A Tribute in Pen and Ink

When my Dad passed away this past December, I wanted to do something special with a portion of the estate proceeds—something that would have significant personal meaning. I’ve mentioned before how my Dad would take me to the movies every Saturday as part of our weekend “buddy days” when I was a kid. They were usually Irwin Allen disaster flicks or movies with a lot of car chases, but then a little film called Jaws was released. I was eight years old and can still feel the knot in my stomach the first time I heard the first notes of the film’s now-legendary theme music. I think I only made up to the point when poor skinny-dipping Chrissie gets slammed into the buoy before I pleaded with my Dad to leave. It would take three subsequent tries before I could make it through the entire film, each time making it a little further into the film before my ever-patient father heard the desperation of the “Please, Daddy…can we leave now?” in my voice. But 1978 was a game changer for ten-year-old me—on the cusp of adolescence—with the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. If Jaws hooked me, Halloween reeled me in and cemented what would become a lifelong adoration of both slasher films and a certain actress named Jamie Lee Curtis. It therefore seemed fitting to incorporate the themes of movies and JLC into my tribute and that something special to have created in memory of my wonderful, loving father.

 

I’ve long been a fan of illustrator and famed caricaturist Ken Fallin, who first came to prominence in 1983 doing the posters and advertising for the popular satirical revue Forbidden Broadway in the style of the famous pen and ink drawings of the legendary Al Hirschfeld—a concept in homage to the great theatrical caricaturist. He’s since gone on to illustrate roughly 500 notable people for the Wall Street Journal and has contributed countless other illustrations to The Boston Herald, The New Yorker Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Playbill (among others). Private collectors of Ken’s work include Angela Lansbury, Warren Buffett, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Jessica Parker, Darren Criss, Bernadette Peters, Sarah Paulson, Bradley Cooper, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Fallin did a lovely caricature of the cast of 2014’s Broadway production of Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina, which I saw with my friend James and loved. I reached out to Ken and purchased a print of the drawing, which hangs today in one of our guest rooms. 

So, the idea came to me: To commission an original caricature of Jamie Lee Curtis, in character, from some of her most notable film roles—in honor of my Dad and the love of movies that he endowed in me. I reached out to Ken who, despite being in the process of undergoing radiation therapy at the time, graciously agreed to accept the commission. Flash forward six-plus months later, and my original, hand-drawn caricature collage of Jamie Lee Curtis arrived yesterday. Featured are her characters from Trading Places, Blue Steel, Freaky Friday, True Lies, Knives Out, Scream Queens, and Halloween II—all surrounding a lovely portrait of her taken at last year’s Venice Film Festival. There will also be a colorized print version on its way to me shortly. To say that I’m beyond thrilled with it would be an understatement.

Once properly framed, this exquisite and one-of-a-kind piece of art will hang proudly somewhere where I’ll see it every day and think of my beloved Dad and our “buddy days” at the movies all those years ago. 

Speechless with gratitude. Thank you, Ken.

The Transcendent Chaos of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

Be forewarned: There is no way to adequately craft a proper review of Everything Everywhere All at Once without an inordinate number of adjectives and other qualifiers. In fact, it would likely be easier to create an extensive list of adjectives—with adverbial modifiers to drive the point home—to critique this extraordinary achievement in American filmmaking.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the bombastic brainchild of the directing duo collectively known as Daniels—Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. The filmmakers previously helmed the 2016 surrealist comedy-drama Swiss Army Man, which saw Daniel Radcliffe playing a corpse with propulsive flatulence and an erection that doubles as a compass. Daniels bring that unique brand of off-kilter kookiness to their latest effort and then turn the sensory overload dial way up past the point of no return. Daniels effectively throw everything and the kitchen sink at the wall and—remarkably and improbably—everything sticks, everywhere, and (yes) all at once.

The incredible Michelle Yeoh toplines as Evelyn Wang, a Chinese-American immigrant and laundromat owner who, while being audited by the IRS, discovers that she must connect with different versions of herself from parallel universes in order to prevent the destruction of them all by an evil entity known as Jobu Tupaki. That’s a dramatic oversimplification of the plot, which also has Evelyn grappling with her daughter’s sexual orientation, learning of her husband’s petition for divorce, and stressing over the arrival of her judgmental father (the legendary James Hong) from China. Looming over all of it is frumpy, humorless IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis), who warns of foreclosure and repossession due to Evelyn’s woeful mismanagement of the business’ taxes.

Through a variant version of her husband, Waymond (The Goonies Ke Huy Quan all grown up), Evelyn learns that every choice made creates a new universe; these innumerable parallel universes make up the multiverse. In order for Evelyn to defeat Jobu Tupaki—a version of her daughter, Joy (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Stephanie Hsu) who’s capable of experiencing all universes at once and manipulating matter at will—she must repeatedly “verse-jump” and connect with the different versions of herself to access the skillsets and memories of her parallel universe counterparts. But there is inherent danger in verse-jumping with such abandon; Evelyn risks splintering her mind, which is what drove a once benign version of her daughter to become the self-hating Jobu.

In her many verse jumps, Evelyn sees how her life would have turned out having made a single different choice. In one, she’s a glamorous martial arts movie star who encounters a sophisticated version of a Waymond she left and never married—one who now rejects her. In another, she’s a lesbian married to Dierdre, in a bizarre world where humans have hot dogs for fingers and play the piano with their toes. In yet another, she and Joy are merely two rocks with googly eyes living on the edge of a cliff. Daniels excel at creating madcap, boundary-pushing dreamscapes within these multiple realities existing at once within the known realm of time and space.

Within their evocative and cacophonous labyrinth of storytelling, the directors employ an anything-goes audacity—a swirling cyclone of fertile ideas and heady concepts—and straddle the worlds of science fiction, comedy, drama, action, and martial arts. The nearly two-and-a-half-hour film moves at a frenetic pace, with nonstop martial-arts action and in-your-face slapstick that allow for no bathroom breaks. (Word to the wise: Only buy the small soda and sip judiciously). Despite the complexity of their convoluted plot, Daniels admirably keep things surprisingly coherent—even the technobabble makes sense.

Yet, despite its massive interdimensional scope, Everything Everywhere All at Once is surprisingly intimate in scale. Even as the film slingshots between realities, somewhere between super-powered pinky fingers and weaponized butt-plugs, its absurdity is matched only by its heart. While you’re strapped in and relinquishing yourself to the cathartic rush-release of Daniels’ delightfully gonzo rollercoaster ride of psychedelic visuals and bold tonal shifts, you don’t expect the film’s emotional core to sucker punch you so hard by the end. With its larger, overarching message about kindness being the strongest weapon, it’s a story of human connection explored here in the conflict and reconciliation between an Asian mother and daughter who learn to cherish each other again.

Anchoring that emotional core is Yeoh’s Herculean performance. The film reads like a love letter from Daniels to the 59-year-old actress, who’s given what’s easily the best role of her career. Yeoh adeptly juggles the myriad nuances of Evelyn’s multiverse counterparts with aplomb, never losing track of who she’s supposed to be at any given moment. That she’s able to play so many versions of, essentially, the same character is no small creative feat. She effortlessly switches from comedic to dramatic, from martial arts maestro to overwrought mother, without missing a single beat anywhere in the film. Yeoh’s Evelyn shows us that even when you feel like you are the worst possible version of yourself, there is hope.

Likewise, the film’s supporting cast is a treat. Arguably, Quan does as much heavy lifting as Yeoh, especially in being tasked with having to explain the more technical aspects of Daniels’ plot. Hsu is a pure joy (pun intended) as both disaffected twenty-something daughter and as the colorful, villainous embodiment of all that disaffection. (Fun fact: Hsu got the role after Awkwafina dropped out due to scheduling conflicts.) Hong, a legend in his own right, lends gravitas to his role as Evelyn’s father and it’s a hoot to see him deployed in the multiverse. Tallie Medel as Becky, Joy's girlfriend, also makes the most of what could have been a pedestrian role. Curtis, who’s become so comfortable in her own skin as an actor as she’s matured, is a real scene-stealer here. In the hands of a lesser actor, her crotchety Dierdre could have been played as a one-note comic relief character, but Curtis imbues her with so many subtle humanities, that she elevates Dierdre beyond the periphery. There’s a scene between Evelyn and Dierdre outside the laundromat toward the end of the film that is utterly pitch-perfect and shows why these two women are Hollywood royalty.

My only beef with Everything Everywhere All at Once has nothing to do with the film itself and more to do with its distributor, A24. Arguably one of the most ambitious and prestigious film outfits out there today, I’m baffled why they chose to release this virtuoso cinematic triumph so early in the year. My fear is that the film will be overlooked come awards season later this year—and that will be nothing short of criminal. The film, its directors, its screenplay, its score by Son Lux, Larkin Seiple’s cinematography, its countless technical achievements, and at least three of its actors—Yeoh and Quan in lead acting categories, Curtis in supporting—should all receive nominations from multiple awards bodies. I hope the members of these various awards institutions will remember this masterpiece film a few months from now amid the noise of the year-end slate of “prestige” films that take over the narrative leading up to nominations.

Somewhere between death and taxes are beautiful moments—and these brief snippets of time are what make life worth living. This is the essence of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Daniels—aided immeasurably by Yeoh and their ensemble—employ an unmatched artistic aptitude in bringing their vision to whimsical, technicolor life. It’s a masterclass in filmmaking that will enthrall you with its exquisitely choreographed martial arts sequences before bringing tears to your eyes with the weight of its profound questions and truths about life. Unlike anything you’ve seen before, Everything Everywhere All at Once is destined to become a classic, an amalgamation of genre anarchy that defies classification, subverts expectations, and explores existential matters with empathy and insight. This marvelously unhinged slice of cinematic maximalism is nothing short of a work of art—and not to be missed.

Just let go—and let Yeoh. 

Mob Mentality and the Sidelined Final Girl of ‘Halloween Kills’

Let’s get this out of the way early: Jamie Lee Curtis is largely relegated to a hospital room in Halloween Kills. Her iconic final girl, Laurie Strode, gets no kick-ass action sequences battling perennial boogeyman, Michael Myers. She winces (a lot) from her injuries sustained in the 2018 installment, threatens to go hunt Myers down, and waxes philosophical about the nature of evil—but gets to do nothing beyond these trivialities. Knowing that Halloween Kills is the bridge film between Halloween and next year’s Halloween Ends, one suspects that director David Gordon Green is reserving Curtis’ genre capital for a climatic showdown for the ages in the last film—but that does little to alleviate the feelings that something’s missing from this film; namely, the lynchpin of the Halloween franchise.  

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we can move on and assess Halloween Kills on its Strode-less merits. I’ve watched the film twice; the first time as my ten-year-old self who’s still enthralled by the boogeyman in suburbia, the second time with a more deliberate critical eye. Like any film in the venerable franchise, Halloween Kills is a mixed bag, hitting some of its marks with brutal precision while missing others completely.

The new film begins with a very clever prologue that continues the 1978 film’s storyline—the pursuit and capture of Michael Myers. It involves a young Officer Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and a life-and-death decision that changes the trajectory of far too many lives to count by now and an encounter between Myers and young Lonnie Elam (Tristian Eggerling). It also features an impressive—if improbable—cameo by a character from the original film. Green and company really shine in this sequence, which possesses both the look and feel of Carpenter’s original, and ably set the mood for what’s to come. After this pre-credit sequence, the film picks up where the 2018 film ended: Laurie’s compound engulfed in flames and its intergenerational trio of final girls—an injured Laurie, daughter Karen, and granddaughter Allyson—jostling down the road in the back of a pick-up truck en route to Haddonfield Memorial.

After giving the audience a reasonably plausible explanation for how he survives the fiery deathtrap Laurie rigged for him, a slightly charred and very pissed-off Myers goes on a rampage, slicing and dicing his way back to Haddonfield proper. Myers is angry in this movie—with the kills brutal beyond anything seen in the franchise since Rob Zombie took his one-two crack at it. While Mikey takes out the majority of Haddonfield’s fire department and a drone-flying interracial couple, the audience is re-introduced to the survivors from the original film—Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), nurse Marion (Nancy Stephens), and a grown up Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet)—who gather at a dive-bar for an annual commemoration of the tragic events of Halloween night ’78 and to toast Laurie. Elsewhere, Lonnie’s son and Allyson’s on-the-outs boyfriend Cameron (Dylan Arnold) happens upon a critically injured Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). As the parties converge upon Haddonfield Memorial, news that Myers has somehow survived and is killing his way back to town gets out. The survivors—led by a baseball bat-wielding Tommy—decide that “evil dies tonight!” and a vigilante mob is formed to hunt Myers down once and for all. Otay, Panky.

