[Special thanks to FatherOfTears for putting this in our trick-or-treats bag!]
Kinder-Taining :: How to End Your Child's Halloween Birthday Party
Hosting children's parties can be exhausting any day of the year, but throwing ones for those born on All Hallows Eve can be down right draining with the extra burden of having to make costumes. Once the games have been played, the cake has been cut, and the gifts have been opened, it's time to clear the room and send the little partygoers on their way. Should you not have an air horn handy or enough energy to call in a bomb threat to your own home, try the simple solution of slurred arithmetic as demonstrated in the 1976 After School Special FRANCESCA, BABY. In the time it takes you to count to five, your house will emptied and you can get back to doing what you really wanted to be doing, like drinking on your child's birthday!
Kindertrauma Investigates :: Lizzie Borden
Hi kids, it's your Aunt John here. Your Unkle Lancifer and I are taking the day off to get ready for this coming Saturday's SECOND ANNUAL KINDERTRAUMA HALLOWEEN PARADE. And by get ready, I really mean settle a choreography dispute with the KINDERTRAUMA DANCERS. So if you haven't sent in your parade picture yet (kindertrauma@gmail.com) get on it!
Anywhoozles, in our absence, Kinderpal Mickster has graciously agreed to take time off from her gig as an investigative reporter and baby-sit today. So spread out your story-time mats, grab your juice boxes, and get comfortable as Mickster takes a whack at LIZZIE BORDEN:
The Lives and Loves of Laurie Strode
It's that time of year when I watch every movie in the HALLOWEEN franchise. The quality ranges from "heart-pounding work of stabby genius" to the cinematic equivalent of a piece of fruit thrown into your trick ‘r treat bag; happily all of the films are required by law to take place on Halloween and I can't say no to that. I never watch the HALLOWEEN movies in chronological order, but there is a method to my Myers madness. First I get PART 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH out of the way, I don't want its joyous insanity mixing with the rest of the group, just like I don't want my gravy touching my peas. Then it's on to "The Laurie Cycle" which includes Part 1, Part 2, H2O & the beginning of RESURRECTION. (The rest of RESURRECTION, I discard like a corn husk.) Then it's time for "The Jamie Cycle" which starts great with Part 4, gets horrible with Part 5 and then gets who cares because PAUL RUDD is in it. The festivities are then completed with a drunken excursion into the ROB ZOMBIE zone.
Where I stand now is in the crossroads between cycles Laurie and Jamie. So while I'm here let's talk a bit about our old pal Laurie, the greatest female horror character of all time (Sorry Ellen Ripley, I love you too but since you drive a spaceship to work and break bread with robots, you gotta play on team sci-fi.)
HALLOWEEN
When we first meet Laurie (the one and only JAMIE LEE CURTIS) she is your typical American teenager except for the fact that she is responsible, respects her parents, shows signs of humility and reads books. In today's world such a creature would be terrorized into committing suicide via an on line social network, but back in the seventies you could wear beige and sing corny songs ("I wish I had you all alone…") in public without fear of retribution. In fact you might even end up hanging out with the two coolest girls in high school Lynda Van der Klok (P.J. SOLES) and Annie Bracket (NANCY LOOMIS)!
Folks can speculate all they want about Laurie's (assumed) virginity saving her hide, but I think that discounts her girl scout ability to make weapons out of household objects (knitting needles, clothes hangers) and her obvious talent for finding the quickest route between point A and point B. For somebody who is labeled a goodie-two-shoes, she sure smokes a lot of weed and spends a lot of time thinking about Ben Tramer. Alls I'm saying is Laurie is not the one note character she is sometimes painted to be. Just because she's not as slutty as Lynda, it doesn't make her a prude.
Interesting note: Knowing that nobody would buy the antiquated idea of a scrupulous, moral being walking the planet, ROB ZOMBIE insisted that in his remake, the thoroughly modern Laurie Strode (SCOUT TAYLOR-COMPTON) should perform various sexual acts upon a non consensual bagel to the horror of E.T.'s mom (DEE WALLACE) while threatening to escalate the atrocity to include an elderly owner of a hardware store.
HALLOWEEN 2
Directly after the incidents depicted in the first film, emergency workers tend to Laurie's wounds, place an insane wig on her head and drive her to the nearest hospital. Sadly, in this installment, our gal is mostly a drugged out blank slate. She's not so far gone as to not suddenly remember that she's her assailant's sister, but she certainly has lost some of her whip-smart edge. Laurie has not become a total dumb-dumb though, she props up pillows to create a decoy and has dead-on accuracy shooting a gun. She's even intuitive enough to start putting the moves on the still breathing orderly Jimmy Lloyd (LANCE GUEST) somehow knowing that dream date Ben Tramer is now a mincemeat and car sandwich.
