The Weekly Stuff Podcast #450 – The HALLOWEEN Episode: Revisiting the Original John Carpenter Classic

It’s time for another episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman, a weekly audio show that explores the worlds of film, television, and video games. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a very special Halloween episode of The Weekly Stuff Podcast, as we’re here on this very spooky day for a deep-dive retrospective review of one of the greatest films ever made: HALLOWEEN, the original John Carpenter classic from 1978 that introduced the world to The Shape, to Jamie Lee Curtis, to one of the most iconic film music themes of all time, and to a hilariously unwieldy franchise that has only gotten stranger over time. But this original film stands very tall on its own as one of the greatest triumphs of American independent filmmaking, a note-perfect exercise in pacing, cinematography, editing, and every other fundamental that makes film great. It’s an absolute joy to talk about, but that’s not all we have on this episode! We also review the campaign for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II – Here We Go Again! in depth and talk a little about the multiplayer, before discussing some Doctor Who news and puzzling over what’s going on with Henry Cavill and The Witcher. 

 

Enjoy!

 

Time Chart:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:02:37

Modern Warfare II: 0:02:37 – 0:32:42

News: 0:32:42 – 1:03:43

Halloween: 1:03:43 – 3:09:39

 

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The Weekly Stuff with Jonathan Lack & Sean Chapman is a weekly audio podcast, and if you subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, episodes will be delivered automatically and for free as soon as they are released. Visit www.weeklystuffpodcast.com for a complete archive of streaming and downloadable episodes.  

The Real Michael Myers was the Friends We Made Along the Way: An Analysis of the New Halloween Trilogy

I used to write movie reviews a lot.  

Like, a lot a lot. It was kind of my thing. I don’t do it anymore, and I haven’t for a while, and while there are a lot of reasons for that – including it just not being a viable career path anyone, no matter their talent, can actually pursue today – the main one is that I just stopped enjoying the exercise. The older I get, the less ‘good/bad’ as a metric matters to me, and the less I enjoy explaining why something falls into one of those broad categories. What I care about more than anything in a piece of media is if it’s interesting – if it’s going for something, if it has something to say, if it tries something I’ve never seen before. I want something worth chewing on. There’s an argument to be made, for instance, that Marvel’s overall output has had a notable qualitative drop since Avengers: Endgame in 2019 – but when I look at how many of their recent films and shows I genuinely like and would call ‘good,’ I don’t know if that’s really true. What is true is that they’re safe, they’re simple, and they don’t really have anything to say. Certainly nothing new. We’ve seen everything in that bag of tricks. There’s nothing left of substance to chew on. And as a result I’ve felt increasingly alienated from anything they’re putting out. 

 

David Gordon Green’s new Halloween trilogy is really, really interesting to me. 

 

These three films – 2018’s Halloween, 2021’s Halloween Kills, and this weekend’s new Halloween Ends – would all, in different ways, be impossible for me to review. Are they good? In some ways, yeah. Are they bad? In many ways, yes. Do they give you something to chew on? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding and overwhelming yes, and it’s a ‘yes’ that outweighs anything I could say about their relative ‘quality.’ These are fascinating movies to me. They are weirdly shaped, they play with a bunch of themes that don’t quite connect, they mostly fail as ‘horror’ movies, and they run back and forth from polar opposite ends of the tonal map – but I also think they’re chock full of interesting ideas and moments and emotions, that they break open and play with a well-worn genre in challenging and provocative ways, and go places (especially in this latest entry) that I never expected to see but am surprised at how engaged I was when we got there. 

 

These are interesting movies. I’m not going to review them – I don’t do that anymore – but I do want to talk about them for a little bit. 

 

Spoilers for all three new Halloween movies coming up after the jump…