Movie Review: Halloween (1978)

The small, independent B-film that became a sensational international success and launched the slasher flick genre, Halloween is a brilliant piece of compact film making. John Carpenter creates a masterpiece of mood, mounting tension and frenzied horror, all embellished with an unsettling killer's point-of-view perspective.

In the small suburban town of Haddonfield, Illinois, 6 year old Michael Myers stabs his sister Judith to death on October 31 1963. Committed to a high security mental institution, he slips into a seemingly catatonic, non-communicative state. At age 21 Michael (Nick Castle) is deemed to be a low risk and transferred to a hospital, much to the horror of his doctor, the psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence). Michael soon breaks out and makes his way back to Haddonfield, killing anyone who gets in his way. Once Dr. Loomis realizes that Michael is on the loose, he gives chase.

Back in his hometown, a masked and threatening Michael starts stalking reserved teenager Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her more outgoing friends Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda (P.J. Soles). It's Halloween night again, Laurie has babysitting duties while Annie and Lynda want to have fun with their boyfriends. The streets are crawling with trick-or-treating kids, Dr. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) are frantically looking for Michael, but the bodies start to stack up as Michael goes on a murderous rampage.

Halloween was produced on a $350,000 budget, and generated $70 million at the box office. Hollywood was awakened to the profitable potential of easy to make horror films, and Michael Myers became the first serial killer of teens to spawn a franchise of sequels, soon to be followed by Jason (Friday The 13th), Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and a host of lessor imitators.

Halloween popularized the essential building blocks of the slasher genre, including the larger than life killer who is next-to-impossible to kill, a world populated mostly by teens, and the final girl trope. The film also established some essential rules for who lives and who dies. Laurie is polite, modest and avoids boys and sexual adventurism. She also takes her baby-sitting responsibilities seriously. The victims tend to be more outgoing, less responsible, chasing boys, and quicker to enjoy sex. Poor Judith gets next to no screen time: she has sex with her boyfriend and dies within the first few minutes of the genre's birth, the first of countless girls to pay the ultimate price for on-screen carnal pleasure.

Carpenter co-wrote Halloween with Debra Hill, and the script celebrates its simplicity. The first act establishes Michael's background (monster is born); the second act is all about stalking (monster prepares to strike); the third act is a frantic kill-fest, with Michael picking off his victims and closing in on Laurie (monster on the loose). Michael is the impersonation of the bogeyman from every child's nightmare, his mask rendering him faceless and his lumbering, imposing gait seemingly unstoppable. And it's all happening on Halloween, the kids under Laurie's care getting a close-up view of a real demon unleashed on the harrowing night.

Halloween is filled with classic, unforgettable moments. The opening single-take sequence through Michael's first-person view is jarring at many levels, the viewer forced to see the world through a menacing killer's eyes. The reveal that Michael, having just slaughtered his sister with a massive knife, is just a kid, is a shocking moment, Carpenter lingering on parents staring incredulously at their young, murderous son. The stalking scenes ratchet up the tension through Michael's sheer presence, as he starts popping up everywhere that Laurie and her friends want to be, behind the bushes, under the laundry line, across the street, standing, observing, plotting, threatening. Nothing violent happens for much of the middle half of the film; just an exquisite build-up of tension.

Carpenter's simple musical theme demonstrated how 10 notes on the piano can conjure up a mood of creeping cataclysm, and adds a suffocating sense of dread to the unfolding carnage. Donald Pleasence was the one known actor Carpenter was able to afford, and he provides Halloween with an anchor of adult sanity, the one observer who forecasts Michael's evil intentions and swings into action to try and save a community. As the daughter of Janet Leigh, moviedom's most famous victim of a deranged murderer, Jamie Lee Curtis was perhaps fated to play Laurie. This was her film debut, and she went on to reign as the "scream queen" in a series of horror films before transitioning to bigger and better roles.

Simple, effective and creative, Halloween slashes its way to classic status.

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Movie Review: Stripes (1981)

A showcase for the comedic talent of Bill Murray, Stripes is only as good as its star. Murray's laid-back sardonic style creates good friction with the motif of military discipline, but Stripes suffers from having little to offer other than Murray's attitude.

John Winger (Bill Murray) abandons his job as a taxi driver, is abandoned by his girlfriend, and has his car repossessed, all on the same day. He convinces his friend Russell Ziskey (Harold Ramis) that they should join the army, and off they go to training camp. The fellow recruits include the overweight Ox (John Candy) and an assortment of the psychotic and the dim. Drill Sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates) tries to make soldiers out of them, with limited success. Hulka's platoon muddles its way to graduation before becoming embroiled in an unexpected incursion behind the Iron Curtain.