If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in Halloween Kills, it’s because there is. Green is firing on all cylinders in this one, his many story threads mirroring the growing chaos of the mob outside Haddonfield Memorial. Karen (Judy Greer), who’s given far more than the yeoman’s work she had to do in the last film, is convinced that Myers is coming to the hospital to kill her mother. Allyson (Andi Matichak) ignores her mother’s directive to sit vigil at her grandmother’s bedside, instead arming up and joining Cameron and Lonnie in their hunt for Myers. Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey, also returning from the last film) tries—albeit unsuccessfully—to control the mob tensions about to tragically spill over at the hospital, even getting into verbal fisticuffs with Haddonfield’s former sheriff, Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who’s now head of hospital security. And Michael Myers? He’s making a beeline for his former family home on Lampkin Lane, now inhabited by an affectionately quirky gay couple nicknamed Big John and Little John and played by MADtv’s Michael McDonald and The Mick’s Scott MacArthur. Suffice to say that Myers reaches the ‘ole homestead before the ragtag crew of would-be vigilantes does and is not a fan of the new color scheme. Or charcuterie.

The film’s third act coalesces in a weird, dreamlike, violent denouement—complete with voiceover by Laurie from her hospital room—the sole intention of which seems to be setting up the next film. It’s in this final sequence of events where Green is either going to succumb to the same fate as all previous sequel directors or rise above it in spectacular fashion: Explaining how and why Michael Myers “transcends” human mortality. It’s clear after the Haddonfield mob puts Myers through his paces that he’s something…beyond a mere mortal man. How Green will expound on this in Halloween Ends will ultimately cement his standing in franchise history.

Halloween Kills isn’t a perfect film and suffers from middle-child syndrome, the degree to which won’t be evident until it can be held up within the context of the full trilogy of films. As purely a sequel, it’s briskly paced with some exceptionally well-executed sequences, like the parkside SUV assault, and some less so. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Big John and Little John.) The nostalgia factor here with returning characters is high (hell if I didn’t get misty-eyed when Cyphers first appears on the screen), with surprisingly strong performances from Richards and Longstreet. Matichak, too, is exceptionally good. Disappointingly, Hall’s Tommy Doyle is a misfire. With his bellowing and menacing baseball bat stance, it’s as if he were channeling Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan from The Walking Dead here. Chalk this up to the film’s inconsistent writing, which Green shares with Scott Teems and Danny McBride. For every well-written scene (like the one in which Greer’s character attempts to help one of the escaped Smith’s Grove patients who’s been mistaken by the hospital mob for Myers), there are two that suffer from cringe-worthy dialogue and weird pacing. Even the big twist at the end of the film feels off, illogical in the context of time and what’s going on just outside the Myers house where it occurs. Elsewhere, Green makes at least one surprising choice in which a character most would peg as a goner early on actually survives their Myers encounter, which leaves one wondering if said character will have a part to play in the final film. On the plus side, John Carpenter (with son, Cody, and Daniel Davies) delivers another outstanding soundtrack that manages to sound distinctive while remaining true to his original ’78 score.

Like its predecessor’s commentary on generational trauma, Halloween Kills works better in a broader sense with its depiction of the dangers of mob mentality. When the hive mind overrides rational thought and reason, Green and company postulate here, the resulting consequences can be worse than the original trigger. The denizens of Haddonfield rise up—collectively—to defeat their longtime boogeyman. It’s a noble undertaking to want to reclaim their home, but Green is there to remind us that sometimes evil wins—especially if you’re the lady who brings an honest-to-God iron to the street fight. And, sometimes, there’s collateral damage. Halloween Kills gives us the collateral damage in spades. This Curtis-light entry in Green’s Halloween trilogy may be short on the Strode but it’s heavy on the brutality. Its breakneck violence works best when viewed as the (fast) moving part to a whole not yet fully in view.

Narrative choppiness aside, Halloween Kills ultimately delivers the slasher goods. Michael Myers is the soulless killing machine we’ve all come to know and love over the course of 40+ years in eleven films (with a twelfth on the way) and a body count now over 150. Best advice: Turn off your brain, grab some popcorn, and just ride the waves of slasher nostalgia. Let the armchair critics of the world argue pointlessly over the film’s merits—or lack thereof—and just lose yourself in the seasonal slaughter. There will be plenty of time for more serious discourse and analysis once we see what kind of bow Green slaps on his trilogy with Halloween Ends.

Rest up, Laurie Strode—we expect big things from you in the next one.

Hilarity and Murder Afoot in ‘Knives Out’

There is a sweet spot where the classic whodunit (think: Deathtrap or Gosford Park or The Cat and the Canary or Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) meets comedy (think: Murder by Death or Clue or Private Eyes). And it’s writer-director Rian Johnson’s great affection for and shrewd understanding of that intersection between murder and laughter where audiences will find him in his cinematic wheelhouse, as evidenced by the brilliant Knives Out.

On the morning following his 85^th birthday celebration, bestselling mystery writer Harlan Thrombey is found dead in his study—the victim of a seemingly self-inflicted throat slashing. But when renowned,  idiosyncratic private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up on the scene, it’s quickly established that he suspects foul play, with each member of the immediate—and pathologically dysfunctional—Thrombey family and household staff suspect in his murder. Flanked by local law enforcement—the straight-shooting Lieutenant Elliot (Lakeith Stanfield) and Trooper Wagner (Noah Segan)—Blanc questions each member of the Thrombey clan, during which  murderous motivations aplenty come to light as each spins a web of self-serving lies. Like a well-worn Agatha Christie paperback, clues are uncovered, red herrings misdirect, and the suspect list grows—then narrows—then grows again, with Johnson skillfully turning narrative tables before the big drawing room denouement.

The acting ensemble—a virtual who’s who of several generations of reputable Hollywood actors—includes Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Ana de Armas, Katherine Langford, Riki Lindhome, Jaeden Martell, and the venerable Christopher Plummer, who—despite his early demise—has much to do in the film’s ample flashbacks. Even veteran character actors K Callan and M. Emmet Walsh show up for memorable bit parts, as does actor-director-puppet voice actor Frank Oz in the role of Harlan’s attorney. It’s enormous fun to watch these actors let loose onscreen with each other as evidenced to no greater effect than the “Eat Shit” scene that went viral from the film’s first trailer.

