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| Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Image courtesy Universal Pictures. |
The redeeming factor
for the wildly inconsistent Halloween
sequel is the ferocity of its female lead. Laurie Strode was a
fighter in the first film, trading blows and stabs with a monster.
The new film makes it clear that Halloween night 40 years ago haunts
her now as it did then, but the extra years have done nothing to
temper Laurie Strode's tenacity. Without her resolve and strength,
Halloween
circa 2018 would be little more than high-budget fan fiction.
Eliding over the
events from movies two, four, five, six, seven, and eight, Halloween
opens with a pair of podcasters (Rhian Rees and Jefferson Hall)
revisiting the horror in Haddonfield 40 years on. After failing to
get a word from Michael Myers (played by both original actor Nick
Castle and James Jude Courtney), they visit Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee
Curtis) who is still scarred from that night. She lives alone in the
woods, alienated from her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and
granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) and preparing for another
encounter with Myers. Myers, meanwhile, is being transferred to a new
mental health facility, much to the protestation of his psychiatrist
Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer). For the second time in 40 years,
something goes awry and Myers is loose again in Haddonfield, pursued
by Strode, Sartain, and the weary Officer Hawkins (Will Patton).
For
much of Halloween,
the question that drives much of the action is the why behind Michael
Myers' wanton murder. Like the first movie, this Halloween
offers little to no explanation (although much conjecture) for why
the monster is a monster, which is for the best. Once the first set
of sequels tried to connect Myers to a strained motivation it soured
the character, and a monster without any apparent reason is far more
horrifying than one with familial problems. But this movie goes too
far into the other direction, painting Myers as more of a shark than
a boogeyman. The scenario becomes predictable midway through the
movie; Myers enters the house, murders the occupant (usually a woman)
by surprise, then walks out to find his next victim. It's designed to
be somewhat comedic, especially in the manner Myers so quickly
dispatches of his victims, but it paints Myers as mindless instead of
calculating. There's no intelligence or cleverness to his actions,
and it removes much of Myers' mystique. Even if the audience never
knew exactly why he picked Laurie and her friends, there was an
intent somewhere that was pretty horrifying to think about.
Halloween
sheds the elegance and nuance of its predecessor and wraps itself
instead in a bothersome coat of bluntness. Director David Gordon
Green takes the basics of the original and ramps up the murders,
showing as much gore and blood as he can. Green occasionally shows
his horror chops on a few kills – highlighted by a rather effective
sequence involving motion-detecting lights – but the murders become
less and less intricate and the gore becomes greater and greater to
compensate for the lack of imagination in the framing. The body count
in Halloween
is high enough to cause the shock factor wears off and the movie
drags to get to the highly anticipated final showdown.
The
path to the finale is pretty rough. Green and co-writers Danny
McBride and Jeff Fradley ended up with a rather funky script that
doesn't meld the horror, comedy, and meta-comedy particularly well.
It's tough to tell exactly what Halloween
is designed to be, especially in the sequences that exist solely
because of horror clichés. An argument could be made for parody, but
there isn't enough of it in the rest of the film to consider these
as much more than storytelling laziness. And the character
motivations are all over the map, with folks changing who they are
just to carry the movie forward. Dr. Sartain in particular has a
strange, unconvincing arc that does more to connect Laurie and Myers
than establish him as a character.
Ultimately
that showdown between Laurie and Myers is all that matters for
Halloween.
Green treats the rest of the mayhem caused by Myers as a means to an
end, steps for the film to reconnect these two after four decades
apart. The battle between Myers and the Strode women is fraught with
intensity and fright, a mother fighting against a monster to save her
daughter and granddaughter. Curtis is great in this sequence,
resurrecting the ferocity that defined Laurie Strode 40 years ago
while adding decades of pent-up rage to her battle against Myers.
Laurie is fighting as a mother, a victim, a warrior, and a survivor,
putting everything she has against Myers and then some to end 40
years of bad dreams and misery. The showdown isn't perfect – Green
can't help but through a couple of unnecessary references in that
throw off the pacing – but it's still a helluva ride and about as
good of an ending as this movie could have.
Review: Three and a half out of
Five Stars
Click here to see the trailer.
Rating: R
Run time: 106 minutes
Genre: Horror
tl;dr
What
Worked: Scares,
Jamie Lee Curtis, final showdown
What
Fell Short: Character
motivations, too many in jokes
What
To Watch As Well:
Halloween
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