Halloween (2018) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Thriller

Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her iconic role as Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago.

Storyline: In October 2018, forty years after the massacre in Haddonfield, true-crime pod-casters Aaron Korey and Dana Haines travel to Warren County Smith's Grove Sanitarium to visit Michael Myers. They briefly interview Michael's psychiatrist Dr. Ranbir Sartain, a former student of Dr. Samuel Loomis, before meeting with Michael in hopes of gaining some insight into his past actions before his transfer to a new facility. Aaron brandishes Michael's mask at him, to no effect. In Haddonfield, Illinois, Laurie Strode is living an isolated life, having been divorced twice, developed a strained relationship with her family and turned to alcohol. Laurie has prepared for Michael's potential return through combat training. The following night, Michael's transport crashes. Michael kills a father and his son who stumble upon the crashed bus on the road, and steals their car. The following day, on Halloween, Michael resumes his killing spree, killing several people at a gas station, including a clerk, a mechanic for his coveralls, as well as Aaron and Dana. He then recovers his mask and heads to Haddonfield. Laurie attempts to warn Karen, and her husband Ray, of Michael's getaway, but they dismiss her concerns.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, December 28, 2018 The macro-level history behind the Halloween movies isn't particularly interesting. After a very successful and genre-defining original classic, the franchise veered into the standard Horror franchise fast lane which it admittedly help shape, spitting out a number of lore-building films, standalone sequels, a franchise film in title only, and a pair of reboots. Indeed, the Halloween brand has essentially taken the path of least resistance through its now forty-year history with various stabs at creativity but largely selling audiences on a name and an expressionless Shape rather than honest character depth and narrative integrity. With this 2018 film, Director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) has done something to shake the film loose from the clutches of closed-minded constraints and built a film that ignores decades of Halloween storylines -- including those featuring Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode -- and builds this Halloween as the one and only true sequel to John Carpenter's original.

Halloween proves largely successful in forging its own identity yet crafting a film that is comfortable and familiar. A few key lines erase any pretenses that the film will adhere to any lore constructed by any of the movies since 1978, though it does adhere to structural formula quite closely, precluding the need for a real plot summary beyond commenting that in four decades, Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) has been incarcerated in a mental health facility under the care of a doctor (Haluk Bilginer) obsessed with his persona while Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has sacrificed her life and sanity in the name of self defense and protecting her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) from Michael at all costs. It's an interesting take, to ask audiences to ignore six direct sequels, but David Gordon Green makes it work, even if it could have worked better than it does. The film is at its best in its first half, when reintroducing the world and building it from the foundation that Carpenter set in the original, not from the variously tentacled branches subsequent films have created. Rather than focus on Michael as an unstoppable entity, the character is humanized in a way that he has perhaps never been humanized before. The audience never sees him directly, but Green, from the outset, reveals glimpses, quick shots at angle, that show an aged man, his face revealing the weathering of time, outlined by a white beard. The character, audiences quickly learn, has not spoken for four decades. Michael Myers is flesh and blood that has grown outwardly old but the man inside remains obsessed with finishing what he started decades ago. It's not a physical condition that drives the character but rather a mental disfigurement that propels him to stalk Laurie Strode, the people closest to her, and those who stand in his way.

That mental disfigurement which has followed Michael for four decades is what has driven his doctor to dedicate his life to understanding him and is what drives a key component in the film's most would-be delicious twist. There's a moment later in the film that's next to impossible to praise without spoiling the reveal, but it's the one legitimate left-field surprise in an otherwise rote movie that momentarily kicks the film, the masked killer, and the franchise into an entirely new direction. Unfortunately the opportunity to run with it is snuffed out in a matter of moments, but it's definitely the high point that could have rewritten the rules and been a transformative turn of events -- literally and figuratively -- for the franchise. Green chooses to ultimately ignore it, to tease, and settle for snapping the film and the audience back into routine, which includes a plodding and methodical middle stretch as Michael randomly kills a number of innocents around Haddonfield and pushes towards a climax that plays out without much ingenuity or surprise.

Green does hearken back to the original a number of times, with shots and locations and visual and aural cues and themes that not-so-subtly pay homage to Carpenter's original. One of the high points for the film comes by way of its score, which like the rest of the movie is built on Carpenter's foundation but that finds its own voice with an edgy, unnerving, and dangerous cadence, highlighted by a scene in which Michael kills two characters in a bathroom partway through the film. Ultimately, though, Halloween struggles to do anything meaningful with the franchise. It's a slick movie with a few highlights, including a handful of creative and grotesque kills and a wonderful performance from Jamie Lee Curtis as a self-trained marksman who has believably spent the better part of her life preparing to battle The Shape one more time, all to the detriment of her family and her increasingly fragile and deteriorating sanity.

Halloween is a good movie that is a little too reliant on genre structure and paying its respects to the original. It's also more risk-averse than it should be. When the film takes its biggest risk with the best opportunity for long-term reward, is squashes the potential to take the film and franchise in a new and interesting direction that could have better defined the psychosis that exists within, and extends from, Michael Myers. Instead, Director David Gordon Green is content to build a movie that is well made and a worthy successor to the original but one that doesn't allow the apple to fall too far from the tree. Universal's Blu-ray is excellent, featuring top-rate video and high quality audio. A few supplements are included. Recommended.

[CSW] -2.4- I was so stoked to see this especially with Jaime Lee Curtis in it and as it opened I was at the edge of my seat. As it went on, and I can't believe I'm saying this, it got boring, predictable and yes, a little lame. The potential was there but the characters were never fully realized. The team behind this film goes out of their way to distance themselves from all the sequels. Yet they literally copy and steal from each and every sequel that they were trying to distance themselves from. Overall it was well shot, and a few good kills. But there was no mood, no atmosphere, stupid comedy, terrible characters, and beyond awful dialogue (even for horror movie standards). Most of the ancillary characters sucked. The Sheriff, Crazy Laurie, a few other exceptions, but even those were underutilized and underwhelming. The last 15 minutes? Stupid.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


º º