PUBLISHER: Pocket, 1/1981 GENRE: Contemporary Horror Fiction SETTING: New York, USA PURCHASE:link MY GRADE: C
FROM PUBLISHER:
AN INTRUDER HAS ENTERED JENNIFER'S WORLD...
A glamorous world of music and movement and sensual excitement.
Now someone watching Jennifer.
He watches her beauty, her grace, her supple young body. He watches the curve of her slender neck as she smiles at her lover.
He watches from the shadows and smiles, plotting, imagining...imagining her dazzling gifts are his alone...imagining her soft warm flesh beneath his hands.
He watches with tingling excitement as he watched all those other girls, all those other times.
He has waited so long, so patiently.
Soon now, Jennifer will dance.
For the very last time...
MY THOUGHTS: The book starts with the body of a ballerina being found, one of ten from three major ballet companies in New York City that have been killed, then the abduction of another one, nineteen-year-old Jennifer North, who willingly went home with the killer, then was abducted by him. She's not a character for me to have sympathy for since she's a cheater and I just didn't care much about what happened to her.
The killer has always had a screwed up relationship with his mother yet he remains close to her. I don't like that she was in this except for in flashback. She kind of ruined it, that and that they were in on some of the happenings together, which was completely unbelievable.
This wasn't very good or too suspenseful. I like part of the ending, at the ballet, but some of the things that happened there with the killer's mother, I didn't like at all. This would have been so much better if the mother had been left out and we'd seen more of the killings.
The cover is die-cut and this image is on the stepback page behind it, but in color.
PUBLISHER: Jove, 10/1982 GENRE: Science Fiction/Contemporary Horror SETTING: California, USA WIKI: link PURCHASE:link MY GRADE: A
FROM PUBLISHER:The streets are quiet. Dead quiet as the shadows lengthen and night falls. It's Halloween. Blood-chilling screams pierce the air. Grinning skulls and grotesque shapes lurk in the gathering darkness. It's Halloween. The streets are filling with small cloaked figures. They're just kids, right? The doorbell rings and your flesh creeps. But it's all in fun, isn't it? No. This Halloween is different. It's the last one.
MY THOUGHTS: I'd like to point out that the author dedicated this book to himself using his real name. I don't like the synopsis the book was given as it doesn't tell you anything about the plot and instead wants you to believe this is a typical slasher novel, which is isn't.
What's not in the film at all: The book's entire prologue isn't. It's Challis sleeping in the lounge room at the hospital, being woken by nurse Agnes, who's complaining about him working double shifts. She's massaging his shoulders. The Agnes in the movie doesn't match with the one in the book.
The novel has him at a convenience store buying cheap masks for his two kids, nine-year-old Bella and seven-year-old Willie. A man and his young son are there and he buys his son a Silver Shamrock Novelties witch mask. As he's going into the store he sees an "uncommonly large person" near the parking lot but lost sight of him. As he pulls away from the store he sees a "tall stiff figure" come out of the shadows and walk past the store. He drives to his ex-wife Linda's house and sees near her front door a "shape." Those sighting are confusing to me. I don't understand why those Silver Shamrock Novelties men in gray suits would be watching him or anyone else in public, especially in a different town than where the mask factory is and where the action takes place later, in a town called Santa Mira.
The scene where Ellie and Challis are traveling to the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in Santa Mira, CA, she tells him of a time when she was six years old and her father bought her a bird. She let the bird out of its cage and her father beat her for it. She said a child never forgives something like that.
Right after that, still in the car, Challis falls asleep and has a very odd dream. He dreamed that he's in another town and there are crying children who are dressed oddly in colorful old fashioned clothes, and a boy with a large head is in a tunnel-like passage with red glowing walls. There's a priest at the end of it. Children came out of wherever they were hiding and followed him. He gathered them into a circle made of rocks. The sun rose up out of it. The priest had a featureless face. He raised a knife, the children screamed, the sky turned red.... and the dream ended. I can see why this was not put in the film because it had nothing to do with anything that I can think of.
