caliber, but then all the sadistic sexual stuff enters the picture and you basically just have a totally sleazy exploitation movie for the rest of the running time. It's really bad. And, being an exploitation movie, the intent is not to explore the effects of sexual violence, the intent is to show it all in a way to excite the audience. So if you think a woman being attacked by literally every man (and one woman!) she runs across is exciting, this is the movie for you.

Medusa (1973)

We begin Medusa with Jeff (played by George Hamilton), playboy heir to a massive fortune, laying dead on a bed in a boat with some lady. In disembodied voice form, he tells us he died three days ago and now he is going to review the mistakes he made in his life. Any movie that starts like this is pretty much destined to be terrible.

The first mistake Jeff feels like reviewing is crashing his sister Sarah's wedding (by the way, it turns out the woman he was laying in bed with was his sister). He's dressed as Elvis and is drunk and this is basically the start of Hamilton's embarrassing mugging and hammy acting. Jeff is supposed to be crazy and carefree and so Hamilton portrays this by basically doing totally random things mixed with horrible impersonations of celebrities, delivering lines of dialogue that completely fall flat. Every single thing this guys says and does is gonna make you want to punch him.

It turns out that Jeff and Sarah may or may have not been cut out from the latest will of their dead father, and since they need that money, something has to be done. Sarah is just used to living the high life, but Jeff owes money to a mobster, Angelo, who borrowed the money from the mob. Meanwhile, there is a hilarious and creepy police detective piecing this all together. He's this really hairy balding Greek guy with the kind of mustache that only grew back in the 70s. And he says things like, "I am like a spider, or a flame. I wait for my prey to come to me." And then he walks backwards, disappearing into the darkness. I think he might be Dracula.

So all this is happening and it's a little hard to follow along because first of all the film is so dark and it's hard to see who people are or what they are doing, and second of all you have the constant distraction of Jeff all over Greece for the entirety of the movie. At one point tries to pick up a girl by introducing his dog to her with this unbearably hot pickup line gem: "It's Part Cocker Spaniel and Part Poodle. Some Call It a Cockerpoo...I Call It a Spadoodle." It works.

Anyway, as it turns out, Jeff and Sarah have had or are having some kind of intimate relationship but the movie would be exactly the same if she was just some girl he used to date but then she got married to some guy, yet they are still in love. So obviously that was just thrown in to give the movie some kind of sleazy edge, which I guess works. But you already know how it ends (they die), since the movie opens with them dead, so what's the point?

Don't Go in the Woods (1980)

I have a quest. I must see all the horror movies that begin with "Don't..." What can I say, I like being told what not to do. Don't Go in the Woods. Don't Go in the House. Don't Look Now. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Is there anything I can do, horror movies?

A bunch of people ignore the helpful advice the movie has given them, and they go into the woods. Then, a lot of them are savagely murdered by a maniac. End credits. Unlike Memorial Valley Massacre, the characters in this movie are not outrageous personifications of all that is awful about mankind. This is both a blessing and a curse. Since they aren't particularly awful, you feel bad about them getting killed which I guess is the point of the horror film. On the other hand, watching nasty people getting killed by maniacs is so fun. So while Don't Go in the Woods is definitely creepier than Memorial Valley Massacre, I can barely remember any of the characters since they are so bland and normal. Some characters are introduced solely to have them murdered seconds later. It is madness.

The murders are brutal and actually pretty scary. There is one scene with a girl trapped in a sleeping bag hanging from a tree and she just has this tiny hole in the sleeping bag through which she can see and then the maniac shows up to attack! It's filmed very well. There is also an awesome trap out of nowhere that gets sprung and I was cheering.

There are quite a few things that set Don't Go in the Woods apart from other slashers. First of all is the soundtrack. It's really effective and creepy and is kind reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange (really). The music is all synthesizer stuff but goes well with the dreamlike atmosphere of the movie.

That's the second interesting thing about this movie. It's so dreamlike and even for a slasher it has so little story. Totally unrelated things just happen to a bunch of people and yeah there are some police around and of course we've got a fat sheriff but the police do absolutely nothing. They don't even try! They just show up in one scene, play some pinball at the bar, and you don't see them until the end of the movie when everything has been already taken care of.

Finally, the nature photography in this film is wonderful. I couldn't get enough of it. If you check out the director online, it turns out he did some work for National Geographic, and it shows.

Unfortunately, while the first forty minutes of this movie are amazing, you get a dry spell for another half an hour and that thirty-minute dry part is really boring. It's definitely worth fighting to stay awake though, because it picks up again during that last ten minutes. Besides what else have you got going on in your life?