Each member of the cast is in top form—thanks in large part to Johnson’s astute ability to write good characters and snappy dialogue. Craig and de Armas are, arguably, the film’s leads and do much of the heavy lifting, their characters and performances serving as nice contrasts to each other. Craig is all wild-eyed energy and an oversized southern drawl—think a chicken-fried facsimile of Christie’s Hercule Poirot—while de Armas earnestly plays the more subdued moral center of the film as Marta, Harlan’s doe-eyed private nurse and surprising confidant. The rest of the cast, although largely relegated to the kind of supporting roles common to the ensemble whodunit, are each put to good use, with Johnson giving every single actor in his troupe some juicy material to work with—two, in particular.

Evans—in a nice change of pace from the do-gooder action hero roles that have largely defined his career in recent years—goes full-tilt rogue as Harlan’s trust-fund grandson, Ransom. He’s smarmy and snarky, swaggering and sneering throughout the film with gleeful abandon. Curtis also gets to flex her acting range nicely as Harlan’s eldest child, Linda, a driven real estate mogul who envisions herself as family matriarch in the wake of her father’s passing. She’s all business—crisp, and cutting right to the point—yet Curtis manages to use the character’s no-bullshit gravitas to great comedic effect, reminding audiences that she’s a deft comedienne who knows how to deliver a funny line. I’m also going to give a well-deserved shout-out here to Segan, who really proves himself to be a scene-stealer several times in the film, with genuinely funny outbursts that find his giddy superfan to the late mystery writer extraordinaire at odds with the dignified reserve required of his occupation.

From the opening scene—a wide shot of Thrombey’s stately (if not slightly sinister) mansion nestled in an autumnal-hued wooded countryside setting that’s accompanied by Nathan Johnson’s dramatic orchestral score—Johnson aims for a grandiose and archetypal cinematic composition. Setting is integral to Johnson’s visual storytelling, with the Thrombey family mansion dripping in an old-world New England neo-gothic aesthetic that’s almost a character onto itself. “The guy practically lives in a Clue board,” observes Stanfield’s Detective Elliot at one point in the film. Indeed, the house is cluttered with old-fashioned flamboyances like antique dolls and overstuffed furniture, ornate moldings and stained glass windows, and a writer’s study on the attic floor that will make any author—established or aspiring—drool. There’s even a spectacular chair made of knives that not only illustrates the film’s title but perhaps not-so-subtly suggests the deadly power grab at play à la Game of Thrones. Hats off to production designer David Crank, aided to immeasurable extent by David Schlesinger’s impeccable set décor, for a set design that really pops and saturates the film with much of its visual ambiance.

But the biggest star of Knives Out is Johnson’s masterful, slyly subversive script, which transcends the typical wink-wink, slapstick genre spoof. It’s fiendishly funny while remaining true to its classical drawing-room mystery roots, with a cunning labyrinth of a plot that never weighs it down or insults the audience’s ability to keep up. Johnson expertly toys with his audience’s narrative expectations—especially in the film’s second act when the reading of Harlan’s will drops a bombshell and the proverbial knives come out—allowing him an opportunity to layer in some razor-sharp commentary on upper-class entitlement and Trumpian politics. In one of the film’s funnier satiric threads, for example, the Thrombeys inability to remember Marta’s Latin American country of origin—despite their demonstrative declarations that she’s a member of the family—cuts to the bone of current national discourse on immigration. That Johnson’s able to take such shrewd political potshots without the heavy-handedness that might otherwise detract from the simple pleasures of the film’s popcorn entertainment pedigree is the true masterstroke of Knives Out.

The game is afoot, dear readers, and in Knives Out it’s best to surrender to being a pawn masterfully manipulated by Johnson’s ingenuity and adept juggling of his byzantine plot. By removing the stodgy seriousness of the standard whodunit without sacrificing its familiar conventions, he repositions and deconstructs the genre without descending into parody or losing sight of the source material that inspired this supersized romp. In the end, though, Johnson proves that people—like a poison-filled syringe—can be just as toxic.

Curtis Anchors 'An Acceptable Loss'

It’s hard to compete with the real-life drama coming out of Washington D.C. these days, but Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss attempts to do just that with this thought-provoking political thriller in which decisions made with the noblest of intentions still help pave the road to hell.   

Former top U.S. security adviser Elizabeth "Libby" Lamm (Tika Sumpter) is a woman haunted by just such a decision—one made during her tenure working for and at the bequest of then-Vice President Rachel Burke (Jamie Lee Curtis). As draftswoman of a plan that led to America dropping a nuclear bomb on a Syrian city that resulted in mass causalities numbering in the tens of thousands, Libby knows that parts of an influential report that led to the aerial strike against a suspected terrorist stronghold were falsified. And, although she initially fulfills her role as a dutiful soldier by helping Burke convince the American public of the legality of the administration’s actions, her conscience is getting the best of her as the full ramifications of her decision play out in the ensuing five-year period. Reduced to a moral and political pariah, Libby takes a teaching position at a Chicago university where her very presence is protested by students and some faculty alike despite the support she receives from the kindly Dr. Willa Sipe (THE VISIT’s Deanna Dunagan). In a scene-stealing cameo, SEX AND THE CITY’s David Eigenberg—here as an unnamed drunken colleague—confronts Libby at a faculty mixer, demanding to know how many innocents she helped murder. It’s no surprise then when a guilt-ridden Libby starts scribbling down a full account of what went down leading up to execution of the Burke Doctrine on yellow legal pads in anticipation of owning up and coming clean. The convenient fact that her father (the always-solid character actor Clarke Peters) is a prominent newspaper editor seems like the logical means to do so. 

But—like all good political thrillers—there are complications. Libby’s take the form of a sullen graduate student named Martin (Ben Tavassoli) who’s stalking her for reasons that are as apparent as his obvious national origin and her old boss, who’s now gearing up for a run to become a second term President. Thrown into the mix is Adrian (Jeff Hephner), Burke's ruthless chief of staff and Libby’s former lover, who makes it clear during his own surveillance activities that Libby is either with them or against them. Cue ominous music. 

Marketing tags are everything, and An Acceptable Loss—as political thriller—will come up short for some since two-thirds of the film is decidedly more political drama, a key distinction. In fact—although Chappelle (who also penned the script) ably ups the thriller quotient in the film’s third act with twists and turns that deliver a strong one-two punch—it’s what precedes the action-packed finale that provides both the film’s strongest asset and biggest missed opportunity: The relationship between Libby and Burke. Indeed, the best moments in the film come via flashbacks between Sumpter and Curtis’s characters—an escalation of the power dynamic between a woman in power who’s seeking more and a woman just beginning to ascend the ranks who sees the real possibilities ahead of her. At first, Burke makes a passionate, hardline case for what she wants to do to the reluctant Libby, attempting to justify the collateral damage by appealing to the younger woman’s sense of “for the greater good” and patriotism; later, we see Burke’s steely resolve as she manipulates Libby using guilt and fear to bring her around. These are magnificent scenes—especially for Curtis—in which the power dynamic between educated women in positions of authority and influence is explored.  Unfortunately for An Acceptable Loss, these scenes and that driving dynamic are relegated to these expository sidebars when they had, in fact, the potential to drive the entire film into interesting and far more dramatic territory.

