Good Morning, World

Happy Monday from me and from writer-director-actor-cutie-pie Jim Cummings, who shared this rare bit of beefcake on his Insta this weekend -- if you've never seen Jim's movies Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, or The Beta Test, I recommend each and every damn one of them. He's a true pleasure. It's possible you've seen him in an acting role outside of his own movies, too -- there's the profoundly strange and awesome movie Greener Grass (which I recommend to any weirdo like me) but as for more mainstream fare he is one of the cops who get killed by Michael Myers in Halloween Kills! Absolutely terrible movie but seeing Mr. Cummings was one of the few and far between highlights. Anyway let's get on with this Monday already...

The Exorcist: Believer in 150 Words or Less

The Exorcist: Believer doesn't deserve the time out of my life it would take to write a proper review or the time it would take for you to read it. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. I will say that we all need to go in financially on a fund that will pay someone to follow David Gordon Green around and smash every film-camera that he reaches for before he can touch it. That's humanity's only salvation! 

13 Toilets of Halloween #7

I've been pretty relentlessly ripping on David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy for the past week (see this Twitter thread here or read my review of Halloween Ends right here) -- and with good reason! He really shit the bed with it! It's an incoherent jumble of half-thought-out ideas, and I am being extremely generous when I call them "half" thought out. But worst sin of all is I could cut several fingers off of my left hand and still be unable to count up as many scares as I had left fingers stretched across the entire damned run of films. DGG proved himself to be wildly inept at building tension, and I shudder to think what he's about to do to The Exorcist. (As long as Ellen Burstyn gets paid really really well I suppose we should be happy with that much.)

All that said as the world's tiniest olive branch I will say that this moment in Green's 2018 film where Michael Myers drops a handful of bloody teeth over the bathroom stall door? That shit is wildly effective. Maybe the only legitimately creepy moment in the entire trilogy? The scene with the motion-sensor light in the backyard in the first movie, the scene with Kyle Richards being hunted in the park in the second movie... honestly what else even is there? Certainly not a single goddamned second of Ends, that's for sure. What a waste of time and money and legacy these movies turned out to be. Also I was gonna ask where the hell Michael got those teeth from, but it was probably the dead gas station mechanic he stole his coveralls from, right?

Click here for the "Toilets of Halloween"... if you dare!

The Shape of Things Too Dumb

One wonders what the word "Ends" means in the title of David Gordon Green's Halloween Ends. Ends. Ends? E N D S. It's like that thing where you stare at a word for so long that it stops making sense. The lines of the letters reveal themselves to be strange, foreign, gibberish-ish. Suddenly you're staring at a puddle of scribbles, as if the atoms of reality have themselves split open and apart and you're falling into an endless void. A gaping maw -- all of eternity, unfathomable in its expanse, so dark it obliterates past blackness to be something darker than dark, colder than cold. 

David Gordon Green's trilogy of Halloween films invite existential despair. But probably not in the way Green intended. I say "probably" because I do not know what is in David Gordon Green's heart. Perhaps he, much like Michael Myers, is emptiness, evil incarnate, and has carefully crafted this series of films in order to drive me personally unto oblivion. Or maybe he is just very very bad at making horror movies. Whatever the case Halloween Ends is indeed, as the title promised, over. And I have survived it. 

Or have I? Will I, like Laurie Strode and Jamie Lee Curtis, be dragged back into this nonsense every few years? Will I move off the grid and fill my back-yard with mannequins? When I close my eyes tonight will I find myself sitting down to watch Halloween Ends again, and again, every night, a Groundhog Day nightmare loop from which I will never escape? Such are the questions that a movie like Halloween Ends invites. It invites lots of questions, actually. Questions like, "Were the writers conscious when they wrote this script?" Questions like, "How does one get paid millions of dollars for filling a pail with my own poop and playing with it?" Questions like, "Hrrwhyingahhhhhfuck?"