Challis meets Marge, the woman staying at the motel, in the parking lot. She's talking about the Silver Shamrock mask and showed him how the round emblem came off when her four-year-old threw it against the wall. She sees the microchip on the back of it, says it looks like the inside of her transister radio, that it must be electronic and asks him to bring her batteries for her to put into her radio to see if she can get the emblem to light up "or whatever it's supposed to do." He also notices the emblem's the size of a U.S. quarter and is made from ceramic. Later on in the book but not the film, Cochran tells Challis that each Silver Shamrock Novelties emblem has a piece of Stonehenge on it.
The film doesn't have Challis and Ellie going to Marge's room right after hearing a lot of noise and finding her dead. In the film they acknowledge a loud sound but that's it. The book's version of this is so much better than the film's.
The lab worker, Teddy, whom Challis is keeping up with about the case of the gray-suited man who burned himself up in the car at the beginning, she's only in the book once, I think, and her death scene's not in the book.
There's a scene in the book where Challis is caught and put in the room at the factory, hands tied with tape and a skeleton mask on and made to watch on a monitor Ellie in another room. Cochran goes into the room with Ellie, she calls him "Daddy" and he gives her a witches mask, comes back into the room with Challis, tells him Ellie is now six years old mentally and that that's a good age to be a victim. He tells Challis that he's bought two minutes of airtime on all three networks (which would be NBC, CBS, ABC) and they're going to air the special commerical at 9 PM.
In the book when Little Buddy was in the room with his parents, watching the Silver Shamrock commerical, it activated the emblem on the mask, making it glow red, which it didn't do in the film. A black spider the size of a hand came out of Little Buddy's mouth then jumped onto his mother's face.
Challis is tied to a chair with black tape or something and he kicks the television screen in, gets a piece of the glass and cuts the tape on his bindings, and escapes. In the book I don't think he's tied to a chair. He gets a Silver Shamrock emblem out of his pocket, the one he took from Marge's room after she died, throws it at the television screen, causing it to explode.
In the book he escapes the room, finds Ellie, they're on a catwalk above all the workers, she spots Cochran and yells out "Daddy!", they all see her, she asks him if she can let the bird fly, she takes out some Silver Shamrock emblems, throws them as if they're birds, they hit the television screens, causing them to explode and the workers to short-circuit, "Their bodies instantly short-circuited and split open in fountains of squirting silicone." The scene in the film is much better because I like how Challis set all the televisions in the room to the Halloween commerical, which caused the emblems to explode when they hit the screens.
The ending is exactly the same except in the book when Challis is calling television stations to get them to not air the 9 PM commercial, he claims he's going to set off a bomb but in the film, he just told the person on the phone to tell whomever's in charge that a bomb's going to go off if it airs.
Other differences: The film's entire opening scene, with the old man running from a car that's following him and clutching a Silver Shamrock Novelties pumpkimask, and the gray-suited man getting crushed between two cars, isn't in the book at all. This scene is far superior to the book's and a suspenseful scene was an excellent way to open the film.
The scene in the film where Challis leaves the liquor store and runs into a man who wants a drink of his liquor then gets killed by two gray-suited men, the man's death scene isn't in the book. In place of that, later, after Marge is killed and put in the car on a stretcher by the men in white coats, in the book Challis sees a headless man in the back of it, dressed like the man from outside the liquor store and assumes it's the same man.
The scene where Challis escapes the motel room through the bathroom window and finds a phone booth down the street, in the book he calls his ex-wife to tell her to get rid of the masks. She misunderstands him as saying to get rid of the masks she'd already bought the kids, Silver Shamrock ones, yells at him, he calls her a "fucking bitch", and she hangs up on him. He leaves the receiver hanging when he leaves the booth and a suited man hangs it up. In the film, the call doesn't go through to her and he hangs the receiver up after the call. Later in the movie when he escapes the room he was held in, he finds a telephone in the building, calls his ex-wife to tell her to get rid of the masks, she misunderstands what he's saying and hangs up on him without him calling her a "fucking bitch."
