Jonathan Sothcott: The English Charles Band; Albion’s Dino de Laurentiis; The Big Smoke’s William Castle; The Nation’s Jason Blum. Whichever your choice, the UK’s Gangster Flick Don has now shifted firmly across to where he began – horror – and that can only be a good thing.
I started jotting down the different films that Helloween riffs upon, but gave up quite quickly. Telling you it takes from John Carpenter’s 1978 ‘Halloween’, ‘The Purge’ series, and the current incarnation of The Joker is a bit facile and does the film a disservice. Make no mistake, apart from occasionally forgetting it isn’t set in Illinois, Helloween is resolutely British, and as such has that extra ‘something’ that horror with a marketing budget that looks like an outlandish mortgage will always miss.
We’ve barely moved on from the very real and utterly perplexing fetish for painting English flags on roundabouts and rounding up fat bald white men to bray themselves even sillier than they already are about migrants stealing their swans, so the fact that Helloween sees the nation’s youth rising en masse dressed as clowns at the behest of a lunatic almost feels like a documentary. There’s a burning and very unfortunate problem I come armed to reviewing this with – I don’t find clowns creepy. Or kids, come to that. This leaves the protagonists an awful lot to do to provide any scares (in my case, that is – I appreciate clowns, dolls, kids, and standing still glaring, gives millions the willies, so I can’t hold that against it.)
Helloween is completely devoid of pretension – it exists purely to entertain. There’s no hand-holding and no whacking you over the head with coded messages, lest you’re unable to watch a horror film without an instruction manual. It starts at a pace, keeps the action in some nicely claustrophobic locations and employs a lean cast who are given some occasional clunkers in terms of lines but make a decent fist of it.
- Ronan Summers clearly relishes his role as Carl Cane, the incarcerated clown child murderer, but is given too many monologues, stripping away much of the mystery. Michael Paré plays an American investigative journalist, whom I’d LOVE to think is based on self-satisfied paedophile hunter Chris Hanson of ‘To Catch a Predator‘. If not, someone needs to make that film, urgently. Bossing it all is Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, the doctor making sense of it all. Head and shoulders above everyone acting-chops-wise, she gets better and better in each film appearance. The film marks the directorial return of Phil Claydon (‘Lesbian Vampire Killers‘)./
I suspect we’ve hit ‘peak clown action’ with the end of the Terrifier films, so it’ll be up to the paying public to prove me wrong. It’s not gory, though the foley squelches are pleasing and the lighting offers regular threats of what might be around the corner. The soundtrack veers from punchy effectiveness to lazy filler, an easy way to elevate future efforts without breaking the bank, I’d have thought. It’d have been nice to have gone more full throttle on the British setting – an out-of-London setting; regional accents; perplexed pensioners getting in the way; fireworks going off early.
British horror film makers need to embrace the differences they offer. Lack of budgets be damned – own the country’s eccentricities; ignore whatever conventions are being peddled as essentials, and, possibly above all, don’t worry about the cliquey, gatekeeping, Blu-ray commentary bothering ‘horror community’ shitehawks who, ironically, behave like onesie-wearing clowns banned from even using safety scissors.
Daz Lawrence