Much of Stripes was improvised on the spot, director Ivan Reitman keeping the cameras rolling while Murray made things up and the other cast members reacted. It's a sometimes fascinating viewing experience, but the struggle to create a cohesive movie out of essentially uncoordinated comedy moments is also clear. Stripes sags and surges, meanders and regains focus, ultimately providing an interesting but bumpy ride.

When it works, Stripes delivers scenes of comic gold. Murray's speech to rally his platoon prior to the graduation ceremony is classic, as is the platoon's performance in the ceremony itself. But in the final 30 minutes featuring the unplanned invasion of Czechoslovakia, Stripes loses its way in a groan-inducing attempt to superimpose superfluous action onto a comedy, with mostly embarrassing results.

The thin ice of material that Stripes skates on is exemplified by a deleted sequence (restored in the Extended Cut) that has Winger and Ziskey hitch a ride on a military plane to an unnamed war zone, where they are captured by undefined heavily armed mercenaries and threatened with death, but save themselves when Winger starts singing Quando Quando Quando. It's a nonsensical interlude, scraping by on Murray's improvisational talent and spontaneity. A mud wrestling match between John Candy's Ox and a bevy of near-naked models is also a punch line stranded by an absence of meaningful context.

Elsewhere in the cast, Ramis proves to himself that he is no actor, his uncomfortable performance as Ziskey crossing the line from comic to incompetent. Warren Oates performs his function as the crusty drill sergeant with good intentions, while P.J. Soles and Sean Young as the Military Police officers who develop relationships with Winger and Ziskey realize early on that they need to be comely rather than convincing.

Stripes is a one-man comedy routine expanded into a military farce. It is remarkable that it works as well as it does, and this is testimony to Murray's unique talent to deliver cool humour with perfect timing.

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Movie Review: Carrie (1976)

A chilling horror film that is both a psychological and physical terror ride, Carrie combines the worst nightmares of any young girl: awkward puberty, bullying by the meanest of classmates, parental religious terrorism, and prom night turning into torment. That Carrie White discovers a way to extract a brutal revenge on all who abuse her through telekinesis just makes Brian De Palma's task of creating a frightfest so much more fun.

Based on the Stephen King novel, the movie opens with withdrawn and friendless high schooler Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) discovering her first period in the gym shower, and being traumatized when her mean classmates, including Chris (Nancy Allen) and Sue (Amy Irving) throw tampons at her. As the gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) tries to make amends and help Carrie out of her shell, Carrie begins to discover that she has the telekinetic power to physically move objects through mind control. Carrie's real problem is her uncompromisingly stern mother Margaret (Piper Laurie), a sexually repressed religious zealot who abuses her daughter.

Sue feels some regret at the mistreatment of Carrie, and to make amends, convinces her popular boyfriend Tommy (William Katt) to ask Carrie out to the prom. But Chris is much more intent to continue the bullying, and plots with her boyfriend Billy (John Travolta) a most humiliating climax to Carrie's prom night. Carrie enjoys most of her evening with Tommy, the one and only successful social event in her life, but when Chris turns the prom from dream to nightmare, Carrie unleashes her telekinetic power to extract a most violent revenge.

Sissy Spacek was 26 years old when she portrayed high school student Carrie White, and her performance is unforgettably disturbing. Acting with haunted eyes, a frail physique, and long, uncared-for hair, Spacek's sheer presence foretells disturbing obscurity and impending doom in equal measures. Spacek is matched by an unhinged, over-the-top performance from Piper Laurie as Carrie's mother Margaret, a religious fundamentalist who embraces all the most twisted interpretations of sin and guilt associated with sexuality and dumps them on her daughter. The scenes of Margaret terrorizing Carrie with her religious dogma are more disturbing than all the blood that De Palma throws onto the screen.

And De Palma is the third star of the movie, using slow motion, camera rotation, and point-of-view shots to great effect. He boosts the impact of the horror sequences by juxtaposing them with tranquil scenes, or by deliciously prolonging the set-up prior to unleashing the inevitable shocks.

Carrie's secondary characters are brought to life by a lively group of actors, many of whom achieved varying degrees of fame. This was John Travolta's last film prior to shooting into superstardom with Saturday Night Fever, while Nancy Allen, Amy Irving , P.J. Soles and William Katt would go to on build modestly interesting movie profiles. Betty Buckley had an excellent stage, screen and television career, and Priscilla Pointer (Irving's real-life mother) was most famous for a role on TV's Dallas.

Many hidden meanings can be layered into Carrie's story, from her entire experience being a metaphor for the sacrifices of womanhood, to the societal damage caused by religious extremism and the equating of sexuality with sin. The hints of subtext bubbling below the surface provide an added edge of enjoyment to the unfolding tragedy.

Carrie is a classic horror film, compact, on-target, unsettling and unforgettable.

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