Heather Wixson (00:00.789) Oh, Beverly Hills adjacent, but I live in the valley. Like, you know, we're all somewhere adjacent, so I dig it.

Bryan! (00:03.76) Ha ha ha.

Yep. All right, so here we go. You're listening to Bring Me the Axe. I'm Brian White, one half of this morbid equation, and I'm joined by my co-host and actual brother Dave White. Dave, how you doing?

Dave! (00:20.782) Thank you for asking. I am doing pretty well. I'll tell you what happened to me today. I was using the internet, the net, if you will, and a pop-up ad came up for the 30th anniversary of that Earth Crisis album, Firestorm. And I thought, 30 years? That can't be right. And you know what? It was right. And then I thought, what else is going to happen? What is, Suzanne Somers going to die or something?

Bryan! (00:29.369) as one does.

Bryan! (00:37.643) Oh my god.

Bryan! (00:41.528) No. Yeah, yeah.

Dave! (00:50.294) THIS FUCKING DAY.

Bryan! (00:51.962) Yeah, it's pretty crazy. You know, Piper Laurie died yesterday. Yeah.

Dave! (00:54.15) And Piper Laurie died yesterday. So Earth Crisis, the album 30 years old. Piper Laurie dies. Suzanne Summers dies. I don't know how much more I can take.

Bryan! (01:05.084) I know it's I'm constantly on edge. Oh, so we practically grew up in neighborhood video stores and steady diet of utter garbage that those shops provided us with continues unabated to this day. There's no one else. I enjoy chopping it up with more about trashy movies than Dave. Just before we get into it, here's a little housekeeping. If you want to keep up with us between episodes, you can also find me on Instagram at Bring Me the Axe Pod and Dave that queer wolf. We're having a lot of fun over there. We've got a really

31 days of Halloween kind of thing going on a lot of recommendations. We're having a good time and we also got a sweet website now at bring me the axe.com you can list all our past episodes there and read the transcripts. You can also contact us directly at bring me the axe pod at gmail.com with any questions comments or suggestions do let us know if there's a movie that you love and would like to hear us give it the business and lastly.

If you like what you hear, you can subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. You'll be doing us a big favor by leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. You can also do that on Spotify. And I've noticed that those counts are going up. So like, I don't know, I guess bugging everybody to do it is actually doing it. It actually has like a. And it makes an impact in a way that, you know, it seems very small, but, you know, it helps us kind of climb up the ranks a little bit, become a little bit more visible. So it takes a second. Do it.

Yeah, so I just want to get all that out of the way right at the top of the show. So Dave, who's this over here?

Dave! (02:36.275) Well, Heather Wixson is our guest today. Hopefully, she's here to offset some of my negative feelings about this film.

Bryan! (02:38.513) That's right. We...

Heather Wixson (02:41.645) I'm sorry.

gonna say that like you're talking about how like a doubt like a bummer summer of a day today is and I was like, wow, we're really gonna have some fun with this, aren't we?

Dave! (02:53.174) Yeah, I capped it off with this brutal movie.

Bryan! (02:53.645) Yeah.

Yep. Heather is an author. She's also managing editor at Daily Dead and she's got the correct me if I've got this title wrong. It's is it monsters make up and effects? Yep. And is that you're also you're also working on the in search of darkness book. Yes.

Heather Wixson (02:56.365) I'm going to go to bed.

Heather Wixson (03:08.457) Yes, that is correct.

Heather Wixson (03:15.017) That is also correct. I am co-writing that with my horror BFF Patrick Bromley. Yes.

Bryan! (03:19.888) very cool. Yeah. This whole show is actually predicated a little bit on that In Search of Darkness show when I was watching it and they got to the Amityville 2 entry and I was like, holy shit, I don't think I've ever actually seen that movie. And then I watched it and I went, holy shit, Dave, we have got to talk. We had to do a podcast just to talk about Amityville 2 and thus Bring Me the Axe was born. So yeah.

Heather Wixson (03:43.937) I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Heather Wixson (03:49.725) Isn't that like the best part about being like a horror fan? It's like you find that one movie and you're like, I need to talk about this. Who can I talk about this with?

Bryan! (03:56.984) I know, and that's kind of my thing is like, I got a big mouth, I can't shut up, I love talking to people. And if I can sort of couple that with talking about horror movies, particularly in a real sort of analytical way, because I can be a weirdo about that. Like I've been, I'm kind of going through an American psycho phase right now, where I've watched it a bunch in the past, and I'm like, oh my God, there's so many details I've never noticed before. And so I'm just looking for somebody to discuss that with. But yeah.

Heather Wixson (04:23.821) I'm glad you clarified that you didn't mean that you're actually turning into Patrick Bateman because then this would have gotten weird. So, you know, we don't want that. No kittens were harmed in the filming or the recording of this podcast.

Bryan! (04:27.584) No, yeah. Yeah. No.

Bryan! (04:36.81) Yeah, so let's, let's give him a little taste before we get into this here. We'll give you a little give a little taste of what's coming up.

Bryan! (06:48.924) There it is. Yep. Yeah, there it is. Yes. Yeah. We said we were doing it. We're doing it. It's Halloween 2007 by one Robert Zombie. So, Heather, I gotta ask you cuz we presented you with like a list of titles to choose from and of everything on the list. You chose this one.

Dave! (06:49.23) Jesus, even the trailer is exhausting.

Heather Wixson (06:52.845) Hehehehe

Heather Wixson (07:03.309) Hehehe

Heather Wixson (07:09.357) I did, I did. Okay, so here is my spiel with Halloween 2007. And first and foremost, what I wanted to say is, I also, for this, and usually pretty much every Halloween season, I watch the unrated director's cut because I actually think it's a better version of the movie. So our experiences might differ a little bit if you've watched the theatrical instead, which totally get, you know. But so, to give you a little idea, so going into...

this remake, I was a huge Rob Zombie fan, saw House of Thousand Corpses in theaters. It actually ended up giving my friend a panic attack during it to the point where she ended up like having to go on medication subsequently. That's how bad it was. I didn't leave the theater, but my friend left with her. I was like, no, I'm here. But I actually didn't really love House of Thousand Corpses at first. And then I rented it the next Halloween season and fell in love with it. And then Devil's Rejects for me is an absolute masterpiece.

Bryan! (07:50.701) Oh my god.

Heather Wixson (08:06.313) So I was so gung-ho for Rob Zombie's Halloween because I'd heard so much about like him bringing like something different to the table and blah, blah. And then sitting in that theater, and I remember everything about seeing it that very first time, it was this theater in Woodridge, Illinois called Hollywood Boulevard. It was kind of like a draft house style. You ate, definitely don't recommend eating during this movie. And I walked out absolutely hating it. I hated it. I absolutely hated it.

Um, I went into his sequel with an open mind, hated that for years. And then I kind of gave it some space because I was like, okay, I went in there with some clear expectations as a fan. They didn't meet them. And so I was like, Nope, I'm out. Um, years later, I went back and rewatched it. It was actually the unrated director's cut. And I was like, you know, when he's not. Beholden to the structures.

Bryan! (08:56.476) I was like, did you know it was me?

Heather Wixson (09:04.229) of Carpenter's original masterpiece, which cannot be touched. It's actually a really effective horror movie. And I've grown to really love it over the years. And I actually really love his Halloween II as well, because it's just like, he was like, oh, so you guys are mad at me for doing what you, what, you know, Carpenter did? Okay, I'm gonna throw in a white horse and we're gonna go crazy. And I actually think Scout's performance in that movie is probably one of the best horror performances we had in the 2000s.

Um, so yeah, it's one of those movies. Like I will never, if somebody tells me they hate this movie, I totally get it. I totally understand. But I actually think that there are some really good things going on in here. Um, it's brutal though. It is absolutely brutal. We always joke that like, cause like AMC always plays like PureFest and you can kind of casually watch any of the other Halloween movies from like the original franchise and stuff like that. Like I can throw on resurrection and whatever danger payments playing in the background.

But like these movies, you kind of have to sit and watch them. There's no casual quality to them because they're just kind of in your face, which is what I've always appreciated about Rob Zombie as a director. You know, and we were still kind of, as collectively as a society, we were still kind of working through our stuff in the 2000s, post 9-11. And like, so we had that wave of American extremism and horror, and this very much reflects that. I just think there's a lot of folks who...

I get being precious over remakes. Trust me. I keep joking until this very day that like, I'm so glad point break never got remade, even though we all know the truth. Somebody tried. Yeah. Oh, it totally did. Somebody actually corrected me on that on a, on a post and I was like, oh, you're so cute. You don't get the joke. Um, I just ignore it. You know, I mean, I, at this point in my life, I've lived through like five or six rounds of remakes. I can't even get mad at them anymore. Um, you know, so like for me.

Bryan! (10:41.055) the

Dave! (10:41.698) Yeah, it did.

Bryan! (10:48.947) Ah.

Bryan! (10:58.148) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (11:02.005) From the movies that you got you had on your list I was like, you know I feel like this might be an interesting conversation because I'm okay if somebody doesn't love a movie, you know, that's okay You know, but I'll be here to kind of defend the parts that I do love

Bryan! (11:14.348) Oh, thank God you're here for this. Cause like, I'll tell you what. So the last, the last regular episode, we started with hollow with David Gordon Green's Halloween. And that's one that, that's one that I actually, I like and Dave does not like it. And we were split so hard. And then I, we going into this one, I was like, okay, we're probably going to be of a mind on this one. Cause this is just, it just does, it just does not work for me whatsoever. So it's good that you're here.

Heather Wixson (11:16.937) I'm sorry.

Heather Wixson (11:27.207) I love that movie.

Dave! (11:29.302) No!

Dave! (11:40.493) Uh-uh.

Bryan! (11:44.296) to sort of pull in the other direction, because otherwise we were just gonna probably spend like an hour and a half just ripping it apart. But.

Heather Wixson (11:50.869) No, I totally get it. Also too, because it just feels like two movies. You know what I mean? Like there's a subsequent shift and I get that. You know, I kind of, I honestly like, I think it would have fared better if like we didn't have another character named Laurie Strode. Like I just think it would have been a different movie if we could have just had, we could have even distanced ourselves more from the stuff that was set up in, you know, Carpenter's Halloween and even a little bit.

Dave! (11:54.303) No, 100%.

Bryan! (11:54.973) Yes. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (12:18.545) in Rick Rosenthal's Halloween 2.

Bryan! (12:21.304) Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts on Halloween as a franchise, and a lot of them are basically they should have cut their losses after part five and done something entirely different with it. Or nothing at all. But at the same time, like there was room to move, there was story to tell. But like they the I've been I've been listening to the audiobook of taking shape to, which is the sort of.

Dave! (12:35.547) or nothing at all.

Bryan! (12:48.796) chronicle of all of the unmade Halloween sequels and a lot of the problem like the big the big bulk of that story is they wrote themselves into a corner with the end of part five and All of the all of the unmade versions of part six were basically hinged on Trying to answer the question of who the man in black is at the end and they all sucked and so like not one of them ever got made until eventually they kind of did but like

This is one of the most like twisted, just weirdest kind of legacies of sequels. But to your point about the 2000s, like Dave and I are largely dismissive of like modern horror movies, him way more than me, but like I've got room in my diet for a lot of contemporary stuff.

Dave! (13:37.326) I'm not dismissive of modern horror movies as a whole. I just feel like a lot of them are not very original or they're not very interesting to me. And like I say all the time, you can either go, you can go one of two ways with horror. You can either be serious about it, and sometimes that works, or you can be kind of goofy and self-aware and have fun with it, but you can't do both and you can't sit in the middle, because it never works. And I feel like everybody right now is trying to go.

super serious and honestly that shit is so exhausting to me. I'm like, I don't need another fucking hereditary movie or any of this bullshit and it's more, I don't need serious stories. Like the world is terrible enough.

Heather Wixson (14:13.257) Well, yeah, to that point though, have you seen Totally Killer yet?

Bryan! (14:16.689) I literally just watched it.

Dave! (14:16.936) Mmm, yeah.

Heather Wixson (14:18.822) It is ridiculously fun. It's super like.

Bryan! (14:22.145) I would like to know if it originally started out as a hot tub time machine, like sequel, in development.

Heather Wixson (14:28.825) It's really funny because like my other half, he's, sometimes I have to watch movies sometimes first because I have to know if he's gonna be cool because he isn't super into a lot of newer horror. And so we went into totally killer blind because we were both watching it for the first time and I was like, all right, let's see how it is. I'm like, but it's a slasher movie with like back to the future. Like we love back to the future.

Bryan! (14:40.336) Gotcha.

Bryan! (14:50.612) Yeah, I was surprised because I also went in knowing nothing about it. And I was like, wait a second. There's a time machine. You you might you might you might like it because it is very silly.

Dave! (14:56.642) I mean that sounds fine to me. My problem!

Heather Wixson (14:58.886) I laughed a lot. I laughed a lot. And it's smart.

Dave! (15:04.318) My problem with those though is, well, I guess some of my issues are that when I don't know how I'm supposed to experience a movie, whether I'm supposed to think it's funny or not, like that drives me nuts and it's hard to enjoy anything that way. But sometimes you can go a little too far over the edge. Like trauma movies, I fucking hate those. I think they're stupid. I don't like how fucking winky and nudgy they are. Like you can be goofy and smart. They just don't go smart. They just go goofy and I hate that.

Bryan! (15:32.109) not, this isn't like, this is definitely not a trauma movie. I recommend it. I thought it was, I thought it was fun. But yeah, but to sort of get into the kind of proper my.

Dave! (15:40.962) But this era, this era of dimension, I think is fucking garbage. They pumped out nothing but terrible movies for this entire decade.

Bryan! (15:48.664) It was a tough time. Like to get in the mood for this, like I went through a bunch of like 2000s horror movies. I watched all of the Saw movies and I watched American Psycho as I mentioned. And like, I really needed to sort of get like, really kind of contextualize it because there is something about that Bush period of America that produced a particular kind of horror movie. And this one I think is

Heather Wixson (15:49.194) Hehehe

Bryan! (16:16.undefined) in like in spite of how brutal like some of the Eli Roth stuff was at the time. This one in particular for me kind of represents the Zenith. Like this was the peak of the whole thing, because right after this, it feels like everything kind of changed a little bit and kind of chilled out a little bit. Because also, like we left the Bush administration and we were kind of flying high on the whole hope and change thing. So.