Interesting note: If the ambulance is rockin' don't come a knockin! In the television version of HALLOWEEN 2, Laurie and Jimmy share a romantic moment at film's close and ride off presumably to go make little DANIELLE HARRIS' and JOSH HARTNETS.
HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS
I know I said this movie is "Cycle Jamie" and not "Cycle Laurie," but I should point out that Laurie does appear in this movie briefly in a photo. Turns out daughter Jamie (DANIELLE HARRIS) lovingly keeps a photo of her mother holding a pumpkin and waiting to be picked up by Annie on the Halloween night she was almost brutally murdered. Nobody knows who took this photo (The Shape?) or how it came to be in lil' Jamie's possession…
HALLOWEEN H20
It's twenty years later (hence the title) and Laurie has changed her name, dropped the wig and nabbed a sexy new boy toy (ALAN ARKIN, who I've come to refer to as "George Goonie.") She has reinvented herself not only as the dean of a prestigious school, but also as a high functioning alcoholic; you go girl! Many claim that H20 is a direct sequel to Part 2 and pretends that HALLOWEENs 4-6 do not exist. I always just assume that Laurie had two kids and kept one and dumped the other for reasons unknown…hey, it happens!
H20 is a dream of a sequel and offers us the rare treat of seeing a characters progress decades on. It sports tons of fanboy references (great job getting NANCY STEPHENS back!) that never get in the way or take you out of the plot. I'm not so keen on the new version of Michael Myers who changes his mask from scene to scene, but I'll live.
If they gave out Oscars for slasher flicks JAMIE LEE CURTIS would have earned one here. (I'm not talking about the scene where she grabs an axe and demands that Michael confront her. I'm talking about the scene where she grabs a waiter and demands a refill of chardonnay.) H20 may throw breadcrumbs to the SCREAM pigeons, but it also stands as an admirable tribute to a character that, when all is said and done, is just as much if not more important to the HALLOWEEN series than its masked killer. My only sadness comes from the fact that DONALD PLEASANCE did not live long enough to either participate or proudly observe from the sidelines.
HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION (Well, at least the first 20 minutes of it.)
Hey fence, this is my ass and it's going to sit on you! I'm not sure how I feel about the way Laurie exits the series. On one hand, it's a joy to see her all ragged and war torn in a mental hospital with semi believable long hair, but on the other she deserved the dignified end of the last chapter where she did not decapitate an innocent bystander, but her arch nemesis instead. I'm not sure I can accept this ending for Laurie; thankfully in horror there are no real endings. For all we know after Laurie got stabbed, made out with her psychopathic sibling and fell several stories into some trees that she landed in the bed of a truck passing by filled to the brim with soft, cushiony Silver Shamrock Halloween masks. A fanboy can dream can't he? Goodbye Laurie! I wish I had you all alone, just the two of us!
Traumafessions :: Reader William H. on Seizure & Star Trek & a Name That Trauma With Follically Challenged Child Aliens
Thanks to two LEONARD NIMOY movies that came out in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, I developed a terrible phobia of bald women. Most memorable was SEIZURE: THE STORY OF KATHY MORRIS, which told the story of a young woman who undergoes brain surgery. Mr. NIMOY plays her doctor. I vaguely remember a traumatizing scene where her baldness is revealed and how it horrified me. I mean, to my five year old mind, a woman was NOT supposed to be bald. Also, I probably associated the sick protagonist with my mother who had M.S.
There was also Lt. Ilia in the first STAR TREK movie who was totally, slickly, shiny bald. She was more terrifying to me than any creature that the crew of the Enterprise was ever to encounter.
And, as a NAME THAT TRAUMA, there was a movie that came out around 1983 that involved a group of bald children aliens that were traveling with a human couple. This movie traumatized me even more than the previous two, and it aired a lot on HBO. I was always afraid to turn the T.V. to that channel.
As a young adult in the mid-'90s, I thought I was over this phobia. There was even a bald super-model with a dragon tattoo on her head that I loved. Then one night I was watching MELROSE PLACE. Dr. Kimberly Shaw had been the victim of some kind of accident, but she seemed to be doing alright. In a cliff-hanging scene, after having made love to her boyfriend, Dr. Shaw goes into the bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror. Then she rips off her wig and has this choppy Joan of Arc haircut and a huge scar. I inhaled so sharply I probably sucked all the oxygen out of my room, thus proving trauma does not stop after childhood.