I suppose I could talk about the plot here at some point, but why bother? No one making this movie cared. Why am I supposed to care? There was a fire sale on dollar bills and everybody ran into the studio and snatched up all the dollar bills they could grab while getting out the back door as quickly as they could. Things like, "This character is one person in one scene and then a completely different person in the next one for no discernible reason whatsoever," didn't seem to be a concern to anyone making it. Things like, "That scene happened in night-time and then the next moment it's day," went unchecked, so too shall go my review. Words! On a page! I! am writing! Them! But why? I! Do not know anymore!

Okay, I'll stop being cutesy and clever. I will get real for this, my final paragraph on a David Gordon Green Halloween Movie ever. Just call this review, "Jason Adams Ends." Here is the fact of the matter. There is not a single scare in this entire movie. I'm not of the mind that horror movies have to be "scary" in the same sense every time -- they can unsettle, unnerve, tap into buried anxieties. There doesn't have to be a jump, or a brutal murder, or a fang-toothed goblin for a movie to be Horror. But whatever Halloween Ends is, it ain't it. That's really all I have to say. It ain't it.

Quote of the Day

"Yeah it’s a really curious genre. It’s a road movie, but it’s also like a Bonnie and Clyde romance. And they happen to be eating people. So it’s got a very thoughtful aspect to it about things that we inherit from our parents. A little bit like Call Me By Your Name, in terms of discovering you are gay, something you didn’t know about yourself. How do you deal with that?"

That is Oscar-winner and Shakespearean powerhouse Mark Rylance talking to GQ magazine about his next project, Luca Guadagnino's forthcoming film Bones and All, which will probably be out next year (I recently heard that Luca is editing it right now) and stars Timothee Chalamet and Waves actress Taylor Russell as star-crossed human-scarfing lovers on the run in the 1980s. I posted the first photo from the film right here, and a snap from the set right here, but the one up top (from the same day) I missed and it gives a definite better look at Timmy's hair-do. Electric orange, baby!

The film happily reunites Luca with his Suspiria writer David Kajganich, which I already knew, but I hadn't looked at the IMDb cast list in awhile and a ton of names are on there now -- besides Rylance there's CMBYN daddy-du-jour Michael Stuhlbarg! Chloë Sevigny (who just gave one of my immediate favorite performances of hers for Luca last year in his HBO series We Are Who We Are)! Also from WAWWA Francesca "daughter of Marty" Scorsese! And did somebody say André f'ing Holland??? Then there's director David Gordon Green??? Huh. Oh and holla...

... Suspiria (both versions) star Jessica Harper!!! Then there's young actor Jake Horowitz, who in the past year has been in the sci-fi flick The Vast of Night (seen below, reviewed here), the remake of Castle Freak (anybody seen that?), as well as Mickey Reece's nun-tastic horror flick Agnes, which screened at Tribeca this past spring and just came out on the 10th. I saw that at Tribeca but have kinda sorta forgotten the whole thing now, and should give it a re-watch. Anyway quite the cast, cannot wait, et cetera et cetera!

13 Needles of Halloween #2

Although I have made this clear on any and every occasion when the Saw films have come up I do want to again reiterate here -- I fucking hate the Saw movies. And it's not because they're gruesome -- I can deal with gruesome. It's not because they're mean-spirited -- I can deal with mean-spirited. And it's not because they are cheap trash -- I love plenty my share of cheap trash. But the combination of those three things added to their incoherent moralism, well this is a recipe I cannot stomach. When movies think they have things to say, and present themselves as such, but the things they're saying are at complete odss with one another, a jumble of preachy hypocrisy, I get fed up real fast. 

I suppose that's part of my problem with the just-released Halloween Kills (my review here) -- David Gordon Green's film seems to think it has a message about mob mentalities and vigilantism and trauma but when it's not being so basic it's stating its intentions in the blandest form of text ("We are all the monster now.") it's actually making a movie that undercuts its own half-baked thoughts at every turn, until nothing it's doing means anything, and yet you can sense the filmmaker leaning back in their chair, smug, expecting my mind to be blown, brah. Oh my mind is blown, David, but for not the reasons you think!

