Trap (2024)

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, Hayley Mills

Have I Seen It Before: Never. If it doesn’t play at Circle, and it isn’t on the schedule for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, I’m going to have to make a real effort to catch it in theaters.

Did I Like It: Lora said the best thing about this film, and I have not seen the thought expressed anywhere else. So, it needs to be shared:

The real twist in the film is that they got Hayley Mills out of retirement to spring a trap on a parent.

Now everybody can see why I married her.

But to the question of just what the twist is. There are a couple of minor turns of fate that change the course of the movie, but no real moment where the entirety of the movie you’ve just been watching suddenly becomes an entirely different movie. Maybe the minor debacle of Glass (2019) scared him off thing that made his famous, but I couldn’t help but think it showed a great degree of restraint to not make it so that the killer’s wife (Allison Pill) was in on the killings the whole time, or the whole family, or FBI profiler Josephine Grant (Mills, trapping parents left and right) was actually Cooper’s (Hartnett) mother… Or, I don’t know… The whole concert was populated by aliens. I applaud M. Night from moving on from this construction. Now if only I as a viewer could get out of the mode where I’m trying to second guess the plot as it unfurls. It’s the least I could do for him, but that would be the precise moment he drops a new twist ending on us.

Hartnett is the film’s real secret strength. Channeling the right amount of at-his-peak John Ritter, he feels perfectly harmless for the film’s opening act, and the performance increasingly makes him seem both terrifying and brilliant in the implementation of that terror.

And it’s good that Hartnett’s performance makes him seem smart, because the plot reflexively swings for lucky breaks as opposed to deserving—even in a sick sort of way—to get out of his predicament. It’s truly a merely serviceable screenplay that keeps this from being great.

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)

Director: Steve Miner

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams, LL Cool J

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I do remember the first time I ever heard about the film. Jamie Lee Curtis was presenting at some awards show, and was introduced as the star of the upcoming Halloween: H20. I was naturally intrigued that Curtis was returning to the series, but based on the title I assumed Laurie Strode had become some kind of latter-day Jacques Cousteau and her brother had come to hunt his sister on some seabase on the ocean floor, like Sphere (1998) meets the original Halloween (1978)…

…actually, now that I think about it, that wouldn’t be the worst possible conceit for a movie. A slasher movie on a submarine. I kinda want to do that now. I might very well do it now.

Anyway…

Did I Like It: The Halloween series, after the wobbly, disjoined affair that was Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) was doomed to follow the path set by other Dimension properties—like Hellraiser*—to direct-to-video depths.

I can’t help but wonder if that might have been better for the series as a whole. The movies—free of meeting corporate requirements for a wide theatrical release—could have gotten a lot weirder. Halloween has never been better than when its being completely ignored by the world at large.

But that’s not the world we live in now, nor is it the world where Thorn governs Michael Myers’ predilections, and every employee of Smiths Grove (except that one) was in on it. This is the world where Jamie Lee Curtis decided to become nostalgic for the beginnings of her career.

The movie that results is slight before it is anything else. Indeed, it has the shortest running time of any in the series, owing largely to the fact that an entire subplot revolving around the detective called to investigate the murder of Nurse Chambers (Nancy Stephens) and his hunt for the Shape.

And yet, there’s an argument to be made that the film could be even shorter. Something has happened to my Blu Ray over the years since I bought it, and it skipped it’s way through several sequences. This didn’t take anything away from the experience, though. That’s not an exceptionally strong endorsement for the movie, I realize. I’m tempted to think that it owes too much to Scream (1996) (which, in turn, owes too much to the original Halloween). A copy of a copy won’t be as sharp as original. Multiplicity (1996) taught me that much. Also, the one-two punch of Halloween: Resurrection (2002) and Halloween (2018) rendered any of the films strengths mostly moot.

And then there’s the mask… As much as I complain about the mask in previous sequels, here it looks mostly okay. Until it absolutely doesn’t. Some reshooting after test screenings necessitated the mask being grafted on via CGI. If there’s one thing that CGI in the 90s did really well, it was recreate things that were already real objects at other points in the film.

You can try to explain to me why they couldn’t just use a single mask, or at least a single mold of a mask, but I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.

*At one point, after Freddy vs. Jason (2003), there was even talk of forcing the Shape to go toe-to-pin with Pinhead. Let us thank Thorn that we avoided that, or at the very least, that I have avoided having to write about.