Halloween (not to be confused with Halloween or Halloween) is a 2018 horror/slasher movie, as well as the eleventh installment in the Halloween franchise. It was written by Danny McBride and directed by David Gordon Green. You'll know David Green as the director of Pineapple Express, and you'll know Danny McBride as the writer and star of 2011's Your Highness. Clearly, these are two people that should do a horror movie. This installment once again retcons a good bit of the franchise's timeline, this time going all the way back to the very first movie and following up on that with a new set of canon. This means that Laurie Strode is still alive, allowing Jamie Lee Curtis to return to the role that made her famous for one last bout with The Shape. Or, at least that's how the movie is advertising itself. It's very likely to get a sequel. But, until then, I'm gonna take a closer look at this one and see if it lived up to the hype. But, before I do that, I need to preface this by saying that I have not seen all of the Halloween films. I've seen this one, the very first one, Season of the Witch, the Busta Rhymes one (unfortunately), and the first Rob Zombie one. I'm not familiar with the entire continuity surrounding these movies, but, given how this one once again paves over a bit of the canon, I don't really think it's important. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's get into this. Spoiler alert.
Along with Laurie being alive, this timeline has other changes: Laurie and Michael are no longer related, Dr. Loomis is deceased, and Laurie has a daughter instead of a son. These are massive changes, but I don't mind them. It gives this movie it's own personality to set it apart from the other Halloween movies. And these changes are rather well-presented. The Laurie-Michael relation is brought up in the first few scenes, then is quickly shot down and never brought up again. Dr. Loomis being dead is brought up, then is quickly dropped and never brought up again. That's honestly really cool. The changes are mentioned, debunked, and then we move on with our lives to allow the new stuff to take over. Like I said before, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode. Laurie is awesome ins in this movie. She's mastered every type of firearm, she's turned her house into a Home Alone trap, and she's taught herself how to fight, all in the off chance that Michael should escape the prison and come after her again. I love this Laurie, and Jamie plays her flawlessly. On the other side of the coin, though, this Laurie is visibly traumatized by the events of the first Halloween movie and spends a decent amount of her screentime crying or screaming. Again, Jamie plays it well. She balances the Shape-slayer side of Laurie and the PTSD side of Laurie remarkably well. Bravo, Jamie Lee Curtis, bravo.
Along with Laurie being alive, this timeline has other changes: Laurie and Michael are no longer related, Dr. Loomis is deceased, and Laurie has a daughter instead of a son. These are massive changes, but I don't mind them. It gives this movie it's own personality to set it apart from the other Halloween movies. And these changes are rather well-presented. The Laurie-Michael relation is brought up in the first few scenes, then is quickly shot down and never brought up again. Dr. Loomis being dead is brought up, then is quickly dropped and never brought up again. That's honestly really cool. The changes are mentioned, debunked, and then we move on with our lives to allow the new stuff to take over. Like I said before, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode. Laurie is awesome ins in this movie. She's mastered every type of firearm, she's turned her house into a Home Alone trap, and she's taught herself how to fight, all in the off chance that Michael should escape the prison and come after her again. I love this Laurie, and Jamie plays her flawlessly. On the other side of the coin, though, this Laurie is visibly traumatized by the events of the first Halloween movie and spends a decent amount of her screentime crying or screaming. Again, Jamie plays it well. She balances the Shape-slayer side of Laurie and the PTSD side of Laurie remarkably well. Bravo, Jamie Lee Curtis, bravo.
This movie is far less gory than you'd expect it to be. That being said, the kills that it does have are awesome. One kill sees a random woman getting stabbed through the neck by Michael in a really good effect, another one has one of the reporters from the beginning having his face bashed in against a bathroom stall over and over again for a full minute. But, by far, the best kill is the one that befalls Dr. Sartain: Michael throws him on the ground and stomps his head into mush, sending brain matter flying out. It's brutal, it's messy, it's quick, it's fantastic. Michael overall in this movie is great. He doesn't get a lot of screentime, but, when he is on-screen, he's legitimately intimidating. He doesn't speak, like usual, but his breathing is heard often. It's rather chilling. It's like he's wearing down as the movie goes along, it's a nice touch. Laurie and Michael don't fight very often, but, when they do, it's great. Laurie finally gets to show off the skills she'd been learning over the previous forty years, and absolutely steals the show when she does so. She spends a lot of the fight beating the tar out of him. She shoots off two of his fingers, throws him down multiple flights of stairs, and even sets him on fire at one point. It's really fun to watch! Laurie spends the whole movie hyping up how ready she is to face Michael again, and, when she finally gets to, she doesn't disappoint. It's great. The entire third act is easily the best part. The teamwork from the Strode family, Karen pulling a switcheroo on Michael which ends in her shooting him in the neck, and it ultimately results in a shot of Michael looking actually stumped. I don't know if any of these movies have shown us that before, but I love it.
Another thing that this movie does right, this time purely from a filmmaking standpoint, is the cinematography. During Michael's first romp around the town on Halloween night, in the scene with the stabbed-through-the-neck bit, he kills multiple people and enters multiple houses. All of this is shown in one continuous take that lasts for almost five minutes. The highlight, to me, is Michael's reflection in a window, which is immediately followed by him walking off-screen and then reappearing inside the house he was just looking into. We don't see how he did it, and I'm really glad we don't. It's creepy. I also move the references to the previous movies. Michael's mask in this movie is battered and worn, and looks similar to the Rob Zombie Halloween movies. Laurie mimics traditional Myers moves, such as appearing to be dead on the floor only to disappear in-between shots in order to sneak attack someone. And I'm pretty sure I noticed a couple kids wearing Silver Shamrock masks from Season of the Witch. But none of these homages take away from the story, they're just cool things that long-time Halloween fans will pick up on. For a movie that is both a reboot and a sequel, it really does it's job remarkably well. But that's not saying that the movie is flawless. It's not. I don't have a lot of criticisms, but a few of them are pretty big.
