POST WEEKEND REVIEW OF THE NEW 'HALLOWEEN' MOVIE

Review of the new Halloween YEAR: 2018

The new HALLOWEEN sets out to make a few things clear. Michael Myers is a human being, not an unstoppable monster that can't be killed. And if you and your date dress up as a doctor and nurse (or vice versa), like the victims of the first sequel, HALLOWEEN II, absolutely no harm will come. Because all those other incarnations mean nothing. This is the one and only followup to the John Carpenter classic...

And here's a dirty little secret not everyone agrees with. The sparse 1978 blockbuster is extremely far from perfect. But... it was a solid, good horror movie, and was genuinely groundbreaking for a body count slasher flick involving a handful of doomed teenagers, which started off an endless chain of copycats including FRIDAY THE 13TH. So where new director David Gordon Green succeeds is making a simple slasher yarn without too many extravaganzas...

Halloween 2018 Rates: ***1/2

What a relief that, give or take a few quick melodramas, the high school students (surrounding a pretty young ingenue) remain benign and, for the most part, less annoying than in most modern horror films. In fact, they hardly mean anything except to serve up violent (but not overly violent) deaths by the knife-wielding hands of Michael Myers, who escaped from a bus on the way to a permanently-unpleasant psycho-ward residence, and the highway's right next to the same old fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, where the suburban avenues are still lined with brown, picturesque leaves... but Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode lives safely on the outskirts in a house more protected with villain-proof gadgets than Macaulay Culkin's in HOME ALONE...

Half a teaser poster

But that's where things wind up: Before there are two nifty acts that have a kind of beginning, middle and end: The first being introduced to the Strode family and how, because of grandma's paranoid militant attitude, things got screwed-up years earlier. The second lunges into the nighttime-nightmare body count deaths the audience paid for. And then an O.K. Corral face-off Western at Strode Manor, which tends to drag a bit for suspense's sake (reminiscent of the final moments where Jodie Foster aims her gun through the killer's dark house in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, only much longer)...

And right before, a twist centered on Myers' psychiatrist (Laurie actually addresses him as "the new Loomis" referring to Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis) is a tad random, farfetched and downright bizarre, but it happens so that the conclusion technically makes sense. Which can sum up this entire two-hour experience: None of it would exist without decades of previous installments; after all, those maligned sequels and remakes helped make the original be that much more timeless, and, thankfully, HALLOWEEN 2018 mirrors its most important asset: In not trying too hard to be great, it's good enough to stand completely by itself.