Long live Michael Myers!
Forget what you know about the Halloween sequels, or just wipe your browser history, to forget the other franchise entries that came in between. This meta-sequel to the 1978 horror classic returns the story to its core and fun as hell…
And well worth the long wait.
Forty years after the events of the original film, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) prepares to face off against serial killer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) when he returns to Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night after escaping from a mental institution.
Director David Gordon Green and co-writer have obviously seen what worked in the first movie to make it a classic and stuck with it, only advancing the timeline forward. Laurie is now a grandmother but a bit of a recluse, armed with a gun and a really long memory as the past forty years have haunted her. She has a semi-estranged daughter (Judy Greer) and a granddaughter (Andi Matichak) but she’s also kept tabs on Michael over the years. Catching up with Michael, he’s in the process of being transferred to another mental facility. You can imagine how that goes. Michael is on the loose back in Haddonfield on the 40th anniversary of his original Halloween rampage.
All the horror movie tropes are present: high school party, teenage makeout sessions, frantic sprints through a dark wood, death by knife and other objects. What really called back to the original was the pumpkin-colored font of the credits and a few original supporting characters. What I really enjoyed was the iconic score. Having the John Carpenter score make a return and certain parts modernized by his son made you feel that Halloween was truly back.
A positive and negative is that Green might have been too faithful; there is no fourth wall breaking or elements from the new generation of horror such as this-is-why-he-kills back story. The positive side: the movie mostly works because it is so fundamental and funny: Michael still never speaks; his mask and his slow, deadly, deliberate walk (that no one has learned to outrun yet) says everything they need to for their antagonist. As for Curtis, she seems to have fully arrived in her role as a midnight-horror queen. At 59, she looks like a complete badass and having a great time in jeans and a grey fright wig, swinging her shotgun around and proving to be the town nutjob that everyone should have listened to twenty minutes into the movie.
It ends as you expect in this classic battle between good and evil – but every horror fan knows that it’s never truly over. Halloween proves that you should always fear the boogie man and he never really goes away. The box office is solid proof of that.
Thanks for reading, everyone! Think you’ll check out this movie during the weekend? Definitely leave a comment! Also check out my Facebook page for this blog and show some love! Until next time!
One Scene at A Time 