Halloween

Halloween is the age old story about a boy and a girl. Like most stories of its kind, Halloween begins with a young boy seeing his sister's boobs and ends with a few high school sex commandos stuffed into closets and drawers. It's about how a young woman fights to save the purity of her precious vagina, despite being surrounded by her hormone-savaged friends, a cadre of babysitters who use children as watchdogs as they indiscriminately fuck their way through the houses of a quaint suburban neighborhood. John Carpenter may have directed a few great B-movies in his career, but he only defined a genre once. In such situations, it's worth asking the question if the first version of something stands up today when viewed through the unforgiving lens of science? Is is still super cool and relevant, like the prism? Or, like the first condoms, has time and technology improved upon it so much that we'd be crazy to attempt to use it for anything other than a historical footnote of a simpler time? We'd say, "This was why we invented the nanobots," except that we didn't invent them and we don't even know if they were even intended to grade movies. All we know is that they sure are good at it! So lock your doors and call the cops on that sketchy gardener, because things are about to get stabby.

• That music. = +30pts
• Presented by Moustapha Akkad. Like, duh. = -4pts
• On second thought... Moustapha Akkad was such a badass that he gets his own section of this SC:
• Produced and directed a film about Mohammad. Yes, that Mohammad. = +10pts
• In preparation for his Mohammad movie, Moustapha consulted with numerous Islamic clerics in an effort to remain respectful of subject matter. = +5pts
• Made his movie anyway when they weren't so cool about it. = +7pts (Take that Saudi Arabia!)
• Did not direct Halloween, elected only to "present" it. = +4pts
• Killed during the Amman suicide bombings in Jordan in 2005. = +10pts (Not for dying. Or for dying in suicide bombings. But for just being a stud. RIP, Moustapha!)
• Directed by John Carpenter. = (In 1978 = +25pts; In 2014 = -10pts) +15pts
• If doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is a sign of madness, then staring into the face of a jack-o-lantern for longer than a second or two must be the homicidal equivalent. = +2pts
• Steadicam shots reminding you that, at night, people can see in even though you can't see out. You know, the kind of thing that helps you sleep at night. = +3pts
• Kid in clown garb grabs knife from a drawer instead of plastic flower that squirts water. Or, what the guy at the OTB calls, the 70s= +2pts
• Given the POV of this opening sequence--the the fact that the eyeline seems to suggest someone of camera-operating height who also has the feeble arms of a young child--our scientific hypothesis is that Michael Myers is clearly suffering from grasshoper legs. This would explain his freakish ability to look down on everyone he stalks/murders, as well as his ability to leap between hiding spots unseen at a moments notice. = +5pts
• Letting a child with a knife and grasshopper legs get the drop on you. = -4pts
• The actress playing Michael's mother approaches her son and chooses to go with the "Did you shit in the cat box again?" look we've all seen from mom at one point or another. = -2pts

• Given the amount of mentally deranged individuals walking freely on the lawn in the middle of the rainstorm, we're thinking someone inside pulled a Chief Bromden. = +3pts (Take that conformity!)
• John Carpenter's score does a great job of reminding us how terrifying a suburb full of white people can be. = +2pts
• Finding yourself on the top of a maniac's hit list because your douchebag realtor dad couldn't take five minutes to do his job and drop off a set of house keys. = -3pts
• Laurie's teacher keeps hammering the word "fate" in her lecture, as if it's gonna be on the quiz or something, when everyone knows that it's really about chaos, randomness, and disorder. I mean, duh! = -3pts
• Moving a parked car without starting the engine. = +4pts
• Ah, the '70s, when women in high school looked like they were in their early 30s. = +7pts
• "I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor." Because nothing is funnier than comedic driving, or a better indicator of homicidal tendencies. We guess this means clowns are totally cool then. = +2pts
• Meet Mr. Brackett, the sketchiest sheriff in all of Illinois, who's inability to smell marijuana on teenagers and talent for appearing immediately behind an unsuspecting civilian is rivaled only by Michael Myers himself. = -2pts
• Nothing says class virgin quite like having a James Ensor poster on your wall. = +5pts
• Wait, who the fuck is James Ensor?! = -5pts
• Oh, that's who James Ensor was. Yikes. = +10pts
• Teenagers listening to oldie radio stations. = -2pts
• Mixing pot with Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" as a way to chill away the paranoia that surrounds having a vagina. = +3pts
• Good thing Laurie dropped the keys for the Myers place off for her deadbeat dad so that Dr. Loomis and Sneaky McSheriff could simply walk over them as they entered the obviously unlocked and abandoned house. Thank God, it only almost cost her life and definitely the lives of all her friends. = -4pts
• Becoming a babysitter so that you have a place to bone. = +8pts
• Number of times Sneaky McSheriff is almost shot while creeping up on Dr. Loomis: 2 = -2pts (Minus a point for every unfortunately chambered round.)
• Call us crazy, Dr. Loomis, but when has announcing that a killer is on the loose ever been a bad idea? = -2pts
• Dressing like a space mechanic for Halloween. = -3pts

