TROLL (1986)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, cosmological*



SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


I finally got around to re-watching the original TROLL, long after devoting a review and a lot of lit-crit theorizing to its epigone-in-name-only TROLL 2.

My original feelings toward the film were confirmed: though some viewers have called TROLL a "bad movie," it's fairly well organized.  Its goals are modest and it achieves them adequately, never attaining its quasi-sequel's delirious ventures into gratuitous meaninglessness.  The creative talents (one must call them that, I suppose) behind TROLL 2 claimed that they had never seen the 1986 film, and that they had always meant for their film to be called "GOBLINS."  I do find it interesting, though, that the titular monster of TROLL begins his reign of terror by taking on the form of little girl Wendy, and then acts out in outrageous ways that horrify the rest of Wendy's family.  Later, TROLL 2 involves the central character, a middle-school boy, who has to act out in outrageous fashion to try to keep his family from eating the food of the goblins.  But then, perhaps both films owe their terrible tots to the mega-success of 1973's EXORCIST film.

TROLL resembles one of those haunted-house movies where the ghost keeps knocking off members of some group of visitors one-by-one.  Here we have a "haunted condo," but the nature of the haunting is much more exotic than a simple ghost.  The troll who takes over Wendy's identity is one Torok, who, rather than killing most of his victims, seeks to transform these occupants of modernity into phantasms of a faery-tale past. 

The parents of Wendy are little more than a standard mom-and-dad unit; the star of the show is the presciently named "Harry Potter Jr.," who initially resents the intrusions of his younger sister.  But as Harry discerns that tenants in the condo are undergoing weird fates, he begins to make connections between these events and his sister's bizarre behavior.  He only learns the truth because one of the condo-occupants is the "good witch" Eunice St. Claire (June Lockhart).  She reveals that Torok the Troll-- once a faerie in ancient days-- wishes to bring back the olden days of faerie.  Because 1986 offers a unique opportunity for cosmic re-alignment, Torok has decided to gradually transform each individual room of the condominium until he has created a small "pocket universe" of faerie-- full of unicorns, giants, and Tinkerbelle-style fairies-- which is capable of spreading forth and engulfing the rest of reality.

Eunice tells Harry Jr. all this because she believes his motivation to save his sister-- now imprisoned in the faerie-world-- will enable him to help defeat Torok.  As the film progresses toward its climax, Eunice gives Harry a magical spear and tells him to go into the magical world and destroy it by stabbing the spear into the biggest, ugliest creature he can find.

The setups with the victims of Torok provide the film's strongest moments, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus transformed into an ageless fairy, real-life dwarf Phil Fondacaro becoming a magical version of a "little person," and Sonny Bono turned into a plant (a dominant trope in TROLL 2, by the way).  Though the budget is limited, these are evocative enough to allow some viewers to accept the wild premise.

What doesn't work nearly as well is the climax.  Eunice's gives Harry a history-lesson about how Torok became a troll-- because he and his fairy-kindred tried to dominate humankind, an ambition sometimes attributed to the demons of the Christian hell. However, though Torok has no reason to care anything about humans, Eunice claims that the troll wants to keep one human-- Wendy-- as a specimen of her people after the World of Faerie devastates the human continuum.  This makes it possible for the audience to believe that Wendy is still alive and ripe to be rescued by heroic Harry, but the idea that Torok wants to play "extinct species curator" doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  It might have been more believable if Torok were seeking a replacement for the human-looking Eunice, who seems to have been a fairy from archaic times, since she was Torok's lover in those days.  I, at least, might have believed that Torok wanted to keep one human female around, whom he would then marry once she matured. 

