This is just what the world needed; another Halloween backtrack. I say that sarcastically, of course, as it’s gotten absurd how many times previous narratives are flatly ignored in favor of new ones. They’re all based around a town in Illinois called Haddonfield and this one, the third simply titled Halloween, plays not as a remake but a direct sequel to the 1978 original. It continues the tradition of being set in real time though, so it’s forty years later.

That means Michael Myers is old. The gray hair on his balding head is shown within the first few minutes, which not only makes him less scary but stretches the believability of a plot that has him overpowering younger men and women without throwing out his back. If he’s inhuman, as the bullets he endures suggests, why does he age and breathe like one? There I go trying to apply logic to a cohort of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.

Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie Strode; she returns every twenty years; but it’s all in vain. This sequel is basically H20 2.0 as it builds to a final showdown between the gun-toting Laurie and her knife-wielding nemesis. It’s Grandpa versus Grandma, except Grandma has the help of her daughter and granddaughter. Rob Zombie’s Halloween remains the best and only good movie in a series that should’ve ended long before even that movie was made.

my rating : 2 of 5

2018