What's not explained in either book or film is what lead Ellie to wonder if the old man who went to the hospital clutching a Silver Shamrock Novelties pumpkin mask is her father in the first place. I suppose she couldn't get hold of her father and wondered if the dead man, who I assume was mentioned on the news, was her father.
MY THOUGHTS: There's not much to dislike about this film. The opening credits are are best, the theme song with the synthesizer, and the ending, which is the greatest one yet, as it's so damn unexpected. I love the gray-suited men lurking about everywhere showing no facial expressions. I don't understand the dislike for this film.
There are things in the book I wish had been in the film but the film's opening scene is so good that I'll have to say I like the film better than the novel. Wikipedia said the novel was a "best-seller" but I have no idea how many copies were sold, and it was reissued two years later.
A friend bought me a movie poster and I framed it, here.
PUBLISHER: Titan Books, 10/2018 PURCHASE:link MY GRADE: D FILM GRADE: F
FROM PUBLISHER: In 1978, Laurie Strode survived an encounter with Michael Myers, a masked figure who killed her friends and terrorized the town of Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night. Myers was later gunned down, apprehended and committed to Smith's Grove State Hospital.
For forty years, memories of that nightmarish ordeal have haunted Laurie and now Myers is back once again on Halloween, having escaped a routine transfer, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. This time, Laurie is prepared with years of survival training to protect herself, her daughter Karen and her granddaughter Allyson, a teenager separated from her family and enjoying Halloween festivities.
MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: Graded D for disastrous. The novel and film are the sequel to the 1978 Halloween. Laurie is no longer Michael's sister, as was introduced in Halloween II (1981). I have no idea why he's still after her, and her relatives, forty years later. It's a crying shame what they've turned the character Laurie into. I don't like it at all. I guess my review is more for the film and not the novel since the author was just going off the screenplay.
I don't like how they've incorporated things from the first three (and probably the others but I didn't notice) Halloween films into this one. Examples: Teenager Vicky babysat on Halloween night, like Annie did in the original. Vicky's boyfriend came over in this one but in the original, Annie's friend Lynda and her boyfriend came over, so in this one they've incorporated both of those into the character of Vicky.
She also made popcorn for the nine-year-old she's babysitting, just like Annie did in the original, for the nine-year-old she was watching, Lindsey.
While babysitting, Vicky looked out the window at night at two white sheets blowing on the clothesline, just like Laurie did in the original, but she did it during the day, right after school on Halloween day.
Michael pins Vicky's boyfriend, Dave, to the wall with a knife, just like he did to Lynda's boyfriend in the original.
On Halloween night, a character named Andrea was at home on the phone with a friend named Sally when she got killed. In Halloween II, the same thing happened to Sally while on the phone with a friend. They weren't even creative enough to change the character's name in this book from Sally to something else.
Now get this scene from the 2018 version, as it combines Halloween and Halloween III- On Halloween night, Laurie's lurking around outside and yells out to three children to go home, since Michael's on the loose. That scene copies the original Halloween when Dr. Loomis yells out to Lonnie to get his "ass" home. One child is wearing a witches mask, one's wearing a pumpkin mask, and the other one's wearing a skeleton mask, homage to the Silver Shamrock masks in Halloween III.
The scene where Laurie goes over the balcony and is lying on the ground, then isn't there when Michael goes outside to her is exactly what happened in the original film except it was Michael who went over the balcony and disappeared.
I suppose some would find all of the similarities clever or funny, but not me. Try being original instead of ripping scenes out of other films and rearranging them to fit your narrative. I'm speaking of the film writers.
I don't understand why they needed a Dr. Loomis clone, complete with British accent, which they have in Dr. Sartain, but I like the madness in him. That was unexpected.
Wikipedia says that Michael's doctor, Sartain, admits to arranging Michael's escape on the bus, "Hawkins and Sartain arrive just in time to save Allyson. Hawkins tries to kill Michael, but Sartain – obsessed with Michael's enigmatic motivations – kills Hawkins, and reveals he seeks to understand how Michael feels when he kills, and reveals that he arranged for Michael's escape to reinforce his perceived role as an "apex predator" who needs to finish what he started and kill Laurie to reassert himself" but I can't find that being said during that scene in the film or novel and I've watched and reread that part multiple times.
