DaveyJoe

This was excellent. Probably the best slasher since Scream. The characters were likable, Michael was really intense, great cinematography and soundtrack. It's everything I wanted out of a modern Halloween.

DaveyJoe

Because they wanted to study him and create a psych profile. They explain this at the beginning of the movie. He never spoke so that's why they were transferring him to a more appropriate facility.

islandclaws

Which characters were actually likable? I'm not being condescending; I'm genuinely curious. Aside from Laurie, and maybe Will Patton's sheriff, I can't think of a single good character in the bunch. Can anyone even name any of them?

Don't forget, the original gave us Lynda, Annie, Bob, little Tommy Doyle... I can't remember anyone from this film.

Also, I really hated the cinematography. So many shots were badly composed, overlit, blown out. The only good use of lighting in the film was the motion sensor scene. And again, I wanted that kid to die - or at least I didn't care - so it carried no weight.

DaveyJoe

I don't agree with the complaints about the twist. The doctor was clearly in love with Michael from the opening scene where he laments about Michael's transfer.

Does anybody know about the original ending they changed for the test screenings?

OldBoy

in that article you posted, bc i don't see it?

DaveyJoe

Laurie, Allison, Hawkins, Vicky, the kid she was babysitting. The latter two had great chemistry especially for their limited screentime. Hawkins was a rare example of a competent cop in a horror movie who believed the victim and treated the villain as a credible threat.

It was a small cast and I thought they found a good balance of characters you liked and douche teens you wanted to see get killed. Are you really citing Bob 'lets rip the little girls clothes off' as a likabale character?

Is not remembering all of the supporting characters' names supposed to support poor characterization? You may remember Bob and Little Tommy Doyle but how many times have you seen Halloween(78) and how many times have you seen Halloween(18)?

Maybe there was an issue with the projection at your theater but I was impressed with the use of color and depth of field in the cinematography. There were several exciting tracking shots where we see Michael stalking around houses and yards unbeknownst to the victims.

Why So Blu?

Post #71

Mike86

That doesn’t seem very believable to me personally. I know it’s a movie, but come on the bastard hasn’t talked in fifty-five years. I would think at some point the facility would realize it’s a waste of their resources. Granted he’d be in state care at a prison too, but for his crimes that seems like it would make more sense.

OldBoy

ty. he said a few posts up. didn't know he meant 70 posts back

DaveyJoe

But I think you clearly have respected doctors like Loomis and Sartain lobbying to keep him in a certain facility for closer observation and I imagine they were successful up until the point they weren't. Sartain was obviously displeased about Michael's transfer and I'm sure he was fighting priorly. We also know that Michael was a 'model prisoner's so despite his crimes he hasn't caused any trouble for the facility over the course of forty years.

And I'm sure that the ultimate decision to transfer Michael was financially driven. Over the years mental health facilities have received less funding as prisons for profit have fourished. They just reached the breaking point where they wanted to send Michael to a less expensive institution despite his doctor's objections.

dsa_shea

We're discussing them studying Michael Myers for 40 plus years, which would not happen in real life if no headway had been made. The whole doctor love fest was laughable and almost as cringe worthy as, "Do your thing, cuz!" from Chainsaw 3D. The movie was mediocre at best. Yes, it had some nice kills. However, Myers was never intended to be a mass murderer but rather a methodical killer. They turned him into a terminator of sorts in this movie.

PatD

The scene with Dr. Loomis (with a voice double, of course) talking about destroying Michael as the only option was the only stand-out scene from this entire "meh" movie.

I do like that this reset does ostensibly grant Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode more mercy than the "Prime Universe/Kelvinverse" of Halloween.

DaveyJoe

Pyromaniacs are often drawn to be firefighters. Are we holding Halloween to a higher standard of believability than Silence of the Lambs?

Trevor

Thought it a fun and competent Halloween film. Can’t see placing it much below any of the sequels, and certainly well above most of them.

dhmac

I liked it overall but found it disappointing. It definitely didn't deserve all the hype.

And I initially liked the idea of erasing the "Michael and Laurie are brother and sister" bit but then the plot development that the movie used in order to get him to her house was so ridiculous that leaving them as brother and sister instead would've been better.

Rewatching the original in which Michael was not intended to be related to Laurie reminded me that Michael only locked in on Laurie Strode and Tommy Doyle as targets after they dropped off keys at the abandoned Myers house (in the below scene). Only then did he start stalking them both and later also add Laurie's friends to his list of targets.



