Review: Halloween (2018)

Halloween (2018)

Rated R for horror violence and bloody images, language, brief drug use and nudity

Score: 4 out of 5

The Halloween franchise has a long and, shall we say, troubled history. Within the original series, there are two continuities, which both take the first two films as canon but diverge from there. The second one, which started with Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later in 1998, abandoned the continuity of the last three films largely because they had turned into such a tangled mess that nobody could take them seriously anymore. That's not counting Rob Zombie's remake duology from about ten years ago, nor does it count Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which doesn't even have Michael Myers in it and was an attempt to turn Halloween into a Twilight Zone-esque anthology series.

Confused? Well, now we have the third branch of the original series, which follows on from the 1978 original, forty years later, and ignores everything that came after it -- including the second film. It has long been argued by fans of the series, including John Carpenter himself, that Halloween II, while still holding up as a good movie in its own right, was the source of all of the trends that destroyed it in the long run. Most notably, it removed the chilling randomness of Michael Myers' killing spree (Laurie and her friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, not unlike how the era's most notorious serial killers operated), instead making him Laurie Strode's long-lost brother while hinting that his murders may be related to the occult. This film, titled simply Halloween once more, dispenses with all of that and takes the series right back to its roots: Michael is a masked maniac who was institutionalized after murdering his sister as a child, broke out of the asylum in 1978 in order to return to his hometown and kill again, and is now repeating his crimes in 2018. It's about as good as I could've hoped for from a Halloween sequel, in that, while the original is still the classic that stands head and shoulders above everything that followed in its wake, this is still a very solid slasher throwback that takes its characters in interesting directions while paying respect to its predecessor, homaging it and other horror movies but still being very much its own beast. Boasting a large quantity of impressive kills and nail-biting tension mixed with just enough levity to keep things from getting grim, this is the first Halloween film in a very, very long while to do the series right.

We start with Michael Myers once again locked away in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where he's been for the last forty years as his new doctor, Ranbir Surtain, has attempted to study the notorious killer. On October 30, he once again breaks out after the bus transporting him to a different asylum crashes, immediately making his way back to his old hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to stage a new killing spree -- and get revenge on the one who got away. Laurie Strode, now a grandmother, did not have an easy time of it after surviving the events of the first film, having been rendered paranoid and unable to maintain a relationship (be it with the two husbands she's had or with her daughter Karen) before inevitably burning all bridges. Karen and her teenage daughter Allyson, together with the rest of their town, are in no way prepared for Michael's return -- and even Laurie may not be, either.

The core of the film is, simply put, the interplay between Michael and Laurie, now with the bad blood that had accumulated from the first film. Michael is older, but no less vicious than he was before, having no problem dispatching grown adults armed with guns with his bare hands. The body count here dwarfs the original, and the brutality of the kills shows that, even forty years later, he can still hang with some of the best of them. One might jokingly compare him to a Liam Neeson character, but I wouldn't call it much of a joke, as he kills so many people that it feels like even the film can't keep up with him, as numerous victims are only discovered later by the characters. This is the Michael of the original film, the higher body count notwithstanding: no Thorn, no sister, just a desire to kill people and finish the job he started. Laurie, on the other hand, has never been the same since that night. Fear of being a victim again has driven her somewhat crazy, living in a well-fortified home in the woods with a ton of guns, traps, and high fences to keep out intruders. I've seen her compared to Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but for me, the real comparison was to Dr. Loomis. Her experience has made her as afraid of Michael as the killer's former doctor had been, and like him, she speaks with the authority of somebody who is unquestionably a badass but has tangled with Michael in the past, and has very good reason to fear him. It has destroyed her life, leaving her with no friends and a family that hates her guts, best exemplified with Karen, who acts downright grateful that social services took her away and put her in foster care. Make no mistake, despite what some cable news pundits might have said, this film is hardly glorifying Laurie's survivalist, gun-obsessed lifestyle. Yes, she's a hero in this film, but she is still a deeply scarred person whose entire life has been consumed by the tragedy she endured, one who Jamie Lee Curtis brings to life with humanity. (She and Sidney Prescott would have a lot to chat about.)

The whole cast is great here. Jamie Lee Curtis, of course, is the MVP, but Judy Greer and newcomer Andi Matichak also do great work as Laurie's daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson. The film heavily highlights the generational divide between the three women, with Karen wishing that Laurie would get over herself and visit a psychiatrist rather than continue to destroy her own life and those of the people around her, while the teenage Allyson is more empathetic of what her grandmother went through. Together, the three of them make for a hell of a team, with Karen and Allyson taking turns playing the role that Laurie did in the original while Laurie, as mentioned earlier, becomes the new Loomis figure. The supporting cast was filled with fun and interesting individuals, from the police officers to Allyson's classmates(/cannon fodder) to the father and son who first arrive at the scene of Michael's escape to a pair of British true crime podcasters investigating the Myers case without realizing what they're getting into to Michael's new doctor Surtain, who has (without spoiling anything) a very different take on Michael than Loomis ever did. While fairly shallow in comparison to the three heroines, or to Laurie's friends from the first film, they were all unique and had enough going on around them that they didn't feel like stereotypes. Nick Castle's return as the unmasked Michael was not only a welcome treat for longtime fans, but he has the chops to keep it from feeling like just a stunt, making Michael into an imposing threat without his age ever seeming to get to him.

The direction by David Gordon Green does an admirable job of aping Carpenter's work on the original, from specific shots to homages to famous scenes to, most importantly, the manner in which the scares are handled. Like Carpenter, when Green decides that it's time to get the audience to jump out of their seat, he reserves the explicit musical cues for when the main characters are in actual danger; when it's something innocuous like one character harmlessly surprising another, it's downplayed. The result is a film that, while not a true standout in terms of pure scares, is still an effective piece of work when it comes to such, especially with how Green fuses Carpenter's "nothing is scarier" ethos with modern gore to surprising effectiveness. Carpenter himself, of course, also worked on the score with Daniel Davies and his grandson Cody, and as somebody who's become a fan of his work in music following his retirement from filmmaking, I was definitely impressed here, with many cues lifted from the original but with enough modern touches to give it its own unique sound. If there were a real weakness to the film, however, it would be that Green and Danny McBride's script, while entertaining and handling the central relationships well enough, often seems to lack focus. In the second act especially, the film takes on a number of subplots, ranging from Laurie's relationship with Karen and Allyson to the police and Dr. Surtain searching for Michael to Allyson's friendships in school with her various classmates and the upcoming Halloween dance they're going to. Sharper writing could've done a better job juggling these, but at times the film can feel disjointed, like it's cramming in many ideas for a Halloween sequel with only slim consideration for how to get them all to work together. The Predator had a similar problem on a much greater scale, and while, unlike that film, it's not enough to derail this one (for one, it's mostly contained to the second act), I still think that this is a movie that could've used a few rewrites.

The Bottom Line

The ultimate Halloween sequel may still elude us, but this is the closest that anybody has ever come. It's a film that honors its inspiration and does a damn good job of living up to it, such that I'd quite honestly call it the best Halloween film since 1978. A low bar, to be fair, but it's one that this film clears with flying colors.