They sure painted a weird image of Michael Myers in this one didn't they?
At one point Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode recalls that Myers came after her when she was 17. She looks over at her son John's birthday card, recalling he is turning 17. She pieces it together: this means that now is when Michael is going to come for John. ...Why? And is Myers presumably buying calendars, clocking months and years, waiting for 17 years to pass?
An hour or so of build and 30 minutes of chase in this quick 90 minute soft reboot sort of (?) So as mentioned in my review long ago of Halloween 5, this is the first of what I can think of in this modern vein of "pick and choose which movies are canon and which are not". H20 chooses to call Halloween 1 and 2 canon, and forget Halloween 4, 5 and 6. Really as I discussed in my Halloween Resurrection post, all they're really throwing away is the verbiage from Halloween 4 that says Laurie is dead and the existence and death of Laurie's daughter Jamie Lloyd.
Either way, we pick up with Laurie saying she faked her death (do I have to rewatch Halloween 2 to see if she was killed off?) so really they're almost acknowledging Halloween 4... the only thing they don't mention then is the daughter and the thorn cult/man in black thing. Laurie has a teenage son played by Josh Hartnett and she is an overly controlling mother figure especially as Halloween day rolls around.
Michael Myers sorta just appears and starts coming after her leaving the typical trail of bodies in his wake. Laurie has to balance her own traumatic tendency to see him in everything with the newfound evidence that the presence of him is actually there this time.
It works as a medium slow build late 90s slasher. It even comments a tiny bit on Scream in a reference on screen and by having Kevin Williamson take a draft at the script. This does not reinvent the wheel but it pairs the two together on screen again after 17 years and it ups the ante with modern effects and renewed energy.
Altogether, this one didn't make as much of an impact as it could have, and it was easy to make another sequel to and then forget and reboot in 2018. Trying to verbalize exactly why that is I find slightly hard, but it may be just the relative predictability and tropiness this falls into, rather than changing in the way that horror eventually did evolve to. It may have just been too soon, too close to Scream, too eager and underwritten. Also the grittiness of the Halloween 2018 stuff wasn't being embraced yet, it could not go full on dark, unfortunately.
I give this 3 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment