Page 6-Sunday, December 10, 1978-The Michigan Daily Tours benefit hospital 'Halloween': Trick or treat? The Hoover Mansion at 2015 Washte- naw, a 23-room mansion decorated by local interior designers to benefit the University's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, will remain open to the public through Dec 17, officials announced. During the month of - December, the mansion has been decorated for Christmas. The design showcase is sponsored by the Pediatric Women's Group of Mott Hospital. Admission proceeds will help provide an expanded intensive care unit for care of critically ill children. The mansion will be open for in- dividual and group tours through Dec. 17. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday. The man- sion will be open on Wednesdays to 9 p.m. and on Sundays from 1 to 6 p.m., according to organizers. COMEDY DOUBLE FEATURE THE WRONG BOX (7OOonly) PETER SELLERS, JOHN MILLS and SIR RALPH RICHARDSON star in this farce of two brothers waiting to inherit an incredible fortune upon the death of one or * the other. Set in Victorian England. MY MAN GODFREY (AT9:05) WILLIAM POWELL, CAROLE LOMBARD and ALICE BRADY star in one of the truly great screwball comedies of the 1930's. During this depression take-off Powell is ruined by the stock market crash but makes a comeback when hired as a butler. TUES: Olivier's HENRY V By CHRISTOPHER POTTER What makes a good horror movie? That just may be the most arduous question in the entire lexicon of film criticism. It is a subject that effectively cuts across all genres and cults, from the a teurists to the literarians. It walks a unique, perennial tightrope skiringing camp, religious offen- siveness and psychiatric. oneupman- ship. Just what cryptic quality has caused Psycho to unflaggingly scare people out of their wits for two decades now, while a film like The Haunting, on its plot's surface a far more macabre and menacing exercise in terror, has long since been banished to the cinematic memory vaults? Volumes upon volumes have been written on what constitutes the perfect formula horror technique: The seen vs. the unseen, the slow-build-to-shock-payoff (The Birds) vs. the start-to-finish frenzy (Night of the Living Dead), domestic vs. exotic locale, and so on. Yet when all has been written and spoken and shuddered at, the essence of fear remains so intensely subjective that the perfect literaly- visual system for defining it simply does not exist. I CAN'T THINK of any genre that can elicit such dismetrically opposed audience responses to the same sub- ject. The super-cult Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves me bored and un- moved; yet a Canadian film called Black Christmas scared the daylights out of me last year, while most of the sparse audiences attending the picture were derisively hooting it down. Or wit- ness the reactiabs of Newsweek's David Anson and The Detroit Free Press's Susan Stark to a pair of current horror flicks, Magic and Halloween-Anson despised the former, waxed wildly ec- static over the latter, while Stark's reaction was precisely the opposite. In short, the horror mythos is so CINIEMA GUILD Both shows for $2.50 One show for $1.50 OLD ARCH AUD The U-M SCHOOL OF MUSIC PRESENTS THE UNIVERSITY CIF MCHIGAN k FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8at 8PM SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9 at 8 PM SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10 at 3 PM POWER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS PREMIERE PERFORMANCES OF WORKS BY GUEST ARTISTS GUS SOLOMONSJR. (performing in his own work) e LAURA GLENN (funded in part by the Nat'l Endowment for the Arts) e GARY LUND Special performance of Jose Limon's THE EXILES . Tickets available at the P. T. P. Box Office in the Michigan League Mon.-Fri. 10 am-I pm, 2 pm-5 pm Power Center Box Office opens 2 hours before each concert idiosyncratic that a critic can rely only on his own gut-level phobias, then try to combine his primal reactions with his general notions of good filmmanship. BU SUCH criteria, writer-director John Carpenter's Halloween breaks about even, displaying both the un- shackled inspiration and the low-budget pitfalls typically inherent in small, in- dependent productions. Carpenter, whose brief career has thus far been limited to the grade-B realm, is clearly aiming for more with Halloween than the standard drive-in shock schlock. He periodically succeeds in limited, oc- casionally inspired fashion, yet one need only compare Halloween with George Romero's recent baroque, marvelously complex vampire flick Martin to realize the general poverty of ideas that ultimately drags Carpenter's work into cliche. The film begins brilliantly, consisting of one long, calmly terrifying tracking shot. It is Halloween night, 1963. Through the camera's eye, we zero in slowly on a quiet, warm-lit house on a small-town residential street. We soon realize we're watching the action through a character's point of view, though whose we cannot tell. Carpenter pans by the windows, revealing two teenagers making out on a sofa. The pair shortly retire to an upstairs bedroom, asthe camera continues on a stealthy, maddeningly slow trend around the side of the house to the back yard. EVENTUALLY WE hear the boyfriend take his leave out the front door, and our unseen protagonist proceeds through thesrear entrance into the darkened kitchen. We see a hand reach out, lift a large butcher knife from a drawer, then proceed toward the stairway. Carpenter dazzlingly or- chetrates our fear of the unknown as the camera moves up the barely lit staris to the accompaniment of ab- solute silence, down a dim hallways and into a bedroom where the half-naked girl sits brushing her hair. She only has time to shout "Michael!" as we see the hand raise the knife, then quietly impassively stab her again and again. The grisly :eed done, we then backtrack down the stairs in the same calm, methodical fashion, retreating out into the front yard. Sounds of a car door closing, j parental exclamations of "Michael, what's happened?" Then wham!