• Howard the Duck comic appearance! = +10pts
• As a result of this easter egg, The PCS has decided to rate all appearances of Howard the Duck in order of best to worst:
• Halloween (film)
  
• Gaurdians of the Galaxy (film)
• Man-Thing (comic)
  
• The zoo
• The pond by the building where Cousin Ralph "stay-cations"
• That scene in Planet Earth
• Any restaurant that serves ducks that once had names
• Man-Thing (porno)
• Howard the Duck (film)
• Apparently space cops are the only people in the galaxy able to see how Michael Myers moves from point A to B. Good call, Tommy. = +6pts
• Doing it in front of a jack-o-lantern. = -4pts
• Calling 5-seconds of halting sex "fantastic." Ah, high school... = +5pts
• Michael Myers gives new meaning to the term poster boy. = +10pts
• Even Michael is impressed with how well he nailed it. = +7pts

• Murdering a girl's boyfriend and then trolling her in a sheet while wearing his glasses. = +10pts (You crack us up, Michael! You make murder hilarious!)

• Being so slutty that you call your BF, who then can't tell whether you are boning or being murdered by a maniac. = -2pts
• Noticing that your stolen station wagon is parked across the street from the house you've decided to stake-out. = +3pts
• Taking 3-hours to do so. = -6pts
• Trying to run in high-waist jeans. = +4pts (For not having even a little bit of quit in you!)
• Credit Michael Myers has received for his cleaning skills, despite years spent in an asylum where we assume his messes were cleaned for him: 0. = +25pts (Consider us at The PCS impressed!)
• That mask fade. = +15pts

• The '70s, when it took more than three dead bodies to decide to get the fuck out of dodge. = +6pts
• Punching through a door with your bare hand. = +5pts
• Bringing a knitting needle to a knife fight. = -1pt
• Those rare scenes that remind you that sometimes turning on the light only makes things worse. = +8pts

• Bringing a hanger to a knife fight. = -2pts (We're no, Dr. Loomis, Laurie. But we think you're regressing.)
• Throw your stabbing implement away once before confirming a kill, shame on you. Throw it away twice...yep, still shame on you. Throw it away thrice...seriously what the fuck Laurie? Did you constantly fail the "pattern recognition" portion of your elementary school standardized tests? = -3pts
• We're pretty sure Michael's last great disappearing act is what finally drove Dr. Loomis insane in the subsequent Halloween movies.  = +4pts (Poor guy never really recovered.)
• Closing your movie with an montage of the empty spaces infected by violence. So, European. So, classy. Still, awesome. = +20pts

Total Score: +177pts
Available on: Sean's personal DVD collection (Get your own copy, you bum!)

The good news for anyone who's ever seen this movie and enjoyed it, is that science has confirmed that Halloween is definitely not an old condom! Yay! Myers and his dirty gardener outfit and bleach stained face remain a pretty effective engine of evil in his first outing. The question that generally gets proposed is: Was the final product great because of the people involved, or because of the constraints of budget? And, like most cases, it's yes to both. As low-budget (and surprisingly low body count) as the movie is, there is still that scene of Myers fading in from the black, that puppy dog stare, that violent splash of light in the closet that does nothing to reduce the fear and only instead heightens it and makes it more visceral, that closing montage. All choices made by someone who should feel pretty proud to call himself a filmmaker. (Unlike the people who made this dreadful knockoff.) Halloween is a movie that poses real questions about society. Questions like: Do people in the suburbs sleep somewhere other than their homes at night? Is it okay to bone in the house of a stranger as long as you have the permission of your friend who's currently dead upstairs and whose silence (due to being dead) implies consent? Is someone's lack of mental faculty proportionately tied to their physical strength? Does Ronald Regan's dismantling of the mental health care industry mean that we live in a world full of Michel Myers wandering the streets? These are the questions science can't hope to answer. Thank God for movies!

(For the record, the answers for the deep questions above gifted to us by this film are: Yes. Obviously. Exponentially so. Probably, but they were all given tickets to Florida.)

Score Technician: Sean McConnell