Forget ‘Halloween,’ This Stoner Action Romp Is the Filmmaker’s Greatest Hit

David Gordon Green’s 2008 comedy classic Pineapple Express marked a career peak for just about everybody involved, from the director to stars Seth Rogen and James Franco. 2011’s Your Highness, another stoner comedy that reunited the director with Franco and his old friend Danny McBride, bombed at the box office, leading Green to an odd decade balancing the demands of studio filmmaking with detours like 2013’s bleak Nicolas Cage drama Joe. But he explored horror in 2018’s Halloween legacy sequel, and it became his most commercially successful film ever, according to Box Office Mojo. Two sequels were greenlit immediately. But despite its success, the movie also felt shockingly enervating for a director who once made a masterpiece of action comedy.

Green began his filmmaking career with impressionistic low-budget films about small towns and corrupted youth, like the 2000s tragic murder saga George Washington, with horror in the periphery (especially in 2004’s Undertow). Those early films dealt with poverty, religion, and urban legends, and their creepy small-town sensibility became key to Green’s take on the Halloween mythos. Pineapple Express was a marked departure from those early dramas, an almost Hitchcockian story of process server Dale (Rogen) stumbling on a murder and embarking on a journey with his weed dealer Saul (Franco). Despite working within the Judd Apatow comedy machine at its most ubiquitous, Green never showed signs of selling out, even with the goofiest script of Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg’s career. If Green could be accused of selling out, it would come later.

David Gordon Green’s ‘Halloween’ Legacy Sequels Had Intriguing Ideas and Stale Execution

2018’s Halloween avoided the full-on remake trap of Rob Zombie’s underrated Halloween films from the 2000s, instead following Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) as an older woman, decades removed from the events of the 1978 original. Her traumatic past has turned her into a paranoid recluse. While the angle was interesting, it also emerged out of the then-pervasive stretch of Hollywood films that were called “legacy sequels,” stories revisiting the characters you loved decades ago as they go through the motions. The trend resulted in massive box office success but often fell flat, and fittingly, Halloween lacked the breakneck energy and suspense of John Carpenter’s original, which is maybe the best slasher movie ever.

While making the trilogy, Green collaborated with fellow University of North Carolina School of the Arts grads Danny McBride and Jody Hill on Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones, and McBride returned the favor by co-writing the screenplays for the movies (alongside other writers like Blumhouse staple Scott Teems). 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends ultimately ran into the typical legacy sequel pitfalls. Kills takes place immediately after the events of its predecessor, but was bizarrely indebted to the original film’s mythology, and its tale of mob rule felt like a muddled take on cancel culture. Halloween Ends, diving deep into teenage psychopathy and Haddonfield’s spiritual decay, felt like the film truest to Green’s past work. Still, it was similarly bland and even boring for long stretches. Compare it to any given action setpiece in Pineapple Express, and it feels like the work of a very different filmmaker.

After a Weak ‘Exorcist’ Sequel, ‘Pineapple Express’ Is Still the High-Water Mark of David Gordon Green’s Filmography

Image via Universal Pictures

After Halloween, David Gordon Green moved on to another legacy horror series with 2023’s soulless The Exorcist: Believer, and followed a similar playbook: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn reprising her greatest role) and Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) are faced with similar horrors 50 years removed from the original William Friedkin Exorcist. Despite an intriguing Southern Gothic flavor, the movie’s negative reception canceled another planned trilogy, maybe even killing the series. Countering Green’s increasingly disappointing horror sequel work was the reliably hilarious and rich television world of McBride’s Righteous Gemstones, which gave him the chance to work in comedy again.

In the wake of Green’s late-career commercial success and critical negativity with the horror films, Pineapple Express is like a beacon, where the arthouse director found a way into mainstream filmmaking that kept his style intact. It’s still very funny, even if the humor is just from watching Dale and Saul watching The Jeffersons. The paranoid conspiracy in which they find themselves is in the tradition of The Big Lebowski, and between the car chases, fistfights, and climactic shootouts, Green’s direction is still exciting, which makes the humor hit even harder. Green’s horror movies obviously weren’t designed to be as funny as Pineapple Express, but it would be nice if they could be as fun to watch.