HALLOWEEN
Offers historical curiosity only to today’s horror fans, nothing more...
Among all the hypes there are two popular quotes that always tied with the highly overrated John Carpenter’s 1978 Horror slasher
Halloween:
One of the best Slasher/Horror film ever made and
The most successful Independent Horror film of all time
I like to agree with the 2nd one only, why?
Let’s start with the plot…Beginning on Halloween night 1968, a 6-year-old kid Michael commits the brutal murder of his 18 year old sister. Michael is committed to a mental institution and 15 years later escapes and returns to his hometown to murder again….
It may sound like somewhat funny, a derivative slasher movie fare when in fact it’s more accurate to say that everything of it since is basically a cheap imitator of Italian Gialli films. I have read in somewhere that it filmed on a tiny budget — less than $500,000 — so much so that the cast had to provide their own clothes. It’s completely lacking in special effects, uses makeshift sets and was filmed on a relatively rushed schedule. Despite all of that, I have to say it’s a good time passing slasher flick but nothing more than that.
First of all, the question is why the hell on earth a 6-year-old kid killed her sister? There was no explanation about that. I hate to compared it with the grand daddy of Slasher films… Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho (1960) but I’m going to do that now cause some of the ardent horror fans like to put
Halloween before
Psycho on their all time favorites list. Anyways the point is Norman Bates had a clear-cut background for his acts of crime but our beloved slasher master Mr. Michael Myers was nothing but a methodical, silent killing machine with no motivation, no root causes. While you may have theorized that he kills teens as some sort of vengeance (but what’s the story behind that?) or Michael Myers is nothing less than a force of nature, an enigma…blah! blah! blah! But to me that’s a brief response that cheapens the truth.
Carpenter didn't deliver much truck with finding a motivation or even a character for his killer - Michael Myers just puts on a mask (Hey! where he got the mask?!) and kills people, end of story. Micheal's doctor, Loomis occasionally mumbled a few well-chosen words about his "evil eyes". In the end, Michael is elevated beyond a mere serial killer when, despite having a gun emptied into him, being stabbed in the eye and falling from a balcony, he simply gets up and vanishes into the night. How comes he doesn't die? So was he some sort of devil in the flesh? Through the whole movie it seemed that he may be a maniac but bloody human being also. A mere boy killed his sister 15 years ago. Then what? His stay on a psychiatric hospital made him immortal? Definitely sounds quite silliness. Moreover, after fifteen years in a mental hospital, how can Myers drive a car so nicely? He's been institutionalized since he was a child. Did the institution also offered special driving classes for the patients so that when they goes back to normal life then they can drive properly?!
In most of the Slasher films we see that the killer always hold an advantage in terms of strength…but here in a particular scene how the knife (logically must have turned into a sword to be able to) hold a grown man stabbed, hanging from the wall?
The movie wasn’t so much about the murders (indeed, there was very little gore!), it's about the waiting in between: 'who will Michael Myers kill next? And when?' that, made "Halloween" an interesting would-be thrill-ride only.
A positive for the film is its unforgettable haunting background music, lingering camera shots and dark lighting, which able to create a frightening atmosphere. A second positive would be the character of Michael's doctor, played by Donald Pleasence was the best part, and his describing of the murderer is quite thrilling.
The three most influential teen slasher movies had one rising star.
A Nightmare on Elm Street had Johnny Depp,
Friday the 13th had Kevin Bacon, and
Halloween had Jamie Lee Curtis. While the former two were just side characters, undeveloped and there for massacre, Curtis was given the lead role (her first movie role, too) of Laurie Strode and, surprisingly enough, she performs quite well, that even labeled her as the Scream Queen!
Technically, however, Halloween was good, considering its small budget. Its cinematography was almost too good for the movie itself. The importance of the movie in displaying certain exciting movements which later moviemakers used without using them up the way Carpenter did with this one. This as a result, produced a seemingly endless supply of terrible, empty, gory films throughout the Eighties. Though the premise of this movie was quite original and it breaks lots of new ground, but still- today in compare to any great horror film it's not that much scary. It has a quite dull supporting cast you don't really care about, so when they get killed you just don't care. Fans of modern horror may find it too slow and annoying at times. The movie is now a historical curiosity only. Nothing more.
Rating: 5/10