You think after 40 years, people would learn to aim for the head when dealing with the supervillain that is Michael Myers.

The old school slasher genre of horror is pretty much dead these days. There is only so much you can do with a masked man with a knife if your objective is to scare people. The general thinking, however, is that if there is one franchise to bring life to the dying breed, it’s Michael Myers and Halloween. I don’t know how many Halloween films there has been, but I’m positive that at least 8-9 of them have been retconned to make this new film work (suck it Rob Zombie). For the third time in this franchise, we have a film entitled Halloween, the last time was in 2007 but the focus here is on the 1978 original. If you can ignore the absurdity of this timeline, the only way for a film like this to succeed is to be scary, and sadly you will get more chuckles than screams with Halloween (2018).

Forty years after the events of 1978, two British journalists (or bloggers, it’s not made clear) interview the people involved with the Haddonfield murders including Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers. Laurie has a broken relationship with her family as she spent the last 40 years dreading the possible reunion with her murderous brother. Her fears turn out to be anything but irrational as Myers is involved in a bus crash that allows him to escape and he begins where he left off in 1978, on a murderous rampage that puts him on a collision course with Laurie for one final showdown.

The best word to describe this film is emotionless. There isn’t anything here that we haven’t seen before. From the opening moments, the film is building to a fight between our feature characters and early on, it does a very good job of it. However, saying the best part of a horror movie is BEFORE the killing begins is a fundamental flaw of the film. Once Michael regains his ironic mask, that is where the story loses direction. The 2nd act is stuffed with many pointless kills and sadly, many of them happen off-screen.

When you finally get to the conclusion that the film has built from the start, the ending just comes off as flat. 40 years is a long time to prep and it didn’t feel like the plan was worthy of the wait. At one point, there is a setup of Laurie’s secret basement that is armed to the teeth with guns and the film drops the ball on the entire angle like Vince McMahon when he brought WCW. Sprinkle that in with some plot included stupidity that has to happen to advance the story and you have a movie that screams of the days of Busta Rhymes because at least then you had someone to root for, even if it was Michael Myers.

Halloween (2018) isn’t terrible, but definitely isn’t worth retconning 10 films just to get to this point. Reason being, you’ll end up forgetting much of this film just like you forgot the 10 that proceeded it.

2/5

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