Bryden Doyle | Contributor
Featured Image: The rhythm of the film’s tricks quickly wears thin. | Bryden Doyle
In making a sequel to John Carpenter’s highly regarded slasher flick ‘Halloween,’ David Gordon Green has high expectations to live up to. Green’s visual flair occasionally enlivens the film, but he fails to build suspense or create ominous atmosphere.
It’s been 40 years since babysitter Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) harrowing confrontation with masked killer, Michael Myers (Nick Castle). Laurie’s now a recluse living in the woods, estranged from her grown daughter Karen (Judy Greer), who doesn’t even want her own teenage daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) talking to Laurie.
While Michael appears to be safely locked away in an insane asylum, Laurie’s spent the last four decades preparing for his return, so she can finally kill him.
Curtis’s performance is one of the film’s few highlights, playing Laurie as a woman so severely traumatized that she’s stopped caring about civility.
When a bus carrying Michael and several other mental patients crashes near his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, Michael journeys home, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.
The original film wastes little time with exposition and sustains a high level of dread. In contrast, the new ‘Halloween’ wastes a lot of time stalling for Michael and Laurie’s reunion with half-baked subplots about a police chief (Will Patton) whose long-standing connection to Laurie is only established through vague, unconvincing dialogue and Karen’s resentment of Laurie.
Occasionally, Green and cinematographer Michael Simmonds construct some striking compositions. A shot of a man filling up his car at a gas station while a blurry Michael stalks across the frame in the background is chillingly understated.
Green’s scare tactics are disappointingly generic and one-note: Someone investigates an unusual noise in a mysteriously silent area. The silence is broken by a fake-out scare, followed by a brief moment of calm, before culminating in a grisly execution accompanied by a sharp music cue. The rhythm of the film’s tricks quickly wears thin.
On a more positive note, third-year visual art student Christina Bozios says of the film: “It was definitely creepy and uncomfortable. I enjoyed the movie as a whole, but it definitely had me feeling ways. You literally feel like you are there, so for me I was literally squirming in my seat the whole time.”
Comic relief’s a reliable tension breaker in horror, but every time Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley shoehorn humour into the film, it grinds the pacing to a halt.
During one violent action scene, the film cuts to a squad car with two cops who are talking about bánh-mì sandwiches. Done correctly, this could’ve been some amusing dramatic irony, but the indifferently written scene goes on for so long that it feels interminable.
John Carpenter himself returns to help compose the score. It’s similar to the 1978 keyboard themes, with some added electronic beats and electric guitar. Still, the music effectively fits the film’s tone—eerie, propulsive, and weirdly catchy.
Late in the film, there’s one genuinely surprising twist that temporarily upends expectations about the climactic resolution. However, the the film reverts back to formula all too soon.
There’ve been so many lesser sequels and remakes that have followed John Carpenter’s horror classic. David Gordon Green’s Halloween is far too forgettable and by-the-numbers to justify its existence.
Second-year film production student Maria Habib comments: “I still prefer the original because of its novelty, which I couldn’t say about this sequel mostly because the tropes were ones we’ve all seen before.”
