Halloween
Michael is back! - 7/10
by Mohamad Khatib
Carpenter’s 1978 classic gets a new breath of young talent and blood, carrying with it a bold move in asking the audience to dismiss all the other franchise entries and making this a straight sequel, which means no brotherly love between Laurie and Michael, more a love-to-kill relationship.
Halloween 2018 takes us back to Haddonfield, Illinois after 40 years, where a patient Laurie Strode has prepared herself, homicidally more than mentally to end this once for all and kill Michael Myers. She has built an armed fortress with metal fencing on the windows and surveillance cameras and a collection of weapons for all situations. Speaking of Laurie’s abode, I admired the likeness of it to the asylum where Michael presently resides, where we can see that both places have special window-fencing and surveillance cameras, as if both Laurie and Michael are in a way caged in their own prison, Michael is waiting for the chance to escape and kill Laurie as she eagerly waits for his arrival to end him.
Act I enjoys a suspenseful and dramatic buildup, a calm before the storm so to speak where some journalists poke around Michael’s and Laurie’s history and in return introduce and establish the events of 1978 and Laurie’s present state of mind and its consequent effects resulting in an alienated relationship with her daughter and a restrained communication with her granddaughter. Once Michael is loose again, Act II gallops along at a rather rushed pace which did not really sit right with me. The moment Michael sets foot back in Haddonfield, he goes from one kill to another, without much frightful anticipation and mystery, which to me made him lose his evil charisma. Even though it is clear the intention of the makers of this movie was to state that he is human, quiet evident when Laurie tells the journalists: “He is human, you have to understand that after all”, in other words, he is killable, still this does not justify making Michael rush through his rampage, leaving us with not enough time to enjoy absorbing the terror that is Michael Myers and what it means to have him back terrorizing Haddonfield after 40 years.
Speaking of rampage, I did enjoy some the kills, in particular the ones that reflected amazing choreography, suspense, and intense montage while the other ones were to me rather poor in making them off-camera kills, it is like having a martial arts scene where we see the beginning of a punch or a kick, then hearing the sound effect of it and cutting straight to the beaten person knocked off or falling down. The only thing I generally liked about the killings was not the kills per say as much as the mood and suspense building up to the moment of these murders.
Reaching the third Act’s epic moment that Laurie and the audience has been waiting for, the moment of confronting Michael again, the storm I talked about in the beginning of my review boils up to a wasteful confrontation, with action choreography, too fast editing, lacking any dramatic notion.
Production wise, what would a horror movie be without a good score, and this is a great one, whether recreating the old theme in a new way or the additional original music composed, it added a lot of terror and creepiness to the movie. The production design, art direction, and cinematography did a nice visual work in by their use of three dominant colors, blue, orange, and red, blue symbolizing night time, the dark blue of Michael’s overall, although I did hate the overuse of that color in the constant flickering of the blue lights of the police cars which believe me if I was epileptic I would have died and the orange symbolizing the color of the Halloween occasion and pumpkins, even evident in the costumes, like what the blonde babysitter is wearing, as an example. Story wise, i respect the nods the writers made in this movie to the original classic but having Michael’s present doctor also be British is a cheap shot by far, this is not a nod, this is copying and unoriginal, they could have created a character that reminded us of Dr. Loomis through his theories concerning Michael’s infamous evil and perhaps through his mannerisms, but not having him be of the same nationality of Dr. Loomis and another matter that annoyed me was the twist surrounding that character that did little to no effect on the story and its progress.
All in all, this is a good sequel, perhaps even better than Halloween II 1981, more so in the directorial aspect, a horrifying soundtrack, a decent story, and a great-looking Michael Myers. I would never compare this to Carpenter’s Halloween and I would never want any director and producer to copy what he did but I would at least ask and wish for a new take and a new stamp, the respect for John Carpenter’s superior work of art is quite present and strongly felt, but i did not feel nor see David Gordon Green’s own mark and vision, he did create a very good slasher film, but not really a decent Halloween/Michael Myers slasher flick.
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