Firstly, and the most confusing, this movie creates a couple subplots, and then does nothing with them. Laurie's granddaughter's boyfriend is cheating on her. We see that in one scene, but then he's never seen again in the movie. One of the granddaughter's friends is a babysitter. We see the kid she's looking after. He's funny, he's adorable, and he's one of the better characters in the movie. Too bad he's only in two scenes and then is never even mentioned again. And, arguably, the biggest of them all is that Dr. Sartain is fascinated with Myers specifically because he wonders how he felt after killing all those people. That is a really interesting sentiment, and it ultimately leads to the doctor killing someone in order to find out. But, nope. One of the coolest ideas that this movie presents is abandoned almost immediately after it's brought up. That was really disappointing. I wanted to see the movie delve more into Michael's psychology. But it didn't. It just went back to Myers killing pointless characters like usual. It didn't break the movie, and I still stand by it as being a good movie regardless, but it did kinda hurt. I also didn't care for the overabundance of cheap jumpscares. Now, I normally don't have a problem with jumpscares. They can be effective. For example, while the 2017 It movie did have about five too many of them, a lot of them worked because of the atmosphere it built up. In this movie, a lot of them don't involve Michael. One of them is just a random guy with a toy horse with a scare chord attached to it. Seriously? That's one of your big scares? In a movie where a guy's head is turned into ground beef, that's one of your big scares?
And, given the fact that famed comedic writer Danny McBride did the screenplay, naturally there are some elements of comedy mixed in there. I say there's a little too much, though. There's a lot of pointless throwaway lines that are clearly meant to get a laugh, but serve no other purpose. The awards for worst examples of these go to "I got peanut butter on my penis" and "They were feeding me guacamole in sexy ways". Some of the comedy does work, but a lot of it doesn't. And, speaking of things that don't work, how about how ridiculously dumb a lot of these characters are? I realize that side characters in slasher movies typically only exist to get naked or get killed off, but this Halloween movie gives us a surprisingly little amount of the first thing, so it has to make up for that somehow. And it does that by having a lot of these characters make decisions that are so dumb that it becomes unbelievable, even for these types of movies. For example, those two reporters that the trailers showed prominently? They both die pretty early on. They die in a bathroom in an admittedly very well done scene, but what gets me is how dumb the female acts. Her name was Dana and the guy's name was Aaron. Well, Aaron comes bursting in with a crowbar and attacks Michael. Naturally, he gets overpowered and Michael starts bashing his head against various things. The crowbar drops, Dana picks it up, and you'd think she'd then charge at Michael for a chance that her and Aaron can escape. But nope. She just sits in one of the stalls screaming and crying, holding the crowbar, and allows her partner to get murdered. She dies shortly after. They both possibly could've lived if she had just rushed at Michael with the crowbar she picked up. She doesn't even use it when Michael starts to go after her after Aaron dies. And they were interesting characters, too.
Another dumb character of note is the nameless old man with his (I assume) grandson. We never get their names, but they're going for a drive and they just happen to stumble upon a crashed bus and a bunch of escaped mental patients walking around the road (one of them is apparently Michael, but this is before he gets the mask so we don't know for sure). The old man gets out of his car to see if the patients are okay. Already, he isn't the smartest character. He tells the grandson to call the cops, and he does, but not before exiting the car himself to look for the old man. The adult dies, naturally, and the kid ends up accidentally shooting Dr. Sartain in the shoulder with a rifle out of fear. However, this does lead to a rather chilling scene when Michael murders the kid. The kid's gotta be no more than 12-years-old, making this the first child Michael has ever killed in the franchise, to my knowledge. So there's that. I know that Michael spends the entirety of The Revenge of Michael Myers trying to kill his niece, but he never succeeds at that, so this is the first child he's ever killed. Probably. Heck, even Laurie sometimes makes a dumb decision or two. Like, for example, there's a lengthy scene in the middle of the final confrontation where Laurie leaves the temporary safety of the gun safe and goes Myers hunting. She checks a lot of the rooms and, when she's made sure that it's empty, locks the room up with prison bars that she somehow installed into this wooden house. This goes on for a little while and is mostly told in a continuous shot, with a minimal amount of cuts, and the only thing lighting it is a flashlight Laurie is holding. This is an awesome scene, but it's also when Laurie does some really uncharacteristic things. Like, for example, following a trail of blood to a closet door and opening it. Granted, Michael isn't in it (a dead body is), but isn't that a very "slasher movie" thing to do? Laurie also spends a lot of time walking forward and not checking behind her in case Michael's there, even though she does that a lot during the rest of the third act. I get that it's supposed to be suspenseful, but this is the only part of the final battle where it feels like it's just a movie. Everywhere else, you feel like you're there fighting Myers with the Strodes, but not here. And it's very jarring.
But, despite those blemishes (some more obvious than others), this is still a very good film. It's a lot of fun to watch, the cast and crew clearly put a lot of love into it, and, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis absolutely knocks it out of the park. I don't see this movie getting an Oscar nod next year, but I'm hoping Jamie's performance does. She's that good. This movie is funny at times, it's awesome at times, it's surprisingly sad at times, and it's legitimately creepy at times. It's a wonderful blend of everything a good slasher should be. I'm giving Halloween an 8/10. It's pretty good, and I highly recommend it. Definitely don't Throw The Harpoon at this one. Throw it at the Busta Rhymes one. Twice.
