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361. Halloween (2018) – All-o’-Ween (#—)

Posted on January 6, 2024 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Joey Keogh, this week with special guests Charlene Lydon and Bren Murphy, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This year, we are running a season looking at the films in the Halloween franchise. So this week, David Gordon Green’s Halloween.

It has been forty years since the night that Michael Myers came home. The killer is in custody and Haddenfield has seemingly recovered from that horrific crime. However, not everybody has been able to move on from those events. Laurie Strode is still haunted by the horrific attacks, convinced the serial killer is lurking in the darkness, waiting for an opportunity to strike.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: america, bren murphy, charlene lydon, danny mcbride, david gordon green, fascism, final girl, halloween, halloween (2018), horror, horror genre, Jamie Lee Curtis, joey keogh, John Carpenter, legacyquel, liminal spaces, michael myers, nick castle, slasher, trump, violence | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Friday the 13th, Part II

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Darren

There is something almost endearing about how direct the Friday the 13th film series is, how comfortable it is in its skin.

There are arguments to be made that the original Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street are genuine cinematic classics, that are frequently underrated because they were followed by decades of sequels, knock-offs, reboots and remakes. Although they rapidly devolved into franchise zombies, Halloween really jump-started a cinematic genre, and Nightmare on Elm Street was slyly post-modern.

Somebody didn’t read the signs…

In contrast, the Friday the 13th films have no such pretension. Instead, the Friday the 3th films exist as pure and uncompromising slasher schlock. Hack and slash and slice and dice. The Friday the 13th film series is powered not by central themes or ideas, but by a simply desire to churn out movies in which attractive and generic characters get brutally slaughtered. It is a ruthlessly efficient model; there were eight Friday the 13th films released between 1980 and 1989.

It’s hard not to admire the ingenuity at work here – the Friday the 13th films are relentless, refusing to let little things like logic or resolutions get in the way of the next sequel. Friday the 13th, Part II starts the franchise machine properly rolling, by rather efficiently getting around the fact that the first film’s serial killer had been fairly cleanly dispatched. It’s time to meet Jason Voorhees.