I might not make much of this point except that it figures so vitally into the climax.  Harry, despite being set up by Eunice to play giant-slayer, utterly fails the task, just as Eunice herself fails in her attempt to battle Torok's pawns with her magic.  The only thing that saves the world is Torok himself.  When the troll's gigantic pawn-- the one whose heart contains whatever spell keeps the faerie-world viable-- defeats Harry rather easily, the creature menaces little Wendy.  Torok rushes to protect Wendy and kills his own creature with the spear.  The spell is undone and most of the condo's inhabitants return to normal.  However, in keeping with the eighties' tendency for last-minute reversal-endings, the conclusion suggests that the condo still maintains a doorway into the perilous faeryland .


Harry Jr.'s failure to play hero, and Torok undoing his own plans, have a clumsy, improvised quality to them, as if the writer didn't quite know what effect he wanted.  Moreover, Eunice's powers seem to be variable.  Is there something that keeps her from spearing the giant herself?  Certainly her age shoudn't be a consideration, for in one sequence Eunice reveals that she can de-age herself (at which point she's played by June Lockhart's real-life daughter Anne).  But even in young form Eunice is rather easily defeated by Torok's minions, so she's not much better as a fighter than as a chooser of heroes. 

Incidentally, though the story has the potential to be of the "combative type," in that it contains two magical forces that *could* come into conflict, the magic forces of Torok and of Eunice never come into significant conflict, and Harry Jr. certainly never provides the necessary heroic gravitas.  Thus in my established terminology TROLL is entirely "subcombative."

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939), THE APE (1940)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

I've always admired a phrase coined by William K. Everson to explain the appeal of Boris Karloff's acting-persona: Everson said Karloff looked "brutal yet sensitive."  To the best of my knowledge not much of the actor's silent-era work contributed to this balance of opposed qualities: not until after he essayed the Frankenstein Monster did Karloff manage to create the persona that made him arguably the most renowned American horror star of Classic Hollywood.

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG, the first of three Columbia films directed by journeyman Nick Grinde (also a collaborator on BABES IN TOYLAND), is also the best of the trio.  It's also one of Karloff's best "mad scientist" roles, boosted in part by the screenplay of Karl Brown (who also scripted the other two films in the "series.")  In contrast to some films, in which the over-reaching scientist is condemned for meddling with the works of God, HANG defends the attempts of science to bring about radical new advances.  True, the dedicated scientist becomes so obsessed with his discovery that he becomes a dead-alive monster, bent on avenging the wrongs done him.  But in part society's purblind conservatism has contributed to the creation of the monster.

Dr. Savaard (Karloff) dedicates himself to finding a way to cryogenically preserve bodies with fatal injuries in order to resurrect them afterward.  A young man volunteers to be a guinea pig, which is to say that he must be killed before he can be resuscitated.  The volunteer's girlfriend reveals the experiment to the police, who arrive in time to find a dead body, but they refuse to let Savaard finish his experiment.  Despite an impassioned plea to his jury on behalf of science's prerogatives-- the high point of the film-- Savaard is condemned to hang.

However, a loyal assistant manages to claim the scientist's body quickly enough to subject it to the resurrection procedure.  Alive but embittered, Savaard decides to seek vengeance on the judge, jury, and coroner who sentenced him.  He gives his future victims an invitation to a mysterious party, not unlike the situation of the earlier NINTH GUEST, reveals himself to his guests and sets in motion their deaths-- one from an electric gate very like that of the earlier film.  Only the intrusion of Savaard's innocent daughter on the party keeps the body count relatively low, and inevitably results in the doctor's reacquaintance with death.  But despite his murderous acts, Savaard keeps the audience's sympathy to the last.

THE APE was released just weeks after the last of the Karloff-Grinde-Brown films, BEFORE I HANG. I didn't like THE APE at all when I first encountered it, but I don't think it was because of its premise, though it is particularly preposterous even for a low-budget mad-scientist flick.

Doctor Adrian (Karloff), a scientist ostracized by his peers for his far-fetched theories, comes to live in a small country town.  He cherishes a desire to do away with paralysis diseases, and so comes to form a paternal interest toward pretty young Frances, a girl confined to a wheelchair by polio.  The locals regard  Adrian as something of an odd duck, and Frances' fiancee Danny seems vaguely threatened by the old man's attentions.