Dave! (16:39.47) I don't put it in that category. I don't put this movie in that category at all because one of the reasons I hate that era is how kind of bro-y it was. It just feels like if a decade could be a fedora, it's that. It's this real douchey era and I have no fucking time for masculinity and all this gross shit, but I don't put this movie in that because I think this is a piece. So as much as I do not like Rob Zombie's movies, I have never seen one that I thought was any good. I love Rob Zombie as a person.

Bryan! (16:50.652) Hahaha.

Heather Wixson (16:51.765) Hehehehe

Dave! (17:09.706) Like, I love that he's out there doing his thing. I love that he keeps me, I will watch every movie he makes because he's so genuine in his appreciation in a way that I don't think like people like Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino, I find that pretentious and awful. I find Rob Zombie very genuine and it's as though he wants to share his love of horror with you and he wants you to love it too. He's just not that great at conveying it probably because he just keeps making the same movie over and over.

I don't know why he hasn't just done Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just do it. Let's get it over with.

Heather Wixson (17:42.561) Well, we've got those, but I don't tend to agree with that because I think if you go back and watch like House of the Corpse, it's like, obviously there's, you know, it's pretty much a giant love letter to Texas Chainsaw one and two, which also to your point when you were saying, you don't know if you're supposed to laugh at movies or not. I mean, Tobe Hooper up until the very end claimed that Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original one, was a comedy. I still don't laugh at that movie. So I think it's all very, like you've, no, he went, I saw,

Bryan! (17:53.317) Hmm.

Bryan! (18:08.531) I...

Dave! (18:08.654) I don't know how serious he was about that though. That seems like something someone says.

Bryan! (18:10.961) E.

Heather Wixson (18:13.865) I saw him in a conversation with Breedken. He was serious. And so like, for me, like, you know, Rob Zombie is like this guy who wanted to take risks. He went out and established himself with House of a Thousand Corpses and with Devil's Rejects. And then gets to do Halloween, gets to play in a really big sandbox after kind of getting screwed over by Universal on House of a Thousand Corpses and having to sort of pave his own way. And then...

He does, you know, so he does some stuff with the Halloween movies and wants to kind of push himself even further and goes and makes Lords of Salem. And like, absolutely, I saw at the end of that movie every single time, it is phenomenal. It's like his fulchy little masterpiece. And then, but fans, because it's weird and it's not what they're expecting, they're all like, no, go back. And so he fan fund, he does a fan funding and ends up making 31.

Bryan! (18:49.4) I love Lords of Salem. I love it.

Bryan! (19:05.921) Yeah.

Bryan! (19:10.351) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (19:10.589) which is very much Rob Zombie back in his head. And I will tell you this, I saw the original cut of 31 at Sundance that year. There is a much better version of that movie that was seen there that was never released. And it breaks my heart because there's actual real character moments. It actually makes sense. I was angry after I left that Fathom events screening because it was cut to shit and it really angered me.

Dave! (19:10.846) Ugh.

Bryan! (19:32.197) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (19:37.529) Um, you know, and then he goes and does three from hell because he wants to wrap it up. And honestly, I think he wanted to work with Sid one last time before he was gone. Um, so I think for me, like, but if you go back and watch houses, a thousand corpses, for as much as he borrows from Toby, there is definitely like things in there about like cinema from the forties and fifties and sixties permeating throughout that script, uh, and throughout the way he approached, like certain visual aesthetics of that movie.

Um, so I, I mean, like I said, I will never try to go and convince somebody that the nihilism that we see often in a lot of Rob Zombie's movies is like for everybody. It's never going to be for everybody, but I do think that there is, and it's like this underlying intelligence for things that sort of get lost in the violence of these movies, if that makes sense.

Bryan! (20:26.428) the movie? Uh yeah. Yeah. The it definitely feels the violence feels a little bit like a bit like a stunt. Also, the expectation of the times were very high and so that you know, it had to be a certain thing. Plus, I'm sure he just wanted to do like big special effects movies. But yeah, so here, let's well, alright.

a warning before we get rolling. If you've listened to the show before, you know, we're going to ruin the whole thing. So watch the movie. But if you're new, we're going to talk about this movie from beginning to end. So spoilers to follow. So here's some facts. The year was 2007. Some other movies released that year were Dead Silence, which I also watched. And I was about a half way just like the other day I watched this. I was halfway through and it occurred to me that I had seen it before, even though I thought that I had not.

So that's about as how memorable that one is. Also.

Heather Wixson (21:27.594) I regularly have to defend Dead Silence, and like, because for a long time, like, when they were sort of still playing in the horror world, like, I got to interview like Lee and James, like quite a few times between like Insidious stuff, and literally be like, guys, stop being so hard on Dead Silence, because they are mean about it too. But I like Mary Shaw, I do. It's weird and it's creepy and quat and forever.

Bryan! (21:45.687) Yeah

Mm-hmm. It, there are moments in it that I was like, oh, I can tell that this is what they were going for. And the studio was like, no, killer doll movie, yeah. So, yeah. Also Frontiers and L'Enterieur, also known as Inside. This was the high age of the sort of new French extremity that was going on. Things in France were also quite brutal at the time.

Heather Wixson (21:58.041) Exactly.

Heather Wixson (22:14.978) Also, don't forget 2007 was the Hitcher remake.

Bryan! (22:18.288) That's right. Yeah, this is the thing is this is this is peak remake season, which is also I think one of the reasons why I avoided I did not actually avoid this one. I saw this one twice when it came out and we'll get to it. I've got I've got some notes about that. But like there's a million movies of that time that I just have not seen because like I saw the original and I saw no reason to watch a remake of it that I knew was going to be inferior in every way. But also saw for came out that year.

I think that's the last of the Boozman movies. Bowsman, yeah. And also. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. And also, lastly, Rounding it out, Trick or Treat, which is a movie that I adore.

Heather Wixson (22:53.515) Bootsman? Yeah. My other half works with him, so yeah, he does.

Heather Wixson (23:06.005) I was, I, this is, I still think about this because like, my, actually my career in horror actually began in 2007. And so that year I had convinced myself because I was like, kind of on the, on the outs with my ex husband and was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I put writing away for so long because I was focused on all the crap you're supposed to do as an adult and kind of lost myself for a few years. And so that was the year I decided. I was like,

I love writing. I miss talking about horror movies. This is what I want to do. So that October, I actually flew myself out to Screamfest for the first time because I was still living in Illinois. And I remember like that was like my first film festival. I felt so cool and it was just really fun. But I remember that was the year they actually did a screening of Trick or Treat. And I had to enter a contest from Arrow in the Head back then to get to go. Yes.

Bryan! (23:57.456) Oh, no kidding. Right, because that's the thing is the movie was made then, but it wasn't released until 09, right?

Heather Wixson (24:04.913) Oh, nine on Blu-ray and DVD. Yeah. And so like, and it was funny cause like, I worked for this tiny little site. I think it's gone now called Terror Tube. And I wrote a review of Trick or Treat. And it was like the most amazing thing I was, this is my space days kids. And Mike Doherty actually reached out to me and he was like, I read your review and that was really cool. Thank you so much. He's like, we're sharing it. Cause they were just trying to get Warner brothers to get behind this movie. They never did until now that there's money to be made.

Bryan! (24:06.874) Yeah.

Bryan! (24:19.735) Uh-huh.

Bryan! (24:26.552) That's awesome.

Bryan! (24:31.768) It's which is, oh, I know. Yeah. No, it is merch up and down spirit Halloween now. And it's like, where were you 16 years ago? Yeah. No, this, that movie is delightful.

Heather Wixson (24:37.546) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (24:41.373) Yeah, we should be 15 years into Sam being a Halloween icon. But it was really amazing because he actually sent me a poster signed all the way back then, I still have it, from 2007. So for me, 2007 was kind of like this crazy kickstart of a year where I was just, it was almost like rediscovering the genre. So you had this weird mix of like.

Bryan! (24:47.267) Yeah.

Bryan! (24:54.205) Oh, that's so nice.

Heather Wixson (25:06.497) the remakes and all the new stuff coming and getting to see stuff. Like I was finally paying attention to like movies from overseas more, which I realized like, especially with the French movement, like how much there really was out there. But it's funny, my favorite thing was with the Hitcher remake. Are we allowed to swear? Can we drop a swear? Okay. My favorite thing was there's like this one crazy brutal kill in the Hitcher and I totally forget what it was.

Bryan! (25:17.987) Hmm.

Bryan! (25:23.854) Oh yes, we are gonna be cursing up and down in this episode.

Heather Wixson (25:31.701) But I'll never forget this guy, literally after it happened in the theater stands up and he's like, now that's how you kill a motherfucker. And everybody in the theater laughed. I don't remember anything about the hitcher. I remember that moment though, and it was amazing.

Bryan! (25:45.212) That's awesome. Yeah. Oh, 2007 was also kind of a big like a big year for me in the same way, like in terms of horror, because I started my old website, Cinema Suicide that year. And, and yeah, I had very much a similar experience where like for, you know, about like nine months, like I nobody knew who I was. And I wrote a couple of a couple of articles that caught some attention. One was a story about Tom Savini, which

Heather Wixson (25:55.858) Oh, awesome.

Bryan! (26:14.52) If you want to hear it, it's in our Maniac episode. And also, but the other was a review of this movie. And we'll get, yeah, and we'll get to it because the circumstances of it were very, very strange. So the director of the film is, as we said, Rob Zombie, heavy metal Renaissance man, one of the all-time greats in metal, solo artist, front man for White Zombie, which is one of my favorite metal bands of all time.

Heather Wixson (26:24.275) So we're full circle now.

Bryan! (26:42.976) and he's a horror movie super fan. Like that was, when that record came out, Devil Music Volume Two, and it's like littered with samples from movies that I recognized. I was like, oh shit, my people. So, and it's so good. It's one of the best, yeah, there's not a bad track on it. It's so goddamn good. It always kind of made sense that he would one day make a horror movie of his own.

Dave! (26:50.274) Yeah!

Heather Wixson (26:54.986) Yeah.

Dave! (26:56.778) It's just a fucking kick-ass record too. Front to back.

Heather Wixson (27:10.529) I mean, he did every time he went on stage with White Zombie. I never saw him until like in the last like 10 years or so as a solo artist, but I'm an old. And so in high school, my gift to my ex, because I married my high school sweetheart, so cliche. But my gift to him when we graduated was tickets to see White Zombie, Pantera and Deaf Tones. And it was like crazy because it really was like, I mean, I think at that point, he was already working somewhat with Wing Top, who's done all of his movies.

Bryan! (27:31.603) Oh, nice.

Heather Wixson (27:40.745) Um, and so he was creating all these like crazy classic horror props and stuff like that, very Alice Cooper esque and stuff like that, minus the battings. Um, you know, so it was really interesting because it was almost like he was already a horror director, I think in his own mind, um, before he even got to do it.

Bryan! (27:48.549) Yeah.

Bryan! (27:57.208) Yeah. Being like an artist really kind of goes a long way for him, like having just a firm grasp on the visual arts because like I think I may not like his movies. I, however, think he's a very good director and his art direction, particularly when he's doing his own stuff. Like the

One of my big biggest complaints about House of a Thousand Corpses is I felt like I was watching Texas Chainsaw 2, but at the same time, like all of the design in that movie is just him. It's all the shit that he's drawn on t-shirts and posters and album art. The same thing kind of goes for Lords of Salem, like all of the like art that appears in that is him and it's an entirely different character. It's still spooky and it's got horror vibes.

but it's way different. It's not the kind of drippy comic book stuff he was doing. So like whenever he's in charge and is allowed to sort of flex as like an artist, a visual artist, I think that's like a real strength of his movies. But cast, Sherry Moon Zombie, Rob's wife and leading lady. You know her best as baby Firefly and you've probably seen her ass in more movies than most actresses. He loves making movies with her and God bless him. I love him for it.

I think she's pretty good. I don't, I...

Heather Wixson (29:22.637) I do, I think you can see her get better over the years, especially once you get to Lord's Asylum. And I actually think her performance in Three from Hell is probably the best, well actually she's really good in Devil's Rejects, but Three from Hell is really fascinating because it's really different for her. And I also think the way that they explore Otis a little bit in Three from Hell is kind of interesting. It gave Mosley a little more to do too.

Bryan! (29:28.356) Yeah.

Bryan! (29:47.524) Yeah. Also, we got Tyler Main, professional big guy, retired professional wrestler and an actor, probably best known for his turn as adult Michael Myers in these Halloween movies, but he's also Sabretooth and Bryan Singer's X-Men movies. And rounding out the cast is literally everyone from the celebrity area of your local horror movie convention. Sheer volume cameos in this is a little distracting, if I'm being honest.

Heather Wixson (30:00.246) Yeah!

Heather Wixson (30:06.854) Hehehe

Dave! (30:07.03) I'm sorry.

Heather Wixson (30:15.017) You don't, to that degree though, that's what I kind of love about Rob Zombie is he made it cool to go back to a lot of these older artists, like older actors and actresses, because no.

Bryan! (30:22.864) I, yeah, I'm definitely not complaining. I love it and I'm a sucker for a who's who. So yeah.

Heather Wixson (30:30.301) Yeah, because when was the last time we saw, for example, Sid Hagen, House of the Corpse, and freaking legend, when was the last time we saw him on a big screen in a movie theater before that?

Bryan! (30:40.664) Yeah. Richard Lynch appearing in this very quickly. I was like, Oh, it's Richard Lynch. I fucking love him. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (30:47.747) Yeah, it's everybody. I mean, Sybil Danny gets stabbed. You know, it's like, it's amazing. Like, let's do it. Stabsterba. I don't care. Let's go.

Bryan! (30:50.948) Yep.

