Halloween – Movie Review

Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her most famous movie role forty years later.

Back forty years later to the scene of the crime in the small town of Haddonfield, USA, where Michael Myers went on his second spree of killing (he had also killed his sister fifteen years earlier when he was a 4 year old!), is the order of this new Hallowe’en movie.
This movie is a direct sequel of the 1978 movie of the same name and stars the same important cast members Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and Nick Castle as Michael Myers. 
This ‘Halloween’, the cinemagoer is asked to forget about the other seven or eight Halloween movies, which built (maybe not brilliantly) on the original Myers/Strode story.  Here we take up the story forty years after the end of the original movie.  At the time, Laurie narrowly escapes being brutally murdered by the evil Myers. 
In the intervening years, Laurie has been twice divorced and is trying to connect with her granddaughter, Allyson (played by unknown Andi Matichak).  (Jamie Lee Curtis too was an unknown when she made the original movie.)  Today, Laurie lives in a forest fortress, where she is repelling the outside world.

Myers has been forty years in a prison for the criminally insane, and has baffled psychiatrists there, and has never spoken a word since 1978.  Of course he escapes, and heads back for Haddonfield, and Laurie gets ready for their inevitable confrontation.
It’s an interesting film, although it has the obvious slashings and killings.  Innocent babysitters and regular bystanders are prey for Myers when he begins his first killing spree in forty years. 
The movie pays homage to the original ‘Halloween’.  There is a late 70s feel to the movie, with the exception of the mobile phones used by characters and about their talk of using the internet.  Other than that, Haddonfield looks the same.
Halloween 2018 is a credible comeback for these familiar characters.  However it should have picked a slightly different name to differentiate it from the original.   But it was all worth the effort for the cast and crew, writes David Flynn.