Here's what you need to know; decades after Michael Myers turned an unassuming Halloween night into hell for Laurie and her friends, she still hasn't recovered from the trauma, turning her home into a fortress and stockpiling an arsenal of guns and traps out of fear that he may one day escape captivity and wreak havoc on the little town of Haddonfield again. But after forty years, forty years of paranoia and alienating everyone she loved, all her prepping looks to have paid off as an old friend of hers comes home, someone who never got over the one who got away.
I was going to save this film for the finale of my Halloween special, but after watching it, I decided otherwise, you'll understand later. Curiously this is also the first film I'm writing the review of for the special, cutting it a bit close since it takes a year for me to write anything, but Halloween is my favourite time of the year and I want to give it a bit of justice, just as I want to give this film a bit of justice, so here we go.
The first five minutes or so of Halloween are brilliant, in fact the first five minutes might be my favourite part of the entire film, as a pair of podcasters visit Michael Myers in prison, everything about this sequence works in setting an atmospheric mood, the music is on point, the cinematography is off-putting, and the scene really knows how to build the tension, the swell of the scene is about the scariest this film gets, and the sudden cut to title credits, which are a complete love letter to the original film, really got me excited. That pumpkin put such a huge smile on my face and I was so ready for this film then, it's infuriating then that just a few scenes later the film's atmosphere completely deflates and my enjoyment of it grinds to a halt. Our reintroduction to Laurie is as effective as Michael as the effect the Haddonfield murders had on her is on display in all its paranoid glory, her house is secluded and fenced off, security cameras and lights cover the entire property, her house is dark and claustrophobic, reflecting her own sense of entrapment. Laurie is a woman who clearly never got over the fear she felt in '78 and she let that fear completely consume her. The anticipation for the Bogeyman's inevitable return has driven her into a hermit lifestyle and driven away her own family. Laurie and Michael are where this film really is at its best, but strangely, the film doesn't focus on them as much as you'd think, because then there's Laurie's daughter, who has also been affected my Michael as her mother spent her childhood preparing her for his return, resulting in a very tense relationship, so far, so good. Then we have her daughter, Laurie's granddaughter, who wants to reconnect with her grandmother and help her get over the paranoia, getting crowded but okay. Then we have her boyfriend who she's going to the high school dance with, and their awkward mutual friend who is the worst case of friend zoning I've ever seen, and her friend who's a babysitter looking to get laid on Halloween night. Then we have Michael's doctor who wants to understand what it feels like to be a killer and is studying Michael to try and understand evil or something.
Are you getting the point here; the film just keeps piling and piling on all of these characters and plot threads, some of which feel out of place in a sequel to Halloween, and some of which that don't go anywhere at all, as opposed to the first film, which has Laurie, Loomis and Laurie's two friends, it was simple and to the point. That purity is lost in this film, which tries to be a drama and a comedy as well as a horror, which can work with good execution, it's just that this wasn't very well executed. Every time Laurie and or Michael weren't centre stage, I was bored, in fact I was more than bored, I was annoyed, because Laurie and Michael are so good and the twisted relationship they have, the obsession they have with each other is what drives this film, they're just not in the film enough. I really cannot understate the negative effect this has on the film, it's Halloween, moreover this is supposed to be some sort of love letter to Halloween, the one true sequel that truly understands that the original film was all about, but this sequel doesn't seem to understand that at all, it adds ten more minutes to the runtime and about half an hour's worth of extra story and characters, hastening the film's pace and giving it less time to build the tension. Add onto that all the scenes that are completely empty of tension, all the drama scenes with Karen and Allyson that serve no purpose to the horror and, therefore, serve no real purpose to this Halloween film. There are times when the dramatic elements of the film do work, but that's all the Laurie stuff, all her having to come to terms with her past and learning to conquer her fear of Michael, I didn't care about Karen, I didn't care about Allyson and her boy troubles, and I know you're not supposed to care about the slutty babysitter, but I also didn't care about her. Then there's the doctor character, who the film even addresses as a discount Loomis, and who does something in the beginning of the film's third act which his completely ridiculous, if the film had any tension to kill, this one action, which is only relevant for about five minutes despite being treated as a game changer, would have killed it real good.
But if we want to talk about killing tension, discount Loomis doing a stupid is just the tip of the iceberg. The film, at several points, tries to be comedic, and I hate it, I genuinely hate it, to the point that I almost walked out of the cinema at one point. And I had an exchange with my sister after the film about it, she was annoyed with me because "people go to the cinema to enjoy themselves" and "it was funny," which might have insulted me as much as the moment in question did. I'm just going to come out and say it, people who found this one moment in the film funny are stupid and have no appreciation for Halloween, because this moment perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with this film, and made me hate the film, a film I went in really wanting to like. I never use the "you just don't get it," argument for a reason, it's a stupid argument that makes the person making it sound like a pretentious wanker, but I'm prepared to sound like a pretentious wanker if it means making any idiot who doesn't get it understand. The first Halloween was not a funny film, it had funny moments but that's true of all films, and in most cases in the first, it wasn't even intentional, the reason that it didn't lean into the comedy however is because it understood that comedy is detrimental to atmosphere, a poorly timed joke would ruin the horror, and in a horror film, you don't want that. This is exactly the same as The Predator because like that film, this film completely fails to grasp that building atmosphere and tension is far, far, far harder when you have some snot nosed funny man cracking jokes. The only difference is that this is worse, because while the tension of Predator came from its otherworldliness and the fear of the archetypal action heroes who always had everything under control until they met the Predator, Michael Myers represents a much more personal, invasive, close to home fear, a monster that hides in plain sight, who stalks invisibly through homely locales and kills mercilessly and indiscriminately, a bogeyman, Michael Myers is the kind of horror villain you would check under the bed for, unless you weren't scared of him because the film you're watching isn't scary. That is Halloween's greatest sin, a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is and what it's supposed to be; the one true sequel to a horror classic, and a crowd pleaser mentality that turns the film into a shallow, insulting bore. And the most frustrating thing of all is all the times that the film does seem to understand, the times that the film actually feels like Halloween, but they're few and far between.
Happy Halloween, Michael
I really wanted to like Halloween, its opening moments gave me so much hope that it'd be something special, be a tense, exciting, old school horror movie, but it turned out to be none of those things. I liked Laurie and Michael in the film and think that the film needed more of both of them, and there are moments where the film gets it right, short bursts of tension that ultimately only serve as reminders of what this film could have and should have been. Instead it's a dull high school drama, a dull family drama, an appalling comedy, and a film that, in general, does not commit to what it needs to be, and it fails as a result. I would recommend this film on the merits it does have; the issue is that the original film did it first and was nowhere near as messy and frustrating as this. I was more disappointed with Halloween than I was with The Predator, and I would not recommend it.
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