Fearsome comeback
HALLOWEEN
Starring: : Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Virginia Gardner.
New signs of knife for an old blade
BE afraid. Be heartened. Be entertained. Then be afraid again.
For this bloodstained love letter to the classic 1978 slasher flick Halloween covers all bases required by hard line horror fans in fine, frightening style.
The first deaths are mercy killings everyone will roundly applaud.
Director David Gordon Green has terminated the contradictory mythologies spawned by too many past sequels and rehashes.
This direct follow-up to the original simply goes back to basics, letting the chilling atmospherics and overall body count rise in terrifying tandem.
Need a plot? You will get a darn good one if that’s what you’re after.
The franchise’s foundation heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a screw-loose hermit waiting in her woodlands fortress for the day that her former tormentor resumes his one-man mission to kill her.
Enter the infamously unknowable and indestructible Michael Myers, newly escaped from captivity, and soon back to his old ways.
To its everlasting credit, the new Halloween is not content to simply put its two protagonists on a cheap and nasty collision course to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their tumultuous first meeting.
The screenplay takes the time to explore the deep and disorienting influence Myers continued to exert on Laurie’s life while locked away.
Her ongoing anxieties regarding the certainty of Michael’s future re-emergence cost Laurie the sum total of two marriages, along with a seriously estranged relationship with her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak).
All she received in return was a reputation far and wide as something akin to a deranged doomsday prepper.
But when Michael finally reappears and begins staggering semi-purposefully towards her heavily armed hideaway, Laurie does not get the time to pause for a healing I-told-you-so declaration.
The only way victory is possible is to win ugly. And man, when the final-act confrontation gets going, the movie busts loose with the brutal bursts of gore you always knew (and feared) were coming.