[rating=4.00]
Try though it may, Halloween, the new reboot/sequel to the 1978 classic that retcons the vast majority of the series’ twists, never quite justifies itself in any meaningful way. Director David Gordon Green (Our Brand Is Crisis, Pineapple Express), who co-wrote the film with frequent comedic collaborators Danny McBride (Vice Principals) and Jeff Fradley, certainly does his best to recapture the glory of John Carpenter’s original, and superficially speaking it almost works.
Long time fans will certainly get what they came to see. Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) is back, knife in hand, with blood on his mind. Maybe that’s enough for some people. Maybe all they need is that familiar, white painted William Shatner mask and some heavy breathing to find their horror satisfaction. It was, arguably, enough for Carpenter in 1978.
Here, however, it’s little more than a ticking of the box. Halloween feels like an attempt at deconstruction gone horribly wrong, with all of the ingredients used in a way that’s all too familiar, ending up with a movie that feels less like an homage and more like a rip off. It’s as if Green, McBride, and Fradley sat in a room coming up with a list of beats they had to hit rather than spending time on the development of a story good enough to justify their efforts.
Their premise is intriguing enough, to be fair. Halloween is billed as a direct sequel to Halloween, doing away with all the reveals in the movies subsequent the 1978 original. Gone is the idea the Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is Michael’s long-lost sister. Gone is the insipid idea that Michael is possessed by the spirit of Samhain. In this movie, Michael has been institutionalized since the infamous “baby-sitter murders” that plagued Haddonfield in the original film.
A direct sequel to the original isn’t, in itself, a bad idea—though it does remove some of the pathos inherent in the character of Laurie, who’s recast here as a perpetually traumatized loner with an obsession for home defense. It makes sense, I guess, even if it does throw out the baby with the bathwater. Michael’s ensuing rampage doesn’t make a whole lot of sense absent this psychological reasoning. For some, this might be scary. Or, if nothing else, satisfying in the slasher-movie kinda way.
Except at no point does Halloween offer us anything we haven’t already seen countless times before. Every moment feels carefully constructed to play into the formula that has dragged this sub-genre down since at least the early-90s. Sure, it’s done with a bit of a nod and wink—every silly jump scare implicitly grins at the audience like a hammy comedian making sure you got his awful pun—but that isn’t enough to make it worth, well, anything.
This feeling runs through much of Halloween. Every bloody death cries out, “This is what you want, right?” Every darkened hallway seems to scream, “You like it this way, yeah?” Excepting some occasional flair in Green’s directorial style, there’s little here that you haven’t seen before. If you haven’t guessed how it will end by the end of the first act, this is probably your first time at a slasher.
I can say that Curtis—despite the change in character—Judy Greer, as Laurie’s daughter, Karen, and Andi Matichak, as Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson, make a pretty badass trio of heroines. It’s just too bad they’re only given a formula to work with instead of actual development and motivation.
Nothing they try ever changes the fact that this is a dead formula, no matter how you look at it or how you try to hide it. Say what you will about Rob Zombie, but at least his remakes were willing to play with our expectations to give us something new. At least he explored the character and story from a new psychological perspective. This is just the same old same old, which creates a film that doesn’t telegraph its secrets so much as attempts to hide the fact that it has no secrets to telegraph.
Even with all the reverence for the original film and all the attempts to recapture the horrifying magic of Carpenter’s vision, we’re still just left with a hollow shell of a slasher that spins and spins its wheels without ever gaining any real traction. Maybe it’s time we just admit that the slasher is truly dead and work on a remake of Season of the Witch for next time. At least that’ll give us something we haven’t seen countless times.
Halloween is now playing in theaters everywhere.
