Halloween II (1981) - The Night That Never Ends / Carpenter and the Screenplay
I couldn’t help but think about the back story/background of Halloween II (1981) while watching it Wednesday morning in regards to John Carpenter’s miserable experience while assisting in the production of the screenplay for the film back when it was coming together and released, somewhat directed by Rick Rosenthal, favorably better than it has any right to be because of Dean Cundy’s role as cinematographer, cohesively landing the aesthetic of the 1978 masterpiece even as developments took an illogic turn for the worse when stretching credibility to the max. I couldn’t help but just get really fucking irritated at the ending at how the film pushed Michael’s creaky, slow-paced walk as Laurie was trying to get away.
Laurie’s written as a cripple who can
barely walk and zoning in and out from a bad reaction to meds to speeding along
at quite a clip, on the ground barely able to peep to screaming loudly once
those who could help her are no longer in hearing distance. The elevator door
closing in the hospital, Michael’s hand making it to the door before it shuts
and yet pulling it away for some reason just so Laurie could get away. And for
seemingly minutes on end, Laurie is in a car with paramedic love interest, Jimmy
(Lance Guest; “The Last Starfighter”), before getting out of the vehicle,
pulling her weight across the parking lot, seeing Loomis, the Marshal, and
Marion going into a clinic, almost without a voice until they are out of the
sight. Then suddenly she can not only bark with a great octave, Laurie gets
those legs pumping. There is so much opportunity for Michael (hard to really
call him The Shape any longer because Carpenter’s script gave him enough
backstory to remove the real mystique) to catch and kill her. But that just isn’t
in the cards because Laurie is the survivor. It isn’t that I don’t want her to
survive, but it is just the way the screenplay lays out how she does…it leaves
much to be desired. I can handle some implausibility.
As for contrivance in
storytelling, I do understand there are times where you must give up a bit of
credibility in order for there to be a movie with an ending that somewhat gives
the slasher audience a pleasant trip home. And Michael’s power and resilience I
admittedly abandon some scrutiny because if I laud and praise Halloween (1978)
which has The Shape lifting Bob off is feet, sticking him to a door with a
butcher knife that holds him up then should I be too hard on the sequel in 1981
when the sexy blond nurse (Tawny Moyer) is stuck with just a scalpel, is
hoisted far off her own feet (with her shoes flop-flopping to the floor), and
dumped with relative ease into a heap? So I do, as a viewer, allow some leeway
before I just throw my hands up and say fuck this.
Knowing that Carpenter,
though, was struggling with the screenplay, battling creative malaise, taking
to beer just to get through the miserable experience, the logical errors seem
to make sense. And considering the critical response to the film, in response
to its dalliance with the popular slasher tropes populating the genre of its
era, the screenplay is often cited as a major overall problem. I mean Tommy
Wallace and director Rosenthal both had their share of problems with Carpenter’s
reliance in violence and nudity (Shoop’s pressures to show her cleavage would
now be considered quite troublesome), as John is reputed to have shot the scene
where Michael sticks a teenager (Anne Bruner) with a butcher knife he took from
the house of an elderly couple, neighbors to the girl whose parents had left
for the night, the former passing on helming the film while the latter had
reshoots and edits altering his final product.
It was no wonder Carpenter
couldn’t wait to get away from this franchise and move on with his life. It was
as if he felt the pressure to compromise with the graphic violence to appease
the slasher audience, and while many of us enjoy Halloween II for its unique
methods Michael Myers uses tools to leave his trail of bodies, I could see why
the less-is-more approach used in the first film might be preferable to what
ultimately made the screen.
- The hypodermic to the temple, another found in a doctor’s eye, a blood puddle from a nurse’s open vein, the head scalded in hot tub water, a silhouetted strangling, scalpel to the throat, hammer teeth to the head, and blood puddle trip into a concussion all leave behind a bad taste to those quite critical of the use of excessive kill setpieces…sure many of us revel in such bad taste, but when you look back at Halloween (1978), it wasn’t about a body count as much as The Shape haunting neighborhoods, an evil on the loose, the lurker in the darkness and shadows.
Comments
Post a Comment