-the camera pulls sharply back to reveal a six-year-old boy in a clown suit, his face expressionless, the bloody knife still clutched in his hand. Carpenter con- tinues to pan farther and farther back, illuminating the disproportionate mon- strosity eminating from that small, angelic-looking figure standing in the yard. It is an ingeniously, disorienting moment-Manson or a Jonestown sud- denly made terrifyingly plausible. UNFORTUNATELY, that sequence constitutes the shock highlight of Halloween, and we've stil got nine- tenths of the film to go. It is now fifteen years later: Michael, turned 21 and confined, since the murder, to a mental institution, makes his escape on a rain- swept night just as his psychiatrist (Donald Pleasance) is making final arrangements to have him permanen- tly committed. Stealing the doctor's car, Michael streaks off back to his as young neighbors and prime objects of Michael's murderous intent, exuding a down-home naturalness distorted into madness by film's climax. Through the course of the picture Michael never speaks, indeed never shows his face un- til almost the very end, adding a mythic luminescence to his already inhuman aura. YET ANY SUCCESSFUL film, even of the horror genre, needs a minimum of logic to proper it, and Halloween of- ten frustratingly fails the test. It simply Nancy Loomis is pictured in a scene from "Halloween," a low-budget thriller currently at the State Theater. Get the Christmas Spirit! SING CHRISTMAIS CAROLS with TIlE U-M MEN'S GLEE CLUB TUESDiY DECEMBER 1Zth Beginning at 3:00 P.M. ONTHE DIAG hometown to reinitiate his murderous predilections. The following night just, happens to be-you guess it-Halloween. The picture's essentially threadbare script now becomes painfully apparent. Our maniac protagonist once again 'stalks teenage girls while the doctor, declaiming balefully about the "ab- solute evil" incarnate in Michael, at- tempts frantically-and quite incom- petently-to track him down. That's all there is to the plot, and the many aesthetic and functional pyrotechnics Carpenter " musters up just aren't enough to carry the film through the next hour and a half. HE MAKES A nice try, though. There are some truly exquisite elements in Halloween: Carpenter masterfully utilizes the mosaic of small-town cor- nerstone America menaced by a mon- sterous, malignant force from without.t He bathes the screen in slow, sweeping pans of passive tree-lined streets, quiety simmering from day into night. Carpenter wisely confines his grisly tale to a 24-hour period and his prime locale to a single residential block. There he zeroes in with the patience of a master, allowing tensions to build with an excruciating languidness to an inevitable apocalypse. Jamie Lee Cur- tis and Nancy Loomis perform credibly defies plausability that village authorities would refrain from infor- ming its citizenry that a psychopath is on the loose (Michael's doctor inex- plicably asks the local cops not to publicize it), especially on the one night of the year every child in town is out trick-or-treating. Community protec- tion seems to consist solely on a lone patrol car forlornly cruising the streets while the doctor skulks furtively around Michael's childhood house in the totally mistaken hope that he'll return it to (though admittedly no one can skulk quite as well as Donald Pleasance). Carpenter's mostly adroit editing now and then leaves much to be desired. One moment his town appears in full summer bloom, the next moment the ground is strewn with autumn leaves. In one scene the sun is burning brightly, in the next the grass and pavement are drenched with rain water. These inconsistencies may seem slight, yet they do grievous damage to the eerie spell Carpenter is trying to weave over his audience-they make you realize rather jarringly and sud- denly that it's only a movie, and a slightly tacky one at that. BUT EVEN Carpenter's imaginative grasp fails him near film's end. When Curtis stumbles upon three corpses in rapid succession, the effect is that of a kind of funhouse kitch, or horror turned grotesquely comic. Even a subsequent, climactic, shock sequence involving heroine, madman and doctor comes across as repetitious to the point of parody, and a final mystical plot twist at the very end seems not so much ingenious as slightly deceitful. Newsweek's Ansen commences his adulating critique of Halloween by citing the joys of "the pursuit, in disreputable ;places, of undiscoveeed talent." The unfortunate aspect of such a diamond-in-the-rough search is that usually the disreputable places weigh just as heavily on the finished product as does the undiscovered talent. Halloween, for all its compelling tricks, is a work that not only doesn't match Carpenter's talent, but often distorts it into inferiority. One must hope that next , time around, potential and material will even themselves out for this ingenious young filmmaker. 4 1) - 11 01 , 4 I-w V pde30t y' ' N N Marson Graphics Inc. EXHIBIT & SALE ORIGINAL GRAPHIC ART Dec. 12, 10-8 Dec.13, 10-6 2 DAYS ONLY Tues-Fri 1Q-6 Sat, Sun. 12- 5 764-3234 iFLRY] FIRST FLOOR MICHIGAN UNION $7.98 $7.98 aa °t " _.. .. LIST LIST ALBUMS TAPES $549 OUR EVERYDAY LOW PRICES Iy'I* G d p/easur dk r Ste' M ER VvINQ " HOURS MON -SAT: 10-9 A Apr '""