Sorry I don't know why I am talking about HK again -- besides the fact that I have spent all week seeing people who should know better trying to defend it, and yet all of their defenses are "Well there have been worse Halloween movies," or "You like some shitty movies, lighten up," and yet their defenses of the movie are all like, "Yeah it's a mess but it like thinks things... but when it doesn't it's like killing and stuff." People really want to have it both ways and yet I've not seen a single case made that states why Halloween Kills presents a coherent case for anything it's flailing around at wildly. I'm supposed to wait for he next movie, apparently. Y'all do that then, and I'm gonna talk about the movie that's here right now if that's alright.

Okay so Saw! Saw 2, in particular. I don't know why I saw the second Saw movie in the theater when I thought, and continue to think, that the first Saw film is one of the steamiest piles of shit that's ever gotten big success in the history of movies, but I did. I believe I stopped seeing the films altogether after the third one -- what can I say, I was young and would go see any horror film to be part of the conversation. Then again I did see the also godawful Spiral: From the Book of Saw last year, so clearly I have learned nothing. Anyway I saw Saw 2 in the theater and the infamous "Needle Pit" sequence did admittedly stick (heh) in my brain, and when I thought of this year's "Needle" theme I knew I had to include this one, even though it's typical of the repulsive pablum that this franchise deals in, which mistakes sadism for profundity. "Get it, man? She's a recovering addict, man! Now she's on a bed of needles, and shit! Gnarly!" It's so deep, I know, I just can't possibly wrap my head around it.

Click here for all of the "13 Needles of Halloween"

Do Anything But Kills

Mia Hansen-Løve's new film Bergman Island, the first of Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie's tremendous 2021 two-some -- the other one being the even better reunion between Lie and Joachim Trier called The Worst Person in the World, which you should be very excited about -- is out here in NYC this weekend, and if you're around to see it, do! It's great. Indeed there are several very good movies out this weekend that you can watch instead of the shit-tornado that is Halloween Kills (my review of that here) -- there's NewFest happening! And the Brooklyn Horror Fest happening! Metrograph has the new 4K remaster of Possession streaming online! Or there's the movie Luzzu about the hot Maltese fisherman playing at the Quad, and at Film Forum there's Ryusuke Hamaguchi's marvel of a movie Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which is also one of a 2021 two-fer with his movie Drive My Car, also excellent, coming later this year. These damn overachievers! Anyway treat yourselves and watch a good movie, please.

Also out today, at @FilmForumNYC! Forget Halloween Kills -- Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy will kill... your emotions!!! https://t.co/s0THtz0vg7

— My New Dead Pants (@JAMNPP) October 15, 2021

Halloween Kills Killed Me

Michael Myers has always been the scariest of the slasher movie killers for me. I think I've talked about this before but I had a nightmare once, the scariest nightmare I have ever had, which involved him, and now the mere sight of that white mask makes me instinctively recoil, my skin crawling backwards on my body like an involuntary face-lift. It's the silence of him, the patience, the spectral ghost-like qualities -- the many mentioned "boogeyman" thing -- that make him stand out. In my nightmare he didn't even do anything -- he just stood there. And that's all it took. 

Director David Gordon Green, two terrible Halloween films in now, has proven beyond any shadow -- or should I say Shape -- of a doubt that he has absolutely no concept of what it is that makes Michael Myers scary. His Michael Myers, which he's strained to tie back to John Carpenter's sleek (and still scary!) version so hard that every string has snapped, is a marauder -- a tornado of blunt force trauma. Green mistakes brutality for creeping terror at every opportunity. He's closer to what Rob Zombie had in mind, which was to my mind the previous nadir for the series -- I have begun to think I should revisit the Zombie films after watching what Green's done! At least Zombie tried to reshape the Shape in his own albeit terrible image -- Green is trying to bridge both, but splitting his pants goofball-style in the process. This is good for nobody.

