Even ifHalloween Ends is a messy, weird, convoluted, predictable, and only quasi-satisfying conclusion to the 40-plus year Michael Myers saga, you have to give it credit for actually trying something new. For much of director David Gordon Green’strilogy-capper and alleged conclusion to the franchise (at least for now), Mike Myers is MIA. He’s gone. Not involved. For the vast majority of the film, he exists moreso as the lingering idea of the nature of evil than as an actual hulking killer. Instead the focus is on an entirely new character, Corey (Rohan Campbell), a hapless teen who gets roped into a night of babysitting. One prank gone wrong later, Corey accidents kills his charge.Read More
The slasher subculture saw its heyday in the 1980s, with franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street accruing scores of harebrained sequels, spawning a pattern of rinse-repeat horror franchises that rarely held a candle to the greats in terms of turnover quality. Jason eventually went to outer space. Freddy Kruger broke the fourth wall. Michael Myers was revisioned as a force for utilitarian good, destined to kill all of Laurie’s family in order to save all of civilization. To say that these sequels haven’t always been so hot is quite the understatement. In 2018, director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) – of all people – has taken the governing principles of the slasher and given it new life through a winning combination of tasteful updates, tactful homage, and gleeful bloodletting and in doing so, he may have just perfected the slasher movie.Read More
When Paranormal Activity 5 couldn’t keep up the annual Halloween-release trend of the last four films in the franchise, the official Latin spin-off, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, looked to fill in the gap. However, that next film in the wildly popular franchise also won’t make a Halloween season release as it’s not hitting theaters until the dumping grounds known as January. Is the series losing steam already or are they trying to shake up the formula and having more trouble with it than expected? With a new poster and an old trailer to go off, see if this looks like anything new or just more of the found footage same.
While the film is endorsed by the makers of the PA, it will be a big move in a new direction as the film will feature an all Latino cast with only little crossover to the mainstay material. It will however feature young Katie and Kristi, played by the same actresses from Paranormal Activity 3. While the details are relatively slim at this point, the film is said to focus on a Catholic investigation of some, you guessed it, paranormal activity.
While this won’t be the first one-off of the series, it is the first official one. In 2010, an unofficial Japanese sequel, known as Paranormal Activity: Tokyo Night, followed Haruka Yamano, who broke her legs in a car accident and has since started feeling the presence of ghosts. It’s later revealed that the woman that Haruka mowed down and killed was Katie, of the original Paranormal Activity, killing her and thus transferring her ghostly follower onto himself. Obviously the film was marked as non-canon because Katie lives on after the events of the first film and continues to be most central character of the franchise.