Sumpter, although appealing as an actor, seems miscast here. At first I thought it was an age thing—that she might have been too young to be playing a seasoned political advisor—but the actress is actually approaching forty, just the right age for the character and her level of accomplishment. Tavassoli, as Martin, is engrossing despite not being given much to do through two-thirds of the film but skulk around Libby’s empty house and act creepy. When he is given something meaningful to do, he ably rises to the occasion. Curtis is the crown jewel of the ensemble and the best part of An Acceptable Loss, taking what could have been a one-note villain role and layering her character’s outward fierce determination and ambition with a tragic sense of misguided nobility and, later in the film, even a note of remorse. It’s interesting that while Christian Bale is garnering accolades for his portrayal of Dick Cheney in another film, Curtis may embody the former VP’s hawkish calculations and puppet-master political persona even better here.

Curtis has entered an interesting phase of her career where her maturity grounds her performances in a captivating gravitas, elevating her dramatic chops into the provinces of the Frances McDormands and Glenn Closes of the acting world. Her chilling portrayal of a politico hell-bent on seeing her vision through at all costs—her reasoning for changing U.S. policy regarding first-strike attacks alone should resonate against the backdrop of today’s geopolitics—is easily one of the best performances of her career. Yes, we know she’s a veteran scream queen and an accomplished comedienne; but let’s hope that the roles coming her way in her own third act take full advantage of this newly-engaged aptitude for drama.   

Watching An Acceptable Loss, one can easily lament Chappelle’s misdirection in opting for straight-forward political intrigue over a nuanced character study of two powerful women—one in a position of authority, the other in a position of influence—and how the subtleties of this power dynamic impact and affect the world around them, but Curtis’s first-rate performance should make that bitter pill easier to swallow. Come for Curtis, stay for Curtis, and be surprised by the third-act tricks Chappelle’s got up his sleeve.

Revisiting Haddonfield in 'Halloween'

It seems that the promotional machine behind the new Halloween hasn’t stopped since star Jamie Lee Curtis took to Twitter in September of last year to announce that Laurie Strode was headed back to Haddonfield. From the earliest teaser photo of Curtis standing on a leaf-strewn porch in the same babysitter garb she donned in the ’78 film with nemesis Michael Myers looking on, the franchise’s sizable fan base has—quite literally—gone along for the ride from pre-production to premiere. Momentum grew in earnest after the first trailer dropped and reached fever pitch after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The promotional buzz has been deafening, and Curtis has so often and so eloquently now articulated both her gratitude for the career that Carpenter’s original gave her and the new film’s feminist timeliness in the #MeToo era that diehard fans could probably recite her answers to interview questions like lines from a script.

Logically, with such buildup comes expectation. And meeting those expectations would be a monumental task for any director of any film—let alone an unproven genre director who’s boldly taken on an iconic horror franchise with a fiercely loyal (and hyper critical) fanbase. Even with the blessing of the film’s original director and co-screenwriter and the all-in participation of, arguably, the most popular and recognizable scream queen in film history, success in the age of the armchair critic and Internet mob rule will be an uphill battle for David Gordon Green’s Halloween. For as eager as fans were for a new addition to the venerable franchise, they’re also loyalists and experienced genre veterans. Just as film scholars have come around to give Carpenter’s Halloween its rightful due, horror movie fans who grew up on the ’78 film and its countless knockoffs have hardened, grizzled a bit, and, perhaps, become slightly more discerning in their tastes.

The last time we visited Haddonfield, Michael Myers got a backstory, someone else was playacting Laurie Strode, and fans were polarized—like Clinton versus Trump-level polarized. Indeed, Rob Zombie’s revisionist take on Carpenter’s source material in 2007, and then again in 2009, is still the stuff of much debate and deliberation—and sometimes raw emotion. Prior to that, we endured the largely unwatchable Resurrection outing in 2002—helmed by the original 1982 sequel’s director, Rick Rosenthal—that saw Laurie Strode die within the first ten minutes of the movie and Myers go on to terrorize Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks. That trainwreck was preceded by the decidedly more watchable—and arguably one of the best—H20 installment. That film came 20 years after the original and took on much of the narrative that Green’s Halloween takes on two decades even further in—how does Laurie Strode fare after the fateful events of Halloween night, 1978? Going back even further than Halloween: H20, there were another four direct sequels to Carpenter’s film and one weirdly standalone film when Carpenter and Halloween co-writer/producer Debra Hill had thoughts of the series branching into an anthology series centered around the titular holiday—long before American Horror Story revolutionized the anthology concept. The Halloween franchise now consists of eleven films and stands—pre-release of the 2018 outing—as the fourth highest-grossing domestic horror franchise at approximately $668 million.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but David Gordon Green—who shares co-writing credit with Danny McBride and Jeff Farley on the new Halloween’s script—had his work cut out for him long before the cameras rolled. History, expectation, and nostalgia are strong forces in the universe of fandom. So, how’d he do? Let’s examine.

The first smart choice Green makes—and, ironically, his most controversial—is to fashion the new Halloween as a direct sequel to the ’78 film. That’s right: No hospital massacre, no sibling ties, no Jamie Lloyd, no faked death and headmistress gig, no fall off the sanitarium roof. Just Laurie sobbing on the floor declaring to Dr. Loomis “It was the bogeyman” and a forty-year flashforward. Interestingly, it’s not the first time the franchise retconned a timeline; H20 jettisoned the events of the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. This retroactive continuity allows Green and company to reset the clock and imagine a new series of events not mired in the myriad inconsistencies and questionable creative decisions of previous films in the series. And—color me crazy—but I find it vaguely comforting to know that Nurse Chambers never met the end of Michael’s butcher knife after all and picture her chain-smoking on a porch somewhere with a faithful Golden Retriever at her feet while she waits for a carload of grandbabies to visit(!). 

