Halloween (2018)

The Halloween film series, just like main antagonist Michael Myers, refuses to stay dead. The eleventh outing has an excellent turn from original star Jamie Lee Curtis but fails to bring much else new or exciting.

Wisely ignoring the sequels (both old and new), the story starts Michael with locked up in an asylum, forty years after the events of the first film. The object of his stalking, Laurie Strode (Curtis) has spent the time suffering PTSD, which has cost her two marriages and the relationship with her daughter. One day she gets the news that she has been dreading - Myers is being transferred to a new facility, giving him the opportunity to escape and finish what he started.

It's always great to see Jamie Lee Curtis in anything, and here she brings a great mix of vulnerability and toughness to her character. The other characters are mostly forgettable, but that is not unusual for the genre. Kudos also to John Carpenter who, with his son Cody and Daniel Davies, has crafted a score that is as discomfiting and driving as his work for the original.

The film is competently made but never answers the question "What's the point of this?". Director David Gordon Green reverently copies many of the shots and tropes of the original, but misses the main thing that made the original work so well. The original’s director John Carpenter stripped nearly everything back to the bare minimum, from the story, to the score, to the fleeting appearances of Myers in tracking shots.

Green takes the opposite approach, overloading the film with themes and topics, (best represented by the two podcasters trying to re-examine Myers story and turn him into an object of fascination) and the inevitable throwbacks to the original film. All this does is remind you how lean and efficient the original was.