This status quo is interrupted by the appearance of a traveling circus outside town.  A caged gorilla (played by renowned gorilla-man Crash Corrigan) escapes after mauling his abusive trainer. The townspeople bring the trainer to Adrian for treatment, but since the man is almost dead of his wounds, Adrian finishes him off by drawing spinal fluid from the trainer to create an anti-polio serum.  His initial test on Frances works, but he needs more spinal fluid.

 The gorilla, wandering in the wild and terrifying the locals, happens to invade Adrian's laboratory.  Adrian very improbably manages to kill the animal.  Somehow the animal's presence gives Adrian the idea to skin the dead beast, wear it as a costume and pose as the ape in order to kill unworthy members of the community and harvest their spinal fluid.  The good doctor continues to terrorize the town although, as with HANG, the body count is rather low.  As a result of Adrian's exploits, Frances's polio is cured, but he's caught during one of his night-time peregrinations-- ironically, because Frances sees the "ape" and calls the constables to attack and kill the "creature."

In my first viewing of the film, I think that I disliked the film because the audience never delivers a "monster," just a man bumbling around in an ape suit. At least HANG shows its mad scientist looking creepy and cadaverous.  The film employs two uncanny tropes-- the "astounding animal" trope for the rampage of the real gorilla, and the "outre outfits" trope for Adrian's simian masquerade.  However, the element of the miraculous polio-cure transports the movie into the domain of the marvelous.

STARSHIP TROOPERS: INVASION (2012), LOCKOUT (2012)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Strangely, though STARSHIP TROOPERS sounds like the title of a pure adventure-opus, neither the original Heinlein novel nor the three live-action films derived from it conform to the tonality of the adventure-story.  Only one derivation known to me, the 1999 ROUGHNECKS: STARSHIP TROOPERS telecartoon, falls into the adventure mythos.  This 2012 direct-to-video release, also animated, can now be added to this short list.

As I said in this review, the original TROOPERS film is certainly constructed as a covert irony.
Following that, as I noted here,the second live-action film in the franchise hewed to a more melodramatic approach, while the third one returned to "a more ironic stance."  STARSHIP 4, however, abandons any ironic or satiric elements, and comes off as a somewhat darker version of the G.I. JOE cartoon-- a similarity that may have been suggested to me by noticing that one of that show's writers, Flint Dille, wrote the screenplay for INVASION.  In truth, I think the characters in G.I. JOE were a tad more individualistic than Dille's versions of such TROOPERS characters as Johnny Rico and Carmen Ibanez.

One of the most un-ironic developments in INVASION is that, during the space-soldiers' battle against their arthropodal adversaries, Rico and Ibanez express negative feelings toward Carl Jenkins, and one of the new protagonists, Henry "Hero" Varro, is put into prison for being insubordinate to Jenkins.  In the original TROOPERS film, none of the Earth-people are in any way aware of the noxiousness of the quasi-fascist things Jenkins says or does.  By making Jenkins a secondary adversary for the "grunts," Dille's script defuses any of his potential for irony. 

INVASION boasts some impressive animated effects, particularly for its newly designed insect foes and by improving on the armor-suits seen only briefly in the third live-action film.  However, all of the characters are relatively routine stereotypes, thus reducing the film's ability to compel audience identification.

LOCKOUT-- in part scripted by Luc Besson, and directed by the script's other two writers-- is no more original than INVASION, being no more than another take on the plotline of John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.  In place of ex-soldier Snake Plissken, we have an ex-CIA man  named "Snow" who is falsely accused of espionage against the U.S.  In place of the government needing to have him venture into the hostile territory of New York, the hero must invade a prison-satellite filled with manicas. In place of Plissken's quarry, the President of the U.S., Snow must seek to rescue the President's daughter-- though something close to this variation had already appeared in a pair of Italian ripoffs of ESCAPE.