Halloween Kills is a disaster on every level. Not a single character is worth caring about the way Green showcases them. They are all, up to and including the queen Laurie Strode herself, assholes who behave ridiculously, stupidly, hatefully. There's a long subplot here that goes absolutely nowhere about mob-rule -- about Michael being an inflection point for terror that turns good people into monsters. We know this because Green and Danny McBride's startlingly inept script has a character say exactly that. "We're the monsters now." Along with what I think were supposed to be several "cheer" lines, where a another character says something like, "Michael... you came home." Like, that's on the poster, y'all! Wow! My mind is blown! 

Lowest denominator shit like that, which thinks so little of its audience, is packed so tight into this thing like intestines in a belly, ready to spring forth at any point. (Sidenote: maybe it's just that I was so fucking bored but seeing Jamie Lee Curtis' intestines hanging out at the start of this film, from her last encounter with Michael, that just sent me off thinking about the world's greatest Activia ad for awhile.) I digress -- and I tell you I will probably digress a lot, given the heat of my fury with regards to this terrible film -- back to the subplot about the rampaging townspeople, poisoned from the inside by Michael Myers' Eeeeevil presence. There is no "good" baseline here for any of these characters to fall from. I suppose there's our nostalgia from John Carpenter's original, which Green & McBride are crutching it up with to make us care. 

But the characters we've seen in Green's two films? I don't care about these people. I don't care about this Laurie Strode. I certainly don't care about her ridiculous daughter or even worse granddaughter. I sure as hell don't care about Tommy, the little boy from the 1978 grown up and recast into Anthony Michael Hall doing his best tomato-faced harridan routine, leading the gang of townie thugs on their mission to hunt Michael down. (Oh and Hall does some of the the most condescending and embarrassing "I am now talking to black people" behavioral changes ever captured on-screen, which I still haven't pinned down whether that was in character or not, but if it is in character -- all the reason less to give a shit about this Tommy!)

So while that sideshow about vigilante justice spins its wheels saying nothing Michael Myers rampages through town, killing entire packs of firefighters and townspeople in choreographed fight scenes straight out of a Kill Bill film (well a lesser, shittier-choreographed Kill Bill film anyway)  making one wonder where and when Michael picked up all these moves. Will the third film have a flashback training montage to Michael's crazy doctor making him carry buckets of water up and down gigantic flights of stairs and catch flies with chopsticks? I wouldn't be surprised -- Green & McBride love to drop fart bombs of laugh-less humor into the middle of their gore-fest. (If I had to say one nice thing about the film I would give props to the gore, which is extremely convincing and well-executed.)

This entire film is one long wheel-spin until the promised, nay threatened, final film in Green's trilogy, the already titled Halloween Ends, and it's entirely possible that Green has in mind an ending that will satisfy some of the questions he asks, with the precision of an axe to the face, here. But in the meantime what the fuck am I supposed to do with this embarrassingly inept and seemingly pointless movie I just sat through? The two hours I just wasted of my life watching Jamie Lee Curtis roll around on a hospital mattress while packs of wilding med students go shrieking up and down the hallways and somewhere out there Michael Myers is pirouetting in a kiddie park, pulling Season of the Witch masks out of his ass like magic tricks? I know what the Shape is, and the Shape is oblong turdish.

Kit Harington Seven Times

Does anybody else keep completely forgetting that Kit Harington is in the Eternals movie? I feel as if I have seen very little of him around, although I will admit that I haven't paid a ton of attention to whatever trailers and clips have come around after the first one. Also there are one thousand cast memmbers in it, all of them new, and the movie's not out for another month. So we'll see, I guess. Anyway here is indeed a new photoshoot of him, and I will use this to make my graceful exit stage right for the night, as I'm off to see a screening of the new probably terrible Halloween movie. I hope to be proven wrong! but after re-watching the 2018 one this week and being reminded how very much it stinks my hopes are not stratospheric. Hit the jump for more Kit...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Halloween: H20 (1998)

Laurie Strode: Molly please, do you have

any thoughts on Victor and Elizabeth?