Bryan! (30:55.32) Yeah. So some notes. The road to production for this movie is marked with tragedy. Following Halloween resurrection, there are a bunch of aborted sequels that only ever came together on paper, including a long protracted development phase for cash grab based on the hype surrounding Freddy vs. Jason that would put the shape up against Cenobites in a Halloween hellraiser crossover. It eventually died. But so did Mustafa Akkad, who was a major gatekeeping force for this whole IP.

He was killed in Jordan in 2005 when Al Qaeda bombed his hotel. And then Malek, his son, promptly took over, redirected the entire project. I respect the shit out of that. Like I said earlier, I think that these sequels really needed to cut their losses as far back as part five and just go in some kind of erratically new direction. A reboot back then would have been revolutionary, but it was also kind of unspeakable at the time. But this is, I think, was a step in the right direction.

like the product. I think it's what they really needed to do. Also, Rob Zombie informed John Carpenter that he was doing this and Carpenter's advice was to make it his own, which he definitely did. This is very much a Rob Zombie movie until it is not.

Heather Wixson (31:59.148) Yeah.

Dave! (32:10.054) I imagine that conversation going something like this. I'm going to remake this movie. And John Carpenter goes, all right, I don't care. Do whatever you want. John Carpenter does not strike me as a sentimental man.

Heather Wixson (32:18.497) Hehehehehehehehe

Bryan! (32:23.442) Well, here's the thing is he's been involved at some level in the development of Halloween sequels as far back as like part six, I think, when like part

Dave! (32:34.962) Mm-hmm.

Heather Wixson (32:35.617) Four. Four was kind of when the last one that he really sort of came into. Because that was when him and Debra Hill signed over their rights and stepped away.

Bryan! (32:39.652) Cause yeah.

Bryan! (32:44.012) Yeah, right. Because I believe and I can't remember. I might have been part four, but his initial pitch was Michael Myers goes to space, which beat Jason. Yeah, would be Jason by about a decade. So yeah, real wild. But yeah, like he's constantly there at some level. Even though I mean, I'm sure now he kind of owns some kind of a stake in it. But at that time, like, yeah, he and Deborah Hill had kind of

Dave! (32:53.134) It's fucking awesome.

Heather Wixson (32:54.846) Yeah.

Bryan! (33:14.416) just got away from it in order to just do something else.

Heather Wixson (33:19.061) Yeah, well, I mean, at that point too, when they were doing Halloween IV, I mean, Deborah was already pretty much well established producing outside of horror at that point. And John, I know they begged John to do H20, and he was like, no, I'm out, I'm done. They're like, we have Jamie here, we have Janet here because you wanted Jamie to begin with because she was Janet's daughter. And he was still like, no, I'm good. Which I mean, at that point, like in his career,

Bryan! (33:26.66) Yeah.

Bryan! (33:43.556) Ha ha ha.

Heather Wixson (33:46.857) He shouldn't have been good. Like he should have been like, sure. I mean.

Dave! (33:48.586) No, he wasn't. He was like, I have to go make Ghosts of Mars, to which I say, no, you don't.

Bryan! (33:50.18) Yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (33:56.322) Oh

Heather Wixson (33:57.973) I will defend Ghost of Mars. It's better than I remembered it to be, but it's still not great. It's not one of my favorite carpenter movies. But like, I think the thing is though that like, there's like two Johns. There's like the guy that like does the clippy stuff during the panels and stuff. And then there's the guy who like, when you really talk to him about stuff, you can tell, like he's still, I think he's still genuinely hurt about the thing. Like I'm sure he's happy that people like enjoyed it.

Bryan! (34:23.996) We've talked about this a little bit and it bothers me how he's not able to get over that because there are, I know, but at the same time, like how many people like have that as their number one? Like that's one of my all-time favorite movies. Like the movies he has made have touched me in a fundamental way. Like they have shaped my life in a tangible way. And for

Heather Wixson (34:33.175) I wouldn't, it's the thing. It's a masterpiece.

Bryan! (34:51.728) Damn it, this movie I made in 1982 didn't go the way I thought it would. Like, come on, dude, you've got so many good fucking movies and there are so many people whose lives you have touched in a really, really great way. Let it go.

Heather Wixson (35:05.481) Yeah, I mean, but the thing is though, like it screwed his career at that point. Like he was ready, like literally already was ready to go for Firestarter, got pulled off of that. You know, basically had to like beg, I think to get Christine to go, I think he went over to Columbia for that one. Like, you know, I get it because the thing is, it's like when you're creative, as much as you wanna say that you're doing it for the love of it, there is still that little bit of an ego stroke to it. And when you're a guy who makes Halloween of all movies.

Bryan! (35:14.468) Yeah.

Bryan! (35:29.924) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (35:34.953) and then comes back with like the fog and like in escape from me, like give him whatever he wants, trust him. And I get the thing was too much in 1982, probably like how for me, this Halloween was too much for me in 2007. I was over it at that point. You know, time can heal some wounds, but I don't know that it always heals all of them.

Bryan! (35:50.392) Yeah.

Bryan! (35:56.905) Yeah, I mean, I bet the thing is, is I guarantee like at the time that they were like, John, come back to Halloween. He was like, I'm just going to play Sonic the Hedgehog and get high.

Dave! (36:04.75) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (36:05.053) And who could blame them? Like that sounds like fun, you know?

Dave! (36:07.17) Me too.

Bryan! (36:08.868) Yeah, now he does seem to be doing, doing a lot. He seems to be living his best life these days, and I love it.

Heather Wixson (36:18.037) Yeah, I think he genuinely likes the idea of just being able to collaborate with his kid and just make music. I think that's the hippie of John Carpenter in there where he's like, I just wanna sit around and jam out. That's cool.

Bryan! (36:25.052) Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, in our last in our last Halloween episode, we talked about that a little bit, where it feels like John works best when he has a partner, you know, and when he was kind of adrift on his own in the 90s, like things just things just didn't work out all that well. But, you know, we've got a decade of just bulletproof gold. It's so you know, this guy is just the goddamn best. OK, so days before this movie was released theatrically.

Heather Wixson (36:38.214) Yeah, I would agree.

Heather Wixson (36:54.998) Yeah.

Bryan! (36:59.572) a work print of the movie leaked online. And this is where like things kind of turned for Cinema Suicide in a really kind of positive direction. This landed in my inbox from a contact of mine who also sent me the leaked script a couple of years later of the Walking Dead pilot. And I was never able to really pin down who this person was or where they came from, but I'm pretty sure they came from movie marketing. Yeah, yeah, I had several.

Dave! (37:23.362) Wait, you had an anonymous source? We were like Woodward and or Bernstein.

Bryan! (37:29.188) Mm hmm. Yep. We met. We met in a dark parking lot and they used in the used in that. I don't know. Yeah. Yes. No, no. This so I got it and I watched it and they were like, hey, it was it was basically like, hey, here's a link to that movie. Everybody's talking about, you know, you might want to see this. And so I watched it. And the thing about that work print, Heather, have you ever seen that?

Heather Wixson (37:29.686) Hehehe

Dave! (37:35.484) Smothers.

Heather Wixson (37:52.985) Um, no, I'll be really honest. I don't typically do. No, I'm, well, is it the director?

Bryan! (37:55.284) You have seen it. You have seen it. Yes, you have. It is the unrated. The unrated version is the is the is the work print. Because I watched this.

Heather Wixson (38:02.725) Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I don't do torrent stuff, so I literally, I got yelled at once for doing a song off of Napster, and I felt really guilty. It was literally the rock song, "'It Doesn't Matter,' the song he did with White Club Jean in the late 90s, and somebody yelled at me really badly for it, and I never, I was like, no, I can't. So I was never good at that stuff.

Bryan! (38:12.02) Oh, no.

Bryan! (38:23.236) Oh no. No, no, but yeah. So I, I've, I wouldn't, when we do this, like my process is usually, I watch the movie a couple of times and I do like, I do like a, just one version to take it in. And then I do a notes run proper where I kind of watch and stop it and think about what I'm going to write and say. And so my initial run through was the unrated version. And I was like, holy shit. It's that work print that came out because there's a whole lot. First of all, it's like 10 or 15 minutes longer.

than the theatrical run. And Michael's escape is way different in the unrated version. And so.

Heather Wixson (38:53.258) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (39:00.029) Yeah, yeah, that's my least favorite part of it.

Bryan! (39:03.76) I hate that one. That's why when I brought it up for my notes run, I was like, I'm just going to do the theatrical version so I don't have to see that rape scene.

Heather Wixson (39:11.273) I get it, I totally get it. I kind of just sort of make myself a little busy for about 90 seconds or so. I get why it's necessary and I think it also shows, it's okay to just kill some really bad asshole people. Like they really gotta come in, like yeah, he's gonna kill some innocent people, but like these guys deserve it. Which is funny, because Lou Temple is literally the nicest guy you'll ever meet. If you see him at a convention, he uses like, ma'am.

Bryan! (39:16.787) Yeah, yeah, I was like, ah.

Bryan! (39:35.388) Yeah, but also, yeah, I've seen Murad.

Heather Wixson (39:38.737) and sir and like he's like the nice like southern gentleman and you're like I hate you so much but then but then he'll yeah

Bryan! (39:42.628) that's funny. Yeah. So with the one with the with the theatrical version, we get, you know, we get Mosley and we get Leslie Eastbrook and we get Tom tolls. But in the in the unrated version, we get Courtney Gaines. And that's the upside to that scene. If there's an upside at all. Yep.

Heather Wixson (40:00.385) Yeah, as a as a burbs fan though, I can't be mad at it.

Bryan! (40:08.037) He's the best. Yep. So yeah, the movie opens on a title card and it is a quote attributed to Dr. Loomis. I can't tell if it's supposed to sound profound or vapid because the Loomis of this movie is a way different character than the Donald Pleasence Loomis. It says the darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss.

but those which choose to break free from the abyss and walk silently among us.

Heather Wixson (40:39.141) I think it's genius to one, open on a clip or on open on a quote of Loomis instead of like Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe or something like that because I think it actually builds the character of Loomis before you even see him and you kind of already know the type of dude you're dealing with before he even enters the school to talk to the principal and stuff because I think it is supposed to be vapid. I think he thinks that these things are profound.

Bryan! (40:44.272) Ha ha ha.

Bryan! (40:56.581) Yeah.

Bryan! (41:00.18) Right.

Bryan! (41:03.512) Yeah, because, okay, that's good. That's good. Because I definitely feel like I was onto something with that. There's a bit, there's gonna be a bit a little later on the notes that I've got that I definitely wanna talk about Loomis as a character because it feels, it almost feels like Zombie was pressed into putting this character in the movie because he seems so bored with Sam Loomis. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (41:28.605) Yeah, I mean, probably is. And I think too, it's like also, no one's gonna touch John of Pleasance. So why try? Why? Go the completely different, you know, take on it. And turn him into a guy who's just interested in book deals and, you know, quotes in the press and crap like that. Like that makes sense. Because that's the kind of guy who would fail Michael.

Bryan! (41:34.636) Right. Yeah.

Bryan! (41:50.372) Yeah, yeah, right. So we cut to Haddonfield on Halloween, over God of Thunder by Kiss. It's hard to know when any of this is taking place because of zombies. Is it? No shit. Does it ever actually establish that?

Heather Wixson (41:57.653) Hehehe

Dave! (41:59.018)

1. Yep. The movie, the opening takes place, yes, at the very beginning. It takes place in 1990 and then I think he gets out in 2005 or 2006 or something. Which is why a lot of this shit, aesthetically and musically, does not make sense for this movie. I appreciate it, but it doesn't make sense.

Bryan! (42:07.489) Okay.

Bryan! (42:11.976) Okay, because yeah, because

Bryan! (42:17.92) Right, because I thought that it was set right. I love it. I love the aesthetic. I thought that it was the 70s because this has a real 70s quality to it. But then, like later on, we're going to flash forward to the present and it's 15 years later, which I say, which I suspect would like place this in like 1992 or something like that. But yeah. Anyway, it's a real decrepit house that's consistent with the Rob Zombie vibe.

and 10 year old Michael Myers wearing a plastic clown mask plays with his rats while his mother played by Sherry Moon makes breakfast over Peter Frampton's baby I love your ways while her shithead boyfriend played by two maximum deadbeat cartoonishness by William Forsyth talks shit and then in walks Judith Myers and uh yeah this

Dave! (43:04.934) also sucks. Every fucking person in this movie is a scumbag. I don't know who to like and who to hate.

Bryan! (43:13.128) It's also, this is also kind of a quality of the, of the era, like so many horror movies of the time were very reactionary in the way that they kind of set up characters who like the, you know, the kid that would wink at you and be like, we're gonna kill all these people later, right? And they're gonna deserve it. Forsythe is, is really swinging for the fences. I kind of, I kind of like the character in spite of the fact that he's just so shitty.

Dave! (43:30.766) Yes.

Dave! (43:35.766) Are you ready?

Bryan! (43:42.5) But also, I've not mentioned, there is an unnamed baby who has a very distinct scream.

And I do like the sound design on that scream because it cuts so hard. So at school, Michael gets cornered in the restroom by a very excited bully played by Darrell Sabara from the spy kids movies. This is where we learn that Michael's mom is a stripper. And the torment sets Michael off against these bullies in a fight starts and then in walks Richard Lynch, as I mentioned before, an actor that I love.

to break it up.

Dave! (44:20.162) Now is he wearing a shitload of makeup or does he just look like hell?

Bryan! (44:24.616) So he, okay, do you know, what do you know about him? He pulled a Richard Pryor in the 70s and set himself on fire while on drugs. And so like his skin is burnt, is like burned, which is why, like, have you ever seen Bad Dreams? Yeah, so that's why they probably a motivating factor why they cast him in that was because he was already burned like very badly, like 70% of his body.

Dave! (44:27.67) Not much.

Heather Wixson (44:34.421) Yeah.

Dave! (44:36.349) Okay.

Dave! (44:39.757) Yes.

Heather Wixson (44:40.897) Yeah.

Bryan! (44:50.044) And I think like up the kind of upper parts of his face. I mean, yes, he's wearing makeup because it's a movie, but like that's also probably just the sort of quality of his skin, you know, being a being a burn victim. But yeah, he's got such a distinct look. And I love him. There's something so weird about him. He doesn't look like a guy who would play a bad guy, but he only seems to play bad guys.