However, though there's nothing very impressive about LOCKOUT's plot or action-sequences, the Besson film does put across some entertaining chemistry between Snow-- played by Guy Pearce, not exactly the first actor one picks to be a muscular action-hero-- and the President's daughter, played by feisty Maggie Grace.  Said chemistry comes about largely because Snow, in contrast to many monosyllabic heroes of similar appearance, shows a mocking sense of humor about nearly everything.  Moreover, some of the jokes are actually funny, so that the audience generally wants to see Grace's character get back some of her own. 

LOCKOUT could have benefitted from some freakier villains, as the prison-maniacs are fairly uninspired.  But overall, it's a good time-waster.

HAMLET (1969), SERAPHIM FALLS (2006)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


In my review of the Laurence Olivier HAMLET I aligned the film with the trope of the "phantasmal figuration," which subsumes those works in which there's a question as to "whether or not to take the fantasy-material at face value."  The 1969 HAMLET strongly resembles the 1948 production in seeking to avoid the problem "is the ghost real or not" by not letting the audience see a spirit in either of the two scenes where it appears.  If anything, director Tony Richardson-- whose only other contribution to fantasy-cinema is the 1990 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA-- is even more abstemious than Olivier in this respect.

Because this production was entirely filmed in the Roundhouse theater, constructed from a deserted train-shed, Richardson keeps his lens focused on the actors either in close-up or at middle-range.  Perhaps the intent was to make this HAMLET more intimate and less defined by cinematic "pomp and circumstance."  Unfortunately, the actors sometimes seem rushed to finish their speeches, unable to fall back on the long stage-tradition of using props for "bits of business."  Nicol Williamson's Hamlet is particularly plagued by this stagecraft-problem.  And although some critics do put Hamlet in his early thirties, which Williamson was at the time, his advanced balding makes him look older, and clashes with the dominant sense of the Danish prince as a book-learned naif.

However, one of the well-trod paths that Richardson does not follow is Olivier's over-emphasis on the Freudian angle.  True, the word "incest" still appears as often as in the play, but there's no mouth-on-mouth kiss here, as in Olivier's version.  In fact, during the infamous scene where Hamlet confronts his mother in her bedroom to chastise her for her waywardness, Williamson's Hamlet seems not at all like a son filled with concupiscent lust for his parent, but like a confused child in a man's body.  One reviewer complained that a kiss between Ophelia and her brother Laertes went on long enough to suggest some greater intimacy, but I didn't get that vibe.

Most of the male performers deliver professional but unexciting turns, with Anthony Hopkins' Claudius a particular disappointment.  The lead females, however, seem to flourish with Richardson's up-close-and-personal approach.  Judy Parfitt makes a Gertrude with a "Mona Lisa" inscrutability and singer Marianne Faithful essays an impassioned Ophelia.

The main plotline of wrtier-director David Von Ancken's SERAPHIM FALLS covers much the same ground as Fritz Lang's "revenge melodramas" like THE BIG HEAT and RANCHO NOTORIOUS.  However, whereas Lang supplies his audiences with up-front details on why his protagonists have hit the revenge trail, Von Ancken delays the backstory for over half the picture.  Thus one does not know whether to empathize with Pierce Brosnan's fugitive Gideon, or his pursuer, Liam Neeson's Carver, though the latter is somewhat more unsympathetic in that he has a gang of mercenaries working with him to track down Gideon.  When the backstory is revealed, it apportions a certain sympathy to both characters, instead of taking Lang's path, in which the audience wants to see the protagonists take down the villains despite the awareness that vengeance corrupts Lang's heroes.

