It's forty years later and Michael Myers is taunted by a pair of murderable podcasters in a mental health facility that could not exist in 2018. They bring out the white-face mask that gave him his look in the first one but he doesn't respond. All the other chained rent-a-character-actors do, though, writhing and squeaking just like their drama group teacher taught them. Meanwhile a psychiatrist who does a bang-on Donald Pleasance impression (he actually gets called the new Loomis halfway through) encourages the baiting twits for his own purposes.
Meanwhile, the aged Laurie Strode (welcome back Jamie Lee) in her backwoods fortress takes practice shots at a group of mannequins that justly give a character later a hell of a creep-out moment. We see her kitchen has a secret basement filled with survivalist preserves and probably an arsenal of lethal stuff. She's grandmother to teenaged Allyson and mother to Karen who is furnished with a series of flashbacks of Laurie's survivalist training. Allyson goes about her day like the highschool kid she is, getting hyped up for the Halloween party.
Laurie breaks out of her nervous self-incarceration on hearing the news about Michael escaping from captivity to warn her descendants about the threat. They are sick of hearing the old woman rant about this thing from four decades ago and try to steer the conversation back to more soap opera style dialogue. But it's no good. Michael's on the loose and killing like it's last years shirts. And he headed for Hadonfield in a fast car. You know where it's going. There are twists but not in this review.
But is it any good? As a sequel? Yes, it's good. The kills are brutal and jolting. The suspense is frequently white knuckle. There is a final tableau guaranteed to delight. And, simmering beneath the action and the violence, there is a sadness as we get increasingly familiar with Laurie's prison of trauma and its effect on the generations that followed her. The monster's resurgence carries a weight bearable only through cartharsis and, if anything, that is the overriding theme of the piece.
Is it any good as a horror movie? Easily as good as H20 was which demonstrates the worth of calling key creative figures form the original back into play. The score is tastefully upgraded though in some moments annoyingly like the ones they grab off the shelf for James Wan movies which can work against the great tension of Carpenter and Howarth's 1978 groundbreaker. There is a twist with one character which is bewildering and wasted. The scenes at the hospital are intended to be digetic rather than filtered through a character's warped point of view and are a throwback to the worst excesses of mental illness = evil. Loomis in the original talks about Michael like a priest about a demon because Michael scared him beyond objective treatment which was the point of his odd dialogue. The "new Loomis" (Jaime Lee gets that line) attempts a kind of scientific curiosity about it but, by contrast, it just comes across as hokey and ill-conceived by the writers.
Am I being harsh? Well, I did enjoy it and appreciated that it brought a few new things to the table (and a lot of references to earlier entries which I just find tiresome these days). It is streets ahead of the Rob Zombie movies with their always mistaken attempt to provide back story to what is essentially a bad guy chasing kids. That's the thing, though: Halloween is blank enough, like its monster's mask, to have been claimed by every political or cultural agenda out there and it's still, at heart, a lean and solid effort that feels by turns featherlight and heavier than granite. To do as well at being that anything with the title needs to do as well and then better or just knuckle under and trot out the kills like Friday the 13th from its original onwards. This version doesn't quite get to as well but it doesn't just crank everything down to routine either.
Do we still need slasher films? A character in this one wonders at the fuss of the original murder spree when it has been so grotesquely trumped by mass shootings and terrorism since. Even in the movies where the '90s swung between self-aware postmodernism like Scream and the increasing sleaze of serial killer movies (which eventually even threw the token morality aside - or altered it to a new sociopathic one - to become torture porn) the scene seemed to squeeze out the old knife-wielders. But, of course, the point is in the selection and the stealth and the suspense, the hunt and the reality-defying indestructibility of the monster. They are the bits that this movie does well. At least you won't hear your own popcorn crunching over a lot of it.
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