HALLOWEEN ENDS

CONTAINS SOME MAJOR SPOILERS

Well, it's better than Halloween Kills, but that's not saying much. That second instalment of one of the most iconic slasher series wasn't just a depressing and senseless bloodbath that existed solely to slaughter as many innocent people as possible, it was a betrayal of everything Halloween started out as. John Carpenter's original was a horror movie you could show your children (or your parents) because it didn't have any swearing or graphic gore, but successive sequels, reboots, remakes and alternate timelines have amped up the body count and the blood spurts culminating in Halloween Kills' tedious massacre of anyone and everyone, whether a significant character, a firefighter, or a random passerby who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The first big surprise of Halloween Ends is that Michael Myers isn't actually in it that much, probably in recognition of the fact that he's 65 years old. Instead, the focus is on Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a previously unknown character who accidentally killed a child on Halloween Night three years ago (this opening scene is actually pretty good, but after that it just sinks) and is still deeply troubled by it. Tormented and bullied by the locals, tonight might just be when Corey finally snaps, unless something comes of a tenuous romance with Allyson (Andi Matichak), Laurie Strode's granddaughter... Laurie herself (Jamie Lee Curtis for the last time, no, really, honest) has adjusted surprisingly well to the carnage: living a normal domestic life without the electric fences and the bunker and the shotguns, embracing the spirit of the Halloween festival, and almost entering into a tenuous romance of her own with Frank (Will Patton), who I actually thought was killed at least one film ago...

The second big surprise about Halloween Ends (With Any Luck) is that it's actually more reminiscent of Christine, John Carpenter's weakest and least interesting film (with the exception of Dark Star), than it is of Halloween itself. Our lead character is a loner named Cunningham, routinely bullied, miserably treated by his family, who spends a lot of time at the local junkyard. Why didn't they go the whole hog and have him drive around in a red Plymouth Fury? But all this does is to distract, to shift focus from what Halloween movies are about at heart: Laurie and Michael, Michael and Loomis, and now Laurie and Allyson. And why they've suddenly decided to riff on Christine, of all things, is as big a mystery as why Haddonfield still does the whole Halloween thing every year after all the misery and slaughter it brings them on a regular basis, or why Laurie Strode (or anyone else) still lives there after everything that's happened, rather than moving a thousand miles across the country.

On a technical level it's perfectly alright, well enough shot and decently put together, and effectively nasty when it wants to be, though Carpenter's score (with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies again) doesn't make any impression. It is undeniably better than the last instalment, and it's better than Rob Zombie's Halloween II, the terrible Halloween 4, and the one with Busta Rhymes, but is that really enough? Personally I am just hoping this is actually the end, and Michael Myers is left in the past along with Jason (there hasn't been a Friday The 13th movie for 13 years now and there's no sign of one on the horizon), though the presence of Myers in the extended Blumhouse logo might suggest they're not going to drop him just yet and will instead milk him for every last dollar. Let him go.

**

DON'T WORRY DARLING

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

There's something rotten at the heart of Victory, a small too-picture-perfect-to-be-true desert township that's home to all the workers and their families. It's some unspecified point between the mid-50s and early-60s: everyone looks fabulous, lives in fabulous houses and drives fabulous cars. In this patriarchal paradise, the wives dutifully do all the domestic work while the men go off to their unspecified work on the top secret Victory Project, about which no-one asks and no-one speaks beyond the meaningless phrase "progressive materials". Alice (Florence Pugh) is starting to have hallucinations or strange visions - including a chorus line from a Golden Age musical - and becomes convinced that there's something badly wrong with the world, especially when one of her best friends suddenly kills herself in front of her and she's repeatedly told by her husband Jack (Harry Styles) that no, darling, it was all just an accident and you're imagining things.