The only metaphenomenal elements here are two strange individuals who appear in the story toward the last half-hour, when Carver pursues Gideon through an arid desert.  One is a Native American (Wes Studi) with a philosophical turn of mind, and the other is a female drummer (Angelica Huston) with a wagonload of goods.  Neither one does anything that's especially fantastic, except that Huston's character pops up as if out of nowhere in one scene.  Von Ancken does give both of them myth-derived names, for the name on the drummer's wagon is "Louise C. Fair" (Lucifer), while the Indian, given no name in the storyline, is billed as "Charon." Some comments assert that they must be either the angels or the devils of the Christian tradition, but neither character conforms to the myths of angels or devils, much less the tales of the Greek boatman of the dead.  Presumably Von Ancken's use of these names, both associated with meting out fate to the dead or dying, means that the two men will perish following the picture's conclusion, though as it happens the enemies manage to forgive one another before the end.  But if anything, the actions of these two ambivalent figures carries the resonance of the Amerindian trickster-gods, who are merely amused to watch two mortals fighting for their lives.  However, Von Ancken's script is not ambitious enough to make these mythic references amount to anything.

HALLOWEEN II (1981), HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*


I noted at the conclusion of my HALLOWEEN review that if there had never been another film in this franchise, it might be hard to judge the original as being either "uncanny" or "marvelous."  Slasher Michael Myers takes a significant amount of punishment from both Laurie Strode and Doctor Loomis, but at the end of the film it's just marginally possible that the killer has simply crawled away to die.

HALLOWEEN II, picking up mere moments after the first film, references the fact that Michael, a.k.a. "the Shape," was shot six times by Loomis.  But when the audience first sees Michael, he shows no sign of having taken any wounds, and at no point is his slaughter-spree slowed down by having six bullets in his body.  Almost none of the victims of Michael's spree manage to inflict any wounds on the killer, and only at the climax does he take about four shots, again from Loomis, which he shrugs off before killing another victim.  Michael seems to have some limitations on his "healing powers," for shortly thereafter Laurie shoots him in the eyes and blinds him for a time.  Loomis apparently destroys "the Shape" in a fiery explosion, though as most horror-fans know later filmmakers found a way to exhume Michael for Part 4 of the series.  At the time writer-producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill intended this film to be the swan song for the Shape.

Sadly, while the original film is a masterpiece of pacing, the sequel stretches out its thin premise with draggy, psuedo-suspenseful scenes courtesy of new director Rick Rosenthal.  Despite all the commotion generated by the Haddonfield police upon discovering three dead bodies and sending the injured Laurie to the local hospital, somehow Michael manages to have the run of Haddonfield as he stalks around, killing both men and women-- though, to be sure, female victims receive a little more attention here than in the first film.  Given the almost total absence of medical activity, the hospital in Haddonfield seems more like a morgue, which is symbolically right but still makes the place seem far more conveniently deserted than any real hospital should be.

Michael shows a little more sadism in his murders this time, as when he plunges one nurse's face into a super-hot tub and drains another's blood from her body.  Arguably, the first film shows a little of this propensity, as when the killer dresses in a "ghost costume" in order to take some pleasure in fooling his next victim.  But there's little of the first film's sense of Michael being an incarnation of evil and/or impending fate. The narrative also retcons the original story to make the slasher the long lost brother of Laurie Strode.  This is at least an interesting development, in contrast to a clumsy scene in which Loomis and a cop ally find that Michael has written the word "Samhain" near the site of one of his murders.  I've seen it suggested that, since Michael spent most of his time at the insane asylum as nearly inactive, possibly the legend of the Celtic version of Halloween was mentioned to Michael by his then-analyst Loomis.  However, though Loomis promptly pontificates on the subject of Samhain for the audience's benefit, he never admits that he is the source of Michael's sudden interest in comparative religion.  Possibly Hill and Carpenter thought it was an ambivalent means of suggesting "pure evil" again, or bringing a "Halloween" theme back into the story since all the trick-or-treaters would've gone indoors by that hour.  Still, the scene doesn't offer any real payoff here.