Traumafessions :: Reader Rita Jean on Dark Night of the Scarecrow
Do you remember DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW?
This movie scared the F-ing crap out of me when I was 10.
Hi! My name is Rita Jean from Huntington Beach, Ca. DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW was burned in my memory so badly that I had to get a copy of it somehow to re-watch it as an adult and put my memories of terror to rest. The VHS is very hard (nearly impossible) to get and DVD's don't exist although I found a guy on e-Bay that made them. I am now the proud owner of my very own DVD copy. I watched it….. and now I can honestly say that I've put my fear of this "film" to rest forever.
This movie was so horribly cheesy and the acting was so bad that I just had to laugh. Even worse is before I made that discovery, I forced my friend to watch it with me (because I was so scared) convincing him it was going to be utterly terrifying. Now he thinks I'm completely retarded.
Subsequently, now my fear of this movie is truly gone forever and I'm not too sure how to feel about that. It's kinda like losing my virginity all over again.
UNK SEZ:: Thanks Rita Jean, I still get a huge kick out of this movie but then again I'm still a virgin, so don't go by me! Funny you should mention D.N.O.T.S. (which was supposed to come out on DVD but seems to have met some snags), I was just showing Aunt John the cool image above which is taken from a terrific (nobody says terrific anymore) T-shirt design from the freaky folks at FRIGHT RAGS!
The House of the Devil
After the phenomenal success of JOHN CARPENTER's HALLOWEEN in 1978 horror movies began to fall from the sky. Eventually FRIDAY THE 13TH was released in 1980 and steered nearly all of the wannabes into a specific bloody direction, however there was a small bubble of time before FRIDAY (call it Thursday) where filmmakers scrambled to create something new and modern but still had one foot planted in traditional horror constructs. SILENT SCREAM, THE UNSEEN, and FUNERAL HOME are all post-HALLOWEEN fare that (sometimes to their detriment) relied more on mood and creepy characters than gore.
Gothic mansions, hidden family secrets or the simple device of having a young woman in the house alone was chilling enough for this crew and, in some instances, audiences yet to develop a hankering for carnage agreed. These are the horror movies you often hear referred to now as "boring" (let me throw later films 1982's UNHINGED and 1981's MADHOUSE into that pile as well), but for me they have always hit a quiet nerve. Cribbing just as much from PSYCHO as HALLOWEEN they all tend to share a mistrust of older generations and antiquated ways and fittingly end up as stylistic clashes between "modern" and "classic" horror as well. Too gruesome to appeal to one group, too restrained to appeal to the other, these chillers tend to fall through the cracks.
THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, which takes place in the early eighties, successfully captures the mood and pace of horror films of that time to a tee. In fact, any and all criticisms against it can just as easily be labeled as further proof of its accuracy. Heck, even its few time period slips (did I hear a car alarm?) seem like the type of harmless flub you'd expect to find in a low budget film of that era. I have a feeling that many modern viewers are going to have a hard time with this one, but as for myself, I have to admit to loving every minute. It's front heavy with loads of set-up, its core consists of a girl meandering around a mansion giving herself the creeps (frankly I could have watched a two hour documentary on the incredible house this was filmed in alone) and it's hard earned climax feels like a hit and run, but what can I say, I ate it up.
I liked how director TI WEST's previous effort THE ROOST lovingly wore its horror fandom on its sleeve, but it ultimately left me cold and unconvinced, with THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL though, there's just too much glorious atmosphere and too many interesting performances to ignore. Maybe I'm a glutton for nostalgia but the only thing I found missing was a personal dedication to myself in the closing credits admitting that the entire concept and all the casting choices were stolen from my dream journal.
Relative new comers JOCELIN DONAHUE and GRETA GERWIG are perfectly cast as pretty, but still from this planet, screamers, DEE WALLACE is the landlady I've dreamt of all my life, and TOM NOONAN and MARY WORONOV are simply, can't take your eyes off them, arresting in every way. Really just seeing those latter two in the same room together was worth the $9.99 I spent watching this on pay-per-view. Again this movie is not for everyone (I know Aunt John was put off by the abrupt close), but if you are the type who has painstakingly tried to watch every film made in the time period this is set in, it's pretty much like discovering an old VHS tape that had fallen between the shelves at your local mom and pop video store. It may not have the power to recruit new followers for this type of film, but die hard eighties horror buffs should consider THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL a genuine blast from the past.
Kindertrauma Funhouse:: John Carpenter Challenge!
Here are ten shots from ten movies directed by JOHN CARPENTER. How many can YOU identify?
