Halloween (2018) Review: Fanservice

This Halloween 2018 reiteration, targeted towards the fans of the original is peppered with fan service and Easter eggs. It’s a well-executed nod to the Carpenter classic. It’s not quite sure whether to be a gritty lo-fi or slick contemporary slasher, but there is impressive imagery here. Playing with focus, shadows, and angles, Halloween (2018) is nicely shot.

What really elevates this sequel though, is its irreplaceable lead – Jamie Lee Curtis. The 11th Halloween movie tosses aside whatever happened in the sequels prior. The Laurie Strode here is a rarely nuanced female character in horror movies. She’s turned into a grandmother who straddles the line between unhinged and badass.

Unfortunately, her performance is underserved by a sequel with well-intentioned but misplaced decisions.

The movie ignores a matriarch’s story that’s ripe for a long-overdue head to head showdown. It doesn’t tap into potential perspectives – a multi-generational family wrecked by paranoia and the twisted dynamic between predator and prey. It missed inherently good ideas – PTSD, Stockholm Syndrome and family dysfunction.

Instead, it opts to copy and paste the original story with the next generation.

Andi Matichak looks like the granddaughter of Curtis, but her character is too one-dimensional to care about. Other characters are also underwritten so they’re just dead weight to a story that should be about catharsis, both for its lead and its audiences who have waited for 40 years for a proper reunion.

The result is a routine slasher flick.

In fairness, we all know that sequels in this franchise have been much worse. Halloween could’ve been so much more though – who cares about a bunch of horny teenagers when you have an unrelenting force of revenge waiting for an unstoppable force of evil?