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"Halloween", from Tuna
Tuna's comments:
Halloween (1978) is considered a classic horror
film, and has been sequeled and cloned to death.
It is often credited with putting the slasher
genre of horror on the map. I find it a good
film. A young boy decides one Halloween night to
put on a mask and fillet his sister with a
butcher knife. He spends 15 years incarcerated in
a mental ward then escapes and returns to his
home town on Halloween night. We are then treated
to a slice of life story about three teen-aged
girls. Of course the killer and the girls
interact. If you wait for dark, turn off the
lights and clear your mind, then get into the
film, it is still scary. The fright stems from
the specter of death, night quite scene, but
hovering just around the corner throughout the
film.
For me, the real
importance of Halloween is two-fold. It marks the
big-screen debut of Jamie Lee Curtis, and it was
the first Indie to do real well at the box
office. Shot in 3 weeks in 1978 for a budget of
$300,000 it grossed $50 million. This proved that
an Indie could stand toe to toe with a major
studio release and hold its own. This had to be
an inspiration to other Indie film makers, and
helped to encourage what are now many of the most
interesting new releases. Jamie Lee Curtis had
appeared in a few TV things when she was cast for
the lead in Halloween (for which she received a
whopping $3,000.00). She ate the camera. She has
the presence of a seasoned veteran, and steals
every scene in which she appears. As a result of
this film, she was typecast for 5 years as a B
horror bimbo. She says, "I never took off my
clothes, never swore, never smoked dope. But I
had every woman's group in the country after me.
Then I do two movies in which I take my clothes
off, and now I'm considered legitimate. You tell
me where the morality is." I couldn't resist
including a few images of the 20-year-old Jamie
Lee even though she kept her clothes on.
The special edition DVD
is digitally mastered, and is very clean. It is
also loaded with special features.
thumbnails
Jamie Lee Curtis
(non-nude) (1,
2,
3)
Nancy Kyes (1,
2,
3,
4)
PJ Soles (1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
Sandy Johnson (1,
2)
"Last
Man Standing", from Johnny Web
The pedigree here is
very complicated. Back in the late 1920's, famed
pulp writer Dashiel Hammett (The Maltese Falcon,
The Thin Man) wrote a novel called "Red
Harvest" about a lone PI in a small town, a
man with no name, who plays two rival gangs
against each other after he finds his client
dead. The great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa
admitted that he took the Red Harvest storyline
without attribution when he wrote 1961's
"Yojimbo", about a nameless,
historyless samurai who enters a small Japanese
town in the 18th century and plays two warring
factions against each other. Is this starting to
sound familiar? That's probably because you've
seen the Clint Eastwood pic "A Fistful of
Dollars", which is the same basic plot
located in the Old West, with gangs of Mexican
banditos instead of samurai.
"Last Man
Standing" credits Kurosawa, probably
motivated by the fact that Kurosawa is a
distinguished screen legend and his name lends an
aura of respectability to the project.
Writer/director Walter Hill might have been more
honest if he had also credited Fistful of
Dollars, from which he borrows several stylistic
elements, moving the Leone movie forward about
forty years, and back across the border to Texas.
Strangely enough,
although this one is the fourth degree of
separation from Red Harvest, it comes full circle
back to Hammett's own Prohibition era for its
locale. Apart from that, however, it's nothing
like Red Harvest. The movie town is far removed
from Hammett's town, which was a real place which
gangsters ruled. (Also true in Yojimbo, in which
there are real villagers trying to live normal
lives.)
The town in this movie
doesn't have anyone left to rule. Except for the
mobsters and their floozies, there appear to be
only four inhabitants, including no wives or
children. The buildings all appear to be falling
apart and left over from an earlier era. The
unreality is further enhanced by the climate,
which seems to be a permanent red dust storm
during the day. All of these elements are, again,
straight out of A Fistful of Dollars.
Interestingly, although they refer to this as the
desert, it rains at night. In fact, it rains so
hard that it interferes with driving. That's good
for movie atmosphere, but I think maybe they need
to look up the definition of "desert".
It's an OK movie, but
you have to understand that the violence is not a
means to an end in this movie. The violence IS
the movie. Body count is the entire raison
d'etre. Although this is not my favorite kind of
film, I did actually get kind of an adrenalin
rush from some of the scenes here, although
others seem too uncreative to be interesting,
rather like watching target practice with live
targets.
Just because I think
Hammett's prose is kind cool, here's the intro to
Red Harvest:
" I first heard
Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired
mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in
Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't
think anything of what he had done to the city's
name. Later I heard men who could manage their
r's give it the same pronunciation."
Karina Lombard (1,
2,
3)
"Man on
the Moon", from Johnny Web
OK, let's make a movie
about Andy Kaufman. He was interesting and
offbeat. Let's get Jim Carrey to play Andy - he's
funny and he's got Andy down to a T. OK, roll
'em. What's that? OK, who forgot the script? Hey,
Jim, do something funny, will ya? Angela Jones and Christina Carson Chorus Girls
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