Sweet merciful crap. How many of these must we suffer through?
BQB here with a review of the latest Halloween flick.
At this point, Michael Myers has to be, what, 70 something years old? And he’s still breaking out of the asylum every Halloween night to slice and dice random townsfolk with his butcher knife?
Sigh. Typical Baby Boomer. Refusing to retire and allow the next generation of psycho serial killers to have a go.
Same with Laurie Strode. Jamie Lee Curtis is grandma-age as Michael’s favorite victim. You’d think at this point she’d move to Argentina, Brazil, Uzbekistan…somewhere Myers can’t get to.
It’s unfortunate because I thought the last installment wasn’t terrible. If you missed it, Strode sets up a veritable house of horrors for Michael, leaving nothing to chance, all but ensuring that he will be destroyed the next time he comes after her. She does this with the help of her daughter and grand-daughter, very modern in that three generations of women are done being victims and are fighting back.
But, hey money is money and I guess the studio decided to go back to the well for more cash, though this one is rather…meh.
Spoiler alert – as it turns out, Laurie’s murder house fails to claim Double-M because let’s face it, nothing ever does. The dude has been through what, 20 movies now? He’s been shot, stabbed, chainsawed, had bombs dropped on him, blown up with dynamite, set on fire…wasn’t he shot up into space once or was that Jason? Anyway, Myers is the Timex of slashers. He takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
Meanwhile, the people of Haddonfield have had enough of this bullshit. Led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall as the jacked old man who makes you wonder where the goofy little kid from the Chevy Chase Vacation movie or Weird Science went and how time can be such a bitch), a kid who got away from one of Myer’s early 1970s rampages, the townsfolk form a posse to hunt down and kill Myers once and for all, begging the audience to ask the question…what the hell took them so long?
From thereon, the movie becomes more of a meditation on the mob mentality and vigilante justice – i.e. we get it. Sometimes it feels like the system has failed so the people have to take the law into their own hands…except the people are not trained, they don’t have police credentials and they are emotional idiots who get it wrong and sure enough, they get it wrong and end up as bad as the killer they are chasing.
Meh. As a director, Carpenter was one of the first to put intense and scary, gory scenes on camera, stuff that really scared the pants off viewers and no one had dared film before. We can debate whether or not he should have opened that door. But he was also able to accomplish a lot of a scary song and ominous footsteps whereas directors today just try to add more and more gore.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It’s OK and it’s a fun little diversion this Halloween season. It got me to open my long dusty Peacock app, so there’s that. On the other hand, it’s not anything I’m itching to watch again. I do kind of wonder why, when everything else has gotten the modern reboot treatment, why they don’t just recast it with younger actors at this point. Myers I guess is an immortal monster so his age doesn’t matter but I’m not sure how much longer they can have him chase Grannie Laurie Strode and still have it make sense, if it ever did.
Bookshelf Battle 