He's in Invasion USA as the bad guy. He's in Bad Dreams, like I said. And also in one of my like favorite fucked up Ruggero Deodato movies, Cut and Run. I love Cut and Run.

Dave! (45:27.692) and run.

Bryan! (45:32.461) So, um,

Dave! (45:33.474) kids that when he comes in the kids in the bathroom they all react to him like he's some kind of like monster they all kind of back up away from him it's a little bit odd and it doesn't feel appropriate for the scene it's very strange that they're all kind of backing away as though he's like menacing them and he's not

Bryan! (45:45.148) I... Well, it's also... it's... Well, he does... I suppose that we are supposed to sort of pick up from the shit that comes up, that he's got a bit of a reputation.

Heather Wixson (45:56.969) Yeah, he's been in like multiple fights already that week. And once we pick up with him in this, like at this day on Halloween.

Bryan! (46:02.156) Yeah, though what is weird is that the bully is just walking around with a cutout from the newspaper of Michael's mom at the strip club in his pocket. That's very convenient.

Dave! (46:08.59) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (46:13.549) They have bullies, you know, they're prepared. Back then they were.

Bryan! (46:15.456) You gotta, right, you gotta know who you're gonna fuck with and then you've gotta have props and stuff that you can just like terrorize with. So yeah.

Dave! (46:22.552) Yeah, it's Deus Ex newspaper clipping.

Heather Wixson (46:25.933) But you know, like if you're like a teenage boy and one of your classmates' mom is a well-known stripper in a small town, like you know you're gonna like, oh, and you saw the picture in the paper, you're gonna bring that crap to school and be like, haha, look at Michael's mom and show it to the other kids. A lot of mean ones. Oh, a lot of mean ones. Have you ever been to rural Illinois? Like it's not unheard of.

Dave! (46:38.702) I don't know what kind of teenage boys you went to school with, but... that's pretty fuckin' cruel.

Bryan! (46:39.156) Ah!

Bryan! (46:44.712) Yeah, no, no. That's that's pretty that's pretty consistent with my experience in elementary school as well. This was that was the. It's probably a lot like New Hampshire, so yeah, I get it. And so yeah, this is where we're like they get they get break they get broken up and they get taken up to the to the to the principal's office. We learn that Michael is a frequent source of trouble and that mom is also very over protective.

Heather Wixson (46:57.002) Hehehehe

Bryan! (47:13.176) And then in walks Malcolm McDowell in a really awesome wig. That's going to be that's going to definitely go on the is it a wig, even though it's a total giveaway. But. But we learned that Michael has dead animals in his locker, probably killed by him.

Dave! (47:17.822) I was gonna say something.

Dave! (47:24.778) He doesn't look good, he doesn't-

Heather Wixson (47:27.555) Hehehehe

Dave! (47:32.77) He also looks like the girl from Hereditary.

Bryan! (47:37.1) Yeah, Daguefair definitely has a look. And so, yeah, they start to argue and this is where Michael runs out and they would get that shot of the exterior and kind of stalking the bullies. I've been to that building like I've done the Halloween tour of South Pasadena. And yeah, because the it's located like a block from the Myers house and like a block from the Strode house as well. And yeah, so.

Heather Wixson (47:59.731) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (48:05.869) The Strode house is for sale by the way right now for 1.9 million. Yeah.

Bryan! (48:05.956) That's a that's a. Oh, no kidding. Holy shit. That makes that makes sense, because South Pasadena is a very, very nice area. I hope the people who buy that house know what they're getting into.

Heather Wixson (48:20.093) It says it in the listing that it's known as the Halloween house and you know, I'm hoping just whoever buys it, they still do the thing where they leave the pumpkin out.

Bryan! (48:21.558) Oh really?

I hope.

Bryan! (48:28.532) Exactly. Because like that's the thing is when I went there, we got there at the time when there was another guy with his son there and the woman who like owns the place was out there just talking to them and she was very, very nice. And we saw the laminate and the pumpkin is a picture of me with a pumpkin on our Instagram and stuff. It's it's it was a lot of fun. I was very excited to go up there. I also walked up to the hedge and took a got to go to the hedge. Oh, God, that would be that would be a travesty.

Heather Wixson (48:50.149) Everybody walks to the hedge. Thank God they haven't cut those down. Ha ha ha.

Bryan! (48:56.1) But yeah, I brought my masks to California with me just to take that picture.

Heather Wixson (49:01.163) I'm sure it was probably like, oh, this is cool. But like, we know where he's going.

Bryan! (49:03.336) Oh yeah. Yep. Either that or either that or I'm now on a list.

Heather Wixson (49:06.561) He's going to California? Oh, okay.

Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe a little from column A, a little from column B. But yeah, I always joke that I'm like, because they showed on, Joe Bob did the 45th anniversary special for the original Halloween. And it's just like, even as a kid, I was like, that's not Illinois. Like, I know what it looks, this isn't it. But I love, so it's like, if they do, if we do end up getting some weird Halloween TV series that seems like we're gonna be getting, just shoot something in Illinois. Like, if you're gonna do this, like do it right just once.

Bryan! (49:27.114) Yeah.

Bryan! (49:39.154) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (49:39.477) Cause all we like we have child's play and we've got the nightmare remake. Like we don't have a lot other than all Dark Knight too.

Bryan! (49:44.308) Yeah. Yeah, because what is it? The 2018 one, I think I believe all the sequels as well were shot in North Carolina or South Carolina. And yeah, and so it definitely looks a little bit more Americana than the original. But a thing about like I can understand, like if you've got a limited budget and you need to shoot in some in some part of California that looks like any town USA.

Heather Wixson (49:56.133) One of the Carolinas and some in Georgia too.

Bryan! (50:14.124) South Pasadena is definitely it is. It is, it is. It's not like, it's not like Burbank. It's not like, it's not even like Pasadena. Pasadena is very Los Angeles, you know.

Heather Wixson (50:16.457) Yeah, I actually, yeah, I was gonna say, I...

Heather Wixson (50:25.949) Yeah, I do say I actually kind of like that Rob was like, you know what, we're gonna go to Pasadena for this. For some reason, I just don't mind it when he doesn't. For the original, I'm like, come on, I can see a palm tree. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Bryan! (50:34.828) it feels like he's it feels like he's paying tribute. You know, like this is a very deliberate choice. Yep. So, Michael stalks the bully from earlier, ambushes him in the woods where he beats him to death with a tree branch while wearing the clown mask.

Heather Wixson (50:50.921) deserved.

Bryan! (50:53.671) Yep, he was a piece of shit.

Heather Wixson (50:55.189) You know what that kid would be doing online these days? Like, he did the world a favor.

Bryan! (50:58.884) Yeah, yeah. He would have like a suicide body count under his under his name. So that night while Michael waits for Judith to take him out trick-or-treating, he watches the thing from another world, which Tommy Doyle and Lindsay Wallace watch in the original. While once again, Forsythe as the death deadbeat loser, Ronnie terrorizes Michael. And then in walks Judith and her heavy metal boyfriend who

Heather Wixson (51:06.526) Yeah.

Dave! (51:27.846) Also a dirt bag. Was Rob Zombie, was Rob Zombie a 1970s dirt bag? I bet he was.

Bryan! (51:29.564) You know, here's the thing about that guy.

Bryan! (51:34.552) Well, that's the thing is, when we looked him up, it was like, oh shit, his parents were carnies. So this all kind of makes sense. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (51:40.713) Yeah, he was literally surrounded by assholes growing up. Like, of course. He's just working some things out, you know, that's all.

Bryan! (51:44.564) Yeah. But here's the thing with this. He just you use what you know. So the thing about this character, the boyfriend, is he presents his dirtbag, but the way that he like kind of plays out like his, you know, he's set to die. But he's like the least deserving character in the entire movie to get killed. Like, I actually think that he's pretty decent dude, even though the joke with the mask is kind of stupid.

But yeah, they leave Michael to go trick or treating on his own, which he does to the tune of Love Hurts by Nazareth, as we get a montage of Michael's mom working. And what's a Rob Zombie movie without a shot of Sherry's ass? I mean...

Dave! (52:30.076) I like how much he loves her.

Heather Wixson (52:31.925) He celebrates her!

Bryan! (52:33.259) This is the thing. I adore this quality of his movies.

Dave! (52:37.199) In any other relationship, I'd be like, that's gross and exploitive, except in this case, I'm like, it's kind of endearing.

Bryan! (52:42.06) Yeah, because I mean, there's even like this very unnecessary shots of her ass in Lords of Salem. And I'm like, okay, I get it. I like, I get it, Rob.

Heather Wixson (52:49.645) But she lives alone, who needs pants when you live alone?

Dave! (52:54.058) Hear, hear. I don't live alone and I barely wear pants.

Bryan! (52:54.297) Yeah, and she's that's also the point that's. Yeah, yeah, that's also when she's like deep in her heroin addiction again. So, you know, it makes sense. Meanwhile, apart from the crappy joke sets up Michael's mask, Judith's boyfriend seems like an OK guy in a movie saturated with Rob Zombie dirtbags. And so Michael returns to find Ronnie asleep on the couch.

Heather Wixson (52:54.413) They're overrated!

Heather Wixson (52:59.233) See, you know, hits are overrated.

Bryan! (53:21.004) the TV is still on and hey what's playing on the TV you guys? Come on somebody. It's White Zombie.

Heather Wixson (53:28.63) Oh, oh, oh shoot. Yes, you're right. Sorry. I was trying to remember if white zombie was on the TV when they were in present day or not. Sorry.

Bryan! (53:37.364) Yeah, no, no. Later on, it's later on, it's they do the thing again. And they also do Forbidden Planet. Yeah. But

Heather Wixson (53:46.673) Okay, yes, sorry. I couldn't remember where White Zombie came in. I thought it was in the Lindsay scenes.

Bryan! (53:53.112) Yep. White zombie. Yep. I love it. So Michael eats nasty 70s Halloween candy or 90s Halloween candy, then decides to kill everyone in the house. Starting with Ronnie who we were

Dave! (54:06.626) Now listen, about Ronnie, I don't care how drunk you are, you would notice someone wrapping you up in 12 rolls of tape.

Bryan! (54:14.916) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (54:15.645) Also, he's also like bandaged up and stuff. So he could be on pain meds too. So, you know, back then you mix that stuff, you don't care. He seemed like a mixer kind of guy where he was like, I don't care, give me some, give me some Vicodin and suburban and I'm good.

Bryan! (54:21.418) Yeah, yeah. Yep. Nope.

Bryan! (54:28.48) Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He he was taking everything that he had. So, yeah, then Michael cuts his throat. And so I made an observation at this scene because I noticed this in a lot of horror movies. And I want to know where everybody is getting these sharp ass knives because this thing cuts Ronnie's throat neatly and deep in a single slash. Meanwhile, I have to sharpen my own cutlery every time I cut a tomato.

It is the most frustrating shit in the world. Horror movie cutlery is amazing.

Heather Wixson (55:02.321) It is, I was watching something recently where somebody got their throat slit really violently. What was it? I've been watching a lot of stuff this weekend and I can't remember what it was, but it was like, and you saw like the different layers of things and yeah, I will say like for me, like to that degree, like I'm actually an apologist for Halloween Resurrection.

Only because it doesn't involve Michael having to have sex with his niece. So that's a plus in its column. And also it's just, it's silly and it's actually really ahead of its time when you look at the subject matter. But him cutting off what's her face's head with a knife. Like that's where, that's when I checked out everything else I was on board with. You know, we joke in our house though, it is not Halloween season until we're watching Tyra Banks make a latte.

Bryan! (55:44.848) Yeah.

Bryan! (55:48.629) Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a

Bryan! (55:57.884) Tyre Banks, Tyre Banks, yeah, Tyre Banks and the Latte Machine came up in the last episode as well. Yep. So next up, Judith's boyfriend goes to make a sandwich and Michael beats him to death with a baseball bat. And then he goes up to Judith's room. He finds the mask from before. The white shape mask is the one that I'm talking about. And then he stabs her to death while she listens to Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult.

Heather Wixson (55:58.013) Let the date, let the day entertainment begin.

Heather Wixson (56:05.699) It's amazing. Love it.

Bryan! (56:27.404) And I'm going to say this, the shots of little Michael wearing the mask are objectively interesting and cool. It looks, I think it is.

Dave! (56:34.31) Oh, I was gonna go the opposite direction.

Heather Wixson (56:37.329) I think it is, because I think it's a guy who's, it's like the little kid who's almost playing dress up in a really weird way.

Bryan! (56:43.192) It's it's for me it's just it's uncanny because it's so big and he's a little like he's like 10 years old I think in this movie. And so like he it's just it looks strange. But I love it just the way that it's lit the way that it's shot. It's just it looks cool to me. And then

Heather Wixson (57:02.509) I was gonna say, I appreciate it because it sort of, to me, felt like the end of Halloween IV, when Jamie stabs the foster mother, and you're like, you're not supposed to see little kids doing this kind of stuff. Like, it was even in, in Carpenter's original Halloween, once we get the reveal, that's why it's so shocking, because it's this little kid, because we don't see him actualize in front of us until the reveal. So I think for me, like, it's just this weird.

Bryan! (57:08.236) Oh yeah.

Bryan! (57:20.973) Right.

Heather Wixson (57:30.417) I like it because it does feel weird. It feels unnatural. Like little kids shouldn't be doing this and they shouldn't be wearing crazy giant grownup masks. It's very, very strange.

Bryan! (57:38.5) Yeah. So later his mother returns home to find the mayhem and Michael has spared the baby. And so yeah, this is where we get that. It's all in the trailer. The stuff with the news reporter describes it as Manson-like in its brutality. So 11 months later, Michael is being moved to Smith's Grove after being convicted of first degree murder on all three.

But here's the thing, Michael didn't do first degree murder. Like this was very, like that's forethought and planning and stuff. This was spur of the moment. So yeah.