Molly: Well, um, well I think that Victor should

have confronted the monster sooner. He's completely

responsible for Elizabeth's death because he was so

paralyzed by fear that he never did anything.

It took death for the guy to get a clue.

Laurie Strode: And why do you think he was

finally able to confront his monster?

Molly: I think that Victor had reached a point in his life 

where he had nothing left to lose. I mean the monster 

sought to that by killing off everybody that he loved. 

Victor finally had to face it. It was about redemption

... it was his fate.

One, it's Michelle Williams' birthday today, and two, I am actively avoiding any and everything regarding the screening of the new Halloween film (Halloween Kills, aka Halloween Bangs) in Venice yesterday, so why not distract ourselves with this look back at the original "Laurie Strode came back to fight her dumb brother and only got a decapitation in its sequel for her efforts" joint. (PS I am not saying I know whether she lives or dies in the new movie -- as I just said I am avoiding everything about it.) 

Anyway in H20 Laurie Strode has become an alcoholic English teacher and in a fun if thuddingly obvious throwback to the original film -- where Laurie's seen sitting in English class prattling on about "fate" in whatever book it was she was reading -- we have this "Molly" character of Michelle's spelling out the plot of the film they're currently in, via a discussion of Frankenstein. "Fate" echoes through the decades, Laurie Strode! We'll have to keep our ears peeled for mentions of this sort of thing in the new film, but I have absolutely no doubt it'll be there. And we probably won't have to strain too hard for it, either. In summation...

... Josh Hartnett in this movie.

That's all. Just Josh.

Pazuzu Don't Discriminate Btwn Sinners & Saints

Today's big news -- that they are making a new trilogy of Exorcist films, with the "they" being Halloween director David Gordon Green, and with One Night in Miami and Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. playing the father of a possessed child who for assistance hunts down the one and only Chris MacNeil who will indeed be reprised by the one and only Ellen motherfuckin' Burstyn, queen of everything -- well that big news is probably the worst example to date of me tweeting out my best thoughts on a subject before I actually get around to writing a post. John Waters always says he doesn't have a Twitter account because why would he give up his best jokes for free, and this is proof!

Linda Blair sitting by her telephone like HELLO pic.twitter.com/Wm5w6Hk4kF

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) July 26, 2021

Anyway this is probably a world class terrible idea -- the 2018 Halloween movie only gets worse and worse in my head the further I get away from it, and I'm not feeling too optimistic about the sequels... and yet. YET. The studio is right that I will go see the sequels, all of them, regardless of quality, and I will go see new Exorcist movies starring Ellen motherfuckin' Burstyn, regardless of quality, so maybe it's not a bad idea if you judge movies by a money stick, and -- because I'm real bright -- I am guessing they do. Thing is, right up until that Halloween movie I was a fan of Green, so maybe I should cut him some slack.  Maybe I should be excited. Maybe I should just remind myself that we'll probably all be dead soon anyway. I don't know. Optimism! 

I go into horror remakes now with an open mind but I DO THAT SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE Luca Guadagnino wrested the Suspiria remake out from David Gordon Green's hands and created a full-blown horror masterpiece, and decidedly NOT because of the cruddy Halloween re-do DGG actually made pic.twitter.com/n0CHnDsmRN

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) July 26, 2021

On Pinheads & Needles

Congratulations this morning re in order to queer horror legend Clive Barker, who just won the rights to his Hellraiser franchise back according to THR -- this means no more cash-grab low-budget nonsense; Barker has say on whatever moves forward. And there are already a couple of things moving forward -- David Gordon Green is supposed to be directing the pilot of a proposed Hellraiser series for HBO, while David Bruckner, the director of The Signal and The Ritual, is working on a new big-screen reboot. Of course there's been talk of getting Pinhead up and running for years now -- at least this means Barker's involved. Although...

.... here's where I admit that I'd never been that big of a Hellraiser fan for most of my life. And I still wouldn't say I am, but I did re-watch the first two movies during quarantine and they tickled me in a way they hadn't previously, so I guess what I am saying is maybe my body is ready for the exquisite pain now.