So is it something like The Stepford Wives, with all the perfect and loyal wives happily subservient to their husbands and the Project? Is it something like Jacob's Ladder where it's all taking place in the mind of someone on the point of death? Or is it all just a dream? My guess at the film's Big Secret was wrong, but it was pretty much just as valid as the Big Reveal they went with. The key to Don't Worry Darling, really, is that payoff: whether you feel the What's Really Going On destination is worth the journey. Personally I'm not entirely sure, though their chosen solution has a particular cruelty and horror about it. To be honest I found myself wallowing in the wonderful period detail and interior design a lot more than the paranoid thriller plot, and I suspect the film was as well: it's a scratch over two hours and it really doesn't need to be.

Musically it's quite interesting, with John Powell's score mixing a conventional soundtrack with distorted and processed voices, though it's all shot through with numerous pop songs of the period and I could quite happily never hear Sh-Boom ever again! Pugh and Chris Pine (as Frank, the Victory visionary in charge of everything) are perfectly good, Styles less so. If you can ignore the controversy about why and whether Shia La Boeuf quit or was fired before filming (and director Olivia Wilde, who also has a supporting role, is/was in a relationship with Styles, who replaced him), and the unanswered questions such as where the biplane came from, it's a solid three-star film and I enjoyed it enough. But I did leave the cinema feeling slightly short-changed as that Big Reveal provoked "oh, okay" rather than "oh, wow!".

***

THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF EXTREME BAD TASTE

It used to take a lot for a film director to get on my blacklist: for them to make movies so awful that I eventually didn't want to see any more from them because life's too short to put up with this rubbish. Peter Greenaway managed three before I said "enough", and Al Adamson and Ted V Mikels managed a mere two each, while the dreaded Lloyd Kaufman scored an astonishing seven before I finally gave up on him. Because of all those years wasted trying to watch every piece of hopeless junk available I waded through no less than 42 films by the legendarily abysmal Jess Franco (of which maybe three were actually worth the effort) before drawing a line in the sand for the sake of my sanity. The only director I can think of who I abandoned after just one is Ray Dennis Steckler, and that's because most of his "works" aren't available in the UK anyway. And now I can add Dasha Nekrasova to that very short roll of honour.

The Scary Of Sixty-First is a godawful little drama yoking in Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew for tedious and tiresome shock effect that thinks it's pushing boundaries and being cutting edge but is actually just crass and exploitative. Two young women (who are supposed to be long-term friends, which is the first thing I just don't believe) seem to have got lucky with a suspiciously good deal on a prime Manhattan apartment, until a mysterious unnamed woman (co-writer and director Nekrasova) turns up and reveals that it used to belong to Epstein. Before you know it, Addie (Betsey Brown) seems to be possessed by the spirit of a child who may have been killed there, and her roommate Noelle (co-writer Madeline Quinn) and the stranger start taking drugs and wandering around New York investigating the Big Conspiracy...

The anonymous stranger actually says "I'm not a conspiracy theorist" before launching into a stream of tinfoil-hat gibberish centred around Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, the Royals and the Clintons, taking in MKUltra mind-control, tarot cards, pentagrams and Pizzagate. There is probably a great film to be made about Epstein, but it's a serious subject for a serious project, and this absolutely isn't it. Addie masturbating frantically over pictures of Prince Andrew and begging her boyfriend to "f*** her like she's thirteen", and a crass four-letter reference to the Queen which wouldn't get a laugh on Mock The Week even if she hadn't died a few weeks ago, feel misplaced, like they're mainly there for pearl-clutching shock effect. But you can't be shocked if you don't believe in what you're watching, and I absolutely didn't buy into a single frame of it. Certainly not the last act, when it just resorts to "strong bloody violence" and throws in an Eyes Wide Shut reference for the sake of it.

The Scary Of Sixty-First doesn't work as either shock or drama because it's completely unbelievable (why is the unnamed stranger so obsessed with Epstein and his legacy anyway?), and the bad taste material just feels like it's trying too hard to be offensive, like a casual 9/11 joke without a punchline. The result is a film that's uncomfortable in its use of genuine evil as the backbone for a thoroughly uninteresting film that gets steadily stupider and more unhinged as it goes along. Also, despite the title, it's not remotely scary: to be honest I was bored and irritated throughout. The real victims of those ghastly, despicable people deserve a lot better than this nonsense. Streaming on Shudder.

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