In the 2018 version of Halloween, we’re re-introduced to the two central figures in the series—Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Myers is revealed to have been apprehended and captured after the events of ’78, locked up in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium ever since. For all intents and purposes, his life and murder spree ended as if someone hit the pause button. Conversely, Laurie has lived forty years’ worth of life—she’s married and divorced twice, had a daughter, and now has a granddaughter—but it’s been a life irrevocably altered and affected by what’s come to be largely forgotten and relegated to an anecdotal footnote in Haddonfield’s history. Myers may be the one physically imprisoned, but Laurie’s been mentally held captive by the trauma of “the Babysitter Murders” for four long decades.  We see the toll her PTSD has taken—from her estrangement from the daughter taken away from her to the labyrinthine compound of traps, triggers, and panic rooms she’s rigged together. She’s a woman lying in wait, confident in her intuition that Myers will come for her again—even if everyone else from the local townsfolk to her own family have come to discount such certitude as the ravings of a damaged woman. She’s like the survivalist version of the neighborhood crazy cat lady.

Green chooses to re-introduce us to Myers first during a gorgeously shot sequence in the enclosed courtyard of Smith’s Grove. Two ill-fated British true-crime podcasters are there to interview him on the day (aka Halloween eve) he’s to be transferred to an out-of-state maximum-security facility. We’re introduced to his new psychiatrist, Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer)—or the “new Loomis” as Laurie snarkily dubs him later—who’s a poor stand-in for Donald Pleasance. After inciting everyone but Myers with his old mask and histrionic pleas to “SAY SOMETHING, MICHEAL!”, the podcaster pair set off—post-opening credits—to interview the lone survivor of Myers' murderous rampage. Deep in the woods, locked behind sliding gates, steel-reinforced doors, and more deadbolts than you can count, we get our first look at this older, damaged version of Laurie, who’s apparently as short on patience as she is on cash.

We eventually meet the other key players, including daughter Karen (Judy Greer), son-in-law Ray (Toby Russ), granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), and Allyson’s assorted besties—Vicky (Virginia Gardner), Vicky’s boyfriend Dave (Miles Robbins), her boyfriend Cameron <wink-wink> Elam (Dylan Arnold), and Cameron’s best bud Oscar (Drew Scheid). Introductions are cursory at best because—as horror diehards know well—cast of characters in a slasher film is little more than code for body count. And Green doesn’t disappoint in that facet of the film.

Laurie is barely finished with her Annie Oakley-style target practice (complete with every leftover mannequin from the prop closet of Tourist Trap it seems) when Michael’s transfer goes not-shockingly-but-necessarily awry. Carpenter’s updated iconic score kicks in and Myers is back on the streets of Haddonfield, slicing his way through town before an incoherent, annoyingly convenient, and completely out-of-left-field twist delivers him to Laurie’s well-lit doorstep to kick off the film’s third—and most satisfying—act. Suffice to say that it takes a village—or at least three generations of well-armed women anyway—to bring Myers’ reign to its simultaneously inevitable and questionable end. It’s kickass, well-paced, and loads of fun; the audience I saw it with was screaming and cheering.

Curtis delivers the goods and is the heartbeat of the film. This is a movie about a victim weary of being a casualty of her shared history with her aggressor. Laurie has painstakingly prepared and patiently waited for forty years—at great personal sacrifice—to reclaim her narrative, and Curtis’ performance reflects that well-worn resolve. She’s nothing short of a marvel—particularly in a scene where she waits outside the sanitarium in her pick-up truck, gun in one hand, booze in another, and watches until Myers is loaded onto the bus and pulls away. Her face conveys everything the character has suffered and lost—pain, rage, vulnerability.

There are three standouts in the supporting cast: First, Andi Matichak who does a competent job essentially portraying Laurie’s younger self. As Allyson, Matichak embodies the quintessential high school girl—an updated Laurie Strode, if you will—with enough presence to be memorable without overshadowing the character she’s modeled after. Although this Halloween doesn’t give her the screen time that the original gave Curtis, she still manages to leave her mark. The second standout is veteran character actor Will Patton. As Haddonfield’s current lawman Officer Frank Hawkins, Patton is given a sizable role on point with that of Charles Cyphers, who played Haddonfield’s original sheriff in the 1978 film. He’s believable and likable and really lends solid support, especially in his scenes with Curtis as you see his reluctant transition from someone who fell squarely into the camp who dismissed Laurie as an eccentric to someone who now—with equal reluctance—realizes that she was right all along. Finally, Judy Greer gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Laurie’s adult daughter, who herself has been the victim of generational trauma. On the surface, it first appears that Greer is given yeoman’s work here but watch a little closer and you’ll see an exquisitely subtle rendering of a daughter grappling with the necessity of self-preservation against the strength of familial bonds. It also doesn’t hurt that Greer gets, arguably, the best line and cheer-worthy moment in the movie.

Overall, Green delivers the requisite slasher goods. The film’s post-Myers’ escape pacing is spot-on, and the body count is suitably upsized from the film’s 1978 counterpart, which is cleverly acknowledged as being tame by today’s standards in the film. He does an exceptionally good job of liberally sprinkling in Easter eggs for the franchise’s faithful—almost two dozen by count—without pulling the new Halloween out of the present and into the past. This reviewer isn’t sure that the casual viewer (or even the diehard fan for that matter) will realize what a tricky balancing act this is. After all, with forty years of history, it would be a missed opportunity not to pay tribute in some way to what precedes Green’s film; conversely, done too obviously or without careful regard for tone and pacing, viewers could be pulled right out of the film. Wisely, Green limits most of his Easter eggs to visual references—sheets hanging on a clothesline, familiar rubber Halloween masks, a closet with louvered doors, a memorable tombstone, a hastily drank glass of wine—and eschews actor cameos (with the brilliant exception of one vocal cameo by a member of the original film’s cast). Sure, I still think Kyle Richards’s adult Lindsey Wallace bumping into Curtis’ character on the street while trick-or-treating with her kids would have been brilliant, but I give Green credit for resisting the easy and obvious stunt cameos.

Again, with forty years investment in the franchise—its characters, its storylines, its hits and misses—it would be easy to nitpick the hell out of the new Halloween. After all, who knows the film better, more intimately than its loyal fanbase whose affection for the series rivals the generational affection of any sports fan for a particular team? I’ll limit my criticisms to those I felt actually detracted from the film—as made—versus any personal projection of what should have been done/included.

