Cody looks back at the first Halloween special Joe Bob Briggs did for Shudder.
Following the server-breaking success of legendary drive-in critic and movie host Joe Bob Briggs’ “The Last Drive-in” dusk-to-dawn-to-dusk marathon in July of 2018, the Shudder streaming service gave the greenlight to two Last Drive-in holiday specials that would build up to a weekly series that would begin airing in early 2019. Those two specials were Thanksgiving and Christmas themed - so the following year, after the first season of the weekly series had wrapped up, we got the first Halloween special: Joe Bob's Halloween Hootenanny. And Shudder had access to a perfect batch of movies to show during that special; three of the films from the Halloween slasher franchise.
It’s becoming a yearly tradition that John Carpenter‘s 1978 classic Halloween comes back to theatres during the month of October, and since the sequels Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5 were independent productions that aren’t owned by studios like the other sequels are, they often accompany it. All three of those movies are owned by Trancas International Films. I've never had the opportunity to catch that triple feature on the big screen, but I have watched Joe Bob show those three movies on Joe Bob's Halloween Hootenanny several times.
The special starts with Joe Bob griping about the Halloween-themed set decoration; he doesn’t want that stuff, he wants Day of the Dead decorations, as the special was airing before Halloween and he keeps saying that Day of the Dead is a pre-Halloween celebration, though he’ll be corrected later that it’s post-Halloween. His preoccupation with Day of the Dead gets him talking about the good ol’ days of being easily able to head down into Mexico to party, which has gotten more complicated in the days of enhanced border security. So, he figures a person could go to the northern border to celebrate – after all, he considers Niagara Falls to be the greatest tourist city in the world... and he gives a whole list of reasons why Niagara Falls is awesome.
Darcy the Mail Girl is so fully in the Halloween spirit that she even starts the special dressed in a jack-o-lantern costume, and she and Joe Bob will continue to bicker about Halloween vs. Day of the Dead throughout the show.
Eventually, Joe Bob has to get around to introducing the first movie. He’s nervous that, with so many different ways to celebrate Halloween, that celebrating by showing Halloween could be considered so on-the-nose that viewers couldn’t find it boring. But, he shouldn’t worry. Watching Halloween is exactly the way a lot of horror fans want to celebrate the holiday. Joe Bob says he’s always surprised when people want him to show movies they’ve already seen multiple times, but that was definitely the case here. I was very glad to get this Halloween special. Watching a movie with Joe Bob is a whole different experience than watching it without his break-ins.
HALLOWEEN (1978)
Director John Carpenter made his 1978 slasher Halloween into a masterpiece of horror and suspense, but it’s producer Irwin Yablans who we have to thank for its existence. It was Yablans who was inspired to make a movie about a babysitter being stalked by a killer. In fact, he was originally thinking of calling the movie The Babysitter Murders. Then he realized that nobody else had ever made a Halloween movie, and that setting could make for an even better horror film than The Babysitter Murders might be on just any random night. He took the concept of a killer stalking a babysitter on Halloween to Carpenter, who put the script together with co-writer/producer Debra Hill while Yablans and uncredited executive producer Moustapha Akkad secured the funding, raising a budget of $325,000. The script was finished in just ten days. A quick and easy work-for-hire job. Then Carpenter was given a three week production schedule to bring the story to the screen, resulting in one of the all-time great horror films.
Set-ups don’t get much more simple than this: on Halloween 1963, a six-year-old boy named Michael Myers stabbed his older sister to death. He was locked up in a mental institution, under the supervision of Doctor Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who came to see Myers as nothing but the embodiment of pure evil. Just in time for Halloween 1978, Myers escapes from the institution and heads back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. He gets a creepy Halloween mask and starts stalking local babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) while picking off her friends. That’s all you need for a cool movie, and Carpenter elevated it with his stylish direction and memorable score.
As great as Halloween is, I do feel that it’s often given too much credit, and so does Joe Bob, as he makes sure to remind us that this movie was not the first to do anything. Laurie Strode was not the first final girl, this was not the first horror movie to have huge box office, and it was not John Carpenter’s first movie. He gives the background on how the project came about, notes that Debra Hill grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey and that some of the locations are a nod to Carpenter’s childhood home of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and talks about cinematographer Dean Cundey’s excellent use of the Panaglide camera. He says the color scheme of orange days and blue nights was lifted from Chinatown, and says Halloween became more popular than other noteworthy horror films of the time because it had that Hollywood shine to it. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead were made by outsiders in Pennsylvania and Texas, this was a multiplex movie made in California. Still, it gets a perfect 4 stars.