Heather Wixson (58:20.945) Maybe in their way that they approached it, the prosecutors, maybe because of like the stuff at the school and there's a lot we don't know that how they could have presented it as first degree murder because it almost does feel premeditated in a way like he's just been, like I don't know that he knew that he was gonna do these exact acts, but you can tell in that opening scene, like he's basically just trying to figure out how he's gonna kill Ronnie. Like he knows he's gonna do it. He just killed a rat he liked.

Bryan! (58:28.858) Uh, yeah? Yeah?

Bryan! (58:45.024) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (58:49.617) and he knows he's gonna kill this guy.

Bryan! (58:51.352) Yeah, yeah. I could see that. Also, I wonder if there was any like courtroom stuff shot for this that just never made it into the movie. Cause it seems like they shot a lot of movie for this. Cause even when the unrated version runs at like two hours long, like my horror movie standards, it's a pretty long movie.

And so like, it seems like there was a lot of stuff in this in this movie. And I'm wondering if there was like just if this whole scenes that like we just we never saw that just were omitted because they were really boring. Because the first half of this movie is also quite long. It yeah, you know, it's not quite an hour, but it sort of feels like it, you know. So this is the moment when I kind of tuned out on Rob Zombie's movies. I'd seen House of a Thousand Corpses.

Heather Wixson (59:26.41) Yeah.

Bryan! (59:41.272) Devil's rejects don't really care for either of them. But this is the one that really kind of nailed it down for me in that he seems to be very interested in the family dynamics of killers. You see it in the Devil's rejects, the whole tutti fucking fruity thing. There's all these character moments of people that typically you're not supposed to like. I don't cheer for Jason Voorhees. You know?

I like the character as a character, but I'm not like, oh shit, like yeah, kill those people. Sometimes I am though. But most of the time, I'm not rooting for the killer. This seems to be a thing that's really kind of distinct to Rob Zombie where he's really into what makes these murderers sort of do their thing.

The original Halloween kind of spares us and it gives us like five minutes of Michael and Judith and then Loomis kind of fills in the details in the background. It all happens in like the opening seconds like before the credits even happen. We all we really need to know is that Michael is kind of wired bad from the start, and that there's evil in him but this one gives us 30 minutes of family stuff.

It gives us all these humanizing moments for Michael. Also adding all these details about like animal torture and stuff, because I don't think I even like I messed or breezed past that, but like he's killed one of his pets. There's like photos of dead animals that he presumably took. There's a dead cat in his locker. Like it's all like real like real serial killer stuff in here. So it seems like he's he's.

Definitely Rob Zombie, that is, is definitely following John Carpenter's advice here to like make it his own. He just seems way more interested in the killers than the other characters. It's a thing that kind of bugs me a little bit. Actually bugs me a lot. It's why I haven't really dug too deep into his into his movies. Like I haven't seen 31 or three from hell. I probably never will.

Dave! (01:01:43.298) Well, it doesn't work in this movie because he chose a movie in which the killer is intentionally a sort of blank slate. So the whole point of that killer is that you're projecting onto it. There's not much backstory. So he's trying to fill it in. He spends all of this time trying to fill it in. And it's like, yeah, you've done all of that. But I don't know anything about anybody else. I think that's where this movie suffers is that I don't know anything about any of these people. And I don't give a shit about a single one.

Bryan! (01:02:01.502) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:02:13.676) Yeah, Heather, you were gonna say something?

Heather Wixson (01:02:16.425) Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the thing is it's like, at this point, if you're gonna, you have to remake a movie, you also have an entire franchise of movies, like Eight Deep at this point, and seven of those movies have done their darndest to try to fill in that blank slate. So I think the smart thing was, is to just kind of let, okay, well, let's see what happens if like you put Michael in a nature versus nurture situation and see what happens because,

It really is interesting because his mom dotes on him. His mom loves him. She unfortunately does it a little too much and is a little too forgiving to recognize the red flags because she's got a lot of stuff going on. I like that he leans into that early on. Is it a little aggressive? Yes. But I think you have to at this point because if you just have a killer or you don't know anything, like at this point in horror movie fandom,

We are rooting for the bad guys. Unfortunately, like, especially for me in the later Friday to 13th, like I'm, I'm all in, I there. Yeah. And I think also too, because we saw it happen with Freddie through the eighties where he became this icon that's showing up on Nickelodeon programming. You know, we were past the idea that villains are just villains anymore. And I think for me, the genius of something like Devil's Rejects is that it's.

two thirds of that movie, he never tries to tell you that the Firefly family are good. He humanizes them because nobody's just black or white, but they're still really bad people until Forsythe shows up and like, you know, enacts his own little brand of private justice to a point where you are actually legitimately sympathizing with them. And for me, I'd never seen a movie that had done that in that way, that actually made me feel sad for these characters that are loathsome, that are horrible.

Like you, the first movie, every time Bill Moseley opens your mouth, your skin crawls because it's like, he's that good, you know? And every time Baby does her laugh, you're like, I wanna punch you in the face. And like, and at the end when she's getting whipped, it's like, it's super uncomfortable, but we should be cheering, but we're not. And I think that's just a reflection of where collectively horror movie fans were. And I think that's kind of progressed. We're like,

Bryan! (01:04:16.249) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:04:38.869) Chucky, we all love Chucky. We shouldn't love somebody who's killing kids and trying to possess their bodies, but we do. You know, we're at the point now where I think we do kind of are in it more for villains than we are the heroes, which is why something like Scream stands out because Ghostface is interchangeable, but like for five movie, or four and a fourth of a movie, Sydney was this, you know? So I think there's something to be said for that. I think collectively it was just.

Bryan! (01:05:03.553) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:05:07.433) You know, it was moving on with how fans had moved on.

Bryan! (01:05:11.728) Yeah. I think in a lot of ways, like, I mean, that's definitely that's certainly that's certainly true. And that's definitely a really, really solid point. I still like I love the bad guys, but I don't love them. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't I never identify with them. And it's very it's very yeah, it's very seldom that I ever. Yeah, it's very seldom that I ever like. Feel like, oh, well, this person like really kind of had it coming.

Heather Wixson (01:05:28.765) No, I would hope not. Patrick Bateman over here.

Bryan! (01:05:42.12) I kind of feel like Scream is the series that pulled horror out of that. Because in the same way, just thinking about the first one, Ghostface's identity was a real shocker at the end, the very first time I saw that. I was like, oh shit, that's a fucking great twist. But all the way up, it's still kind of a Michael Myers situation where you could project anything on this. Their motivation is just murder up until they...

kind of explain it and they break it all down. And so it gave you a chance to really go all in on the final girl thing of that. I think Terrifier does that really well too, where they present you with a really, really awesome villain, but they also, at least Terrifier too, balances it out with a really kick-ass final girl as well. There's a balance that I feel like really needs to be struck between the two.

And at this period in horror movies, particularly when Rob Zombie was making them, it was really hard for me to find anybody to really root for, because, like, everybody sucks in these movies.

Heather Wixson (01:06:51.55) Yeah, I get it.

Bryan! (01:06:51.748) Yeah, but so getting back to it, we now go through a long period of little Michael in the hospital. And what we learn is that he seems to remember nothing of the killing. And there's a maintenance guy played by Danny Trejo, who is kind to him, tells him to do what he did when he was in prison and sort of inhabit his mind where no one can wall him in. Though well intended, this is probably the worst fucking advice Michael needed to hear, because that is what he does.

Also, Michael has taken to making masks. And the more he wears them, the less he seems to interact with the world. He wants to go home, obviously, not really understanding what he did to end up in the hospital and his conditions worsen because of this. And then he spends more time with the masks on than off. And also, I'm gonna tell you one thing, they're not going to give a violent psychiatric patient metal silverware. No.

Dave! (01:07:44.714) No, or paper mache for that matter.

Bryan! (01:07:49.604) But on one of her last visits, Michael's mother gives him a picture of him holding his sister. Up to this point, only known as Boo. And apparently in an original, like in a sort of draft, early drafts of the script, Michael was supposed to speak at the end. And that was what he was going to say. To sort of, yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:08:09.622) Yeah.

Dave! (01:08:11.114) I think Sherry Moon's great in this part. This is the part I think where she kind of won me over because I think she's very good in this. I think she's actually a pretty good actor. I think she gets shit on a lot by people, which I think is probably more misogyny than anything else, but I think she's really good in this role. I think she's good in the next one too.

Bryan! (01:08:15.572) She is, I'm telling you, I think she is, I think she is great in this. Like her performance.

Bryan! (01:08:26.392) Yeah. I think she was great. Yeah, she's very strong. So at

Heather Wixson (01:08:34.521) I was gonna say too also really quick because like the thing, you know, with Sherry and how strong she is, like I've seen when she's watching the home movies. And I think that's one of the genius things that Rob Zombie has done through several of his movies is incorporated that home movie feeling because I think that garners sympathy from the audience. That's something that we all do. We do it now with our phones, but like you do it to capture a memory and memories are strong and they make you feel human.

Bryan! (01:08:58.628) Mm-hmm.

Heather Wixson (01:09:02.013) And for me, like watching her watch those movies and just laying on that couch, sobbing before she shoots herself. He does it in Halloween too. He does it at the end of Lord's Asylum. And I'll tell you, every single time he does it in Devil's Rejects, every single time he does that, that's when like it turns into something different for me. Where like I find myself suddenly crying in the middle of a freaking Rob Zombie movie because it's such a powerful tool and he's smart. He knows that.

He's manipulating us and I'm okay with being manipulated.

Bryan! (01:09:33.668) Yes, I am definitely like some people will talk about that. Like it's a real shitty thing, but I am. I open myself up to that as well, and I let it sort of wash over and happen to me, and it definitely elevates certain movies for me. This is not one of them, but there are definitely movies that I am willing to take to go for the ride. Do whatever you want to me emotionally. I don't give a fuck. I am looking forward to it. In fact.

Heather Wixson (01:09:47.948) Oh!

Bryan! (01:09:59.864) But also, I bet you that's a sort of a quality of his of his like of his childhood, a thing that he did a bit or that his family did like they probably had like home movies for that to be such a late motif to keep appearing. It's got to be something that he has direct experience with sort of really

Heather Wixson (01:10:13.225) Yeah. He actually, he even does it in House of Thousand Corpses, I just realized, when he does it before her dad dies, where he's thinking of them before, in front of the Christmas tree with the puppy. So he's been doing it from the very start. And I kind of love that, like I'm good with that. Like everybody makes fun of, like, they'll champion Tim Burton for doing the same things over and over again, but Rob Zombie does something over and over again, and they're like, this hack! He doesn't know what he's doing. And I'm just like, oh, calm down.

Bryan! (01:10:25.105) Oh yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Bryan! (01:10:42.896) double standard. Yep. So as they leave a nurse played by Sybil Danning sits with him and like a fool turns her back on him because Michael stabs her in the neck with a fork.

Heather Wixson (01:10:44.413) Yeah, it is.

Heather Wixson (01:10:56.589) She also talks shit too though. She has a coming. Cause she calls the baby cute and she's like, no way it could be related to you. Like she had it coming. Queen bitch, simple dating, I love it.

Bryan! (01:10:58.46) Yeah, she's. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Bryan! (01:11:04.78) What a bitch. Yeah.

Bryan! (01:11:10.528) Yeah, as if she was able to play anybody else. Yeah. So, yeah, as you mentioned at home that night, Michael's mother beside herself with grief shoots herself. And so we cut to 15 years later. And so this is where Danny Trejo now accompanies white trash orderly Noel played by Lou Temple to Michael's cell. And Michael is now a hulking behemoth of an adult.

Heather Wixson (01:11:13.353) Right? She knows.

Bryan! (01:11:35.476) and he occupies the same cell as before, but now it's plastered wall to wall with homemade masks. I love those masks, they're very cool.

Heather Wixson (01:11:44.213) They really, really are. I think they actually for a while, because Wayne Tuff who worked on this, he also owns Halloween Town in Burbank. And I think for a while he actually was like recreating some of the masks that were seen on the wall. And then I think he had to stop because it was like a copyright thing. I probably, but yeah. So there's a lot of really great detail that goes in all of those. It's actually a fun scene just to pause.

Bryan! (01:12:01.684) Uh, you got to see some desist. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:12:11.429) and look at the different things because you could almost see like motifs for the movie play out in those masks, which is pretty cool.

Bryan! (01:12:18.336) All right. All right. Yep. So we learn from Loomis, who is about to retire, that Michael hasn't spoken since that last attack. So he's been silent. Yep.

Dave! (01:12:28.182) beautiful goatee though. Nothing says asshole like a goatee.

Heather Wixson (01:12:30.654) Hahaha!

Heather Wixson (01:12:34.333) Like just pinpoint precision on that shaving too. It's amazing. No, that was actually real. It was. I did a panel with him once. Actually, it was for the 31 panel. I did with them once, which turned into a really weird situation where some guy asked him if he liked the rape scenes from Clockwork Orange with his kid standing right there. It's infamous. Like everybody that goes to Flashback Weekend in Chicago will be like, do you remember the 31 panel? And I was like, do I remember it?

Dave! (01:12:38.052) Mm-hmm. That, I can't be real, it has to be fake.

Bryan! (01:12:38.194) Oh yeah.

Dave! (01:12:43.372) Oh, God.

Bryan! (01:12:54.332) Gross!

Dave! (01:12:55.762) Mm. Classy.

Heather Wixson (01:13:03.921) And Malcolm like reamed that guy out, like in front of like a room of like 400 people, it was amazing. But the facial hair was very real.

Bryan! (01:13:06.505) Ugh.

Dave! (01:13:11.287) No.

Bryan! (01:13:11.6) Yeah, I think I think he was doing. Then actually, this might be a little too early, but I think he was doing community around the same time, and he definitely had the goatee on community. But yeah, elsewhere, he is doing reading from his book about Michael, and it's a screed very similar to Donald Pleasance's Devil's Eyes bit.

But what we also learn is as a result of Loomis leaving, the hospital is prepping to transfer Michael to another facility, and the security staff is Bill Mosley, Tom Toles, and Leslie Easterbrook from Police Academy. I don't know how many cameos are we up to at this point? This has gotta be seven or eight.

Dave! (01:13:54.53) Let me see here.

