Change Your Image
JumboMills
Reviews
The Madame Blanc Mysteries (2021)
Poorest writing I've ever seen
I decided to watch another episode, just to see if the previous episode that I watched was a fluke. But no, this one was even worse. Once again Madam Blanc and the bloke who follows her around (apparently he's a cab driver but I've yet to see him actually out driving a cab) were happily traipsing all over a crime/murder scene, picking things up, moving things around etc etc. At one point the police actually left them there completely alone to do as they please. Later on, in a bizarre and nonsensical twist, the moo-moo wearing Madam Blanc actually had the audacity to scold her cab driver sidekick for walking around the crime scene and potentially destroying evidence. It makes no sense at all, but the writers of this show clearly aren't bothered by that sort of thing. There's another scene in which a suspect is interrogated at the police station. Of course, Madam Blanc (who runs an antiques shop and isn't a police detective) sits in on the interrogation. But this time, the suspect at least had a lawyer present. The scene was approximately two minutes long, and in that time the lawyer didn't say or do anything. They literally just sat there the entire scene and said nothing while their client spilled the beans. I seriously wonder if anyone else on the cast and crew asked what was the point of the lawyer being in the scene? The whole show is really weird. It's like it's written for five year olds. I originally thought the series would be good for a laugh, but I've changed my mind. It's just bad. Really, really bad.
Halloween Ends (2022)
The cherry on top of a cake full of mistakes
This entire trilogy seems to have been made by people who didn't pay any attention to the original Halloween. I think it can be summed up by two major mistakes.
The first mistake. I really don't understand this whole 'we're going back to the original where Michael Myers was a mindless killing machine with absolutely zero motivation, because that's way scarier' line of thinking. You only have to watch the original Halloween once to note that Michael Myers was not some empty, thoughtless automaton. On the contrary, the character throughout shows consciousness, method, intent, playfulness and massive amounts of patience. He doesn't just kill whoever crosses his path. For the most part of that original Halloween he spends his time either at home, stealing a gravestone from a cemetery, breaking into a hardware store and/or driving around the neighbourhood, simultaneously avoiding detection whilst singling out his prey (a group of babysitters). He hides and watches from behind trees and bushes and toys with his victims. When he finally does get into gear, he does so in an extremely patient manner, often ignoring the first (and second) opportunity, waiting until he is good and ready to strike. He plays inexplicable little games (wearing the sheet and glasses, posing his victims etc) and, at the end, evades capture once more. That was the original Michael Myers, and that, to me at least, is what made the character so incredibly unnerving. Whatever it was that motivated him is a mystery, but there was definitely method to his madness.
The second mistake. The original Halloween (1978) began as a very simple concept. John Carpenter and Debra Hill were given the task of creating a movie about a series of 'babysitter murders' set on Halloween. That was the depth of intellectualism involved. The execution (pun not intended) of the idea was sparse but brilliantly suspenseful and genuinely unsettling. With minimal backstory we were introduced to Michael Myers (aka the boogeyman), an escaped murderer who returns to his hometown on Halloween night to do away with a group of teenage babysitters. That's basically it. One of the reasons it worked so well is that it was originally intended to be a one off movie; the question asked-and somewhat answered-being: was Myers just a madman or something more supernatural (the actual boogeyman)? Halloween 2 (1981) worked well in my opinion because it was a continuation of the same night and it maintained that creep factor. Carpenter didn't like the film, considering it unnecessary, but it was still effective and Michael Myers didn't deviate from the patient, methodically creeping menace of the original. And whether or not you were a fan of the brother-sister angle, the mystery still remained (what is it with Michael and sisters?). It's being such a simple idea, from there on out it is no surprise that the rest of the sequels were going to struggle, and the more hokey-pokey nonsense of evil transference, possession, telepathy and pagan cults would emerge. A few years later and the once truly terrifying Michael Myers is taking orders from the Busta Rhymes and Corey Cunningham's of this world. In this latest instalment, he is depicted as a homeless old age pensioner who can barely defend himself against the town's resident wimp (the aforementioned Cunningham). He is finally defeated with haste by a granny, a microwave oven and a fridge. Seriously!
The problem with the new trilogy is that it was sold as being something it wasn't. It wasn't a return to the original (at least not in a character sense). It discarded all the elements that made Michael Myers genuinely frightening. It removed the brother-sister angle, leaving Laurie Strode's inclusion in the trilogy nonsensical and pretty much redundant-she goes from ultra sensible, level-headed and resilient to an unhinged hermit living in a booby-trapped gun range (and this is a whole 4 decades after she had what was essentially a brief run-in with Myers, who, it must be noted, has been locked up safe and sound ever since. It may have been believable had they not ignored Halloween 2, but they did, so...). It depicted Michael Myers as just a normal man, an invincible, senseless force of nature who moves (with speed) from house to house killing everything in his path. To top it off, it also included the hokey-pokey mind-reading-evil-transference/transcendence rubbish. It was just a big dishonest mishmash of all the things that made most of the previous sequels so poor.
If the franchise survives this and dares to return at some point in the future, it really needs to be handled by people who have actually watched and understood what made the original so eerily effective. It would also do well to pay more attention to John Carpenter's actual execution of the original idea and not what he might have said about it years after the fact. Finally, it needs to ditch all the phoney self-congratulatory intellectualising on the 'nature of evil' and the needless on-the-nose attempts at social commentary. It wasn't rocket science when John Carpenter did it back in 1978, and it isn't rocket science now.
PS. I'm not saying that it's easy to write and/or create a decent movie, I'm saying that in this instance the basic ingredients were already there. When you say you're going to do something (go back to basics) you should actually mean it and at least try to stick to your word.