Joe Bob tried to dig up some obscure factoids for this showing, and he sure drops a lot of trivia as the movie goes on. He points out that the opening tracking shot is not one continuous take, there are hidden cuts along the way. Some claim the POV idea was stolen from Black Christmas, but Joe Bob cuts Carpenter some slack on that one, and says POV camera is always spooky. He’s baffled by Laurie’s curriculum. He says Carpenter was fixated on the film’s bad reviews, especially the one where Pauline Kael called it silly, because Carpenter was always angling for mainstream acceptance. He covers the careers of most of the cast members, including Donald Pleasence, who was supporting a wife and six daughters when he took this job. Pleasence insisted that Michael Myers be pure evil and there be no sympathy for the character. He also requested a rewrite that eliminated the idea that Loomis had a wife, as the character needed to be single-minded in his pursuit of his patient. Coincidentally, Pleasence and co-star Charles Cyphers were both known for playing tramps in stage productions of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Jamie Lee Curtis was not the first choice for Laurie Strode, Anne Lockhart was. Joe Bob isn’t familiar with Anne Lockhart, but Darcy knows her from Battlestar Galactica.
Carpenter got paid 10K and 10% of the profits for making the movie. While covering the career of Sandy Johnson, who plays Myers’ sister at the beginning of the movie, Joe Bob gets distracted thinking of another movie she was in, Gas Pump Girls.
Joe Bob notes that for a movie that was once intended to be called The Babysitter Murders, it takes a long time to get to the first babysitter murder. Debra Hill was quoted as saying that Laurie was an extremely strong woman who feared nothing, which Joe Bob strongly disagrees with, as the character demonstrates that she actually has a healthy fear of everything. She’s protective of the kids in her care because she’s aware of things that might be scary that others are ignoring. Laurie even gets her hands on Myers’ knife twice and throws it down out of fear of violence and also because she doesn’t want to touch what he has touched. Hill also said there was no nudity in the movie, but there certainly is. Joe Bob hates when dogs get killed in movies, and one does get killed in Halloween. The Thing from Another World is shown on TV in this movie and Carpenter went on direct the remake The Thing – and mention of that gets Joe Bob talking about a roadside attraction called The Thing.
Joe Bob talks about the film’s box office success, the actors who have played Michael Myers throughout the franchise (the actor was primarily Nick Castle in this one), and points out that real serial killers usually try to pass themselves off as charming, which is very different from the slasher icons we have in horror movies. Pictures of Michael Myers cosplayers are shown throughout the special, and Joe Bob also asks that fans write in to explain to him what made Michael Myers go crazy and why is he unstoppable.
After the movie, Darcy brings in the mail bag to show Joe Bob some cool Last Drive-in items that were created by viewers.
HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988)
By the time the special moves on the second feature, the Halloween decorations have been replaced by Day of the Dead decorations. In addition to the Day of the Dead concept, Joe Bob also bickers with Darcy about the fact that they’re not showing Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a movie Joe Bob dismisses since it doesn’t have Michael Myers, but it happens to be Darcy’s favorite of the franchise (aside from H20). She even threatens Joe Bob with an ass-kicking from Halloween III star Tom Atkins for his dislike of the film – and later, Tom Atkins even leaves a voice message to make the ass-kicking threat himself!
Halloween 4 is Joe Bob’s third favorite of the series, following the first two movies, and it happens to be my favorite of the sequels. Since they didn’t have the rights to show Halloween II, Joe Bob catches us up on what happened in that one, including the reveal that Laurie Strode was Michael Myers’ long-lost younger sister. Jamie Lee Curtis chose not to come back for Halloween 4, opening the door for the sequel to focus on her (written off with a fatal car accident) character’s 7-year-old daughter, Jamie Lloyd, played by Danielle Harris. After being in a coma for ten years, Michael Myers wakes up and heads back to Haddonfield on a mission to kill his young niece. Joe Bob points out that it’s rare to have a slasher going after a child, as movies often choose not to put children in peril... Unless they’re Lifetime movies. Which gives Joe Bob the chance to say that movies on the Lifetime Network are the great low budget exploitation movies of today.
Halloween 4 also gets a perfect rating of 4 stars, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Joe Bob rightfully says that it has one of the greatest opening sequences of all time, and he admires how establishes the whole back story for both Michael Myers and Jamie Lloyd right up front. He says the opening of the film has a great sense of menace, which is true – and points out that Michael Myers displays some superhuman strength in this movie, even though director Dwight H. Little disputes that there’s anything supernatural going on. He likes that Myers has scars on his hands from being caught in a fire at the end of Halloween II, but mocks the makeup job on the burn scar seen on Loomis’s face. He enjoys the fact that Loomis is even crazier in this movie than he was in the first two, and has fun with a scene where Loomis catches a ride with a nutty drunk. Back in those days, if Buck Flower wasn’t available to play drunken coot, you’d get Carmen Filpi, who plays the drunken coot here.
Joe Bob isn’t sure about the Michael Myers mask being among Halloween masks in a Haddonfield drug store, because you wouldn’t think Haddonfield residents would want to see that around. Most people wouldn’t want to wear that mask, and parents wouldn’t let their kids wear it. But there it is. There are some strange moments with the mask in the movie, as the production had trouble getting it right, and some fans hate the way the mask looks in this one. Joe Bob is wowed by the roof chase sequence and, in the end, says that the sequel with the best opening also has the best closing scene. He goes over the careers of some of the cast members... and says he remembers seeing Kathleen Kinmont nudity when he saw the movie on the big screen in 1988. I don’t know if any nudity got cut out, because I didn’t see the movie until its VHS days, and there wasn’t any nudity to be seen at that point.
