Went to see the new Halloween movie last night. Halloween 2018 – staring Jamie Lee Curtis – is a direct sequel to the original Halloween. It ignores the seven sequels and two Rob Zombie reboot movies in between. Which is fine since most of those sequels weren’t very good and were certainly not to the caliber of the John Carpenter original. But why it’s not called Halloween 2 is weird…
This Halloween is probably the best one that isn’t the (still far superior) original Halloween. As a direct sequel starring Jamie Lee Curtis, this new film follows her character Laurie Strode, her adult daughter, and her teenage granddaughter on the night that Michael Myers – after 40 years in prison – escapes and comes back to Haddonfield for nefarious and entirely unscripted reasons.
I’ll be frank… as good as parts of this movie is, it’s also a bit of a mess. The first hour or so is pretty average. On a technical, budget, and film-making level, it’s a better made film than most of the cheap knock-about sequels… but not significantly better than them as entertainment. It just kind of wanders around, barely introduces characters, had Myers randomly murder some fools, introduces sub-plots that it immediately forgets, and generally does little new or interesting.
But the final act is really pretty cool… verging on great at times. Suddenly the film gets suspenseful and sometimes even genuinely scary. It has good laugh lines, exciting audience-friendly moments, great callbacks to the original film, and moments that subvert the slasher movie in general. The final act not only saves the film, but single-handedly makes all the other Halloween sequels seem like the waste of time most of them are. I mean, for a slasher film of course. This is still about a faceless murderer doing his thing.
One of the reasons the movie works is by finally getting to the point where it can ignore what doesn’t work about it. One big structural problem is that it’s not enough about Laurie Strode (Curtis). She’s a shell-shocked survivor, a paranoid agoraphobe who lives alone behind gates and security sensors. She taught her daughter to be a survivor in this prison of a home until social services took her away. Now her daughter (played by Judy Greer) is married and has her own teen daughter and has to deal with her crazy mother.
That’s a fine setup… but this is a Halloween movie and we have to get the kids to see it so the flick also focuses on the teenage daughter. Too much time is spent bouncing between the three women with the teen daughter getting the lion’s share of screen time when the focus of the story clearly wants to be on Curtis (and her adult daughter). You can see this in how the film is structured in that final act where the character growth and moments are specifically NOT on the teenager.
So, there you go. This is easily the second best Halloween movie but that’s a pretty low bar to cross. It is a film made with a good budget by a pretty assured film maker and not just a quickie, cheap shlocky knockoff. If it were only a more consistent movie that didn’t have to fall into standard issue genre tropes, it could have been a great film. As is, its probably worth seeing… definitely worth seeing if you’re a horror fan.
Score: 83