In contrast, though HALLOWEEN III has a lot of problems, it's never as dull as Number Two frequently is.  If it had been successful, possibly Hill and Carpenter would have continued the franchise along the lines of THREE, with each new film pursuing new plotlines on a general Halloween theme.

The finished script of THREE is credited to director Tommy Lee Wallace, though an early version was written by Nigel Kneale, who withdrew his name from the movie when producers insisted on an elevated level of goriness.  THREE is indeed much gorier than the first two HALLOWEEN films, but it rather fits the new concept, in which the "witch" of the title seeks to bring back the Celtic custom of massive ritual sacrifice.  At very least it's a better use of the Celtic-Halloween theme than we see in TWO.

Doctor Dan Challis (Tom Atkins), father and somewhat browbeaten husband, happens to be on duty at a California hospital when an injured man, brought in for medical attention, is murdered in his hospital room by a mysterious, passionless assassin.  The same assassin then covers his tracks by setting himself, and the car he occupies, on fire.  What Dan does not know-- though the audience does-- is that the killer is one of several identical androids.

The patient's pretty daughter Ellie shows up at the hospital, swearing to find out why her father was murdered.  Dan is both curious about the murder and intrigued with the young woman, and he accompanies her to investigate the victim's last place of employment: the Silver Shamrock Novelties Factory, located in Santa Mira, California.  Ellie is apparently impressed with Dan as well, for upon reaching a motel in the factory-town, she goes along with their masquerading as a married couple.  She also ends up sleeping with Dan rather quickly, considering that her main goal ought to be finding her father's murderer.

Dan and Ellie learn that Ellie's father sought to expose a massive plot by Irish-born factory-owner Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy) to sacrifice dozens upon dozens of trick-or-treaters to his pagan gods.  One might consider it the super-villain's answer to "tainted Halloween candy."  Cochran's factory produces mass-produced masks that have the capability to kill those who wear them, though as a means of explaining why he's doing this for the first time in 1982, the villain helpfully explains to Dan that the stars have to be "in conjunction" before the sacrifice is made.

On the plus side, long before the nature of the peril is known, the film continually foregrounds Cochran's masks through a barrage of television ads, urging all the kiddies to don their masks at just the right time. On the minus side, it's vague as to what powers Cochran commands.  His identical android-servants seem like pure products of scientific innovation.  However, though the audience is set up to think that the masks are also mechanical menaces, the one time they're used, they unleash what would have to be mystical effects, in that a kid's mask fills up with insects and snakes.  The villain also steals a "bluestone" from Stonehenge to make his plan work, and the stone gives off an assortment of weird effects at the climax.  Dan manages to achieve an initial victory over Cochran's forces, though the film ends on an ambivalent note, so that the viewer doesn't know if he manages to avert the crisis fully.  While some films are stronger when they attempt this type of "maybe-unhappy ending," the attempt in THREE merely seems to come out of left field.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN V (1998), CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666 (1999), CHILDREN OF THE CORN VII (2001)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological, metaphysical*


Now that I've finished watching the first six sequels to the original 1984 CHILDREN OF THE CORN film, I've decided that there really isn't any deep symbolic reason as to why the franchise has lasted so long.  Now I tend to believe that the main reason is economic.  Entries in the series are always going to feature young actors with few to no credits, which keeps the producers' costs down, even if they may turn around and hire a few "big names" to spice up the appeal to renters.  On top of that-- how much does it cost to maintain cornfield sets?

Not surprisingly, the next three in the series get further and further from the original concept of the Stephen King story.  Five, Six, and Seven are all inferior entries in a dubious franchise, though they're mounted well enough that they're still better than most SYFY channel dreck.

CHILDREN V is subtitled FIELDS OF TERROR.  Perhaps the original intention was FIELDS OF SCREAMS, to play on a famous film-title, and some lawyer said "no."  It's the weakest of the sequels, as it returns to an almost empty plot-well: dopey teens in trouble with supernatural evil. 

