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Trick-or-treat special: Rashid Irani reviews Halloween the movie
It doesn’t have the panache of the 1978 original, but this sequel about an escaped serial killer and three generations of women uniting to fight him off is still compelling.
The original Halloween scared the living daylights out of audiences worldwide in 1978. Ignoring the nine subsequent iterations, Halloween (2018) is a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s seminal stalk-and-slash frightmare.
Carpenter is back on board as executive producer, besides contributing another spine-tingling background music score. Jamie Lee Curtis, a 19-year-old debutante in the original, returns too, in the role of traumatised survivor.
The action unfolds in the Illinois suburb where the resourceful heroine (Curtis) still lives, now with an estranged daughter (Judy Greer) and teenaged granddaughter (Andi Matichak).
When the serial killer nicknamed The Shape (portrayed in turns by Nick Castle, the villain in the original, and James Jude Courtney) escapes from captivity, the three generations of bravehearts unite to fight the knife-wielding bogeyman.
Director David Gordon Green (All the Real Girls)’s Halloween is not as stylistically assured as its progenitor. There are interesting undertones of #metoo in the plot, though. Overall, the film displays enough panache — particularly in the extended climactic confrontation — to appease even the jaded horror-hound.
