Review of Halloween (2018) by Mooviefan — 18 Oct 2018

Halloween! In 2018?! I was excited. Was being the operative word. I saw the movie at my earliest convenience and what I saw left a lot to be desired. The opening credits got me right in the zone - the rotted pumpkin clearly representing the poor Rob Zombie attempts and some of the other stinkers in the Halloween series.

But that was all to be forgotten, the pumpkin was reborn and re-lit and the audience sat there with me, ready to digest whatever was in store for us. What was in store, was a poorly put together mish-mash of poor acting and poor script.

Now granted, Jibrail Nantambu is a young actor but his role of Julian was so poor I thought I was watching an out-take. His delivery of lines was comically out of sync with what the script-writer had intended that it sounded like something that wouldn't have made the cut in a B-movie, yet, here it was.

The premise of Michael being in a mental institution for the past 40 years seemed like a strange premise, but it was just about pulled off, although the way we got to the mental institution was lame - the journalists clearly were there for cannon-fodder.

And this was the problem throughout - the cast just seemed to be there to kill. There wasn't anyone I really cared about. If you cast your mind back to earlier Halloween movies, you'll remember Bernard Garrett (Halloween II).

Although his screen time was relatively short, I liked Bernard. Halloween has the stereotypical love-triangle thing going on which really felt like we haven't progressed in horror movies - or rather, we have (Saw didn't feel the need to add teenage love triangles into the mix).

There are glimpses of hope - Michael Myres is as violent as ever and he's on a mission to kill. The music, threat and potential is there, but just as we head towards a good scene, the pacing moves from being too fast, to super slow.

..really, slow. There are a couple of twists and turns but one of them I wont spoil was in my opinion, an offense to fans of Loomis. One other thing that sticks in my mind (like the smell of a rotten egg) was that when Michael killed a cop, the police response was weaker than the response you'd get for posting a controversial tweet.

The ending, which I wont spoil, was rather dull and a ultimately somewhat of a let-down considering the amount of advertising i'd seen for this movie. I wanted to love this movie - I even went as far as watching several of the other Halloween movies before this one, but I suspect the rating will drop as more people view this.

Unfortunately, the pumpkin is still rotten and i'm not sure if this is a series than can be revived.