Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

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★★☆☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween (1978)

John Carpenter preempts the first- and third-person perspective sandbox video games with his original Halloween, a 1978 movie in which the camera hangs back behind the residents of Haddonfield and follows them as they wander in and out of homes and up and down streets, like we are watching Carpenter's playthrough of Silent Hill, starting in the opening scene with Michael as a child in Halloween costume navigating a circuitous path into a home to start his long career of killing; then, fifteen years later, we follow Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie as she wanders around the township with student books in hand, friends in tow, unaware that murderous Michael, now 21, has escaped an asylum and is himself wandering around with a camera hanging just behind his shoulder - the net effect, not just dread for the minute all this peaceful ambling turns murderous and chaotic, is a sense by movie's end you have almost revealed the whole map of the township.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

After the misguided pagan mythology world-building of the third movie, Halloween is back to being just a grisly day on the calendar in this simple "Michael Myers comes home" fourth episode that has the masked killer heading once again to Haddonfield, Illinois, this time to kill, for no clear reason except perhaps that Jamie Lee Curtis was too expensive, Laurie Strodes's daughter (Michael's niece), a young girl whose protection from the madman depends, sadly, on a bungling loser-in-love babysitting step-sister, a gang of trigger-happy vigilante hicks, and of course Donald Pleasence's now scarred and maimed and always-too-late plodding-far-behind-for-a-third-outing-now Dr Loomis. 

★★★☆☆

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Like most third movies, Halloween III is the one that opts for unrestrained series-perpetuating exposition over simply doling out another episode and here not only do we not get another simple "Michael Myers comes home" episode, the masked killer does not even feature in a departure from the slasher horror series that, with its pair of investigators heading into a toy factory to find it full of brainwashed henchmen and a diabolical secret (mass production of Halloween masks with brainwashing microchips in them!) is more suited to an episode of 70s TV series "The Avengers" with slasher fans being told suddenly that Halloween is not just a calendar event but a pagan backstory.

★★☆☆☆

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Halloween II (1981)

You can nearly map the township of Haddonfield given the way the camera in Halloween II, like a before-its-time third-person sandbox computer game, follows behind people - the asylum escapee, masked lunatic Michael Myers, for example, or Donald Pleasence's psychiatrist (in not-so-hot pursuit of his patient) or random Haddonfield trick-or-treaters (including a very unfortunate someone who makes the mistake of way too quickly uptaking the latest halloween costume trend) - and as the camera follows these people around, around them the everyday of the town is revealed, its mundaneness in stark contrast with the serial killer's steady, bloody, inexplicable pursuit of Laurie which continues here immediately where the original movie left off: Laurie is taken to hospital after her climactic confrontation with Michael in number one (Jamie Lee Curtis pleads with doctors and nurses, "Don't put me to sleep," and then gets an injection that sends her to sleep for the whole movie); then there comes the beginning of an explanation for Michael Myers' pursuit of Laurie and the reason for his, um, resilience.

★★★☆☆

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

With his scrubbing brush bristles for hair and comical way of Where's Wally-ing himself into every other scene, sometimes darting past in a sportscar, sometimes idling nearby in a green lorry and other times turning up in his grey overalls to stare through gates and windows, Michael Myers, the original movie's six-year-old-now-twenty-six-year-old serial killer, is an object of absurdity, not horror, in this retcon that has, for fans, the pleasing aesthetic of the original Halloween and the crowdpleasing reappearance of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, now living as a boarding school teacher with a new identity, but is otherwise a movie that is over before it starts, blessedly short but a mere breath of a slasher movie with an overabundance of barely developed characters.

★★☆☆☆

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