Fans sent in a lot of theories about Michael Myers’ insanity, with popular ones being that the character was just born evil or that he left his humanity behind at age 6 and now only exists as the embodiment of pure evil. Joe Bob rejects the pure evil theory, he thinks something had to have set him off. But I believe the pure evil theory is accurate.
When the movie ends, Darcy comes in wearing the clothes worn by Kathleen Kinmont’s character in the movie and delivers mail from a viewer who’s in the military and watched the Deathgasm episode on his helmet while doing maneuvers in the woods.
HALLOWEEN 5 (1989)
Things get bumpy as we head into the last movie of the triple feature, Halloween 5, which Joe Bob clearly didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm for. Maybe this is why he has a bit of an existential crisis at the start of this section of the special. First, he questions why the special is called a “hootenanny,” because doesn’t a hootenanny need music? Then he has a meltdown over the whole Halloween / Day of the Dead situation and starts tearing down the decorations.
Anyway, Halloween 5, the “one year later” follow-up to Halloween 4. It was produced by Moustapha Akkad, a guy from the Middle East, and directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard, a guy from Europe, so Joe Bob isn’t surprised this sequel seems to miss something about Halloween in the Midwest. Debra Hill recommended Othenin-Girard for the job, and when he walked into his meeting with Akkad, he immediately took the script they had (which was almost brought to the screen by director Jeff Burr) and tossed it in the trash, saying that he and a co-writer would rework it from the ground up. Somehow, Akkad was impressed and gave him the job over Burr. Othenin-Girard and his collaborator then put together a script that has some interesting elements, but also some odd, poorly thought-out (or not thought-out at all) elements. Joe Bob says the director should have apologized for the way his movie turned out, which leads to him talking about a Chinese director who did apologize for his movie, and he mentions other filmmakers who should apologize (or be flayed) for their failures. Still, he gives Halloween 5 the 4 star rating simply because any Halloween movie is better than no Halloween movie.
After a year of recuperating in the care of a hermit (and the opening sequence was reshot to replace an occultist hermit with an old hermit), Michael Myers continues his quest to murder his young niece Jamie, who now has a psychic link to him. This psychic link allows Jamie to get a glimpse, momentarily, of the human side that still exists inside Myers, which Othenin-Girard felt was a brilliant addition. Asked what he was going for with his movie, the director said, “The film is a question of cat and mouse. We see the cat and we see the mouse. The mouse knows about the cat and that cat is going after the mouse. That’s about it, I guess.”
The result was one of the least popular entries in the Halloween franchise and one of the least successful, released in the year that the slasher era crashed and burned with this, an underwhelming Elm Street sequel, and an underwhelming Friday the 13th sequel.
Very few things about Halloween 5 come off like a logical extension of what we saw in the previous movie, but it does have its charms and some great suspense sequences – some of which, like the scene where a car chases potential victims through a field and the scene where Jamie is stuck in a laundry chute while Myers repeatedly plunges his knife through the side of the chute, were somewhat dangerous for the actors to shoot. It’s said that Donald Pleasence even broke the nose of Michael Myers actor Don Shanks in the scene where Loomis beats Myers with a 2x4.
Joe Bob enjoys the fact that Loomis has lost all control and ethics in this film, but he gets angry when Jamie’s foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) is shockingly killed off early in the running time. He also doesn’t like the cop characters who have clown music playing on the soundtrack when they show up, and feels that Myers is shown in the daylight too much in the film. He cringes at some bad dialogue, is baffled by the scene where Myers is driving a car with Rachel’s friend Tina (Wendy Kaplan) in the passenger seat and actually stops the car so Tina can buy cigarettes, and is surprised there’s a “safe sex” message in the middle of a sex scene in a barn. He points out that Othenin-Girard didn’t care about continuity with the previous movies (as is evident from the appearance of the Myers house, looking completely different) and wishes that Jamie would have become the child psycho killer focus of the movie. He is aware that there are fans who love Halloween 5, and theorizes it may be because it was the first one of the Halloween movies that they saw. I wouldn’t say I love it, but I have fun with – especially since it’s the one that’s closest to my favorite sequel, Halloween 4. (Same characters, locations, etc.)
The movie wraps up with Myers being put in a jail cell with his mask still on, one last bit of absurdity for Joe Bob to be baffled by. He and Darcy agree, Halloween 5 isn’t very good. It’s one big mess that has annoying supporting characters and too much screaming.
In the final moments of the special, Joe Bob and Darcy are joined by art director Yuki, who confirms that, while there was no Halloween in Japan when he was a kid, the holiday has made it to the country since. Yuki then puts up a Halloween / Day of the Dead piñata for Darcy, wearing Tom Atkins cosplay, to smash with a 2x4.
And so ends a fun Halloween triple feature.
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