Movie review: Halloween is all killer, no filler
This should not work.
It's the umpteenth instalment and nth reboot of the slasher franchise. It should be dead and buried.
And it's directed by David Gordon Green, the guy behind lame stoner comedies Your Highness and Pineapple Express, with his frequent collaborator, actor-comedian Danny McBride, as co-writer.
And yet, Halloween is so good - even brilliant in parts.
Smart, funny when it needs to be and, of course, it brings the horror.
Even more unexpected is that it is beautifully shot. Beauty and gore, together at last.
Keeping everything that made the original Halloween strike the collective psyche of cinemagoers back in 1978, it adds its own flourishes.
To make the story work, it jettisons the previous sequels and remakes and is a direct sequel to the original. Though for fans of the deep cuts, some elements of those sequels are alluded to.
What set John Carpenter's original apart from every other jump scare horror flick back in the day was calmly putting his killer in broad suburban daylight, making him an unnerving presence.
Carpenter is on board here not just as a producer, he has brought his iconic, tension-setting soundtrack with him. Here, it is emboldened by Carpenter's film score composer son Cody.
Like the best of its genre, there is the subtext.
We get the obsession with tragedy porn, thanks to some young journalists out to exploit the four-decades-old slaughter for their true-crime podcast, and it also as something to say about how victims can be dismissed.
As sole survivor Laurie Strode who suffered from post-traumatic stress, Jamie Lee Curtis is the lynchpin to everything.
And admittedly, she is a few cuts above the rest of the cast.
You feel her anguish at having a family who does not seem to care about what she went through. The years of preparation, possibly hope, that her tormentor would get out and she could finish the job have turned her into the town's mad old recluse and a conspiracy theorist - until she is proven right.
Myers is a seemingly unstoppable killer who never rushes, yet is shown to be disturbingly strong, like a panther able to pull an antelope into the branches of a tree with ease.
The terror comes from that simple brutality.
It's a great comeback, but given Halloween's resounding box office success in the US, can its makers resist temptation to go for another sequel?
MOVIE: Halloween
STARRING: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak
DIRECTOR: David Gordon Green
THE SKINNY: Grandmother Laurie Strode (Curtis) has a final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked silent psychopath who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night 40 years ago and was put away, to make sure he never kills again.
RATING: M18
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