John Carpenter remaking Halloween

[The NZA]

this was really good - one of those rare instances of revisiting a classic franchise and feeling like it barely skipped a beat.  

 

i'm not gonna call it unforgiven but it does to a great job of attempting some new stuff with some of the troupes while still very much honoring the groundwork & managing to not be too wink-wink-nudge-nudge self referential either 

 

just went into this hoping for a competent slasher and came off really pleased with it 

[alive she cried]

Really looking forward to this, me, Liam and two more of our brothers are going this Friday. Haven't been to the cinema in ages.

[Keth]

So I gotta say I really loved this! The soundtrack was so great 

 

The uncut scene following Michael through those first couple of house was brilliant. And the motion sensing lights were creepy as hell.

 

 

Crazy doctor was kinda dumb though.

 

That said.... I still think I kinda prefer Rob Zombie's Halloween. I need to rewatch it though and see if my opinion is the same. The direction and cinematography in this new one kicks it's ass though I'm sure. 

 

[Donatella]

Yeah Rob Zombie’s was an interesting  reimagining. I thought he did a great job with it. But I really appreciated this one as a love letter to the original. It was straight up classic slasher flick and I enjoyed the hell out of it! I agree with your spoiler tag but still loved it as a whole! 

[Iambaytor]

I don't much care for Rob Zombie's Halloween.  I appreciate where he was going and what he was doing, and props to him for taking a big swing with it, but he's a bit too hamfisted to do anything interesting with the idea and he managed to explain Michael Myers in such a way that it completely ruined all the mystique of the character without providing any worthwhile explanation of why he is the way he is.  I mean, bullying and an oedipal complex is the best he could do?  Really?

 

That said, I really enjoyed Halloween 2.  There are still a great many parts of it that are just dumb or bad (the dream sequences, the sad trailer piano cover of Love Hurts) but it delved into its characters in real and meaningful ways.  I like how they showed the fallout where rather than an avenging angel Loomis is a smarmy opportunist, Danielle Harris' character is a mess of post-traumatic stress, and Laurie is spiraling out of control (I think the way that movie handles immediate post-trauma Laurie contrasted with the way this one handles 40 years later post-trauma Laurie is an interesting juxtaposition.)  Ultimately I wish they would have made that third Michael-less movie with Laurie in the mental institution but sadly that fell through.

 

They absolutely won't do it, because money, but this really should be the last Halloween.  There's a reason Jason Voorhees is more popular than Michael Myers and it's because there's really nowhere you can go with Michael.  The more you use him the less he works, if you expand his mythology it robs him of any quality.  They can't make him talk, they can't give him a more complex motivation, they can't even give him a different mask.  He's the least franchiseable slasher of all and they've covered their bases, so lets get Busta Rhymes in here to karate kick this franchise into the fire.

[Keth]

I still need to watch Season of the Witch, but with this doing the soft reboot thing maybe the standalone film idea would work this time around?

[Iambaytor]

I would buy a ticket for each of those movies opening night just on principle but we both know that to the studios Halloween = Michael Myers and never shall the two be separated.

 

It's like, I had a golden idea for a reboot of the Friday the 13th series where instead of making it about Jason, make it about Camp Crystal lake.  Something happened there long ago and now the ground is cursed.  Movie 1 is Pamela's killing spree, Movie 2 is Jason back from the dead, then you do something else in the same location.  Maybe a cult, supernatural creatures, zombies, some sort of redneck torture family.  Use the location because that can always be fresh.  And if you follow the series it's so obviously what they were trying to do every movie.  They even successfully managed to kill Jason and have him gone for a full movie but they never manged to make Tommy Jarvis the killer even though they foreshadowed it 3 seperate times, they tried to bring Pamela back the same way they brought back Jason but the best we got was Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X as twists on the formula and they barely broke the format.

 

On that note I actually did think of a way this could continue with the current mythology without bringing Michael back.  Laurie, now robbed of her driving purpose for the last 40 years, is going around the country looking for the next Michael Myers.  It happened once so it could happen again, right?  So she finds someone who she thinks fits the profile and the story plays the story two ways with Laurie serving as the Loomis character in her own story and the Michael character in the suspect's story.  Just really make it look like Laurie has flipped her shit and has taken paranoid delusion to a whole new level, victimizing someone because she's imprinted her attacker on to them only to reveal in the third act that she totally called it.  No Michael, no Shatner mask, something completely different.  Call it Halloween Reborn or something.

[The NZA]