Without the brother/sister bit, I wish the new movie had just done another sequence of him randomly locking in on someone as a target (for example, a grown-up Tommy Doyle still living in the same house) and that eventually leading him back to Laurie instead of using such a ridiculous plot twist to get there.

Mike86

Yeah I agree. Keeping them as siblings would have actually made more sense. The way the film handles it there’s a lot of happenstance occurring that Michael just happens to get to Laurie again forty years later. On paper the idea of axing the sibling angle was probably good, but it was poorly executed.

DaveyJoe

I think one of the themes is how trauma negatively affects a victim but it's totally impersonal. Laurie spent all of her life preparing for this moment but it turned out ultimately that Michael didn't care about her. It was Laurie hunting him and the Doctor arranging the reunion because they were the ones trying to attach meaning to something they couldn't understand.

Michael is symbolic of random violence in this film. Early on the kids allude to school shootings and other soft target assaults as a comparison making the events that haunted Laurie seem tame to them. When those events happen, people always seem to try to attach meaning to them and figure out an easily digestible motive. But a lot of times it's just completely random.

Michael represents the trauma that haunts survivors. He has a corrupting influence on those close to him. Laurie is suffering from severe PTSD from Halloween night. The doctor has grown obsessed with Michael because it's his life's work to understand people like him, but there's no understanding Michael. He will kill a ten year old child and walk past a dozen trick or treaters. We also get a tease of this theme when Allison is still clutching the knife at the end of the movie. Will these events leave her unbalanced?

The machinations of Laurie and The Doctor show the desperation that grows inside people in an attempt to understand the chaos of such random violence. I thought it was very intriguing how uninterested in all of that Michael seemed. To him, it wasn't personal and that could be one of the most frustrating things about it for Laurie.

Why So Blu?

I never thought about it that way due to being a fan of the franchise and all that -- never thinking to go past the glitz and glamour of a slasher.

Good post!

DaveyJoe

Thanks! I think you also see it during the prologue of the movie where the journalists are trying to escalate things to provoke Michael, screaming at him to say something. But he's very much the Shape in this film. The only one who seems to get it is Dr. Loomis who insists that termination is the only sane outcome. Notice that Dr. Sartain is encouraging the journalists at the beginning, even though they're clearly agitating all the other patients?

I think he film did a great job honoring the original movie but also bringing the slasher into the modern world. We've seen the masked maniac slicing teenagers done to death over the past 40 years, so the real meat of the film is the element of trauma on those affected by tragedies like this. That's why moments like the dinner scene with Laurie and her family were so compelling. You can feel the resentment in Karen and despite all of Laurie's survival training you can see how close she is to falling apart.

Why So Blu?

Damn, this is going to be one of the most subversive slashers in a long time and I'd like to think that I am good at picking apart subtext.

DaveyJoe

And for those who hated the twist with Dr. Sartain you have to ask yourself how the film is trying to challenge the viewer thematically. It's no coincidence that Allison's class room scene echoed the lecture on fate from the original film. Think of all the circumstances that had to line up to out Sartain in a position to reunite Michael with Laurie. The film is asking us if this was fate or happenstance. If you find the Doctor's turn to be too incredible, well wasn't that kind of the point?

Is there anything Laurie could have done to avoid being a random target of Michael in the first film? This event essentially defined her life. Is there anything she could have done to avoid a showdown with him a second time? Was she on an inevitable collision course with Michael Myers, was it fate? Or are her own actions subconsciously leading her down that road. Laurie and Sartain are two sides of the same coin, they both want closure. Before getting on the bus Sartain mentions that he has to see this through to the end and Laurie straight up tells Hawkins she prayed for Michael's escape so she could kill him. Ironically, Michael found himself swept up in the whirlwind of their obsessions.

Obey The D

What about 5? That's a stinker IMO. 5,6, Resurrection and Zombie's 2nd are definitely the bottom of the barrel for me.

OldBoy

i had no idea Laurie Strode has no relation to Michael whatsoever. So, she was just a random stalking victim?

Obi-Wanma

In this film, yes.

In the previous continuity, she was his sister, but that wasn't revealed until Halloween 2.

This film pretends none of the sequels ever happened. So it's basically a remake of Halloween 2, set 40 years later.

Mike86

The fifth is disappointing but I don’t completely hate it. I find The Curse of Michael Myers to be a strangely interesting film despite being very flawed. I find the first seven films all pretty good on varying levels truthfully. Especially the first four. Resurrection and the Zombie films are bottom of the barrel. The new one is fine I just don’t think it’s that great. It’s not worth wiping out the other films for in my opinion.