Happy Almost Halloween Forever

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As of yesterday we've had Jamie Lee Curtis playing Laurie Strode in our lives for 41 years -- seeing as how I am 42-years-old that is mathematically speaking a mighty high percentage! Unfortunately my parents didn't take one-year-old me to see Halloween when it came out in 1978 -- talk about lousy parenting. Anyway I personally will always consider Laurie Strode the ultimate Final Girl and I wrote a little bit about that over at The Film Experience today, what with it being the week of All Hallows and all, you should go read it.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Halloween (1978)

Brackett: It's Halloween.
Everyone's entitled to one good scare.

Or forty years worth of good scares! Not to beat a dead babysitter with all the Halloween posts this week but today is officially the 40th anniversary of John Carpenter's original movie -- it opened in Kansas City, Missouri on this day in the year 1978. Kansas City? Why Kansas City? Well according to the film's producer Irwin Yablans in his book The Man Who Created Halloween, Kansas City was chosen for the movie's premiere because...

"He figured the area wouldn't attract too much attention and advertising costs there were manageable. The first day resulted in $200 per theater; however, business doubled the following night and the night after that. 'By the end of the first week, Halloween was the biggest thing in Kansas City,' said Yablans. 'It was a phenomenal example of word of mouth.'"

That ad there to the right is one of the original ads used to promote the film in Kansas. The film was made for 300K and ended up growing over 70 million dollars in its original run, which is the equivalent of nearly 300 million in today's dollars -- David Gordon Green's film (read my review here) has already grossed nearly 90 million in less than a week... we'll have to see if it has the legs to reach the original though, since horror movies do tend to drop quick. But this one's got another week of All Hallows on its side and the fact that the only other horror movie opening (Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake) is only hitting a couple of theaters this weekend on the coasts. So maybe it can!

Anyway I don't want to get bogged down in box office yammering since for all of its success John Carpenter's film is so much more than dollar signs - it's like a perfect thing dropped out of the heavens... or more precisely raised from the depths of Hell. The film is nearly two hours long but every single frame is accounted for, every moment adding to an accumulation of heavy-breathing atmosphere and chest-heaving terror.
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This movie is so goddamn pretty, you guys pic.twitter.com/G66cqEbl7F

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) October 19, 2018

Something Wicked Cool This Way Comes

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During the filming of the original Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis was asked to make up some lyrics to a love song for her character of Laurie Strode to sing to herself as she strolled down the street of Haddonfield alone. Well not really alone - Michael Myers was of course tagging along, her ever-present dark side, a shadow at her heels. In the final movie you can barely hear what she's saying during this scene, as Laurie's quite a distance down the sidewalk from us when this moment occurs (we're with Michael just then), but what she sings is, "I wish I had you all alone... Just the two of us... I wish I had you close to me... So close... Just the two of us..."
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In David Gordon Green's remake we get to hear the "original version" of this made-up song - DGG had a band record the song like a lost track from the 1970s, and you can hear it playing on the radio in the background of a scene set towards the start of the movie. Fun, right? It's totally fun. It's also a perfectly good encapsulation of what doesn't really work about this new Halloween - that it mostly exists via clever echoes, spruced up, and not a lot more.

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It's the hardest to write a review of a movie that you sort of enjoyed but didn't ultimately love, the dreaded mixed place, and that's where I am here - I don't want to make this review come off as scathing, which is a hole I could fall into easily enough given I had outsized expectations for the movie going in. The new movie's fun, and hollering with pleasure alongside an entire enthusiastic audience as Laurie effin' Strode kicks ass late in the movie will remain one of 2018's cinematic high points, for sure. But!

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But David Gordon Green's been wanting to make a horror movie for a really long time now, having first heard about it with his attachment to the Suspiria remake a decade or so ago, and I can't help but feel like he should've had a better handle on tone after all these many years of talk. I'm sure I didn't do him any favors watching John Carpenter's original the night before, but Green never comes anywhere near to drenching the town of Haddonfield in the unrelenting dread that Carpenter managed with like one one thousandth of the budget.

