Halloween (2018)

With the release of Halloween Kills this month, it felt like an appropriate time to get up to speed with the latest iteration of the slasher classic. I’ve not seen any of the sequels at all, but that doesn’t matter because David Gordon Green’s take on the tale of Laurie Strode (a terrific Jamie Lee Curtis) severs ties with all the sequels and works as a straight up sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 game changer. Laurie, forty odd years on from her night of terror at the hands of Michael Myers, has never fully recovered from the experience, living in the middle of nowhere surrounded by self-made security. Her daughter and granddaughter see her as a sad old paranoid drunk woman, but wouldn’t you know it, turns out she’s right to be; on the night of Halloween, Michael Myers escapes from incarceration as he’s being transferred to a different prison. And it turns out he still hasn’t forgotten Laurie, he’s hell bent on killing her. What makes this Halloween a surprisingly decent affair is mainly seeing Jamie Lee Curtis in such fine form, as well as Green’s decision to set it forty years on meaning you buy into Laurie’s elderly paranoia, outcast from her own family. There’s too much footage of Myers running riot killing people; the terror of the original came from the apparent lack of reason behind his madness, and the lack of seeing him up front and personal. And it doesn’t hang together entirely partly due to its pointlessness as a sequel to Halloween. That said though, if you were going to do a sequel, Green has taken at the very least, an interesting route. It probably entices a sigh at its very existence, but again that probably has more to do with the previous four thousand sequels. Green has done a solid job in bringing life to a franchise long ago presumed dead, and even if it does eventually outstay its welcome, 2018’s Halloween has done something I didn’t think was possible; produced a sequel to Carpenter’s original that almost held my attention to the very end. 6.1/10