A new locale, Divinity Falls, takes the place of Gatlin, Nebraska, but at least, in contrast to THE GATHERING, the demonic child-cult still worships "He Who Walks Behind the Rows," that devilish corn-god.  However, the deity takes an unusual form here, that of a fire-creature who lurks within a grain-silo.  Addtionally in a move that goes against the whole "kids vs. adults" trope, the demon-kids have a old man as the leader of the cult, fanatical Luke Enright (a spacy David Carradine). 

In addition, one of the trespassing teens-- lead character Alison-- happens onto the cult without knowing that her long-lost brother Jacob is a member.  Jacob must struggle against his allegiance to the cult and his loyalty to his sister, recalling a similar struggle in CHILDREN III.  In addition, the most dedicated of the evil kids is again a kid of middle-school age.  In general throughout the series it's the younger kids who are the most dangerous, while the older ones are capable of being lured away from the cult by sexuality or by earlier relationships.

In contrast to earlier films in the series, there's far less attention given to designing elaborate deaths for the victims of the children, which helps to make the film even duller than its rambling plot.

The script of CHILDREN 666, subtitled ISAAC'S RETURN, makes the greatest attempt to ground its mayhem in the original events of Gatlin, Nebraska, for it revives "Isaac," the leader of the child-cult from the first film. In addition, protagonist Hannah is the full-grown offspring of Rachel, a character who had been one of the original Gatlin kids.  Hannah is raised by adoptive parents, but chooses to visit Gatlin to find out the truth about her mother, partly because Hannah is tormented by recurring weird visions.

Naturally, weird things happen to Hannah as soon as she arrives. She meets an old street-preacher who, unlike most preachers in this series, actually seems to have read the Bible, for he seems to know about her visions and draws a comparison between Hannah and the Biblical seer Samuel. 

Isaac, who has not aged since being put in a 19-year sleep by his corn-god, is told that he spawned a son previous to that sleep.  Isaac, desiring a "pure race" to serve the corn-god, plans to wed his son Matt to Hannah.  There might have been some mythic potential in this plot, given the association of corn-rituals and fertitlity.  But any such potential gets lost because the script introduces too many characters, none of whom take on any distinctive personalities, not even Stacy Keach's woeful Doctor Michaels or Nancy Allen as Hannah's mother, who tried to prevent Hannah's involvement in the cult's business.  Still, there are some decently creepy scenes, as when the street preacher tells Hannah that she should never have been born-- a feeling some adoptees have experienced for mundane reasons.

CHILDREN VII, subtitled REVELATION, makes only minimal use of the Gatlin mythology, as heroine Janie, seeking her missing grandmother in not-so-rural Omaha, stumbles across a new cult of evil children, who also apparently worship "He Who Walks Between the Rows."  As Janie follows clue after clue, seeking to learn if her grandmother is dead, she learns that the woman had once been a member of a religious cult, and that she's been reclaimed by the child-cult.  The motives of the cult seem murkier than ever in this sequel, but REVELATION is at least superior to the previous two in presenting assorted creepy scenes, though there's too much reliance on dream-sequences.

The one standout characteristic of this sequel is that Janie is an atheist and declares vociferously that her grandmother was the same.  Only later does she learn that this posture was a cover for the grandmother's earlier activities-- and more importantly, that the corn-god is real.  In contrast to the pagan explanation from CHILDREN II, a Christian priest (Michael Ironside) identifies the creature with the devil, and this may be closer to the original intent of Stephen King's story than any other interpretatiom.  Unsurprisingly, REVELATION doesn't manage to reveal any level of metaphysical complexity with its simplistic approach.  

HALLOWEEN (1978)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*


Though the original HALLOWEEN probably hasn't been as extensively critiqued as the original PSYCHO, there's been so much written on John Carpenter's breakout work that it can be daunting to try saying anything new about it.

