This was something I wrote on Facebook two years ago after seeing the latest "Halloween" movie at the time.
In his review of Halloween from 1978, Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and compared it to Hitchcock's "Psycho".
Having just returned from seeing Halloween, the new sequel, I too can compare that to "Psycho".
The original Halloween (Which I'll refer to as Halloween 1978) opened with simple credits of an ominous looking jack-o'-lantern the timeless John Carpenter score.
Halloween 2018 opens with a rotted pumpkin that slowly morphs back to life into that same looking pumpkin from before and that's an apt metaphor for this movie: Something that is old and well past it's best before date is trying to be reanimated and show that it has life back in it. However whatever life is in Halloween 2018 is uninspired.
Where Halloween 1978 set new standards for horror, this new Halloween just reminds us of all the bad that came with the many sequels and imitators that followed. Unnecessary gore, murders that are taking place so that we know Michael Myers is dangerous (Thanks, the first movie made that pretty clear) and characters so unlikable that they make you cheer for the escaped mental patient when he kills them.
Characters are introduced only for the sake of later being murdered that it makes me think, "What the fuck was the point of YOU!?"
Where the victims in Halloween 1978 were hardly saints, at no point was I ever saying, "I can't WAIT for this bitch Annie to die. And if Linda says 'totally' one more time, I'M gonna kill her."
These characters...hell, I can barely remember their names and quite frankly, I never cared for them.
The only one I DID come close to caring for was Laurie Strode played by Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising the role that made her a star. But even Laurie's portrayal seems...just a step too far.
I actually wish that her portrayal was closer to what we saw 20 years ago in Halloween: H20; a woman trying to live a normal life while at the same time, haunted by the horrors she witnessed one night in 1978.
Here they try to make her into Sara Conner from Terminator 2 and it just feels wrong.
See, Sarah Conner was completely different in "Terminator 2" compared to the first "Terminator" because she knew that the war against the machines was coming. She knew that she had to prepare because they might send another Terminator back in time to kill her or her son, so it made sense that she knew how to handle an assault rifle and was prepared for the absolute worst.
But if you go back and watch Halloween 1978, Laurie only encounters Michael in the last 10-15 minutes of the movie. That's it. In this film, they've wiped the slate clean, none of the sequels happened (Good idea) and we have this elderly woman armed to the teeth because she's paranoid about a serial killer who tried to kill her over 40 years ago and hasn't made any attempts to escape in the year since.
It just doesn't make sense to me.
Also, maybe it's just me but I think this movie should have been made 10 years from now, mainly due to the fact that I look at Laurie's daughter and her son in law and think, "THESE are supposed to be your kids?"
They can hag Curtis up but it doesn't stop her daughter and son in law from only looking five years younger.
When it was announced that this movie was going into production, a lot of people were excited, especially with the involvement of John Carpenter, the director of Halloween 1978, but I was cynical and said that there hadn't been a great Halloween movie since the first one and this movie continues to prove my point.
With an over-reliance on gore instead of genuine horror, protagonists too stupid to live and a lack of any real story, Halloween 2018 tries to live up to the standards of the original classic, but all it does is remind you of the inferior sequels.
Babysit Lindsay Wallace & Tommy Doyle instead of watching this crap.
0.5/5
Often imitated, never replicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment