Halloween

Halloween Kills

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Halloween Kills
  • IMDb: link

2018’s Halloween offered a final confrontation between a haunted Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Meyers. Better than most of the Halloween sequels, it seemed a fitting end to the franchise offering closure to both Michael and Laruie’s stories. However, with big sequel money waiting to be made, unfortunately the story didn’t end there.

Set immediately following the events of the previous film, Halloween Kills is an unfocused hodgepodge of bad ideas which, bizarrely, comes to the exact opposite conclusion than the previous film. Michael survives the fire thanks to the first responders he gladly murders on his way to cutting a new swath of blood through Haddonfield, Illinois in a three-minute sequence that turns out to have a larger body count than the combined the murders from the original Halloween.

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Halloween (1978)

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Halloween (1978)
  • IMDb: link

The 1978 film directed, scored, and co-written by John Carpenter (along with Debra Hill) introduced the world to Michael Meyers and launched a franchise of, to date, 13 films. Looking back on the original Halloween, it’s surprising the small amount of bodies dropped and blood spilled compared to more recent horror films. Instead, Carpenter counted on thrills, ambiance, tension, and the menace of an unstoppable killing machine, without conscience or remorse, who took his first life on Halloween night when he was only six years-old.

After the opening scene involving a first-person look through the Halloween mask of Michael killing his teenage sister, the film jumps 15 years in the future where Michael has escaped the sanitarium where he has been locked away and returned to the sleepy town of Haddonfield, Illinois to begin a killing spree on Halloween.

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Halloween (2018)

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Halloween (2018)
  • IMDb: link

Retconning all the Halloween sequels that came before, 2018’s Halloween is a direct sequel to the original. Set 40 years later, the film’s set-up shares story elements with Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, catches up with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her family decades after her encounter with Michael Meyers. Taking a page from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, this version of Laurie went into survivalist mode after her experience with Michael, leaving a broken family in her wake, always believing he would eventually return.

The method of Michael’s return involves a bus crash, a pair of true crime podcasters awaking something in the killer that has spent four decades in a mental institution, and Michael’s psychiatrist (Haluk Bilginer) who has far warmer feelings to his patient than Dr. Sam Loomis ever did.

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
  • IMDb: link

Released 20 years after the original Halloween, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later brought back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode while retconning much of the franchise becoming a direct sequel to Halloween II (which, until H20, marked Curtis’ last appearance as the character). After an initial sequence showing Michael Meyers (played here by Chris Durand) back on the hunt, the movie opens with Strode having faked her death years earlier and now living as Keri Tate, the headmistress of a private school that her son John (Josh Hartnett) attends.

Directed by Steve Miner, after John Carpenter proved too expensive for the project, the sequel lacks the look of the early Halloween films feeling much more like any other generic 90s horror flick. We also get LL Cool J in a role of school security guard, Adam Arkin as a love interest for Laurie, Janet Leigh as the school secretary, and Michelle Williams, Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Branden Williams, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as teen monster fodder for Michael.

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