Heather Wixson (01:13:55.221) Look, they all got to keep their health insurance that year, and that's literally what matters.

Dave! (01:13:59.362) We're on six, we're on number six.

Bryan! (01:13:59.608) Yeah, that's awesome. So, uh, yeah, so I don't know if this was a reshoot, but the original work print, we talked about this a little bit. It omits the transfer scene and it sets it up where Lou Temple and Courtney Gaines use Michael's room to like rape a patient. And then that's what Michael kills the shit out of them and breaks out. I personally like the transfer better. I think it makes way more sense. It's way less nasty.

But he does wear the same.

Heather Wixson (01:14:29.757) You know what's really, I was gonna say, you know what's really weird though? I would always think that they would use the theatrical version, like when they show it on Fear Fest, but they actually just have the edited version of the rape scene, which is strange to me. Cause I always kind of, I'm always kind of like, oh, this will definitely be like the theatrical one because that's usually how these things go. But it actually, it's just a really edited down version of that scene, which kind of, I'm a little bundled up because I like.

Bryan! (01:14:36.868) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:14:41.576) Uh... huh.

Heather Wixson (01:14:56.921) I'm good with watching the Unrated Directors Cup, but I wouldn't mind seeing Bill Moseley pop up on my TV more during Halloween season, you know? So I get it. It's definitely a different vibe and a very less, oh, Jesus Christ, do we really need to go there vibe. But also watching them die, it is. But it also, it feels really good when they die, really good.

Bryan! (01:15:02.077) Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bryan! (01:15:13.316) Yeah, because it's so long.

Bryan! (01:15:21.144) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I like Lou Temple gets his head smashed against the wall. It's like a big blast of blood. It's it's a pretty satisfying conclusion. In this version, however, Michael literally just breaks the chains holding him and he kills the guards with them. And then Danny Treeho's Ismael is the name of the character. He arrives for his third shift to find the place of bloodbath and Michael is walking free and

They have like a good relationship. And Michael, he kind of puts his arms, his hands out like he's gonna let him put his handcuffs on him. He turns the tables and he brutalizes him before smashing a television over him.

Dave! (01:16:06.946) Listen, if you're willing to kill my sweet precious Danny Trejo, then all bets are off.

Heather Wixson (01:16:13.645) All hope is gone for this person. You have no soul. Like, why would you do that to poor Dady Trey-O?

Bryan! (01:16:13.808) Ha ha.

Dave! (01:16:15.178) Nope, there's nothing left.

Dave! (01:16:20.822) That guy is awesome.

Bryan! (01:16:22.997) Yep.

Heather Wixson (01:16:23.557) Oh yeah, he's the reason I love the Death Race sequels. Like, come on, why wouldn't I wanna watch Danny Trejo doing Death Race? Get outta here.

Bryan! (01:16:31.656) Oh yeah, he won me over so hard with basically in the same movie that everybody loved, like learned to love him and that was with the Shetty. I have not.

Dave! (01:16:39.79) Do you see the documentary about him? He's a fucking stand-up guy. He is really awesome.

Heather Wixson (01:16:44.733) Yeah. I actually.

Bryan! (01:16:45.7) Yeah, I hear here's taco place is pretty good too.

Dave! (01:16:49.486) Delicious.

Heather Wixson (01:16:49.625) It is. It is. Yeah. To be honest, I was extremely obsessed with Desperado my senior year of high school. I was on a double date and it was like our friends were going to Mortal Kombat and I was like, I want to go to Desperado. I went to Mortal Kombat the next night. But I fell in love with Robert Rodriguez at night, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, but also Danny Trail because I was like, who is this guy? And I think it was like...

Bryan! (01:16:58.862) understandable.

Heather Wixson (01:17:17.277) A couple of months later, Entertainment Weekly actually wrote an article about him that was really interesting that talked about his prison life and how he'd come around. And Robert Rodriguez was one of the key factors in really helping him find a foothold in Hollywood. So I've been a huge fan of his since the 90s. And I love seeing him getting celebrated any which way, shape or form. I think there's even like, somebody did like a mural in City of Industry or something like that of Danny Trejo.

Like he's an angel because he is. He's a walking angel and how dedicated he is to helping folks who are coming out of the prison system to finding better paths in life so they don't end up back. Like he is literally a saint walking amongst us humans. And it does, his death in Halloween 2007 is really horrible and terrible and makes me genuinely sad. I was good to you Mikey. Like, oh, I know you were.

Bryan! (01:17:59.771) Yeah.

He's doing the Lord's work.

Bryan! (01:18:09.084) it's such a it's such a bummer too because like yeah yep so with Michael in the Wind one of the administrators played by Clint Howard looking awesome in that wig yep he calls Loomis to let him know but now we come upon my favorite scene in the entire movie we cut to a truck stop where Tom Sawyer by Rush is playing very loud

Heather Wixson (01:18:24.955) Right?

Dave! (01:18:36.462) So good.

Bryan! (01:18:37.332) were introduced to my entire my favorite movie in the entire movie Joe Grizzly played by Ken Furey

Heather Wixson (01:18:44.638) How do we not have a I'm a joke I'm Joe Grizzly bitch t-shirt how is that not a thing? I feel like that's a genuine disrespect.

Dave! (01:18:49.778) Oh, there's gotta be one.

Bryan! (01:18:50.052) Oh, I think I think there's gonna be.

Heather Wixson (01:18:53.998) I will now, I'm gonna have it made. I'm gonna get it.

Dave! (01:18:56.51) Isn't that what T-Public is for?

Heather Wixson (01:18:59.301) Exactly. I'll go on Redbubble. I don't care.

Bryan! (01:19:01.116) Yeah. Yep. Michael barges into the restroom while the Joe's on the can working on a taco deluxe supreme, which is

Dave! (01:19:09.258) I feel like the shit joke here, it goes on a little too long. Like, come on. Be better, Rob Zombie.

Bryan! (01:19:15.585) You want to know this scene in the unrated version is way longer and there's a list is a lot is a lot of it but yeah the I like there was.

Heather Wixson (01:19:21.245) It is.

Heather Wixson (01:19:25.421) There's actually more that got cut too, by the way. There's, I'm not joking. I remember hearing him talk about once at a panel. There's probably at least another two minutes because Rob is like, just go, just keep going.

Bryan! (01:19:36.708) They just set up a camera and sat him down, and we're like, okay, action. Yep, I'm Joe Grizzly, a bitch. God, I love that scene so much.

Heather Wixson (01:19:40.789) Go! Enchiladas, go!

Dave! (01:19:49.506) I'm gonna tell you what I love about this scene so much, is that even when Michael Myers is kicking the shit out of him, he's still kind of making like these real sassy comments to him.

Bryan! (01:19:58.576) Ha ha ha!

Heather Wixson (01:19:59.953) he's Joe Grizzly, bitch. He's not gonna go down. How did that not become the... Everybody does the do-your-thing-cause now. That's the new funny thing to say from terrible legacy sequels. How did I'm Joe Grizzly, bitch? I can't even say it. That's how profound it is. How did that not become a thing? Because it should.

Dave! (01:20:01.143) Huh?

Bryan! (01:20:01.168) Cuz he's Joe Grizzly, bitch. Yep. Oh, he's it's such a great scene.

Bryan! (01:20:15.509) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:20:27.569) Even if you hate this movie, how could you not have a good time saying that?

Bryan! (01:20:30.896) This was the one thing that I told everybody about after I saw this for the first time. I was like, there is a scene with Ken Furey when he's on the toilet and he gets killed. And his whole, like the big line is, he stands up and says, I'm Joe Grizzly, bitch. Oh, God, yeah, I love it. It's such a fucking pristine moment.

Heather Wixson (01:20:45.63) Ugh, perfection.

Heather Wixson (01:20:51.272) This is me as Martin Scorsese's like, this is cinema. Moment.

Bryan! (01:20:54.136) Yeah. So Michael attacks him after Joe introduces himself. He steals his knife in his coveralls. And then Michael does something throughout that bugs the shit out of me. He grunts when he attacks. I prefer this is this is Rob's take on the character, I guess. But I love the silent killing machine like my other my other favorite like slasher killer is Jason. So like it just it follows. It makes sense.

Heather Wixson (01:21:09.494) Hmm

Bryan! (01:21:22.884) But yeah, he does that a bunch throughout it. I don't think I noticed it the first time, but I was like, definitely the second time. I'm like, is he like making a lot of noise?

Heather Wixson (01:21:32.373) Well, I almost wonder if that's a reflection of the sort of hint it like they're being two Michaels. There's Michael, the kid who doesn't know anything. And then there is the killer. So because every, every other time we see him in the theater or it seemed in the theater, it seemed in the movie when he's just standing around watching people, he's silent, but when he's killing, he's grunting. So I'm almost wondering if that's like a psychological thing. I can't say for certain, but you know, it could be it's interesting, but yeah. But I totally get what you're saying where it's like, you know,

Bryan! (01:21:41.349) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:21:49.85) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:21:54.224) Alright.

Bryan! (01:21:57.708) It's a take.

Heather Wixson (01:22:01.889) But it's almost like Leatherface in a way. You know, Leatherface did the little squeals and grunts and stuff, so.

Bryan! (01:22:04.182) Uh, yeah.

that actually that does that is logically consistent with Rob Zombie movies is he definitely. Yeah, he's definitely a bigger fan of Texas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre than he is Halloween. So, meanwhile, back in Haddonfield, Laurie Strode is on her way out the door to go to school, and her parents are played by Dee Wallace and Pat Skipper, who played Scully's bro, played, played Scully's brother on the X-Files among a

Heather Wixson (01:22:12.938) If I was a betting person, I'd put money on that.

Dave! (01:22:30.83) Number nine, number 10.

Bryan! (01:22:36.676) a shitload of other roles, but that's where I know him from. Yeah. And then what follows here is more or less the movie that John Carpenter made originally. Like, this is where it's sort of. OK.

Heather Wixson (01:22:39.948) Yes.

Dave! (01:22:46.53) So there's an explanation for this. Apparently, he had, I don't know if he was showing them dailies or what, but at around this point, the Weinsteins and maybe a cod came to him and were like, well, I know we said that we didn't care what you did, make it your own thing, but the audience is gonna want more like the original. He was kind of like, okay, I guess. And so that's why.

halfway through this movie, it becomes almost a shot for shot remake. Like, he is lifting wholesale scenes from the original, dialogue and all, probably because he was a little bit frustrated that they were like, no, it has to be more like the original movie, though. That's why the first part of this movie feels totally different than the last half. And from this point on, I'm kind of like, at least in the beginning, he was trying to do something. The second half is sort of like, I've seen this before. I know how this was. I could turn the sound off.

Bryan! (01:23:23.941) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:23:30.106) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:23:42.921) But is that really his fault though?

Bryan! (01:23:45.324) Oh, that's the thing is definitely not like I I'm on the record saying like I mean sex crimes not withstanding the Weinsteins are the worst fucking things to ever happen to Halloween.

Dave! (01:23:46.466) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:23:54.089) they were. They were the worst thing that happened to a lot of movies, a lot of movies that got so messed up because of their meddling. You know, but Halloween is definitely one of the bigger ones. But I think for me, like, I think that, you know, obviously there is beat for beat to certain things, but I do think that it's different enough for me to not be like, oh my God, like now I'm like, okay.

Bryan! (01:23:58.362) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:24:20.909) I get, you can see the parts that are the studio interference and you can see the parts that aren't. Like Lori finds Annie and it's brutal. And like Tommy or Lindsay standing there and the boyfriend, we finally see Paul, he's hung with a pumpkin on his head, which is kind of cool. I don't know how Michael did that. But I dig it. And you know, it's

Bryan! (01:24:28.228) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:24:39.751) Did he did he did he carve the pumpkin himself?

Heather Wixson (01:24:43.181) I don't know, but you know, good for him. Cause it's a really great visual actually. Cause it's a little different than anything we would be like typically expecting for the beat for beats, you know, that we're expecting. And like, so it's, it's tough because I think you can definitely feel at this point in the movie, there is this guy who wants to make his own movie, but also is having to basically be a yes man for these two very powerful guys in Hollywood. I don't, I.

Dave! (01:25:11.478) Yeah, the air goes out of the movie at this point.

Bryan! (01:25:11.514) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:25:12.653) I don't think it was, yeah, I don't even think Malik was probably pushing for as hard as the Weinstein's, or because the Weinstein's technically are the ones who put up the money. You know, so it's really tough. And I think for what it does, cause it almost gives us like two different endings. You know, Annie lives, like, you know, there are things about it that are different enough that like, I'm like, okay, so.

Bryan! (01:25:21.676) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:25:39.177) you could feel that there was this movie that Rob was trying to do. And then the wine scenes were like, okay, you know, was that the boogeyman? Throw that in there, we need this. Like that scene in the car feels like totally weird. And I would be willing to bet that Rob probably never wanted to do it, but it's also scary as shit.

Bryan! (01:25:48.469) Yep.

Dave! (01:25:52.427) Oh, it's terrible.

Bryan! (01:25:59.982) You see it coming though, that's the thing.

Heather Wixson (01:26:02.285) You do, but here's the thing. Like, look, like, you know, there's been a lot of great Michaels over the years. I actually think Tyler Maine is the scariest of the Michaels because the way that he moves is so specific and so like filled with ferocity and so deliberate. Yeah, like he's not, he's slow, but he's not slow. Do you know what I mean? That's not easy to pull off. And I think he legitimately is like the scariest Michael.

Bryan! (01:26:18.84) He's very physical. He's way more physical than any of the others.

Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:26:32.245) I don't think that any of them from the new ones come close.

Bryan! (01:26:35.755) I'm a fan of the new ones. Yeah, for sure.

Heather Wixson (01:26:38.089) Well, no, I actually, I really, 2018 is probably one of my favorite horror movies of the 2010s. But I think this is far scarier, Michael. Like, he's good.

Bryan! (01:26:48.504) Yeah, Nick Castle will Nick Castle will always be my favorite forever.

