The Exorcist Movie with NO Exorcist Between the years 2018 and 2022, public enemy number one and all round generally despised menace, David Gordon Green dropped his much loathed Halloween trilogy. Naturally, I championed each and every one of them over in Vol. 1 Issue #5. Not much has changed except Halloween Ends has emerged as unexpectedly my favourite of the notorious three. Most would say the first was superior and I begrudgingly admit it was a sturdy slasher if lacking in weight. This is true but I have been swayed by the near unrepeatable Halloween Ends for a its unique weirdness. For this was the moment David Gordon Green finally combined his Terrence Malick origins and his later penchant for horror. He really made that one his own. Sure, there are some bizarre decisions with characters stepping outside themselves at times and straying from any realism we know but it has vision. Laurie becoming some sort of agony aunt, hammering away at her laptop is a particularly odd contribution. More Log Lady than the young teenager who once fought off a serial killer. Let's not forget though that Twin Peaks wasn't without this kind of psychotic surreal melodrama. How could anyone forget when Leland Palmer tragically dives on his daughter's grave as it is being lowered in to the ground, leading his wife to question whether he could make this awful day any worse? Gordon Green turns Haddonfield in to a similar kind of place where the owls are not what they seem. Who can deny the sonic and visual beauty of Corey Cunningham and Allyson Nelson riding off in to the night on bikes to Boy Harsher and having their little romantic rendezvous on rooftops discussing leaving this rotten town for good to avoid being caught in a never ending cycle of generational grief. Halloween Ends has all these beautiful detours and then slips back in to violent slasher mode at the click of a finger. Marching in to the radio station, muderering receptionist Darcy the Mail Girl and slamming the DJs head in to a vinyl copy of The Cramps I Was a Teenage Werewolf so that the listening experience is ruined by a wayward tongue spinning on the record. The bloody wreckage at the scrapyard in which several bullies do finally be getting it.
Then ending it all with the series unofficial theme song Don't Fear the Reaper as Laurie and Deputy Hawkins sit on the porch. The title credit is thrown in and you contemplate the serious fact there is absolutely no part of you that thinks there is any resolve in this story and that Michael Myers could ever truly die. Before watching The Exorcist: Believer, I returned to Halloween Ends, ignoring the overwhelmingly bad reviews, hoping for the same kind of curveballs. They can talk shit about his Halloween films all they want but for the most part they intrigued me. Gordon Green is not quite the Hollywood hack he's made out to be. Both him and writing buddy Danny McBride operate on a strange plane. Not quite fully intellectuals and not quite dumb morons. Typical failing to achieve true potential stoners would be how I'd describe them. Smart enough to have ideas, dumb enough not carry them through. Half-baked outrageous additions that are not clever enough to stimulate the critics and not safe enough to excite the genre die-hards. I never found any of them boring, I'll tell you that. For Halloween Kills, he literally came up with having packs of hunters tracking down the apex predator. A genre role reversal. A lunatics take on Fritz Lang's M where mob justice is critiqued. Or at least attempted. As though incorporating incidents such as the United States Capitol Attack and other right wing resurgences due to Trump. This is not me praising the results, this is me baffled by their inclusion. Amusing, it was. What leg has David Gordon Green got left stand on when he loses me, his greatest defender with his latest film, The Exorcist: Believer? The first in a planned trilogy. Word is those no good idiots at Blumhouse, (who effectively did to horror what Jaws and Star Wars for mainstream studio filmmaking in infantising audiences, but didn't even have a Jaws or Star Wars to make up for it, instead giving us Insidious), paid 400 million for the rights to make three films. It was almost always going to be a critical disaster but whether this turns out to be a poor business choice remains to be seen.
10
