HALLOWEEN
Horror. With Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer and Andi Matichak. Director: David Gordon Green. 18HLV.
“I realised what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil,” said the psychiatrist in the first Halloween (1978). In this film he’s a middle-aged man, but serial killer Michael Myers still longs to put on that creepy mask and butcher as many people as he can.
But he doesn’t consider his sister, Laurie Strode (Curtis, giving an unhinged performance), who’s had enough of his harassment every year on 31 October and has an arsenal of weapons in her house waiting for him. Michael has been in an asylum for the criminally insane for 40 years, but nothing can change him. While being transferred to a maximum-security prison, he escapes. “I prayed every night that he’d escape so I could kill him,” Laurie tells a priest. Will she succeed?
This is a proper scary flick that harks back to the horror videos you secretly watched with your friends when you were a kid in the ‘80s, such as Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) – nail-biting movies that gave you nightmares for weeks on end.
Over the years there’ve been nine Halloween films, a few of which were almost unwatchable. This movie, which is a direct sequel to the original, takes us back to the chilling atmosphere of the first film. Hearing that theme tune again is sure to send shivers up your spine.
Who’s going to get murdered next? It’s almost like Game of Thrones where you must prepare yourself that your favourite character might be next, though moments of gallows humour help relieve the tension.