My chief grievance is the film’s uneven editing. There are scenes—important scenes like the one with Curtis, solo, in her truck—that are cut so abruptly that they’re jarring. It leaves the finished film feeling like there was too much to cram into some subjective studio-mandated running time constraint. No doubt the film’s future home video release may shed some light on what was cut and how—or even if—the trimmed footage changed the movie’s original footprint. My second beef is the inclusion of too many unnecessary characters—chief among them Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey) whose wholly pointless presence seems purposed only to fill an arbitrary diversity quotient and whose ridiculous cowboy hat to remind us that we’re in the Midwest. Third, Green’s film has been woefully shortchanged by the film’s marketing. Too many trailers showing way too much footage (including some footage that obviously fell victim to the editor’s hacksaw). Forget what I said a moment ago about ruminating on the should’ve, could’ve, and would’ve. The studio should have literally let Curtis talk the movie up the way she has with virtually nothing but perhaps a single trailer with flashes of images. Less would have been infinitely more here. Audiences know—or can easily deduce—the entire storyline going in. That lends itself to the problem of expectation mentioned earlier. Truly brilliant marketing would have been to let audiences walk in blind, having only Curtis’ well-articulated treatise about post-generational trauma in their heads as they settled into their multiplex seat to watch the movie.  

Lastly, and ideally, I would have liked to have seen a new Halloween that was relentlessly grim and frightening. Yes, I know in the post-Scream era that horror films—especially slashers—are required to infuse humor in between the murder and mayhem. But why? As films like The Descent and The Witch and The Babadook and Hereditary have shown us, it’s ok to just go for the jugular and scare the living shit out of an audience. Horror audiences are a durable bunch who don’t need chuckles sandwiched between the jump scares. Halloween, circa 1978, worked so well and has endured because Carpenter understood that. Any laughter elicited was nervous laughter. Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace added to the tension with their childhood fears, not detracted from it with precocious one-liners like (the admittedly adorable) Jibrail Nantambu’s Julian does. His Webster-like comedy schtick just undermines what should have been a horrific, traumatizing scene.

And there you have it: David Gordon Green’s Halloween is an enjoyable, if imperfect, roller-coaster ride that does what it sets out to. Buoyed by a franchise-best performance from Curtis, some impressive set design and cinematography that captures the essence of the titular holiday, and an altered timeline that simplifies matters and brings the proceedings back to the spirit of Carpenter’s original, the new Halloween is a respectably solid addition to the Michael Myers mythos. Like time proved ultimately kind to Carpenter’s original—hey, even The New York Times recently gave the original film a proper review after a forty-year oversight—years and endless analysis will ultimately give Green’s film its rightful ranking within the franchise canon. For now, go see it—have a laugh, scream a little, cheer a lot. There’s something cathartic about watching a woman long-scorned taking names and kicking ass in this revitalized feminist age.

Plus, it’s Halloween—everyone’s entitled to one good scare, no?

SCREAM QUEENS: A Bloody Mess of Good Fun

Comedy and horror are two distinct genres, each with its own formulas and structures, devices and characteristic stylings. Blending the two is tricky stuff and, inevitably, one genre proves dominant when this hybrid model is attempted. In the SCARY MOVIE franchise, for example, comedy is the dominant genre at play, with the laughs outnumbering – even overshadowing – any frights. Conversely, in the films of the SCREAM franchise, scares trump the laughs in equal measure. 

So when Ryan Murphy, then best known for the straightforward comedy GLEE and upfront horror of the AMERICAN HORROR STORY anthology series, announced a comedy-horror anthology called SCREAM QUEENS back in October of 2014, the passionate pop culture junkie himself had to know that successfully pulling off the feat was a tall order at the outset. Then again, maybe not, as Murphy seemed to think – with arguable arrogance or naiveté – that he was creating something new here with frequent collaborators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan.

Expectations were high. Murphy – who had by that time developed both a passion and a penchant for successfully casting actresses of a certain age – wooed perennial scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis back to the small screen amidst negotiations of limited time on the show’s first season New Orleans set. Anticipation was also high because Murphy had proven himself adept in both genres. As the FOX and Murphy PR machines launched massive amounts of advance press – including a much-touted and successful dual AHS-SCREAM QUEENS panel at San Diego Comic Con – SCREAM QUEENS promised to be a slam-dunk. 

SCREAM QUEENS bowed on September 22nd, 2015, to decidedly mixed reviews from critics and (seemingly) lackluster ratings, attracting a disappointing 4.04 million viewers while lagging in same-night numbers behind shows on CBS, NBC, and ABC. Being beat by THE MUPPETS reboot didn’t ease what must have been Murphy’s initial pain. But Nielsen’s first delayed-viewing snapshot of the season would tell a different story, with SCREAM QUEENS realizing a 65% gain – the night’s biggest in both raw numbers and percentage according to Nielsen’s “live plus-3” estimates.

As reported by VARIETY, SCREAM QUEENS would prove to be an example of modern-day viewing habits, with only a fraction of the show’s audience watching live when it aired and viewership increasing by 189% when time-shifted viewing and multi-platform viewers for the entire season were factored in. The inaugural season ended up bringing in a total audience of about 8.1 million viewers, no doubt aided by the buzz-worthy show’s sizable social media presence.

Ratings and critical notice aside, the first season of SCREAM QUEENS was a mixed bag. The plot for the show’s thirteen-episode first season focuses on a string of gory murders plaguing the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority at fictional Wallace University, triggered by events linked to a twenty-year-old murder mystery and cover-up. Curtis plays Dean Cathy Munsch, nemesis to the sorority’s president, Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts). Dean Munsch wants to see the snobby sorority system dismantled; Chanel wants to rule over it with a Prada-coiffed iron fist. Interrupting this battle of feminist wills is a red devil-masked serial killer who dispatches at least one hapless cast member each episode in increasingly outlandish ways.

Murphy and company wear their horror influences proudly on their sleeves with the elaborate murder set pieces here harkening back to the high camp sensibility of the giallo films of the mid- to late-70’s. Highlights of the pilot alone include a maid getting her face melted off in deep fryer, a prank involving a spray-tan tank spiked with hydrochloric acid, and the Red Devil tooling around on a lawnmower decapitating a sorority sister buried up to her neck in the sorority house lawn. Visually, the show is a treat with garish colors and flamboyant couture that give the gruesome proceedings a highly-stylized aesthetic.

Cast is uniformly excellent, with Murphy’s knack for attracting talent on full display. Roberts seems born to play the uber-bitchy Chanel, with Billie Lourde (real-life daughter of Carrie Fisher and granddaughter of Debbie Reynolds), Abigail Breslin, and pop ingénue Ariana Grande ably rounding out her clique of Chanels. Keke Palmer (in a breakout role here) plays sassy KKT pledge Zayday Williams, while Skyler Samuels plays fellow pledge Grace Gardner, who’s drawn into a Nancy Drew-like amateur detective role as the murderous goings-on escalate. Oliver Hudson (replacing originally cast Joe Manganiello) plays Samuels’ alumni father, while Diego Boneta takes on boyfriend-sidekick duties as journalism student Pete Martinez.

