Haddonfield's (and heartland America's?) dark night of the soul. If the original Halloween is carefree late afternoon and early evening trick or treating, then this is an after-midnight, witching hour reckoning.
Halloween is getting ready for the annual dance and working up the courage to ask a boy out; Halloween II is your crush melting away, a fiery husk crumbling into the flaming wreckage of a car accident.
Halloween is candy and jack-o-lanterns; Halloween II is razor blades in apples.…
My favorite movies are the ones where you're pretty sure everyone involved needs therapy of some kind.
This kind of endurance test horror isn't really my kind of thing, but I had a begrudging respect for TERRIFIER 2 because Leone made such an artistic leap from the original. Between the evocative photography, intriguing lore, and Lauren LaVera's revelatory turn, Leone crafted a fascinating paradox: a slasher movie epic that beat the one-trick pony allegations.
Unfortunately, the same can't exactly be said for this latest outing, a half-baked rehash that finds Leone still pushing the envelope but not…
Sean Cunningham and Steve Miner set the mold, Joseph Zito refined it, and Danny Steinmann unhinged it. And then Tom McLoughlin came along and reshaped it, nudging a few holes and wrinkles into it with Jason Lives, the first of the series to show some self-awareness. It's not a glib, above-it-all self-awareness, though, and that makes all the difference. Sometimes I think McLoughlin really "got" this series better than anyone, and it's a shame this was his only outing. I think he would have especially delivered a killer Freddy vs Jason had they actually produced it in the 80s.
