25
Oct
2018
Halloween

Halloween

Two British investigative journalists gain access to serial killer Michael Myer’s prison. Due to be transferred to a harsher, non-medical facility Michael chooses to ignore them. However as they track down Michael’s surviving sister (Jamie Lee Curtis), it soon becomes clear that from the burnt-out wreckage of his prison transit, October 31st will reunite Michael with his sister again.

…ploughs a more dramatic furrow.

Director David Gordon Green’s sequel acts as a later continuation to John Carpenter’s 1978 original. Whilst featuring characters from some of the intervening sequels, this ‘Halloween’ reunites the series’s talismanic actress Jamie Lee Curtis with the franchise that launched her career.

Noticeably devoid of any jump scares or stale horror movie tropes, this ‘Halloween’ deliberately ploughs a more dramatic furrow. Also in playing Laurie Strode as an elderly paranoid, survivalist Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance has clear echoes of Linda Hamilton in ‘Terminator 2’. Now discounted as a nut job, she alone seems to be alert to the threat of her lumbering, homicidal brother.

In its plotting and sequential disposal of characters, David Gorden Green’s ‘Halloween’ is an unapologetically old fashioned movie. With Halloween having coined the genre of slasher movies, this is one sequel that sees no reason to change. What we do have though is the most frightening component of the whole franchise: John Carpenter’s chiming score. Like John William’s ‘Jaws’ and Bernard Herman’s ‘Psycho’, Carpenter’s signature theme announces and teases the arrival of its monster. Audible bangs and jolts are also skilfully woven into the scene edits and shots of innocuous objects – all of which ratchets up the tension for the horrors to follow.

So, still ever hungry for teenage blood and seemingly able to sense the presence of any and all intervening generations of his family, Michael Myers is a monster that doesn’t invite close examination. In fact, the absence of a detailed motivation or forensic backstory is probably the key to his ongoing appeal. Michal does what he does indiscriminately, and in this movie, like the others, he provides the same. By its violent end, Michael should be well and truly dead but much like the movies themselves, die-hard ‘Halloween’ fans should know what to expect next.

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