Heather Wixson (01:26:53.193) I mean, seeing him in the scenes at the opening of 2018 and getting to see little glimpses of him here and there, the nostalgia part of my heart is so happy. And I actually think that makes it for a really interesting sort of dynamic to Michael that we just didn't get before. But in terms of the Michael performance, like, it's cool. He's good and he's really very precise for a guy who's been locked up for 40 something years. So, suddenly he knows how to judo.

Bryan! (01:27:17.944) Yeah. Yep.

Heather Wixson (01:27:21.797) You know, he's moving with a very like John Wickian kind of style. And you're like, where did you learn this?

Bryan! (01:27:27.448) Yeah, yep. And also he does this thing that like, it drives me nuts, but it's unavoidable at this point. He shrugs off bullet wounds. What are you gonna do?

Heather Wixson (01:27:36.425) Yeah. He's been doing it. He's been doing it since 78. So what are you going to do about it at this point? Right.

Bryan! (01:27:41.732) Yep, yep. So yeah, so this is where things become very familiar. Laurie has to drop off an envelope through the mail slot at the old Meyers house. We also meet her regular babysitting gig, Tommy Doyle.

Dave! (01:27:53.366) This kid's the best part of the whole fucking movie.

Bryan! (01:27:56.389) That's Skyler, I think his last name is Cassando. He plays Gideon Gemstone on the Righteous Gemstones and he's also.

Dave! (01:28:02.082) They have, I think they have great chemistry. I think he feels so natural. I think he is the best part of this whole movie.

Bryan! (01:28:07.94) Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, uh, God, who's the guy? God, I forgot his name now. Is it Julian in 2018?

Heather Wixson (01:28:08.909) I'm going to go to bed.

Dave! (01:28:15.438) Oh yeah, very, very similar vibe. Like you get a real, like you're a regular kid vibe. You're precocious, but he is, I think, even the first time I watched this, I was like, wow, this kid is really good.

Bryan! (01:28:16.248) Yeah, he

Heather Wixson (01:28:16.65) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:28:22.34) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:28:27.512) Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, Michael is already at the Myers house, and that's where he tears up the floorboards in the attic. Michael?

Dave! (01:28:35.135) Question about that. Who put those there?

Heather Wixson (01:28:39.797) He does, technically, yeah. When he's a kid. Cause he changes back, he changes back, or I don't know, he does change back into the clown mask when we come back, yeah. So he's back in the clown mask.

Bryan! (01:28:51.47) Yeah.

Yep. So yep, he hid the knife and the mask. So next, we're introduced to Laurie's friends. We get in. Yeah. Yeah, Annie. She the thing is, is she plays very young. I even today she looks very young. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's just that's her whole thing. Like she definitely even today. She looks very young.

Dave! (01:29:01.986) teenager, Danielle Harris, who by the way is 30 years old.

Dave! (01:29:12.717) She... I will say, I will admit, she does actually look like a teenager.

Heather Wixson (01:29:13.599) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:29:21.904) But yeah, Amy, played by the original Jamie Lloyd herself, Danielle Harris, and Linda, who's played by Christina Klebe, who I recently just saw in Brooklyn 45. She's the German lady. Yep.

Dave! (01:29:33.71) Who is she and that?

I thought that was a movie I thought was, that was a new horror movie I thought was okay. I have a lot of problems with it, but I think it was generally good. So there you go.

Bryan! (01:29:43.64) Yeah, yeah, I enjoyed it a great deal too. Yep, Michael is watching them through the window from the ground floor. You know, it's the scene at school. Back at Shady Grove, the administrator is played by Udo Kier, who I feel like, yeah, I feel like he's got a much bigger part of the unrated version, but I might be mistaken, but yeah, they called him up for a day and we're like, come on in, be yourself.

Heather Wixson (01:29:43.99) Oh, I liked it.

Dave! (01:29:57.57) Yeah, that's gonna be number 11 right there, number 11.

Bryan! (01:30:11.22) So Michael continues to stalk the girls. We find out that Annie's dad, the sheriff, is played by Brad Durif.

Dave! (01:30:17.898) He's not getting a cameo, he counts as a character.

Bryan! (01:30:20.076) Yeah, he's the main character, but I'll tell you what, I'll take him anytime. In any, in any role.

Heather Wixson (01:30:25.005) Honestly, Brad Dorif gives one of the best performances, I think, in the entire franchise in these two movies. I think he adds a lot. His reactions to Annie's death in two, my God, is like a gut punch. Especially because he probably had to take himself to a really bad place thinking about maybe his own daughter Fiona, who now we all know and love. That to me, yeah.

Bryan! (01:30:41.424) People for-

Dave! (01:30:50.738) He's an Oscar-nominated actor. He's the real deal.

Bryan! (01:30:50.808) Yeah. I would say people forget he was in fucking, you know, one flew over the cuckoo's nest and like he's like the real shit. Yeah, he's a hell of a he's a hell of an actor. I love him. Sid Haig plays the guy in charge of the play, Charles Guy, the cemetery. I would say the sheer volume of cameos in this movie is so distracting. But.

Heather Wixson (01:30:57.366) Oh yeah!

Dave! (01:31:05.25) 13, uh, 12, 12.

Dave! (01:31:13.102) We're gonna get one more.

Bryan! (01:31:14.252) Yeah, but yeah, it's like he said, it's like he goes to whatever horror con is happening and he's just like D Wallace, PJ souls, according to games are coming with me. Everybody else hang tight. I might need you later. Yep. So Bob and Linda, we learn have been using the old Myers place as a party house. And they are now doing it to Halloween to by the Misfits.

Dave! (01:31:38.922) Weird choice, deep cut.

Bryan! (01:31:40.58) Deep cut. Yeah. But they have no idea that Michael is already in the house. And so in a call back to the beginning, Linda puts on some post coitus. Don't fear the Reaper while Bob goes to get the beers. Also, Bob kind of looks like the boyfriend at the beginning to like this is a real deliberate detail.

Heather Wixson (01:31:41.717) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:32:03.288) And he is he's instead killed by Michael the same way the carpenter kills him. And then he goes and he does the ghost thing and strangles Linda. And now Loomis is off by an epistol from the monkeys, Mickey Dolan's, which is easily the most unexpected of the bunch, because like all of these other cameos, they've been in other Rob Zombie movies. I don't think Mickey Dolan's has been in any of them.

Dave! (01:32:15.874) That's 13 right there.

Heather Wixson (01:32:17.677) Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

Heather Wixson (01:32:29.918) No, he has not.

Dave! (01:32:29.934) I feel like he feels like he met him like that morning somewhere. I was like, hey, I'm doing a thing. What are you doing later?

Bryan! (01:32:34.477) he's like he's having coffee. He's like I need a guy to sell some guns. Yeah. But I that was a truly delightful cameo at Laurie's house. Laurie is picked up by Annie and then Michael attacks and kills her parents for some reason. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:32:40.449) Hehehehe

Dave! (01:32:49.334) No, I ain't gotta kill, you know, I gotta kill D. Wallace.

Heather Wixson (01:32:55.497) No, but also it's a sort of a callback to Laurie's parents being missing in the original Halloween 2, which it was in the TV cut of Halloween, the original Halloween 2, it was revealed that her parents had died.

Bryan! (01:32:55.692) No, she's earned her stripes, man.

Bryan! (01:33:03.774) Oh yeah!

Bryan! (01:33:10.544) That's right, okay, because he writes in a bunch of Halloween 2 stuff to this movie.

Heather Wixson (01:33:15.741) Yeah, so yeah, so that's sort of a callback to the original Halloween 2 in a way.

Bryan! (01:33:20.665) Oh, okay, that makes sense now.

Dave! (01:33:21.922) Well, she's the only likable person in this movie, so to see her go is really sad.

Bryan! (01:33:26.277) A real bummer. Yep. So, uh, oh yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:33:28.239) What about Danny Trio though? Come on.

Dave! (01:33:29.878) Well, my precious, my sweet precious Danny Trejo is in a different category.

Bryan! (01:33:34.492) So yep, Laurie gets stuck with Tommy and Lindsay like in the original and they watch the thing from the from another world like in the original. Loomis tries to convince Sheriff Brackett how bad things are while Let It Ride by Bachman Turner Overdrive plays. And I don't know if I like Loomis in this one. And this is where I come to my sort of analysis on Loomis because he is up to part six. He's like

Dave! (01:34:01.91) He is five, his last one.

Bryan! (01:34:03.648) Okay, so yeah, he, he in, that's what I thought. Right, right, right. Cause, cause, cause they

Heather Wixson (01:34:05.793) Six is the last one.

Dave! (01:34:07.662) Is he in six? I thought he died before that came out.

Heather Wixson (01:34:09.209) Oh, he very much is. No, he died right after it finished filming. He's in it with Paul Rudd, yeah.

Bryan! (01:34:13.736) Right. Because, but yeah, because in part five, it's implied very heavily that Michael kills him, but they're like, fuck it, we got to bring him back for part six.

Heather Wixson (01:34:23.473) Six ends up with him, like depending on which version you watch, non-producers cut, or actually no, both of them end up with him having the mark of thorn on the end, on his wrist. And I think at one point, in the producers cut, Michael ends up stuck in the circle of ruins that Paul wrote the leaves for him, so wonderfully. But yeah, but I think both of them end with Loomis taking on sort of the mark of thorn for the Man in Black.

Bryan! (01:34:33.02) Bye.

Bryan! (01:34:40.889) Oh yeah.

Bryan! (01:34:49.761) Hell yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:34:50.257) Sorry, I do watch these movies a lot. Ha ha ha.

Bryan! (01:34:53.216) not watch. I do not care for the sequels post part three, so I have not seen them in quite some time. But yeah, this is the thing is he's wild-eyed and crazy in the first one, but the more they use him, the more he's kind of straightened out into the kind of the hero of the story. He's still obsessed in shit, but you can't make a Halloween movie without Loomis, but

The way Rob Zombie portrays him in this movie is so weird because he's almost an afterthought. And it's almost like somebody at Tracus was like, you've got to put Loomis in this. So best deal with that now.

Heather Wixson (01:35:35.661) I mean, the thing is he was announced pretty early on. I remember Malcolm McDowell. So I think he was always gonna be in there, but I'm wondering if he wasn't supposed to factor into the second half of the movie as much because of how different the character feels than the first half.

Bryan! (01:35:41.804) Yeah. Well, like, yeah, you gotta have him.

Bryan! (01:35:50.672) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:35:54.088) Right, because like it feels like, I mean, you can't remake Halloween without him. And but to me, he strikes me as a character that Rob Zombie just was not interested in because like he's a totally different he plays totally different. He just kind of stumbles into the last scenes. It's just it's so, so weird that the way that he that he's kind of changed in this because everybody else is fundamentally the same.

But yeah, it's, Loomis gives bracket the Loomis speech from the original, but it also ties in the whole Laurie is Michael's sister thing that every Halloween writer from part four on has hated with every fiber of their being. It is a detail that nobody, nobody likes having to write in for some reason, even though it becomes kind of like a central piece of the sequels. Right.

Dave! (01:36:47.358) Once it's established, you have to contend with it in some way. You can't leave it out. It's...

Heather Wixson (01:36:51.241) No, and also Carpenter said he basically was super stoned when he was writing it and kind of did, and he never put any real importance on it because in their minds at the end of Halloween II, Michael was dead, that story was done, it was never gonna have to be a factor again, you know? And then ultimately once Four came back, it was like Mustafa was basically of the opinion, and I actually love Four, Four is one of my very favorites.

Bryan! (01:36:51.964) Right, right, right.

Bryan! (01:37:08.799) Yeah, yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:37:20.881) I have to give a shout out to Dwight H. Little on behalf of Patrick Bromley, because that's his boy. But you know, that was kind of, Mustafa wanted to take it back to the family roots because in his mind, for better or for worse, this was a story about this character who is like hunting their family. Like I don't know that it was the right one. It would have been nice if Jamie Lloyd was just some random kid getting terrorized by the boogeyman, but why?

You know, when unfortunately, too, established why Michael was doing it and had Carpenter maybe put down the weed that night and just wrote and then, you know, celebrated afterwards, like, we might be having a completely different conversation.

Bryan! (01:37:48.622) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:38:03.02) Yeah, the people who wrote all the sequels have had a really bad all. All of the sequels had a really bad habit of sort of writing themselves into corners with these details that were kind of supposed to be like throw away parts that subsequent scriptwriters just seized on and couldn't let go of. And they kind of those are the parts that really kind of bog the sequels down for me, like why I don't really go back to them. But yeah.

Laurie, Lindsay and Tommy watch the house on haunted hill. That's the house on haunted hill, right? With the skeleton coming out of the pool. Yeah. And that's where they talk about the boogeyman. And because you got to any and Paul have sex while listening to Alice Cooper's Only Women Bleed. Get it. And then Michael is already in the house and he appears to kill them both.

Heather Wixson (01:38:37.245) Yes, that is correct.

Bryan! (01:38:56.988) in Loomis and Brackett, they raced to the Strode's house. We learn through a completely unnecessary exposition dumped that Brackett rescued Boo from the suicide scene of Michael's mother. He dropped her at like an emergency room and that the Strode's then told him later on that they were like adopting a baby and it just happened to be that baby.

Dave! (01:39:22.248) I would say, if you were to talk about Daniel Harris getting killed or getting almost killed, I think having her running around with no shirt on is completely tasteless.

Bryan! (01:39:27.394) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:39:33.621) You, but you want to, here's the thing. That was Danielle. She, because here's the thing. So.

Bryan! (01:39:34.309) I've always been a little bogged by it.

Dave! (01:39:40.542) Alright, well I think it's tasteless for Danielle Harris to do that then.

Heather Wixson (01:39:44.297) No, because the thing is so many horror fans for so long never saw her beyond being this little tiny kid. And she was like, you know, in her twenties. But yeah, so she just want like, it was just her kind of like shedding that and being like, that was something completely different. I'm somebody.

Bryan! (01:39:53.052) Oh god, it's the Disney Channel effect.

Dave! (01:40:03.534) He's the director, I mean, he's the one who should say, I don't know, that seems kinda tacky.

Bryan! (01:40:08.742) Dropzombie!

