Were you disappointed or satisfied?

Changing my original opinion to quite satisfied. I thought it was a mostly great film. One major flaw, but everything else was excellent, so much so that I could overlook the plot flaw! Worthwhile sequel, especially considering some of the junk that has been made in the past (which I still love!). Sitting with it in my head for a few days has helped me to like it even more (which, while not a guarantee, is typical of me - I don't judge a movie on one viewing all the time and need to think on it for a while).

Neither disapointed or satisied, it was fun but there was something lacking, I do not know why but to me it lacked a little something. Still good to see. Jamie Lee Curtis she's good in it, the rest of the cast as well but at the end I still felt it could have been a bit better.

I'm glad a lot of people are enjoying it, but I personally was let down. Not by the soundtrack though, JC and his kid are doing great stuff (3 albums besides this soundtrack in recent years).

There are a decent number of Halloween sequels that I'd pop on before this one.

Satisfied but not excited. Several excellent moments. But only good as a sum of those moments. It was a good Halloween movie. 7/10

Problems:
1. Boyfriend set up with enough script to make him a player. Only there to crossdress, it seems since they ignore his existence thereafter.
2. Dad & dance son were needed for the escape perspective but had script weight of greater significance than their part.
3. Nearly every single kill happens off-screen. (every one of them? Can't recall any that we could see at all)
4. Krueger-esque effect moments like the light inside the cop's mouth or the two dots on the sheet to look like a Halloween Ghost (although the throw-back of that was kinda cool). Michael is an intrepid, focused killer. Taking time to set up scary shit is outside his bailiwick.

Still, I enjoyed it. A million times better than those sour, handicap RZ productions.

At this point I have nearly 0 expectation for any new movie. Personally I can't think of a great horror movie that has been made in the past 20 years or so. I almost got hyped for IT, which turned out to be a letdown for me, so I certainly went into this expecting nothing.

That said, this movie was "okay", which is kind of nice and at the same time kind of my problem with it, and it ties back to the current state of movies in general. This is going to be pretty sloppy bc I don't have a lot of time to refine, but here are some random thoughts, some specific, some sweeping (SPOILS):

• Visually this is pretty tootin' nice, with a few very strong, beautifully shot images and scenes: MM's mask looks great, his first prowling long shot sequence, the carved off jack-o-lantern face kill, the ghostie next to the aquarium, etc. It will look beautiful transferred to VHS.

• The score is awesome, but not better than the original.

• The opening with the pumpkin inflating – GREAT. (But at the same time feeds into an issue... see next pt.)

• The main thing this movie seems to be doing, on a number of magnitudes of scale at once, is taking the original film and creating thematic inversions and symmetries out of its elements. This is both kind of a cool approach, and works, but at the same time, feels very lazy, and renders this ultimately not much more than nostalgia porn/fan service ornamentation, which I see as the unfortunately prevailing standard d'jour. It's so easy to just take that approach and rationalize it because it fits the endgame. This is my main issue with the film, and it's been my beef with the franchise since Halloween 4: It's fundamentally ANTI-CREATIVE, and post-H3 is essentially pure sellout material. The audience at large fuels this, but dearth of creative integrity on the Hollywood side has sealed it in.

(cont'd.)

(pt.2)

• This film must have been so easy to conceptualize. Very little is not just a collage of pre-existing elements. All you have to do is pick the parts you want, re-contextualize it into a revenge inversion, and then fill in the specifics along the way. Not that there's inherently anything wrong with any film that was easy to conceive, but at this point it would be nice to have had something a bit more original than this. Yet it's still one of the better installments. It's kind of amazing that it's this hard to make a great followup to the original, but at the same time speaks to how unnecessary it is to try.

• This one didn't manage to capture the halloween/autumnal atmosphere for me. (Nor the essence of the original film, as advertised, so much.) There was more of that in the first 2 mins of Halloween 4 than this whole flick. Not that it had to but it would've been cool.

• The pacing could have used some shaping, and more runtime would have helped to flesh everything out. Besides the overarching revenge trajectory, each of the stories, Laurie's for instance, was more of a quick sketch. Personally I didn't feel that her condition here was terribly believable. I also didn't feel a sense of dread nor a buildup, though the final scene had some tension.

• The dialogue is the weakest aspect, most of which is telling rather than showing, and exposition dumping. Many of the lines seemed like quotation marks placed around bullet points pulled right off the treatment. Lots of very caricaturesque lines and things that no human would ever say if they didn't have to to move a story along. Also cringeworthy bazinga moments like "gotcha" before shooting MM and "goodbye Michael".

• I was expecting that they were going to try to make this a much more grounded and realistic alternative to the existing sequels, but it's really just as ridiculous as any of them, and in a lot of the same ways.

• Trailers are seriously blowing movies these days.

(cont'd)

(pt.3)

• The sandwich convo – kind of funny but also remember when Pulp Fiction did this? And Fargo?

• I felt it was a mistake to show as much of Michael unmasked as they did. For me it did suck the ambiguity as to his quasi-supernaturalism out of it, and proves how important that element is. Also I did not need to see him put the mask on. I understand the moment they were trying to have, but in the original, not seeing anything between the little boy in the clown costume and the Shape was very effective.

• At this point the role of the mask is pretty ridiculous. Originally it was just happenstance that he ended up with that particular mask, and here it's treated almost as if it contains the supernatural power to transform an ordinary human into an evil immortal killing machine. The mask is significant to the audience in symbolizing the evil that is the shape, but within the world of the story there's not much reason why it would be treated as it is.

• Please... no more callbacks and easter eggs... no more...

• The dance/party scene: are you trying to give me flashbacks to Rob Zombie Halloween II? Oh god why.

(cont'd)

(pt.4)

• We're still doing "knife sound effects" in 2018. Right up front in the mix, straight from the stock archives. Shhingg!

• Isn't the Home Alone booby trap stuff a little preposterous? Kind of cool but kind of silly when you think about it. Why would she ever imagine that things would go down as they just so happen to in the end here? Also, if so much work was going to be put into preparing mechanical means to trap him why not make the entire thing automated w/ no requirement to detonate anything by hand?

• This one could be a whole discussion and I'm not sure whether I really want to get into it... but the backbone of the film is clearly a feminist inversion of the slasher archetype, very much in light of current events, with Michael standing in as an emblem of systemic oppression (ie patriarchy etc.) One thing that occurs to me, when we see the shots of Laurie doing target practice, loading her guns and so on, is that there's a very Schwarzeneggarian macho quality to it all. We know that she has PTSD which has led her to this point. On the one hand, she is taking it into her own hands to be prepared to fight back. But it comes back to violence and machismo being the solution to violence and oppression, while that Commando, heavy artillery ass-kicking status is posited as the crux of what it is to achieve equality, or to invert the narrative. It seems like perhaps a self-limiting concept of what a "badass" character is, male or female, and possibly perpetuates a more overarching problem in society... Will have to think about this one more.