On the fraternity side, Glen Powell emerges as a real breakout star playing the narcissistic dumb jock Chad Radwell, President of the Dickie Dollar Scholars; pop hunk Nick Jonas as Boone, his gay best friend and fraternity brother; English actor Lucien Laviscount as the appropriately named Earl Grey, and YouTube twins Aaron and Austin Rhodes as Roger and Dodger, respectively. Niecy Nash is the genuine scene-stealer throughout the show’s first season, her uproarious portrayal of skittish security guard Denise Hemphill marked by over-the-top shrieking, screaming, and zippy one-liners.

Interestingly, the show’s first season both succeeds and fails in the same key creative aspect: the writing. With writing duties shared and handed off between Murphy, Falchuk, and Brennan (or MFB, abbreviated), one could reasonably expect some problems with consistency. But what we get with the first installment of SCREAM QUEENS is painstaking attention to detail when it comes to character dialogue and an overall disjointed larger narrative.  MFB have an uncanny knack for dialogue, and their work here on SCREAM QUEENS is exemplary with lines that snap, crackle, and pop with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. Roberts’ lines, in particular, are razor-sharp with snarky, cringe-worthy political incorrectness. Her petulant coffee-shop rant over an incorrectly made pumpkin spice latte boils over with brilliant social commentary on millennials and entitlement. Curtis, meanwhile, is handed lovingly-crafted monologues that anchor the show’s abject silliness in weightier themes of feminism, politics, and the inherent evils of social hierarchies.

Plot-wise, SCREAM QUEENS maintains strict adherence to the slasher formula while borrowing heavily from Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE model, complete with a sizable body count that slowly narrows down the identity of the killer through a bloody process of attrition and dramatic drawing room-like denouement. One would think that such a solid (if clichéd) narrative structure would lend itself to an easily sustainable level of coherence – but it doesn’t. MFB, while giddily constructing tongue-twisting lines of deliciously glib dialogue for their characters to spew at each other, quickly lose sight of what matters most in a murder mystery – plot. The narrative zigs and zags all over the place, with illogical twists and turns that smack of convenience. It’s as if MFB use the parody element of SCREAM QUEENS as an excuse to lazily eschew any and all semblances of logic.

The first season of SCREAM QUEENS ultimately wallows in its own absurdity, with cartoon pacing and overblown…well, everything. It’s gaudy, glitzy excess in every sense of the word. But it’s deceptively mindless fun, with an underlying satirical brilliance that peeks through its garish coating in snippets of spot-on pop culture deconstruction.

Halfway through the first season, it was obvious to most that SCREAM QUEENS would enjoy a single-season run. Viewers were torn – too macabre for comedy fans, too silly for the horror crowd – and ratings were dropping. The show would finish its inaugural season on December 8th, 2015, with 2.53 million viewers, losing 1.51 million of its screaming queens along the way. Although Curtis garnered a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance in a Television Series by an Actress – Musical or Comedy (which she’d lose to newcomer Rachel Bloom), and the show won both a People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Comedy and a Critics’ Choice Television Award for Most Exciting New Series, cancellation seemed all but a certainty.

But Hollywood is a weird little machine that plays by its own set of rules – and Ryan Murphy clearly boasts some serious say-so around town. It was announced in January that SCREAM QUEENS would indeed be back for another go-round.

Five episodes into the show’s sophomore season, SCREAM QUEENS seems to be finding its tonal footing. MFB have opted to set the new season in a hospital for medical oddities, already seeming a more authentic match for the show’s Grand Guignol-style of madcap macabre. Curtis is back as Cathy Munsch – now an honorary PhD who buys the hospital for as-yet unknown reasons – and MFB, wisely, have made her more front and center (likely to do with the more Curtis-convenient Los Angeles set). Niecy Nash also returns as Denise Hemphill, now an FBI Special Agent, but no less crass and smart-alecky. Zayday, along with the surviving members of the Chanels, are all back as medical students, with the ageless John Stamos and (thoroughly unappealing) Taylor Lautner joining the ensemble as doctors. Lea Michelle, whose first season deeds have finally caught up to her, is also back as Hester, now hysterically Hannibal Lecter-like, as is Glen Powell’s even-funnier himbo scene-stealer Chad Radwell. Kirstie Alley rounds out the second season cast as Ingrid Hoffel, the stern hospital administrator.     

To differentiate between a first season that failed to meet expectations that the advance hype promised and the second season reboot, Murphy and company have wisely opted to visually distinguish SCREAM QUEENS, version 2.0, from its predecessor. While the highly-stylized aesthetic that made the first season such a visual treat to watch is maintained, the show has ditched the bubblegum pink and red hues that colored fictional Wallace University and the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority and adopted an alien-green and blue color palette to tint its dingy hospital interiors. The visuals pop amid the lurid, nightmarish colors.

More importantly, MFB have seemingly settled into a creative comfort zone with the writing, opting for ghoulish comedy versus humorous horror. It’s a small distinction some might dismiss as semantics, but it’s key here. It’s no longer horror trying to be edgy with the humor; it’s comedy trying to be edgy with the horror. The dialogue still snaps, and MFB continue to write deliciously sharp soliloquies for Curtis.

Unfortunately, it may be too little, too late for the millions of initial viewers who gave up on the series. Ratings for the second season premiere were down by almost 50%, with World Series and election night preemptions doing little to keep attention-deficit viewers in place and focused in subsequent weeks on the macabre mayhem at the CURE Institute.

Prediction: SCREAM QUEENS is headed for almost-certain cancellation following its sophomore run. Murphy will move Curtis over to AMERICAN HORROR STORY in a much-ballyhooed return to her roots or to one of his other properties, depending upon the themes of future installments of AMERICAN CRIME STORY and FEUD. I’m already squealing in anticipation of shared AHS scenes between Curtis and Kathy Bates, so I’m rooting firmly for the former scenario. Roberts will also return to the AHS fold, and it’s not the last of Powell or Michelle we’ll see in the Murphy universe either. SCREAM QUEENS, the concept and the show, will go down with a lackluster legacy of having more style than substance, likely being better remembered in the Curtis filmography versus television history itself.