After being told for years that Halloween is the best effort the slasher genre has ever made... I unfortunately am forced to agree. Horror is a fascinating genre, because when it’s successful, it’s good, but when it fails, it’s (no pun intended) horrible. Halloween is at the peak of the slasher subgenre of horror, which features scantily-clad teenagers running around and falling down while being chased by a nutjob in a mask wielding a machete. As one could imagine, that gets old after a while. I really don’t see why someone would put themselves through watching something like this. Either the appeal is just lost on me, or I am the only sane man on the face of the Earth. Maybe a little bit of both.
Halloween is the first installment in the long-running and lucrative Halloween franchise, because (as it always is with horror movies) one wasn’t enough. At the beginning of the movie, a young boy named Michael Meyers (who later went on to star in Austin Powers and Wayne’s World) inexplicably murders his sister and is sent to a mental institution, where he is examined thoroughly by a psychiatrist (Donald Pleasence). After years in isolation, Michael escapes, drives away, and begins to wreak havoc in his hometown once more.
It’s an okay premise, but it’s completely undone by a myriad of horror movie cliches and tropes. In every horror movie, the exact same things happen, and Halloween is no exception. Really, you could chart this and every subsequent horror film quite easily. It starts off with 40 minutes of dialogue and ‘character development’, which mostly consists of bad teenager writing that smacks of a 40-year-old trying to write for young people. It then starts with the lamest of horror scares: The sudden disappearance, where the main character looks out the window, sees the killer, does a double-take, and he’s gone. Of course, this is never creepy enough for her to freak out. She just goes right to sleep.
And then the killing begins... first to go is the topless girl. Then, she and her boyfriend are strung up in various disgusting ways by the killer, just so that whoever stumbles upon them will have a fit. Then, the victim spends a good amount of time crying in the corner, giving the killer a chance to sneak up on her. But fortunately for her, he only has bad aim when he’s trying to kill the main character! I could go on, but it would just be more of the same (much like slashers are). People make dumb decisions like hiding under the bed instead of running away, and then when they DO run, they always fall down. It’s repetitive, boring, and I’m fucking sick of it. There’s only so many times you can watch someone die in a disgusting way before you finally say “You know what? I think I’ll watch something with a brain.”
Final Score for Halloween: 5/10 stars. It gets points for its classic status, and for the fact that it started the entire slasher genre, but I can’t really respect it for starting a genre that I hate. It’s cliched, silly, and (worst of all) it’s not even remotely scary. Everyone makes dumb decisions (such as TEACHING MICHAEL TO DRIVE), nobody knows what’s going on (such as when Jamie Lee Curtis turned her back on Michael, allowing him to escape-- TWICE), and the film simply reeks of bad dialogue and bland acting. It’s a creepy enough movie to watch on Halloween night with your friends, but if you want to see a horror film that is satisfying and intelligent, I suggest you look elsewhere.
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