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John Carpenter's film still terrifies me after forty years and dozens of viewings. Green's film has a couple of scary sequences - the gas station scene is brutal in the best way. And everything having to do with blonde-babysitter Vicky (Virginia Gardner) works - if only that actress, who crafts a likable character in a matter of seconds, had been given more to do like perhaps oh fine let's just come out and say it she should have been given the role of Laurie's granddaughter. I wasn't getting anything from the actress they cast in that pivotal role at all, which really cramps up the last act. (And I might have to hand in my so-called gay card for saying this next bit but I also don't really get what Judy Greer, who I normally adore, was doing with her character either.)

Mostly though Green's film just coasts on our memory and love for the original, which is nice - hey look Michael has a scar on his neck where the knitting needle would've stabbed him all those many years ago! - but not enough for the long run. Think of John Carpenter's film as Laurie Strode - she's a survivor. She will last. David Gordon Green's film is Annie, then - she'll get out some great wisecracks and smoke you up, but before you know it her head's in the laundry room window and her ass is in the air and she's making a goofy face as she dies, honking loudly.

Strode a Pose

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Having re-watched John Carpenter's original Halloween last night in preparation for seeing David Gordon Green's update tonight I can say this much already - we really don't talk about how swank Laurie's outfit is once she stops being polite and starts getting real. (Insert your own The Real World: Haddonfield joke here.) But, uh, for real - Laurie really ups her style game once her life's on the line. Look how dumpy she is at the start:

I know entire books have been written on the subject so this isn't a novel catch but I do love how all the Final Girls, how part of their very being, is coming into their own, finding their best selves, under the knife. Anyway please share your thoughts on the flick if you see it herein the comments! And do stay tuned to the site over the weekend, as our "13 Mustaches of Halloween" series will continue...

The Night She Came Home, Again

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If you think I've been strangely - you might even say eerily - quiet on the new Halloween movie out this weekend you'd be darn tootin'. I've been avoiding everything like the plague, and writing about it invites looking things up and looking things up invites spoilers. I cover my eyes and ears when the trailer's come on at the theater these past several week - I ain't kidding around with this one. I have my tickets for this weekend, and that's that. We will see. But first! Today's "Beauty vs Beast" is tangentially related, because I used Jamie Lee Curtis as our jumping off point, click on over to The Film Experience to get your freak on...

Who Wore It Best?

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survey service

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I stole that image up top whole-hog from VF (thx Mac) where they wrote this whole thing about how neither of them wore it better, they both wore it their one hundred percent best and why should we compete, yadda yadda, because I would like to compete, so there.

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Michael Myers vs Donnie Darko

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You know what would be cool? Having Jake Gyllenhaal on hand to do your bidding. (Understatement of the millenium, right?) Well according to Jamie Lee Curtis it turns out that David Gordon Green, the director of the upcoming Halloween reboot thing, is actually that lucky - after Green made Stronger with Jake he was able to convince Jake to go visit his good family friend JLC while she was  on vacation and one thing led to another and we have a new Halloween movie starring Laurie fucking Strode coming out in a few months. You can read a whole chat with Curtis over at Variety where she tells this story and more. 

Oh and I haven't bothered to watch this yet but here's the trailer for the new Halloween, just in case this is the only site you visit on the internet and you really wanted to see this trailer but were like, "But MNPP hasn't posted it, however will I watch it...?" I am sure there are lots of you.

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In related news I posted some new old Jake pics 

on the Tumblr earlier. Halloween's out October 19th.

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Why the Long Face, Michael Myers?

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The poster for David Gordon Green's Halloween... reuppening... has arrived - it is great! But doesn't it seem longer than normal American posters are supposed to be? Maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me, I don't know. He seems very lonely up there at the top with the type so far away! Poor Mikey. I'll be your friend. We can watch The Thing From Another World together and I won't even stick a knitting needle in your neck, pinky swear.

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