Halloween (2018) Review - MODERATE SPOILERS

Halloween.

It may not be, as some claim it is, the first slasher film (that distinction may belong to either Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or Bob Clark's "Black Christmas") and it isn't even the best film John Carpenter would ever make; but it most certainly is the definitive template for the slasher genre going forward. It created the concept of the indestructible masked slasher killer, it created the concept of the virginal Final Girl and it also created the concept of the endless slasher movie franchise. 

Speaking of which, they finally made another one. Yay?

Yes, after multiple sequels of varying continuity (one not even featuring the Michael Myers character) a remake and a sequel to the remake set in some bizarre universe where retarded hillbilly rapists outnumber the general population to the point where they are hired as orderlies in mental institutions, we finally get a direct sequel to the original that has absolutely nothing to do with ridiculous cults, long lost relatives or old Irish tycoons distributing evil masks to children to fulfill an ancient occult ritual. 

Seriously though, Halloween 3 is actually pretty great, go watch it.

Forty years after Michael Myers originally escaped from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and wrought havoc on Haddonfield, Illinois - in particular the life of Laurie Strode who witnessed the butchery of her friends - Michael once again escapes to Haddonfield to terrorize the area with a new spate of killings. But this time Laurie, a traumatized survivalist living essentially as a hermit in a fortress-like house, is ready for him.  

Firstly I have to say; what is it with the modern film industry that they can't come up with names for their sequels? The fact that they've called this film "Halloween", only differentiating it from the original with (2018) next to it, gives me serious flashbacks to the "The Thing" prequel. And this is something you do not want to do. I mean it's not even a remake, it's a sequel. They couldn't put a "Rebirth" or a "The Vengeance" in there? Cliché yes but I'd rather that than having to constantly clarify which movie I'm talking about by specifying the date it was released in. It's already annoying enough that I have to specify "the original" whenever I'm talking about a movie that some coke-addled Hollywood sex offender decided to remake because to these people "taking a risk" means paying a child star's parents to keep quiet, not actually trying anything new.  

(Ed Note: Okay Glenn, Hollywood is filled with sexual deviants. We get it. Back to the review)

As for the film itself.... not bad. 

I mean we're talking about slasher movies, the fast food of the horror genre. The bar was already incredibly low so when I see one that's actually tolerable to watch I tend to take note. Is it as good as the original? Well... no, but just look at it. The original was all about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. This film... is about a murderer breaking free from a mental institution and killing a bunch of teenagers. Cut, print, they nailed it. Congratulations, you managed to keep me awake with a modern slasher movie.

Okay to be fair there's a little more to it than that and it actually sports one or two fairly clever, if not fan-servicey as hell, moments. If we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of the thing then realistically the only characters who really matter in this film are Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. The other characters, like in almost any slasher film, are expendable. But slasher films don't need characters, they need lemmings. They need hollowed out automatons whose only settings are "fuck", "do drugs", "fuck whilst doing drugs" and "walk into that dark room with the creaky door and flickering light that you just heard someone's scream followed by a death rattle and meaty stabbing sounds come from mere moments ago." 

Slasher films are not horror, they're schadenfreude.

So what do we have in terms of characters? Well at the beginning we're introduced to a couple of true crime podcasters who visit Michael in the sanitarium and then engage in a short interview with Laurie, only to then be killed almost immediately. They're generally set up to be prominent characters so one could argue that it's a tribute to Janet Leigh's shock death in "Psycho". But at the same time Psycho was going against narrative norms of the time, here it just seems like the writers (yes, this slasher film required multiple writers) just couldn't think of anything to do with them and so just dropped them. 

In terms of teenage characters, our main one is Allyson, Laurie Strode's granddaughter. Her and her friends are simply what you'd expect, hormonal, dumb and prone to drama. They're not annoying and they don't actively court death with their very presence so I have little to complain about. Again, they benefit from the fact that the slasher film bar is already pretty low, but still nothing as memorable as PJ Soles punctuating her sentences with the word "totally" or the famous "See Anything You Like?" scene, in which I most certainly did. 

Totally.

But as was said, the only character other than Michael who really matters in the long run is Laurie Strode, and she is by far the most interesting thing about this movie. Why? Because in the intervening decades she has gone completely batshit insane.

This is where this film's strength lies. As stated previously Laurie is, for all intents and purposes, a hermit who lives in a woodland fortress that is both surrounded by and filled with bullet hole ridden mannequins. She has a basement hidden by a moving kitchen worktop that's filled with an arsenal that would make Burt Gummer from "Tremors" feel inadequate, she has the reflexes of a Vietnam veteran when someone sneaks up on her and just about any time she's on screen she's doing something insane; like showing up at her granddaughter's graduation dinner babbling about wanting to kill a man, or appearing inside her daughter's house with a revolver just to scare the shit out of her. 

"BOOM! You're dead.... You're fucking dead."

To top it off, she is 100% the manliest character in this entire film. Allyson's boyfriend Cameron certainly can't compete (his name alone has a low T count), you have Oscar who strikes out so hard with Allyson it's amazing her womb didn't shriek like a banshee the moment she met the guy and her dad, in conjunction with being generally useless, has the shittiest, least memorable death in the entire film; proving once more that the institution of the Western Male has become a shadow of its former self and women have had to pick up the mantle. 

"It's time to go Ray."

"Was I useful?"

"No. I'm told you were basically furniture."

Laurie basically lives for the moment that Michael finally escapes, just so that she can kill him. And it's here that the film has some of its cleverer moments in scenes like the one where Laurie's granddaughter is looking out across the road from her classroom window and seeing Laurie standing there waiting, mirroring the same moment in the original Halloween when Laurie spies Michael standing across the street. Something similar happens later when Michael tosses Laurie off a balcony, turning away and then looking back to find that she has disappeared, again perfectly mirroring the same moment at the end of the original. 

Yeah it's obvious and fan-servicey but I dug it. It's clear that they are trying to do a sort of "they aren't so different" thing, which is a bit of a cliché in its own right but again, slasher movie. The fact that this had any kind of symbolism in it, let alone decently done symbolism, is a miracle to rival Britain actually leaving the E.U in March 2019. I'll take it for what it is. 

That doesn't count.

I mean even as fan service it sure as shit beats the "leave the axe" scene in "The Thing" prequel. It actually makes sense for one thing. 

"Don't, leave it."

(Awkward silence)

But I'd say some of this film's flaws other than it's largely uninteresting characters lies also with it's camera work at times. John Carpenter is quite well known for his sparing use of his camera, and here for the most part they pay homage to that style. However it gets somewhat annoying when they make use of shaky cam technique during more violent moments. On top of that you have the unfocused plot since, I think we can all agree, this entire film should have been called "Laurie Strode" and should have been about her generally being a paranoid nutcase waiting for the moment when Michael inevitably breaks out. 

Overall, not bad. I might even watch it again. I know I forgave it a lot for the mere fact that it's a slasher film that didn't bore me shitless but if you've seen as many as I have, you'll understand. Plus getting John Carpenter back to co-write the soundtrack is a stroke that I very much appreciate since Carpenter's soundtracks are part of the reason you watch Carpenter.

So I'd like to say Happy Halloween but I took forever to review this so it isn't Halloween. 

Oh well.

…...

Bye.

BOO! Hahaha... I'll go now.