Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence, gore, profanity, brief drug use and fleeting nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.19.18
You can’t go home again … but boy, the Hollywood sausage-grinders do keep trying.
Hollywood has unleashed 10 sequels, remakes or re-boots of John Carpenter’s modest — but undeniably ground-breaking — 1978 chiller, and not oneof them has anywhere near the original’s intensity or suspense. Instead, they’ve all succumbed to the ever-increasing gore quotient much more reminiscent of the deliberately disgusting Friday the 13th series that kicked off two years later.
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| As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has just discovered, not even a heavily fortified home can stop a homicidal maniac crafty enough to punch through a window. |
This one’s no exception.
The butchery here adheres to the usual formula: exercises solely designed to challenge the imaginations of make-up and special effects crewmembers. Of particular delight is the carving knife thwocked into the back of a woman’s skull, the blade’s front emerging between her agonized eyes; and the head that gets stomped into hamburger beneath a heavy boot. Tasty.
Carpenter must be of two minds. On the one hand, he’s likely pleased that every one of these misbegotten offspring have made his first film look ever better with time. On the other hand, he’s gotta be dismayed by what that film has wrought, and how it keeps getting blamed — unfairly — for all the gruesome “doomed teenager” franchises that have erupted in its wake.
The saddest part is that director/co-scripter David Gordon Green hasn’t even tried to make this new film halfway decent. He and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley merely introduce a sizable stable of one-dimensional doofus characters who exist solely to be slaughtered. I mean, really: With almost no exception, these are numbskulls who’d wander into night-time freeway traffic, in order to marvel at all the pretty headlights.
Factor in the first resort of lazy horror-franchise filmmakers — the idiot plot, which lurches forward only because each and every individual behaves like an idiot at all times — and there’s very little to recommend this early Thanksgiving turkey.
Green and his cohorts probably would argue that such behavior is expected of the characters in horror flicks, and that this adds a desired note of dark humor. In the first place, that’s nonsense; in the second, I’m not willing to credit them with that much insight. This is hack work, plain and simple.
This Halloween rebelliously insists that none of the other franchise entries existed, save Carpenter’s first film. (That’s somewhat essential, since Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode was killed toward the beginning of 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, and yet here she is again.)
Forty years have passed — as actually is the case — during which the homicidal Michael Myers has been locked up in a reasonably comfortable mental facility, where he has been carefully studied by psychiatrist Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer, standing in for Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis, in the first film). Michael hasn’t spoken a word the entire time.