However, I have one advantage in that I believe a great deal of the criticism that has focused on the sexual elements of HALLOWEEN has been misapplied.  I'm not saying that there are no sexual elements in the film, but I don't believe they are the center of the film. It should be noted that Carpenter's previous two films, DARK STAR and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, are not films about sex but about surviving violent forces.  ASSAULT has sometimes been compared to the similar works of Howard Hawks, and as it happens Hawks' one science-fiction film THE THING appears briefly on a television set in HALLOWEEN.

Far too much has been made of the distinctions between main character Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her two friends Annie and Lynda.  Criticism seems to focus on the idea that Laurie survives the assault of psychopathic Michael Myers because she's a "virtuous" teen, while Lynda and Annie are sluts who have slept around.  In actuality nothing in the Carpenter-Debra Hill script suggests that Annie and Lynda are killed because of their promiscuity, though the critics may have influenced many, many derivative films to use that very formula.

According to the girls' conversations, Laurie's lack of a boyfriend is not attributed to any virtuous refusal of pre-marital sex. Rather, Laurie herself says that she doesn't attract guys because they think she's "too smart."  This is confirmed for the audience in a subsequent scene, wherein an unseen teacher calls upon Laurie in class to explicate two authors' beliefs on the nature of fate.  Laurie responds with a concise analysis of the authors, noting that the latter believed that fate was inescapable-- much in the vein of Doctor Sam Loomis' pronoucements that his former patient Michael is "pure evil."  These are certainly more metaphysical thoughts than one would get from the average filmmaker putting together a script about imperilled babysitters.

Annie and Lynda are not stupid, but they are overly complacent as to how safe they are in the suburban terrain of Haddonfield.  In an early scene Annie yells to a fast-driving car, "Hey, jerk; speed kills!"  There's a moment of suspense when the car stops, as if the driver-- whom the audience knows to be the unseen asylum-escapee Michael-- contemplates getting out to assault the girls.  The car drives on, and all three teens more or less forget about the matter.  However, when Michael descends on the girls, Lynda and Annie have both let down their guards, making it impossible for them to apprehend the threat.  To be sure, Laurie has an advantage in that she's the last one Michael attacks. Still, she shows a heroic ability to strike back at her tormentor, best represented by her desperate but clever maneuver to stab her attacker in the eye with a coat-hanger wire.

While I don't think the sexualizing distinctions apply to Laurie and her friends, there's certainly a sexual element in the Michael Myers makeup. The prologue informs us that at the age of six little Michael Myers took a knife and stabbed his sister after she'd made love with her boyfreind.  Yet, though this inevitably conjures the spectre of incestuous sexual jealousy, Carpenter and Hill only indirectly invoke Freudian explanations of Michael's malice.  Then they undercut the standard psychological interpretations by having their Voice of Authority speak not of the Oedipus complex but of an "evil" that has left Michael bereft of any normal affects.  It's also inevitable to associate the stalker's knife-attacks with the employment of a substitute phallus, but one must ask: is it because Michael suffers from negative compensation, or because he has, in some inexplicable way, become the literal incarnation of "the Boogeyman?"  Does he attack young women because he's attracted to them, or because, being sheer evil, he opposes everything that symbolizes life?

This brief analysis must pass over other complexities of Carpenter's direction.  However, the question arises: what type of phenomenality does the film portray?  In this film-- unlike others in the series-- Carpenter and Hill keep the audience guessing.  Does Michael really possesses some sort of supernatural potency, or does he just throw off his injuries because he's too crazy to know he's hurt?  If there had never been another film in the HALLOWEEN series, I might go with the latter, though being shot six times point blank is pretty good even for the most enfevered psycho.  However, since the initial film becomes implicated into the scheme of the later films, where Michael survives incredible assaults, I have to categorize even the first film as a "marvelous" work.