Heather Wixson (01:40:08.885) Yeah, because boobs don't sell tickets to horror movies. Like, come on, of course they do. You know? Somebody who grew up in the 80s, I've saw more horror movies with boobs than without. It's whatever at this point. Now we don't even get them. We don't even get people in romances in movies anymore, because that's a weird thing. So, you know, I mean, yeah, is it a lot? Sure.

Dave! (01:40:14.03) Well they shouldn't.

Heather Wixson (01:40:38.793) But like, if Danielle wanted to go for it, like, hey, who am I to tell her what she can and cannot do on screen?

Bryan! (01:40:47.377) Yeah. The brutality of the kill is what kind of puts it over for me because like not only is she like half naked like he kills the shit out of her even though he doesn't kill her. I mean we're going to find out she's still alive but like just barely. But yeah, I want to know how Michael knows that Laurie is his sister though. Because I don't know if they ever really that's never really established.

Not even in the original Halloween 2.

Heather Wixson (01:41:16.429) There, I think, here's the thing, I think there's a deleted scene and I'm trying to remember who plays the adoption agency person, but I feel like there's like some sort of thing that happens where he goes, oh, Adrienne Barbeau, that would be your number 14. But I think there's a deleted scene where he figures out where she is. And then she ends up showing up at his house either. And I will say, this is what always.

Bryan! (01:41:23.662) Wow.

Bryan! (01:41:30.357) Oh, that's right.

Heather Wixson (01:41:41.749) did bug me about like the reveal that comes in the original Halloween 2 of Lori being Michael's sister is like, we get these flashes where like her parents are telling her that she's not really their kid. Like the mom is really mean and the laundry scene. And then like her dad's a realtor who sends her to the house of her murderous brother to drop keys off. And he represents that house. That to me always felt weird, you know, where this, it's like,

Bryan! (01:41:55.172) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:42:04.861) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:42:08.556) Yeah. This one, he at least he at least sets it up with a baby that survives. So like there's a little something.

Heather Wixson (01:42:11.098) You know, I don't think...

Heather Wixson (01:42:15.913) Yeah, but also too, I get the sense that like Bracket knows the real identity of Laurie Strode, but I don't think the Strode's knew that she was that baby. So at least, exactly. So at least it's sort of like muddies that a little bit more so than the original connection, which I was like, okay, all right, cool, I get it now. But yeah.

Bryan! (01:42:24.504) Yeah. Right. Yeah, they had no reason to know.

Bryan! (01:42:38.86) Yeah. I wonder how much I wonder how much freedom to sort of write and rewrite the story he had like, because in Gore in Green's version, he's just like, Oh, yeah, that's just some bullshit people made up. And off it goes. That's it no longer part of the canon, which I was fine with.

Heather Wixson (01:42:58.089) Yeah, I'm totally fine with it too. And it also in a way really kind of makes sense for the character of Dr. Loomis, because again, in the original Halloween II, he is somebody who's super invested in Michael. So when he says like, you know, what case file are you talking about that I wouldn't have seen, you know, and then she explains them like, there's no way that Dr. Loomis would not have known that Michael had a sister. Where this one, this Loomis is so wrapped up in what he can gain from Michael being.

Bryan! (01:43:19.844) Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:43:26.409) his patient, he sees him as a cash cow. So why the hell would he even look into what happened to that baby after his mom killed herself? He wouldn't, that's the kind of lumus he is. So again, I think that was a nice touch that really sells the dynamics a little bit more and the plausibility of this. But I'm with you 2018, I think for me, because Michael doesn't give a shit about who Laurie Strode is, never did. Probably never thought about her again, other than

Bryan! (01:43:34.328) Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:43:56.413) I should have killed her, you know, sitting in that, you know, mental institution for so long.

Bryan! (01:43:59.94) Right, because that's the thing is she's the one who sort of pulls him into toward her.

Heather Wixson (01:44:05.621) Well, Sartain really is the one who sets it all up because he's an idiot. But yeah, she's the one who's just spent her entire life obsessing about him. He's probably thought about her maybe twice. And I like that. I'll take most of all of it. Cause it's just like, at least it's, we're gonna shed some of the dead weight. We're gonna probably take on some other dead weight, but it all balances out eventually.

Bryan! (01:44:08.633) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:44:14.712) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:44:30.532) Yep. So Laurie and the kids go back to the Wallace house and they find Annie slashed up but alive on the floor, unaware that Michael is still in the house. I will say this. I do. I like this scene quite a bit because the way that the door like they all rush in and they're like, Oh my God, Annie, and they run into the house deeper than the door sort of slowly closes and he's just like standing there behind it. Yeah. It kicks off the big sort of tense finale. She calls 911

Heather Wixson (01:44:51.893) Yeah, it's a great set piece.

Bryan! (01:45:01.048) And then Lori escapes while Michael chases her to the Doyle House, I think. And the police charge in while Forbidden Planet plays on TV. And Michael can't help it. He's got to do it. It's it's this is like the movie version of all the like samples that the white zombie was always using.

Heather Wixson (01:45:11.197) I'm going to go to bed.

Bryan! (01:45:21.144) Also, I love Forbidden Planet to death. And.

Heather Wixson (01:45:24.321) I mean, killer clowns borrow, like everybody borrows from these things, it's awesome. Like that was Rob Zombie at his most 80s, is that he was riffing on all these like 50s and 60s horror movies throughout.

Bryan! (01:45:27.287) Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Bryan! (01:45:34.112) Yep. So Michael attacks the cops, taking gunshot wounds in the process, and then he takes Laurie away. Bracket and Loomis arrive to the Wallace house and they find Annie slashed up but still alive. And the kids come hauling ass down the street directing Tommy or directing Loomis to Tommy's house. And then it's here that Laurie wakes up in the basement of the Myers house to find Linda's dead body under the Myers gravestone.

Heather Wixson (01:45:56.098) Cough

Bryan! (01:46:03.204) and then Michael arrives and he gives her the photo of little Michael and Boo. Again, I don't know how he knows who she is, but you know, that deleted scene would have been helpful.

Heather Wixson (01:46:16.085) Yeah, I think again, it sets up something, but I think also it's kind of genius too, in the fact that like, you know, she's just like, what do you want me to do with this? Like, okay, there's pictures of kids, cool, what? Like what? And you know, Michael doesn't talk. So like, that's the only way he has to communicate other than his knife, so.

Bryan! (01:46:24.763) Yeah.

Yeah. No.

Bryan! (01:46:35.82) Right. Yeah, because like, oh yeah, her she has zero memory of this. She was a fucking infant when this all happened. And yeah, he takes the mask off to reveal his face as though that's going to be meaningful to her. But also just the thing that they key they consistently do. We never see it. Not that it's important, but she fakes him out, grabs the knife that he dropped and stabs him by enough time to get away. Michael does rise though.

removing the knife and resuming the hunt.

And then Laurie runs and falls into an empty pool, which looked very painful. Yeah, I know. Again, cornered by Michael, but this time Loomis shows up and he shoots Michael a bunch of times rescuing Laurie. But this being Halloween, you can't kill the boogeyman. And just when we think everything is OK, he smashes through the police car window. He takes Laurie away again into the Meyers house and Loomis chases him and Michael appears to kill him, which is ballsy as hell.

Heather Wixson (01:47:13.569) Oh, yeah.

Bryan! (01:47:40.26) And so, yep, Michael starts literally smashing the house up, trying to find Laurie, who now has Loomis' gun. And Michael finds her when she falls through the ceiling. He charges at her. She raises the gun. They go out the window together, smash into the ground below. And straddling him, she shoots him in the face, but there are no more bullets in the gun, or so it would seem. And she pulls the trigger several more times as he lies there, unconscious. He grabs her arm, but one more pull, fires the gun directly into his face.

close up of Laurie screaming, roll credits.

Heather Wixson (01:48:15.433) Yeah, that final shot, I love it. I actually, we just talked about this because we just recently kicked off our Hang In With Tobe Hooper podcast because we just finished up Craving Cravin and every time we talk to say Tobe Hooper, I think of Mr. Cooper. So we were like, hang in with Tobe Hooper. There we go. But I love that Rob gives that Lori her Marilyn Burns moments.

Bryan! (01:48:24.393) Oh, yeah.

Bryan! (01:48:34.257) That's cool.

Heather Wixson (01:48:43.721) You know, that very much is the end of Texas Chainsaw Masker where you're staring at this woman's face covered in blood, freaking the hell out. And you're just like, oh my God. Like it's a moment that's supposed to stun you. And I think it's actually pretty good at that. But yeah, this is definitely Texas Chainsaw again.

Bryan! (01:48:43.982) Yeah?

Bryan! (01:48:50.392) Yeah. Yep.

Bryan! (01:48:57.784) Yeah, yeah. You know what? You know what it reminds me? It would have reminded me of like on first impression is the end of the Hills have eyes also. Because it's the same thing. It's a freeze frame on the screaming face. Like it's it really it really leaves an impression. It makes me wonder. I mean, he had to know that they were going to be like, Rob, this is great. Let's make another one.

Heather Wixson (01:49:10.773) Gotcha.

Heather Wixson (01:49:23.349) Yeah, but I mean, even when you end the movie, when you supposedly Michael's dead, you know as a horror fan, he's never dead. Other than the end of Kills, which is probably why people are so mad about it, but like, because you just don't come back from that. And I'll.

Bryan! (01:49:26.896) Yeah.

Oh no, not enough.

Bryan! (01:49:37.676) Right. I you know, here's the thing. I got to be the only person who loves the end of Halloween kills or Halloween ends.

Heather Wixson (01:49:43.149) Here's the thing. Yeah, Halloween Ends is what I meant, sorry. I said Kills, because it just, it should have, their titles suck. The movie that, you know, anyway, I actually, the first time I watched Halloween Ends, I was kind of like, oh Jesus, okay. Second time I watched it, again, pulled myself back a little bit. I really appreciated what it was doing in comparison to Halloween 2018. I think Kills is a mess of a movie.

Bryan! (01:49:47.782) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:49:51.332) They do.

Bryan! (01:50:12.848) That's ridiculous.

Heather Wixson (01:50:14.453) I, again, I would rather watch Resurrection than Kills any day in the week, because at least it's having a little bit of fun. Where Kills is just, it's just, it sets up so many things that never pays off. And, but, you know, so at the end of ends, like I'm like, yes, we need this to be done. If you're gonna tell me that Halloween ends, end it, and they do it, and you know what, people got mad about it. And it's like, well, what do you think? Like, yeah.

Bryan! (01:50:27.661) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:50:41.392) What did you expect? Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:50:43.945) You know, so, but I mean, and also again, it was just because that was, you know, you could tell that they were finding that balance between Michael and Lori and how much we're supposed to care, you know? And so, you know.

Bryan! (01:50:54.788) Yeah. The big final showdown, the big fight at the end of it, I think is the shit. It's great. Oh my god. It's so brutal. But yeah, but yeah, that's it. Rob Zombie's Halloween. Oh boy, am I glad I'm done with this one.

Heather Wixson (01:51:04.573) It is. It totally is. Yeah.

Heather Wixson (01:51:15.445) Well, I apologize for picking such a controversial subject matter.

Bryan! (01:51:20.358) No, I am glad to. I'm glad to have had you. I love I love a challenge. My God, my microphone stand is falling. But yeah, that is that brings this one to a close. Heather, I want to thank you for joining us. It was a lot of fun. I've had I've had a great time talking to you. Where can I where can everybody find you?

Dave! (01:51:34.995) Mm-hmm.

Heather Wixson (01:51:36.237) Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. Well, these days I'm kind of on sabbatical from Daily Digest, because I've got a lot of book stuff going on. So I'm still kind of hanging over on the Twitter slash X place at the Horchic, but I'm also on Blue Sky. I'm trying to remember to use Instagram. I'm really bad at it, because I just don't feel like I'm cool enough for it.

Bryan! (01:51:59.32) Oh, see, I didn't think I was cool enough to use Instagram either, and I'm having a blast with it. So let me assure you, it's good. It's good time for everybody.

Heather Wixson (01:52:03.393) Yeah, I'm working on it. I'm working on it. But yeah, so like right now I'm in the midst of finalizing some stuff for the In Search of Darkness book, which for anybody who wants to pre-order, you can go over to 80shorrorbook.com and they got like a sweet little fun retro package that comes with it. And I'm also in the process of trying to put together volume three of Monsters, Makeup and Effects. It turns out writing to really...

labor intensive books at the same time is tough when you have a full time job. So I had to kind of put that a little bit on hold, but there, we might end up just having two books of monsters, makeup and sex next year. We'll see how it goes. Um, but yeah, so that's kind of, I'm like online sometimes. And I, and then kind of, I disappear for a few weeks because I'm just so stuck on deadlines and stuff, but I'm around. So if you're out there and you're listening and maybe.

Bryan! (01:52:36.454) Yeah.

Bryan! (01:52:44.46) Nice.

Heather Wixson (01:52:58.869) Maybe I've convinced you to revisit Halloween 2017. If you don't, it's okay. But if you do and you're like, oh, and there's something that you found to appreciate about it, like, please tell me. I'm like, I'm just always curious if like, somebody goes back and revises a movie, because I can't tell you how many times I've watched something where I'm in a bad mood, or like, it's just not my vibe. And then I go back and give it a second chance. And I was like, oh, okay, I get it now. Like, and you know, we're constantly evolving as human beings, so.

You know, if nothing else, hopefully at least made for a spirited debate on the Rob Zamba-verse of it all.

Bryan! (01:53:32.793) Yes. Yep. Alright, Dave, what are we doing next?

Dave! (01:53:38.724) We got Halloween proper, 1978.

Heather Wixson (01:53:42.856) 8

Bryan! (01:53:43.428) Yes, yes, finally, finally. Yeah, the original plan for this was we were going to go, hey, what are we doing next week? We're doing Halloween. And then we get to, you know, we do the green one. And then, you know, people think we're doing the 78 one. And then we go, hey, what are we doing next week? We're doing Halloween. Everybody thinks we're doing the classic one. But then we do Rob Zombie. Then we go, hey, what are we doing next week? And then we finally do the 1978 classic. So, yes, finally, in two weeks, see us back here when we take on John Carpenter's original classic Halloween. This time, I swear.