PUBLISHER: Zebra, 10/1981 GENRE: Fiction/Horror PURCHASE:link MY GRADE: D
FROM PUBLISHER: It's Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. Six gunshots pierce the silence of this normally quiet town. Neighborhood kids trick-or-treating on the street stare as a man plunges off a balcony. A doctor form the county mental hospital rushes from the house. He has followed his patient, who escaped from the institution, back to Haddonfield, where fifteen years earlier he brutally murdered his own sister. The demented young man has already killed three teenagers this evening. Tonight's massacre has only begun!
MY THOUGHTS: I've never liked the Halloween II film so I didn't expect to like the novel, and I didn't though it's a little better than the film. It's not interesting because all it is Michael killing people in a hospital and there are too many characters to keep up with. In the book Loomis said twice, pages 30 and 39, that Michael killed two people in 1963 but he only killed his sister, Judith. I have no idea why he'd say that. I don't know why that would have been in the manuscript so I'm assuming the author made that up.
It's not stated anywhere in the book that this is based directly on the screenplay, like the book Halloween by Curtis Richards was, so it's unclear if Jack Martin read the screenplay or if he's basing this directly off the film, with a little extra thrown in.
Book vs. Film- Opening credits are very cool when the pumpkin opens up, revealing a skull. Not in the film is hearing Loomis, while still outside at the end of the film Halloween, waiting to kill Michael and not knowing yet of the murders of Annie and Lynda, talk to himself, "I should have torn your heart out with my bare hands and stuffed it down your fucking throat. I should have carved out your eyes like one of your miserable pumpkins and fed them to your rotten face, read you your future from your stinking entrails." That violence doesn't sound like Loomis at all.
Mrs. Elrod's female neighbor, who's on the phone with a friend is named Sally in the book and Alice in the film. In the book there's a death involving news reporter Debra, who's television station is there on the scene where the chaos is that's not in the film at all. Her car has a flat tire, a man stops to help, he makes her uncomfortable so she asks him to leave, she opens the trunk to get tools and Michael's there. He slits her throat. That scene is right before Mr. Garrett, the security guard's, death scene. There's a scene right after that in the film where kids are trashing the old Meyer's house. That's not in the book, I don't think. When Budd and Karen are in the tub in the therapy room at the hospital, the book says Michael turns the water's temperature up to 127 degrees F. The book is more graphic in describing what Karen looks like after being in the scalding water, "...the skin of her face and breasts boiled and peeling loose in long, dangling strips."
In the book when Laurie's roaming around the hospital, right after Michael thought she was in her bed and started stabbing her, we hear her internal monologue. I don't know how she knows that Michael's her biological brother but she was thinking about how, as a toddler right before their parents died in a car accident, she'd ask about him and they'd beat her for it.
The book's epilogue said that the murder count was ten so I guess he's talking about everyone except Annie, Lynda and her boyfriend. So that's Sally, Mrs. Elrod, head nurse Mrs. Alvers, nurses Jill, Karen, Janet, paramedic Budd, security officer Mr. Garrett, Dr. Mixter, and Deputy Hunt. Jimmy wasn't murdered but died later in the car with Laurie from head trauma from hitting his head when he slipped in Mrs. Alvers blood. The reporter Debra was murdered elsewhere.
I don't like how in both book and film when Laurie was in the elevator towards the end, Michael, instead of stopping the elevator door from closing with his hand since he was right at it, he just stuck the knife's blade in it to prevent it from closing, then pulled it out and let it close, allowing Laurie to escape him. I also don't like that we're to believe Ben Tramer, the boy Laurie has the hots for in the first film, was the Michael lookalike who died in the car accident. Two teen boys go up to a sheriff in the movie and book and tell them that Ben left for home an hour before and hasn't made it home yet. Nothing strange about that and no one's going to be telling the police that someone hasn't been seen in only an hour anyway unless it's a small child. We know there's no way Ben could have had an outfit exactly like Michael's so that bit was downright stupid.
