Alfred Hitchcock may have invented the “slasher” film, with 1960’s Psycho, but forty-years ago (in 1978), it was John Carpenter’s Halloween that made the deranged-killer movie a genre of its own.
I liked both Psycho and the original Halloween, and while I’ve never outgrown my love for the latter’s star, Jamie Lee Curtis, I’ve have come to loath the sight of people being gratuitously and gruesomely killed.
When you stop to really think about it, it’s rather disturbing to sit in the middle of a dark theater where an audience of strangers is excitingly, almost orgasmically, laughing and cheering at people being mutilated onscreen. How is this entertaining in any way? It’s actually scary… not the movie itself, but the people who are enjoying the blood and guts of it all.
All social commentary aside, the new Halloween movie sequel is an awful film in almost every respect. It is poorly directed and written by David Gordon Green, together with his Vice Principals HBO TV Series cohorts, Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride.
Additionally, the editing in this movie has some serious problems with awkward and/or altogether missing transitions that will leave you scratching your head.
All the previous Halloween sequels and re-boots are ignored in this story, like they never existed (which is fine with me), and the story simply starts forty-years after the first film ended.
Laurie Strode (Curtis) has spent the past four-decades preparing for the masked killer, the infamous and iconic Michael Myers, to return and pick up where his murder spree left off. How he gets from prison to Haddonfield, Illinois again is as ridiculous as it is predictable.
As each of the characters is introduced, it is way too easy to tell which will survive and which will become a victim, and at some point you wonder if this is all just a parody of the original and the endless stream of bloody movies that followed.
I did have high hopes going into this film and I was thrilled that Jamie Lee Curtis was reprising her star-making role, but the filmmakers squandered all of the potential this sequel had going for it in favor of unoriginal and outright goofy storytelling. And, in this day and age, its treatment of the serious issues of mental illness and PTSD is appalling.
However, the new Halloween is not completely without merit. There is one sequence wherein Michael seamlessly blends in with trick-or-treaters that was both humorous and thought-provoking, with an interesting commentary on the downfall and numbing of our societal norms. (Whether this was intentional or a happy accident remains a mystery.)
But, despite one or two brief moments of genius and a couple of laughs, my foremost thought while watching this terrible re-hash of gore and stupidity was, ‘Just kill me already.’ Grade: 2.5/10
Photos Copyright © 2018 Universal Pictures
